Consumerism

Yet again I come to you with rant, but this time seems like the reason is Microsoft’s huge lapse in basic Skype account security. Probably like mst of you, I have created my Skype account Many years ago.

It is really basic premise, and I didn’t even invent it. Alas I have to warn other potential Tivo customers, after giving company many chances to make things right and a month of monumental efforts (mostly mine). Also, this is Not an investment advice regarding Tivo Inc (NASDAQ:TIVO).

Yes, this is not a typo – printing To your iPhone, I know it sounds weird! It is actually very handy, saves plenty of trees and makes “printouts” easier to carry around and find in the future. There are specific cases where you want to “print” a confirmation of an appointment from a website, both to remind yourself and to show at the business you are heading to. Other times it could be a receipt for online order, or any other “generated” page which you can’t easily link to, but may need to reference in the future. Some places will accept coupon printed this way, where you can simply show it to the cashier or scan it from the phone.

It is that time again – time to decide how much credit we should allot to our users, versus how much we should “protect the user from him/her self”. Ah, the eternal dilemma – but wait, Apple to the rescue? Didn’t they pioneer the “we know what you want better than you do” model?

Short post – more of a call to arms, to discuss burning point for many people today. That is, What Platform to choose to purchase this iconic Steve Jobs biography eBook. I am completely at a loss – what could have been price war between heavyweights in this category, turned into a paralyzing situation for consumers (like me) preventing our purchase completely. My interpretation is that Publisher insisted on same pricing across all platforms! What Gives?

I fondly call my wife lately Commodity Investor, as she loves to scout out best deals on eBay. In fact, I would easily bet that we are in their top 10% of customers list, and let’s just leave it at that. So why is it that they allow themselves to continuously upset us?

I spent last two days working hard on setting my youngest son up with his own dedicated desktop PC. What is interesting, is that his prime gripe about his earlier system was that it couldn’t run Minecraft properly, especially with some add-ons!

First, this is a response to a blog post here (via Techmeme). If you are too lazy to read it, here’s an executive summary: Google is saying they will delete 2 years worth of email and all other Google Account data for 10 years old Alex (Who is naturally crying now). All because he is under 13, which they just now learned about.

That is what my daughter exclaimed, after learning that we purchased Kobo eReader from Borders and mishearing the name. She came to this natural conclusion after seeing that our new device prefers ePUB books to feed it’s appetite for content!

Yesterday, while reading an article on USA Today, my eyes gazed over to prominently displayed “News Stories” on the right side of the page. Clicking through seems to reach respectable site, apparently presenting TV affiliated news site, complete with anchor photos, videos and long authentic looking article.

Yep, my iPhone 4 arrived via FedEx today and so far all I did was Shamelessly Fondle It all over. It is in the long process of synching with iTunes, and filling it up with Apps and Stuff.

So, we picked up this nice HP Photosmart Plus All-in-one. I can’t speak to the printer quality much, only time will tell, but I can report my initial observations around setup process:

I am posting this courtesy of my good neighbor, who willfully provided a password to his wireless network to save us from going completely crazy and self-destructing as a family. You see, we are over a week now without Internet!!!! It feels that almost every aspect of our family life is crippled, and thus far Comcast seem to have done little to resolve our issue. After their tech didn’t show up for an appointment (which we already waited almost a week for), they said that all they can do is schedule us for Next Saturday….. All our pleas on the phone and even via twitter, didn’t help the situation thus far. Worse yet, it is pretty clear that outage is outside our home, and most likely affecting other houses. But onto the main topic — Is Internet a Luxury or basic utility of our times? From school assignments even for our youngest new K student, everyone expects use of Internet on daily basis. Without going too much into longest list, it feels like every other moment we are reminded that something cannot be accomplished because there is NO INTERNET! I ask myself — Is Internet really a Luxury and our family is just spoiled here and too centered around it? Or are we the new norm, where most activities, whether for school/study/work/shopping or after-hours gaming and video viewing, require fast Internet connection? If Internet indeed such an integral part of life and such a basic utility, should any self-respecting provider allow themselves outages for weeks at a time? Would you agree to live without Water for a week? Or Electricity? Of course I would understand if there were a major storm and some serious damage that took time to repair, but this feels like simple incompetence where overloaded lines caused entire neighborhoods to loose signal, and no-one cares… There, rant done! Weigh in on how you see things and whether I should seek immediate “Internet Rehab” for entire family or instead consider switching to new provider (which may be available all over town!).

I use my Zune 30GB daily, but not today, thus far. I was afraid to even try today, but decided it is important to, for you, readers. So, found my Zune also Dead this morning, though it was fine last night. It’s hung now, during boot-up, so doesn’t boot… As I learned on the Net this morning, some bug associated with Dec 31st caused all original 30Gb models to fail.

Hi, Happy Thanksgiving! This is just a quick post to tell you that Google has released Picasa 3, and it is even better than the earlier versions. This is undoubtedly best software to manage your photo collection. I have been using it since version 1 and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

We just received the new XBox 360 Experience, and I decided to blog about it right away (I know, totally untypical!). I expected much from this major upgrade, and I have to say so far I am impressed!

Wow, sorry for disappearing on you. So much happened in the past few weeks, that instead of posting all those brilliant (aka: weird) thoughts I am having, I’ll just summarize recent events in my life:

It’s been only few days since I got my phone, but I feel like I can type up 10 posts about it, and still not be done. But, I will try to focus on most important points for now, with more to follow, for sure.

UPDATE (Jun 2009): Hulu.com took down most of these excellent movies, and replaced with (*expletive censored*). So I had to come up with a new list of recommendations. I just came across some excellent full length movies on Hulu, that appear to be available to everyone (in USA probably) completely free and legally! Here are some examples:

I am heading to local Home Depot, where finally it should be Easy to recycle those old broken fluorescent light bulbs. All of them contain Mercury, a very dangerous Cancer causing chemical, even in small quantities can be inhaled and cause all kinds of nasty things.