RHFtech Help Desk (and more)

lastpass was recently recommended to my by Ed Bott as a multiplatform password manager. I like lastpass a lot. It does exactly what I wanted and needed and it is free. They have a product LastPass Premium which adds functionality—BlackBerry app and YubiKey multi-factor authentication—that appeals to me. The price is $12 per year for the service and an additional fee for the YubiKey of between $30-$40, depending upon delivery method. I was all set to buy both when I was confronted with a PayPal page.

In the past when I went to a merchant’s PayPal page there was an option to pay with my credit card and not have to login to PayPal. Not this time. This time I had to login to PayPal to make the transaction. They left me no choice since I had a PayPal account. I tried to use a different email address but that didn’t work because PayPal knew my credit card number. Although I could have used a different card I was not interested.

So I logged in. Now PayPal wanted to debit my checking account and offered no option that I could see to use my credit card.

I refuse to allow PayPal to debit my checking account. They are unregulated and, in my opinion, untrustworthy. I don’t let any business debit my account. I prefer to initiate the transaction to retain control over the account. I prefer to use my credit cards. But this time I could not.

Enough of this aggravation! I cancelled my PayPal account. I wrote lastpass.com an email explaining that PayPal debiting my checking account was unacceptable to me and that I was unlikely to buy their premium product or to recommend it since PayPal had become an impediment.

Robert B. of lastpass responded quite quickly suggesting that I could do what I wanted to do with a link to buy by credit card on the PayPal page. Sorry, Robert, that link was not available to me as long as I had a PayPal account.

Yes, I cancelled my PayPal account after this aggravation. Now I am too frustrated to go forward with the LastPass Premium transaction. This is too hard. I wanted something secure and simple. I wanted it on my terms. I did not get that.

When I need to find a graphic image—photo, picture, or drawing— I used to use Google’s Images search. However, there is an alternative interface, Google Image Ripper, that improves on Google.

Google Image Ripper (GIR) saves steps. GIR serves up the images. Google Images search serves up thumbnails with links to the webpages and maybe the image.

The nsfw (not suitable for work) check box on GIR is a content filter. If checked, images that might make you blush or offend you are displayed.

Below are screen shots of my search for small TiVo images on both sites.

Many people equate price with quality. Their mental equation must be something like, “higher price = better product.” I have been a skeptic about this equation for as long as I can remember.

A recent Consumerist.com post Do Coat Hangers Sound as Good as Monster Cables? highlighted how absurd this calculus is. An audiophile hooked up a blind test comparing Monster cables to straightened coat hangers used as speaker cables.

The audiophile subjects could not tell the difference.

Unbent clothes hangers performed just as well as expensive Monster products. If you scavenge your closet you will lose nothing in the sound reproduction but you will save a bundle of money.

Speaker wire transmits analog signals, so it may be possible that in some configurations upper end products matter in faithfully transmitting the signal.

Most video and audio signals transmitted between electronic components (not speakers) are digital signals. Either the bit, a 1 or 0, is decoded or it is not. This means that there is no benefit to you in paying for premium digital cables. Most retail outlets sell HDMI cables that cost a lot. Don’t fall for this. Digital cables do not have to be expensive.

Today, a 6-ft gold plated HDMI cable costs $8.37 at MonoPrice.com and a similar product at BestBuy.com costs $39.99.

Microsoft is running new video ads, Lauren is one,  that highlight the affordability of Windows computers compared to Macs. The ad is quite good, the best that Microsoft has done in recent memory.

Mac enthusiasts are likely to counter that they get value for the extra expense—simplicity of use, freedom from malware, good support. Those are good points.

The freedom from malware is likely to disappear in the future, perhaps the near future. Macs are not immune from malicious software. They are far less secure than Windows machines. They have avoided being the targets of attacks in the past primarily due to low sales. Today they are a far more tempting target to bad guys because they represent a significant, minority share of the US computer market and they are all unprotected.

Simplicity of use is a relative thing. I often encounter Mac users who do not understand that closing a window on a Mac usually does not close the application. You have to quit the application to remove it from memory. Consequently, they experience mysterious slowdowns due to the fact that they are unknowingly running a lot of different memory intensive applications. There are other UI/UX issues I see with Macs. They are different than Windows issues but they do exist.

Windows 7 should also give lie to some of the current Mac advantages in simplicity of use and cool design. I also believe that Windows 7 will reduce the need for support in networking and sharing, two very confusing features in Windows Vista and XP. Furthermore, the shift to more-and-more browser based computing relieves both Apple and Microsoft of some of the traditional need for support.

Microsoft may be on to something here.

You hit the Send button but did your email provider really get the message and send it? I always bcc myself (with a different personal email address) to see. If I get the message in my other email account, I can be assured it was sent.

If the rest of the world treated me this way I would feel like royalty.

My post of March 21, 2009, Another angry Cablevision customer, recounts my frustrating and anger inducing experience talking with the billing department about what happened after the technical department fixed a problem with my service.

Yesterday I was called by Cablevision’s Andrea W., a polite, kind lady, who wanted to fix this issue. She listened to my side of the event and was the first person to understand that:

1. I did understand what Cablevision’s “revised” bills were about.
2. From my point of view, Cablevision had surprised me with a very large unannounced set of new bills, forever accelerated what I owed them by two weeks, and that the lack of sympathy and concern on the part of the “robotic” agents in the billing department was off-putting, frustrating and anger inducing. After all, Cablevision had caused the problem and fixed it by screwing up my account.

Additionally, another employee, Jim M., has been following me on Twitter and sending me private posts to see if this situation can be resolved. It is fantastic that a multi-billion dollar company would reach out to resolve my complaint this way.

I am usually an advocate of Cablevision’s services. They usually offer bleeding edge services, top-notch technical support, and reasonable pricing, especially compared to the alternatives. My experience with the billing department made me rethink my unpaid evangelism.

On Tuesday night, at my CTPC presentation on Social Networking for the 21st Century: Facebook and Twitter, one of the members who had moved out of the Cablevision territory related his unhappy experiences with Comcast and AT&T’s Uverse.

My typical reply to people who complain to me about Cablevision is that they could experience really bad service if they had AT&T, Charter, Comcast, or Time Warner instead. Andrea W. knows. She works for Cablevision but lives in a Time Warner location.

I am gratified and impressed that Cablevision respected and responded to my concerns. Sometimes large corporations get it right. This is one of those times.

Cablevision is my cable company. They provide me with three services—cable TV, Internet service and telephony, respectively Optimum IO TV, Optimum Online, and Optimum Voice. I was a happy customer, even a fan of Cablevision. They have top-notch, often bleeding edge technology and good technical support. What’s not for a geek like me to like—their billing department!

All the good will they built up over more than twenty years was extinguished by my encounter with their billing department today.

About a month ago I wanted to set up a web server using the hosting service that is included with my premium high-speed broadband Internet service they call Boost. I tried to access the web hosting to no avail. I spoke with three different technical support people over a two week period who all tried their best to help. Finally, Erik hit upon the idea of fixing the problem by rebuilding the account in their database, which he did and it worked, I think. You see, I started my server project when I had a window of available time. Since it took almost two weeks to fix the problem the window closed and I have not had the opportunity to set up the service.

Today I received two bills from Cablevision. I had paid the most recent bill on March 18, 2009 so this was a surprise. Adding further to my surprise was learning that Erik had precipitated a change in my account number and that Cablevision was now billing me for a stub period on the old account and about 40 days on the new account. They had also changed my billing cycle, moving it up from the end of the month to the middle. In effect, Cablevision was asking me to loan them about $100 for a month or more because of the way they fixed the web hosting problem.

I tried to explain this to five customer service representatives in the billing department. Their consistent response was that the billing was correct and they could do nothing to adjust it. They were indifferent to the fact that Cablevision had neither notified me that this would occur, nor gotten my approval. They did not dispute the events. They just were not going to fix this.

I have been a customer of theirs since 1987. I have always paid my bills on time, usually early. This means nothing. Their billing department acts like a bully and there is little I can do but add my voice to all other angry Cablevision customers.

The engineers at Gmail are continually tweaking Gmail, adding new features. These features are nice additions, but I wonder if they aren’t muddying the application with too many features.

Undo Send, the latest change, adds the ability to stop a message from being sent after you click on the Send button. The undo capability lasts a few seconds and is not user-editable.  I have a similar feature enabled in Microsoft Outlook, where I instruct Outlook to wait 60 seconds before sending any email.  The Thunderbird add-on Send Later provides similar functionality.

You will find the Gmail feature in the Labs section of Settings.

Undo Send

Gmail Labs description

My three-week love affair with the Kindle 2 ended when it slipped off a couch and gently fell 20 inches to a carpeted floor. The display was corrupted by this fall. The upper 20% of the screen was a useless jumble. The lower 80% had a dark grey cast and vertical lines that marred its appearance and readability. (See Kindle 2 – The screen breaks.) Amazon sent me a replacement unit without complaint. The replacement Kindle 2 was overnighted and arrived the next afternoon. The original Kindle 2 with the corrupted screen was delivered to a UPS store to make its way back to Amazon. 

The new one needed to be charged and registered with Amazon. Charging took an hour or two. Registration was relatively quick and painless. Then the “fun” began.

The broken Kindle 2 had two purchased books, an issue of Atlantic that I had purchased for $1.49, sample chapters of books I was considering buying and had downloaded, several audio books I had uploaded, and some PDFs I had converted to MOBI format, the Kindle’s eBook file format, and uploaded to the device.

The new Kindle’s contents were sparse. The two purchased books showed as archived items. This means that Amazon is keeping a copy available on their servers to download when you want. None of my other items appeared. The two purchased books would not download.

After two calls to technical support and waiting several hours, the purchased books showed up on the Kindle. The issue of the Atlantic was more difficult. Amazon issued a credit for the original purchase and now I can re-buy the magazine. Amazon’s support personnel were easy to reach, pleasant and extremely helpful.

The rest of the original Kindle 2’s content is gone. If I want it back on the new Kindle 2, I will need to replace it myself. This means finding the content, registering the device with the various software applications and then synchronizing the device. I probably will not try.

Ironically, I was able to read my purchased books on my iPod Touch 2G even while the Kindle 2 was useless. This is a far better experience than I imagined. Reading fiction on the small Touch screen is surprisingly easy and pleasant. However, non-fiction suffers from the small screen. Diagrams and illustrations are often too small to read.

The Kindle 2 is an expensive way to read. Navigating books is unwieldy other than page forward or backward. Screen changes can be sluggish. Battery life is awful when the wireless is on. This could be fixed if we could schedule wireless connectivity so that it turned the wireless on/off on a user created schedule. Currently this is a manual exercise only. Most importantly, the device is too fragile.

The corrupted screen is an indication that this device is not as rugged or dependable as the books it intends to replace. In my 50+ years of reading, I never needed technical support for a book. Sure, librarians have helped me locate books but not fix them so that I could read them.

My opinion is that eBook readers are still not ready for primetime. Borrowing or buying books and storing them is not as convenient. However, using a book is a much better experience.

Yesterday, following a gentle, short 20″ fall to a carpeted floor, my Kindle 2′s display went bonkers. I have included a couple of photos below. I tried resetting the device by holding the power switch in the right-most position for 30 seconds, twice, without affect.  I called Amazon’s customer service. Megan was both apologetic and extremely helpful. She is overnighting a replacement unit and provided me with both an RMA label and a free UPS shipping label to return the defective device. Wow! The new machine should arrive later today.

Until then, here are the two photos of the busted screen, in standby and showing the Kindle’s table of contents. Note the garbled area at the top of the screen. Note the vertical lines. Note the dark cast over the lower 80% of the screen.  

Kindle 2 defective screen in standby mode

Kindle 2 defective screen, device TOC.