Archive for the 'Bitching' Category

Leopard: Great eye candy, pity the keyboard doesn’t always work.

Published on December 9, 2007 in Apple, Bitching and OS X. 35 Comments

<rant>

Dear Apple,

I have a Macbook Pro. It's your hardware. Unmodified. As shipped from your factory. I also recently bought your operating system upgrade for OS X Leopard. The only problem is that since I upgraded to Leopard, I can't use my keyboard without it freezing every few minutes.

Yeah, that does suck. In fact, it sucks huge hairy elephant balls.

See, this other company, Microsoft, they got the whole keyboard thing working without a hitch in, oh, what was it? Version 1?

You see, Apple, keyboards are important things. They're usually the primary means by which we provide input to our computers. In fact, I'm trying to use one right now -- quite unsuccessfully, I might add -- to write this blog post.

You remember those arrogant "I'm a Mac" ads that tout how reliable Macs are when compared to PCs? (And they truly were with Tiger.) I used to chuckle at them as I remembered what hell my life was under Windows before I switched last year. The only problem is that since I upgraded to Leopard, the ads seem further and further removed from reality. I kind of miss how I never had to worry about my keyboard freezing up in the 23 years that I used Windows. I'm beginning to eye those shiny new Vaios with envy again.

What the fuck is wrong with you Apple? You haven't even publicly acknowledged this issue and it has been reported to you over a hundred times on your own support forums for the past month.

Here's the Apple ad that Microsoft should make ASAP:

Mac: Hi, I'm a ................
PC (grinning): Mac?.. Mac?.. I think his keyboard's frozen again. But have you seen his shiny new 3D dock? Ooh-la-la!

Apple, do you have any idea how incompetent this makes you look?

Most importantly, the first thing you need to do is to officially acknowledge that the problem exists.

Yes, bugs are a fact of life in our industry but it is also common practice to _acknowledge and fix them_.

Next, state that you are working 24/7 on isolating it and finding a fix for it. Tell us you're aware of the problem and working on it. Heck, say you understand. While you're at it, you might even apologize to the hundreds (thousands?) of people who are losing their productivity due to this unbelievable bug.

And scrap your arrogant ads, you don't deserve them anymore. Maybe snack on humble pie for the next year or so until you get Leopard as stable as Tiger was.

Leopard just works? My ass! Tiger just worked. Not Leopard.

(Do I seem _really_ annoyed? Maybe it's because my keyboard has frozen about a dozen times so far in writing this blog post.)

I'm just one previously enthusiastic Apple user who is getting ever more annoyed and disenchanted with Apple. Something tells me that I'm not the only one. Here's a quote from one of the frustrated MacBook Pro owners on Apple's support forums:

Sadly, I am writing this from my Dell. I can't stand using the MBP at this point. How could they let a bug like this get out? At my company, a team would be working 24/7 to fix a problem like this. Do you want to begin to quantify how much this could cost Apple in the long run? Every day without a fix is another level reached in my anger and I assume there are thousands of others like me. I have two friends who are also having the problem now. One MPB from Fall '06 and one MPB from last week! Mine is from early October. I will not be buying Leopard for my fiancee's (fall 06) MacBook Pro this Christmas!

Oh and if any you should come by the cafe I'm in the next few minutes, I'll be the one with the shiny Macbook Pro frantically tapping his Num Lock key to see if his keyboard is back so he can continue working.

Un-fuckin'-believable.

Thanks a whole bunch, Apple! I'm off to restart my computer and (hopefully) get my keyboard back so I can do some work instead of bitching about my computer not working.

</rant off>

Links:

The problem with LiveDocs

Published on March 23, 2007 in Adobe and Bitching. 24 Comments

Movie demonstrating the LiveDocs performance issue

Ever wonder why Adobe LiveDocs (sample page) is so slow? It takes, on average, a single use of LiveDocs to give up on it forever. I remember doing so many moons ago when I found it so slow that it was unusable. Nowadays, if a Google search brings up LiveDocs and I mistakenly click on it, my series of reactions is to (a) frown, (b) sigh, and (c) hit the back button as quickly as possible before that mother of a beast chokes up my browser.

I'd actually conveniently forgotten about LiveDocs for a while now. We had evolved a zen-like calm in our relationship where we stayed out of each other's way and no one got hurt. It's only on my radar this morning because someone who goes by the moniker of Spender sent a link to a discussion thread titled Adobe Livedocs: A World of WTF to the FlashBrighton mailing list and it reminded me of just how unusable LiveDocs is.

But why exactly is it so slow? Well, someone on that thread actually captured the behind-the-scenes traffic on LiveDocs and published it as a SWF movie. You have to see this -- it's actually quite humorous (well, as much as an animated traffic graph can be, I guess!) :)

Adobe, please do something about LiveDocs. They really are completely unusable in their current form.

F.A.C.T. Off! Let’s give F.A.C.T. the finger.

Published on March 9, 2007 in Bitching and FACT Off!. 60 Comments

I just saw this on Adriana's blog and had to reproduce it here. I love that poster.

Piracy: Giving the movie industry the finger?

There’s nothing I hate more than sitting down for a film at a cinema only to have that horrendous F.A.C.T. screen come up to threaten me about what could happen to me if I take a photograph or record the film. Thank you for threatening me right after I’ve bought a ticket and sat down to watch a film and RE-FUCKIN’-LAX for goodness’ sake!

If you read my blog, you probably know that I don’t like being threatened. In fact, you may say that I’m somewhat allergic to it. That’s why I’ve developed somewhat of a chronic rash against the MPAA, RIAA, and recently, the BBC

In fact, here’s an idea: Let’s organize a single day where we all go to the same movie and take a photo (with flash, of course) of the F.A.C.T screen at the start of the movie and post it as a protest on Flickr? Why not organize this as a national event with meet-ups at cinemas all over the country? We can call it Finger F.A.C.T. day. Or F.A.C.T. off! I like F.A.C.T. off! In fact, I just registered factoff.org. Let’s do it!

Who’s with me?

Captcha madness

Published on March 8, 2007 in Bitching. 7 Comments

Why didn't anyone tell me there was a pissing contest on to create the freakiest captcha ever? Or that the folks at Shozu had won with the following manly specimen?

Shozu goes for the ridiculous look with their captcha.

Shozu's a great mobile application that lets you upload your photos to Flickr from your phone. So what were they thinking with this captcha?

Update: I'm on the second step of the form and it gets worse. Here's the next screen:

Shozu doesn't want you to download their mobile client. Really, they don't!

Notice the blatant violation of the Innocent Until Proven Guilty principle (it's warning me from the outset that I've entered an invalid phone number when I haven't done anything yet). And there's another Captcha! WTF? Why two captchas? Surely, you can't get to the second step if you haven't passed the first step and, if you've passed the captcha in the first step, then surely you're human (or superhuman, in this case!) Not to mention the fact that you can only access this page by logging into your account in the first place.

Is there a crazed, out-of-control captcha developer loose at Shozu? Someone call the captcha police!

Be nice

Published on March 7, 2007 in Bitching. 3 Comments

A certain domain registrar has been emailing me ever since I registered a domain with them eons ago. That domain has since expired and, today, I got fed up of the emails and wanted to unsubscribe myself. Instead of clicking on a simple link to do this, I had to sign in to my account with said domain registrar. Of course, that meant having to go through the whole dreaded Forgotten Password Process (FPP). Finally, when I logged into my account, I just wanted a quick way to close it. They don't have one. In fact, I couldn't find any officially sanctioned way of saying goodbye to these people so I decided to get creative (they also have lousy form validation.)

close my account message left in the personal information form

Case in point: If you don't want smart asses like yours truly leaving comments like this in your forms, provide people with an easy way to close an account. And for bulk email, give a simple link that unsubscribes the user without making them jump through hoops (having to log into an account for this is an unacceptable hassle.)

Anything else is more trouble than its worth. You just irritate people, tarnish your brand and generally spew bad karma into the atmosphere (which we all know contributes to global warming -- of tempers, that is.)

Bad Behavior has blocked 0 access attempts in the last 7 days.