I was setting up some brand new HP Probook’s today (typically VERY nice machines in my experience) when I was suddenly rendered crippled by a IMPOSSIBLE to use touch-pad.  What a DREADFUL piece of shit this new design is.

Basically, the touch-pad and buttons are all one surface.

Observe:

The problem comes from the fact that the “button area” is still part of the touch-pad.  So you place one finger on the button, and now you can’t use the fucking touch-pad.  Your cursor will either sit there and stare at you like a vegetable or it’ll jump all around the screen like crazy.  Either way, the touch-pad is completely unusable if you’re touching either button.  This is incredibly frustrating because my style of laptop mousing is resting one hand’s fingers on the buttons while using the other hand to navigate the mouse, or resting one finger on the button, while the other navigates the mouse for faster mouse action.  The only effective way to use this touch pad is with one hand and one finger.  Christ.  It’s awful.  Seriously.

I ended up grabbing one of those USB ball mice and plugging the damn thing in and using that, because trying to use that bloody touch-pad was making me want to kick puppies.  And I love puppies.

Thanks for the SHIT design HP.  I’m sure as hell glad this isn’t my machine.  I would be returning it if I had to put up with that damn thing.

It seems like only 7 short months ago I wrote… wait, 7 months?

I can’t believe it took 7 months… but yes folks, Fox has FINALLY canceled the Wanda Sykes show.  Let us all rejoice.

That is all.

Pssst, Walmart… it’s hard to believe your silly commercials about efficient truck routes and less cardboard in shipping to help save resources, when I go to your store, buy a 12 pack of soda and some saltine crackers, and I get a receipt that is 15 inches long!!!

Seriously?  2 items should warrant a receipt no longer than 4 or 5 inches.  A 15 inch receipt is just an extreme waste of paper.  I can’t believe your shitty commercials when you pull crap like this hundreds of thousands of times a day across the country.  No one wants to take your crappy survey, shrink the Xbox-huge logo at the top, shrink the barcode, reduce the white space.  Bam, 4 inch receipt.

Here, I even mocked one up for you.

If you have read my previous articles about Java being a malware writers dream, then you’ll understand why Mozilla did this.

If you hadn’t… well, hit the 2 links above to catch up.

When I fired up Firefox today I got an interesting message:

Nice!  Apparently Mozilla has decided to act where Oracle has not.  Mozilla has disabled the Java Deployment Toolkit, responsible for probably hundreds of thousands of malware infestations, across the board in Firefox.  Thank you Mozilla for taking responsibility where Oracle has not.

Orace: You suck.

Well well well, what do we have here?  Oh yeah, it’s HD in my house, finally!  A couple weeks ago I wrote about New Wave’s failure to bring me the HD service I requested not once, but twice.  I was pretty frustrated with them and let loose.  I didn’t try to contact them to fix the problem, honestly because I was so fed up with them.

On Tuesday this week I was contacted through my site by a high-up guy over at New Wave’s marketing department (Evidently he stumbled upon my post via search engine.  I guess the Search Engine Optimization plugin is good for something!).  He seemed genuinely concerned about my situation and getting it corrected from his email, so I replied back.  With in a half hour he called me and we discussed my situation on the phone.  He was very very nice about the whole thing, as was I.  He told me they would have someone out that very evening when I got home to get my HD installed, and on top of that they were going to waive the installation fees and credit my account for a nice chunk of HD service.  I was pretty happy to hear this but still couldn’t quite believe it.  But sure enough, at 6:30 on the dot, the New Wave tech pulled up in my drive way.  He installed an HD-DVR box and had me all up and running in probably 10-15 minutes.  I finally had my HD!  And let me tell you, it is gorgeous!  It’ll be even nicer when my HDMI cable comes in  (New Wave only had component cables.  I would’ve liked to have seen HDMI since it’s been around for a while and a pretty accepted standard, but no big deal).  I found a 10 foot HDMI cable online for less then $4 shipped to my door.  A lot better then the $48 Walmart wanted, but that’s a rant for another day.  The HD-DVR works great!  I finally got to put it to the test last night when I recorded Bones in HD while grilling out.  Then we came in and sat down for dinner and watched it.  It was a fantastic picture.  So crystal clear you can see individual hairs on their head.

I just felt like I should make a post updating my situation.  New Wave righted my wrong, and their Marketing guy assured me that if I ever have any more issues, to let him know and he will get it taken care of.  It is reassuring to know that someone out there at New Wave does care about their company.  I just hope that my situation has brought any problems existing with my local offices (or maybe wider spread) in to light and New Wave can work on ensuring that my lack of care doesn’t happen to others.

Thank you New Wave for fixing my situation.

I’ve had my Android phone a week and a half now and I love it.  It brings everything together in to one phone.  Perhaps that is why they called it the Nexus One?

But there was one “link” missing.  If you spent time entering birthday information for as many of your contacts as possible, they don’t show up in your calendar.  Even my girlfriend’s Blackberry does this, surely Android can.  I had downloaded an App from the market call EboBirthday.  While the app worked, it still had a flaw.  The birthdays didn’t show up in you calendar.  If you wanted to see what birthdays were coming up, you had to actually open up the EboBirthday app.  And on top of that, if you added in any new birthday information, you had to manually resync the EboBirthday app.  Rats… this isn’t the best solution.

Well, last night I was playing around and Google Calendar, and there is actually an option tucked away, built right in to Google Calendar, that lets you show your contact birthday infromation right on the Calendar!

Here is how you add it on:

Go to the Google Calendar web interface on your computer (google.com/calendar).

1) Click the settings button in the upper right

2) Click the “Calendars” settings tab

3) In the Other Calendars section click “Browse Interesting Calendars”

4) Click the More tab here

5)  You should see an item labeled “Contacts’ birthdays and events”, click the Subscribe link. (While you’re in here, you might want to poke around.  There may be some other calendars you’re interested in adding in to your own as well, such as holidays and stuff!)

That’s it!  In a couple minutes, all your contact birthdays will show up on the Calendar in your phone.  How cool is that?

While this is a nice feature to have available, it highlights one of the issues with Android and Google integration right now.  When you’re looking for a setting, it’s not always in the most obvious place, and some times you can only change it on the web.  However, I do expect as Android matures, we will see a lot more features and options added directly in to the Android OS.  I love Android and I suspect will be sticking with it for a long time to come!

It’s hard to even figure out where to start with a company as truly awful as New Wave Communications is, but I’ll do my best to start where my problems with them started, which is as soon as the took over my local cable network from Charter Cable in Spring of 2008.

Since the very first day New Wave took over and my IP address switched to their network I have had atrocious service, and no one from New Wave cares about it.  By fall 2008 I had called them no less then 10 times over a network congestion issue. I honestly lost count of how many calls I made and every single time I reached a “tech support” person, they were 100% incapable of understanding my problem and 100% unwilling to even do anything to attempt to solve it.  The exact problem I was having was network congestion.  During peak internet usage hours (evenings after work and weekends… basically any time I wanted to actually USE my internet), the service was unusable.  My ping times would often shoot from 30ms ping times to over 500ms ping times during peak hours.  Trying to use my “broadband” service for any “broadband” activities like streaming video, playing games online, was 100% out of the question.  Pages would often take minutes to load, streaming even music was not even possible.

At the time I didn’t know exactly what was happening, so I took it upon myself to write a script that sent out 1 ping per minute and log the response time.  After running the script for a few days I quickly realized that my problem was because of network congestion.  The sad thing is, I diagnosed in a few days, what New Wave had been unable to tell me for months.

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Apparently HP does.  In their mice.

Come on people.  It’s 2010.  Optical mice can be had from Newegg for $4.  I can’t believe ball-mice are still being packaged with new machines.  And this wasn’t even a cheap piece of crap Acer, this came with a brand new HP Proliant server!  Sheesh.  Spare no expense with that fancy fuckin technology why don’t yah?

I guess since it’s a server it’ll be remoted in to 99% of the time anyway, but still.  Like it would’ve broken HP’s bank to throw an optical mouse in there?

I had forgotten how absolutely frustrating ball mice are with out a perfectly flat surface until now.  Thanks HP.