by Matt Soreco on April 3, 2009
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. Dribble coffee on my shirt for the 20th time, you are my worst enemy.
I thought I hit paydirt when I found the Bubba Keg. I consume way too much coffee, I know. But this thing allowed me to bring 34 oz of home brewed goodness to work. 7-11 coffee was starting to cut into the household budget. Side note: I usually didn’t finish the entire 34oz.
The Bubba Keg is big, but not obnoxiously big. The problem with me going with a quality brand like Thermos is a 34 ouncer would be enormous. I basically wanted a big cup that I can travel from home to work with (oh and that doesn’t leak all over the place)–and can fit into a standard car cupholder too. I’ll sacrifice heat for the convenience of carrying it. I don’t like piping hot coffee anyway.
One one problem. The friggin thing leaks like a sieve. No matter how tight I screw the lid, the thing leaks. I’m not sure why it took at least 20 stained shirts for me to finally hate and give up on this thing.
I have a pet peeve with inferior products. Bubba Keg is on my S list big time now.
I even took a pic. See the damn dribble lines? About half of that is on my shirt.
by Matt Soreco on March 12, 2009
I guess I’m inspired more to write to vent than I am to like. What’s this say about my outlook? I’ll ponder that after I belt this post out.
Today’s vent goes out to any and all technical help staff I’ve ever dealt with. Why? 1) For treating me like a moron. 2) For not believing me when I tell you up-front that the problem is on YOUR END! And 3) For not being around afterwards for me to taunt you when I’m right (which is roughly 93.472% of the time).
Ok, maybe not ALL technical staff I’ve ever dealt with, but this happens way too much.
Example. Today. I host a few sites with fatcow.com. I check in on them and they all are down. Kaput.
I wait about 10 minutes. Still down.
I check on 3 different browsers. Down.
I do a twitter search. Turns out someone else is having trouble with fatcow too. Down.
So THEN I write to technical staff. They write back that it works for them, I should delete cookies, etc. WTF! What is with deleting cookies!?!? That has to be the biggest tech staff cop out ever. I HATE when they don’t look into problems.
It turns out they did in fact have a system wide f-up. Egg in your snide face, tech worker??? HMMM? HMMMM? Sorry, did I interrupt your WOW game!?
I’m a reasonable guy. And slightly tech savvy. Not really a geek, but kind of a wannabe geek. Well not really a wannabe geek, but I have casual interests in some geeky things–but the interest stops where geekhood begins. Lets put it this way… I’m tech savvy enough to diagnose a problem to determine that it’s not me, it’s YOU!
I know they must deal with certified idiots, but don’t treat me like one!
Now it turns out that I had to submit another ticket for something else. I made sure to preface this one with some strong language to the effect “it’s on your end bud, don’t even THINK of writing back unless it’s to tell me the problem is fixed.”
Yes my computer is plugged in. No I don’t need to look for the “any” key. No I’m not a moron, jerk.
by Matt Soreco on March 4, 2009
So much for a streak of likes.
I love Goggle Reader. So every single blog I want to keep up with is in there.
So, Goggle has 2 other services, one from Blogger lets you “follow” a blog, the other Google Friend Connect lets you add your profile to your favorite sites’ page (as long as they accept Friend Connect).
Sometimes Google’s user experience just plain sucks. 1) For not giving you any option. 2) For being pretty stupid to begin with.
So now, I have many of the sites I’ve already subscribe to (via rss) showing up twice in Google Reader. That’s because some genius at Google thinks it’s nice to automatically add them again (since I decided to follow or friend connect) under another folder in Reader.
Sucks when I see 150 unread, when in fact it’s counting many of them twice. What a cluster-F. LEAVE IT ALONE GOOGLE!
I swear some of the annoying things Google puts into place (like gmail’s rotten contact management decisions) leads me to believe the decision makers don’t use their own service to understand how frustrating these things can be. I don’t believe for a second they eat their own dog food.
So I’ll say so long to Friend Connect (it’s a weak attemp at social media anyway–one I predict will be killed off ala notes and my shared stuff) and I’ll go and “unfollow” all the blogs I’m following just to clean up this garbage.
by Matt Soreco on February 26, 2009
Just Monday I wrote a pro Microsoft entry, and since I’ve had 5, count ‘em 5, blue screens of death. I didn’t know that ever happened anymore. Now I get 5 in the last 3 days?
I hope a system restore will do the trick… If not, back on the S list Microsoft will go.
by Matt Soreco on February 17, 2009
Why bore my vast audience with posts like this? Well because I don’t have a vast audience and because I like to use some blog posts to keep notes and refer back to them for reference. Maybe someone will notice. Maybe one of my three monthly unique visitors subtracting the two who accidentally stumble across it is a bigwig over at Google.
There are some pretty annoying bugs on the G1. Showstoppers, no. But they bug me.
- When opening Gmail through the app, often times it opens up to a conversation that was deleted and purged days ago. I’m not sure why this happens.
- Sometimes too, when the above happens, I don’t get notifications of new e-mails that come in.
- Think about calling into somewhere with voice prompts, like any customer service line. When you call and put the phone on speaker, there is no way to keep the screen from timing out quickly. So when you have to wait to “hit 9 for other,” you have to hit menu twice and pop open the number pad quickly to do it. For some reason it goes blank in a few seconds. There should be a way to “lock” it open when on speaker or when using a hands free device. I’ve fumbled with this too many times, with the delay forcing me deeper into CS VoicePrompt Hell.
- There is no way to edit recurring events in Calendar without crashing the whole calendar. You have to go to a separate browser to edit recurring events. And if you try, you have to clear out all the stored calendar data and resync to get it working again.
- Since it’s Google’s own app, I’ll include it here. The Scoreboard app is always late with scores and never notifies me of anything until I go in and hit refresh in the app. Even after all of the recent app updates. The point is to pick your favorite teams, and have a notification after each score. I don’t need or want to constantly open the program and hit refresh each time. Plus the scores are always way way way behind the live score. It’s quicker and easier just to go to espn.com or something.
- Even after RC33, the camera continues to blow. A few posters on the t-mobile forums reported an improvement, but I haven’t. It takes a good 5 seconds from the time you hit the button until the pic is taken, resulting in a blurry mess unless you are taking a pic of something completely still (e.g. not my 9 month old son).
- Battery life! I’m throwing this down as a bug because the battery life isn’t too too too much of an issue with me as the inconsistency of it is. Sometimes I can get through a day of moderate to heavy use. Sometimes the battery just sucks itself dry in a few hours. I can’t figure out why. The peanut galleries on the many message boards are no help either. Actually they do more harm than good IMO with their harebrained advice. At least I found that a reboot of the phone seems to help this.
- GPS is sometimes unreliable too. And just to make it clear, since my wife has a G1 too, I’m able to test things side by side. So I’m judging these things side by side under the same conditions. Just last week, my wife’s G1 was able to hone right in on a location, while mine kept getting stuck with the big blue radius. Mine seems to have worked itself out since, but it’s a mystery to me why this happens sometimes. Again the peanut gallery message boards are no help whatsoever.
- Voice Search is an abomination. It has yet to even come close to what I say. It’s such a waste that I’ll never ever use it again.
Otherwise I love it. Don’t get me wrong, I think those things are relatively minor in my grand scheme of rating the phone on the whole.
This brings me to why I resent the message boards so much. Hence the peanut gallery comments above. I should have known this kind of dynamic would exist since I post to sports message boards. Well maybe not since I didn’t think there would be hardcore “fans” of the phone. On the boards, you are either a hater, or a lover and nothing in between. Nothing annoys me more than response from the lovers who say “then get a iPhone if you don’t like the G1” or “you should have expected this with a first generation phone” whenever anyone posts the tiniest complaint or concern. With the “lovers’” attitudes, you’d think the phone is perfect and in no need for any improvements whatsoever. See more about this in my Tech Fanboys, Workarounds, and Lay Users post.
by Matt Soreco on January 23, 2009
Is it too much to expect things to work correctly? I’m often aggravated to no end over technology that’s almost there, but not quite. I blow my lid when I visit support forums, where people are cool with the bugs and where people offer workarounds as solutions.
Case in point… For over a year I had Google alerts set up to search for terms, then e-mail my Gmail, which I had set up a filter to send to my work e-mail. I had the rule for said alerts set so it forwarded the e-mail, then deleted it. Nice and clean. Then suddenly in November or so, it stopped working. I didn’t find this out for a while until I noticed I stopped getting the alerts. So I visit Goolge’s help forums. Many others had the same problem and were as frustrated with this as I was. This is where the tech Google fanboys dismissed this as not a bug (working correctly). And the “solution” is to take out the delete part of the rule. Um, NO, this is not a solution. It WAS working. Now it’s NOT working.
I see this more and more. Which brings me to the lay user, which is me. I’m not going to hack into registry files and what not to fix stuff that shouldn’t be broken. The SOLUTION is never a workaround. Especially complicated ones. If the thing isn’t working right, fix the damn thing.
That concludes my rant of the day.
