I just spent most of a morning trying to figure out why the Blackberry software installer installs the Palm desktop manager instead of the Blackberry desktop manager. After extirpating anything related to palm on my drives and in the registry, including anything containing the words “fist” or “frond” just to be sure, I finally moved the zip file from D: to C:, figuring (correctly, I’m pretty sure), that the zip file was executing a different file that happened to be named “setup.exe.” I don’t know why the wrong one wasn’t overwritten by the right one, or maybe the unzipper was too stupid to get the paths right. But installing from C — because it’s C or because it’s not D? — seems to have done the trick.

Now can I have those four hours back? Thank you. [Tags: windows windows_sucks blackberry]

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Cell phones have clocks built in. So, if their batteries are low, why can’t they figure out not to give you warning beeps if it’s the middle of the night? What are they, babies?

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Knowledge@Wharton has an excellent interview with Tantek Çelik and Rohit Khare, two of the creators of microformats. Microformats are simple, standard ways to express data of particular types (e.g., reviews, events) so that information on the Web becomes more usable and reusable. (I vblogged an interview with them on the same topic.) [Tags: microformats tantek_celik rohit_khare supernova2005]

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[NOTE: Read the note at the bottom of this post where I explain that it was our fault, not the Yaris’. Now we’ve had it for a few weeks, and we’re enjoying it, and it’s been trouble-free.]

Our ’96 Saturn bit the dust a few days ago. After seriously considering a $4000 Jetta that turned out to need $2200 in work, we bought a brand new Toyota Yaris.

That was yesterday.

This is today:

It intermittently doesn’t start. It’s as if the battery is dead, except: 1. It starts without problems sometimes; 2. It has failed to start after having been driven for 45 minutes continuously. I’m no car guy, but the intermittency of it bothers me if only because the Gods of Perverseness just about guarantee that it’s going to start fine at the dealer’s.

It’s a manual transmission, so an intermittent failure to start is particularly dangerous: Some of the people in my family have been known to stall in traffic. (Ok, me too.)

I haven’t found any serious starting issues discussed on the Web by Yaris owners, so it’s likely that this is just one of those problems things put together by humans have. And until it stopped starting (which is preferably to its starting to stop) it was fun to drive, the back seat is roomier than you’d think, and it gets 34 mpg in town and 40 mpg on the highway, if the Feds are to be believed. Not to mention that it’s red.

The dealer, Toyota of Watertown, has acted honorably about the whole thing so far. [Tags: cars autos yaris toyota]

It turns out that it was totally our fault. You have to push the clutch waaaaay in for the starter to start. further than you have to push it in to disengage the clutch. What a bunch of schmucks we are. But, the dealer has been kind. I assume they are only mocking us behind our backs.

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Bank of America’s phone support person just asked me four questions to verify that I am who I am: My name, the last eight digits of my ATM card, my home address, and the amount and date of a recent ATM withdrawal. After I complied, she said that if gave her a one-word verification, the next time they could verify me much faster. And what is that one word that will open my bank account to anyone with a touch-tone phone?

My mother’s maiden name.

When I suggested that an enterprising felon, a malevolent family member, or anyone who has ever worked at any of the 12 million other companies that have asked for my mother’s maiden name would not have much trouble getting my mother’s maiden name, the support person said I could supply another word, but that they would not be able to give me a hint. Apparently having a hint field in their database would cause an information overload with cascading effects that would bring down the world economy.

Besides, aren’t we embarrassed talking about our mothers’ maiden name? [Tags: whines banking digitalID security]

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I am a satisfied user of CounterSpy, the anti-malware program, but that won’t stop me from whining. When you click on the “Abort” button when it’s running a scan, you get a dialogue box that says “Please wait while ConterSpy is working…” with only one button on it: “OK.” If it were OK, I wouldn’t be trying to abort! It reminds me of an old short cartoon in which a character encounters a rope dangling from off screen. The rope has a sign that says “Do not pull.” After much hesitation, the character finally of course pulls the rope. Another sign appears: “Out of order.”

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(Disclosure: I am just not a Las Vegas sort of person.)

I’m at a resort at Las Vegas Lake for the day to give a talk at a company’s annual user meeting. LV Lake, about half an hour from LV, is a built around a long, skinny lake. The place seems to be patterned on Florence, complete with a Ponte Vecchio spanning the lake. Nothing that 400 years and a Renaissance wouldn’t make interesting.

At every intersection in the “village” there are small water fountains, about half the size of a kid’s wading pool, with little spritzes of water shooting up from them. At least they architects didn’t go into full Trevi Emulation Mode when designing them. The amazing thing to me is that into every one of these pools visitors have thrown some coins. So, we can now add to the table of equivalences: Gambling in a Las Vegas casino = Walking through a Las Vegas casino with a hole in your pocket = Leaving a tip for a mobster = Losing your wallet = Throwing money into a Las Vegas fountain.

Actually, I’m assuming the coins in these fountains came from tourists. Maybe they’re seed coins placed there by the casinos. But if they’re real, they’re a form of meta-gambling: Toss money into the water so that hyou’ll have better luck tossing money into slot machines. In fact, as the world turns more meta, here’s a meta-gambling ploy I’m surprised the casinos haven’t hit on yet:

The only place I could get breakfast agt 6am this morning was in a casino. On the way out, I tried to find a slot machine into which I could put a quarter, because the reptilian portion of my brain responded to the twinkling lights. But the machines only take bills or vouchers. And since they pay out only in a voucher you redeem for money — bring back the analog cash! — they let you bet uneven increments. Anyway, let’s say you buy a $100 voucher. Why not have some slot machines next to the cashier that don’t pay out in money but instead increase your odds at the other machines? Meta-gambling!

(Someone please inform Captain Copyright and his good friend Reichsmarschall Patent that I own this idea. Thank you.)

[Tags: whines las_vegas gambling casinos florence]

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The Boston Globe is a great paper, I love it, I subscribe, I read it everyday, ok? But the little things unreasonably annoy me. Aaarrrgggghhh! For example:

EVery Saturday, the Globe’s op-ed page runs a box of notable and fun quotes from the week, usually with a jest or two from the TV funnymen. This week, one of the seven quotes is Bill Clinton saying “I had a lot of happy times there,” talking about his private White House office in an audiotape tour of his museum. Ooooh, “happy times”…Bill Clinton….snicker snicker. This is as funny as Steven Carrell saying “That’s what she said” on The Office, except on the TV show it’s supposed to be embarrassingly not funny.

The funnyman quote is a Jay “The Opposite of Funny” Leno joke about the Capitol being locked down because of what sounded like gun shots. It turned out it was just a pneumatic tool being used to repair an elevator. Japed Jay, “You can see how these mistakes are made. See, people in Washington, they’re not used to the sound of actual work being done.”

Hey-oh!

This was the funniest political joke on TV last week? Congress is lazy? Clinton got blown? How trenchant!

Both of these quotes are lazy and thoughtless. They’re comforting, not revealing or provocative like the best political humor. In a small small way, they help abrade democratic discourse.

(Note to self: Next time have the morning coffee before blogging.)

[Tags: media whines boston_globe jay_leno humor]

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My new Blackberry 8700c can be charged via a plain old USB cable attached to a PC. Yay! But unless you install the 35MB of Blackberry desktop software onto your laptop, the device rejects the charge. Boo!

I’m guessing that the software somehow regulates the voltage going out of the USB port, which I suppose is reasonable. It’s too bad Blackberry won’t allow you to choose to risk it in case of emergency. And it’s too bad Blackberry won’t let you download a small file rather than the 35MB monster for when, say, you’re away for Memorial Day Weekend and only have a dial-up connection.

[Note to potential burglars: While we’re away, Chuck Norris is staying in our house, and he’s coming down off a sugar high so you do not want to mess with him.] [Tags: whines blackberry chuck_norris]

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The Boston Globe reports today that Cingular is entirely unable to back up its heavily-advertised claim that it has the fewest dropped calls. Cingular referred the reporter, Bruce Mohl, to a research company called Telephia, and Telephia refused to provide any information about the study. So, it seems to be based on a statistically significant steaming pile of horse crap.

My own study certainly backs up the horse crap hypothesis. My Cingular phone only works if I actually climb a Cingular antenna tower, of which there seem to be a total of nine in the continental United States. Fortunately, the towers are only 11 inches tall.

I exaggerate. My Cingular phone also works if my phone is within shouting distance of yours. In fact, I’d like a rebate for the total minutes I spend yelling “Can you hear me now?” into my phone. If the terrorists were smart they’d use variations of “Can you hear me now? How about now?” as code, thus slipping by any covert government eavesdropping programs.

Plus, how about pain and suffering damages for the hours of sleep I’ve lost because my stupid !#@$%-ing phone — which has an automatically-set, atomic-quality clock in it — insists on beep-booping in the middle of the night to tell me that it’s lower on power.

And I shouldn’t pick on Cingular. Yesterday I went to the local Sprint store to check on how much they charge to use one of their phones as a modem. The brochure the clerk showed me contradicted itself in every line: The $39.99 “unlimited data” plan actually gives you 40MB before it starts charging on top of the $39.99. But, you can get a “special offer” of unlimited data for $59.99, except in the fine print it turns out to be unlimited up until 40MB. When I asked the clerk about it, he claimed to be entering a tunnel, and made static-y noises.

Is there a single person in the US who does not HATE her cellular company? [Tags: cingular cellphones advertising horse_crap]

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