James's Weblog

My dad, my mom, and I shared a cellular phone family plan through Sprint. The account was under my dad’s name. Not wanting to pay for service to my dad’s phone anymore, we called Sprint and asked them how to cancel that phone and transfer the account to my name. The Sprint representative told us to fax in the death certificate and to supply a contact number, and then Sprint would call us back to settle everything. Okay.

We did that. A few call-less days later, I called Sprint back and asked them what was going on. The representative said to wait about 3-5 business days for the death certificate to be processed, that Sprint would call us back when it was, and then we could go down to some local Sprint store to settle the account. Okay.

Tonight I discovered that my cell phone stopped working. My mom’s stopped working too.

I called Sprint. Sure enough, they completely closed our account without warning. The first representative said that we’d have to start a new account with a new service agreement. (No thanks, we just finished ours.) He bounced me to a second representative who was much more willing to help, although unfortunately she and her supervisor turned out to be powerless. Apparently once an account is closed, it can’t be reopened. Legal reasons of some sort, they claim, but it sounds so stupid that it might be true. She advised me to call Sprint’s credit department, which was responsible for processing the death certificate and for closing the account in the first place. Unfortunately right now it’s closed, so I have to wait until tomorrow.

Our Sprint bill was due today too. I was putting off paying for it until Sprint contacted me about my dad’s service, and I had intended to pay for it online today, but with our account closed, I’m unable to do so. If I am able to reactivate our account, I wonder if they’ll make me pay a late fee. And if I’m not able to reactivate our account, I wonder if we’ll be able to retain our phone numbers when we jump ship to another carrier.

Update (February 16):
Progress so far:

1. Tuesday night: Talked to customer service representative #1.
2. Bounced to customer service representative #2.
3. Directed to credit compliance department, which is closed for the night.
4. Wednesday morning: Called credit compliance department. Bounced to some accounts department.
5. Bounced to Sprint corporate office.
6. Bounced to customer retention center. Talked to somebody who seemed like he could help.
7. Instructed to make trip down to the local Sprint store to sign things.
8. Sprint store said there’s still something wrong with my account and the guy from step #6 needs to fix it first.
9. Spent Wednesday afternoon and all of Thursday trying to call guy from step #6, leaving messages, and waiting for him to call me back.
10. Friday morning: Guy from step #6 called me back, shortly after I’ve left for work, and no one was home. ARGH.

Update #2 (March 9):

1. Tuesday, February 20: I gave up on waiting for the guy from Sprint to call me, and I emailed the Sprint CEO. He (or likely someone on his staff) responded and told me someone would contact me.
2. Wednesday, February 21: A woman from the executive services department called me. She told me that she’s working on our case and is trying to get our telephone numbers back.
3. Saturday, February 24: Received a bill from Sprint. They’ve got to be kidding.
4. Sunday, February 25: Sprint finally got my telephone number back. They walked me through reactivating my phone. They were having trouble with my mom’s and thought it might take another day or two. They said not to worry about the bill.
5. Monday, February 26: I discovered that I could receive and make telephone calls, but my data service wasn’t working.
6. Tuesday, February 27: Sprint said they have my mom’s number back. They walked me through reactivating her phone. They said it might take a few hours for the phone to become active. They helped me fix my data service problem.
7. Waited several hours. My mom’s phone could make outgoing calls, but incoming calls were greeted with a recording from Verizon about the number being disconnected. The number was originally a Verizon number, so maybe the phone number went back to them when Sprint closed our account? I decided to wait a little longer to see if there was a longer-than-usual delay due to another carrier’s involvement.
8. Thursday, March 1: My mom’s phone still couldn’t receive calls. Called Sprint’s executive services office back to complain. Left messages and waited for them to call me back.
9. Tuesday, March 5: Sprint called me back. They walked me through reactivating her phone again in case I made a mistake the first time. They said that if it still didn’t work that there was probably something wrong with the phone and that they’d call back in a few hours to follow-up.
10. Mom’s phone still wasn’t working. Waited for the follow-up call. Didn’t come.
11. Friday, March 9: Called Sprint back. Actually got through this time without needing to leave a message. Sprint insisted that my mom’s phone must be faulty and that I should bring it in to a store to get it serviced or replaced. They said I might have to pay for a new phone. I gave up and asked for a new number; my mom hasn’t been able to receive calls in a month anyway. The new number worked immediately.

So after all that, we ended up needing to get a new telephone number anyway. Sigh. Cellular phone carriers suck. At least it’s over.

For the Christmas before my dad passed away, I bought him a Bluetooth GPS receiver and the Palm OS version of TomTom Navigator for him to use with his Treo 650. I’ve started using it myself on my Treo during the past few weeks.

Things I don’t like:

• TomTom’s restrictive copy “protection” scheme. Had I realized how draconian it is, I probably would never have bought their software. They require software activation, and the software can be activated at most twice. To show just how ridiculous their policies are, from their “I am having trouble activating a second hand TomTom Navigator” knowledge base article:

  Second hand TomTom Navigator products are likely to have already been activated once or more by the first buyer and the product code may therefore no longer be valid. For this reason we advise our customers not to purchase TomTom Navigator second hand. If you have already purchased a second hand TomTom Navigator product and cannot activate the software, we suggest you return it to the seller.

  In other words, they’re unwilling to help you, and you’re screwed. I’m somewhat tempted to call them to complain that the previous owner was my dad and that they’re a bunch of insensitive jerks.

  I downloaded a crack off the Internet instead.

• Doesn’t automatically switch between day and night colors. The day colors are too bright at night, and the subdued day colors are too hard to see in the sunlight. At least hitting the “C” key quickly and easily switches between the two.

• No verbosity control. The thing is a chatterbox sometimes, saying things such as, “Turn right, then turn left. Left turn ahead. Turn left.” within the span of seconds.

• Some of its directions are misleading. TomTom often gives verbal directions like “turn right, then turn left” even though the left turn is a half mile away. I’d rather it didn’t mention the second turn at all until getting closer to it or if it said, “turn right, then stay in the left lane.”

• Menus are permanently cluttered with buttons that require paid service. I have no intention of ever paying for traffic or weather service, but they’re always listed in the menu choices, and I’m forced to wade through them. Reducing options in a software application that might be used while driving (despite their warnings against it) would be good.

• It uses strange defaults when restarted. When the software starts up and tires to retrieve the current location from the GPS receiver, it initially displays the “Home” location rather than from the last known location. It’s disorienting and weird. And once it does obtain the current location, TomTom Navigator always wastes time attempting to navigate to the last destination, even if you previously cleared the route or even if you already arrived there.

• It doesn’t tell you the name of the street you’re currently on. Admittedly that’s not so important if you’re just blindly following the navigation directions, but it’s something I’d like to know.

• It formats addresses as “Fake Street 123” instead of as “123 Fake Street”. There’s an option in the preferences to put house numbers first, but I can’t tell what it affects.

• You can save addresses to a special “Favorites” list and give them meaningful names. For example, you can save “742 Evergreen Terrace” (er, “Evergreen Terrace 742”) as “The Simpsons’ house”. However, once aliased, you can’t retrieve the actual address. Want to tell someone else where “The Simpsons’ house” is? Too bad.

• Incapable of learning. There’s no way to teach it about roads it’s not aware of, and worse, there’s no way to teach it about permanently blocked roads. Consequently, it will forever get the directions to my house wrong, because I live in a gated community, and TomTom (like most online mapping services) thinks there’s an accessible entrance into it where there isn’t.

• Inconsistent time formats. When showing the amount of time to the next turn, sometimes it says “0:15 hrs” to mean 15 minutes. Sometimes it shows “9.50 min” to mean 9 minutes, 50 seconds. And yes, I told it to use U.S. formats.

• Blinking speed indicator. If you choose to show your current speed, when the software thinks you’re speeding, it displays your speed in blinking red text. This is annoying because the speed limit can be higher than it thinks it is, the blinking red text is annoying and distracting, and because it’s blinking, by the time I look at it, the text is often gone.

• Its “point-of-interest” system is hard to use. If you search for nearby businesses, the list of search results shows you how far away they are but not where they are. Selecting an item from the list automatically navigates to it rather than giving you more information first, and if the selected item turns out not to be the one you wanted, you need to perform the search all over again. Oh, and there is no point-of-interest category for supermarket/market/groceries.

That said, the TomTom Navigator software does look very nice and have a good feature-set, though I wish its features were more easily accessible.

Emergency Broadcast System message today:

EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM
Issued an alert for the following counties… Alameda County… Effective until 10/17/2006 18:57:00
Broadcast Station
or Cable System
Issued a

Child Abduction Emergency

Less than thirty seconds afterward, they issue it again, this time adding Contra Costa, Sonoma, and Santa Clara counties. There’s no information provided about the names or descriptions of those involved. Despite television being a visual medium, no pictures. Useless. And not to dismiss the seriousness of kidnapping or anything, but is it really an emergency? Most of these kidnapping emergencies usually are child custody disputes anyway, where the children aren’t in any imminent danger.

Also, apparently the Emergency Broadcast System on cable television also cuts off cable Internet access. What the heck?

As much as I like ING Direct, the 5% interest rate that some other places offer just seems too enticing over ING’s 4.35% interest rate, so I decided to switch.

I first tried to sign up for a savings account with Emigrant Direct, ING’s traditional competitor. I was very unimpressed with their website:

• They use “intelligent” form fields that automatically advance to the next field when you fill up the current one. Although they’re not necessarily bad, Emigrant Direct’s implementation is broken. Making a typo in a field and triggering the automatic advancement has an enormous penalty:
  • Backspace doesn’t work in this model. The form fields automatically advance to the next field but have no automatic means to return to the previous field. The standard method for correcting typos consequently is crippled.
  • Shift+Tab is unusable. Not only is there no automatic way to return to the previous field, but the manual way doesn’t work either. Attempting to use Shift+Tab to return to the previous field retriggers automatic advancement, and you’re stranded where you started.

  Worse, since most of the “intelligent” fields are numeric, typos aren’t uncommon.

  Is it so hard to do this right? If you can’t make something smart, keep it stupid and consistent. Being only half-smart is dangerous.

  Also, the need for automatic advancement can be avoided by abandoning their overly structured form design where, for example, they make you enter your telephone number across three separate fields (area code, first three digits, last four digits) instead of using a single freeform field that they validate later.

• Their session timeouts are too short. Although the online application process is spread over multiple web pages, the form on each page is somewhat lengthy, and they’re full of questions to which I don’t immediately know the answers. Unfortunately, if you spend more than a few minutes figuring out when you last moved or digging up your checkbook, your session times out and all the information that you entered is thrown away and wasted.

If Emigrant Direct wants to make it that troublesome to sign up for an account, it obviously doesn’t want my money, so I went elsewhere. I next tried signing up for Citibank’s e-Savings account. Citibank’s website also suffered from automatically advancing form fields, and at the end of the application process, it offers a confusing procedure to opt out of its mailing lists:

Citibank will periodically send information to you about new products and services … unless you check the box next to your name below. Information about your accounts will continue to be sent to you even if you check the box(es).

Citibank is allowed by law to share with its affiliates any information about its transactions or experiences with you. Please check the box next to your name if you do not want us to share among our affiliates any other information you provide to us….

Financial institutions that want people to trust them with their money should avoid such shady practices that obviously aren’t in the customer’s best interest:

• It’s an opt-out system rather than an opt-in one. Lack of action grants permission. (“If you want me to eat them for you, please give me no sign.”)
• Citibank uses negative instructions.
• Citibank uses inconsistent wording; they use “unless” for one checkbox and use “if you do not” for the other.

I went with Citibank anyway. Sigh.

Well, I’m back from the CHI 2006 conference in Montreal. I stayed at the Hyatt Regency, which the conference organizers recommended, but I later discovered there were hotels just as close to the convention hall that had better rooms, better service, and that were cheaper too.

Things I didn’t like about the Hyatt Regency in Montreal:

• The light switches were in non-standard locations. Rather than having the switches for the main area and for the entryway arranged side-by-side as usual, the switches were arranged vertically.
• The only light switch to the bathroom was on the outside. It confounded me every time.
• The bathroom was not laid out well. The towel rack was on the opposite side from the sink, so after washing my hands, I had to drip water across the floor before I could dry them off.
• The shower faucet confused me. It took me a couple of minutes without my glasses to notice that it’s the small ridge along the top that points to the temperature, not the handle itself like in my shower at home. (Incidentally, the valve in the faucet broke the morning of my return flight, so it was broken in more than ways than one.)
• The hotel room’s alarm clock used Comic Sans for its labels. Good gravy. I immediately knew I’d hate it.
• The alarm clock had no buttons to adjust the hour for the current time or for the alarm time; there were only minute adjustment buttons. (To make matters worse—and this wasn’t really the hotel’s fault—but its time was off by 12 hours when I got the room. It’s a good thing I noticed!)
• The alarm clock was a radio alarm clock, and the volume knob controlled only the radio; it didn’t control the normal alarm chirp, which happened to be way too quiet.
• Hyatt charged money for Internet access, and it’s hard to find the rate from the hotel’s internal website. Just to get to the pricing page, I first needed to try to sign up for service and to accept a license agreement. And even once there, the pricing page was hard to understand, listing prices in a seemingly random order. (Luckily, the Hyatt apparently blocked just web traffic; ssh access was unrestricted, so I used Remote Desktop through an ssh tunnel to do everything I needed.)
• They didn’t leave chocolates on my pillows.
• There was a plate in the hallway by my door when I arrived, and it was there for the following three nights. I swear it got closer to my door every night.
• Half of the television stations were in French, and the ones that were in English had mostly American programming.

In contrast, the hotel that Jeff Wong stayed at was cheaper, had free Internet service, was large and spacious, and even had a kitchen and fridge.

One nice thing about the Hyatt was that it was connected to the convention hall by way of an underground shopping mall, so I could get to the conference without going into the outside cold. Still, it wasn’t so cold in Montreal that it was a big advantage, and I’d rather have seen more of the city anyway. I didn’t get to look at any of the stores either, since almost everything was closed outside of the conference hours.

From the CHI 2006 submission guidelines (PDF):

Be careful with the use of gender-specific pronouns (he, she) and other gender-specific words (chairman, manpower, man-months). Use inclusive language (e.g., she or he, they, chair, staff, staff-hours, person-years) that is gender-neutral. If necessary, you may be able to use “he” and “she” in alternating sentences, so that the two genders occur equally often.

Sigh. Not that I don’t believe in gender equality, but alternating genders across sentences is supremely stupid, unless your goal is to ruin otherwise perfectly good sentence and paragraph flow (and comprehensibility). You’d think an organization trying to improve human interaction would have better sense. Or maybe some people purposely want to disrupt readability so they can draw attention to themselves: “Hey, look at us, we aren’t sexist! Aren’t we great?”

I have a better idea: Okay, English doesn’t have neutered word forms, but we can make some up. Better yet, let’s make up some transgendered words.

• he/she: ’e
• him/her: herm (which could double as an abbreviation for “hermaphrodite”)
• his/hers: herms

A couple of weeks ago I read about a scam anti-virus program sold by some no-name software company. The software reported false positives to induce hapless people into thinking that they were infected with something and to buy their useless product. A few days ago, Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals wrote about bogus spyware removers.

I’m so disgusted that I wonder if there should be a programming ethics board that allows programmers to become certified or licensed voluntarily. Shouldn’t people writing so-called anti-virus software take some form of Hippocratic Oath? Such a system wouldn’t be too different from the driver signing that Microsoft does, except it’d be a general system for individual developers, not for particular binaries. Hobbyists still would be able to create, distribute, and sell unlicensed programs, but anyone wanting to establish trust could advertise that they’re licensed. A signing authority could verify that licenses are active and authentic. Obtaining a license could require verification of developers’ personal information, allowing them to be identified and accountable if they break the code (pun intended). Qualification exams even could test for recognition of buffer overflows and other unsafe practices.

On the other hand, what would the punishment be? If the licensing fee is too low, it might be worthwhile for dishonest developers to obtain licenses just to break them. If the licensing fee is too high, no one would participate. And, of course, it’s unclear how to distinguish between intentionally malicious code and simply negligent code.

Netflix allows people to rate movies. I remember their rating system once upon a time including a “just okay” choice. Now, however, their options are:

• 1 star: Hated it
• 2 stars: Didn’t like it
• 3 stars: Liked it
• 4 stars: Really liked it
• 5 stars: Loved it

There is no room to indicate that a movie is mediocre, that you neither would demand your money back nor would care to watch the movie again. Is this another form of society’s belief that there’s something inherently wrong with being average? It’s like parents who can’t stand the thought of their kids getting C grades in high school.

So, as in high school, the end result is grade inflation. I see a movie that I think is “just okay”. I don’t dislike it, so I give it 3 stars. But then I see a movie that I actually do like, and now that the 3-star rating is cheapened, I have to give it 4 stars. Argh. (And do we really need to distinguish between “really liked it” and “loved it”? Is this really high school?)

Why can’t everyone have Bill McNeal’s attitude? (And yes, he did admit at the end of the episode that being adequate sucks, but it was fun while it lasted.)

Not coincidentally, it’s the time of the year when everyone at VMware writes performance evaluations.

Cool Firefox extensions I’ve recently discovered:

• Password Composer (video demo). Generates passwords based on a master password and on the domain name of a website, so you get a unique password for each site without having to remember each one. This is a really slick, simple, and effective solution to my complaint about e-commerce sites requiring accounts. Unlike other password generators, even though it generates strong passwords, they aren’t random, so you always can derive your passwords as needed, even if you don’t have the extension installed. (My friend Lior points out that a weaker, low-tech alternative is simply to incorporate the website name directly into your password, e.g. swordfish_gmail. If you do that, though, you should make it less obvious; perhaps use only every third letter of the site name.)
• Document Map (screenshot). Creates a nifty, navigatable outline of the current page’s headings in the sidebar. Works really well for wiki-generated pages, WordPress weblogs, and programming reference documents (such as w3.org’s HTML and CSS specs).
• Web Developer Extension. If I still were attempting to do web development, I’d be all over this. View tag and style hierarchies, make live CSS edits, and more.
• Keyconfig. Modify Firefox’s keybindings. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve accidentally hit backspace outside of a textbox and lost something I was in the middle of writing.

Another cool trick I discovered was how to run multiple Firefox profiles simultaneously. This can be useful if you want to have separate profiles for web development and for normal browsing and want different sets of extensions installed for each. It’s also useful if you want to try out new extensions and themes without screwing up your default profile. To do this on Windows, make a firefox.cmd script:

@echo off
setlocal
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1


:: Adjust the path to firefox.exe as appropriate.
start "" "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p %*
endlocal

Create a new profile by running the script with no arguments. Thereafter, you can load that profile by running firefox.cmd profile-name.

VMware took us all to see Revenge of the Sith on opening day last week. Woo! Overall I thought it was okay; it was way better than The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, and it could have been a lot worse.

Impressions (spoilers ahead):

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