Oh boy is the internet pissed at Godaddy this week! Turns out they supported SOPA (which they later changed their mind about). That was reason enough for quite a few folks to start pulling their domains and move them to different registrars. I know I did, but not because they supported SOPA. More like, that’s the straw that broke the camels back.

I’m transferring domains away from GoDaddy as fast as my checkbook will allow. I only have 8 or so left with them, and I hope to have them transferred to Hover by the end of January. This is a process I started earlier this year after Bob Parsons came home from Africa after spending some quality time shooting elephants. But that’s only part of why I’m moving my domains.

Another part is their famously awful user interface. Or the fact that they are the worst WordPress host. Or the fact that when trying to check out when purchasing anything you have to click through 10 different pages offering upgrades, magazine subscriptions and ginsu knives. But, like the other reasons, this is just a part of why I’m transferring away.

If we take a second to look at the graphic at the top of this post. That is a screen shot from my Gmail account. Please note the date stamps on each line. If you want to know why I’m transferring away from GoDaddy, it’s because they are practicing email spammers and there is no way to make it stop that I can find.

Buy a domain? 2 emails. plus the weekly “buy more domains” email. Have a domain? 9 months before it expires they start sending reminder emails to renew. As the date draws closer, the frequency of the emails increases until you are getting 2 per day (per domain). Once the expiration date has passed, they continue to send emails at the rate of not less than 1 per day per domain. And there is no way to make them stop.

Worse part is when you don’t want a domain name any more. I let about 10 go this year that I will never do anything with (or my customers won’t be using). And the damn emails never stop. It’s truly rediculous.

So, if the emails won’t stop, if the UI won’t change and if the check-out process won’t stop pushing ultra high security email and faxing from my rotary phone, then I’m out.

And now you know The rest of the story.

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I’m having a pretty good week so far if I can be so bold. Nice and busy, but not crazy busy. Just about perfect. Perfect except for 1 thing. It may seem minor to some of you, but it is making me absolutely batshit crazy.

Everyone one of my customers this week have had printer problems. Every one of the printers was an HP. And every one of them took me no less than 2 hours to complete if it would even complete at all.

Whiskey tango foxtrot, over?

Let’s start with the size of the basic driver download for a PC (Windows, all versions, all bits). For most of these downloads the file size was a compressed 205MB or larger. I had 2 of these drivers, uncompressed, that weighed in at 1.5GB. Gigabytes people. For basic drivers.

Next up was the installation. On a brand new and fairly buff Windows 7 machine, one of those drivers took almost 8 minutes to install and required a reboot. The longest of the printer driver installs was 45 minutes. Yes, you read that correctly. Almost 1 hour to install a printer. Sure it was XP. Sure it was a Celeron processor. Sure it only had 1GB of shared RAM. Is that an excuse? When I can install video drivers on that same machine in less than 5 minutes? No, it’s not.

Maybe I’m too old school in my thinking. I remember when a driver was nothing more than a few .inf files, maybe a .dll or two. Fit on a floppy disk and installed in just a few minutes. I guess that is no longer the case. Or, probably more like it, HP is getting lazy and/or Microsoft is making them include a but of crap that isn’t even needed but they think it is.

If you are looking for what the problem with Windows is gang, just look at the printer division of HP. Bloated software that performs poorly and clogs the system with files and features that aren’t needed or required.

I know I am repeating myself, but printers are nothing but a waste of time, energy and money. I went paperless a few years ago on everything that doesn’t require my signature, perhaps you should encourage your users to start doing the same thing.

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Or to the web developers that have never heard of a Mac, a browser other than Internet Explorer and still think Front page is a cool thing to use.

Or to the architects. Wherever you are.

Please take a minute the next time you create something that one of your customers, potential employees or anyone in the general public could possibly interact with and let someone else look at it before you pull the trigger making it live.

Please.

You HR people. I understand there are rules and that you need a ton of information when an applicant applies for a job. I do. How about making the process make sense? How about paying a designer with some idea of user experience planning to design the forms for you? How about a little beta testing to make sure that the forms work?

You that build large corporate websites used for support and to serve customers other important information (verizon.net, I’m looking directly at you). Why not follow the links you create to make sure they go somewhere? Again, beta test that cool new feature of the site to make sure it works before rolling it out to the general public. And, hey? Why not take a few minutes to add a little consistency to your entire web presence?

Finally, you architects. I realize that you don’t always get to see your projects to completion. Still, why not visit a property you designed to make sure ‘it works’ correctly and things are easy to get to and find. Essentially, test the navigation. See how fucked up it is and take that back to your drawing table to make things better. Make sure to account for trees and parking structures if they aren’t already in place.

Through the course of each and every one of my days I’m constantly coming across things that could have be fantastically awesome if only someone would have taken a little bit of extra time and planning to make sure it worked correctly. To make sure the navigation was consistent. To ensure that it looked cool, no matter how it was viewed.

I’m less than a genius. I’m also the first person to admit that I’m not always the smartest person in the room. But I do know how stuff should work. Sometimes I can even do something about the stuff that you made to make it work the way it should.

Anyway, I would really appreciate it and owe you a solid if you could do something to help me out here. Just stop making things that suck.

You rule, as always!

xoxo

db

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We discussed this back in ’06 and I am here to say that BitTorrent is still not useful. Back then I said,

For bittorrent to be useful, there has to more than a few users with fast connections. If you try to download something that is only shared by a few users, the download will take forever. Same goes if any of the users sharing are doing so over a dial up connection.

As you can see from the graphic above, I’ve almost got the complete download. .01GB is all that’s left and it’s gone caput. It’s been running like this for almost 24 hours and nobody out there has that last bit I need to complete the download.

We can only hope for the day when bandwidth and storage is so cheap that this kind of thing won’t even be necessary. I’m not saying BitTorrent is bad, but if it’s something that might be a little older or not very popular, it’s just not the way to go.

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Get Windows 7, 50% off!

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I admit it – I actually read the phishing e-mails, some more closely than others.  Not because I believe that the Crown Prince of Nigeria wants to give me any money or that I’ve inherited money from an unknown relative in Tiawan or anything.  It’s just that some of these e-mails are so pathetic that it’s kind of amusing.

The latest one to get my attention:

—–Original Message—– From: chenjb [mailto:chenjb@mail.stut.edu.tw] Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 4:35 AM Subject: Please Reply to this email:acct.service55@gmail.com

Attention,

This mail is to get you inform that there was a record of a deposited fund of $1.5 million dollars in our Bank with your details by Steven Coleman Company Ltd as your own share of the contract you both did

You are been noted as to get back to us so that we can be able to work out the transfer immediately.

UBA BANKING GROUP PLC

E-mail:acct.service55@gmail.com

David Doye

Note that more details will be needed for transfer clarity sake.

Thanks,

chenjb Lui

Please Reply to this email:acct.service55@gmail.com

What I really like is the e-mail address it came from – this guy is so lazy he can’t even be bothered to send from an e-mail address that might almost be remotely credible… Instead he just uses what is quite probably his own student e-mail account from his school in thTiawan…  So here it is for every e-mail spambot on the interwebs – chenjb@mail.stut.edu.tw  SPAMBOTS ATTACK!!!!!

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I use Twitter. I like Twitter. I think it’s handy to have around. But lately it seems that it is the only thing anyone can talk about.

For example, the word Twitter appears over 20 times on the front page of Mashable. I have unsubscribed.

In the last 2 episodes of TWiT, more than 50% of the stories were about Twitter. I have unsubscribed for the time being. Hopefully normal tech talk will resume soon.

Even on Twitter there is getting to be too much talk about Twitter. I just finished unfollowing about 5 of the worst offenders there.

It’s time to realize that there are more important things to discuss than how many people follow you on Twitter or what’s the best Twitter app to use or, or, or.

You people are like Pitbulls. You find something you like, get it stuck in your jaws and wave it around until it’s a bloody, limp mess that nobody wants anything to do with anymore. Time to find something else to talk about.

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Sure, it’s simple, right? Find the app in The Finder, drag it to the trash and poof, it’s gone. Except that it really isn’t.

Over on Windows, MS made developers include a uninstallation routine with the installer. Sure it was hit or miss until Windows XP, but it was still there. And, it was there for many reasons, least of which is that uninstalling applications in Windows without it is practically impossible unless you are the original developer of the app. There are folders. There are .dll files. There are registry entries. Log files. Mold, mildew and soap scum. When you install an app on Windows, it gets everywhere.

Not so on the Mac. You open the .dmg, drag the icon out and that’s it. Everything that app needs contained inside of a nice package.

Until you run the app.

Suddenly .plist files are created and stuck in one of 37 /library folders, buried 4 or 5 folders deep from there. But not just in 1 folder, in multiples. Places where I’m sure normal computer user folk would not dare to go. These are also files that, when you uninstall an app, do not get uninstalled. You might have noticed this if you unstalled an app, then reinstalled only to find that your settings are still there. I thought that was odd the first time it happened to me.

Sure there are apps that you can get for the Mac that will help you to uninstall applications, including getting rid of all of those pesky preference files. But should I have to pay $15 or so for this? Sure I could go through and start deleting preference files, but what if I delete the wrong one? I could mistakenly remove the files for Transmit when I thought I was removing transmission. That could be a serious nightmare for me. Made even worse by the fact that I’m not using Time Machine (but that’s for another post).

Just don’t think that when you drag an application icon to the trash that it’s all the way uninstalled. If you do want to make sure an application is 100% uninstalled, go over and purchase AppZapper. That will do the geek stuff for you.

Speaking of the /library folder, is there a definitive guide that tells me what the difference between ~/ folders and / folders are? It would be keen if said guide also explained the hieroglyphics that are everywhere in this damned OS too. It’s been more than 2 years and I still don’t know which is which.

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I’ve been using Tweetdeck for my Twitter needs of late and I can tell you that it’s the only app built in Adobe AIR that I actually like. Until it came time to upgrade to a newer version.

Everytime I tried to run the upgrade, it would crash and not restart. I tried reinstalling from the website using Firefox and Safari, but couldn’t get it to go. I tried installing other AIR apps the same way, but no go. So I tried to reinstall AIR, but that kept telling me that AIR was already installed, which means the installer wouldn’t run.

No big deal, I think. I’ll just uninstall and reinstall AIR I think. How hard can it be? I have expert level technical experience and skills, and this is just a simple software uninstall/reinstall.

Until I find that I don’t have an uninstaller for Adobe AIR on my system. Great. I then go about searching on google, on adobe and anyplace else I could think of. It would seem the only way to fix this problem is to sign up for an account on the adobe support site and submit a question.

Why?

All I want is the runtime uninstaller. Hell, I’d be happy if I could just reinstall AIR, but it won’t let me since it’s already installed. I don’t want to jump through a bunch of hoops and give my information for a file download.

As it turns out, there is a way to uninstall AIR without the uninstaller that I found here. It requires using terminal and having the installer DMG open, but it works.

Why couldn’t I find this on Adobe’s site? Why did I have to use a command line to fix this? It is thing like this that make computers hard to use for the majority of users and the only benefit is to keep a few support staff busy with phones and email troubleshooting the problem.

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The thing is even the card registration process is simple – so simple that I can (and have) done it in my sleep.  Sadly however quite a few of the end loosers users here are so dumb that they’re completely incapable of finding their way to the restroom let alone how to register their card.

Some of the common conversations:

End User: Hi I’m here to register my card

Me: Have you ever logged in to the system?

EU: Umm – the folks at the gate told me to come up here….

Me: Right, but have you ever logged on to a computer here?

EU: I got a new card at the gate, they said to come here…

Me: I understand.  But I need to know if you have ever logged on with your card before we can get started….

EU: ???  Um I just got a card?

This morning’s person showed a little promise at first:

EU: I got a new card and the gate said I needed to see you

Me: Ok.  Have you ever logged on with a card before?

EU: No I have a username a password

Me:  (Excited that I may have a user with half a brain) Ok, log on to the computer just like you would at your desk.

EU: Do what now?

Me: (sinking back into the pit of dispair) Log on with your username and password just like you do in your office.

EU: But I have a card, why can’t I just use my card?

Me: Well we need to register your card before you can log in with it.  You need to sign in with your username first so we can register your card with your account.

EU: But, I have a card now…

Me: I know but you can’t sign in with it until it’s registered to your account, if you would please sign in we’ll get you set up…

EU: Ummm.  I forgot my password.

And then my head exploded….

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