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Printer Voice Command April Fools Prank

01 Apr

There’s a popular prank floating around online that is a printer “voice command” page. Presumably coworkers can be tricked into talking to their office copier in lieu of pressing buttons.

I plan on putting this to the test today, and for those who wish to join me, I am including a Word (DOC) version of my own voice command page. This one is designed for a Canon copier, and you can make your own adjustments.

Just be sure to find an inactive button to replace the “ID” on your keypad if you don’t have one, and it helps to print it in color. Download the Printer Voice Command April Fools Prank in Microsoft Word [DOC] or [DOCX] format and give it a try!

 
 

Firefix 4 Released, Sans CTRL+E Shortcut

24 Mar

PCWorld.com had a nice article on the new Firefox 4 today that talks about some of its features and the benefits of using Firefox over Internet Explorer.

One thing that really struck me was the rate at which users upgraded to Firefix 4. Microsoft was bragging not too long ago about its IE9 download figures for the first 24 hours of its release, which Firefox proceeded to destroy in about a quarter of that time.

I am also amused by the steady decline of IE’s market share given Microsoft’s typical greediness and business practices. Don’t get me wrong: of course Microsoft is a for-profit organization whose ultimate responsibility is earning a profit for its shareholders. But I’ve been rubbed the wrong way one too many times by things like broken security tools, monopolistic practices, and modified file extensions. (Remember when Word document extensions were only three letters?)

So to see IE now holding less than 50% market share makes me a little bit happy. Not only because I like seeing Microsoft actually have to try, but also because I know Firefox is a far superior product. This statistic means that web users overall are having a better and safer browsing experience.

I haven’t been using Firefox 4 long enough to comment on its overall stability, but one thing I did immediately notice was the removal of my CTRL+E search shortcut. I don’t use a mouse and have grown accustomed to this as an alternative method of accessing my search bar. Luckily an easy fix can be found in the Change Search Shortcut extension. Very easy to install and does the trick wonderfully.

I’ll write more on the Firefox 4 features later, but for now, please support the cause! If you are tired of slow webpages, frequent crashes, and constant security glitches, make the change to Firefox 4 today. Firefox is compatible with all your favorite websites and will copy all your favorites and personal settings right in from Internet Explorer. Give it a shot.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/change-search-shortcut/
 

GoDaddy Uptime Guarantee Fail.

22 Mar

These days it seems like everyone wants to “guarantee” something. It’s easy to do, instills confidence in customers, and if properly executed, doesn’t leave you on the hook if you fall back on your word.

Before I proceed, let me be clear that I am not knocking GoDaddy as a company: I think they’re great most of the time. But the uptime guarantee is, well, not very comforting.

For starters, GoDaddy provides for the following recourse:

If Go Daddy fails to maintain this level of service availability, You may contact Go Daddy and request a credit of 5% of Your monthly hosting fee from Go Daddy for that month. The credit may be used only for the purchase of further products and services from Go Daddy, and is exclusive of any applicable taxes.

Again, to be clear, they are not offering a 5% credit. They are offering you the opportunity to contact them to request a 5% credit. So what their guarantee boils down to is “we promise to keep your website up 99.9% of the time, and if we fail, we’ll let you contact us!” If they grant your request, you may be entitled to a 5% credit of your hosting fee. For the vast majority of GoDaddy customers who are on hosting plans that cost around $7/month, you’d be entitled to about $0.35, also known as the tax on a $5-footlong at Subway.

But GoDaddy doesn’t stop at simply offering a worthless guarantee: they also make it nearly impossible to cash in on. The following types of interruptions are excluded from coverage:

1) Anything caused by the customer (i.e. bad scripting), or any FTP/email outages that don’t affect front-end use. These are pretty reasonable.

2) Outages caused by scheduled maintenance or repairs that GoDaddy is making to their servers… kind of makes sense, though I’d really prefer to suffer downtime due to scheduled outages.

3) “Outages related to the reliability of certain programming environments,” or in other words, well I have no idea what they are talking about.

4) “Causes beyond the control of Go Daddy or that are not reasonably foreseeable by Go Daddy.” – In other words, if all else fails, it’s okay as long as GoDaddy didn’t see it coming.

So to recap, IF your website is not online 99.9% of the time, you are guaranteed permission to contact GoDaddy to ask for a 5% refund of one month’s hosting fee (aka $0.35). IF it wasn’t your fault, and IF it wasn’t because they blame something else for being unreliable, and IF it wasn’t because they were fixing something, and IF it wasn’t unforeseeable (aka if they knew an outage was coming but didn’t stop it), then MAYBE they’ll grant your request.

To top it all off, they conclude this section of their legal paperwork with a notice that “Total Service Uptime shall be solely determined by Go Daddy”. So in other words, good luck.

 

CBS Self-Copyright, Rape in the Military, South Dakota Fetus Protection

15 Feb

I found a few interesting pieces to share from Reddit.com today…

Yahoo! News: Rape in the US Military: Filmed getting gang raped, severe bruising, but no investigation because commander says she “did not act like a rape victim” and “did not struggle enough”

Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress: IRONY ALERT: South Dakota moves to legalize killing abortion providers, would make preventing harm to a fetus a “justifiable homicide”

The Guardian: The defector who convinced the White House that Iraq had a secret biological weapons programme has admitted for the first time that he lied about his story then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war.

pezdev: CBS files a copyright claim against themselves o_O (Note: this is not literally what happened: they more likely filed a claim against an infringing video that was hosted elsewhere. However, the fact that someone else at CBS embedded that same video on a CBS website, and in doing so acknowledging its presence and usefulness, is what I found interesting.)

Sometimes people make me wonder.

 
 

Sprint: New Smartphone Fee, No Love for the Pre

13 Feb

SprintI walked into a Sprint store yesterday intending to use my upgrade to get the new Samsung Epic and sign onto a new 2-year contract with Sprint. Instead of leaving with a new phone, I left ready to change carriers.

I’ve been a Sprint customer for close to a decade and it has been quite a roller coaster. I rocked a Samsung SPH-N200, my very first phone, with pride back in 2001. I’ve since seen some of the worst and best customer service imaginable: one employee told me he “didn’t care” whether I was a customer or not, and others have gone to great lengths to keep me as one.

Right now Sprint seems to be in a bit of a lull and I cannot help but wonder how they are going to attract new customers in the coming months. The iPhone is still gaining market share, and yet Sprint is not carrying it. The Palm Pre has gained a loyal following of webOS users, and yet Sprint has announced no plans for carrying the Palm Pre 2, or even making a webOS 2.0 upgrade available for original Pre users.

In fact, the only thing Sprint has succeeded in doing is stringing Palm users along while we were told that a webOS upgrade would be forthcoming. Up until as recently as right now, Sprint has maintained that this would be available during the first quarter of 2011. However, a new update on the Palm website states:

Your device is not able to support the new features of webOS 2.

Therefore, your device will not receive a webOS 2 update. The latest software version for your device is webOS 1.4.5.

We are working on alternative plans with Sprint and will be sharing details in the coming weeks. Please come back to palm.com/webos-info to find out more

Your current device:

Palm Pre on Sprint.

So what I’m basically hearing is we are out of luck. Fine, I’m willing to ditch webOS. Occasionally Sprint has a great release of another product, and I thought the Samsung Epic might be worth my while. I went in for an upgrade.

Instead of happily signing me up for another 2-year contract and letting me pay $150 on top of that for a new phone, the CSR informed me that an additional $10/month fee had been enacted on all smartphones. Assuming I want to upgrade from the Pre, my costs of staying with Sprint are now as follows:

  1. The loss of choice that comes with a 2-year service agreement.
  2. Either $150 or $199 for the purchase of the new phone.
  3. Assuming a 2-year lifecycle, an additional $240 to cover the new “premium data” fee on top of my smartphone plan. (Nevermind the fact that I don’t use very much data at all).

So in short, assuming Sprint’s $70/month plan, about $10/month in taxes, and now factoring in the phone and fee, being a Sprint customer for the next two years will cost me about $1,300/year.

I have yet to run a complete cost analysis on the other carriers, but I would guess that Sprint is losing out on its price competitiveness. The only excuse for their neglect of webOS users would be if they maintained low prices across the board, but given the circumstances I do not understand what they are doing.

Also See: Sprint’s New Smartphone Fee — How ‘Bout a Little Honesty?

 

Is Bing Copying Google Results?

01 Feb

BingI found a fascinating article on Reddit this afternoon about Bing copying Google’s search results. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised to see this: I’m still not a big Microsoft fan and I don’t believe they can build a better algorithm than Google. However, to see them caught in such a blatant act of copyism is surprising.

How can Microsoft go around trumpeting Bing as being different from or in any way superior to Google when it is literally copying exact results from them?

Bing has, in my experience, seriously lagged behind both Google and Yahoo. I don’t know a lot about the hardware and systems behind search indexing, but I do know that Bing is several weeks behind on some of my sites compared to Google and I would never rely on it to provide current information.

The fact that they blatantly copy results from Google only prove that they cannot compete: and Microsoft knows it.

 
 

Get Back Expired Miles

30 Jan

American Airlines AAdvantageAmerican Airlines has a new program that lets you get back miles you’ve lost due to expiration (18 months of inactivity). This is not published but information is available on some of the various frequent flyer internet forums as well as from American Airlines themselves if you ask really nicely.

It is the AAdvantage Re-Engagement program.

The Wiki on FlyerGuide.com has more information and is where I’ve borrowed this information from, but the same was sent to me by an American Airlines staff member in PDF format.

  • To restore up to 50,000 miles:
    1. Subscribe to AAdvantage eSummary and AAdvantage Promotions emails for the duration of the challenge (minimum 3 months)
    2. Complete at least one of the following:
      - Become a Citi AAdvantage credit card holder and earn at least 750 base miles using the card
      - Earn at least 5,000 miles using the products and/or services of at least 3 AAdvantage partners
      - Purchase and fly one round-trip ticket on AA of at least 750 miles each way
  • Call AAdvantage Customer Service upon completion of these requirements to validate activity and restore miles

I don’t think this is particularly difficult to do and will likely use the Citi card or book a round trip in the near future to earn back my expired miles.

Check out the link above to visit FlyerGuide.com and learn more about methods for earning back even more miles.

And lastly, a big kudos to American Airlines for making these options available. As I told a Customer Service Manager, you cannot take away from your customer loyalty program without also taking away from your customer loyalty. The American Airlines Re-Engagement Program is a definite step in the right direction.

 
 

High CPU usage? Firefix won’t start? Check your antivirus.

26 Jan

I’ve seen many cases of wasted time, money, and resources due to bloated antivirus software. One of the biggest culprits has been McAfee Antivirus, which embeds itself in several locations on the computer making itself virtually impossible to remove fully (even using the tools provided by McAfee).

During my troubleshooting days, the single most frequent request I had was to optimize office computers and remove unnecessary software. One company told me they’d just spent a substantial amount on McAfee licenses, paid someone to install it on 25 computers, lost hours of productivity from employees whose systems it had ground to a halt, and finally had no choic ebut to pay me to get rid of it. Quite a waste.

Today I experienced something similar with Symantec Antivirus. My computer had been doing strange things, locking up, “System” CPU usage is spiking near 100%, and Firefox would not load at all. I spent two hours going through everything I could think of before I finally disabed Symantec Antivirus. This, of course, fixed everything.

Once more, I want to remind everyone that there are very good antivirus products out there that are free for home users and very good alternatives to paid software.

  • Microsoft Security Essentials
  • AVira
  • AVG
  • Avast

On the MSE I am usually the last person to recommend a Microsoft product, but they’ve done a good job here. From what I’ve read it has a pretty good detection rate. AVira is often recommended for low-performance PCs that are more memory sensitive. But I’ve used all four of these with good results.

 
 

At least my GPS has a sense of humor…

20 Jan

 
 

Expedia Travel Coupons: “Marketing” or “Account Updates?” You Decide, FTC.

12 Jan

I really dislike disingenuous marketers and companies who “breach” my personal space. I take pride in my customized email filters and my SlotGuard subscription (to stop junk mail on the postal side). Sometimes companies get through because I trust when I shouldn’t.

Expedia.com was a shining example of this today with their most recent email: “Account Update: We deposited your $200 travel coupon.” Since I have already opted out of Expedia marketing emails and the “Please SPAM Me!” box in my Expedia account is definitely unchecked, I assumed what most reasonable individuals would: that “Account Update” means “Account Update.”

I book business trips regularly with Expedia, so it’s not unrealistic to assume they might be doing something special to thank me for my business. “That’s nice,” I thought.

Then I opened it.

Dear Expedia Customer,

We just dropped a Holiday Bonus coupon into your account. You’ll save $200 on any roundtrip package that includes a 5+ night hotel stay. Redeem your coupon for travel by March 31; travel by April 30, 2011.

It’s easy to redeem your travel coupon:

* Sign in to your Expedia Account
* Choose a 5+ night vacation package*
* On the Vacation Package Billing and Delivery page, click “I have a coupon”
* Select “apply and reprice”

Plan your next vacation on Expedia

Sincerely,
Expedia Travel Team

The deal itself isn’t so bad: what bothers me here is what I perceive to be clear deception on the part of Expedia. First of all, the holidays are over, decorations are down, and the holiday-promotions ship has sailed. We are well into the sick-of-this-and-waiting-for-Spring part of the season.

Secondly, I believe this is at its core a marketing email, not an account update, and exactly the type of thing federal legislation has sought to prevent.

Title 15 Chapter 103 ยง7704 (a)(2): It is unlawful for any person to initiate the transmission to a protected computer of a commercial electronic mail message if such person has actual knowledge, or knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances, that a subject heading of the message would be likely to mislead a recipient, acting reasonably under the circumstances, about a material fact regarding the contents or subject matter of the message (consistent with the criteria used in enforcement of section 45 of this title).

I reasonably thought this message was an update about my account, and receiving a real $200 credit/gift might be consistent with that. Being told about a special promotion is, to me, not an account update. Expedia would likely argue that having a new coupon “added to my account” qualifies as an update on which they should keep me apprised. By extension, this would also mean that they could have any special promotion “applied to my account” at any time and consider it an account update. If this is their justification then we will definitely have to agree to disagree.

At the worst, their interpretation is incorrect and they are in violation of federal SPAM legislation. Or more likely, since I’m sure their lawyers are no fools, they are simply finding new ways to disrespect customers’ wishes by exploiting legal loopholes.

To conclude, I will again point back to the special little box in my Expedia preferences that reads: “Please send me Expedia emails with travel deals, special offers, and other information.” It is clearly unchecked, which should be a good indication to Expedia that I don’t want to hear from them with “travel deals,” “special offers,” or “other information.”

So, basically, leave me alone.

Apparently the only way to accomplish this is to cancel my Expedia account, which I will get to later in the week. I have no particular loyalty to them and am quite confident that any of the other Google results for “travel deals” could provide similar service with a little less talk.