Category Archives: Rants

Not merely ramblings, these are flat-out rants.

Rants

One More Straw

Starting in September, T-Mobile is introducing a new fee. If you receive a printed bill, you’ll be assessed a fee of $1.50 per month. The only way to avoid the fee is to switch to electronic payment.
They’re trying to “greenwash” the new fee by claiming that it’s supposed to benefit the environment by reducing the use of paper, fuel, etc. But the money doesn’t go to any environmental protection effort, it just goes to T-Mobile’s bottom line. Funny how that works.
Also funny is how when you have electronic payments automatically being transferred out of your account, you probably won’t notice if the amount increases again at some point down the road due to an “electronic payment fee” or an “executive compensation fee” or a “because we felt like it fee.”
As a T-Mobile customer, I already have to put up with:

  • Frequent dropped calls.
  • Lousy coverage (T-Mobile is the only provider where I’ve ever been unable to obtain a signal while on an Interstate).
  • Poor broadband coverage (They claim my house is in a “good” – as opposed to “excellent” area for 3G coverage. In reality, I almost always get a slower Edge connection.)
  • Lack of integration with emergency services (more on that in a future post).

And now I have to pay more for the lousy service?
That cracking sound you hear is the camel’s back.

Rants

E-ZPass is Too Much Trouble

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I got a letter from E-ZPass a few days ago which says that starting July 1, 2009 they’re adding a few new charges. I’d heard that the Maryland legislature had told them they could add fees, but I (rather naively) hoped smarter people would prevail.
I’m a casual user of the E-ZPass system. I use it a half-dozen or so times each year. For most of the year the Maryland Transportation Authority just kicks back and collects interest on my account balance.
The letter doesn’t spell out all the new fees, but visiting the Maryland E-ZPass web site, details of the new fees (PDF file) were only a few clicks away.

  • Monthly Account Charge.
    A monthly account charge of $1.50 will be deducted from all E-ZPass Maryland accounts.

    WTF*? The system saves them money (the E-ZPass lane has no toll collector), means fewer cars in the backups at the toll plazas, and also means fewer cars in that backup idling their engines and contributing their tailpipe emissions to the atmosphere. So because it’s good, they’re going to add a fee to discourage me from using it? WTF?

  • E-ZPass Transponders.
    All new or replacement devices must be purchased.

    If I have to buy the transponder, does that mean it’s now legally mine? (Previously, I believe it had to be returned.) And if I’m buying the transponder, what does that monthly fee cover? Executive compensation?

  • Commuter Discount Program.
    The duration of E-ZPass Maryland commuter discount plans will be reduced from 60 days to 45 days.

    Doesn’t affect me personally, but it still sounds like the people who use it are getting screwed. Shouldn’t they be encouraging people to use something that saves the Maryland Transportation Authority money?

  • E-ZPass Shoppers Plan for the Bay Bridge.
    A new Bay Bridge plan will be offered for Bay Bridge customers. The Shoppers Plan costs $10 and is good for 10 trips that may be used Sunday through Thursday only and expires after six months.

    Again, doesn’t affect me personally, but this may be the only positive in the thing

  • Notice of Toll Due.
    Traveling through any lane in the toll facility without providing sufficient payment for the toll due will cost $3 + toll due. The notice will be mailed to the registered owner of the vehicle.

    I don’t have a huge problem with the intention on this one; essentially it’s a penalty for not keeping your account in good shape. Similar to a bounced check fee in some ways. The problem is, this gives the people running the system an incentive to “forget” to replenish your account, or “accidentally” charge you in hopes that you won’t notice. Of course, as we all know, public officials are completely above that sort of behav… Damn. I couldn’t even hold a straight face while typing that.

  • Toll Violation Charge.
    Failure to pay the toll due by the deadline will result in a $25 fee in addition to the $3 + toll due.

    OK, so first off, you have a non-law enforcement authority issuing fines. That’s troublesome in and of itself, but nothing new. But in addition to the fine, there’s a fee for collecting the fine… That just seems stupid.

Screw it. This isn’t worth the added costs. I’m going to cancel my account.
* As you know, the ‘F’ in WTF means “Frak.” As in “What The Frak? Do they think I’m not going to notice a huge spike in what this thing costs?” If you prefer Farscape over Battlestar Galactica, you may substitute “Frell” for “Frak.”

Rants, Silliness

More Fun with Software Licenses

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I took a few moments out of my evening tonight in order to update to the most recent version of the Mozy Home backup software. The dense legalese on these click-through licenses is almost impossible for us mere mortals to understand (I can’t find the citation, but evidently the courts have ruled some of them to unenforceable), but I’ve fallen into the habit of skimming them just in case something leaps out at me. And sure enough, every so often I find evidence that the lawyers are out of control.
Mozy’s terms of use include this paragraph (Unnecessary capitalization is theirs. Red and bold is mine.):

THE FOREGOING LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY SHALL APPLY WHETHER THE DAMAGES ARISE FROM USE OR MISUSE OF AND RELIANCE ON THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICE, FROM INABILITY TO USE THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICE, OR FROM THE INTERRUPTION, SUSPENSION, OR TERMINATION OF THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICE (INCLUDING SUCH DAMAGES INCURRED BY THIRD PARTIES). DO NOT TAUNT HAPPY FUN BALL. SUCH LIMITATION SHALL APPLY NOTWITHSTANDING A FAILURE OF ESSENTIAL PURPOSE OF ANY LIMITED REMEDY AND TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.

The paragraph before that states: “FURTHERMORE, YOU AGREE TO USE THE SOFTWARE OR SERVICE EXCLUSIVELY FOR GOOD AND FOR AWESOME.”
And then we’re back to the usual idiocy:

THE SOFTWARE AND SERVICE ARE NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN CONNECTION WITH ANY NUCLEAR, AVIATION, MASS TRANSIT, OR MEDICAL APPLICATION OR ANY OTHER INHERENTLY DANGEROUS APPLICATION THAT COULD RESULT IN DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE, OR MASS DESTRUCTION, AND LICENSEE AGREES THAT LICENSOR WILL HAVE NO LIABILITY OF ANY NATURE AS A RESULT OF ANY SUCH USE OF THE SOFTWARE.

Pointless Posts, Rants

Decision Making

This is happily nothing to do with anything going on in my life, just a general observation I can’t get out my head.
In the corporate world, before scolding a subordinate for making a decision they don’t agree with, most senior managers prefer to increase the level of irony by first giving a speech about how important it that everyone be empowered to make decisions.

Assorted Ramblings, Rants, Stories, Tech

First Impressions: Android

2 Comments

I’ve been a Sprint customer for the past eight years, but over the course of my most recent contract, I encountered a number of customer service issues:

  • Unable to block calls from unknown numbers.
  • Being charged for text message spam.
  • Sprint deciding to wipe out all user accounts on their web site.
  • Sprint store employees unable to sell replacement batteries.

When I wrote to the head of customer service, Sprint’s response to everything was best summed up as “We don’t do that.” (Amusingly, on one of my phone calls to customer service, the person I spoke to admitted that she doesn’t use Sprint at home.)

When my contract expired in December, Sprint offered me a $50 rebate if I’d sign on for another two years. What they didn’t offer was an apology. That’s too bad, because they certainly are sorry.

So now that I’m footloose and contract-free, I started looking around at some of my other options. I have some misgivings about T-Mobile, and a few more about Google, but the Android Operating System has all sorts of Geek appeal. (Regardless of whether you actually do it, the notion of being able to being able to program your phone is kind of cool.)

I’ve certainly heard plenty of good things about the phone. A co-worker has been raving about his since the week after they came out, and when I bumped into her at Farpoint, Katie started evangelizing about the G-1.
So, I decided to give it a try. I ended up buying the phone directly from T-Mobile and arrived home on Thursday to find a note from UPS waiting for me, saying a signature was required. I finally got the phone late Friday evening when I went to the UPS pickup location.

When you first turn the phone on, it prompts you to either login to an existing Google account, or create a new one. So I entered my information and clicked the “Sign-in” button. The login process ended with a message telling me that the phone couldn’t log in. It might be a temporary problem, or it might be that the SIM card hadn’t been set up correctly. After twelve hours later, I’ve ruled out the idea of it being a temporary glitch.
The first call to T-Mobile’s “Customer Care” number (Whatever happened to calling it “Customer Service”?) didn’t go so well. First I got a bad connection. Next, the representative kept telling me how I could find out the new phone number by entering a code (Gee, if only I could get the phone set up, I could try that!), and then I got cut off.

The second call was a bit more productive. It turns out that when I ordered the phone, the sales person forgot to sign me up with the required data plan. (Buying the G-1 phone absolutely requires you to buy a data plan, but somehow the sales person managed to skip that step.)
I’m set up with data service now, but the Customer Care rep told me it may take anywhere from a couple hours to a couple days before the service starts working. (If it ends up at the “couple days” end of the scale, I’ll be returning the phone. I’m already several days into the trial period without being able to try it.)

So my first impression of the G-1 Android phone is this: It’s a brick. I’d been hoping to write about how well it was working, maybe even post something via the phone. (Before it died, I would occasionally post via my PDA.) Instead, I’ll have to settle for letting Katie write about her phone in the comments.

Most likely the problems I’m having are because somebody turned off the satellites.

Pointless Posts, Rants

Bye-bye Google

The Google ads are gone from this portion of the site. (At least, I think I found all the places where they were set up.) I still need to remove them from the blog on the fandom part of the site, and also from Wylie’s pages. But much as Rome wasn’t built in a day, it took a while to tear it down too.
Just to be clear, I don’t have a problem with companies making money to pay for the content they put on line. I simply don’t agree with Google’s decision to keep track of what sites individuals visit. That’s just a little too invasive and a little too easy to abuse. (I’d love to think I’m part of a larger backlash on this one, but most folks seem fairly oblivious to privacy concerns.)
One thing I do agree with though: Google should try to make their ads a bit more relevant. Looking at my fandom blog just now, Google’s displaying an ad for car insurance. That one’s not only irrelevant to the content of the blog, it’s irrelevant to anything I’ve even looked at online in the past six months.

Rants, Tech

Hiding From Google

3 Comments

Google has announced plans to make their ads more “interesting.”
Evidently the plan is that they’re going to track what web sites you visit over time and use that information to decide what ads you might find interesting. They’ve had this capability for years, every time you visit a site with Google ads, they set a cookie in your web browser. By serving up a cookie with the ads, they’re able to track you no matter what sites you visit. If the site includes Google ads, Google will know you visited it.
Do you find it a little creepy that Google will know your every move? They’ll let you opt out. You just have to be know that they’re watching you and also know that there’s a way to turn off the tracking. Because, you know, this is going to be completely obvious to everyone. (Believe that and I have some ocean front property in Colorado I’d like to talk to you about.)
My personal preference for dealing with this is to change my browser settings to discard cookies every time I exit from the browser. That way, none of the various trackers (Google is just the largest company to do this) knows my usage patterns outside a single session.
This is fairly easy in Firefox: Go to Tools menu, select the Options sub-menu and a dialog box will open. On the Privacy tab, change the setting for “Keep Until” to say “I close Firefox.” Note that after making this change, most web sites with logins will require you to login again for each new browser session.
Turning off cookies in Firefox.
Internet Explorer is a little different, but not too much more difficult: Go to the Tools Menu (you may need to press the [Alt] key to make the menu visible), select the Internet Options sub-menu and a dialog box will open. On the Privacy Tab, click the “Advanced” button.
Turning off cookies in Internet Explorer, part 1.
This will open a new dialog box. Click the “Override automatic cookie handling” checkbox (1). To block ad-based cookies, in the column labeled “Third-party cookies”, select “Block” (2). For greater privacy, you can also choose “Block” from the “First-party cookies” column, however this will prevent some web site logins from working. Check the “Always allow session cookies” which will allow cookies to be set for the current browsing session (3).
Turning off cookies in Internet Explorer, part 2.
Full Disclosure: You may have noticed that my site makes use of Google ads on a number of pages. I don’t care for Google’s new tracking technology, so I’ll be removing the ads completely over the next week or so. Between the privacy concerns, the lack of relevancy, and the number of blatant scams appearing in the ads, I don’t think they’re worthwhile.
Until I remove the ads, I’ve modified the settings in my Adsense account to exclude my content from the interest-based ads. In the meantime, Google’s context-based ads will continue to appear. It may be entertaining to see what sort of ads result from this post. 🙂

Rants

World's Most Dangerous Meme

4 Comments

I just ran across a meme that leaves me breathless. I can’t decide whether the guy who came up with it is an absolute idiot, or a criminal genius.
In case you’ve somehow missed out on this craze (in which case, I’m deeply jealous), a reasonable colloquial definition of a “meme” is that it’s a series of questions that you’re supposed to answer and either reply back to everyone on the email you received it in (plus perhaps everyone you know) or, more recently, post the answers on your blog and encourage others to copy and answer on their own blogs.
Now I’ll admit, I’ve participated in a few of these things, most recently a list of “Have you ever done these things?” but I’m generally reluctant to share much in the way of personal information. (A co-worker recently commented that she knows I take time off from time to time, but never had any idea where I was going.)
This new meme terrifies me. I don’t know whether it originated as email, or in blogs, but what you do is start off with your real name (or perhaps even your full name), and then make up your “Witness Protection Name”, “Nascar Name”, “Stripper Name” and so on. The way you create these names is through various concatenations of the name of your first pet, the name of the first street you lived on, your mother’s maiden name, and various other bits of information that are normally reserved for establishing your identity when you open a bank or credit account.
Armed with that information, a scammer should have no trouble impersonating someone who participated in the meme.
What scares me is that a member of my immediate family fell for this one, which means my identity has been compromised too.
Some days, I truly hate the Internet.

Pointless Posts, Rants

Exclusive Coverage: Obama Eats Lunch!!!

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OK, I haven’t seen that headline yet, but when I was taking a break on Monday afternoon, I did see this one:
President Obama bumps his head
It seems that as the president was boarding Marine One, he paused to wave to people on the ground and didn’t duck low enough to clear the helicopter’s doorway. And with everything else that’s going on the world right now, CNN decided to put that story on their home page. (They also hastened to assure us that Mister Obama wasn’t harmed in the incident.)
Y’know, there’s a fine line between enthusiastic media coverage and stalking. CNN didn’t step over that line so much as they pole-vaulted.