iPhone OS 3.0 Revisited

I've been running the OS 3.0x on my iPhone for just over two months now (I upgraded near the end of June), and I'm sorry to say that I am very disappointed with it. Sure, it has some improvements -- cut and paste is great when it works, but there are many times that it doesn't work.

By far, the biggest problem I've had with it is performance. It just sucks. I regularly find myself several WORDS ahead of the keyboard when typing, I can't say for sure, but I think typing is actually slower than the initial release when the iPhone 3G was released. Maybe it's me? Do I type too fast Apple?

I've also run into countless network-related problems. I regularly start up TwitterFon and hit the refresh and am told that there is no network connection. Sure, maybe it's a TwitterFon issue? But I get exactly the same thing with Safari - it'll open up, start refreshing the current page, then pop up a "no network connection" message, and then actually refresh the page behind the popup window.

Beyond performance, I've lost count of the number of times I've had to actually turn the phone off and then on again in order to get any sort of network connection. It's almost like I'm running Windows Millenium Edition. Sometimes the phone will say there is no service and and after restarting will have a decent 3G signal. Other times it will have a strong 3G signal and will just not connect to anything (Safari fails, Facebook, TwitterFon, etc).

Did I mention - I still can't send or receive an MMS message?

I have to wonder. Apple - is this intentional? Did you intentionally make the new OS slower so I'd run out and buy a new phone? Maybe you should have talked to AT&T about that (come on, we know you talk to them about everything). I might have upgraded phones if tey didn't make it so freaking expensive. And who knows, maybe next year when my contract was up, I might have thought about upgrading to the iPhone 3GS++. But lately, all I think is "man, is this what life is going to be like, Apple ships an update, I install it, and life sucks" (remember the last two Mac OS X updates trashed my previously stable machine). Do I really want to invest any more in you?

Microsoft Bing Commercials

Dear Microsoft,

Your "bing" commercials suck. They're incredibly annoying. Second only to the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld commercials you had not too long ago (nothing personal Bill/Jerry).

Don't get me wrong, I understand what your message is, that your search results aren't littered with useless pieces of information like the results from some other engines might be. But rather than taking this negative approach and criticizing others, why not be positive and highlight your bing's results, which are clear and concise, free from all of the meaningless bits.

To this effect, I've written a small skit for you. Feel free to use it or not. If you do use it, I only ask for a free Windows 7 upgrade (Professional, please), and maybe you could feature me in one of your $1000 computer commercials?

Ok, here goes..

A couple is walking down the street. Suddenly the man breaks out in song (American Pie, by Don McLean)...

Him: I drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was try and good old boys were drinkin' whisky and rye... Hey, what's rye? Not bread, right?

Her: Uhm, I don't know. It's a grain, alcohols are made with grain.

At that moment, they walk past a bus stop. A stranger, possibly John Ratzenberger (aka Cliff Clavin from Cheers), waiting for the bus overhears their conversation and interjects:

Stranger: It's a whiskey, the American version is made from a mash of at least 51% rye.

Him: Wow, thanks stranger.

And so on..

You've got to admit, it's far more positive than the rubbish you're running right now. Let me know what you think.

iPhone 3.0 observations

I installed the latest iPhone OS (3.0) on my iPhone 3G the other day. Yeah, yeah, why do I even bother with such an old phone, why not upgrade.. I'm cheap, that's why :) Sure, I'd like to have all of the cool new features that the "3G S" includes, but I can't see paying $500-$600 for them, so for the time being, I'll live without the ability to record videos and a compass.

But I digress, this is about the OS, not the phone. Like I said, I upgraded to 3.0 the other day. The upgrade went well for the most part. There was an issue with iTunes and the phone talking after the installation/reboots, but those were related to iTunes on Vista I think.

Way back when the first announcements were made, I thought I would see these features:

• Cut/Copy/Paste
• MMS
• Stereo Bluetooth (aka A2DP)
• Ability to send multiple pictures in a single email

But, of course, AT&T said no to MMS (sure, they didn't say "no", they said "it'll take us time." - might as well have said "no").

I "found" cut/copy/paste accidentally. It wasn't quite as nice as I would have liked - but in truth, I'm not sure what I'd like - ideally, I could make some sort of swiping gesture to select text and then the next tap would make the little popup guy appear. Maybe it works like that and I'm doing something wrong, but mostly it works.

Stereo Bluetooth I've not seen though. Perhaps because I don't own a pair of stereo bluetooth headphones - that's a combination of "what's the point?" and "I'm cheap" and "oh, is it supported now?" - but I saw nothing in the Bluetooth configuration that looked any different than it did before. Maybe I'll pick something up at Frys just to test this.

This leaves emailing multiple pictures at one time. It took me a while to figure out how this worked. I usually select a picture and then while looking at it, click the "email" application. With 3.0, tapping on the "email" button while looking at the Camera Roll lets me select any number of pictures that I can then "share" (which means email). Pretty cool, but as with earlier versions, a scaled down (800x600) picture gets sent rather than the native resolution (1600x1200).

But here's something cool I noticed - if you select a bunch of pictures using the email button from the camera roll and then "Copy" them, you can open up the email application and paste them into the body of a new email and magically, they get sent in the native resolution, and even have "real" filenames (if you consider "IMG_0102.JPG" and such a real name anyway).

US Customs and Border Patrol

Ethel and I went to Austria this summer for vacation (the one in Europe, not the one in the southern hemisphere). Surprisingly enough we were able to book our flights using her frequent flier miles - it only took about three hours total of phone time, and a bunch of very helpful airline (Lufthansa and United) employees - more on them another time.

Everything about the trip was great. We saw friends, family, ate good food, drank great beer, etc. It didn't even matter that it rained 10 days out of 10 days. The only "problem" with the whole trip happened when we landed in Seattle and tried to go through immigration.

Holy Crap! Never before have I seen so much incompetence packed so tightly in a small place.

Ethel's a green card holder, and I'm a good old boy, citizen of the U.S. of A. I'm so 'merican, I might as well be from Alabama (but thankfully I'm not). There were six or so different lines in the immigration area - one labeled "US Citizens," and the other five labeled "Visitors."

Ethel's not a citizen, nor is she a visitor, she's a resident alien. In San Francisco, we always get in the "US Citizens and Resident Aliens" line, so we did the same thing in Seattle, assuming they were trying to save money on printing ("it's $0.75 per letter Jan"). The line moved quickly - after 10 minutes, we were near the start - woohoo..

Then one of the immigration officers said something about this line being ONLY for US Citizens, not resident aliens, etc. And then we noticed small 8.5x11 sheets of paper taped to the immigration booths saying the same thing - professional looking - right down to the yellow highlighing scribbled on parts to draw attention to it. Pity these signs were not at the END of the line where we would have seen them before waiting..

So we moved over to line 5.. Sadly, we were at the end of the line. And there we sat, at the end of the line. Literally only about two people were ever behind us in the line ever again. We were in that line for over an hour.

Why was it so slow? Simple.. Stupidity. The US Citizen line went quickly because processing everyone was simple - look at the passport, stamp it, look at the customs declaration, scribble on it, off you go. The "Visitors" line, on the other hand was littered with people with all sorts of issues. There were the people who had been outside the country for more than a year (a no-no if you are a resident alien), there was the gaggle of Korean teenage girls, processed individually, 10 minutes per child, all claiming to be here to work for the summer on an internship at restaurants (yeah, I'm thinking "prostitution" too).

And so on.. What the hell were they thinking..

Of course, when we were finally at the front of the line, we asked - what were you thinking (toned down from "what the f*ck are you thinking, are you people idiots?").. And "Helen" explained - non-US Citizens need to have their pictures taken and get fingerprinted, so they can't go in the other line, this includes resident aliens - a new procedure, starting in 2009.

Ethel said "but I flew into San Francisco in March, they allowed resident aliens in the US Citizens line." Helen ignored her. A good approach when faced with facts - ignore them. Maybe Helen was a Creationist at heart?

We pointed out to Helen that her colleagues were now, in fact, doing exactly that - processing "foreigners" in the line that had previously been used to process US Citizens (that line had emptied of US Citizens 45 minutes earlier). She seemed to not follow this, nor to see the cameras and fingerprint machines in those lines. Facts don't work, logic doesn't work. Thanks for playing along Helen, there are some nice parting gifts for you backstage.

I had a few minutes the other day and decided to go off in search of this "policy" that Helen mentioned. I found tidbits about the fingerprinting and pictures, but that was it, nothing that spelled out that resident aliens couldn't be processed alongside US Citizens.

But I did find the most amazing news release - apparently from less than a week ago, describing a "Model Port" initiative to make our ports of entry more friendly to visitors, to improve signage, to be more professional, to speed people through, etc. Amazing. Right there, at the bottom of the news story - Seattle is a model port. Excellent. I particularly like that the 8.5x11 inch pieces of paper are considered "improved signage" - I wonder what they had earlier..

The other thing I found on the border patrol web site was a "wait time" application. Simply select the airport code, a date, (ignoring javascript messages along the way) and magically you see the wait times. For grins, I put in the date we were there - June 27, 2009. The site said the maximum wait time was under 30 minutes - I guess they divided the hour that we had waited by two (because there are two of us?) to come up with that?

Cisco regraded

My replacement Linksys SD2008 switch arrived the other day - I think it was just over a week from when I called til I got the replacement - most of the delay was because I didn't have time to go to the post office.

Sadly, when I hooked the switch up, I found that three of the eight ports in it were bad (as in didn't work). This is a replacement part too. Nice.. It was clearly labeled as having been quality assured. I wonder what that means - did someone actually test all 8 ports? Or maybe they tested the LEDs? Either way, the new (refurbished, I think) switch was toast.

I called Cisco/Linksys "business" support and explained the whole thing - old switch died, we swapped, new switch has three bad ports, maybe we could call it an SD2005 ("5 port" rather than "8 port"), etc.. The guy on the phone opened a new RMA and said "don't worry, we'll pay for shipping for the defective one this time." Cool, nice of you guys. It was your crap product that died (twice now), but it's a nice gesture anyway.

Alas, the replacement is backordered. I have to wonder about that, which I did, aloud, while on the phone with support - "backordered? really? Is that because you realized they're all bad and you've decided to actually look to see what's causing them to die? Or maybe so many have died your stock of 'we think these might work' spares is gone?"

So that B+ you got when I first posted about this - I'm knocking you down one grade because you sent me a replacement that didn't work (feel free to blame FedEx, but you packaged it up for shipping, so it's on you either way); and then you're losing another half grade because it's been over a week since I called about the replacement being defective and you've still not sent me a new replacement (I should consider this a good sign, perhaps it means you're actually testing them before sending them.

Final grade, C-, sorry. You could have been a contender, but you dropped the ball this time.

Customer Service Scorecard

I've made a bunch of customer service calls in the recent past and thought it would be good to report on them. I had read in a tweet not too long ago from @comcastcares that he thought our current economic troubles would result in improved customer service (I'm paraphrasing), and wondered how my experiences measured up.

HP - I called them because the computer I got from them was cheaper at a local store. It took three people (two calls and one chat), but I got someone who was helpful and offered me $100 credit (close enough to the $130 price difference to call it a wash). A- (it did take three attempts after all, though the final guy I talk to gets an A+ of his own)

American Express - This is a bit embarassing. I inadvertently paid the wrong Amex bill (yeah, I have two cards). One phone call was all it took - the guy who answered the phone understood what had happened and happily moved the money from one account to the other, and assured me there won't be any finance charges. A+

Cisco Small Business Support - Yes, I'm a small business. Or, rather, I buy the same networking hardware that a small business owner would buy. In this case, I had a Linksys SD2008 Gigabit switch that died (computers connected at 10Mb/s rather than 1Gb/s). I called the small business support number, and in less than 5 minutes, the RMA process was kicked off and I had received the emailed instructions. A+ -- but I'm going to have to knock you down a grade just because you sold me this switch which one out of every two reviewers on Amazon has had problems with. B+

Cisco Consumer Support (aka Linksys) - I buy consumer hardware too. In this case, it was an EG008W Gigabit switch. This one died a few months ago, but I didn't think to call to get it replaced. The Small Business Support guy couldn't help me, but he transfered me to a guy who should have been able to. I say "should have" because the conversation didn't go so well. There were communication issues, I said something about my computer connecting at 10Mb/s instead of 1Gb/s, he asked how I knew my computer was connecting at 11Mb/s (yes, he said "11"). The call ended when he put me on hold to "look something up" and then came back and started saying "can you here me? I can't hear you. Are you still there?" and so on until he hung up. I'm sure he heard me fine and was just covering his ass - "yes boss, something happened to the connection." F -- this isn't a surprise, is it?

Frys - everyone's favorite consumer electronics store. I stopped by this evening to get a Netgear switch (GS608) to replace one of the Linksys switches. I happened to see the Norton Internet 2009/Ghost package that I bought for $99 a few weeks ago on sale for $69. With no receipt, I walked up to the return counter, explained things, and was given a store credit of $30 (which I proceeded to spend on the Netgear switch :) A+ -- that's a first for Frys, huh?

Sadly, that only averages out to a C, but that's Linksys bringing the score down. Without them, the average is an A, so I'd say things are looking up. I'm looking to you, Linksys, to get your act together - quality products, competent support. Work on it. It's really not that hard to do.

HP Computer/Customer Service

I finally broke down and bought a new computer the other day. Our old HP desktop (m1050e) died back in December - first the disk went, and then the power supply, since it was 4 years old and mostly too slow to do anything, I didn't bother trying to fix it, I just decided to wait til something new and exciting came out and buy that.

So we waited. And waited and waited. Then finally, two weeks ago, HP listed a new machine - an m9660f on their site. It looked pretty nice, 8GB of RAM, 750GB of disk, AMD Phenom II-940 processor, etc. It was everything I needed, apart from lots of spare drive bays (one internal 3.5", one external 5.25"), and it came with Vista (64-bit) - ok, so it wasn't quite perfect. So I ordered it..

It arrived, yippee!! The box was all sorts of abused, the styrofoam packing material wast smashed all over the place (shame on you HP, using styrofoam, get with the program). And I spent the rest of the week installing things on it - iTunes, a new copy of Outlook (so I can sync my phone's contacts), Norton Ghost (so I can back up the boot partition - WTF Microsoft, would it have killed you to include this in Vista Home Premium?), and so on.

And then it happened. Friday I was flipping through the Frys ads in the Mercury News and there was my new computer, for $130 less than I had just paid 10 days earlier to HP. Crap. $130 will buy lots of accessories, so I called HP to ask for a price match. The computer came with a 21 day guarantee, so I was pretty sure I could say "fine, if you don't want to match Frys' price, I'd like to return the computer" (they cover return shipping too).

My first call to 1-800-BUY-MYHP was answered by "Jessica" (her real name, or so she told me). She assured me that they would match the price of any online retailer. Unfortunately, Frys' price online was different than the one in the paper. Amazon to the rescue - they were around $100 less than what I had paid hp.com. Jessica put me on hold to verify things, and then never came back. I sat on hold for over an hour, waiting, hoping for Jessica to come back. She never did.

Towards the end of my time with Jessica's music on hold, I tried online chatting, with "Sally." I wish I had gotten further with her, but I didn't. She told me they had no price matching policy, but said that I could fax the information (order number, copy of ad, etc) to them and someone would think about what they wanted to do. I somehow imagined this would take longer than the 11 days I had left to return the PC for free, so instead of doing so, I called the 800-BUY-MYHP again.

Thankfully someone other than Jessica answered. This guy read all of the information and then suggested that he could either give me $100 credit on the spot, or I could follow up and fax in all of the other crap and pray (he didn't mention prayer, that's my doing). Of course, I took the $100 credit - it was far easier than finding a fax machine, etc.

After the call, I took a survey which asked questions mainly about "this call" - not the others, but just this most recent one. That sucked. I had had three interactions, Jessica, Sally, and the unnamed guy. Of them, only the unnamed guy actually cared enough to solve my (ok, self-inflicted) problem. Jess and Sally didn't care. Sally just quoted company policy, and Jess, well, she's apparently not mastered the telephone system, so it's not clear where her competence lies.

Anyway, HP, if you're listening, roughly 66.7% of the people handling consumer post-sales issues aren't so consumer-friendly. You might want to look into that. And give the guy who took ownership of my problem some sort of bonus - he was really great.

Not-so-targeted Marketing

I've been a Comcast customer for almost five years now, and mostly have no complaints. Sure, there was the ordeal at the end of 2007 when they took away the Hallmark Channel, but I moved past that and have been pretty happy with my digital cable service (you can quote me if you'd like Frank :).

But sometimes, they do the stupidest things. No, I don't mean their commercials - who can fault them for hiring an inept advertising agency. I'm referring to the most recent promotion I received in the mail. It was a special offer for one free On Demand movie. All I needed to do was to fill out the back of the enclosed coupon and send it in with next month's payment.

Sounds easy enough, but there are two problems with it:

1. We don't send in our payments. We pay electronically - we save Comcast money by doing this (they don't need to print our bill, nor pay for the postage), and at the same time, we're saving the environment (and making the lives of our local postal workers a bit easier). No payment to send in, no way to return the coupon.
   
   
2. We don't have a cable box, which is required for watching On Demand movies. We have digital cable, of course, but we went with a cable card in our TivoHD (Tivo rocks, more so with its 1TB drive!) rather than a cable box/DVR combination from Comcast.
   

Sadly, Comcast knew both of these things - they know we pay our bill electronically and they know we have CableCards (we get billed for these each month). Perhaps future promotions could be just a teeny weeny bit more targeted? You know, check to see if something actually applies to me before sending it to me maybe?

Network Storage

I've been looking for some sort of network storage device for a while now - something for backing up my computer to, storing music, etc. I came across the Linksys MediaHub this afternoon. I've still not forgiven Linksys for the CIT400 support debacle, but the device looked interesting.

I started reading the documentation - something's not right. Take this blurb that follows the "switching to RAID 1" instructions:

WARNING: Existing data on the Media Hub will
be lost; Linksys strongly recommends that you
back up its data to your computer or an external
hard disk before you continue.

• When you set the Media Hub to the Increase Protection: RAID 1 mode, the Media Hub will be unavailable for approximately 15 minutes and then automatically reboot.
  
  
• After reboot, the Media Hub will synchronize the data on the two disks.
  
  
• Depending on disk size, disk synchronization may take from several minutes to several hours. Synchronization progress can be viewed from the Disk screen. Rebooting or removing power from the Media Hub during this time is not recommended

So, let me see, if I turn on RAID 1, all of my data gets lost, ok, I'm good with that. But then the device will be rebooted, ok. And then the data will be synchronized across the disks. That would be the data that was wiped out? And then, depending on how big the disks are, synchronizing the non-existent data may take several hours? Interesting, very interesting.

The steps involved in recovering from a disk failure (two disks, in RAID 0) are equally not well thought out:

1. To shut down the Media Hub, press and hold the power button until the power LED starts flashing. If this step does not shut down the Media Hub, then
2. proceed to step 2.
3. Disconnect the power adapter from the Power port.
4. To release the drive bay cover, push the button on the top panel.
5. To remove the defective disk, push together the clips of its drive bay, and then pull out the drive bay.
6. Remove the defective disk from its drive bay.
   NOTE: Do not install a replacement hard disk at this time. The Media Hub must revert to single disk mode before you can install a second hard disk.
7. Push down on the hard disk to make sure the connectors are securely seated.

Step 6 says to remove the defective disk, and then warns me not to put another disk in yet. But then step 7 tells me to push down on the hard disk to make sure the connectors are securely seated. Would that be the hard disk I just took out, or the one I didn't replace it with? Maybe you mean the remaining disk - do they come loose on their own often?

I think I'll continue my search elsewhere, unless someone at Cisco wants to send me an evaluation unit?