What Really Pisses Hugh Off

Hotel “Special Rates” for conferences

Yes they are – especially more!

They really look to rip attendees off by charging more than they would otherwise, but what really pisses me off is that the conference web site then gives you a link, with a special code, so that when you click on it you are identified as the person to be ripped off!

Example: Tonight, an invitation to
4th European Semantic Technology Conference 2010
December 2-3, 2010
Vienna, Austria
www.estc2010.com
The conference website gets me a “special” rate at the conference hotel (Marriot, The Imperial Riding School Renaissance Vienna Hotel) at €120 for a “Guest room, 1 King or 2 Twin/Single” for the night of 3rd December 2010.

Perhaps not too bad, unless you go to the standard Marriot reservation site at http://www.marriott.co.uk. Then you get an offer for the same room for the same night at €103, taxes included, etc..

Yeah, sure, I’m sure there are all sorts of complicated explanations about reserving rooms etc., etc., but in the end it’s a rip-off, and I have seen it so many times it really pisses me off.

iPad 1

No TAB key.

I have always avoided LinkedIn – the idea of a site where I can’t see anything unless I join tells me me they don’t actually provide anything people want unless they are press-ganged.

But it is worse than I thought.

I really needed to contact someone, and the only email Google showed was on LinkedIn. So I bit the bullet and created an account (fu@glasers.org, of course), and happily went to look at his details. There was a tiny bit more, plus the offer to “Send InMail”. So I happily clicked on the link and…

“To send an InMail now, upgrade your account.”

WTF! They want $24.95 per month for me to send a message. Apparently, for that, I can actually send 3 InMails, which they tell me is $30 of value. $10 per message! And they actually recommend a $49.95 account.

Well at least closing the account was not too painful – only had to confirm three times.

I have never, ever, had an airline upgrade.

My wife has, my son has, my researcher has, and it seems everyone I know has – even my suitcase has.

I have even been downgraded – yes, that’s right, they have a form which says “Involuntary Downgrade” – bet not many people have seen that.

And all the stories about how to get one just don’t work for me.

I have turned up early, with a Gold Card holder, who was going business. And I was Premium Economy. I asked, but still no dice, and that was the time they upgraded my suitcase and left me where I was.

Apple screws up iTunes zoom box

I am always finding that my iTunes window is too big for the laptop screen, since it usually gets resized on the big monitor. So the resize corner is off the bottom of the screen, and somehow I need to get it back.

Every other app I know lets you hit the zoom button (the green +) to get an (possibly) ideal size.

Not iTunes – you get a stupid little mini-browser if you do that. So maybe I can get the window to resize by moving the window (as in Safari)? Not a chance.

I finally had to read the Shortcut Keys in Help (if all else fails RTFM). It kindly and politely informs me that I should Option-click to get the normal behaviour.

FFS.

Autocomplete in Safari doesn’t backspace right.

Type a few characters in the address or Google bar; realise you got the last two wrong so do two backspaces – you might have thought you got back to where you were, but you didn’t or maybe you did!

If it did an autocomplete, then the first backspace cancelled the autocomplete, and the second cancelled one character;
If it did not do an autocomplete, then you lost both characters (probably what you wanted).

This just can’t be right – I have to look at the screen to find out what my typing has done.

The number of times I type a search term and press go, only to look up and see that there is an extra character at the front really pisses me off.

Email responses from web forms never include your message

They all do it – nice (possibly) form to fill in on the web, where you put your carefully crafted message to tell them their service was great/crap or simply ask a question.

But the response never, ever, actually includes the message you sent; and because they made you bypass your email system, usually on the grounds of security, you have to keep a copy somewhere else to work out what the hell their response means.

Do any of them actually try being a user of the system, or just watch someone going through the process of communicating with them?

Yet Another Web 2.0 Site (c) Les Carr

What really pisses me off about these sites such as http://academia.edu/ is that they make it so you have to join before you can search (as Linkedin).
So firstly you actually can’t find out if it is good to join, and secondly it doesn’t function as a way of non-members finding you, even though it fills up the Google search page.

Trying to upload a photo to Facebook

So I have one tiny little photo I want to upload … 20 minutes later I am still looking at a “Select Photo” screen that is flashing away.

It told me that the “recommended” way was to install a plugin – fine, but it didn’t offer me any other ways, so I clicked “OK” instead of “Cancel” – seemed a reasonable choice. After allowing it through my security, I then try again.

So what is it doing now? Either it has failed, or it is trying to index every photo on my hard drives, I guess to be helpful and offer me the choice.

Is there an exit button? Of course not. I need to close the window and try again.

“Fixing” things

Why would anyone fix a utility as fundamental as “touch”? It wasn’t “broken” so it didn’t need “fixing”.

What was in their minds when they changed the code?

I can just see some clever little oik, wet behind their Linux-like ears finding the “bug”, and being delighted they have found something to spray their piss on, retiring in the warm glow that all those copies of the software will go round the world smelling of them for the rest of time.

What am I on about?

The latest version of RedHat has broken my scripts. I used to be able to do

touch -d 20010000 foo

but now it gives me

touch: invalid date format `20010000′

yes, I know it wasn’t sensible, but it wasn’t “wrong”.

It is now, so because some tosser doesn’t understand the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy, I’m going to have to go round and check every bloody script and “correct” them.

What was the point?