Archive for the 'Annoyances' Category

I ran across a story at BBC News (via Digg) that is just plain depressing. It seems that Knut the polar bear killed 10 live carp in front of zoo visitors. The seemingly natural act has caused some controversy, with critics saying that the fish shouldn’t have been there in the first place. German media claims that the fish were there to clean up algae, and they quickly point out that we are talking about a polar bear, the most carnivorous bear species in the world.

Won’t someone think of the children?!?

Google recently enabled “Search Suggest” at their official home page. I find this feature annoying, and I wanted a way to disable it. Thankfully, the solution was very simple:

1. Visit the Search Preferences page
2. Set the Query Suggestions option to “Do not provide query suggestions in the search box”
3. Save your preferences

I wish Google had made disabling this a little clearer, rather than quietly adding the preference to the preferences page.

Slashdot is running a story on how Time-Warner is considering moving to a per-gigabyte service fee. According to them, 5 percent of their customers use over 50 percent of the network. So, because of these few “bad apples,” they’ll make everyone pay more. Steven Levy of the Washington Post has an interesting theory that Time-Warner is trying to hobble movie rentals via iTunes (trying to keep their pay-per-view stuff alive in the process).

I hope above anything else that this ‘idea’ of theirs never sees the light of day. Capping folks at 5-gigabytes (which is their current idea … can you believe that?) is incredibly poor judgment. This kind of thing will single-handedly destroy the online viewing capabilities of Netflix, it will ruin online gaming, and it will make MSDN subscriptions irrelevant.

And that might just be Time-Warner’s ultimate goal. Let’s hope they fail in every way possible.

There are a few gripes I’ve got with iTunes, all of which revolve around my subscriptions to podcasts:

1. Large downloads freeze iTunes (and sometimes the entire system) upon completion.

When a large (~250 to 500 MB) video podcast file has completed downloading, iTunes will completely freeze up. It feels to me like this hang is related to copying the file from a temporary download location to the intended destination (which is undoubtedly what iTunes is doing). Seeing as iTunes is a multi-threaded application, this should not, under any circumstance, happen. It should spawn a child thread to do the copy operation in the background, so that I can still use the application. Every once in a while, I even see my entire system hang up during this operation, which is doubly bad.

2. Some video files cannot be recycled immediately after viewing them.

After completing a video podcast, I find that I cannot immediately recycle the corresponding file from within iTunes. If I try to do so, the entry in iTunes is removed, but the file does not get removed! To recycle the file properly, I have to shut down iTunes, start it back up, and delete the entry. Somewhere a handle isn’t being released properly, and the file remains locked. Again, this is a bug that could easily be solved.

3. The Windows screen saver screws up video playback.

If you have iTunes installed on a Windows system, try this experiment. Get a video file through iTunes (a video podcast for example), and start it playing. Pause the video and walk away from your computer for a while. Allow the screen saver to turn on and, when it has, come back to your computer. When the screen saver is cleared, try to play the video again. What happens? No video! This particular bug has existed for years (I’ve seen forum references to this bug as far back as iTunes 5 and 6), and it’s apparently a known bug at Apple. That they don’t get around to fixing it is very intriguing to me.

I got an email this morning mentioning the following:

This is just a notice that your DreamHost Account #XXXXX has a balance of $71.34 (including any charges not due until 2009-01-23), with $71.34 due (since 2008-12-23).

What?!? I renewed my subscription about a year ago (if I remember correctly), and I got a 2 year renewal, meaning that I should still have about a year left. Furthermore, I completely used rewards money to pay my bill (since I had it available), so my credit card was never charged to begin with. Thankfully, the credit card they have on file for me had expired, but I’ve lost all of my referral rewards! Needless to say, I was pretty upset by this. Then I found this post over at their emergency status blog: “billing issues“. It seems like something went wrong, they know about it, and are fixing it.

I have yet to get my money back, and I have no doubt they’ll fix the problem, but it bothers me nonetheless. This problem, coupled with the DreamHost hack seen back in June, are starting to concern me. Not to mention the fact that the server this blog is hosted on has degraded in performance drastically over the past several months. It might be time for me to find another web host. I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Update: To their credit, DreamHost has corrected the issue. They also posted about what happened.

There’s currently a lot of buzz about the supposed firing of Jeff Gerstmann, a long-time editor at GameSpot (Penny Arcade! even has a comic about the incident). He was apparently fired based on a poor review he gave for “Kane & Lynch: Dead Men,” a game for the xBox 360. Eidos, who publishes the game, currently has a large advertising partnership with GameSpot for the game. This move indicates to me that Eidos was attempting to buy a good review, which they didn’t get. I have no trouble believing that they had a hand in getting Mr. Gerstmann fired.

It’s really sad to see when professional reviewers are forced to say one thing or another, but it’s not surprising. The almighty dollar seems to make most of the decisions these days. Years ago I subscribed to Computer Gaming World magazine, but I canceled my subscription after the quality took a nose dive. The “larger” gaming websites are starting to head in that direction as well, especially after shenanigans like these. I do most of my game review reading through Metacritic, checking out what reviewers as a whole have to say about various games. I also try to seek out independent reviews, from people like myself.

This kind of story is one reason that I decided to post my own reviews here on this website. Although I don’t have as much readership or visibility as the big review websites, I try to provide an alternative to the paid endorsements that publishers try to shove down our throats. Hopefully you find my reviews to be useful and honest. If so, then I’m succeeding where the large sites are failing. And that’s good enough for me.

I really hate how news outfits continually refer to Cyber Monday as ‘the busiest online shopping day of the year.’ If you take a look at the Wikipedia article, you’ll see that the term “Cyber Monday” is actually a neologism, undoubtedly created to generate public interest (and therefore, boosted sales figures). A number of online retailers point out that early December is actually a busier time than today supposedly is.

That being said, I love shopping online, and I try to do most of my holiday shopping through online outfits (though some things just have to be bought locally). How about you? Do you do your holiday shopping online, or do you head to the brick and mortar stores?