ComplainerMan

Dark Water is a 2005 “horror” movie starring the beautiful and always moody Jennifer Connolly. It’s a remake of a 2002 Japanese horror flick, called the same thing, but obviously in a different language. It is also a waste of 107 minutes of your life.

Problems:

1. It’s not scary. Unless you are OCD or hydrophopic. A lot of dirty water messing up the apartment. That’s about it.

2. No suspense. There are scenes where you could have had some startles to get your adreniline pumping at little, if they had been directed and edited properly. But apparently the director didn’t know how to do those. The DVD cover made mention of Alfred Hitchcock. Survey says: Buuzzzz.

3. Very familiar plot. Dead girl in water comes back to haunt someone. Think ”The Ring” but dull and not scary at all.

4. Stiff and phoney characters. You can’t tell if the building super is trying to be menacing, friendly or just confused. The teenage “tough guys” are as threatening as Opie and Goober.

The cast does include some good actors like John C. Reilly and Tim Roth, but they are wasted and can’t quite rise above the material. Touchstone made a profit of 19 million on the flick, so I guess the got the job done. Good work on a movie that sucked.

I upgraded from Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 to Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 a couple of days ago. The first thing I noticed is that it is a lot like Firefox 2, that I normally use.

The thing I don’t like about Firefox is that it is incapable of dealing with a limited user account on Windows XP. I try to access the Internet from a limited user account as much as possible, because if I can’t install programs, neither can malicious websites. Internet Explorer 6 works fine, and it appears that Internet Explorer 8 does too. Firefox, however tries to update, but can’t because it doesn’t have the permissions. Going to a admin account on the same machine and updating Firefox doesn’t help for some reason, and neither does selecting “Run As” an admin account from the limited user account. I still get the dialog that Firefox was unable to update. But I digress. Back to Microsoft Internet Exploder 8.

I’ve been using it for a couple of days now, and have noticed that it crashes every once in a while. No surprise there. However when downloading files to the hard drive, I noticed that it fails to download the complete file on a regular basis, without warning. On two seperate occassions today I need to download some zipped application files, and about 75% of the time, the file was truncated. I guess it’s not confirming the checksum or something, but the bottom line is, I need to switch to Firefox to properly download files. Good work Microsoft! You screwed up Vista, the X-Box beyond anything that could be expected from a high school junior achievement class, and the hits just keep on coming!

My Joomla forms stopped working one day a couple of weeks ago on one of my websites. The way I found out was when I checked my Google Analytics and saw a lot of hits on the contact form page, but no contact emails. Sure enough, both the standard Joomla contact form and DFContact were erroring out for no apparent reason. Of course 1 & 1 does not provide error logs for it’s shared hosting customers, but I had a pretty good idea what the cause of the problem was. Undoubtedly 1 & 1 had implemented a new email security measure without telling anyone.

Now if  you are a 1 & 1 shared hosting customer, you know how utterly useless calling their customer support is, unless you like talking to a rude american high school dropout or to someone reading off a card in a Filipino sweatshop. So I did the only sensible thing. Moved the site to another web host. Guess what? Forms are working perfectly!

It’s frustrating listening to all of the utter garbage that spews out of people’s mouth regarding the automotive industry in the United States. Don’t tell me that cars made in America are just as good as those made in Japan. If you haven’t owned an American car and a Japanese car (in which case there will be no question in your mind which is better) then just look at the resale value.

Japanese cars aren’t better quality and value because the Japanese are a better people than Americans. They are better because the Japanese manufacturing process is better. Their manufacturing process is better because their economic system allows it to be. It doesn’t insist on maximizing profits for the shareholders RIGHT NOW like the American system does.

I heard Mayor Gavin Newsome on Larry King spouting some more garbage, that may make sense if you know absolutely nothing about automobile manufacturing. He said that Japanese and other foreign automakers made better bets than did the U.S. in the kind of automobiles they manufactured over the past few years. The U.S. bet that big gas guzzling SUVs would be the way to go, while other countries’ manufactures focused on smaller, more energy efficient cars. BULLCRAP!!! American automakers did not bet on anything. They geared their manufacturing towards SUVs because George W. Bush and his cronies gave huge tax breaks for businesses to purchase these gas guzzling monstrosities. Do you think the oil companies benefited from this? They did too. Short term profit is the overriding motive. Greed is God.

Until we fix our out-of-control brand of cronie capitalism, we aren’t going to be able to make a car as good as they can in Japan. Until the shareholders in this country can tolerate short term cost in acheiving long term benefits, such as are necessary in high quality manufacturing processes (ever heard of TQM, Demming, or continuous improvement?) then the US will continue to be second rate. As long as we think that management is divorced from manufacturing, and hiring some MBA as a manager, who doesn’t know his ass from an allen wrench, US cars will suck. That is if there are any cars manufactured in the US in years to come.

2Checkout is like a low-class Paypal, where you can join up and use their transaction processing services to sell products from your website. First of all, their Website is a nightmare. Someone decided that since social media was all the rage, they would turn their entire website into a community! Even if the concept is valid, which I’m not sure it is, the excecution on the 2Checkout site is horrendous, so good luck finding anything.

Because it is such a miserable website, you’ll need to contact customer support if you have problems with their services, which you will. In my first experience with submitting a ticket, the support person politely directed me to an FAQ, which had absolutely nothing to do with my problem. After wasting valuable time trying to figure out where the useful information was, I told them the FAQ was useless. The person apologized and sent me to the correct FAQ, which did help.

I don’t know if their customer service is outsourced to another country, or they just hire people who can’t spell or use correct English grammar, but either way, it makes you wonder about the quality of the support you are getting.

Last, but not least, when I tried to log into my support account after a couple of weeks of using it. I discovered that my username no longer existed. I’m not surprised. This company is a freaking mess, so stay away!

I’m deaf in one ear!!! Thank you AT&T. I hate you. Why do the designers of cell phones feel it is so urgently important that we know that our cell phone is low on batteries? Why have I sacrificed the hearing in one ear for the knowledge that my cell phone battery is low, and why did I have to be warned right in the middle of a phone conversation.

Furthermore why is in necessary to repeat the warning every 3 minutes, so if you are asleep in the middle of the night and have misplaced your cellphone, you lose a night’s sleep over it? I know! I went for the FREE phone with my cellular plan. Should have bought a phone for $250! I would hope a phone that is that expensive is not designed in such an idiotic manner.

eBay is scammer central. There are many sellers who know the system well and can fool you into trusting them. They know all the tricks, and if you are an infrequent eBayer, it’s easy for them to get the best of you. Here are some warning signs that the eBay seller you are considering making a purchase from wants to scam you.

1. The seller is relatively new, but has an apparently sophisticated system going with many auctions or sales. This could indicate the were banned, or got a large amount of negative feedback with a previous account or accounts, and are starting fresh
2. They have a low number of feedback comments, but frequent sales.  Again, if they are selling at a good pace for a number of weeks, it could mean they are new and getting a strong start. More likely they are an experienced seller and just started a new account because they were banned or got too much negative feedback.
3. Their positive feedback is for low priced items. They do have some negative feedback, especially regarding misrepresentation or poor communication. People on eBay generally don’t give negative feedback lightly, so no matter how plausible the reply, multiple negative feedback in a short amount of time is a red flag. 
4. The deals look too good to be true. They usually are.
5. The shipping is too high.  Shipping is now posted prominently in auctions, so it’s harder to pull this now, but scam sellers will try to get away with jacking it up as much as they think they can get away with. They will often quote a premium shipping service and actually ship with a cheaper carrier, and pocket the difference. 

Even after  you know you’ve been scammed, and confront the scam seller, they will try to fool you into thinking you have no recourse. You do! Immediately post negative feedback and warn others. Go to the resolution center. If you paid with Paypal (which you should ALWAYS do on eBay)  visit the PayPal Resolution Center to open your case. Then you can file a claim under PayPal’s Buyer Protection program.

Babel DVD

Babel, starring Brad Pitt and Kate Blanchett is the third movie in a trilogy co-written and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It won the “Best Picture” Golden Globe. That shows how pretensious and shallow Hollywood establishment journalists are. Also won Oscar nominations, which is not surprising.

I checked Babel out at the library so I didn’t waste my money. Just my time. The value I got out of it was the “slice of life” from different cultures in Japan, Mexico and Morroco.

The movie itself was exploitation draped in a thin pretense. Sure they spoke different languages. Sure they were connected, but in a very contrived way. That doesn’t justify depicting a child pleasuring himself after seeing his sister naked, or a deaf Japanese school girl flashing in public, or a dying woman making out with her husband while using a bedpan. To pretend that these scenes were anything other than exploitation is hypocrisy.

Another thing I gained from seeing this movie, is confirmation that if you want to make a film that wins awards, just make the film revolve around a safe, non-controversial ”issue.” Then pour in the action, perversion and porn to sell, sell, sell!!!

I purchased an old Macintosh SE on eBay last week for $10 plus $40 shipping. For $50 I would have a piece of computing nostalgia - an anachronistic curiosity that I could mess around with for the remainder of it’s life, and then properly discard as eWaste, when that life came to a natural end. I have old SE peripherals, software and music files I used to create MIDI music back in the day, and this machine would allow me to take a stroll down memory lane. But it was not to be. When I received the old Mac, it had already met it’s demise:

Sad Mac. Dead Mac.

The Sad Mac icon, indicating a dead hard-drive. The icon is barely discernable because the CRT (cathode ray tube) is so messed up. I looked at the box and could find no damage. I did notice that it was shipped DHL, not UPS as the auction specified. I went back to eBay and confirmed that it was supposed to be shipped UPS with $100 of insurance, but I noticed something else. My sad Mac was not the same model as the one in the auction picture, which was there to demonstrate that the unit being sold still worked.

One of these things is not like the other.

I contacted the seller to inform him of the problem, but didn’t mention the picture issue to see what he would say. He didn’t respond within 2 days, so I sent another message, this time mentioning that the picture he sent of the working Mac SE was a different model than the broken unit I received. This time he responded within about 15 minutes, saying he was sorry the unit didn’t work, but that the picture WAS of the unit I received. That was it. Either he accidentally sent the wrong Macintosh SE from his extensive inventory (sarcassm) or he was trying to scam me. Selling a broken computer as working, and pretending it was damaged in shipment. I replied with the specifics of how I or anyone could tell that the computer in the auction picture was different from the Mac I got.

His reply completely ignored the picture issue and instead offered to refund the $10 I paid for the computer. Not the $40 shipping. A little back and forth later the best deal I could get from him was a full refund by shipping the computer back to him at my cost. So any way you sliced it, I was going to pay for shipping a dead stick across the country. I chose to leave negative feedback and try to get eBay to resolve the issue through the resolution center.

My wife and I received a couple of Olive Garden gift certificates as wedding presents, but there isn’t an Olive Garden restaurant near our home, so it was a number of months before we actually got to use them. This afternoon, however, we were moving some items from a storage unit I have in Hayward, and were near enough around dinner time that we dropped by.

We arrived at Olive Garden in Fremont at around 5:30 and were surprised how many people were waiting out front. The wait was around 45 minutes, but that is exactly how long they told us it would be when we signed in.

After we were seated our waiter visited promply and took our drink orders. He arrived quickly with the house red and proceeded to fill our glasses to about 1/4 inch from the very top. “We got our money’s worth” I told my wife. We ordered, and our food arrived quickly and was very good.

When we had finished and I was chewing my last bit, I felt a crunch on one of my molars. At first I thought I had lost a filling, but on closer inspection I realized I had been chewing on a piece of broken glass. Just about that time the manager was making his rounds and asked us how our meals were. I replied that everything was good except for the broken glass in my food, and showed him the shard. He, of course, apologized profusely and replaced my almost-finished meal with a new one. He also took the price of my meal off of the bill and gave us a $25 gift certificate. Well, maybe if it doesn’t hurt coming out, I’ll give Olive Garden in Fremont another try.