TruGreen Carpet Bomb

TruGreen stop the carpet bombing. There’s no way anyone at “Main Campus Drive, Lexington, MA” is going to buy your service. That’s 387 addresses you can remove from your database, and save the planet some paper, energy and postage.)

(Though if it would save Saturday postal delivery, I could see the USPS raising rates for carpet bombing mailings like this.

I’ve spent about 15 minutes trying to setup my Season Pass episodes on my new Tivo Premiere XL.

I can see the program listings, I can see the upcoming episodes, I can’t successfully setup the Season Pass. No error message, no indication if the Season Pass scheduling was successful or not. No information at all.

(Turns out there is a confirmation if the Season Pass is recorded, but I didn’t know that until one successfully recorded. The UI in the Premiere is completely different than previous Tivo models.)

So I contacted Tivo to ask what was going on…here’s what I got from their customer service chat.

Source: Brandon

Bad Tivo

Here are three I’ve received in the last week…

Photo Credit: Brandon

Lawncare? No thanks!

Um, I live here…

Credit: Brandon/Google

Here's where I live...

It’s a big apartment complex, and you might be really happy to get our business. But, I don’t own the apartment, nor am I responsible for hiring the landscapers.

Photo Credit: @alwayskatharine/flickr

Go Green!

Please?

Brett McLaughlin posted an article relating “e” in ebooks to the <blink> tag.

But, d’oh!

This is before the fix…

Credit: Brandon/O’Reilly’s Radar

Download the full-size movie (9.6MB, MOV)

Radar Blink Foobar by Brandon Muramatsu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.mura.org.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.mura.org/about.

funky-star

Network Fail

I’m at yet another university that has locked down their network so far that it gets in the way of doing simple things — like IM. For some reason the firewall and/or routers are not routing those ports. Great, thanks.

This is one of the reasons I like Google, they do everything in a web browser over port 80.

Source: Brandon/AIM Express

AIM Express - AIM in a Web Browser

(I really wish I could have my friends that can break through these network blocks in my bag when I travel to other universities to show folks how silly all this unnecessary security is…)

I wrote a review on the seller, they didn’t like it too much.

Here’s the email they sent me:

Dear customer,

sorry about the inconvenience.

We will refund $3.00 shipping fee.

Could you please remove your feedback?

3 of 5 Wow, really slow shipping. Jan 16, 2009 10:35:22 PM
here’s the link to remove feedback:

1. Please go to below link or log in to your Amazon account and go to ‘view my orders’

https://www.amazon.com/gp/css/history/view.html/?orderFilter=feedback&link=feedback

2. Locate the order ( your order # is 002-xxxxxxx-xxxx869 ), then scroll to the feedback section.
3. Click *Remove*.

When you have removed your feedback, please email us.

Sincerely,

–
JoWow Sales Team
www.jowow.com

They wanted to buy a better review for $3.00 in shipping. Um, no. At least offer to refund the whole shipping amount, not just a measely $3.00.

Interestingly, I can’t pull up the original order in my order history nor can I find the original item at Amazon to link to it directly.

Oh well.

That’s just wrong. For one he’s dead. Must because of all the mormons that I know from Utah…(you know I love you!)

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth since I didn’t have to pay for the software, but the download process is so…1995. Here’s a screenshot of the download screen.

Source: Brandon

Timewarp, 1995?

There are 6 disks, uh ok. This is 2009, many folks have broadband access, they can easily download 1.44 MB or larger files. I say 1.44 MB, but really the disk images range from 1 MB to 3.2 MB in size. Yes, that’s megabytes. The total download is 15.4 MB–um, could we make that a single file, mkay? (Don’t get me started on why they’re using a proprietary .vip image format.)

I have another post idea that will probably take significantly more than 1 hour to write.

/sigh

</return to regularly scheduled programming>

There’s a reason I titled this site…Rocket Science.

(Update: I found a reversed Я to use in the post from Wikipedia – Faux Cyrillic.)