Category: Pet Peeves

I’ve been on two business trips over the last weeks and I noticed the following:

Barcelona: Express Bus service from the Airport to the city center every 5-10 minutes.

Stockholm: Arlanda Express every 15 minutes.

Vienna: CAT every 30 minutes.

I do see some potential for improvements here for Vienna.

Last year, we had troubles getting spares delivered via UPS.

This year I ordered a book from Blurb and FedEx was the carrier. This time, it was addressed to my flat in Vienna. The tracking info sounded all right, up to the first missed delivery. They were definitely trying as the delivery guy left a note on my mailbox.

I filled out the note (yes, delivery to any neighbor is ok) and put it back. Eight days later, it is still there, and the tracking page lists a number of tries:

We were at home. I never left my flat 24th – 26th. And the last two days we had sick kids at home.

Why can’t these companies be honest and admit that they failed to come?

Folks, this one is so simple:

Whenever I have a batch of photos converted from jpeg to paper by any random online photo print service, they print some information on the back. Usually that includes the current date, perhaps the filename, order-ID, or some other information the shop needs to keep track of its print-jobs.

I have the following suggestion: Print the date from the EXIF header on the back. 20 years from now, I won’t care at all when the print was made, all I care will be when the photo was taken.

(Any additional information from the EXIF header would also be appreciated, but the date is the one thing that is simple and really needed.)

A few times I used the work-around of using “stamp 2.8” to encode the date into the filename and get it printed on the back of the photo, but that’s really a crude kludge.

This is more of a memo to myself than anything else:

The solution is here:

1) Make a static playlist called “All Live Files” and copy your entire library into it.
2) Make a smart playlist called “Missing Files” with the rules set as ” ‘Playlist’ ‘is’ ‘Music’ ” and another rule set as ” ‘Playlist’ ‘is not’ ‘All Live Files’ ”
3) Select all songs from “Missing Files”; they should all be flagged with a “!”, then use shift-DEL to remove them from your library

Worked with iTunes 10.1 under Windows just now.

I’ve already written about the broken list of available updates in Windows 7. Today I spotted something similar:

Windows supports keeping a copy of a remote directory on the local computer and syncing back offline changes. Today I got confronted with the following dialog:

Okay, I press “Sync” and get:

Conflicts? Show me:

What gives?

I recently upgraded from the old Nokia Suite to the Ovi-branded version. In other word, I replaced one piece of sh***y bloatware with another.

But one thing is interesting: When using USB-based tethering, I get the following notice:

Well, if they think it makes the bloatware work better, ok. Then I took a closer look:

Article ID: 925681 – Last Review: December 8, 2009 – Revision: 3.0

When you try to download a file from the Internet by using Windows Internet Explorer in a Windows operating system, the download stops responding and then times out. The problem occurs when you use a USB modem that has a data transfer speed that is faster than or equal to 240 kilobits per second (Kbps).

Just look at that date. Microsoft found a problem that affects a good part of their customers (USB-based 3G modems are quite common these days), managed to cook up a solution, and seven months later it still wasn’t folded into the monthly updates and is still sold as a “hotfix”.

Sorry, this fix isn’t “hot” any more. It’s cold and very much over-due.