Results tagged “rant” from KPAO

I was booking a flight back home to Michigan to see my dad and his new puppy, Buck #2. Tickets are getting pretty expensive now that I'm in the 2 weeks before the trip window. So I thought I'd use miles to book a ticket.

I have to say I do generally like the tiered system for awards travel. 12,500 miles for the cheap seats (book >3 weeks in advance), 20,000 for mid-tier, and 30,000 for top tier. Even the mid-tier flights at this point were sub-optimal: red-eyes, long layovers (4+ hours) and crazy routing (SFO to DTW via JFK? WTF?!).


I finally found a not-so-sucky itinerary for 20k each leg. I had everything set and was ready to pull the trigger. I clicked on the select seats button, then accidentally hit the backspace key and that messed everything up. I got an error that told me to start over.

Annoying, but no biggie. I know what I want. I just need to go through the transactions. Only now, the outgoing leg cost 30k. Shit. The system screwed up, and while I'm trying to fix it, someone else snatches the last cheap fare out from under me.

Well, if I'm going to spend those miles, I might as well check out other options. So I got a non-stop flight for the 30k. It's pretty pricey for miles, but then again the dollar amount on this same itinerary is just shy of $1000. I also learned my lesson this time; I locked in the itinerary first, then went to select my seats.

And lo, there are two itineraries sitting in my profile. You guessed it: the original one where the system barfed and I got locked out somehow was saved as a hold in my account. And that's what caused the original leg to jump from 20k to 30k.

Why the heck can't the system be smart enough to throw up an alert when I start a new itinerary saying "Hey, don't forget you've got this other itinerary on hold over here." The sad thing is Delta was trying to do the right thing, but by doing it poorly, they screwed me over worse than if they hadn't saved it at all and the flights were released back into the pool.

I'm ending up getting 1.93¢ per mile, so it works out to be a pretty good deal. But still, come on Delta. This is not the way to endear yourself to your customers and foster a sense of customer loyalty.

I was at Target yesterday, and someone had a table set up asking for donations for some random cause (children's cancer? hopefully they were against it.).

Now I consider myself a generous guy; I give at least 3% of my income away every December. But I really don't appreciate having to walk a gauntlet after making my purchases. It's stressful. Even girl scouts selling cookies bother me. I can't buy them because they're not vegan, but I don't want to get into a big discussion with them. So I have to just say no, and that makes me look and feel like a jerk.

Retailers take note: By giving permission to these people, you are stressing out your customers. And I will take that into account the next time I'm deciding where to shop.

My MacBook has one of the best designed power adapters out there: the MagSafe. Until we get wireless power, this is the next best thing to prevent your laptop from hitting the ground as you inevitably trip over the power cord on your rush to the bathroom between hands in a PokerStars tournament. Oh wait, that's me.

At any rate, MagSafe is a great innovation. As are some other features, such as the narrow design for fitting neatly into a power strip, and the folding prongs for travel. But the extension cord attachment, not so much. It's almost like there's some "conservation of design quality" law keeping the universe in balance.

You see, the brick by itself is not grounded. The plug has only 2 pins, and both of them are the same width, so it can be plugged into any outlet in either orientation.

But the extension cord is grounded. It has 3 prongs, meaning that -- aside from any hacksaw modifications -- it must be plugged into a grounded outlet.

And the question is simply, why? Why does extending the  length of a wire place an additional constraint on an otherwise hippie-in-the-Haight-in-1967-like constraint-free power adapter? All the electronics for handling ungrounded power are clearly in the brick itself. Otherwise, the non-extended version would be unsafe, right? So why not simply have a 2 prong plug on the extension that is the same as the one on the unextended adapter?

Look, I know that any modern building is going to have 3 prong outlets, and for most use cases this is a moot point. But my house is not modern. Nor are many of the cheap office spaces in SF I've tended to visit as of late. And traveling with a 3-to-2 prong adapter is both a hassle and not in line with Apple design standards.

Screw it. I'm getting the hack saw.

Funny place, California. On the one hand, we pass Proposition 8 -- removing the right of same sex couples to marry. It alters the state constitution -- the highest, most sacred law of the state, with a simple majority vote. Meanwhile, the state legislature can't raise taxes one cent without a two-thirds super majority because of the (in-)famous "Prop 13."

I hear people on both sides of both issues complaining about the "rule of the majority" or the "rights of the minority." What I don't hear so much of, is how completely screwed up the entire state political system is because of one entrenched problem: the initiative system is fundamentally broken.

Don't get me wrong: I'm a democrat through and through. Churchill said that "...democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried.." and that sounds about right to me. But let's not forget that there are many forms of democracy, from systems where everyone participates in every decision, to those that essentially elect an autocrat every few years.

I'm not a historian or political scientist, but it seems to me that we in California are essentially expressing our dislike for a current political problem like immature kids. We lash out, throw a tantrum, and make a "They're never going to do that ever again!" kind of rule.

A representative legislature separate from the executive is expressly designed to give reasonable consideration to laws (and constitutional changes). In California, since the Brown Act and the rise of Open Government we have good transparency into the formerly "smoke-filled rooms." I'll go so far as to say there is nothing we have accomplished via a California initiative that we could not have done through the legislative process in a similar amount of time. (And yes, I know there's no way to prove or disprove that).

As an added bonus, if we didn't have to vote for 15 different initiatives, judges, dog-catcher, and so on, our ballots might be simpler, easier to count, and maybe more people might vote.

Fry's Electronics is a classic example of the "love it / hate it" dilemma. The exasperatingly low quality of their staff is well documented elsewhere, so there's little need to go into that again. If you happen to be in a Fry's in Silicon Valley, it's not an exaggeration to say that you are more likely to get help from the consumer standing next you in the aisle than the service rep. I have witnessed, and participated in several interchanges where an engineer responsible for some aspect of the product in question happens to be shopping there, answers questions from customers.

But like I keep trying to say, that's not the point of this post. This post is about your civil rights. In 1788 Patrick Henry said "You ought to be extremely cautious, watchful, jealous of your liberty; for instead of securing your rights you may lose them forever." Here's a tiny little thing you can do at Fry's to be a patriotic defender of liberty: stop fricking showing you receipt at the door!

Fry's is not Costco -- it is not a "club," you did not pay any money or sign a contract to "join" Fry's. Shopping at Fry's does not constitute an agreement to give up any of your rights -- it's a public establishment. When asked for your receipt at the door, just (politely) say "no thanks!" and keep walking. Not having a pink mark on your receipt doesn't mean you can't return an item -- I've easily done this many times. (OK that's a lie, returning things to Fry's is never easy, but you get the idea).

I have been doing this for years, and I have never had a single issue -- in fact the employees at the door have always been polite. They understand that they can't stop you -- you should too.

The title of this post aside, I actually like Country Sun Natural Foods in Palo Alto. They have a pretty good selection of vegan and vegetarian products, lots of locally grown organic produce, and a knowledgeable staff. Of course, one-quarter of the floor space is dedicated to supplements and homeopathy, but if they want to sell worthless-crap snake oil to clueless morons that's their business. Hey -- it's capitalism -- give the customers what they want, right?

Well almost right I suppose. I won't complain too much that Country Sun doesn't accept American Express, even though the Amex Blue Cash is my new favorite credit card and every other grocery store in the county accepts it. And I certainly can't complain they there is now better produce available cheaper right outside their own door every Sunday morning at the local farmer's market. After all that's not their fault. What I will complain about is their refusal to accept more than one coupon of any kind. That's their rule: one coupon per household per day. The only reason I that I can think of for this policy is that it must be too much of a hassle to redeem tons of manufacturer's coupons. (Cue the tiny violins).

Maybe there's some other reason? No clue -- they wouldn't say. The helpful clerks just kept repeating the rule: "one coupon per household per day." There's no shortage of organic groceries available in Palo Alto these days (we invented "earthy crunchy" in the Bay Area). Even mega-corp Safeway has good organic food these days, and since they're based in the Bay Area they even qualify as local I suppose. Plus they take all of my coupons, and my American Express card.

Although it is not illegal to share lanes with motorcycles, it is unsafe.

California Driver Handbook

Cars and motorcycles each need a full lane to operate safely. Lane sharing is not safe. Riding between rows of stopped or moving cars in the same lane can leave you vulnerable. A car could turn suddenly or change lanes, a door could open, or a hand could come out of a window. Discourage lane sharing by others.

California Motorcycle Handbook

I got my motorcycle permit before I learned to drive a car. I recently gave it up, simply because it's too dangerous. I suppose if there's any part of your body you wouldn't mind losing, then you can get away with not protecting it. But I want to keep all of mine, which is why suiting up for a ride takes over 10 minutes.

That's why it baffles me that on top of the already dangerous activity of simply driving a motorcycle on the road, many riders feel the need to crank up the risk factor and speed along between lanes of traffic mere inches from impact. I don't care if it is legal. So is smoking. So is eating meat. So is riding without a helmet in one of the 30 states that don't require it. Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it is safe.

Nor does it mean you necessarily have the right to do it. Drivers are under no obligation to make room for motorcycles splitting lanes. In fact as the California Motorcycle Handbook states, drivers should "discourage lane sharing by others." I do just that, and I encourage other drivers to do the same.

Now that I'm an American citizen, I feel a little bit more at ease revealing my decidedly un-American activities. Here's my first admission: today I rode public transit to work (but I promise it won't happen again)! Google Maps transit planner showed me that I could walk to the bus stop, pay $1.75, ride for 20 minutes, then walk to the office, all in less than 30 minutes, with no transfers needed.

Sadly, my office is moving in a couple of months to a new building just about 5-10 minutes further drive from my house. Google maps transit says I will need to take two buses, walk more, and have a total commute time of 70 minutes. If I ride my bike to the bus, then I can skip a transfer and have a slightly longer bicycle ride on the back end -- total time about 45 minutes. But I could also just ride directly to the office, and skip the bus for a total time of, well, about 45 minutes.

I'm fortunate enough to be able to ride my bicycle to work when I want to, but I seem to live in that all-too-common American "suburban grey zone" -- too short a commute to make public transport a good option, but too long to make walking or biking a no-brainer. Maybe I just need to change my brain to get on the bicycle more often. Hmm.. more un-American activities...

Craigslist is fantastic -- I've used it to buy and sell all kinds of stuff. But why won't they let me search for things in a reasonable way, and beyond my local area? Say (just for example) that I want to buy a BMW K75S motorcycle. I might be willing to go from the SF bay area to Sacramento to get a good deal on a nice used bike. But Craigslist does not let me expand my search beyond the local area -- I have to search multiple times. Worse, searching for "K75" produces different results from a search for "K75S".

Searching Craigslist is so bad, that a whole industry has popped up to fix it:

• http://craigshelper.com
• http://crazedlist.org
• http://www.craigspal.com
• http://www.craigslistcompanion.com
• http://www.craigslist-search.com
• http://www.craigslittlebuddy.com
• http://www.motiont.com/craigslistreader.aspx

I have a suggestion for craigslist: fix the problem. Clearly your users are trying to tell you something.

On a recent trip to Yosemite, I was reminded of a simple bit of driving etiquette that hardly anyone follows: use turnouts to let vehicles behind you to pass. It's even called out in the CA Driver Handbook:

Special "turnout" areas are sometimes marked on two-lane roads. Drive into these areas to allow cars behind you to pass... If you are driving slowly on a two-lane highway or road where passing is unsafe, and five or more vehicles are following you, drive into the turnout areas or lanes to let the vehicles pass.

I'm never quite sure if these folks are oblivious, ignorant, or simply trying to somehow "enforce speed limits", but it's annoying and illegal. It doesn't matter if you are going the speed limit. The law states that if you are "proceeding at a rate of speed less than the normal flow of traffic", you need to pull into a turnout and let the traffic behind you pass.

RVs are some of the worst offenders. I especially wish the RV rental shops like Cruise America to hammer this point home with their customers. In fact, it'd be great if I could call or SMS and report one of their renters who is creating a mobile parking lot in their wake. If enough people call in, they get an "asshole tax" levied when they pay.

Rhapsody MP3 launched with great fanfare this week. Finally some competition for DRM-free music. Well it turns out Amazon doesn't really need this sort of craptastic competition; they're doing just fine by themselves, thank-you-very-much.

As a launch promotion, Rhapsody was giving away $10 credit if you sign up for an account, so of course I did. I went through my list of favorite artists searching for gems I may have missed (like Peter Gabriel's Ovo, which I only discovered about a month ago.) And I found it: Jason Falkner doing a cover of Do Ya on a Jeff Lynne Tribute album. Sweet.

So I order it up, and click the download link. 32 tracks at 256 kbps is nearly 250MB. But no worries; I'll just leave it going in the background while I finish up some work. I flip back over to the download an hour later, and it's stuck at 72 MB. I try kicking it by pausing and resuming, but it's officially hosed. No worries, I'm heading home, so I just kill it outright. I log into my account from home, go to my downloads page, select all, and download. And I end up with 22 tracks.

That's right. I am missing the first third of my album. Rhapsody thinks that my stalled download from earlier in the day was a unmitigated success, and happily turns off my ability to get these tracks again.

So I ping support. I try to explain how my partial ZIP file is corrupt and I don't have access to the tracks, either on my computer or on their web site. They send me back inane boilerplate such as "try redownloading the ZIP file again. You should be able to do this through the My Account" and "Our policy is that you can only download the tracks once" (which I take to mean at most once. Apparently zero is OK too). I go through two exchanges with "customer support" over 2 days, and finally give up. This is "support" in name only.

I'm on my own now. I spend far too long looking for a free tool to recover files from a corrupt ZIP archive (why the heck don't all ZIP programs do this?). I am unsuccessful and as a bonus, I acquire a virus on my Windows virtual machine. Fabulous. Something else to deal with. In my final act of desperation, I sign up for yet another Rhapsody account and purchase the album using a fresh $10 credit. Again.

I had an unbelievably crappy first experience. Maybe I just got extremely unlucky. Maybe their store isn't that bad. But I'll never know. I already had a bad impression of Real Audio going in from their craptacular Real Player software, and this only solidified that for me. I do know Amazon. I use them all the time. They have great prices, a great customer experience, and great customer service. So go on over to the Rhapsody MP3 store before July 4 and get your $10 credit to milk them for some free tunes. Then abandon that account and get your music through Amazon's MP3 store.

Freedom is a funny thing. Even when one theoretically has freedom, there are inherent biases in the system that influence people to choose one path over another. In essence, this is what interface designers (like me) do when they present you with this UI:

or click me
It's pretty obvious which one the designer wants you to click.

The same is true for food. Yes, one could argue that we have the freedom to choose what we eat in this country. However, the system is set up with its own set of influences that push us down the path of least resistance.

It all starts with the Farm Bill. This monstrosity of the democratic process looks a hell of a lot more like socialism than any American politician would care to admit publicly. Yet it's the foundation from which our food choice are foisted upon us. For example, the corn subsidy, which is so outrageous that the vast majority of processed foods have some form of corn in them: corn syrup, corn-fed livestock, corn meal, cornstarch...

The same goes for the meat and dairy (livestock) subsidies. They get massively subsidized water rights, which is one of the primary reasons no drop of the Colorado river reaches the ocean anymore. They also get to externalize costs such as the huge pollution caused by their animals: land, water, and yes even air (Cows excrete massive amounts of greenhouse gas. Literally.).

And all this means that the government and the corporations are the ones who are ultimately deciding what you eat. By making all of these things cheap and prolific via subsidies, it makes them the path of least comestible resistance for a public that views food indiscriminately. Whatever is nearest, or cheapest, or yummiest, or marketed best, or placed at eye level on the end cap of the middle aisle of the super-convenience store, that is what is bought and eaten, likely out of its wrapper while the consumer talks on a cell phone driving 80 down the freeway in a H2 Hummer.

OK, so I'm ranting a bit here. But think about this: choose any random restaurant, then choose any random dish on the menu. Or choose any random supermarket, then choose a random product off  its shelves. What are the odds that its healthful? What are the odds that it is unprocessed (or minimally processed)? What are the odds that it has fewer than 5 ingredients in it? What are the odds that it has no meat, dairy, or corn in it?

I'll give you a hint: It's the same as making love when the temperature is just barely above freezing.

Fucking close to zero.

Incent or Incentivize? Technically both words are correct, but one is half the length and syllables as the other, and sounds a lot less like stupid business jargon that should be on a buzzword bingo card. And to preempt any confusion, incent is not the same as incite nor incense (the 3rd definition).

David Brooks of the New York Times writes this week on the evolution of the God debate. The essay is moderately interesting, in the usual David Brooks-ish sort of way: state a problem or challenge, then characterize with an ivory towered, pink-shirted / pink-tie-wearing characteristic simplicity -- i.e. in a narrow way that is then easy to ridicule. (Seriously, can someone please send him a new tie?).

As an engineer, lawyer, computer programmer and Roman Catholic, I have a problem with the concept that the evolution of the species just happened. From an evolutionary perspective, we are probably somewhere in the chicken and egg debate.

As man supposedly evolved from a single-cell amoeba to the complex organism that he is today, we had to develop a complex brain to manage the process.

The first problem facing a self-developing species in its early stages would be the need to know that there is something out there to see, feel, hear, touch or taste. The second problem is that a complex brain could not survive the incredibly complex development process without the five senses in operational mode. And you can't get the senses in operational mode until you have developed a sophisticated brain with the ability to communicate and interact with the senses.

Therein lies our chicken and egg dilemma.

Ken LeBrun

Stony Brook, N.Y., May 13, 2008

WTF, I'm setting up a new virtual machine on my Mac so I can test my web site designs against IE 6. It's taken me nearly 3 hours already to get XP installed and update to SP2 from CD. Now I'm at the Windows Update site and it's looking for updates. And the thing has been going for well over 3 minutes now. I have just one question: why?

How hard can it be to check for updates? It's not like the hardware and software configuration of my computer is changing that often. It would seem pretty easy to have a background task that looks for changes and adds them to some sort of config file that will be uploaded to the server when I connect. Then the server can compare all the entries in my config file against the latest updates on the server manifest. I don't see why this would take so long to do.

Oh, wait. There's your problem. Buggy code.

The website has encountered a problem and cannot display the page you are trying to view.

I ended up having to download Service Pack 3 from a 3rd party site and install it manually before Windows Update would work for me. And after SP3 was installed on my main PC at home, it would no longer boot; I had to back it out. I really wonder how people without the knowledge I have deal with thos sort of crap.

I've been doing cross-browser CSS styling for work, and what a PITA that has been. My most recent discovery is that Firefox conveniently adds the padding to elements after sizing them to 100% of the parent. So let's say you want a form text field that is as wide as the parent div. You set style="width:100%". But now the text abuts the left edge of the text entry box. So you add a left pad: style="width:100%;padding-left:4px". Now the text looks great, but WTF?! the right edge is no longer aligned with the parent DIV. In fact is extends by 4px. It'd be nice if this worked: style="width:100% - 4px;padding-left:4px", but of course it doesn't.

So you have the brilliant idea of using text-indent instead. After all, that's what this property was intended to handle. style="width:100%;text-indent:4px". Perfect. Looks great. Except on IE where for some logic-defying reason, the browser actually indents the entire text field rather than just the text inside the field. WTF?! Who are these people who implement the CSS standards and where do I sign up to beat them with an improvised bolo made from an old 56k modem & phone cord.

Thankfully someone intelligent on the IE team realized that their rendering engine was so broken, that web developers might need to write IE-specific code to handle it without making the display look like a bad interpretation of Picasso's home page. So now I've added the following to my web page:

  <!--[if IE]>
    <style type="text/css">
      INPUT .textfield {
        padding-left:4px;
        text-indent:0; }
    </style>
  <![endif]-->

And that's when I took up heavy drinking to dull the pain...

I got my invitation to the Peter Gabriel-backed music discovery service, The Filter, today. I am underwhelmed. There are some annoying display bugs on the Taste Profiler page, as you can see below. They don't have some artists in the database like Ben Folds Five (WTF?!). But worst of all, the music it plays are 30 second clips, and it's mono.

Also, after putting in my favorite artists (Ben Folds, Vertical Horizon, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Guster, Counting Crows, Jason Falkner, Fountains of Wayne), it came back with... the Rolling Stones? and Van Morrison? Are you serious? I get better recommendations from Amazon than this. Even imeem or YouTube's related media is better than this.

And honestly if you want the best, you still can't beat Pandora. I really don't see myself using this service. Sorry Peter. You put your name on a piece of crap.

Steve Kirsch has been a long-time philanthropist and also staunch supporter of philanthropy. The vision listed on his foundation's web site is:

We want a safe and peaceful world, one without the threat of destruction. We want a healthy world, one without disease and without pollution of our air, water, and land, and one in which all species have the ability to survive and flourish.

But now that's all changed. Steve was recently diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer affecting less than .0005% of the population. Here's the statement posted on the foundation's web site:

In early October 2007, the Kirsch Foundation announced a major change in direction for the organization. After extensive deliberation, the Foundation's Board of Directors made a decision to invest a substantial portion of its assets into research associated with Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia. The Board came to learn about this rare blood cancer through Founder Steve Kirsch's diagnosis with the disease in August.

So basically as a result of this diagnosis, Steve has decided to close his foundation turning his back on it's vision and divert most of the remaining assets to research for an extremely rare form of cancer with a median age of onset between 60-65 with a median survival rate of 5 years after diagnosis. According to the CDC, the average life expectancy for males in the US is now 75.4, so here is an illness that affects a miniscule portion of the population, and for those who do get it, it reduces their lifespan by 7-15%.

It's really too bad, Steve. You had big, hairy, audacious goals, and then you just gave them up for something that's none of the above and feels more self-centered than charitable.