Archive for the 'irritating' Category

Dear nbc.com on demand video…

Published at April 27, 2008 in absurd, irritating, internets, product review, tv and user experience. 0 Comments

Your interface is a serious stinker. Great idea moving off of iTunes. Gives you a chance to showcase that stinker of an interface *and* force me to listen to the same commercial over and over and over again. Are your advertisers totally hooking you up for that? Because after hearing the same jingles over and over again, I can promise I won’t buy anything being advertised.

That is all. Xoxo, Erik

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TomTom 920T (GPS) Review: Part the third

Published at April 27, 2008 in gps, beetle, iPhone, irritating and product review. 0 Comments

No awesome news at this point. While I continue to appreciate the user interface overall, and the beautiful industrial design, I am no longer in love with this product. You can start with my honeymoon review (#1), and my 3 month slump review (#2) here before reading this (my 3rd) review.

  • I am still irked by the cable situation: You can have the iPod control cable, or the traffic cable, but not both. What’s up with that, TomTom?
  • Crappy FM transmission to the radio. Admittedely, this is an almost universally sucky problem unless you live on Mars, but in the bay area, and anywhere with a lot of overhead wires (electric bus lines, in particular) its essentially unusable. For folks without an aux port to their car stereo, it’s pretty much the only solution, and its sad that it doesn’t work.
  • Now the really bad news: The connecting via aux port is bad too. I recently bought a new car with an aux stereo port, but there is a ton of high pitch over the 1/8th inch stereo plug (and I tried another cable, just to be sure). I’m now plugging my iPod directly in to my car stereo, and letting the TomTom’s internal speakers give out overly chatty directions. So much for allowing the TomTom / iPod control, and allowing the TomTom to act as a hub.
  • Finally, disregard of traffic conditions. It’s easy enough to see 101 is a mess on my iPhone, but for some reason the TomTom can’t or doesn’t care. Using approximately the same traffic information, it seems to think that I can squeeze a 1.5 hour drive into 45 minutes. Rerouting? Why bother. Those solid red and yellow lines all over 101 can’t possibly mean a delay!

So, in conclusion (for now) I won’t recommend this device to friends. It works well enough getting me from A to B and I don’t intend to replace it anytime soon, but I’ll definitely borrow a friend’s Garmin or other device for a week next time I am in the market.
I’m getting a lot of referral traffic from GPSTrackLog, which has compiled a list of reviews for the TomTom 920T (and every other GPS device on the market), so definitely check them out for potentially more balanced reviews ;)

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love/hate drake’s fortune

Published at April 3, 2008 in ps3, games, irritating and nifty. 0 Comments

My favorite game on the PS3 is Drake’s Fortune: Uncharted. The sound design, graphic design, insanely real animation, and story are really out of this world.

You play Nate Drake, a descendant of Sir Francis Drake. You’re a treasure hunter in search of El Dorado. Lots of fun guns to play with, a partner who actually helps kills people for you, fun puzzles to solve, and a beautiful environment in which to play. Seemingly relatively straight forward, and earth bound… until where I am stuck right now.

For more or less no reason, there’s these effing manimal beasty things with point teeth and 3 toes and bald heads who are infesting (of course) a dark tunnel system in which you’re trapped. You have to solve a mystery while klaxon horns sound and these damn manimal thingies come out of nowhere to rip out your throat.

It’s totally stressing me out. I’m not *scared* of these things, in the sense that I have nightmares about them, but they’re freaky. You can hear them snarl around the corners of your dark tunnel. They run a lot faster than humans. They hunt in packs. If one latches on, you have to shake your controller to get them off of you. THey’re powerful too: you can only sustain two direct slashes before they kill you. Every time they come out, my heart races and my palms get sweaty.

I can only take a few minutes of it at a time because it makes me a bundle of nerves. Not relaxing, not particularly fun at the moment, but its the best damn game I’ve ever played. So much so that while I continue to try to solve this one, I’ve sent 2 other games back to GameFly for their inferior… everything. The animations suck, or the fighting engines are ass backwards, or the sound design or story is stupid. (heavenly sword & frozen planet… awful)

Anyhoo I’m about 3/4 done with this game and another one (Folklore… also awesome, talk about it another time), and am mostly really pleased I decided to buy my PS3.

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Privacy disclosure for credit application

Published at April 3, 2008 in irritating, absurd, money and car. 0 Comments

I’m looking into buying a new car, and they have an online credit check. I clicked on the privacy policy and read this:

Disclosure of Private Information
We may disclose all of the information we collect, as described above, to companies that perform marketing services on our behalf or to other financial institutions with whom we have joint marketing agreements. We may make such disclosures about you as a consumer, customer, or former customer.

We may share Private Information that consists of transaction information with our affiliates. Our affiliates include other automobile dealerships and financial companies.

We may also disclose Private Information about you as a consumer, customer, or former customer, to non-affiliated third parties as permitted by law.

Is that normal language for a credit check? If I include all my information, including social security number, can they legally share that info? I get that that info gets shared around with other finance companies, but with marketing companies? Marketing companies with my social security number?

*Weirded out*

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Things you don’t want o hear your mechanic say…

Published at April 1, 2008 in irritating and car. 1 Comment

“I think it might be over”

Back up your hard drive. Now… or this could be you

Published at March 30, 2008 in irritating, sad, geek and mac. 3 Comments

I used to sorta kinda back up. Every once in awhile I would think “jeez I should do something about all that data” and I sometimes would.

But lo: The mac. It never breaks. Ever. Nor has a hard drive ever failed on me. So I got lazy.

Yesterday my 750GB Barracuda stopped mounting. Worse yet, it doesn’t appear even register on the bus. Not even spining up as far as I can tell (Though its hard to tell on a G5, which has enough fans to levitate the 50lb box)

This puppy has all my burned music, iTunes purchases, TiVo downloads, pictures, design portfolio extras, the works. I think there’s about 300GB or so worth of stuff I really want. More than is convenient to back up so I never bothered, because hard drive failures happen to other people.

Drivesavers wants $200 if they are unable to recover it, and a range from $900-$3500 depending on what they can recover (’/m assuming this is about $1/MB for recovery. Ouch.)

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I hate the day after reality show finales… [no spoilers]

Published at March 6, 2008 in irritating, internets, entertainment and tv. 0 Comments

I only watch two with any regularity: Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model. The PR finale was last night and I didn’t have a chance to watch… this means I not only have to carefully keep my ears closed at the office, and am more or less prevented from reading blogs all day long, since most folks brainlessly put the winners and losers names in blog post titles, or as the first line of the post without a spoiler alert.

I just managed to blur past a post about the PR winner and haven’t spoiled it for myself yet.

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Spam of the day: Enormous device is your main luck

Published at February 13, 2008 in irritating, absurd, internets and funny. 0 Comments

spam

What is a male aggregate? Also, I love me an Ursula.

TomTom 920T GPS Review part deux

Published at January 7, 2008 in gps, irritating, product review, nifty and user experience. 0 Comments

This is a continuation from my first review of the TomTom 920T, which i bought just before the holidays (Merry hoho to me). I’ve had some time to get used to my new toy, so I thought I would follow it up with some more thoughts.

Additional things to love:

  • I’ve had almost no problems staying in tune with satellites. Granted I am in the bay area, but I still expected to drop out every once in awhile in rural areas like Woodside. I’ve only had some minor problems on the east side of the financial district, specifically when navigating around the Embarcadero centers.
  • Great battery time. I have no quantitative numbers, but it seems to do a nice job.
  • Nice night-colors. I only have my previous unit to compare to, but this is very usable and melllow, even in day time.

Additional things not to love:

  • My previous review discussed iPod integration. In fact I have an iPhone, which makes a bit of a difference. The iPod Connect cable is not one of the “apple licensed and approved” devices for the iPhone. It does work, but only on the second try. When you plug it in you get a warning on the iphone that it’s not approved, and “would you like to go into airplane mode to minimize something or other”… um. No, but thanks. I dismiss the iPhone dialog box and move to the TomTom, where I navigate into the iPod control area and try to hit my driving playlist. As soon as I touch it, the TomTom reports that it lost the iPod connection. I have to un/replug the cable, dismiss the dialog box again, then it works fine. Every single time. Dunno if it’s a TomTom or iPhone thing, but irritating.
  • Overly global and semi-sticky voice preference. Most of the time I know where I am going. I don’t need to hear turn by turn instructions from the TomTom telling me to keep to “two hundred and eighty Ess Bee [sb=southbound] towards San Ho-Tha [San Jose]” or “Towards San Frahn This-Kaa [san francisco]” So I keep it off most of the time. There appears to be no way to keep voice traffic alerts on while keeping instructions off. Occasionally I’ll jump to the traffic menu to have it speak traffic conditions, which it does quickly and smoothly. Unfortunately this toggles the global voice back on without warning.
  • Overly chatty voice. There are several major and minor turnoffs along my usual route to work. The system seems to be unable to distinguish this so it helpfully tells me to “keep left then follow blah blah for another 2 point 2 miles” where it gives me another prompt to stay left. And another. The whole way down. Useful in an unfamiliar area, but not so much in a known area. This manifests in the text/list route browser as well: 35 miles of my trip is along 280, but the list shows it as about 10 different steps of X.X miles. No roll-up. There should be a “detailed v. simple” instruction mode.
  • Stupid cabling. The worst annoyance is that the traffic antenna cable and iPod connect cable use the same port. So you have to choose which one you want. It already talks to my phone over bluetooth for traffic supposedly, but still wants that antenna plugged in. I don’t know why, and it may be an operator error. Anyway, this means I have the 1) power cable 2) the traffic cable, and 3) the ipod cable to manage. All of which have to be put somewhere, and between those three they fill up my rather small center console box when keeping them hidden.

The only thing that can’t be fixed with software updates is the cord management, so overall I am still very happy with this.

Update: Getting a little less happy with my TomTom in my third review

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Upgrade your DSL now!

Published at December 27, 2007 in irritating, internets, product review and user experience. 0 Comments

Happy/Sadzy

Today, someone in my house was either doing some serious streaming porn, or the interwebs were just slow, but I got annoyed with my dsl speed. I’ve had my ISP for about 5 years, and while I am very concerned that the suck factor might go way up after their recent acquisition by a Big Box Retailer, they’ve been very good. Only a few outages that I’ve noticed and reasonable speeds.

So I went and looked at the marketing pages to see what sort of prices they were offering. The package I bought 5 years ago isn’t present, and the materials are pretty light wrt specifics, so I was not particularly weirded by what appeared to be somewhat higher speeds and somewhat lower prices.

I called the sales office up to enquire about an upgrade. At first it appeared that I would be able to upgrade my existing 1.5 down / 768 up to something along the lines of 8 down / 1 up for about 50% more, and no new equipment required, just a modem reboot. Not too shabby, let’s do it.

Then he called back to let me know their info was incorrect, and I would max out at 3 down / 768 up because we’re about as far away from a phone CO as you can get in the city. Sigh. Bonus points: My price would decrease by about $25 a month.

Rewr. “Really?”, I asked. Yes really. Isn’t that a great deal. It sure is, but why oh why didn’t you offer me this magic upgrade before? Well golly we’re very very busy what with 50k+ customers. Uh huh.

You have not provided me with excellent customer service, ISP. Particularly for a loyal customer of 5 years. While staying has the advantages of me not having to do a damn thing except enjoy lower bills, this irks me enough to wonder if I might be able to get even faster speeds for slightly more money with just about anyone else. Loyalty counts, and shitty customer service drags your brand down.

So, his advice to me, and mine to you, is check in with your ISP frequently to see if they’re screwing you around by inaction. :P

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