I absolutely hate the word “blog”

Dear Bank of America Website: You should not default the radio button to having ‘Yes, remember this computer in the future’ selected. The default should either be nothing or NOT remembering it. SECURITY, PEOPLE.

Dear Google: You should not implement a feature that hides Labels that don’t have any useful content for me, but then have the hidden labels contain unread messages that then never get displayed. If you decide to implement such a ‘feature’ you should allow me to adjust settings to opt out of it.

Dear Shazam: Twitter integration only works if you allow users to modify the default tweet text, or if you make the default tweet text sufficiently un-douchey. But really you should just make it modifiable, come on.

Dear Chipotle iPhone App: You should tell me BEFORE I go to all the trouble of ordering via my iPhone that a) I cannot pay for my order via my iPhone at the location I have selected, and b) my order will never, ever, EVER get made before I arrive, thereby making iPhone ordering totally pointless.

TECHNOLOGY, YOU HAVE FAILED ME!

Courtesy of Gizmodo (via imgur via Digg).

I had a weird little flashback to childhood the other day, when I came across an odd button in the elevator at my doctor’s office. The button, instead of reading “STOP” or “Emergency”, read RUN STOP, kind of like the old Commodore 64 keyboards.  I don’t think I’ve seen that command (outside of the fake keyboards programmed into some Virtual Console games) in 20+ years.

I recently got a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, so I could type by dictation. (This decision arose partly from recurring tennis elbow that makes typing painful, and partly from my frustratingly long commutes from Redmond.) I thought I could dictate the text of the book I’m working on for my online dating consultation company while I was stuck in traffic, ya know? So I busted out the old Logitech headset-with-mic that I haven’t used since WoW raiding days of yore, and I gave it a whirl for the first time this morning.

OH MY GOD. This isn’t even close to language. It honestly reminds me of the linguistic disorder I learned about during college called Wernicke’s Aphasia, in which a certain area of the speech center of the brain is damaged in such a way that patients retain animated, fluid speech that is completely content-less and incoherent. A nickname of this syndrome is “word salad“.

Ladies and gentlemen, it seems that my voice dictation software needs a wee bit of training before it accurately captures my speech. You can’t make this shit up, people. Enjoy.

Good morning I’m currently working on Asian spies is a little bit reengineering however,.

I have no idea Latin American 1110. I know that I know he is. I know there’s a lot of know if you

everyone is getting done in.

In an online dating? Congratulations and that no one can and that if you give.

And I would leave you. If there is? Difficult mountain.

One.

Waiting for a late-night everything? No I’m not minimum. You and your women noted by you. The diagram that you doesn’t mean you’re writing your danger personality enlightened on a brand-new look at all of your photograph exhibit name marble on the lottery. There is no need to go back to year of of the mainstream not been any young you begin here know. Usually Baden-Württemberg you know, the one in which you genuinely enjoying yourself, that was your you and your winning I’m you ever do you mean, you are using your picture and the a lot of John you are right the beauty of digital cameras being a mean we you know when you zoom into the living room you.

We know he means it when you knew you were the one I didn’t know I you never really know that you do you mine. You need me to write it down when I heard 1. However, the remaining years of online meeting you in your you are you reasonable me know if you, or newly named online. You never really know if you get a airport, the little white lie already you may how do you know you are you. However he is the you, you you you you you you you you, you invited me. I leaned that you didn’t find the other person wonderful, were a worry anyway not right for you. You are the you are reading now start, to know if you are you are oh you are you. I normally, though, if you’re going to be easy,

And… scene.

It just so happened that I needed to update both my iTunes and my Adobe Reader this weekend.  I tend to be pretty lazy with these kinds of updates, so I just click YES and GO and MAKE IT HAPPEN as quickly as I can.

And when all was said and done and downloaded and installed, guess what I had?  Three brand-spanking-new desktop shortcuts… which I happen to hate. MOST good software developers nowadays include an installation screen that asks users whether they’d like shortcuts added anywhere, which was a welcome change when I first saw that trend.  But apparently, Apple and Adobe still think you might need a hand figuring out how to start your newly updated program.

In Apple’s case, it sort of makes sense, because they STILL haven’t figured out how to make iTunes use the old shortcut when an update is installed.  (And don’t get me started about how they constantly try to bundle the unrelated Safari in with your iTunes updates — I finally just gave up, cleared out the necessary hard drive space, and accepted the Safari download, just so I’d have one less box to uncheck during every iTunes update.  Just so you know, Apple, I’m boycotting your parasitic Safari install to teach you a lesson.

But the real kicker is Adobe’s shortcut.  Have you EVER, in your ENTIRE LIFE, used a SHORTCUT to Adobe Reader to open a .PDF document, instead of just OPENING THE DAMN DOCUMENT DIRECTLY?

Here’s hoping this Facebook email thread needs no real intro:

—–Original Message to Facebook—–
From: Virginia Culler
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: PRIVACY-BUGS: “Wallster” app — spam/worm

User id: xxxxxxxxx
Description of problem: I received a message from an alleged Facebook app called “Wallmaster”, informing me that a picture from my profile had been used on xxxxxxx.com.  This appears to be a very sketchy site.  The friend who allegedly sent me this message did not in fact send it (I have informed her of this fact), and the app does not appear to actually exist.  I’d like to forward you the email, but you don’t seem to up-front about providing an email address (understandably).  If you’d like to provide me with an address to which I could send the email in question, you’d probably be able to crack down on this a bit better.  As it stands, I can only paste it in:

2008/11/10 Facebook <wallmaster+m1mh~hdm@facebookmail.com>

Lauren wrote on your Wall:

“has anyone emailed you to let you know your faceboook pic was just featured on dinascript.com”

To see your Wall or to write on Lauren’s Wall, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/xxxxxxxxx

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

___
Want to control which emails you receive from Facebook? Go to:
http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Thanks and let me know if I can be of additional help!

–Virginia

Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3

_____

Hi Virginia,

As part of the new site design we have updated the “Friends” box to offer more customization options.  To edit these settings, simply navigate to your profile page and then click on the pencil icon in the upper right hand corner of the “Friends” box.

The Edit Box that appears will allow you to specify how many friends are displayed and which friends you always want to show.  If you want to ensure that friends from certain networks appear, you can select those networks in the “Include friends from” section.  Finally, checking the “Show Networks Section” will display a list of all of the networks your friends are in.

We hope that you enjoy these changes and welcome any feedback.  Let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Daisy
User Operations
Facebook

_____

Me again.  So what just happened?  Did you actually READ my message, “Daisy”?  Taking bets as to whether or not this is yet another Facebook virus — ten bucks says “Daisy” doesn’t really exist (unless it’s like a subtle nod to Kubrick, and Facebook is actually powered by HAL?).  Ah well, now I know all about the new Facebook (TM) customization options.  So there’s that!

I’ve wondered for the past couple of years why Google didn’t have a Web browser, and I guess now I know… they were working on it, just not talking about it. Chrome is their brand-spanking-new, just-released-yesterday browser that’s built by design for today’s Web, which is heavier on applications than when the Internet first came to power fruition.

Along with the release came a nifty little e-book, which is geared more towards other developers than to consumers. Despite this fact, it’s a fun read that gets into some of the more complex aspects of the project’s programming, while still being peppered with cute jokes and references.

The e-book was made public a bit too early, according to Google. However, they immediately jumped on board and made the comic public.

And how is the browser holding up? So far, sorta good… and sorta buggy. Not exactly a shock, the day after its release — but I was hoping to be blown away! So far I’ve experienced at least one crash that brought down the entire program, even though they intentionally designed thing such that crashes would remain isolated in the tab where the problem originated.

That, and performance has been VERY slow so far, compared to the semi-recent Firefox 3. Like painfully, get up and do something else while the tab loads slow. And this has been the case for a lot of lower-memory tabs that performed super-fast in other browsers. GAH!

Plus — and this is just a language nerd’s pet peeve — the text in almost all of the warning/message banners is cut off. Not the case for Grant, though. I’m running Windows XP Home Edition and I have a wide-screen laptop, and I don’t do any weird text magnification settings… and I don’t think I have *that* unusual of a set of circumstances. How come he gets complete, pretty-looking text and I get pre-beta-looking stuff? No fair!

Don’t get me wrong, though — Chrome is already set as my default browser, and I trust that it will only get better with time. (I did read the book, after all.) I just hope the speed thing gets resolved soon!

Not exactly the first time, but still.  This was pause-and-shoot worthy. Especially given that these days, the mere mention of Sarah Palin’s name is a standalone punchline. Even the women on the skincare and makeup forum I frequent had to take a stab.

Anyway. On a political note, Imaginary Readers, allow me to introduce you to Grant’s new blog. (Here’s hoping he doesn’t mind the Imaginary Plug.)

Grant will most likely write about politics far more frequently than I will. He will also write about video games and movie reviews and… aw hell, go click it. He’s funnier and wittier and taller than I am. Well, in many contexts/shoes, anyhow. So there you have it.

He’s also figuring out how to do a lot of custom CSS stuff from scratch, which makes me jealous and impressed. Who knows — maybe I can get him to work his newfound skills on this tired old blog. (Kidding, kidding — he’s the one who helped me co-design this hack-of-a-theme just a few months ago, so I could update to a non-WP 1.0 design.)

I feel like I’m in a Volkswagen commercial. I’m sandwiched between two other bus commuters who were previously both yammering loudly.

But they finally shut up and both started listening to music. And for the past two-ish tracks, we’ve all been subtly tapping our feet/fingers/neighbors in PERFECT TIME with each other.

Aww, Loud White Tapper just got off. Way to ruin the groove, buddy.

In other news, this post was brought to you by the new-ish WordPress iPhone app. Testing, one, two…

Grant’s video iPod recently suffered a broken headphone jack, but he was eight full months out of warranty coverage. Still, he took it to the Apple store to see what could be done, and they gave him a new one on the spot. Their reasoning? “It looks fresh out of the box [because you've always kept it in a case so it's not scratched up]“.

Yep, a brand-new iPod, no questions asked. I friggin’ love those guys.