Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
OK, this is shooting the low-hanging fish right off the barrel (or some such mixed metaphor), but why does anybody still use Internet Explorer and Windows for embedded systems?
The proximate cause is a dead Internet link, but somebody obviously didn’t take that problem into account during the design phase. I’m sure there’s a keyboard hidden inside the box, wherever the box might be, but the rest of us are left to snicker at a jammed display.
The problem resolved itself (or somebody plugged in the cable) by the time we walked past the display again.
Found this in a church restroom, which is pretty much a benign public environment.
If you put a pushbutton control at the usual place for a light switch and give it a light-switch affordance, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people push it.
Now, if the pushbutton happens to both turn off the light and disable the automatic light function, well, that’s hardly the user’s fault, is it?
Methinks it should be an automatic light switch with a manual override tucked inside a cover that doesn’t look at all like a pushbutton. Of course, the IR lens over the sensor would then require some up-armoring, as it’d look a lot like a button.
Just got a new credit card, which arrived with the usual “Privacy Policy” flyer describing how they’ll keep our sensitive bits safe & secure. Except, of course, that by default they’ll share those bits with nearly any organization that asks, if there’s even the least bit of money to be made in the process.
The flyer explains how we can tell them of our privacy choices. Oddly, in this Internet Age, none of the banks have figured out how to put our privacy policy choices on their websites. Maybe that would be entirely too efficient.
Anyhow, we’re supposed to either:
Pick up the phone to deal with their customer service apparat or
Pick up a pen, fill out a form, cut it out, and mail it to them
For our joint accounts, if I forget to say “And this also applies to my wife”, well, then they’re free to share her sensitive bits.
I’m sure they know that when they make “choosing” difficult enough, nobody will bother.
Ya think?
For the record:
Chase: press 0 to short-circuit the account info blather and get to a rep
Citi: press 6 for that purpose. Why not 0? Huh…
The Chase folks tell me this may require up to 90 days to take effect. Wow, do they fill out forms and hand-carry the paperwork to Galactic HQ for further transcription?
Memo to Self: Remember to tell the nice voice…
This applies to both account holders
Turn off all information sharing options
Turn off “convenience checks” (is anybody stupid enough to use those things?)
Turn off automatic credit line increases
This takes about four minutes for each account on a Sunday morning.
So Verizon seem determined to spend as much money as it takes to bury us in FiOS Triple Play mailings. For the last few months, we’ve been getting at least one mailing a week with exactly the same offer. Perhaps they think we’ll eventually get fed up and buy the damned thing, although rumor has it that the offers keep coming even after you do that.
Anyhow, I called the number (877-896-3354 this week) to ask:
How about selling us FiOS 15/5 Internet and Freedom Essentials (unlimited US residential VOIP) for $60/month for two years with no installation fee?
Failing that, put us on the Do Not Solicit list to shut off the junk mail
Come to find out that:
Nope, the nice voice can’t dicker on the monthly price, but…
They’re willing to waive the installation fee ($50) without blinking
The fact that we don’t have a TV and aren’t interested in the Triple Play is a dealbreaker for them
The DNS list is just a checkbox on their display of my account: done!
At this point we’re spending $50 for Optimum Online cable 13/2 (more or less) internet and nigh onto $30 for a Verizon landline phone without “long distance” calling (which we do by VOIP these days). They can do a bundle for something like $80/month with a brief teaser discount, but no better than that. So we’d wind up paying more for basically the same thing.
After a pleasant conversation he asked if I would recommend Verizon to my friends & relations. I said “Absolutely not” and he asked if I wanted to talk to a Quality Assurance representative. Figuring it’d be good for a laugh, I said yes… and then went directly to the usual interminable wait-on-hold.
The QA guy asked why I wouldn’t recommend Verizon, so I gave him a few reasons:
Their phone menu system is impenetrable
I often get mysteriously disconnected during intra-Verizon handoffs, particularly if I’m asking difficult questions
Nobody in their “customer support” phone tree can explain how much the “Other charges, taxes & terms” might add up to on a bundle deal: they can’t tell me what their service will cost!
Nobody at Verizon can explain the random charges / credits / debits / adjustments on my buddy Aitch’s wireless + Triple Play bill. He’s a smart guy; if he can’t figure it out, I certainly can’t.
Their pricing is not competitive; it’s more than we’re paying now for basically the same thing. Why switch?
He actually tried to claim that I can’t get FiOS speeds from cable. I pointed out that the difference between 15/5 and 13/2 isn’t “This is FiOS. This is BIG!”, it’s just barely discernible and not guaranteed anyway. Oddly, in the last few months, Verizon has quietly bumped the base FiOS speed from 12/2 to 15/5, which I infer means they found that trying to sell a slower speed to cable customers wasn’t working out that well.
I also infer this whole FiOS thing still isn’t going as well as they’d like. If it was, the incessant offers would stop.
The QA guy said he’d call me back if they could do anything about the price; there’s evidently a New & Better Deal coming out in a few weeks. Of course, since we’re on the DNS list, we’ll never know…
I told him here’s what it would take to get me to switch: paying less than $80/month for internet + phone. I figure $60 (plus the mystery charges) would save me maybe $10/month. I’ll geek for that if they don’t screw me over for installation and suchlike.
Failing that, we may just shoot the landline in the head and go with the cheap prepaid cellphone deal. Google Voice seems to be a reasonable solution; I got a local number that’s very close to our current landline, so maybe it’s time to print up a stack o’ cards and send out some notices.
So our 6-year-old Whirlpool electric water heater tank failed and dribbled water on the floor. Fortunately, I spotted the leak before it flooded the basement: I look at the heater just about every time I venture into the Basement Laboratory Electronics Wing. Judging from the mildew & fungus growing on the wooden base I built for it, though, I haven’t been doing a good job of walk-by inspecting. In my defense, the visible wooden edge is 3/8″ thick below the dark rim of the heater.
Grit drained from tank
I turned off the inlet & outlet ball valves, flipped the breaker off, routed a garden hose out the door, laid the end in an old cake pan, and drained the tank. The pan collected a fair amount of rusty grit (and more washed down the driveway), which means the glass-lined tank was suffering from internal rust.
A call to the Warranty Hotline produced an Indian-subcontinent accented voice, who told me that I had to get a licensed plumber to tell them that it was, in fact, rusted out. “Any plumber in the phone book will do”, he said, “Just have them call this number and we will verify the situation with them.”
My back of the envelope, confirmed by friends, is that it’d cost about $150 for a plumber to drop in. Oh, and this was on a Saturday morning, which means it might be a while later and bit more expensive than that. Paying somebody $75/hour to wait on hold didn’t seem attractive.
A new heater of the same general nature is $400, give or take.
Soooo, in round numbers, I’d be spending half the cost of the “free” replacement just to find out if Whirlpool would honor the warranty.
I was ready to just cut my losses and buy another heater when my friend Aitch suggested two simple alternatives:
Call the warranty line again, point out that this is the Internet Age, and offer to send them pictures of the problem, along with a statement that I was being truthful.
Spend the $150 to ship the dead heater to the office of the Whirlpool CEO with a note describing the situation
I picked the first option and had a brief conversation along these general lines:
paying nearly half the price of a new heater for an “evaluation” is absurd
the leak was near the top; even the caps over the heating elements were rusted
the grit shows that tank has internal rust, so it’s not external corrosion
I’ll send pictures anywhere you want
Much to my astonishment, the pleasant voice gave me a replacement authorization! No pictures needed.
Knock me over with a feather…
So I hauled the corpse back to Lowe’s, swapped it out for a new one, and away I went.
Now, it’s worth noting that the new heater has a 12-year tank warranty, not the lifetime one that came with the original purchase. Given my experience with the first one, we’ll see what happens; I suppose they learned how expensive a lifetime warranty can be.
Overall, a pleasant surprise, although the initial presentation wasn’t encouraging in the least.
The proximate cause is a dead Internet link, but somebody obviously didn’t take that problem into account during the design phase. I’m sure there’s a keyboard hidden inside the box, wherever the box might be, but the rest of us are left to snicker at a jammed display.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 