Don't try to show up the chick with the scorebook.
Don't try to show up the chick with the scorebook.
January 24, 2009
I just spent the day in the "Virtual Waiting Room" trying to get a couple or four tickets to just about any game this season. The goal was to be able to go to a game or two with people. I was released from the interminable waiting room twice. The first time, I was greeted with an image of a seating chart for a random Tigers game, but anytime I tried to click through to select seats, I was greeted with the following: "We're sorry, we were unable to process your request due to high transaction volumes. Please try to submit your request again by clicking the CONTINUE button." (Clicking CONTINUE just gave me the same message.) Eventually I was booted back to the waiting room.
Finally, about 20 minutes ago, I was let out of the waiting room again. Only now I was told that the only seats together were standing room only. Grrr... going to baseball games should not be this hard. Maybe it's time to be a Paw Sox fan.
January 23, 2009
The fundamental difference between being a baseball fan in Michigan and being a baseball fan in Boston?
In Michigan, if I wanted to see the Twins play I would drive to Detroit the day of the game and purchase as many tickets as I wanted without paying crappy TicketMaster fees.
In Boston, it is still January, and I went looking to see the status of Twins-Red Sox tickets to find that I can no longer get two seats together. Thus, I have just given TicketMaster $16 for "convenience" and have a single ticket to each of the April 21st and April 22nd Twins/Red Sox games. Also, one of the tickets cost me $90 -- there is not a seat anywhere in Comerica that approaches this.
January 20, 2009
Longer MH2K9 post to follow later in the day, but for now, thanks to the Bombers for a fabulous hunt. We did surprisingly well -- second place with the final runaround reverse engineered such that it probably would have taken us less than a half hour to finish had we only thought to play checkers with the last meta.
In other news, today we have a new president. I came into work only to find an e-mail from Friday (which I never saw because of the Mystery Hunt) telling me that no one had to come in until 1 pm today because of the inauguration. As I was already here, I went over to the hospital cafeteria to watch Obama's speech. It seems that all the people attempting to stream the coverage over the Internet has slowed down the network dramatically today -- IS even sent an e-mail to that effect, requesting that people please try to find a television instead.
I heard stories of doctors delaying their patients' appointments while they joined them in lobbies to listen to the new president. It sounded like the patients didn't really mind. I watched a black cafeteria work cry and then applaud wildly. Everything's moving a little bit slower today -- everyone seems aware of a massive attitude shift in our country. We've gone from an administration that hides behind lies and fear tactics to an administration which maintains its own blog in order to make We The People feel more involved with our government.
Perhaps the "change" that's come won't be the magical band-aid that some people expect it to be, but after years of failed policies and lies and incoherent speeches, I can't help but think that we are a far better nation than we were yesterday.
January 13, 2009
Phone-scannable tags are an old idea, but Microsoft has actually produced a surprisingly decent implementation, in the form of MS Tag. For instance, here is the "url" tag for my photo galleries:
I was able to snap this awful picture of it, straight from the screen, and the software interpreted it without a hitch and sent me on to the website.
In addition to URLs, you can also create "dialer" tags, which tell the phone to dial a number, "business card" tags, which contain contact info for your addressbook, or you can make up "free text" tags. The tag is just a reference; all of the information resides on the server, and the phone needs internet to get to it. But it's pretty quick.
All major phone platforms are supported, including Blackberries, iPhones, Androids, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, among others. The integration with the native software on my BB was truly flawless, and well-thought-out. It was almost hard to believe this was a Microsoft product. But then...
The only image formats supported by the tag creator are PDF, WMF, and XPS. Really, not a PNG or a JPEG, even? Now this is more like it: take a great idea, do an decent job all the way, then leave out one tiny little frustrating detail, so that I have to run a command line conversion before I can post any of the tags. Or maybe they're trying to push their own formats, which would be just another example of a flawed business model ruining their products. Still, I'm kinda tempted to put one of these on a business card.
January 01, 2009
Some of you will remember that a few years ago I won a Zune. Sometime in 2007 there was a firmware update and it sucked -- I no longer had the ability to add a single song to my "Zune library" which was frequently all I wanted or needed to do with the software. Thus, I vowed never to bother with firmware updates again since I had a free player that worked (mostly) how I liked it and I didn't want to risk losing more features.
Well, today I am very grateful that I never bothered with the 3.x version of the firmware. One of the key features of this update was that, for the first time, the Zune got a clock (and also lost the "QuickList" feature -- equivalent to "Playlist-On-The-Go" for iPod users). However, it seems that those fine programmers over at Microsoft forgot that 2008 has 366 days and Zune's of my model everywhere are freezing up and freaking out. Google trends even indicates the problem (see 41, 53, 82, 88, and 94). But, according to Slashdot readers, it's a firmware issue and those who never updated are fine. The official Zune site also claims that as long as you didn't connect it to a computer before Noon GMT today, you're also fine.
Way to be Microsoft. Didn't the whole Y2K "crisis" teach you how our calendar works?
Luckily, my version 2.0 firmware is currently cranking out K.T. Tunstall as we speak having experienced no such problems... if it ain't broke, why fix it?
Edit: The Guardian appears to have uncovered the specific lines of code that caused the bug and indicates that it's not really Microsoft's fault -- well, not the fault of their programmers anyhow. The QA department is a different story.
