weblog
Fail
Strange Sounds
Aug 25th
Heard a couple strange and disturbing sounds today, while at the office.
1. The sound of a typewriter. In the modern business age, especially in an IT group, who still uses a typewriter? I should’ve tracked it down to find out.
2. The sound of someone typing on their laptop keyboard, while in a bathroom stall. Really?
That is all.
iOS 4.0.2 Still Buggy
Aug 24th
While iOS4 is pretty nice, there are a few somewhat minor/buggy things that bother me.
- Exhibit A: see picture. Listening to music via iPod app, rotate horizontal and back vertical. The top status bar stays as if it was horizontal, while the rest of the app switches back to vertical mode. Sort of random, doesn’t happen all the time.
- The second gripe I have is also with orientation and the accelerometer. While watching a video/podcast in horizontal mode and the video ends, the iPhone doesn’t “know” that the iPhone is horizontal anymore. The video plays as if it was vertical. You have to physically move the iPhone back vertical and back to get the video to recognize it’s proper state.
- The last thing is signal strength indicator. The phone will display a couple bars of 3G, then out of the blue, it will switch to Edge or just say No Service. A quick flip in and out of Airplane mode puts the phone back to 3G again. It’s pretty random, but annoying.
Other than those things, I’m pretty happy with iOS4.0.2.
Exhibit A
Car Troubles
May 17th
As I sit here in this tiny little car shop in Lake Geneva, WI, staring into my iPhone and listening to a local radio station on a “boom box” sitting atop a Little Debbie Snack Cake rack filled with “pixy stix” and stale “blow pops”, I find myself pondering a few questions.
Before I get to the questions, here’s the situation.
Last week, the water pump in our VW Jetta broke and since we were near a local shop where we know the mechanic, we pulled in and asked advice. He told us to take the car down the street to this other shop that specializes in foreign cars.
We did and they couldn’t look at it until the next day, which was Saturday.
Remember that we sold our other car last month, so we’re a one car family now.
Saturday comes around and we’re told that the car won’t be fixed until late Monday. OK, so, shit. We make a few calls and my mom was gracious enough to let us use her only car for the weekend.
Monday comes around and we call the shop to get a status on the car. Jen asks how it’s going and gets a reply of “(big sigh), it’s going, car is not going to be ready until 5pm, but call before you come.”. We call at 4:45pm and were told that it wouldn’t be ready until 6:00pm, but call before you come. We called at 5:30pm and they said to be here before 6:00pm and it should be ready.
Jen’s dad drove me down to the shop, which is only about 4 miles from our house. The mechanic shows me the water pump that was in the car and how it was broken. Cool.
Fast forward to today, Monday of the following week. I drive the car into Milwaukee to go to work and don’t notice anything out of the ordinary. I leave work and as I’m driving out of the parking lot, the “holy shit, you’re either out of coolant or your car is way too damn hot” light came on. I say WTF to myself and proceed to the nearest gas station to see what was going on. As I look under the hood I see that the coolant is indeed empty. I look under the cat and see a nice little drip of something coming out of the car. It feels slick and appears to be coolant. Awesome.
I venture into the gas station to buy some coolant and wouldn’t you know it, they are all out. Awesome.
It just so happened that I was less than a half mile from a large VW dealership. I drive the car over to the dealership and pull into their garage bay. I explain my situation and they happily fill the coolant for me and since my plan was to get the car back to Lake Geneva to the car place that did the work last week, I was on my way.
Driving approximate 55 miles from Glendale to Lake Geneva not knowing if your car is going to overheat is kind of stressful. Every little noise I heard I was thinking that the car was doing something that it wasn’t supposed to, but, the drive back went fine, no overheating.
I pulled into the local shop and explain the situation. The owner guy takes my keys and I sign some paper saying he could work on the car and he looks up and says “OK, we’ll look and let you know what we find.”.
I look at him and reply “this is our only car and I am on foot now, I’ll be hanging around the shop.”, which brings me back to the questions I’m now pondering.
1. When someone comes into your establishment with car problems, is it normal to assume they came there with alternative transportation? I relate this to computers, because it’s easier for me understand… If someone drops their computer off to be fixed, would the tech say “OK, we’ll email you when the computer is fixed.”? I suppose the answer depends on the person. Just sort of got under my skin when he assumed I was just dropping and taking off.
2. Are local mechanics worth their weight compared to a dealership? I’ve had a lot of work done on cars over the years and it’s been my experience that I’ve had to return to the local shops more often than to the dealership to have them redo or rework the previous work.
3. Would anyone really purchase candy from a place like this? I mean, a gas station / car shop type place isn’t known for cleanliness. Nasty.
The mechanic / owner came out to talk to me. He indicated that there wasn’t a leak and that the coolant container was keeping pressure normally. We walked into the garage and he raised the car up on the hydraulic lifts so I could show him where the leak was. I show him the spot where the coolant was dripping out and he shows me how it is dry and no longer leaking.
He provided a couple thoughts about what could’ve caused the leak or spillage of coolant. One idea was some dirt under a seal that must’ve cleared itself out. Another was a ‘burp’ of the radiator that would cause coolant to spill out.
I’m not a mechanic, but I can tell when someone is telling me something he doesn’t really believe himself. We’ll see whether or not the issue was indeed nothing, hopefully it turns out to be. Its horrible to think that the car could overheat with Jen and the kids in the car.
For now, we’re keeping an eye on any drips or leaks. Stay safe in your cars…
Phallic Ice Cream Cone
May 16th
Excuse me? Don’t really have much else to say, other than this is how it looked directly out of the package… Umm…
Tylenol & Motrin Recall
May 3rd
In 2009, children’s Tylenol and Motrin were recalled for various reasons. In 2010, children’s Tylenol and Motrin were recalled for various reasons. Each year, we seem to have to cleanse our cabinets of medications for the kids.
Children’s Motrin and Tylenol isn’t cheap, at around $6 to $7 each, this cleansing of products sets us back around $20 per recall.
During the 2009 recall, we didn’t pursue reimbursement. During this latest recall, we have three products being recalled, each of them a different product, each of them at varying levels of usage and have submitted for reimbursement of each.
- Children’s Motrin, new in the box, just bought it.
- Children’s Tylenol, half gone, been using it for a while
- Concentrated Motrin Infant Drops, just about gone, had it for the longest out of the three.
Since we’ve administered two of these products to our kids, we’re obviously concerned about what’s really wrong with them. The McNeil Product Recall website and the Tylenol.com website both say this is a voluntary and not on the basis of adverse medical events, which I take to mean that there haven’t been enough sick kids reported.
Here’s the quote from the websites:
McNeil Consumer Healthcare is initiating this voluntary recall because some of these products may not meet required quality standards. This recall is not being undertaken on the basis of adverse medical events.
However, as a precautionary measure, parents and caregivers should not administer these products to their children.
I really hope that whatever is wrong with these medications, isn’t serious enough to harm any child.
On a side (and more geeky) note, I find it funny that Tylenol.com and McNeilProductRecall.com both have the Netscape icon as their ‘favicon’.
Bottom line: Please check your medicines and get rid of anything included in the recall.
funny keyword ad
Mar 28th
I use the Internet to diagnose pretty much anything that comes to mind these days. Recently, I was searching for something related to my toddler’s hands and saw this gem of an ad on Google.
Cheap Toddler Hands
Thanks Google / NexTag, I was indeed looking to purchase cheap toddler hands. 
Tanning at a health food store
Dec 19th
There’s a health food store in Lake Geneva that, in my opinion, is sending a mixed message about being healthy.
Last I looked, artificial tanning wasn’t exactly the best for your health. Too funny…
Dirty Air in Lake Geneva?
Nov 20th
The weather channel has an air quality alert out… This is quite a comment. :) ”A STAGNANT AND INCREASINGLY DIRTY AIR MASS WILL INTENSIFY”
What the hoof?
Incase Power Slider – Fail
Oct 11th
Yesterday, I purchased the Incase power slider for my iPhone 3G S. It boasts that it will double your iPhone battery life while protecting it with it’s case. Since battery life is important to me and I find my self constantly running out of battery (usually around 2pm each day), I was excited to get my hands on this. Even posted a tweet about it.
The initial reviews I read indicated that it was worthy of purchase at the right price. Best Buy had it for $47, which I thought was a great deal (since it was originally priced at $99). The packaging indicated iPhone 3G, but not specifically the iPhone 3G S. I asked a worker in the mobile phone department if it would work OK in the 3G S and she indicated “yes, I use it on my iPhone 3G S every day.”. Sold.
The instructions say to fully charge the device before putting your iPhone in it. So, like a good person who just RTFM’d, I plugged it in and let it sit for a couple hours until it was fully charged. What happened next was what surprised me…
I inserted the iPhone into the bottom part of the shell (per instructions), then put the top part of the shell on. The battery on the iPhone did indeed show that it was charging, which is what the user manual said it would do. Then, without warning, my 5 bars of 3G signal, disappeared and went to No Service. I was shocked, so I power cycled the iPhone, just incase it needed to officially recognize the new battery device. Still, No Service.
I took it out and put it back in, probably about a dozen or so times. Each time, the No Service indicator came up about 5 seconds after using the Incase Power Slider.
I googled some more and found other reports of people having the exact same issue. A few people mentioned that Incase retired that model of product because of issues, but I couldn’t find anything to support that claim. Since I really need my phone, I decided to return the Incase Power Slider to Best Buy and find something different.
I ended up with the Invisible Shield. So far so good with the Invisible Shield, but that’s a different post…
Summary: Incase Power Slider = Fail (in my humble opinion)
Firefox Opens Behind Applications in Snow Leopard
Sep 16th
Ever since the upgrade to Snow Leopard, Firefox started to open behind other applications. It launches from the dock normally and is the active application in the top menu bar, it’s just behind everything else. You can click the icon again or command-tab to bring Firefox to the front, but I must say, it is quite an annoyance.
A google search revealed a mozilla support thread reporting the same thing, but at the time of this update, no replies with any details on how to fix it. See this URL.
I’ve switched my default browser back to Safari now, until a time when Firefox opens the way it should.