Category: Rants & Raves

As much as I love WordPress, I’m stunned at how some of the simplest things don’t seem to work properly, and how no third party developer has stepped up and filled the gap with a simple tool. YouTube videos for example: when I embed them directly into this blog using the code provided by YouTube, the layout breaks and the videos don’t work. I tried one plug-in, and it didn’t work at all. I tried another plug-in, and it worked, but also pulled in all of my recent videos instead of just displaying one. Finally, I looked at this one and it seemed very promising. I installed it, then discovered that my server doesn’t have Curl installed – I use Cpanel, and it’s all automated, so I’m not about to install something new on my server just to use this one plug-in. Why is this so hard? It’s the WordPress plug-in design schema so difficult that no one can create a simple, flexible tool to accomplish this one thing?

I ordered some tickets for Ashley and I go to see Switchfoot in February, and I was happy to see that the tickets were only $25. I’ve never seen them live, but I dig their music, so it should be a good show. When ordering the tickets, I looked at the price breakdown: the ticket price is $25, but there’s an additional $12.70 in extra charges from Ticketmaster. That’s just over 50% of the ticket price for such dubious things as “convenience charge”, “building facility charge” and “order processing charge”. What a scam. Now I grasp why Pearl Jam went to war with Ticketmaster – they’re truly the mafia of the ticketing industry. I’m all for businesses making a buck, but there’s something very wrong when a ticketing company is charging 50% of the price of the whole damn show we’re going to see. In this era of online orders, PayPal, and other fast and easy methods of transactions, why are bands still using Ticketmaster? Are they really providing that much value? I suspect not.

Since I can’t update any of my “real” sites, here’s the scoop: our main server is seriously messed up. It appears to be some sort of database corruption, but running MySQL repairs doesn’t seem to have helped. My limited Linux knowledge is a handicap here – beyond a few basic commands I’m more or less useless. All my volunteer server techs are offline/away/MIA, so I’ve just reached out to a Linux-guns-for-hire company and hopefully they can get things up and running soon. And here I thought having my main office computer fail was the worst things could get with my technology!

3:47 PM UPDATE: Things are back to normal now thanks to some help from Jorj.

I’ve always had a contentious relationship with Apple software products, mostly because they seem to write their own rule book (which doesn’t surprise me at all). Apple is the only company I’ve seen that offers a free media player (Quicktime) that nags you randomly to upgrade to the professional version. Either make it free or don’t, but nagging me to upgrade is a cheap tactic. For quite some time, Apple also made it hard to find the Quicktime-only version of the software, instead making the Quicktime+iTunes bundle the only obvious option. They’ve changed that now so it’s easy to download Quicktime if that’s all you want (and it’s usually all I ever do want). There’s a software update program that comes with Quicktime now, and guess what it suggested I do the other day? That’s right, just like the screenshot says, it offered me an updated version of Quicktime…with iTunes installed. Apple, I DO NOT WANT iTUNES. Lame.

Sometimes I hate the way the Internet is so de-centralized and de-regulated…I understand those are the very reasons why it has grown to be such a great tool today, but sometimes the very things that make it so wonderful are the things that make it SUCK. For the past four months or so, a spammer (or series of spammers) has been using jasondunn.com as the reply-to domain for their email spam. The problem is that I have an all-domain email forward active, meaning that if someone sends an email to [email protected] (or anything else @jasondunn.com) I’ll get it in my Inbox. Normally this is a good thing, because it allows me to make up email aliases on the fly – meaning when I register for something at a Web site I can create a unique email address linked to that site (Amazon.com, Napster, etc.) Then, if I ever get spam to that unique email address that only that one site had access to, I’ll know they sold my email address and can simply set up a server-side block on that exact address. This is the way I’ve done my email for years, and it works really nicely.

Unfortunately, the one weakness is the scenario I find myself in: some piece of crap spammer is sending out umpteen thousands of email messages, and using random @jasondunn.com email addresses as the reply-to addresses. Every day I get 50 to 100 email messages that are bounces from email addresses that the spammer sent email to that no longer work, error messages from email accounts that are full, bounces from spam gateways telling me their blocking “my” spam, and even now and then an angry email from a real person who wants me to “remove them from my list”. This has happened before in the past, but the spammer s have always moved on to using other domains, so it lasts for a few days then stops. This time, it seems that the spammer in question isn’t changing his tactics – I’ve been getting hit with this stuff for months…and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it other than keep pressing that delete key – all because the Internet is so de-centralized and de-regulated.

In general, I try to give a company several chances to prove itself to me – I know that product defects happen, and that just because I happen to get a defective product, doesn’t mean that other people are going to have the same problem. Last night, however, was the last straw. Over the past year, I’ve had two defective Belkin KVM switches (the expensive DVI kind) go bad on me (one was bad right out of the box), I had a defective Belkin 802.11g router, a flaky pre-802.11n router that never worked right, and last night the last straw: I bought two Belkin wireless mouse/keyboard combo units from Dell a few months ago, 50% off, for only $20 each. I figured for that price, what did I have to lose? I’d keep ’em as spare units. I decided to take one over to my in-laws house to set up because they commented that someday they wanted to buy a wireless mouse/keyboard. I struggled with the setup for 30 minutes, including changing batteries, before I finally determined that the unit was defective. I tried setting it up on my laptop and had no luck there either. So from now on, I’m avoiding all Belkin products like the plague – they just don’t have the right level of quality control for me to trust their brand again.

One thing that causes me to bang my head into my keyboard, repeatedly, is when I get into a “discussion” with a high-tech geek like myself who doesn’t grasp that not everyone thinks like they do. I think it’s the height of hubris to feel that the way you perceive the world is the way that everyone else does (or should) perceive things. This thread over at The Hive is a good example of this form of massively flawed thinking. One of the people I’m talking with there believes that the only differences between a Zune and a Pocket PC is that the Zune has more storage. He doesn’t understand that one (the Zune) is designed to work like a simple appliance – simple user interface, easy to understand, quick navigation, highly focused around specific behaviours. The Pocket PC, on the other hand, is a computer. It has a start menu, dozens of applications multiplied by dozens of menus, giving you hundreds of functions. Given enough time, sure, an average person could find the media player and listen to music on the Pocket PC, but the difference between that scenario and handing someone a Zune and watching them use it (which I’ve done several times) is enormous. I’m so incredibly thankful that people who think user interface doesn’t matter are no longer the ones in charge of projects like the Zune – though I think sometimes they are, if you look at the horrid Archos products.

This post requires some back story: About three months ago, I was eating dinner, and I must have been really enjoying my food because I bit down very fast, and very hard, on the inside of my right cheek. It hurt like a mofo, and there was a fair bit of blood. Within a few minutes, I had a swollen spot of tissue about the size of very large pea. Over the next couple of weeks, I tried chewing on the left side of my mouth, but invariably I’d forget and chew on the right side and bite the swollen tissue again…and again. I was biting it every few days, so it just wasn’t healing. I went to see my dentist for a cleaning, and talked to him about it. He said to give it six to eight weeks to heal, and if it hadn’t healed (or I kept biting it) he’d laser it off. I, ignorant of such things, asked it the laser cauterized the tissue. He said no, that would require 400 degrees of heat and burn my entire mouth – the laser super-heats the cells in the swollen tissue and causes them to evaporate. Cool! The dentist was very nice, the office was clean, he had shiny new gear, and it was only three minutes away from my house. Seemed like the perfect new dental professional. The receptionist told me when I was booking the appointment that it would cost $149 if it wasn’t covered by insurance – not too expensive, and certainly worth it.

A little over a month after my first appointment, I was back in the chair to get the swollen tissue blasted away – a least a few times a week I’d chomp down on it, so it wasn’t healing. When I arrived at 7 AM (ouch!) after not getting enough sleep the night before, he started the procedure. It was pretty interesting, because the laser machine was quite small – about the size of a breadbox (who even knows what that is anymore?). First, a bit of topical gel for freezing. Then a needle into my the inside of my cheek – don’t worry, I didn’t feel it. While the dentist was using the laser to blast away the tissue, his assistant was holding the suction straw, removing the smoke from my mouth – yes, smoke. Thankfully, I didn’t smell burning flesh, so the laser must do something else other than just burn (do boiling cells smoke?). I left with a slight indent on the inside of my cheek – the dentist said that he was going to send off the tissue (I guess there was some left after all) for a biopsy. He must have saw me look dubious, because the tissue was swollen from constant trauma, not because I contracted spontaneous mouth cancer that grew a tumour in 30 seconds. He explained that sending it for a biopsy was “standard procedure” and something they did “just to make sure” even though he acknowledged that he was quite certain there was nothing wrong with the tissue. I shrugged and figured “Ok, whatever, their call.” I assumed (oh boy, here we go) that the biopsy was part of the original fee for the procedure. I left the office and they were going to submit the procedure to my insurance company to see how much would be covered.

I received an email today from the dentist’s office telling me that Blue Cross (my incredibly useless and lame “health insurance” company) wasn’t going to cover any of the procedure. I wasn’t terribly surprised – if I were to be attacked by a chainsaw-wielding psycho, and lost all four limbs, Blue Cross would likely only cover the cost of sewing my legs back on, claiming that re-attaching my arms would be purely cosmetic. Yes, they’re that bad – I’m slowly obliterating my teeth by grinding at night, and Blue Cross won’t cover a new appliance. At any rate, I digress – I’ll rant about insurance companies another day. The dentist office told me that the cost was $265. Pardon? I emailed back and asked why it wasn’t the $149 I was told it would be They replied back that the $265 covered the laser excision (read: laser slice ‘n dice) and the biopsy. The biopsy? The thing that I didn’t think I needed but the dentist wanted to do anyway just to be sure, even though it was pretty ridiculous? Yeah, that biopsy.

What bothers me is how the dentist didn’t discuss it with me – he made the decision for me, didn’t tell me what it would cost, and didn’t offer me the choice. I believe medical professionals should give patients information, but allow them to make the choice. Especially when it comes to dental work, which can be quite expensive, I find it frustrating that a dentist wouldn’t be up front about the cost of the work. As I’ve grown older I’ve realized that medical professionals are like everyone else: they have to make a living, and some are more aggressive about making money than others. While I’m sure some dentists are up-front about the charges for their work, so far every dentist I’ve dealt with hasn’t been. We assume, as patients, that the medical professionals we deal with have the best interests of our health in mind, and are only going to recommend procedures that are absolutely necessary. I’m sure that some medical professionals act that way, but certainly not all. I don’t think my dentist is a bad guy – maybe he assumed I had great insurance and some big corporation was going to be paying for the whole thing, so it didn’t matter. Maybe there’s no profit in the biopsy for him (it goes out to a lab), and he really did only have my best interests at heart. But when it’s all said and done, I’m having a procedure that isn’t medically necessary (or logical), and it’s coming out of my pocket. I have better things to spend my money on.
Of course, if the biopsy comes back and something was wrong, I’ll feel like a complete idiot. Won’t be the first time!

I picked up a new router (as I explained in an earlier post) and needed to update the firmware. So I headed off to the Linksys site. I knew that I had a WRT54G router, because that’s what the package and the Web-based admin interface said. I wish they’d have implemented a “one button update” where the router would ping the server, and if there’s a new firmware update, it would push it down and install it automatically. That’s the way it should work, but it doesn’t of course. Upon finding my way into the support area, it prompted me to select what kind of device I had. Here’s what one portion of the drop-down menu looked like.

So I knew I had a WRT54G, but what version did I have? Did the box tell me? No. Did the admin interface tell me? No. I had to go into my furnace room, where the router is, and flip it over to find the version number. Why didn’t the admin interface tell me what device I had? Why didn’t they revise the package to that it said “WRT54G-4” or something similar? It’s insane that they’ve had seven hardware revisions without changing the actual product number – imagine if they did that in the automobile world? “Oh, you have a Mazda Protégé 5? What revision? You’ll have to look on the engine to find out before I can get you this part…”

Not like this is news to anyone in the tech world, but I’m constantly amazed at how bad Microsoft’s search engine is. I haven’t done a lot of detailed comparisons, but one ranking I’m always interested in is how well my own sites are doing. Here’s a comparison.

KEYWORD: pocket pc
SITE: Pocket PC Thoughts
Google: 5th result
Live Search: not in the top 120 results

KEYWORD: smartphone
SITE: Smartphone Thoughts
Google: 4th result
Live Search: 53rd result

KEYWORDS: digital media
SITE: Digital Media Thoughts
Google: 4th result
Live Search: not in the top 120 results

KEYWORD: zune
SITE: Zune Thoughts
Google: 17th result
Live Search: 64th result

It’s not that the results returned by Live Search are all that bad – they all seem to be fairly relevant. But the search engine seems to hate my sites and I can’t figure out why. So either Google has it all wrong, and my sites are not valuable resources in their respective categories, or Live Search has such a radically different method of ranking that my sites simply don’t matter. I’d disagree with that of course, so for now Live Search sucks in my book.

UPDATE: Well, turns out the egg is on my face. Although I never explicitly blocked the Live Search bot from scanning my sites, it seems I had an old robots.txt file on there that was stopping it from indexing the content on all my sites save Zune Thoughts. So my apologies to the Live Search team. I’ve now deleted the robots.txt files off my sites, so come back and visit me Mr. Live Search Bot!