Author: Jason Dunn

To All My American Readers…Please Improve Your Economy

That title is tongue-in-cheek, but it underlines a severe problem: as someone who gets paid in US dollars for 95% of the work I do, the rising tide of the Canadian dollar against the US dollars is becoming increasingly painful. I remember getting 40% on the dollar around five years ago – those were awesome days to deposit $1000 USD and end up with $1400 CAD. How bad has it gotten now? I was moving some USD to CAD and this is the conversion rate I got:

cad-to-usd-exchange-rate.png

4.9 percent different…that’s just sad. Currency fluctuations are always based on more than just one economy – the Canadian economy is booming, and that only makes matters worse. Of course, the credit card companies seem to be immune to this problem, as they always charge an inflated fee – on the same day that the bank gave me a 4.9% difference going from USD to CAD, they charged me a 10% spread for a charge in USD on my credit card. What a bunch of crooks! The company charging the card is already paying a per-transaction fee to VISA, so VISA is getting their money, but they’re skimming more off the top – in this case a little more than double what the exchange rate should be. Why aren’t there laws against this sort of thing?

cad-to-usd-exchange-rate-2.png

Make Your User Interface Easy to Interact With

While looking up what movie to go see with Ashley tonight, I clicked on a banner ad that caught my attention over at Calgary Movies (you should always click on an ad if you visit a site), and it took me to a Samsung promotion page. Samsung is demonstrating the breadth of their product line, and since I didn’t know they made refrigerators (that’s the type of hardware I don’t know much about), I clicked on it. Nothing happened. I clicked again. Nothing happened. I clicked on the stove. Nothing happened.

samsung-ui-design-click-points.jpg

Of course, silly me, the itty-bitty grey squares surrounded by the thin black line is the click point. They took the smallest possible user interface element and made it the only thing the user can click on to see more about the product. Idiots. One of the golden rules of user interface design is that if you want the user to interact with your interface, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to click on items – meaning you pick the biggest, most obvious things in the interface, and those are what drive the interaction. Whomever did this interface must have slept through that class in school.

Who Dun Broke ‘Ma Internet?

If there’s one technology glitch that gets me ticked off, it’s when there’s a networking problem somewhere outside my home, but also outside the network centre where my servers are. For the past three days, I’ve seen atrocious performance when trying to download files off my servers. I have two dedicated servers, each in different locations, yet on both when I tried to download large files I couldn’t get anything faster than 40 KB/s. I’m used to seeing speeds in the 1500 KB/s range, so this was a real shock. At first I suspected a problem with my cable modem (again), but a quick test showed that my connection from the modem to the ISP’s server was pounding at 9 mbps. I then thought maybe there was a bandwidth or load problem with both of my servers, but checking them both showed me that they weren’t overloaded nor were they saturated in terms of bandwidth. Even accessing the Web was flaky – some sites came up fast, some didn’t. Outlook 2007 was locking up on me because it would lose connection to my Exchange server/IMAP accounts and freak out (it’s so ungraceful when dealing with connection problems). Just an hour ago I was trying to post a message to the Microsoft NNTP server and Windows Mail was locking up on me.

I was deeply puzzled and decided to finally call my ISP (Shaw). I knew it would be tough going because trying to convince a tech support person there’s a problem outside their immediate network is almost impossible. While waiting on hold I fired up my FTP program to try again, fully expecting to see 40 KB/s download rates…and instead I saw 800 KB/s downloads. Wouldn’t you know it, somewhere between here and there someone turned the SUCK knob down from 11 to zero and everything is fast again. I pulled down some files from my server at 1300 KB/s – nice and fast.

Thanks to whoever dun fixed ‘ma Internet. 😀

Only in Calgary…

This is what I woke up to this morning:

calgary-may24.JPG

Two days ago I was mowing my lawn because it had grown so much the week before – and this morning I’m shovelling heavy, wet snow. If you look at the tree on the far right, you can see it’s bent – the snow was so heavy it bent all the trees and shrubs in our backyard in half. Only in Calgary…

The Facebook

People that know me understand that sometimes I find the little things in life utterly hilarious. One such thing is how some people add the word “the” in front of online companies and services. People will say things like “I was on The Google”, as if it were a broad term like “The Internet”. I’ve heard “The YouTube” and several other amusing names. But here, today, I have proof that Facebook (which is all the rage now in case you’ve been living under a digital rock) is really…The Facebook! Here’s a screen shot of a purchase I made (gift credits) and look at the name:

the-facebook.png

So now apparently I can’t laugh when someone calls it “The Facebook”. And interestingly enough, www.thefacebook.com resolves to www.facebook.com. Excuse me while I’m off to go check my profile on The Facebook…

Manually Updating Printer IP Address When Swapping Routers

I’ve been swapping out routers lately (the D-Link 624 was incompatible with the Vista wireless drivers on my Fujitsu P7010), but I ran into a fresh problem that I haven’t seen before: now that I have the hp 2600n networked laser printer connected, when you swap routers and IP addresses change, the clients (PCs) that need to print don’t magically find the printer at the new IP address. You need to re-configure the IP address of the printer port on every PC that you want to print to the networked printer. Here’s how (and remember this is under Vista, but the procedure is very similar under XP):

  1. Open up the Printers panel under Control Panel (or just hit Start then type Printers)
  2. Right-click on the printer you want to fix, select Properties
  3. Switch to the Ports tab
  4. Find the port that is the IP address – it will likely be 192.168.1.32 or something similar
  5. Select that port, then click on Configure
  6. On the line that says”Printer Name or IP Address”, change the IP address listed to the IP address of your printer (which you’d get either from the printer itself by printing a status report, or from your router’s list of connected clients)
  7. Ignore the binging sound that occurs when you type in any of the new IP address. Ignore the fact that the Port Name is the old IP address, it has no effect.
  8. Click OK to save the settings
  9. Click back to the General tab and click Print Test page to make sure it works

Here’s what step six looks like:

printer-port-ip-address-configure.png

A Good Day for Customer Service

Today was not only a holiday across Canada (and thus a good day), but I managed to score back-to-back customer service wins: first, over the weekend Ashley and I tried to assemble a Boltz Multimedia Rack…only to discover that I ordered a stand-alone MM-252 rather than the expansion unit that I should have ordered to link up with the four units we already have. The stand-alone unit was more expensive, and lacked the connector bolts that we needed to connect it to the other units. The unit came up from Arkansas, so shipping and brokerage/taxes were a bit pricey and it wasn’t practical to ship back. Thankfully when I phoned Boltz today I was able to order the parts I needed, with shipping, for around $30 or so – I was afraid they were going to tell me to return it at my cost. Score one for the consumer!

Here’s the big win: I have a Dell W2600 LCD TV, which is a 26″ monitor that I purchased back in November of 2004. In my office I used it with Vista Media Center to watch recorded TV, DVDs, and listen to music. Unfortunately for the past six months or so it’s been flaking out on me: the power button wouldn’t reliably turn it off or on, nor would using the off/on button on the remote. I’d have to disconnect the power plug, leave it for a few minutes, then re-connect and try to get it powered up. I felt like Han Solo punching a control panel on the Millennium Falcon (I watched Empire Strikes Back this weekend). I already had it replaced one for a similar problem in late 2005. Since that’s so much hassle, I’ve left it turned on for months now, only allowing it to go into a suspend state. That’s worked really well, until last night when we had a power outage at 2 AM and the monitor turned off. I tried for 15 minutes this morning but was unable to get it turned on.

I decided to phone Dell to get the name of a local authorized repair shop, but instead they shocked me by saying they’d replace the whole LCD TV and ship me a brand new one. I was shocked because it was long out of warranty, but they’ve apparently had abnormal failure rates with some of their TVs and are replacing them if the customer calls in. I’ve had my problems with Dell monitors in the past – boy have I ever – but I’ve always thought highly of their products and this situation certainly made me feel loyalty as a Dell customer.

So by the end of the week I’ll have my DVD/CD collection back together again in our TV room, and I’ll have a brand new Dell LCD TV (that I’ll promptly purchase an extended warranty for). It’s starting off to be a great week!

The Location of Internet Explorer RSS Feeds

I made the mistake of importing my OPML file (with about 150 feeds) into Internet Explorer 7 because I wanted to read my RSS feeds using Outlook 2007. That didn’t turn out so well, because Outlook 2007 has next to no tools for managing feeds – it looks like a last-minute add-on, lacking even basic features such as marking feed item as being read when you exit the feed. So I decided to switch back to using Feeddemon. Outlook 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 have a symbiotic relationship to feed items – meaning that whatever you import into IE7’s RSS feed items will also show up in Outlook 2007. As Shakespeare would say, here’s the rub: there’s no way to select all the feed items in IE7. If you want delete them, you have to right-click on each item and delete each one. I thought there had to be a faster way, so after some research I discovered that the IE7 feed items are located here (you’ll need to turn on hidden files to see them):

C:\Users\Jason Dunn\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds

Now here’s the ugly part: Outlook 2007 creates a one-time, not a permanent link, with the RSS items in IE7. Meaning that even though I deleted all of the RSS items from IE7’s data store, they all still existed in Outlook 2007. 🙁 The slightly better news is that pressing the Delete and Yes key in rapid succession allowed me to get through them all pretty quickly. The ultra-ugly news was that even after deleting all the feeds, I still had 8500+ unread mail items in Outlook – and the only way to delete them was to delete them in groups, feed by feed. What a completely screwed up scenario this is…I hope I don’t have to repeat all these steps with Outlook on my main workstation (I did this all on my laptop).