alex.mullr.net/blog

While talking to Adam last night, he mentioned that a certain online bookmarking company had been particularly unhelpful when he was emailing their tech support. Imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to find ‘Luke’ had updated my Twitter support ticket. I’m not sure whether it’s the person, the coders or the company, but something’s crap here. This is the story…

On the 8th of April I opened a ticket to let Twitter know that they’d spelt Twitterrific incorrectly on their downloads page. Fine, it’s a tiny problem, and an easy fix, but nonetheless something that should be fixed. ‘andr8a’ replied within a day, and was very grateful.

Thanks for the heads up! We truly apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Andrea

Poking around towards the end of last month, the problem still hadn’t been sorted. Fine, another support ticket opened, how tough can this be to fix? After jumping through hoops (they now close your ticket with a list of FAQs without even reading it, sigh), this is the reply I was left with this morning:

Thanks. This will not be fixed at this time.

What the hell? How hard is it to fix one typo on their own site? And I didn’t need an essay back, but did he have to sound so pissed off when I was clearly trying to help? Thanks, Twitter. You guys rock.

Oh c'mon, National Express. Surely you've learnt by now that outright blocking stuff isn't the answer. It doesn't really prevent it, and actually just pisses people off. Really, your Wi-Fi can't deal with a minute long YouTube video? A DNS lookup later, and…

Blocking by domain name. Clever.

So, so frustrating that they block this 4MB YouTube download, but won't try to stop me updating my browser (30MB) or downloading some video podcasts (~100MB).

Rumour (well, the YSTV quotes board) has it that I once said, when asking for confirmation on something television-related: “I have the attention span of a raccoon!” I think I've started to have problems with the tiny length of time I can keep focused on a task…

Something that I've been noticing increasingly lately is that the more “stuff” that gets thrown at me, the more I’ve reduced the amount to which it can bother me. When I started out with a Mac Mini and 4:3 display a couple of years ago, I had Google Notifier set up to make an obscene noise, show me my unread email count and display an overlay with the new message summary. I had system wide notifications set up for IMs, tweets, iTunes changing. In short, my computer was really annoying.

Since then, I've switched off pretty much everything. Tweets appear in the background, and I'll read them if I want. New instant message conversations show a tiny exclamation mark in the menu bar. Google Notifier… well, I actually just quit Google Notifier. I want to see how long I can do without it, but hope this is the start of something productive. Honestly, didn't realise how much all that stuff pained me until I got rid of it, and I don't think I'll be going back.

So consider this a poke for you to do something about your pain-in-the-arse computer; the revelation that the world won't implode if I don't reply to email just hit me, and it feels good.

Here’s one I’ve never seen before, never even seen it mentioned, and it was pretty cool to happen upon. If you right click on a user in System Preferences » Accounts, you get a sheet that looks a little like this:

Is it just me, or is that big red WARNING: one of the least Apple-esque things on the Mac?

I've put together a little page that uses the Google Chart API to put together a bar graph of what time you played the hundred most recent tracks on your Last.fm profile. I love this API from Google – it's really nice and flexible.

You can find it at http://alex.mullr.net/lastfm/graph/.