marklio - Gripes

XBox360 going back again

Mark — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 20:36:13 GMT

I'm fairly frustrated. I got a replacement console back from the XBox repair center last week after mine died. It seemed to be a fairly quick, relatively painless, and reasonable procedure. However, when Becky popped in a DVD and got a region code error, I was pretty upset. They had sent a console with the wrong region code setting. Now, setting arguments against region coding aside, this is riduculous. Now, I have to go through the procedure of sending the box back AGAIN, and there's no guarantee I won't have some other thing wrong with it.

I might be less upset about this if I had been given some compensation for this stupid mistake like some complimentary Microsoft points for the marketplace (especially since I have to buy my arcade games again so my wife can play them on her account) or even a sincere apology would have been nice. Instead, the "technician" simply read a pre-written apology to me without the slightest bit of feeling.

ThanksNo (and unfortunate soapbox rant)

Mark — Tue, 23 May 2006 17:24:23 GMT

Scott Hanselman pointed out a service that I am sure to get tons of use out of in the next few months. ThanksNo.com is a polite-as-possible way to remind your friends and family that you really don't want to get all those forwarded emails, jokes, or other "non-personal" emails from them. It does a good job of pointing out why you don't want them, which is often hard to explain. Visit for yourself to see what I mean. You pretty much reply to the email with a short message and the link, and hopefully the flood of "non-personal" email from people you know will cease.

This has been a huge problem for me. I get all kinds of emails from friends and family with dozens of people copied, and with very little, if any, value. In the past, I've dealt with them by just silently archiving them for fear that any email explaining that I didn't want that kind of email would be misinterpreted. (Actually, maybe this blog post will do the trick.)

Now all we need is a similar service for what I refer to as "corporate spam". Why bother having any kind of intranet at all if you're going to send out 3 emails a day to every employee full of useless or redundant information? I can understand getting the information by default, but at least let me opt-out of all but the most important emails.

And another thing. What's will marking every email as "high importance"? It has lost all meaning when you get an email at work marked urgent, you open it up quickly to find out what action you need to set aside all of your important work for only to find out that there is a bake sale next week.

Vending Machine Price Madness

Mark — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 17:47:24 GMT

I very often bring my lunch to work and supplement it with some items from the vending machine depending on my mood. Typically, this is just a can of Diet Dr. Pepper (the only diet drink I can stand), for which I pay the outlandish price of $.65. Sometimes, when I am a bit more hungry, I will get a bag of delicious Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips, or yummy Baked Doritos (or any of the other baked chips that taste better than the originals...even Fritos). Anyway, the chips used to be $.75. Today, much to my surprise, I discovered the chips are now $.90. And no way am I paying $1.50 for some fruit juice.

I've always been frustrated by the price of things "within the walls" here, but this is ridiculous. I feel like I'm at Disney World or something. Ideally, I don't think anyone should make money off of selling things like food to employees at their place of work, but that can be impractical for a business to provide such services "at cost". But, under no circumstances should I have to pay more for something here than I would within a reasonable distance from here.

Driving home in the dark

Mark — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 01:46:28 GMT

I hate the fall time change. When I was young, I was always was fooled into liking it because I got an extra hour of sleep. Now I know it's just a trick to take one hour of daylight from the end of the day. I can get an extra hour of sleep pretty much whenever I want by going to bed earlier. I'd much rather drive to work in the dark than come home in the dark. It makes me just want to go to bed when I get home, and it doesn't really help me wake up any earlier.

More initial impressions of Time Warner HD DVR

Fri, 16 Apr 2004 05:16:23 GMT

I'm assuming these would apply to the SD DVR as well.

Good:

Multiple tuners - I can record two shows at once
All digital pipeline - Digital channels are recorded directly.
Digital sound - Lots more Dolby digital than I thought there would be. Sounds great.
HD - duh. Seems like everything is being up-converted to 1080i.

Bad:

Not very responsive - Tivo solved this by providing audio feedback of button clicks. The picture didn't immediately respond, but you had almost immediate feedback of stuff. Overall the interface is more sluggish.
Transport controls suck - Tivo had a small jump backwards at the end of a fast-forward since you can't react fast enough. It doesn't appear to have that feature.
Tivo's interface was all about giving you access to your shows. This interface is about cramming lots of information down your throat and making you weed through it with inadequate tools. You have to wade through the guide to find shows, or attempt to browse by the first letter of the shows for a given day in a list that's not quite alphabetized correctly. I never had to know what channel or showing time, or even the name of my shows with Tivo. That is a necessity for this machine.
Since everything is being converted to 1080i, my TV is locked in HD mode, which doesn't give me alot of control over the geometry of the picture. That's a shortcoming of my TV, but some of the HD channels are bizarrely stretched, and some channels seem to have the field order reversed, or the fields scaled oddly and it makes them unwatchable. The Fox HD channel is that way when it's scaling SD content like the Simpsons. They look much better on the SD station.
Tools for managing your scheduled recordings are practically non-existent.
The remote has no enter key, forcing you to wait for the entry to “take“ or by typing 0, 0, 0, 2 to get to channel two.
In order to see what shows are recording, you have to scroll through the list of scheduled recordings to get the details and find the ones with the “rec“ indicator. There's also no easy way to delete shows or manage recording priorities.

The list goes on. I'm sure you're tired of hearing me complain, but I just thought it might aid some other people in their decisions, or help people who think Time Warner's hardware is good to see the light. Maybe someone at Time Warner will come across this as well and take it as good feedback.

On CSS and formatting without tables

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 05:04:16 GMT

I finally had some “spare” time at work today, so I re-worked the layout of our huge data analysis web site using CSS styling and layout rather than the original old skool methods we used when we first built it many years ago. The original design was done back in about 2000, and I didn't have alot of time to do it, so I just threw it together.

I've had a fair amount of experience in the last couple of years with all-CSS layouts. My favorite place to learn is CSSZenGarden. Anyway, the benefits of separating content from presentation are well known, and CSS is not the only method of decoupling, so I won't really go into why I was doing it. Although I did come to the conclusion that CSS is lacking some things that would make what I was doing much better. Anyway, I did do some searching for some examples when I couldn't eliminate a stray pixel spacing here and there.

What I found was alot of people raving about having no tables on their site. Personally, I think that's a little silly. Not to say I'm not impressed by what people can do without tables, but that would be like me saying, “I built a house, but I didn't use any bricks” and expect people to be impressed. Certainly, there are many houses built without bricks. Very functional, beautiful, well-built houses. But you can't build a brick house without bricks. Most people who brag about not having any tables don't realize why they would want to banished tables other than they read someone else bragging about being table-free.

The point is not to rid the earth of the table because it's evil. Tables are perfectly fine for identifying content as being part of a table, after all, you don't replace all the images on your site with thousands of tiny DIV tags perfectly sized, colored, and positioned to replace every pixel. That sounds silly, but I've seen people do the equivalent of that in trying to replace a table in the quest of table-less HTML. The point is to organize the structure of the content so that it can be interpreted as simple data, and can then be “styled“ for presentation.

Well, looking back over this entry, I find it to be one of the most lame entries ever. Oh well, I feel better having griped about that.