!@#$%^ Comcast has changed their online TV listings again. And they were dumb enough to include a “Tell us what you think” survey button. No good can come of this.
Were really excited to share our new TV Listings with you and want to know what you think!
1. Do you think this version of TV Listings is better or worse than previous versions? There was no button for “This Sucks.” 2. What makes this version of TV Listings better or worse? You took away the easy navigation drop menu that allowed jumping to a different day or time. 3. What other improvements would you like to see in TV Listings? Dump this turkey. Reinstate the prior version. Or the one before that. Barring that, add a navigation drop menu that allows jumping to a different day or time.
No good can come of this: either they will tabulate the survey results for a year without telling us anything or they plan to ignore the results entirely. Either will annoy the crap out of us. And then they can change the interface for the worse again next year, telling us they responded to the survey.
Sure would please us (all) if we could deal with somebody other than !@#$%^ Comcast.
We had been yattering by cell about tire blowouts and how rare they are. 20 miles later, I encountered explosive decompression of the right rear tire on the (topless)(white) car. I had been driving along the Interstate near St Pauls, NC, minding my own business at about 75 mph, when I noticed a little wibble in the after end.
Hmmm, I thought; that feels like a tread separation.
Pulled off at the next exit, about a mile up the road. Observed a couple of goiter-like protuberances in the sidewall. Drove around the corner to a Mobil station.
The explosion came just past the pumps; the gas station attendant and people at the McDonald’s next door thought Armageddon.
Waited and waited and waited for AAA because I hoped they could flatbed me somewhere to get a replacement tahr (that’s the proper spelling and pronunciation). I really didn’t want to drive more than 1,000 miles on a rubber donut; I drove 1,000 miles on the (10% shorter) donut. That’s not good for the positraction rear, suspension, or the other tire but the Owner’s Manual says, “Just do it.”
I bought the tires in Wilmington on a trip to Florida six years but only 20,000 miles ago. Goodyear Eagles. New. From Sears Roebuck and Company who had a nice sale going at the time. A little Googling showed that Goodyear manufactured the Eagle T/R exclusively for Sears. Sears in Fayetteville had none in stock. Sears in Raleigh had none in stock. Sears in Wilmington had none in stock. See a pattern? Sears in Willow Grove had none in stock and the tire guy there said they hadn’t had them for years. Even Don the Fender Bender hoped he might have a used tire in my size and told me he’d “call back within the half” but he came up empty, too.
Chevrolet shipped the (topless)(white) car with Goodyear Eagle 235/55R16. That’s OK. Sears sold me Goodyear Eagle 235/55R16s knowing full well that was a discontinued size and they would be unable to replace it under warranty.
Turns out the shredded tire was still under warranty. (The full warranty is for the first 25% of tread wear with a pro-rated cost for the remaining 75% of treadwear. These tires had 8/32″ of tread left out of the original 10/32″.)
Sears didn’t want to, but the computer showed I had been a loyal customer since 2006 when I bought the tires so the manager made good on the warranty and offered me a Hankook tire. I held out for the Goodrich T/A, a tire I didn’t want less than I didn’t want the Hankook. None in stock, of course.
The shop guys jacked up both sides of the car and had started taking the left side wheel off when I blew the klaxons. It was the right side — the one with the miniature spare — they needed to change, I said. Turns out they had already mounted the (directional) Goodrich for the left side so the had to swap the existing Goodyear to the other.
So far, I don’t notice much difference in handling.
I met a lot of really nice people throughout this road trip. Jimmy Frank at the gas station and Billy Bob in his little Ford AAA van made sure I was happy and comfortable and on my way safely. Everybody looking for a replacement tire was sorry there weren’t any. And Corey at Sears absorbed my temper tantrum about orphaning my car with no tires and got me back on the road for free.
Wally World does not often impress me but they did on Friday.
The Internoodle is rife with estimates of Wal-Mart’s cost to We the Overtaxed People, protests over sprawl, criticism of their labor practices in this country and the labor conditions in supplier factories around the globe, complaints about unfair treatment specifically of the women who work in the stores and Supercenters, shoddy assembly of most consumer goods driven by the way the firm has reshaped manufacturing around the world, and far more.
Opponents of a planned Wal-Mart here in North Puffin have protested for almost two decades.
PBS reported, “Wal-Mart’s [Vermont] opponents argue that the state’s economy and culture would be damaged by the retailer’s presence. In California, opponents say the company has cost taxpayers millions by shortchanging its employees on healthcare.”
Every bit of the superstore v. Main Street argument is absolutely true.
Wal-Mart built their fourth Vermont store, a 150,000 square-foot box, in Williston in 1997. I shopped there on Friday.
So did a lot of other people from North Puffin because we don’t have a department store in this county.
We didnt need any other shopperamas a decade ago because we still had Ames back then but Ames closed all its retail stores here in 2002. Since then, pretty much everyone in Northwestern Vermont has had only a couple of choices for sox and underwear: buy them at the supermarket or the Dollar store or pay the I-89 tax to drive an hour to the big box center in the next county.
So I spent the $27.50 in gas to drive the truck to Williston on Friday because we don’t have a department store any closer than that. I also had to go to the Sears Auto Center but that’s a story I’ll tell later.
I saw a sign for Wal-Mart Interpreter Services in the pharmacy department. That impressed me and I said so to the pharmacy consultant.
“Surely you don’t have all those interpreters in the store,” I said, “and the tricorder/universal translator isn’t out of Google’s prototype lab yet.”
“Nope,” she told me. “All the customer has to do is point to their language on this card. We call a translator at the home office and Bob’s your uncle.”
The store can handle 12 different languages (13 if you count English) from Arabic to Vietnamese. A mom-and-pop operation can’t afford to keep a dozen U.N. translators on staff.
[Oooo, business opportunity!]
Regular readers know that I will not willingly deal with any company that requires me to “Press 2 for English” in part because immigrants to this great melting pot should help us learn their cultures while they assimilate ours and they need to learn English. Without that, America stops being a melting pot and becomes a nation of tiny, armed, walled, exclusive Arabtowns and Chinatowns and Mexicotowns and Viettowns. That said, Wal-Mart’s system to let them do business in their native tongues means they will do business outside their shell communities and that’s a good thing.
Humans rely on habit and muscle memory to accomplish every day tasks.
Ergonomists know every detail about how we interact with our tools. Frederick Winslow Taylor who earned a degree in mechanical engineering by correspondence at Stevens Institute of Technology, pioneered the “Scientific Management” method to find the optimum method for carrying out pretty much any job. During WWII, a young lieutenant named Alphonse Chapanis eliminated most “pilot error” by de-confusing airplane controls.
In about 1973, a fellow on my pit crew installed the shift linkage backwards on the race car. I went out and shifted from third gear to first when I thought I was grabbing fourth. Surprised pretty much everyone including the engine builder when that about stood the car on its nose.
“A good driver should be able to adjust,” he said.
No. A good driver should be able to concentrate on pointing the car, not on where the next gear might be this week.
Big consumer companies employ most of the (working) ergonomists in the universe. Heck, I’d bet a doughnut that two or three of them work for Microsoft. Why are these consumer companies so blind to the way we accomplish everyday tasks? Why do they want us to keep adjusting to different shift linkages?
Liz Arden mentioned this morning that Google has changed its Latitudinal Check In so she can’t just poke a button on her desktop any more.
Not a biggie in the grand scheme of things but it fits the age old question, why did they have to fix something that weren’t broke?
Google had trained us to use their service one way and now they want us to do it some other way for no reason other than that they can.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote three years ago that Windows 7’s changes “suggest … that Microsoft is putting design ahead of usability.” Ya think? Apple afficionados say the same thing about the company Mr. Jobs built on the perfect User Interface. I Googled “Lion annoyances” and came up with about 297,000 results which is far fewer than the 1,540,000 results I found for “Windows 7 annoyances.” An entire industry has had to spring up to publish quick cures and workarounds for the two most “popular” computer operating systems.
Lion changed the three finger salute of Snow Leopard to two fingers, and reserved the three finger gesture for Mission Control. In Windows 7, you can’t tell which programs are actually running on the Taskbar and which are just links since some, like Internet Exploder, add an identical button for every open window and some, like WordPerfect and Dreamweaver, simply change the look of the one button so you know what to push. Microsoft also moved all the files around in Windows 7 so “My Documents” is now just another broken link and your IT department can’t find anything without retraining.
Microsoft and Apple had trained us to use our computers one way and now they want us to do it some other way for no reason other than that they can.
And who ever heard of pushing “START” to turn off the engine.
Oh. That’s how keyless cars work now, too.
Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
NPR jumped on that bandwagon last week when Science Friday changed its website. “Redesigned with you in mind” is its new banner.
You maybe, but not me. It is now totally buggered.
I don’t subscribe to many podcasts because I don’t necessarily listen to every show and have enough clutter on both my hard drive and my broadband connection to want it filled with stuff I don’t use. SciFri trained me to go to their site to download the segments I want to hear each week. It was fast. It was accurate. It was scientific.
SciFri had trained us to listen one way and now they want us to do it some other way for no reason other than that they can.
Like host Ira Flatow’s approach to Global Warming, the site is no longer fast, nor accurate, nor scientific. In fact, of the two segments I grabbed last week, one had pieces of three with one piece repeated and the other was screwy. [ed. note: see the update from NPR in the Comments section below.]
Airheads.
I can fix this by teaching the companies just one word but I dont work cheap.
