I have recently had two very annoying experiences with the online fronts of two different businesses.  First up is Budget truck rentals.  On Tuesday of this week I reserved a moving truck from Budget, using their website.  I picked the closest center to our house as the pickup/dropoff location, and they reserved a truck that I could pick up at 8:30 this morning.

So Stephanie and I headed over there this morning, getting there about 8:00.  We walked up to the office, because we saw a guy getting there and unlocking the gate.  “Are you guys here to pick up a truck?” “Yeah, for Robinson.”  “They were supposed to call you, this location is no longer open.”  “Come again?”  “This location is closed, last Saturday was our last day... what was the name?”  “Robinson.”  He went inside and looked at the four names he had, and said Robinson wasn’t even one of the names he had on his list.  After some discussion, I mention that I made the reservation on Tuesday, after this location had been closed.  He said they were supposed to have blocked that location from the website.  The guy was nice at least, and called around to other Budget locations nearby to see if anyone had a truck that wasn’t reserved, and after about fifteen minutes he found one not too very far away, so we rushed over there to get it.  So it turned out okay, but it was incredibly scary for a minute, because we had to get moved into the house today, and some people from our church were showing up at 9:30 to help with moving and we needed to be there with a truck.  Plus I’m probably going to have to deal with a $50 no-show fee, which will require some kind of hour long phone call to try to explain what happened.

The second situation is with Time Warner.  I called them about two weeks ago to arrange for our cable to be cut off at the apartment and turned on at the house, and they set up an appointment for 1-5 on Friday (yesterday) to turn on the cable at the house (they didn’t have to come out to disconnect at the apartment).  Yesterday morning I wanted to see if the technician could give us a call-ahead before showing up, since 1-5 is a pretty big time window.  I went to the website to find a number, and decided I would go to the “chat with a customer service representative” option.  I wouldn’t have to be on hold forever, and chatting would be easier to do while I was working.  The lady on the chat window told me that a technician didn’t even need to come out, since the last people had never canceled their service, so they would just change the account over to our name.  I was a little miffed at this, because had I not called, someone would have been at the house from 1-5 with no technician showing up.

So this morning, when we were moving into the house, we saw that we had a message.  It was Time Warner, saying that the technician had showed up at 1:50 and no one was home.  When we got a TV unpacked we discovered that the cable had been disconnected and the internet didn’t work.  I called Time Warner and they sent someone out, and when the guy got here and connected everything he said “I’m sorry we have idiots working for us.”

Both of these situations were really annoying, because the people at the website aren’t communicating with the actual people on the ground.  This whole world wide web thing is not new, and its primary purpose is, after all, to be a communication tool.  Both of the situations shouldn’t have happened.

I noticed something interesting on Google Maps today.  I had followed a link giving driving directions between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil.  I changed the “from” address to Charlotte, NC.  I was expecting either a “no routes found” message or a path taking me along the Pan-American Highway (although that is apparently not complete).  Instead what I got was a joke from the Google Maps developers:

Very clever, guys. :)

Interestingly, I couldn’t reproduce this behavior with any other destinations.  I tried London, Paris, Honolulu, Tokyo, Sydney, Havana, and San Juan.  All said they could not calculate driving directions.  Must be the work of a Brazilian programmer.

You may have heard that Apple is bringing the Safari web browser to the Windows platform.  In fact, you can download the beta now.  I wanted to see how compatible my own website is, since Safari is not a browser I’ve ever tested.  Unfortunately, proxy support seems to be broken right now.  Whenever I try to go to a website, I get prompted for my name and password to get through the proxy (this is on my PC at work).  After entering this information, Safari immediately crashes.  This is beta code, so I won’t fault them for having bugs.  I do, however, question the validity of this chart:

From my own experience, this is completely backwards.  Opera is much faster than IE, which is faster than Firefox (when I say IE, I mean IE 6, whereas the chart says IE 7; maybe IE 7 is slower).  I’m not sure what kind of HTML they used to conduct this test, but it must have been much more complex than your typical webpage, in some way that made Safari look good.  Of course, I still use Firefox, the browser that feels slowest to me, because 1) I need my precious extensions, 2) IE is teh suck, 3) Opera cheats with overzealous caching, 4) the speed difference is not really significant, and 5) Opera doesn’t support ctrl+enter, which I rely on to type URLs.

The other thing I noticed in my brief time with Safari is the font smoothing technique, which must have required a lot of work to port over.  I’m not going to get into a discussion of whether it is better than the Windows technique or not; if you’re interested, Joel Spolsky has already done a pretty decent job of covering that topic on his excellent blog.  The problem I had is that my monitor at work is a little unusual in that its sub-pixels are aligned backwards (BGR instead of RGB).  You can fix font rendering in Windows to account for this, but I couldn’t find any such option in Safari.  For an illustration of the problem look at this image:

If you are on a CRT monitor, both probably look OK to you.  If you are on an LCD monitor, one of them probably looks significantly easier to read.  For most people it is the text on the left; for me, it is the text on the right.  This means that the text in Safari will be really difficult for me to read.  Again, they are in beta right now; they might fix this issue by the time the final version ships.

My screen at home is normal, and I don’t go through a proxy there, so maybe I will actually get to try it out tonight.

I just read this article over at the site formerly known as The Daily WTF.  It is about someone who worked for a government agency and couldn’t send e-mails to a client named Mr. Gookin, because the filtering system was flagging this as a racist e-mail.  Apparently “gookin” is a racial slur (I’ve certainly never heard it used).

This story doesn’t really surprise me, but what does surprise me is when I read some of the comments to the post, how many people have had the same thing happen.  And some of them are just completely ridiculous, like an e-mail containing the phrase “one group” because (if you remove the spaces) you can see the word “negro” in there (which I guess makes the United Negro College Fund a racist organization).  Or filtering out an e-mail containing the word “Saturday” (because of the “turd,” of course).  Or people with the name “Dick” that run into this problem all the time.  Or someone with the name “Callahan,” since that contains “Allah.”  Or the person who was involved with forensics, and frequently had e-mails to and from police departments filtered out (I guess it’s kind of hard to discuss a rape investigation without using offensive words like “rape” or “sex”).

What’s even worse than the stupidity of the filters is the refusal of many IT administrators to remove these words from the banned word list, even when it presents a problem to the employees.  And even when it prevents them from conducting business!

Fortunately I don’t have this problem at my office, otherwise I probably wouldn’t be able to exchange e-mails with Rakshit (that’s really the name of someone I work with).  But this kind of thing happens often enough that there is even a name for it: The Scunthorpe Problem, named after an incident in which AOL blocked mail from people living in Scunthorpe, England.  Follow the link if you’re not sure why..

I wonder is Spam Assassin blocks e-mails about Spam Assassin...

I was killing wasting time on Google Maps today, trying to find the Sears Tower without knowing what it looked like or where in Chicago it was.  You know, the kind of thing that’s fun to waste company time and bandwidth on.  Anyway, I came across a place where the satellite images are stitched together in a very interesting manner.  You can’t see the seams, but there are at least three different satellite photos represented here.  The various angles of the buildings reveal the relative position of the satellite when the photos were taken.  You can see the south and east sides of some buildings, the north and east sides of others, and the south and west side on some others.  What it results in is a cool M. C. Escher look to the buildings:

I’m on MySpace now.  I only created a profile because it told me I had to be logged in to read someone’s blog (but I don’t think that’s true anymore).  I was originally going to try to make it look nice, but then I lost interest and made it really tacky instead (much easier to do).  I even put up an extremely low-quality image to give it a finishing touch, which has been faithfully reproduced to your right (highest JPEG compression level Photoshop would allow!).

So.. let me know if you want to be my friend.. or whatever it is you do on MySpace.  So far I’m only getting friend requests from porn sites, so it will be a nice change.  Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how MySpace got so popular in the first place.  It’s like GeoCities was nine years ago, except now there are more ads, more idiots, and more people trying to sell you Cialis and consolidate your debts.  And some of the things you can choose to show in your profile make no sense, even if you think of it as a dating site—I mean, income??  Who would possibly list their income on their web page?  And it keeps telling me I need to list my school.  Maybe this is unusual, but I don’t go to a school anymore.

In conclusion, you’re welcome to visit my MySpace space.  Just don’t expect me to be there.

Remember the internet before CSS?  Set the dial to 1996 and crank up the flux capacitor for the worst web design advice ever.  Here’s a sample: “If you want people to read [your web pages], don’t [use standard HTML constructs]. They take away your typographic control. Specify your own font sizes when you want a size change.”  To a nongeek, let me just say that reading this statement is tantamount to reading “When running with scissors, make sure they are always pointed up.  Otherwise, if you fall, you might stab yourself in the thigh.”

Last week I installed Opera for the first time, to make sure my site was usable to Opera users.  Well there is some weird cookie/caching thing that makes it difficult to switch back and forth between text-only and full-graphics versions of my site, but other than that I only saw one thing that didn’t render the same as Firefox (and that turned out to be an ambiguity in my css that is now fixed).  In fact, I haven’t yet found a site that doesn’t work in Opera (of course, I haven’t really been looking very hard).

I was not “won over” by Opera, in the way that I was with Firefox.  Firefox was basically aimed at IE users who wanted a modern piece of software.  I mean, they don’t advertise it like that, but if you look at the keyboard shortcuts and the menu layouts, they’re practically identical.  Opera... not so much.  I mean, I rely on Ctrl+Enter finishing a URL in the address bar-- I can’t remember the last time I had to type “www.” and “.com” in the address bar.  And I rely on URL auto-completion in the address bar.  Opera lists URLs that match what you’ve typed so far, but hitting tab doesn’t select the first item in that list.. meaning, I have to use the mouse too much.  And Ctrl+T doesn’t open a new tab-- another shortcut I use all the time.  Of course these are all ergonomic issues associated with using new software, and it may very well be that Opera has better ways of doing these things.

The good thing I noticed about Opera is that it’s fast.  I mean, really fast.  It was the first thing I noticed.  I had long thought that something was wrong with either my server or my PHP code because Firefox often pauses briefly during a page load.  Not with Opera.  When I looked around the Opera site, I found that this speed is (not surprisingly) one of their selling points.  I’m still not giving up Firefox, but now every time I use it I am painfully aware of just how slow it is, whereas before I was blissfully ignorant and assumed that’s just how the internet worked.  On the plus side, it looks like the latest Gecko engine has undergone some big performance improvements, so maybe Firefox 2.0 won’t suffer from the same slownocity as 1.5.

PS-  The sky looked pretty cool the other day so I took some pictures of it.  I thought they were pretty so I put them on the site.

For any who may care, my site now is now validated XHTML 1.0 Transitional.  I was gonna do strict, but it seemed a little too strict (no target attribute on an anchor tag?  What’s that all about?).  Oh well.  I wanted to make a very short post after my previous very long post, so... peace out homies.

So I got ripped off on eBay.  It actually happened in November, but I am only just now mentioning it here for the same reason most rape incidents go unreported:  it’s embarrassing to admit you got screwed.  Yes, I just equated losing two hundred dollars to being raped.

When I found out that there was a Pearl Pink Nintendo DS bundled with Nintendogs Best Friends Edition, I had to make that Stephanie’s Christmas present.  But it turned out that the pink system was extremely limited, and they only sold it at Toys ‘R Us and K-B Toys (maybe a few other places, but definitely not Best Buy or EB Games).  So while I could have purchased it in a store for $149.99 in August, by November I could only find them on eBay, where they ran for around $200.  After watching the auctions for a couple of weeks and losing a few of them, I found this one for $190.00 with Buy It Now, and I figured that was as cheap as I was going to find it (and by mid-December they were going for $250+).  The guy (whom I will refer to as “Dick” from here on out) had a feedback rating of 33, which didn’t seem bad, with only one negative comment from long ago when he was a buyer.  On November 14 I made this purchase.  $190.00 + $10.00 shipping + $2.00 for shipping insurance = $202.00.  It turns out that the $2.00 may well be the best two dollars I’ve ever spent.

Well Dick didn’t take PayPal, so I sent a money order.  A week later he said he got it and the day after Thanksgiving (November 25) he claims he mailed it priority mail from Akron, OH.  It should have gotten here by the following Tuesday at the latest.  It never arrived.  I called Dick (who happened to be at home in the middle of the day on a weekday..) and told him I hadn’t gotten it and he’s like “well.. I mailed it.. it should be there soon..”  It never got here.  After three weeks the postal service will let you file an insurance claim for something lost in shipping, but the person who ships it must file the claim.  Turns out Dick didn’t keep the receipt, something they require, so he couldn’t file the claim.  At this point it was a week before Christmas so I got Stephanie a regular Nintendo DS, and I looked around on eBay to find out what I could do.

I found out that if you purchase shipping insurance and the seller fails to provide it, you qualify for eBay Standard Purchase Protection Program.  They will refund me what I paid for the item ($190.00) minus a $25 processing fee ($165.00).  I have until 90 days after the transaction to file for that, so I told Dick that I would give him until February 1st to refund me the money, and that if he did so I wouldn’t escalate the claim.  I explained that if I escalate the claim eBay will reimburse me, but that they would also probably investigate him and his account would suffer or something.  He said he could definitely get me the money by February 1st.

Well today is February 1st and there is no money.  I have sent Dick five e-mails in the last week, none of which he has responded to.  So I submitted my claim this morning.  Hopefully in another month or so I’ll get $165.00 from eBay, meaning I’ll have only lost a net total of $37 dollars, which isn’t too terribly bad.

Oh I forgot to mention that not long after Dick said he shipped my system his name showed up in eBay as “Not a registered user”, which means I can’t leave negative feedback.  What a Dick.