Jeffrey McManus

We just picked up our first HDTV for our rumpus room (a really sweet Samsung LCD) and an Apple TV to go along with it. Love the new TV. Love the Apple TV. But I’m not enamored with the Playstation 3 we’ve had basically gathering dust for a year. The idea was to use it as a Blu-Ray DVD player (only — we aren’t using it as a game machine). So I tried to hook it up to the HDTV last night and it wouldn’t talk to the new TV over the HDMI port (it would only send output via the low-fi analog connection). So I downloaded the latest system software upgrade for the PS3 to see if that would help. After running it, it got stuck on a screen that said “Updating Database/Do Not Turn Off The System/0%”. For eight hours. Restarting the unit got us back to this same screen.

Now, in this situation, you’d think that a little something might have gone wrong with the system update software, right? But Sony doesn’t think so. After calling Sony tech support, they wanted me to send them the PS3 and pay $150 to have it fixed, since, incredibly, there is no way for a civilian to reformat and reinstall system software on a PS3 that is in this state.

So I told the customer service rep (very politely) to cram it, and to provide a rationale why I should have to pay $150 to remedy an obvious fault in their system updater. Here are two of the most awesome excuses I got from Sony reps over the phone:

1) “The unit is out of warranty.”

So that’s fine, but it’s not like my two-year-old was jamming unwrapped slices of American cheese singles in the DVD slot — Sony’s software upgrade clearly caused the problem. Have you never heard of the phrase “you break it, you bought it”?

2) “There are no known issues with this update.”

Wrong, chuckles. There is at least one known issue with this update, and it’s going on right this effing minute on the PS3 in my living room. The fact that 10,000 other people haven’t complained to you doesn’t make a bit of difference to me. This is the same rationale as the fictitious auto maufacturer that Ed Norton worked for in Fight Club, the one that only does a product recall if the number of accidents times the number of insurance settlements exceeds the cost of a recall. Therefore, I think it’s safe to say that if Sony ever gets into the automobile or heart-monitor business, we should all run screaming.

At one point I asked the customer service rep “Why would I send you $150 to fix a problem that was obviously caused by your software? I mean, is there any question in your mind that this problem is not my fault? Why wouldn’t I just put the PS3 on the curb, let the neighborhood kids ride their bicycles over it, and take photos to post on my blog as an art project?” (I am pretty sure that they didn’t have an answer for that one in their call center script, so I got sent to the assistant supervisor. Pro tip: to get escalated through customer support voice jail, be as surrealistic as possible.)

But being escalated through the hypothetical chain of command sadly didn’t do anything. Each time I asked to talk to someone who could describe to me why I had to pay $150 for Sony’s messed-up software, each person said “That’s our policy, I don’t have the authority to change it.” If that’s the case, then why am I talking to you? You’re wasting your time and mine.

In years past, I’d stuck with Sony components because they were fairly indestructable and they weren’t too expensive. (Our stereo and standard-def TV have always been all Sony and we’ve been pretty happy with them.) I hate to feel like I’m the old guy with his pants hiked up waving a garden rake at the neighborhood kids on his front lawn, but seriously, I’m going to avoid Sony products (all of them) for at least the next few years because of the excreable customer service experience I had today.

Flying somewhere used to be simple, but recently airlines have begun to implement unbelievably complicated pricing policies. If you ask them, they’ll say it’s because of the increase in the price of oil. But it’s funny how all these special fees only seem to go up, never down. Some airlines are saying that this kind of pricing is a life-and-death proposition for the industry, while other airlines don’t feel terribly compelled to follow suit.

If it’s really the case that airlines can’t make money in the current environment without resorting to these pricing practices, how come Southwest, one of the most consistently profitable airlines in the country, doesn’t charge anything to check a second bag? And how is it that Continental can possibly get away with serving free meals on its flights?

Also: Fifty bucks to check a second bag, Delta? Seriously? Seven bucks for a fruit plate, Northwest? You guys are douches.

Tacking on all these little charges is cheesy. It’s yet another thing (in addition to abusive airport security and interminable delays) that makes me not want to fly at all. Anytime you can’t express the price of something in a sentence or less, there’s nearly always something predatory and possibly crooked going on.

People accept these charges because they have to; by the time you get to the airport, you don’t have any choice but to pay them if you want to get on your plane. But if all these charges were applied at the time you purchased your ticket instead of at the airport, my guess is that we’d see them evaporate (folded into the regular cost of a ticket) pronto.

I actually don’t mind what United and other airlines do with upsells at the airport — they let you pay a few extra bucks (typically under $20) for an exit row seat, which is sometimes worth it to me since I’m a big guy. But this is an option, not a requirement they force on you at the last minute.

This table shows a handy list of a few dozen major airlines and the fees they charge for stuff they used to do for free.

Update: I just booked a flight to London in November and paid an extra $100 out of my own pocket to fly Virgin Atlantic instead of United, la la la.

Link: American, Cutting Back, Plans $15 Bag Fee

“It’s the end of an era,” said Robert W. Mann Jr., an airline industry consultant in Port Washington, N.Y. Referring to the range of fees that customers face, Mr. Mann added, “Soon, like freight, we will pay by the pound for passenger air travel.”

Horse hockey. Only the amateurs and unfortunates who are for some reason forced to fly American will have to put up with this. Airlines try this kind of stuff all the time; it only sticks if the other airlines follow suit. So if customers remove American from the list of airlines they’re willing to subject themselves to (as I plan to), the other airlines won’t emulate this predatory pricing tactic and we won’t have to put up with it.

I should mention that last week when I was traveling to Florida and New York I flew Continental and it was terrific.

You know the page that merchants are supposed to use to generate payment buttons? You remember, the buttons that enable people pay money, which in turn enables you to make money?

The page that generates these buttons does not work. It redirects to something that says "Page Not Found".

Please to fix.

Cheers,

Jeffrey

P.S. I know there used to be a way to kick off the PayPal payment flow with a simple URL instead of a form submit. Why is this buried in your documentation? I’m sure I’ve done this before but now I can’t find the instructions on how to do it.

Update: Looks like the page works now. Kudos!

I’ve been critical of eBay’s acquisition of Skype (like a lot of people, I think they overpaid by a lot). But now that I have a client in the UK, I am using Skype at least once a week.

Today on a lark I tried to make a call to a U.S. based land line using Skype, just to see what the experience would be like. To make calls from Skype to a land line, you have to pay Skype. They’ve given this the challenging monicker "SkypeOut".

What an incredible pain this was:

• They send you to a web page to set up payment. This page took about fifteen seconds to load on my machine.
• You can link your Skype account to your PayPal account, which seems like it would be good, although they inexplicably ask you to fill out a form providing your name/address/etc. which is dumb for a PayPal flow (if you have a PayPal account, they already have all this information or can get it from PayPal).
• At this point, you figure, my Skype account is linked to my PayPal account, tremendous, I can start making calls. But once you go to make a call, Skype says, sorry, can’t do that, you may think you’re done, but you first have to buy credit.
• Okay, swell, you think. I’ll buy some credit. Here’s what the form that lets you buy credit looks like:

Hey, wait a minute. I have to pay you ten bucks and the credit expires in six months? I thought Skype was supposed to be cheaper. Compared to my cel phone, that’s highway robbery. I’m trying to make a call that should cost me less than a dollar here, and you insist on charging me $10 in hopes that you can enjoy the float on my funds and I’ll forget about it within six months? This is bordering on scam-like behavior here.

When you link a Skype account to a PayPal account, why can’t it just debit funds from your PayPal account as you use the service, just like every other PayPal payee in the world, including eBay, does? I mean, if it’s somehow possible to pay iTunes for a $0.99 download using PayPal, it should be possible to pay Skype for a 15-minute toll call in the same way.

This is too much work. I’m reverting back to my cel phone and I’ll only use the free mode of Skype with other Skype users.

Comcast has been blocking forwarded email from The Well for a few days now, which means if you are a Comcast customer and you’ve been forwarding your Well mail to your Comcast account, they’re probably losing your mail.

It took a couple of days for administrators from The Well to even reach anyone at Comcast to talk to them about what was going on, and when they finally did reach someone, Comcast faulted The Well for receiving so much spam — in essence, blaming the victim. Elise Ackerman at the Merc did a story on this today which has more details.

Since Comcast is being intransigent about this, it seems like the smartest recourse is to switch ISPs if you can. (If you’re in Northern California, I can’t recommend Sonic.net highly enough.) You should kick Comcast to the curb even if you’re not affected by this particular problem, since Comcast has had this problem with other peers in the past, according to the article. If you’re using Comcast to handle your email, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before they start routing your mail to the bit bucket.

We knew that Comcast was not what you’d call a center of excellence when they so badly bungled the TechTV acquisition a few years back, but keeping email going is pretty basic, guys.

Linux.com | Ubuntu turns to NUN to help new users.

The New Users Network, or NUN, is a group of experienced Ubuntu enthusiasts who help new Ubuntu users come to grips with the operating system.

Volunteer NUN mentors spend time on Ubuntu forums, mailing lists, and IRC channels looking for new user queries. The mentors have agreed to follow the NUN guidelines, which caution against the use of popular responses to newbie questions, such as RTFM, JFGI, and UTFS. Instead, they try to answer the queries in an easy-to-follow fashion, and point to online resources wherever possible, such as a wiki that explains things in details.

"At first the NUN was nothing more than an IRC channel (#ubuntu-nun on the freenode network) that we could bring a user from #kubuntu or #ubuntu into, for one-on-one work that couldn’t be done in the busier support channels. Since then, it has become a popular haven for geeks and new users alike," says Rich Johnson, a NUN mentor.

But what really makes this team laudable is its aim to foster intelligent and knowledgeable users. Throwing commands isn’t encouraged, unless that’s all the user wants. The NUN guidelines call for mentors to exercise caution while pointing users to resources such as ubuntuguide.org that simply list the commands to get a task done, without much explanation.

It sounds like the Ubuntu guys are hitting all the right notes with this; I can think of a couple of platforms that aren’t getting the adoption that they should because they don’t consider support for noob users to be a priority. I wonder how well Ubuntu users in remote time zones are supported?

  Philippe Gardelle by jeffreymcmanus.

This is Philippe Gardelle, chef/proprietor of Chapeau! restaurant, where we dined for our sixth wedding anniversary last night. Philippe rocks.

If you’re in San Francisco, you should make a point to dine at his place. The food is outstanding, the service is bar-none the best of any restaurant in the city, the wine list is terrific, and it’s extra fun to be greeted like a regular by the owner when you walk in the door and when you leave (even if you only eat there once every six months).

One time when we ate there we didn’t quite know the drill and we slipped out without shaking hands and chatting with Philippe — he literally chased us halfway down the street just so he could shake our hands and ask us how everything was. (Naturally my first thought was that I’d forgotten to pay or leave a tip, or I’d forgotten my coat or something.)

Excellent New York Times article about the "Genius Bar" at the Apple Store, where you can get help with your Apple products from people who actually know what they’re talking about and who can replace your product on the spot if it’s busted.

I hadn’t been in a shopping mall in a couple of years, I can’t stand them. The only serious mall-ish retail I’ve done in the past year was our trip to The Grove at Farmer’s Market in LA last year, which doesn’t count as a mall since it’s more like a lovely well-tended park that happens to have a bunch of retail stores around it. (The Grove has an Apple Store, too — if you’re unfortunate enough to find yourself in L.A., it’s worth checking out).

It’s crazy how happy I get when I go into an Apple Store. Even if I know I don’t need anything in there, it’s still fun to get in there and touch stuff.

My daughter’s CD player broke a few weeks ago and my wife suggested that we get her a cutesy replacement CD player with Hello Kitty on it or something. Last night at the store I saw an iPod bumping the tunes inside of one of the donut-shaped JBL OnStage speakers and got all excited. Screw Hello Kitty, I think I’m going to get her her own iPod. It’s cuter.

Update: Wifey put the kibosh on the kiddie iPod ("she’s THREE YEARS OLD"). And she has a point. Hello, kitty!

Update the 2nd: Just returned to this post after more than a year because I’m doing some blog housekeeping. I actually wound up winning the iPod argument in March 2005 because we all started commuting down the freeway together after I changed jobs; I gave my disused iPod Shuffle to the kid and she freaking loved it. So I am here to say that it is totally proper to give your kid an iPod Shuffle, and more importantly, I am not a bad father for wanting to do so.

When it came time to upgrade my beloved Macromedia Web development tools to the new “MX 2004″ version, I took the plunge and paid $599 to get all of my upgrades along with a Macromedia DevNet subscription. My reasoning was, it wasn’t that much more expensive than the upgrade to the Studio suite (which includes Dreamweaver and Fireworks, which I use on a regular basis, as well as Flash, which I suspect I’ll be using more frequently in the future). And they throw in a bunch of extra goodies like components and add-ins, so I figured the extra $100 or so would be worth it.

I’ve got to say, I’m disappointed with my subscription. The promise of getting free product upgrades for a year isn’t very meaningful when everybody knows that Macromedia only upgrades its products every 18 months. Their year-end special offer (buy and register the product in November or December and get some extra extensions) was a slap in the face to early adopters like me who bought the DevNet subscription as soon as it was available.

The ability to download all your products, documentation and related goodies from a personalized DevNet page is handy, but the download system limits DevNet subscribers to just two downloads. This is a boneheaded move in a world in which all these products are licensed with product activation. Since product activation prevents you from installing the software on more than two machines, why do you care if I download a product twice or twelve times? It can’t be the bandwidth cost: I could just as well download a trial from macromedia.com then activate it with my legal key afterwards. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

And another thing: When you try to install extensions from the DevNet CD, the installer doesn’t work (at least on my Windows XP machine, anyway) unless Internet Explorer is your default browser. You can work around this by plumbing the depths of the resource kit, but good God, people. There is absolutely no excuse for Macromedia, of all companies, to not QA its products against browsers other than IE. And DevNet is indeed a product (although you wouldn’t know it from Macromedia’s Web site — DevNet isn’t listed as a product on their product support home page).

The new version of Flash is really amazing; I have been using it on an experimental basis (mainly to do proof-of-concepts to make calls to the eBay API, but also to experiment with providing developer information on demand using the excellent new slideshow features in the product — features which should be kicking Powerpoint’s ass up and down the boulevard if there’s any justice in the world).

Dreamweaver MX 2004, on the other hand, is buggy and slow (on Windows as well as the Mac, from what I understand). I’ve been struggling for the past four hours to get it to load a not-very-complicated Web site that I set up to teach myself CSS-P. The site is based on a very simple template. When I create a new file based on that template and save it, Dreamweaver freezes up again. When I open a file based on that template in Dreamweaver MX 2004, the program freezes up. When I open the file in a text editor and remove the reference to the underlying template or style sheet, it opens up okay. Lame.

I’ve been evangelizing the Macromedia tools for years. I wrote about Flash in one of my books in 1997, just before it was purchased by Macromedia; in 1999 I gave a full day seminar at Builder.com Live on Dreamweaver Ultradev for Active Server Pages developers. At that time, most Web developers who used the Microsoft tools had no idea they had an alternative that was 100 times better than the vile Visual Interdev. I’d love to be able to recommend Dreamweaver MX 2004, but there’s really not much there for ASP.NET developers in particular. If you’re using the previous version, Dreamweaver MX, you should stick with it, at least until Macromedia releases a patch for DWMX 2004 (they’ve suggested that a patch is on the way, but no word on when we can expect it).

It looks like the next version of Visual Studio .NET will include a lot of the features that make Dreamweaver useful to me, like templates, intelligent handling of HTML editing in visual or code mode, and simple deployment via FTP or straight copy (no more FrontPage extensions required to deploy your application). I really do love Dreamweaver, for all its warts, and turning away from it is going to be painful for me, but unless the quality of the software improves markedly, I’ll be moving to VS.NET for all my Web development when it’s released next year.

Until then, say a prayer for me and all users of Dreamweaver MX 2004. We need as much help as we can get.

I bought a really outrageously expensive flat-panel LCD monitor about a month ago, the Samsung 213T. I’m totally overjoyed with it. The software they bundled with it that lets you view the display at various angles is junk, though. Let me explain.

First, the software embeds it’s own menu cruft in the right-click context menu whenever you right click on anything on the desktop. This is completely bogus — I don’t need a context menu for this stupid thing at all if it resides in the system tray (which it does). I certainly don’t need its context menu to pop up when I right-click on the Recycle Bin to empty it. And, um, your logo is TWICE AS BIG AS ANY OTHER MENU ITEM on the context menu and serves NO USEFUL PURPOSE. Do people actually pay you money for this or is your company advertising for itself on my desktop something I actually signed up for?

Next, it creates a global keyboard hook into Ctrl+Shift+R, a combination I actually use pretty often (it’s used to mark aggregated weblog posts as read in SharpReader). It did this without informing me; it just took over Ctrl+Shift+R when it was installed. This means that when I’m in any program and I hit Ctrl+Shift+R, my screen jarringly rotates ninety degrees to the left. To fix this, I have to hit Ctrl+Shift+R THREE MORE TIMES, which takes about a minute.

Finally, guys, if you’re going to go to the trouble of creating a FAQ on your Web site that refers customers to your tech support so you can ask a question frequently (like, for example, how do I go about remapping your brain-dead software to a more rational key combination or get the bloody thing to not automatically start up when my system boots), how about providing an actual LINK to your tech support page?

Your Pal,

Jeffrey

TechTV is having a twelve-hour Call-for-Help-a-thon starting Friday morning. The New York Times has a great article on it today.

This was brought to my attention by my wife Carole, who works as a Web producer at TechTV and runs their online community. She and I share an appreciation of the process of celebrities unraveling. We were joking that it will be interesting to see host Leo Laporte in hour 11 of the marathon. Our hope is that he goes into full-on Jerry Lewis mode.

Whether Leo survives or not, Carole tells me that TechTV is on fire these days, with a big bump in ratings and an all-time peak in users of the online community.

There are about a half-dozen things that a good online business must do. One is providing good customer service in a way that doesn’t force you to hire a giant building full of people. This seems easy but is done well fairly rarely. One online merchant that does it well is CDBaby. Here’s the email you get from them when you buy something:

Read more »

Here’s an excellent site on the use of weblogs in government. A quote:

If you as a government information provider think that visitors will continue flocking to your sites through traditional surfing, following links, or saving bookmarks…. think again.

One-to-many information management is a big problem in a world in which email utterly wrests control from the user, is bogged down with spam, and breaks when the recipient changes jobs or companies. Yet the information has to get out there, particularly when the world changes quickly and the stakes of missing a message are high. We have the same kinds of problems broadcasting information in a sensible way at eBay.

Question for the multitudes: Would you like to see information on the eBay Developer Program (or other useful resoures such as the eBay Announcement Board) in the form of an RSS-capable weblog? Would it make your life simpler? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

Hoo boy. Interesting post by a developer who attempted to get a non-canned response from our friends over at Google.