This happened last week and I thought after all the negative blogs and podcasts Apple wouldn’t do it again.

Sure enough, I found this update notice on my Vista machine:

I don’t want Safari, most people on Windows don’t want Safari, and trying to trick people into installing it does not help your brand.  It’s an idiotic move by someone in marketing who thinks that this way maybe they can get "market share", which will involve irritating a lot of users and IT support personnel when stuff quits working.

I guess the only way to stop this from happening is to uninstall iTunes and QuickTime.  No great loss since I moved to a Zune 80 with its music subscription.

I’m just sitting here doing some bookkeeping and billing a customer.  In order to get paid by this customer, we *must* include their full PO number on the invoice.

The PO number is, get this, TWENTY SIX digits long!  Even better, there are eleven zero’s in a row between what might be considered a vendor identifier and PO method, and what looks to be the actual PO number of another three digits.  So it appears that they feel they felt they needed 14 digits for the total PO number over time.

Um, folks, no one, and I mean no one in the history of the planet is going to need a PO number that goes into the trillions.

But hey, at least I found something that QuickBooks can’t handle out of the box.  Maybe I should submit a bug report.

Last week I had to travel to West Palm Beach to do a few days of training for a client.  I had originally planned on staying at a Days Inn on 45th St. in West Palm Beach.  When I told my client where I was staying, the reaction was "Whoa!  Under no circumstances should you stay there unless you want to buy crack and have your car stolen."  At first I wrote this off to hyperbole, but he even went to the point to say that if I couldn’t find a different place to stay, he would find something.  He was very committed to making sure I survived the night to showed up and train the next day!

I promptly made reservations at a Holiday Inn Express (I was training the next morning, so I had to be super smart!), and tried to cancel my reservation at the Days Inn.  While I expected to be dinged for perhaps a one night stay (this was happening at 5pm), they told us that they would be charging my credit card for all three nights originally scheduled.  It turns out, that when you do a search on their web site, they give you a price that is completely non refundable, and no indication that there are more expensive rates without that restriction (or so they say – I haven’t been back to price out a room at Days Inn, and never will again).

So, lesson learned.  Don’t do business with Days Inn.

But!  This gets better in a very cool way.  I reserved three nights at the Holiday Inn Express.  I arrived Monday night, and then as it turned out, I ended up leaving late on Wednesday, at which point we were into the third night of the stay.  I checked out at about 6pm and fully expected to pay for that third day.  Nope, no charge for it. 

Can you guess where I’m staying this week as a write this, and next week?  And the week after that in Chicago? Of course you can.  And it doesn’t rhyme with Plays Rin.

This is an email I sent to the feedback address that amazon provides for Kindle owners:

My story: I had been long wanting an e-Reader, and was drawn to the Sony one; However, the Sony was lacking a lot of features, and I was worried about the longevity of their e-book store. When Amazon announced the Kindle, I was very excited!

After now having it for a few weeks, I’m more excited than ever!

Here are a couple of thoughts for you:

1) You are already taking a lot of flack for the cover. In my case, the Kindle stays in the cover properly, but the elastic band is already stretched. This is a design that needs to be fixed. In the perfect world, perhaps something with a clasp will be made available. I don’t have a problem buying a new cover (I’d rather not spend the money, but I will), you just need to come out with something better, ASAP

2) There should be a way to organize content a bit. For example, on my Kindle I have two main types of books – personal reading and technical reading. I would like to be able to easily tag books with a type, and then filter on that type. I would also like to be able to mark a book as read and then have it not show when browsing except when I explicitly want to see items that I’ve read. You could argue that read books should be removed from the device, but given that currently memory isn’t a problem I would rather leave them in my “library” and just not see them.

3) Finally, regarding the actual design – it’s not as bad as many people make it out to be. The keyboard is workable. The large buttons do make it hard to pick up at times, but I’ve just made it a habit to “lock” it when I put it down, thus rendering it safe and easy to pick back up. I would like to see more contrast on the screen itself, but I know that is a limitation of the e-ink technology. Perhaps you can help drive advancement of it through a large volume of sales.

Thanks for listening! – Eric.

Overall I’m very happy with the Kindle, and I have to say that having a bunch of books on hand without needing to rifle through my library is pretty cool.  A few minutes ago I decided I needed to pick up a book on SQL Server Reporting Services 2005, and within two minutes I had purchased it and had it downloaded onto the Kindle.  Very cool, and very bad for retail book stores (and shipping companies).

On February 2nd, 2008, the South Florida Code Camp 2008 will be held in Miramar, Florida.  This will be my first time speaking at this Code Camp.  I spoke in Tampa last year.  CRM sessions don’t draw too many people, but the ones that are at the session are really interested in what you have to say.

My session is "Programming against MS Dynamics CRM Web Services" and will be right after lunch at 1:20pm.

If you live in Florida, or will be around the area, sign up for Code Camp and come join us.  Even if CRM isn’t your bag, there are dozens of other sessions, none of which have anything to do with CRM!

See you there! – Eric.

These are Phil Plait’s choices for the top 10 astronomy pics of 2007.  Definitely an eye opening page to visit.  Visit his blog at http://www.badastronomy.com/.  Lots of good stuff. 

Verizon customer service may suck most horribly, but FiOS rocks my world.  See picture for all the details you need…

I got a certificate this morning celebrating my 10 years as a member of Mensa.  I took the test as a lark on day (a former employer of mine had been bugging me to do it long before I actually did it) and a few weeks later found out that I qualified.

The sad thing (maybe) is that in all that time I’ve only gone to two Mensa meetings.  A few weeks ago I was telling Deb that I need to go more often, but I don’t want to nerd out too much, you know?

Oh yeah, if I had invested my IQ in an investment that returned 5% over the past 10 years, it would today be at about 237.  Instead I’ve decided to bathe my brain in beer, wine and margarita’s, so I’m lucky if it’s not down to 90 by now…

Yup, definitely don’t want to nerd out too much…

Just before the holidays I decided to try out a Zune 80.  The new Zunes are getting pretty good reviews, and I decided that I would try one out so I could get all my .wma music onto the system from my media center PC that died on me.  Yes, I know I can convert it to mp3, no I haven’t done it yet.

Besides getting my music onto this thing, I wanted to see how podcasts work on it.  The original Zune didn’t have the ability to handle podcasts, which was enough to keep me away from it.  Probably 75% of the time that I’m in the car alone, I’m listening to a Dot Net Rocks, TWiT, RunAs Radio, or some other podcast.  If I’m going to be driving, I might as well be learning, right?

Before I got the Zune 80, I downloaded the software for it from MS and got it up and running on my Vista system.  No problems there.  The software installed easily, and after some adjustments to the options, it got busy indexing my music.  So far so good.  With that done, I ran over (well, drove really – I do live in the USA after all) to Target and picked up the Zune 80.  I got it home, plugged it into the PC and all was good and simple in the world.

Overall, I find the user interface on the Zune 80 to be quite nice.  The screen is big and bright, and you can put a picture of your choosing on as the background.  The Zunepad (aka Squircle?) is kind of neat, and not hard to get used to coming from an iPod.  The original Zune’s attempt to use a circular directional pad was a huge mistake, and MS fixed that problem.

So overall, it’s a fine device.  The music playing works well.

Subscription Music

Subscription music is something that I love.  I pay my $12 or $14 a month and can listen to anything I want.  Previously I was using Rhapsody, but I switched the Zune store and started loading up with everything from Saliva to Linkin Park to Dane Cook.  I’ve enjoyed having all this music / stuff with me, along with the 300 albums that I already owned.  The Zune store seems to work pretty well.  I do wish they offered the equivalent of radio stations like Rhapsody does though.

Podcasts

Well, here we run into the first misfire of the experience.  On the iPod with iTunes, you subscribe to a podcast and it immediately downloads the three most recent shows.  Then as new shows are made available they are downloaded and sync’d with your device.  With the Zune software, it works a bit differently.  When you subscribe to a podcast, it downloads the first three episodes and puts them on your device; however, when the next episode is downloaded, the oldest of the three gets booted from the device!  So even if you haven’t listened to it, it gets removed from the device.  This is a changeable setting, so you can set it to keep a certain number of episodes; However, if you do this, you cannot delete an episode that you’ve already listened to if it is in that range of episode.  For example, if you tell the system to keep all episodes, then you listen to 10 of them and try to delete them, the software will just re-download them!

On the device side, there is no obvious way of knowing if you’ve started listening to an episode.  On the iPod there is a dot next to new episodes, but nothing of the sort that I could see on the Zune.  So, if you are on a roadtrip and you are listening to a variety of podcasts, you will have a lot of trial and error trying to keep things straight.

There is the ability to have only unlistened episodes loaded on the Zune, which is a nice touch.

Finally, if you listen to a podcast and then sync the Zune, the PC software doesn’t know where you last stopped listening.  If you’ve listened to 37 minutes of a Dot Net Rocks episode and you want to continue it through your PC, you get to start at the beginning and try to find the location.  ITunes doesn’t force this on you.

Xbox 360 Playback

You can feed your media from the Zune software to your Xbox 360 over the network.  The 360 easily discovers the media on the PC, and lists it in the standard 360 interface (workable, but not great – playlists are your friend!).  However, when you try to play the music, currently most of it comes up as not playable.  This is not due to the music format, but rather apparently the last update to the 360 broke this feature.  I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a fix yet.  Plugging the Zune into the 360 worked perfectly, and there’s nothing like blasting fast and loud music while getting your ass kicked in Halo 3 by a bunch of 12 year olds.

The Windows client software

Well, overall, it looks pretty nice.  However, as is to be expected with media software, there are UI problems.  Why everyone that creates media player software feels the need to make it not conform to the platform standards, I’ll never know.  Why Microsoft insists on doing this is well beyond me.  Let’s take a look at a few examples, shall we?

First of all, take a look at this screenshot (taken with the software in Now Playing mode) and tell me where the close button is on the Zune player window:

It looks easy to find, right?  Top right corner…. Nope.  Look just below the X that you think is the close button, and you’ll find a very faint set of minimize, maximize and close buttons.  Those are the Zune players buttons, not the ones you can actually see.  This is a real screenshot, not doctored in any way.  This is why several times when I’ve gone to close the program, I’ve closed the one behind it instead.

Now, let’s find the Now Playing playlist:

Feel free to zune, er, zoom in to find it.  Give up?  It’s the little bar graph to the right of the fast forward button in the bottom right corner of the window.  You know, the one that would mean "equalizer" in every other context.  Yeah, that’s intuitive.  I had to freakin’ Google for that one (yeah, that’s right Googlawyers, I verb’d your company, come and get me).  Oh yeah, don’t look for the equalizer, they removed it from this version – but I don’t miss it because I never use it anyway.

Third Party Support

When connecting our iPods to our cars, we use the Belkin adapter that includes an amp in it so that you don’t have to crank the volume of the iPod in order to have an easy to hear connection.  No such thing appears to exist for the Zune (yet), so you have to crank the volume of the Zune to 20 (10? 11?  For losers!  20 is the new 10!) and turn up the volume on your car stereo to hear it loudly enough to have the windows open while driving.  Also, without a device like this, I need to remember to pause the Zune when I turn the car off – with the Belkin adapter, the iPod pauses automatically.

Summary

Overall, the unit itself is very nice.  It feels good in the hand and the screen is wonderful.  The matt aluminum back on the device doesn’t scratch (easily) and attract fingerprints instantly like the iPod does.  My Zune is about 3 weeks old now and there are no scratches on the back.  Most iPods without cases pick up scratches in the first 30 nanoseconds outside of their packaging.  The Zune software is okay, but the UI misfires mentioned above are really baffling.  Finally, the podcast situation is still not ideal.  Sometimes less is more and in this case, MS could have done a lot less work and made the podcast subsystem work better.  If you are looking for a media player and aren’t married to an iPod yet, give the (new) Zune a try.

Over the past month I’ve had two client sites have problems with Verizon service.  The number of hoops they make you jump through in order to try to solve a problem are incredible.

In the most recent instance, the client called to say that no one there can get onto the Internet.  I walked them through the usual resetting of the DSL modem and router device (a Linksys in this case).  After that, they still were not working.

I attempted to use the Verizon web site to contact tech support.  First, I tried to find a phone number to call, but had no luck finding one.  Finally I had to resort to using the online chat function.  After I entered all of the relevant information (including problem, description, DSL phone number and my name), I was connected to a rep.  He then promptly asked me for the DSL phone number and name. <sigh>.  After that, he needed a description of the problem <sigh>^2.  Finally he asked me for the model of the DSL modem.  I informed him that I wasn’t in front of it.  Big mistake.  At that point, all he could say was that I had to be at the client site in order to help me.  Which is funny, because the client site doesn’t have Internet access!  No matter how many different ways I tried to get him to just check the darn line, he refused to help.  Apparently they are incapable of checking into anything without the DSL modem model.  Oh yeah, and it was very important to know what my operating system was, which of course has nothing to do with the problem as all computers were unable to connect, AND THE INTERNET LIGHT WAS OFF ON THE MODEM!!!

So, long story (1 hour 20 minutes) short, after going on site, I called the Verizon support number (which was the one good thing to come from the earlier chat) and when I tried to access tech support the system checked the line and claimed that nothing was wrong, and then proceeded to give me two options: 1) Go back to the main menu and 2) Hang up.

There was NO option to talk to, oh, I dunno, a human being!  After trying all forms of getting in touch with someone through the tech support line (screaming Agent and Operator and various profanities into the phone got me nowhere), I finally connected to billing, spoke to some poor guy there who finally transferred me to a support line where I could get in a queue to talk to someone.  Now here’s the best part, I’ve been working on this for over an hour and I finally get to talk to someone.  The first thing she checked (after getting the DSL number yet again) was whether there was an outage in the area.  Well guess what – there was.  Certain users in the Tampa area were having problems due to a piece of broken equipment in the central office.  It took all of 2 minutes for her to get this info.

Now, which part of that information required me to either be on site, or needed the DSL modem model number?  That’s right kids, none!

Anyway, if you ever need to get in touch with Verizon tech support, call (800) 569-6789.  If you want to find out if there are any outages in the Verizon DSL network, go to http://wapp.verizon.net/systemstatus/status.asp?status_type=DSL&template=eastern and there you will find out what’s going on.

Summary: Die, Verizon, Die!