After 4+ years of using the same awful phone, I’ve finally moved into the 21st century. I no longer have the classic Saved by the Bell cell phone, pictured below.
Everyone in my family got their phone upgraded to the LG VX3200. It’s pretty basic (no camera or bluetooth), but it’s a lot lighter and smaller than the old phone. It’s also flip style, which is much better than the older style.
No more blushing when I reach to pull my phone out of my pocket in mixed company.
My sadness quickly turned into rage last night because I wouldn’t have my toy this weekend. I read at several places, including Macworld’s forums that if you didn’t get your copy of Tiger on time, you could call Apple to get one of three things for free.
Finding this out, I called up and they promptly offered me iLife ‘05. I didn’t hear him offer the other two options, but personally, I didn’t care as that was what I wanted anyway.
So, for any of you disenchanted Apple fans that expected your copy on Friday and didn’t get it, call Apple up and see if you can collect on some free stuff.
I was riding on cloud 9 last night. Today was supposed to be a great day. My day was supposed to be wake up at 9, see some houses at 11, then come home and relax before Tiger arrived late afternoon or in the evening.
Everything went according to plan… except for the last part. My copy of Mac OS X Tiger got delayed for delivery by Apple. I could have driven to an Apple Store to get it, but nooooo, I had to tell Apple ahead of time that I wanted a copy. Rookie mistake apparently.
As a result, the series I was going to do on Tiger will be delayed and I get to stew in my sad juices.
During a round of service adding last night, I figured out a way to differentiate between no results and an error. That’s good because now users will know when they’ll have to visit the source itself to see the results. The worst error offender by far is Technorati. Probably the majority of the tags will come up with an error message. You can then run their feed through the feed validator and witness for yourself the problem.
You’ll probably see some red question marks in a see of asian characters. Many, many people submit blog entries in a foreign language. Really, they are a large part of the problem. Probably what bugs me most is that these entries are in that foreign language, but tag them in English. How does that make any sense?? I’ll let that go, but that means the responsibility then lands squarely on the feed publisher’s head to ensure that when they publish a feed encoded with UTF-8, it is UTF-8. If they don’t, it will break many RSS parsers (including MagpieRSS, which I use). It makes me look incompetent even though it’s their mistake.
I may have to amend the error message to reflect this. Something along the lines of Sorry, a request or processing error occurred. Most likely the source has invalid characters in their feed. Please contact them if this bothers you.
The transition from iPowerweb to Dreamhost is complete. I got an email from iPowerweb telling me that they were happy to renew my subscription to their service for another year. Well, considering I’d already migrated the site I thought that might be a little silly. I had to call them and let them know that they were fired.
As I sat there on the phone listening to muzak, I went over how this conversation would go in my head. I figured that they might ask why and I thought that I’d just mention all my issues from last summer. I’m not an unreasonable person, but after having to explain to their brain dead staff half a dozen times that my problem was not an inherent problem in WordPress or any of the plugins I was using with it. If their attitude was going to be that the problem was that I didn’t use their provided software, I knew I’d be having a problem.
I woke from my reverie and told the representative that I didn’t want to renew and that I was canceling my account with them. May I ask why? I heard her say. For some inexplicable reason, a flood of reasons emerged.
I managed to restrict myself to the first five, but I couldn’t control myself. I felt like kicking them while they were down. Maybe it was payback for being treated like a child last summer (and having to make simple test cases to prove that they were the children). After I said a few and I could hear her typing furiously in the background, I felt bad. It wasn’t her fault. It still felt so good. It was like spitting in the greeter’s face after waiting for half an hour in line at Wal-Mart. Take that old man!
