Recently in Annoyances Category

This one is for you Charter (and every other cable company I've ever had.) Why can't the cable companies normalize the volumes of all their channels? I know there are variations between programming and advertising volumes, but when I switch from channel to channel, I typically either can't hear the channel or get blared out. I'm not typically sensitive to these changes, but I hate when I'm watching a program at night (kids sleeping) and I change the channel only to find myself in the middle of an action sequence in a movie with the volume suddenly twice as loud.

I know some TVs had volume normalization features (including automatically turning down the volume during noisy commercials) a couple years back, but why not eliminate the problem? Why not pick a volume range or maximum peak volume and adjust channels to the standard at the cable company's end of the technology before re-broadcasting the signal down their network?

I'm sick of (so-called) experts predicting $4/gallon or $5/gallon gas. Now that prices are dropping the headlines read $3/gallon gas by end of Summer. I'll leave it up to you to determine whether or not I'm an expert, but if words have as much effect as it appears on market forces:

I predict that gas will be $1.50 or lower by December 2008.
(The average price of gas in Montgomery is $3.59 on August 7, 2008.)

We've got a new high school going in near our house, way out in the country north of Prattville, Alabama. There has been a lot of buzz about naming the new school after the (old) Marbury High School which this school will be replacing. There's been online petitions and a regular stream of articles in the local weekly paper talking about community, memories, provenance, etc.

It seems to me that building a new school is an excellent change to brainstorm, involve the community, get creative and come up with a new name for a new school. Instead everyone seemed to get stuck in nostalgia.

The (old) Marbury High School is in Marbury, a very small community in rural central Alabama. The (new) Marbury High School in not in Marbury, it is not even near Marbury. It's 8.5 - 10 miles from Marbury to the new school site depending on your route. The new school does find itself in the community of Pine Level, Alabama.

Why not rename the current Marbury High School to Marbury School (it is destined to become the new middle school) and give the new school a new name that reflects something about its new location, an honored member of the education community, or some famous individual (president, governor, etc.)?

That's my two cents, now I'll sit back and wait for the first sporting event at the school where the visiting team erroneously goes to the old school because they didn't even know there was a new school...

• (new) Marbury High School construction project page from Cooper Brothers Construction
• (new ) Marbury High School construction photos from Cooper Brothers Construction

This is my yearly report of what crime was reported on a day in Montgomery, Alabama. My original tally was for a Thursday in late June, so I'll keep with that just to minimize variables.

On Thursday, June 19, 2008, there were:

11 Vehicle Burglaries
21 Burglaries
5 Vehicle Thefts
9 Thefts
2 Robbery
1 Domestic Violence Assault
1 Assault

reported in Montgomery, Alabama (est. population 202,000).

The estimated value of goods stolen on this one day total $85,789 with an additional $3,910 worth of damage to personal property (vehicles, homes) in the commission of these crimes. Total damages/loss from crimes committed on this day: $89,699. These are just the reported crimes, for one day. Assume those numbers are a representative sample and multiply out those numbers over the course of a week (~$627,893), a month (~$2,735,820), or a year (~$32,762,560) as it pleases you. The real picture might be slightly better or slightly worse, but the picture is ugly anyway you slice it. This is simply a tally of the crimes reported in the Montgomery Advertiser Montgomery Crime Reports section.

A recent e-mail mail from a headhunter to my monster e-mail address...

Hi David,

Hope you are doing in the best of the mood!!
I came across your resume on the job site and i feel it's a good
match for your skill's. If you feel the same do send me your most
updated profile asap, so that we can have the ball rolling.

For immediate update send your resume to ahtesham32@gmail.com. (Because nothing says professionalism like using a GMail account for your corporate e-mail)

Title: Tivoli Consultant
Location: Endicott, NY (Lockeed Martin, perhaps?)
Length: 3 Months+

Description:
Our client is looking for High Level TIVOLI consultant.

Regards,
xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx
LMNOP Technology Inc. (changed)
" Committed to Human Excellence Through IT " (What?)
Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. Why are there so many two-bit headhunter outfits in NJ?

Apparently Monster is going the way of Ebay. Remember dotcoms, enough scam business on your service will turn your whole service irrelevant to your legitimate clients. Maybe headhunting has just got that scummy.

Netflix:

• Make your "online movies" available to users of all computer platforms (including Linux.) All the cool video sites are doing it. Notice that YouTube never tells me "sorry your computer platform is unsupported." Make it work, period.
• I need tool to manage moving movies from queue to queue (even if it is only from the "main" account queue to the subordinate account queues.) It's ridiculous that I'm basically reduced to jotting down notes and re-searching and re-adding to move a couple dozen movies from one queue to another.
• Allow me (as the "main" account holder) to view when the same movie is duplicated on multiple queues in my account and resolve the situation by choosing which queue I want to remove it from.
• Please allow me to provide links to individual Netflix inventory (note: as of September 2008) (a particular DVD, for instance) so I can refer people to a movie on your service directly. Ideally, tie this to a affiliate program where I might make a couple bucks to cover my subscription fees. Your current affiliate program, a "Subscribe to Netflix" button, adds no value and was worthless to me.
• Similarly, provide an affiliate button that lists popular movies that are currently low in demand in your system to help drive demand on these movies and possibly even gateway people into a subscription. This could also be done on a geographic basis to drive regional demand.
• I may never watch all 500 of the movies in my queue, but why limit me to 500? The longer my queue, the longer I'm a customer of your service...
• When I add a movie to my queue, let me pick a queue position for the movie to be inserted into. Now my only options are at the bottom (default) or at the top, why nothing in between?

A while back I contacted the top five or so vendors of home weather stations to see if they offered any product that would simply measure various atmospheric variables and allow the home user to poll the station for data via some sort of open API. My search came up empty. Most of the time I felt like I had just asked them if they made pants with four legs.

I know there is a segment of consumers want a weather appliance that sits on their counter and tells them the weather. There is another segment that wants to be able to work with and track the data (for which some vendors provide their own software, usually Windows only.) Still another segments literally wants to just have the information available through an API that I can interact with. That last segment is me; that's what I'm looking for.

If you have a weather station that will:

• provide basic weather information
  • temperature
  • humidity
  • dew point
  • wind speed
  • wind direction
  • barometric pressure
  • precipitation
• allow me to poll the weather station
  • when I want
  • for what values I want
  • from on open API from whatever computer OS I want

then I would like to talk to you about purchasing one of your weather stations.

You can reach me at speed-weat@transmit.net.

I recently contacted Charter's support chat to see if they offered a reasonable solution to recording HDTV on PVR. The Moxi Box I have now (great, Linux-based solution) only has 80GB of storage, which represents about 6 hours (give or take) of HD programming that can be stored. This past weekend I recorded both Divisional Playoffs on Sunday, then accidentally hit the record button while watching TV later and the Moxi wiped out one game completely to make room to record the current show. I'm ping on the edge of the storage space with nothing but 2 3-hour shows recorded. I've added an external 250GB drive to the Moxi and it worked fine until the drive overheated and died. I don't want to maintain my DVR infrastructure, that's why I effectively rent this solution from Charter with a monthly fee.

Here's the online discussion I had with Charter.

A representative will be with you shortly.
You have been connected to Janet .
Janet : My name is Janet. Thank you for contacting Charter Communications. How may I assist you?
Me: My Moxi box is woefully inadequate for my DVR (esp. HDTV programming) recording needs. Do you offer something with more storage?
Janet : May I please know if your DVR is hd capable?
Me: Yes, it is. I recorded 2 3-hour football games this weekend (in HD) and it wiped out all other programes on the box.. I could've kept some of the programs, but then I couldn't record the games.
Me: I really need to be able to record more than 6 hours of HD programming
Janet : HD
Janet : HD DVR only records short hours.
Janet : If you want longer hours of recording, you may add external drive to your moxi.
Me: I'd prefer not to be in the business of upgrading my infrastructure, that's why I'm paying Charter a monthly fee. Do you offer anything more than the Moxi with 80GB of storage?
Me: I understand that HD requires (drastically) more storage. Is Charter offering any practical solution to this issue?
Janet : Yes, you may add an external hard drive to your moxi.
Janet : That is to have longer hours of recording.
Me: Please take a note for Charter: I'm going to switch to satellite because they will not provide me a more adequate solution for my PVR/DVR needs. I don't want to buy and maintain extra hard drives because Charter isn't keeping up with technological demands. That is why I pay a DVR fee to Charter.

If you are looking at using Charter's cable television services (especially HDTV) beware their DVR solutions are drastically limited on space (while otherwise being a great technological solution.) Expect Charter to not upgrade their infrastructure, but to pass on storage upgrade costs onto you, the consumer, despite you renting the DVR from them in the first place.

That felt good, now I'm off to go shop for a satellite provider...

In a product as carefully developed and mature as Microsoft Office Excel 2003 SP2, you'd think there'd be a nice way of intuitively removing multiple hyperlinks from a set of cells. The general thought process for designing this functionality would be something like:

1. Select range of cells from which you want to remove hyperlinks,
2. Right-click, then select "Remove Hyperlink(s)" option,
3. Done.

This seems intuitive, heck, that's how you remove a hyperlink from one cell, why wouldn't multiple removes work the same way?

I recently received a spreadsheet with several hundred hyperlinks included on a key field that had me accidentally linking to a web page (along with being prompted for authentication every time) whenever I selected the hyperlinked field. Useful for someone, a major annoyance to me (click-Hold, BTW is the correct way to select a hyperlinked field.) I tried the approach detailed above several times with no success. The choice to "Remove Hyperlink" disappears when multiple cells are selected. I gave in and asked Microsoft Office Help how to "remove hyperlink" and got the following procedure:

1. Type the number 1 into a blank cell,
2. Select and copy it (right-click, select "Copy" option),
3. Ctrl-Select the fields from which you want to remove hyperlinks (Shift-select or click-drag are also acceptable), release Ctrl or Shift keys if you are using them,
4. Select the Edit menu, then the "Paste Special" menu item,
5. When the Paste Special window opens, select "Multiply" under the "Operation" section, then choose "OK.

Who at Microsoft thought this was a useful, intuitive, or even understandable way of removing hyperlinks from multiple cells? It's almost as if some programmer's hack made it into the end-user's experience and no one noticed. Someone had to do functional test on this in Quality Control, right? Did it seem right then? I haven't used the newest Microsoft Office Excel offering, but I sure hope they've improved this bad user interface design. I'll add to this post tonight to comment on how OpenOffice deals with this task.

So I've been having a problem with my "Send To Flickr" Bookmarklet functionality on Flickr, and been in a foul mood about it. I finally got to the right person at Flickr who set me in the right direction and give me permission to post the javascript contents for the bookmarklet here.

"Send To Flickr" Bookmarklet Code:

javascript:t='';for(var n=0;n<document.images.length;n++){t+='<a href=/ onclick=\'document.f.url.value=document.images['+n+'].src;document.f.submit();return false;\'><img border=0 src='+document.images[n].src+'></a><br>'};if(t!=''){document.write('\<p\>Click an image to add it to your photostream\</p\>\<form name=f action=http://www.flickr.com/tools/sendto.gne method=get\>\<input type=hidden name=url\>\</form\>'+t+'');void(document.close())}else{alert('No images!')}

<20050906 Edit>How Do I Use This?

Highlight the text in this box and drag it onto your "Bookmarks Toolbar" (Netscape/Mozilla) or ":Personal Toolbar" (Opera.) Optionally, you can manually make a bookmark. For the 'Location' field (Mozilla) or 'Address' field (Opera) paste in the javascript from above. (It needs to be copy-and-pasted as one line.) Then go load the page with the picture you want to upload to Flickr. Click on the bookmark(let) and it will list all images on that page. Click the image you want to upload. Login to Flickr if it asks you to. Choose "Upload To Flickr" button. Voila! Your file should be uploaded into your account on Flickr.

To make this really useful, add the bookmark to your "Bookmarks Toolbar" (Mozilla) or "Personal Toolbar" (Opera) under View->Toolbars, so you can use your bookmarklet easily while browsing. If at this point, you can't figure it out, please wait for Flickr's new Bookmarklet coming to a browser near you soon.

</20050906 Edit>

I believe this is the exact JavaScript from Flickr (they wrote the code, not me), but I can't guarantee it. It works correctly and YOU can scan through the JavaScript, there doesn't appear to be anything untoward in the code. Flickr is reworking their bookmarklet upload function currently, so keep an eye on their Upload Tools page (you must be logged in to use that link) and be sure to use their new bookmarklet when they post it. (I'll modify this blog entry when they do...)

</20070323 Edit>

I've stopped using YahooFlickr, so I can't verify whether or not this still works. I'll leave it here for history's sake, and in case anyone finds it useful. As before, this code came from Flickr, I do not support it or provide any warranty to it working or working correctly for any of your needs. Your mileage may vary, use at your own risk/benefit.