How many of you are old enough to remember:
“The computer for the rest of us” and
“1984 will not be like 1984”
These were two of the slogans that Apple used in 1984 when it introduced the Mac. I loved it with its WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pictures). Almost everything you needed to know was on the screen.
Many Mac users of that time were eager for the newest operating system or newest Mac: hard drives, multi-tasking, color.
I can’t pinpoint when it all changed, but I stopped looking forward to the latest operating system. Features that worked fine on OS P were a nightmare on OS Q. It seemed that the gratuitous changes were made only to keep programmers employed. Or that a new set of programmers had to do it their way no matter what most long-time customers wanted.
This has been one of those bad years for me.
Sometime in March or April, Apple made a minor update. It did not seem like a big deal and I installed it. I found out much to my chagrin that my Epson WF-3640 would no longer accept paper from anything but Tray 2. I thought the machine didn’t work and exchanged it with Best Buy on a warranty. The second one did the same thing.
After a couple of calls to Epson I learned that Apple had changed the print dialog to all the information the user needed from being on the screen to being buried under certain choices. Once I had that info, I could print from whatever tray I chose.
Then Apple provided a gratuitous “EPSON Printer Software Update, Version 3.3”. I downloaded and installed it. Now my printer didn’t work at all!
A third person at Epson said it was my cable. Well, as I talked to him, I did have my external hard drive connected, not the printer. But when I was off the phone and had the proper connection, it still didn’t work.
I next tried the the friendly folks at Geek Squad. I described the basic problem and they were ready to set me up with a Geek Squad account. Each time I got near the bottom of the payment window it would disappear. What were they ready to blame: my browser (Safari). What? There are dozens of payment windows that work just find with Safari.
I had to go elsewhere and excused myself.
Today, I despaired and went to Best Buy to buy another cable. i also bought a couple of thumb drives to replace those that I “crashed” by taking them out of the USB slot before closing them. Another story for another day maybe.
I plugged my new cable into my MacBook and into the printer. Nothing happened. I couldn’t print.
I didn’t keep track of the buttons I pushed on the printer and the computer, but the results varied widely as to what happened. Eventually my Mac and my Epson printer connected properly with one another. I really don’t want to be a scientist who keeps meticulous notes on every step and every observation. After all, the Mac is the computer for the rest of us. And after 58 years being involved with computers (from punched cards to rooms full of tape drives) I just want to be an ordinary user.
Then I exchanged the new cable for the old cable. Everything worked as it should.
As a senior wailed in the computer lab when I was a graduate assistant, “That isn’t what I meant!
Showing posts with label customer support. Show all posts
Showing posts with label customer support. Show all posts
Thursday, July 20, 2017
Thursday, August 25, 2016
In praise of email
In today’s world, the most efficient means of one-on-one communication is email. Texting follows if both parties have smart phones.
Email and texting allow senders to create the message at their convenience and the recipient to respond at their convenience.
Given Congresses disabling the Post Office, a letter can take two days in some locales to arrive its destination. Congress’s putting such onerous pension requirements on the Post Office, requirements that many corporations don’t even come close to, has caused sorting facilities to be closed, such as in Duluth MN. Now mail from Duluth to Duluth has to be trucked 300 miles round trip.
A phone call either is not returned or the caller is on hold for a long time, sometimes an expected wait time is periodically given, sometimes not. Sometimes pleasant music is played, and sometime it is interested frequently by “Your call is important to us.”
Lots of companies only accept calls or offer chat rooms. Both can involve indeterminate wait times. The advantage of a chat room is that you often have a transcript of the chat. With a call, most of us are scribbling just bits and pieces.
Email gets around these because you don’t have to wait by the phone for a response. The only problem is that some people are as bad about answering email as they are about returning calls.
This was triggered by our leasing a new car. I tried to call the insurance agency, Otis-Magie, about the change. Once upon a time the receptionist took the information and we were done with it. This time my call was forwarded to an agent. I got his voice mail.
That was over an hour ago. I emailed the VINs of both cars to him. Then I emailed my phone number just in case I had garbled it up with my voice message.
I have to go mow the lawn. How can I hear my cell phone over the lawnmower?
Wouldn’t this all be easier and more convenient for all concerned if I could have done it all with email?
P.S. He did call back after an hour and a half. He had to handle one call after another. As I tell many people, you can only handle one customer at a time. He did appreciate my mailing the VINs to him.
Email and texting allow senders to create the message at their convenience and the recipient to respond at their convenience.
Given Congresses disabling the Post Office, a letter can take two days in some locales to arrive its destination. Congress’s putting such onerous pension requirements on the Post Office, requirements that many corporations don’t even come close to, has caused sorting facilities to be closed, such as in Duluth MN. Now mail from Duluth to Duluth has to be trucked 300 miles round trip.
A phone call either is not returned or the caller is on hold for a long time, sometimes an expected wait time is periodically given, sometimes not. Sometimes pleasant music is played, and sometime it is interested frequently by “Your call is important to us.”
Lots of companies only accept calls or offer chat rooms. Both can involve indeterminate wait times. The advantage of a chat room is that you often have a transcript of the chat. With a call, most of us are scribbling just bits and pieces.
Email gets around these because you don’t have to wait by the phone for a response. The only problem is that some people are as bad about answering email as they are about returning calls.
This was triggered by our leasing a new car. I tried to call the insurance agency, Otis-Magie, about the change. Once upon a time the receptionist took the information and we were done with it. This time my call was forwarded to an agent. I got his voice mail.
That was over an hour ago. I emailed the VINs of both cars to him. Then I emailed my phone number just in case I had garbled it up with my voice message.
I have to go mow the lawn. How can I hear my cell phone over the lawnmower?
Wouldn’t this all be easier and more convenient for all concerned if I could have done it all with email?
P.S. He did call back after an hour and a half. He had to handle one call after another. As I tell many people, you can only handle one customer at a time. He did appreciate my mailing the VINs to him.
Monday, January 18, 2016
More on erratic iPhone cellular setting
Follow-up to http://magree.blogspot.com/2016/01/erratic-cellular-data-settings.html.
I spent an hour or more pouring over postings in the Apple User Community looking for some solution to my long wait for cellular toggles to be activated in my iPhone. I finally found a link a user made to T-Mobile.
Quite simply a soft reset works. For how long, I know not.
A soft reset is to hold the on-off button and the home button until the screen goes blank and the Apple logo is shown again.
Why didn’t Apple offer this advice?
I spent an hour or more pouring over postings in the Apple User Community looking for some solution to my long wait for cellular toggles to be activated in my iPhone. I finally found a link a user made to T-Mobile.
Quite simply a soft reset works. For how long, I know not.
A soft reset is to hold the on-off button and the home button until the screen goes blank and the Apple logo is shown again.
Why didn’t Apple offer this advice?
Friday, August 28, 2015
Clawing out of the Abyss
As of this writing, we are into week two without cellular access on our iPhones (See “Cutting the cord and falling into the abyss” in last week’s Reader).
I think the biggest thing I miss is reading the Duluth News Tribune, Star Tribune, and the New York Times at breakfast and lunch. To check email, statements, and other important and unimportant information, we have to go to the library or coffee shops. I’m drinking a lot more coffee than I normally do.
The easiest is to walk to Chester Creek Café at the corner. But we don’t want to take up a table when there are many lunch or dinner customers.
Perk Place is a quiet place, but for some reason I could not log on to their server. Another Mac user had been successful. I wonder if he was using a newer operating system. A staff member did get me signed on using the coffee shop account.
Once upon a time I would walk to Bixby’s and other shops at Mt. Royal, but every year the hill up Woodland Avenue seems to get steeper, especially with a backpack with a computer. And so I wimp out and drive.
The Mount Royal Library may or may not be crowded. When I went on Thursday it wasn’t, but it did take a bit of effort to log in. I was successful with my iPhone and iPad, but I never managed to click all the right buttons for my laptop.
A diversion at the library was looking for a follow-on book after viewing “The Young Victoria”. The movie had a lot of follow-on summary information. I wanted to know more about her reign and her successors. I used my iPhone to sign on to the catalog and select some books. Having the call numbers of the desired titles on my iPhone sure beat copying those numbers onto paper from the library computers.
Caribou at Mount Royal Market is spacious and quiet. It’s biggest drawback is that there are no power outlets at the tables.
And at the cabin we are completely disconnected from the web. At least, we can still use our phones.
So, I have to carefully plan all my work before hand. I am writing this at home and will go to one of the coffee shops to email it to the Reader. I have to write most of my email beforehand. I have to plan ahead what web sites to visit.
One of those plan-ahead sites was the Apple Support Community. While at a coffee shop I downloaded thirteen threads about excessive data usage. It’s nice to know that I am not alone with this problem. Some useful advice, some blaming the user, but no really clear cut advice.
I do know first hand that solving computer problems can be a long, arduous project. Relevant information comes in dribbles from the customer and lots of digging by programmers. I was the lead investigator of frequent crashes of a Univac 1108 in Sweden. Many of the memory dumps showed a particular program was active. I badgered to customer into giving me a copy of the program. I took the copy to another site and the program crashed because it was putting data outside of its assigned space. To make the story short, the problem was they were using an outdated library and that their computer had a memory protection failure. I think it took three months from the first alarm to final resolution. And those computers were a lot simpler than what we carry in our pockets now!
Once upon a time it was said that Mac owners never used a manual. I did look up a few things now and then, mostly just what keys did I need to push to get å, ä, é, î, ö, and other western European characters. The Mac’s were described as WIMPs: Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pictures. Just about everything you needed to know was obvious from one of these.
Even then, many users came up with seemingly intractable problems. Apple’s answer was to encourage user groups. Unfortunately, often there was nobody at a meeting who had an answer. I remember somebody asking why they couldn’t make their “Whiz Bang” printer work on a Mac. The leader would ask if anybody had a solution and look around the room. Not a hand went up. This happened over and over again.
The human interface, the computing power, and the range of software has improved exponentially in the last 31 years (remember the 1984 Apple ad). We can do many tasks quickly and easily just by poking the screen or dragging a finger over it. But when things go wrong! Hoo boy!
I think I caused my problem with an inadvertent reset. My choices include going back to the last iCloud backup, but would that be done before the coffee shop closed? By reading the manual, I found that I can double-click the home button, swipe up on the screen, and then slide through all the open apps. I can close an app by sliding its image up. This doesn’t remove the app from my iPhone, it just stops it from doing any harm.
Once September rolls around, we’ll have the data part of our Consumer Cellular contract restored. I think the closing apps plan is my best alternative. I’ll start with only keeping the supposedly harmless apps open: Weather, Mail, Calendar, and a few other standards. Then I’ll have to wait until all the data is in for that six-hour period. If usage seems normal, I’ll keep a few more apps open. Either I’ll eventually find the run-away app or that the conditions are such that the app is now behaving.
Meanwhile, I’ll be drinking lots of coffee. I thought of having beer instead, but it will be just my luck to knock over the glass…
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/26/5837_clawing_out_of_the_abyss.
I think the biggest thing I miss is reading the Duluth News Tribune, Star Tribune, and the New York Times at breakfast and lunch. To check email, statements, and other important and unimportant information, we have to go to the library or coffee shops. I’m drinking a lot more coffee than I normally do.
The easiest is to walk to Chester Creek Café at the corner. But we don’t want to take up a table when there are many lunch or dinner customers.
Perk Place is a quiet place, but for some reason I could not log on to their server. Another Mac user had been successful. I wonder if he was using a newer operating system. A staff member did get me signed on using the coffee shop account.
Once upon a time I would walk to Bixby’s and other shops at Mt. Royal, but every year the hill up Woodland Avenue seems to get steeper, especially with a backpack with a computer. And so I wimp out and drive.
The Mount Royal Library may or may not be crowded. When I went on Thursday it wasn’t, but it did take a bit of effort to log in. I was successful with my iPhone and iPad, but I never managed to click all the right buttons for my laptop.
A diversion at the library was looking for a follow-on book after viewing “The Young Victoria”. The movie had a lot of follow-on summary information. I wanted to know more about her reign and her successors. I used my iPhone to sign on to the catalog and select some books. Having the call numbers of the desired titles on my iPhone sure beat copying those numbers onto paper from the library computers.
Caribou at Mount Royal Market is spacious and quiet. It’s biggest drawback is that there are no power outlets at the tables.
And at the cabin we are completely disconnected from the web. At least, we can still use our phones.
So, I have to carefully plan all my work before hand. I am writing this at home and will go to one of the coffee shops to email it to the Reader. I have to write most of my email beforehand. I have to plan ahead what web sites to visit.
One of those plan-ahead sites was the Apple Support Community. While at a coffee shop I downloaded thirteen threads about excessive data usage. It’s nice to know that I am not alone with this problem. Some useful advice, some blaming the user, but no really clear cut advice.
I do know first hand that solving computer problems can be a long, arduous project. Relevant information comes in dribbles from the customer and lots of digging by programmers. I was the lead investigator of frequent crashes of a Univac 1108 in Sweden. Many of the memory dumps showed a particular program was active. I badgered to customer into giving me a copy of the program. I took the copy to another site and the program crashed because it was putting data outside of its assigned space. To make the story short, the problem was they were using an outdated library and that their computer had a memory protection failure. I think it took three months from the first alarm to final resolution. And those computers were a lot simpler than what we carry in our pockets now!
Once upon a time it was said that Mac owners never used a manual. I did look up a few things now and then, mostly just what keys did I need to push to get å, ä, é, î, ö, and other western European characters. The Mac’s were described as WIMPs: Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pictures. Just about everything you needed to know was obvious from one of these.
Even then, many users came up with seemingly intractable problems. Apple’s answer was to encourage user groups. Unfortunately, often there was nobody at a meeting who had an answer. I remember somebody asking why they couldn’t make their “Whiz Bang” printer work on a Mac. The leader would ask if anybody had a solution and look around the room. Not a hand went up. This happened over and over again.
The human interface, the computing power, and the range of software has improved exponentially in the last 31 years (remember the 1984 Apple ad). We can do many tasks quickly and easily just by poking the screen or dragging a finger over it. But when things go wrong! Hoo boy!
I think I caused my problem with an inadvertent reset. My choices include going back to the last iCloud backup, but would that be done before the coffee shop closed? By reading the manual, I found that I can double-click the home button, swipe up on the screen, and then slide through all the open apps. I can close an app by sliding its image up. This doesn’t remove the app from my iPhone, it just stops it from doing any harm.
Once September rolls around, we’ll have the data part of our Consumer Cellular contract restored. I think the closing apps plan is my best alternative. I’ll start with only keeping the supposedly harmless apps open: Weather, Mail, Calendar, and a few other standards. Then I’ll have to wait until all the data is in for that six-hour period. If usage seems normal, I’ll keep a few more apps open. Either I’ll eventually find the run-away app or that the conditions are such that the app is now behaving.
Meanwhile, I’ll be drinking lots of coffee. I thought of having beer instead, but it will be just my luck to knock over the glass…
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/26/5837_clawing_out_of_the_abyss.
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Cutting the cord and falling into the abyss
We received so many unsolicited calls on our land line that we stopped picking up the phone until we knew who the caller was. Too often, no message was left.
I received almost only junk email on my cpinternet account through our CenturyLink account. Besides offers of garage door openers and of sex, I received messages in Japanese and Turkish. Very rarely did an old contact use this account.
Besides, our nominal 7Mbps speed was often under 4Mbps. We were eligible for an upgrade to 12Mbps, but we had to call an 800 number to find the details. Once upon a time, Qwest, the predecessor to CenturyLink would state on its website how much 256Kbps, 512Kbps, and 1Mbps would cost, exclusive of taxes and fees.
A digression on telecommunication taxes and fees: the telecommunication companies (telcos) can’t give these accurately because the vary widely from locale to locale and narrowly from month to month.
We also had an iPhone 4s through Virgin Mobile (VM) because we got a deal a few years ago from Best Buy.
Along the way, we started using cell phones through Consumer Cellular: you can’t miss their ads, especially if you are an AARP member. Consumer Cellular (CC) stated on its website the exact cost of each service and its level that you requested. You could change these at any time, either up or down. I eventually bought an iPhone 5s from CC. They piggy back on the AT&T network (at 3G rather than 4G). Not only could I use the iPhone in Brimson, but I could use the phone as a hotspot for my iPad or MacBook.
With all of these providers, our total monthly payments seemed to be getting out of hand. I did a small spreadsheet to compare using only CC instead of multiple providers. If we bought another CC iPhone, our costs would drop about a thousand dollars per year (not including monthly payments for new phone. Even then, we would still save hundreds of dollars a year.
One problem was our wireless printer. How would we access it without our DSL modem? I pulled the phone cord from the modem and found that the printer still worked. The DSL modem was our router, even if it was not connected to the phone system.
We ordered a new CC iPhone 5c, and when it arrived, we set it up for my wife’s use. We could also use it as a hotspot, and so she wouldn’t have to depend on my iPhone if I was elsewhere. Also, because it worked in Brimson, we could use our phones as walkie-talkies. We would have much better reception, and nobody else would be listening to our calls.
Except, we couldn’t get her phone to work because we couldn’t transfer the VM number without an account number. None of our VM bills had an account number, only the phone number. We had to call VM, and of course, the first person we talked to couldn’t do it. We were switched to someone who suggested we might get a better deal. Unmentioned was the cost. After I don’t know how many minutes, we were told our account number. Then we called CC with it and they activated my wife’s iPhone. We didn’t have this hassle when we dropped our land line at our cabin and put it on a Home Base wireless system.
Next step was to call CenturyLink to cancel our phone and DSL. Again, we were routed to someone who tried selling us faster service. We declined, and sometime in the next day or two the phone no longer worked, but the modem still accessed the network.
Ah yes, we had separate ISP, CPinternet, from the bad old days when we had only 56Kbps dial-up (56 Kilo bits per second for those too young to remember dial-up). When we started with QWest at 256Kbps we kept CPInternet as our provider. CPInternet really had great customer service, too. Then CPInternet was bought by Hickory Tech of Mankato. Then Hickory Tech bought Enventis and assumed its name. Still great customer service. Then Consolidated Communications of somewhere bought Enventis. I didn’t have much need to call customer service, until we wanted to cancel our ISP connection. My first attempt got the automatic wait message of something like “Enventis is now Consolidated Communications”. On the ninth reiteration of this, I hung up, and tried another time.
Then new problems started, some of them my own doing.
The printer works from my wife’s iMac, but not my MacBook, the one I tested printing from.
I attempted to reset my wife’s old iPhone to erase all our data before recycling it. It needed the password for her Apple ID. We thought we knew it, but all the variants we tried were rejected. I spent over a half-hour with Apple Support trying to resolve it. Terry cheerfully assured me that he had seen many problems like this. Unfortunately, he had to admit defeat and suggested we take it to a Genius Bar in an Apple Store.
In all my attempts to reset her phone, I picked up my iPhone and clicked reset. Ah! My Apple ID. My password worked. Dummy! You just reset your own iPhone!
I’m running out of space, but I’ll give the short story on the next problem. We used up our quota of CC data and were automatically cut off. I finally figured out that my iPhone was still trying to load the one program that was no longer available from iTunes, over and over and …!
Iiee-
ee-
ee-…
This also was printed in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2015-08-20 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/20/5807_cutting_the_cord_and_falling_into_the_abyss.
I received almost only junk email on my cpinternet account through our CenturyLink account. Besides offers of garage door openers and of sex, I received messages in Japanese and Turkish. Very rarely did an old contact use this account.
Besides, our nominal 7Mbps speed was often under 4Mbps. We were eligible for an upgrade to 12Mbps, but we had to call an 800 number to find the details. Once upon a time, Qwest, the predecessor to CenturyLink would state on its website how much 256Kbps, 512Kbps, and 1Mbps would cost, exclusive of taxes and fees.
A digression on telecommunication taxes and fees: the telecommunication companies (telcos) can’t give these accurately because the vary widely from locale to locale and narrowly from month to month.
We also had an iPhone 4s through Virgin Mobile (VM) because we got a deal a few years ago from Best Buy.
Along the way, we started using cell phones through Consumer Cellular: you can’t miss their ads, especially if you are an AARP member. Consumer Cellular (CC) stated on its website the exact cost of each service and its level that you requested. You could change these at any time, either up or down. I eventually bought an iPhone 5s from CC. They piggy back on the AT&T network (at 3G rather than 4G). Not only could I use the iPhone in Brimson, but I could use the phone as a hotspot for my iPad or MacBook.
With all of these providers, our total monthly payments seemed to be getting out of hand. I did a small spreadsheet to compare using only CC instead of multiple providers. If we bought another CC iPhone, our costs would drop about a thousand dollars per year (not including monthly payments for new phone. Even then, we would still save hundreds of dollars a year.
One problem was our wireless printer. How would we access it without our DSL modem? I pulled the phone cord from the modem and found that the printer still worked. The DSL modem was our router, even if it was not connected to the phone system.
We ordered a new CC iPhone 5c, and when it arrived, we set it up for my wife’s use. We could also use it as a hotspot, and so she wouldn’t have to depend on my iPhone if I was elsewhere. Also, because it worked in Brimson, we could use our phones as walkie-talkies. We would have much better reception, and nobody else would be listening to our calls.
Except, we couldn’t get her phone to work because we couldn’t transfer the VM number without an account number. None of our VM bills had an account number, only the phone number. We had to call VM, and of course, the first person we talked to couldn’t do it. We were switched to someone who suggested we might get a better deal. Unmentioned was the cost. After I don’t know how many minutes, we were told our account number. Then we called CC with it and they activated my wife’s iPhone. We didn’t have this hassle when we dropped our land line at our cabin and put it on a Home Base wireless system.
Next step was to call CenturyLink to cancel our phone and DSL. Again, we were routed to someone who tried selling us faster service. We declined, and sometime in the next day or two the phone no longer worked, but the modem still accessed the network.
Ah yes, we had separate ISP, CPinternet, from the bad old days when we had only 56Kbps dial-up (56 Kilo bits per second for those too young to remember dial-up). When we started with QWest at 256Kbps we kept CPInternet as our provider. CPInternet really had great customer service, too. Then CPInternet was bought by Hickory Tech of Mankato. Then Hickory Tech bought Enventis and assumed its name. Still great customer service. Then Consolidated Communications of somewhere bought Enventis. I didn’t have much need to call customer service, until we wanted to cancel our ISP connection. My first attempt got the automatic wait message of something like “Enventis is now Consolidated Communications”. On the ninth reiteration of this, I hung up, and tried another time.
Then new problems started, some of them my own doing.
The printer works from my wife’s iMac, but not my MacBook, the one I tested printing from.
I attempted to reset my wife’s old iPhone to erase all our data before recycling it. It needed the password for her Apple ID. We thought we knew it, but all the variants we tried were rejected. I spent over a half-hour with Apple Support trying to resolve it. Terry cheerfully assured me that he had seen many problems like this. Unfortunately, he had to admit defeat and suggested we take it to a Genius Bar in an Apple Store.
In all my attempts to reset her phone, I picked up my iPhone and clicked reset. Ah! My Apple ID. My password worked. Dummy! You just reset your own iPhone!
I’m running out of space, but I’ll give the short story on the next problem. We used up our quota of CC data and were automatically cut off. I finally figured out that my iPhone was still trying to load the one program that was no longer available from iTunes, over and over and …!
Iiee-
ee-
ee-…
This also was printed in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2015-08-20 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/20/5807_cutting_the_cord_and_falling_into_the_abyss.
Thursday, May 07, 2015
Quick correction of corporate mistakes
This noon I tried reading the eEdition of the Star Tribune. Safari on my iPod said it couldn’t the load the page because of “too many redirects”. No matter how many times in how many different ways, I kept getting the same result.
Come on, folks, don’t deprive me of my comics fix. They are not as readily available as in the eEdition, the screen equivalent of the actual printed page.
I sent email to the digital access address of the paper. Then I tried calling, but there was a wait. Ah ha! I’m not alone.
This was about noon today. By sometime around three, if not before, the problem was fixed and I could read the comics again.
I did send a thank-you email.
Come on, folks, don’t deprive me of my comics fix. They are not as readily available as in the eEdition, the screen equivalent of the actual printed page.
I sent email to the digital access address of the paper. Then I tried calling, but there was a wait. Ah ha! I’m not alone.
This was about noon today. By sometime around three, if not before, the problem was fixed and I could read the comics again.
I did send a thank-you email.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Netflix comes out ahead again on customer service and trust
We put a Netflix DVD in a mailbox outside a post office on Sunday, October 14. On Saturday, October 20, it was still listed as not returned. I clicked on a button about returns, noted that I had returned it on October 14, clicked that it was a street mail box, gave my ZIP code, clicked OK or whatever, and poof! The DVD was no longer in my account as not returned!!!
We thought about the problem a bit and wondered if it was because we opened the mailer at the wrong end. That cut off the closing tab from the return envelope. My wife jury-rigged a closure. Maybe that closure didn't hold and the package wound up getting jammed in a sorting machine. I also realized that the post office where we returned the DVD does not have the same ZIP code as we do.
I called Netflix and within two minutes was speaking with Travis of the cheery voice. Essentially he said, "Don't worry. It's not your problem. It will probably turn up."
I know there are lots of company's that take the customer's word about a problem and make amends quickly. But there are also many company's that don't trust their customers any farther than they can throw them. The former are companies that treat their employees with respect; the latter are companies that create rule-burdened bureaucracies.
We thought about the problem a bit and wondered if it was because we opened the mailer at the wrong end. That cut off the closing tab from the return envelope. My wife jury-rigged a closure. Maybe that closure didn't hold and the package wound up getting jammed in a sorting machine. I also realized that the post office where we returned the DVD does not have the same ZIP code as we do.
I called Netflix and within two minutes was speaking with Travis of the cheery voice. Essentially he said, "Don't worry. It's not your problem. It will probably turn up."
I know there are lots of company's that take the customer's word about a problem and make amends quickly. But there are also many company's that don't trust their customers any farther than they can throw them. The former are companies that treat their employees with respect; the latter are companies that create rule-burdened bureaucracies.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Why facebook's stock price went down after the IPO
Simply put, facebook's software is too buggy!
Yesterday, I used my iPod and Safari to access facebook. I could not log off! There was no button to do so, and no button gave a drop down menu with log off in the list. When I tried using my MacBook Pro to access facebook, I could log on, but then my news feed was blank. Sometimes I would get a blank area and sometimes I would get a blank area with a spinning ball next to an arrow.
Then today I had three symbols at the top of the iPod window in addition to the three bars, which had done nothing before. One of the symbols had a red number one. It was that I had a message or a like. The three bars now had a drop down menu. Way, way at the bottom of the more than screen-length list was log out (or log off). Dumbly, I didn't click on log out but clicked on the button with the number. I found out that two people liked an entry. Now the three bar menu had no drop down menu!!!
I used my wife's computer to like an item on my facebook page. After several attempts of turning my iPod off and on and other screen changing actions, the three additional buttons were shown on my iPod. I didn't click on them but went straight to the three bar button, scrolled down to log off, and clicked it.
Poof! I was now back to the facebook log on page. Close that window and be rid of it!
I went back to my laptop and logged in to facebook. I now had news feeds, but only a handful from today or last night. I could find no button to look at older items. That means I can't go back to an item that I only glanced at yesterday or that I want to check for additional comments. Up to yesterday, I could look at a week or more of news items.
This is corporate efficiency?
Of course, buggy software does not really correlate to stock price. Look at the way Apple stock has risen since the release of its latest operating system, OS X Lion. Apple announced Lion with great fanfare and the claim that it had 250 exciting new features. What they didn't say there were 300 features that no longer worked or didn't work as well as before. OK, 300 features is poetic license, but I run into annoyances every day. Clicks that don't work on the first try, watching the beach ball spin more than I have in previous versions, resets that later revert to an older setting, and on and on.
Whatever happened to "the computer for the rest of us"? Gosh, and I was once a programmer, have been using Macs since 1984, and I have a hard time!
The next time somebody gives a favorable comparison of private enterprise to government; ask them if their computer does everything they want as easily as they want as fast as they want.
See also "Why Apple's stock price went down".
Yesterday, I used my iPod and Safari to access facebook. I could not log off! There was no button to do so, and no button gave a drop down menu with log off in the list. When I tried using my MacBook Pro to access facebook, I could log on, but then my news feed was blank. Sometimes I would get a blank area and sometimes I would get a blank area with a spinning ball next to an arrow.
Then today I had three symbols at the top of the iPod window in addition to the three bars, which had done nothing before. One of the symbols had a red number one. It was that I had a message or a like. The three bars now had a drop down menu. Way, way at the bottom of the more than screen-length list was log out (or log off). Dumbly, I didn't click on log out but clicked on the button with the number. I found out that two people liked an entry. Now the three bar menu had no drop down menu!!!
I used my wife's computer to like an item on my facebook page. After several attempts of turning my iPod off and on and other screen changing actions, the three additional buttons were shown on my iPod. I didn't click on them but went straight to the three bar button, scrolled down to log off, and clicked it.
Poof! I was now back to the facebook log on page. Close that window and be rid of it!
I went back to my laptop and logged in to facebook. I now had news feeds, but only a handful from today or last night. I could find no button to look at older items. That means I can't go back to an item that I only glanced at yesterday or that I want to check for additional comments. Up to yesterday, I could look at a week or more of news items.
This is corporate efficiency?
Of course, buggy software does not really correlate to stock price. Look at the way Apple stock has risen since the release of its latest operating system, OS X Lion. Apple announced Lion with great fanfare and the claim that it had 250 exciting new features. What they didn't say there were 300 features that no longer worked or didn't work as well as before. OK, 300 features is poetic license, but I run into annoyances every day. Clicks that don't work on the first try, watching the beach ball spin more than I have in previous versions, resets that later revert to an older setting, and on and on.
Whatever happened to "the computer for the rest of us"? Gosh, and I was once a programmer, have been using Macs since 1984, and I have a hard time!
The next time somebody gives a favorable comparison of private enterprise to government; ask them if their computer does everything they want as easily as they want as fast as they want.
See also "Why Apple's stock price went down".
Sunday, July 24, 2011
New and improved can be worse
Microsoft touted its new and improved Office 2011 for the Mac. It showed videos of programmers showing off all the cool new features. Apple touted its new and improved OS X Lion. It showed over 250 cool new features.
For me, the only cool thing about Office 2011 was that Microsoft put back in Excel the macro capability it took out in Office 2008. It was not so cool that some very simple macros wouldn't work, macros that had worked in Office 2004.
For me, the only cool thing about OS X Lion is that one now drags up to scroll up. It is taking a bit of getting used to, but if you think about it that is how you move paper. It was not cool because a couple of things stopped working.
I don't know what the relation between Office and Lion is, but after I installed Lion, all my tasks in Outlook disappeared. They are not gone because some will in Office Reminders. I was able to find a topic in Microsoft Support that brought this up, but the only answer didn't work. I added a reply, but I can't check if anybody added anything because…
I downloaded Lion at home with my nominal 7Mbps connection. Now I'm at our cabin with our 24kbps connection, and I can't get online. OS X Lion considers an Apple USB modem unsupported. What? It was supported in many previous versions. Am I supposed to drive 50+ miles from the cabin to buy a different modem?
OK, I gave Apple's 800 number a try, and had a pleasant but unfruitful talk with Jennifer in Apple Care. Lion is a 64-bit operating system and the USB modem has 32-bit firmware. Nobody seemed to think it was worth it making it work; after all, the only way you can get Lion currently is with a high-speed connection. In her enthusiasm to be helpful, Jennifer thought I should get online to look for a compatible modem. Oops, I can't get online. She also suggested having my ISP come to give me a hand. I pointed out that they are over 200 miles away and I am in the woods. She did do her best to make lemonade out of the lemon the developers gave her and me.
I'm glad that I didn't come to the cabin to do some big bucks work. That really would have ruined my weekend.
When we design complex systems, be they nuclear plants, computer operating systems, or legislation, we will never think of everything. A simple decision to put something in or take something out can have far greater consequences than we expect. Murphy's Law will always hold.
When I got back to Duluth and my DSL connection, I found that Apple had sent me email asking me to take a survey about my Apple Care Support Center Call. I normally don't take surveys, but I thought I could at least vent about product compatibility decisions. Jennifer did a great job with the tools given her; Apple did a lousy job of providing "seamless" migration to a new system.
My feedback was:
It's not what the Advisor could have done or not done. It's Apple's decision to unilaterally discontinue support in Lion of the Apple USB modem. I would not have purchased Lion at this time had I been able to easily find out that I would not be able to access the web from the dial-up at our cabin.
If I'd known that Lion would have cost me, not $29.99, but $79.99 or $129.99 or more (the difference being the cost of a new modem), I would have waited until 10.7.1 or whatever version Apple decided to be backwards compatible for many of its users.
One thing the Apple Care support person was not able to tell me was what USB modems are compatible with Lion.
For me, the only cool thing about Office 2011 was that Microsoft put back in Excel the macro capability it took out in Office 2008. It was not so cool that some very simple macros wouldn't work, macros that had worked in Office 2004.
For me, the only cool thing about OS X Lion is that one now drags up to scroll up. It is taking a bit of getting used to, but if you think about it that is how you move paper. It was not cool because a couple of things stopped working.
I don't know what the relation between Office and Lion is, but after I installed Lion, all my tasks in Outlook disappeared. They are not gone because some will in Office Reminders. I was able to find a topic in Microsoft Support that brought this up, but the only answer didn't work. I added a reply, but I can't check if anybody added anything because…
I downloaded Lion at home with my nominal 7Mbps connection. Now I'm at our cabin with our 24kbps connection, and I can't get online. OS X Lion considers an Apple USB modem unsupported. What? It was supported in many previous versions. Am I supposed to drive 50+ miles from the cabin to buy a different modem?
OK, I gave Apple's 800 number a try, and had a pleasant but unfruitful talk with Jennifer in Apple Care. Lion is a 64-bit operating system and the USB modem has 32-bit firmware. Nobody seemed to think it was worth it making it work; after all, the only way you can get Lion currently is with a high-speed connection. In her enthusiasm to be helpful, Jennifer thought I should get online to look for a compatible modem. Oops, I can't get online. She also suggested having my ISP come to give me a hand. I pointed out that they are over 200 miles away and I am in the woods. She did do her best to make lemonade out of the lemon the developers gave her and me.
I'm glad that I didn't come to the cabin to do some big bucks work. That really would have ruined my weekend.
When we design complex systems, be they nuclear plants, computer operating systems, or legislation, we will never think of everything. A simple decision to put something in or take something out can have far greater consequences than we expect. Murphy's Law will always hold.
When I got back to Duluth and my DSL connection, I found that Apple had sent me email asking me to take a survey about my Apple Care Support Center Call. I normally don't take surveys, but I thought I could at least vent about product compatibility decisions. Jennifer did a great job with the tools given her; Apple did a lousy job of providing "seamless" migration to a new system.
My feedback was:
It's not what the Advisor could have done or not done. It's Apple's decision to unilaterally discontinue support in Lion of the Apple USB modem. I would not have purchased Lion at this time had I been able to easily find out that I would not be able to access the web from the dial-up at our cabin.
If I'd known that Lion would have cost me, not $29.99, but $79.99 or $129.99 or more (the difference being the cost of a new modem), I would have waited until 10.7.1 or whatever version Apple decided to be backwards compatible for many of its users.
One thing the Apple Care support person was not able to tell me was what USB modems are compatible with Lion.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Corporate bureaucracies eat into other corporations' profits
I've often said that government has no corner on bureaucracy. Almost any large organization, for-profit, non-profit, government, has a large bureaucracy. They have to in order to look into many, many details that are needed to run the organization efficiently. You read that right, an organization needs a bureaucracy to be efficient.
Who is going to do the details of hiring and firing? Who is going to process the payroll for thousands of employees. Who is going to pay and collect the bills. Certainly not the executives. Certainly not the employees involved in developing new products. Certainly not the employees providing goods or services to customers.
The purpose of a bureaucracy is to take care of details that free other employees to do the primary work of the organization.
One corporate bureaucracy is customer support. These are the folks that process customer questions and complaints and attempt to find solutions. When run well, customer support provides satisfaction to the customers and feedback to the rest of the organization. When customer support is not given organization support, it devolves into an unresponsive bureaucracy. The result is less customer satisfaction, which in turn can lead to the demise of the organization.
A case study is the corporation many love to hate but many depend on for the functioning of their own organizations - Microsoft.
I mentioned my calendar problems in "Quote of the day - Ease of use" and "Misdirected ire".
Since then, I've been subscribing to a thread "Meetings disappearing" on Microsoft's Apple Support Discussions. Hoo Boy! Talk about non-responsiveness! This thread has been going on since February and there appears to be no resolution.
Well, maybe there was some resolution. Many report that if they set up a regular weekly appointment for a year and then change one, all subsequent appointments disappeared! How often are regular meetings changed in your organization? Sometimes changed meetings become the norm. What was the solution that one writer said Microsoft proposed? Set up 52 individual appointments for the year!! Wow! That certainly is a shining example of productivity improvement. Guess what? When the user changed one of the 52 individual appointments, the subsequent appointments disappeared.
What a way to run a railroad or any business! I've had better responsiveness from city, state, and federal bureaucracies.
Who is going to do the details of hiring and firing? Who is going to process the payroll for thousands of employees. Who is going to pay and collect the bills. Certainly not the executives. Certainly not the employees involved in developing new products. Certainly not the employees providing goods or services to customers.
The purpose of a bureaucracy is to take care of details that free other employees to do the primary work of the organization.
One corporate bureaucracy is customer support. These are the folks that process customer questions and complaints and attempt to find solutions. When run well, customer support provides satisfaction to the customers and feedback to the rest of the organization. When customer support is not given organization support, it devolves into an unresponsive bureaucracy. The result is less customer satisfaction, which in turn can lead to the demise of the organization.
A case study is the corporation many love to hate but many depend on for the functioning of their own organizations - Microsoft.
I mentioned my calendar problems in "Quote of the day - Ease of use" and "Misdirected ire".
Since then, I've been subscribing to a thread "Meetings disappearing" on Microsoft's Apple Support Discussions. Hoo Boy! Talk about non-responsiveness! This thread has been going on since February and there appears to be no resolution.
Well, maybe there was some resolution. Many report that if they set up a regular weekly appointment for a year and then change one, all subsequent appointments disappeared! How often are regular meetings changed in your organization? Sometimes changed meetings become the norm. What was the solution that one writer said Microsoft proposed? Set up 52 individual appointments for the year!! Wow! That certainly is a shining example of productivity improvement. Guess what? When the user changed one of the 52 individual appointments, the subsequent appointments disappeared.
What a way to run a railroad or any business! I've had better responsiveness from city, state, and federal bureaucracies.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Misdirected ire about buggy software
In "Quote of the day - Ease of use"
I berated Steve Jobs and Apple about his quote "Everything syncs without us having to think about it" because calendars in Microsoft Outlook, Apple's iCal, and my iPod were not synching properly.
Well, the problem was far worse than a few duplicated events. I had dozens and dozens that were duplicated over 100 times and one possibly over 500 times. That's a lot of shift-clicks followed by a delete. I've spent over a week now cleaning up at least three months a day.
Why delete duplicates from nine years ago? Because each item takes up space. For every three months cleaned up, I would back up the calendar. For 2004 it could take well over five minutes to backup. When I cleaned up into 2010, it started backing up in a minute. When I cleaned up into 2011, it backed up in less than a minute.
I also spent lots and lots of time looking at Microsoft's support pages. Hoo, boy! There ain't much praise there! Message after message complains about this and similar problems. The only posted responses are from MVPs (whatever that stands for), volunteers who try to direct users to relevant support pages.
Microsoft put out an update last week that I downloaded and installed. However, despite people complaining about sync problems since April 6, there was no mention of them in the notes for the update.
I wonder how much Microsoft is even screening any of these comments. I posted two comments on June 13, and they are still marked "Your comment is awaiting moderation."
This whole situation has the earmarks of upper management declaring something should be done by such and such date, middle management trying to figure out how to assign the work to too few people, and the programmers trying valiantly to put round pegs in square holes.
Shades of Dilbert!
Shades of the bad old days of mainframes! We felt lucky to get out a new system that crashed a few minutes less frequently than the previous version.
I berated Steve Jobs and Apple about his quote "Everything syncs without us having to think about it" because calendars in Microsoft Outlook, Apple's iCal, and my iPod were not synching properly.
Well, the problem was far worse than a few duplicated events. I had dozens and dozens that were duplicated over 100 times and one possibly over 500 times. That's a lot of shift-clicks followed by a delete. I've spent over a week now cleaning up at least three months a day.
Why delete duplicates from nine years ago? Because each item takes up space. For every three months cleaned up, I would back up the calendar. For 2004 it could take well over five minutes to backup. When I cleaned up into 2010, it started backing up in a minute. When I cleaned up into 2011, it backed up in less than a minute.
I also spent lots and lots of time looking at Microsoft's support pages. Hoo, boy! There ain't much praise there! Message after message complains about this and similar problems. The only posted responses are from MVPs (whatever that stands for), volunteers who try to direct users to relevant support pages.
Microsoft put out an update last week that I downloaded and installed. However, despite people complaining about sync problems since April 6, there was no mention of them in the notes for the update.
I wonder how much Microsoft is even screening any of these comments. I posted two comments on June 13, and they are still marked "Your comment is awaiting moderation."
This whole situation has the earmarks of upper management declaring something should be done by such and such date, middle management trying to figure out how to assign the work to too few people, and the programmers trying valiantly to put round pegs in square holes.
Shades of Dilbert!
Shades of the bad old days of mainframes! We felt lucky to get out a new system that crashed a few minutes less frequently than the previous version.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
More examples of corporate inefficiency
I know and you know that many corporations are not perfect; after all, they are run by imperfect people. I know and you know that many governments are not perfect; after all… However, because there are so many commentators who forcefully state the second statement and deny the first, I feel the urge to provide examples of the first.
In addition to the "Star Tribune can't live within its means", I found that the Star Tribune is very inefficient in collecting its money. Over two weeks after raising its price 33-1/3 percent, it still has not fixed its boxes to reflect the price increase.
Every morning I go out with seven quarters for the Duluth News Tribune (still 75 cents for its few sheets) and for the Star Tribune. Every morning I come back with one of the quarters because the Star Tribune box still says 75 cents and still opens when I put in 75 cents.
Hewlett-Packard, with its multi-million dollar CEOs (see "Talk about boards with conflict of interest"), can't seem to write documentation that matches its products.
For years, my printer periodically makes horrible ratcheting sounds as it feeds paper. For years, I've looked in vain on the HP site for a solution. The only references are a cleaning kit for PCs (not Macs) and pictures and directions that don't look like my printer.
Today I gave another try at finding a solution. Yay! I found a page that tells about using the HP Utility for OS 10.5 and 10.6. It lists:
Paper Feed Cleaning : If the product is not picking paper correctly, this procedure cleans components inside the product to improve paper picking.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c02019145&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN
Boo! "Paper Feed Cleaning" is not in the items displayed in the HP Utility window on my computer!
Ah! The fine print at the bottom of the web page says, "NOTE: The availability of these features depends on the product model."
But, I found this page by searching the Hewlett-Packard website with the model number of my printer.
Go figure!
In addition to the "Star Tribune can't live within its means", I found that the Star Tribune is very inefficient in collecting its money. Over two weeks after raising its price 33-1/3 percent, it still has not fixed its boxes to reflect the price increase.
Every morning I go out with seven quarters for the Duluth News Tribune (still 75 cents for its few sheets) and for the Star Tribune. Every morning I come back with one of the quarters because the Star Tribune box still says 75 cents and still opens when I put in 75 cents.
Hewlett-Packard, with its multi-million dollar CEOs (see "Talk about boards with conflict of interest"), can't seem to write documentation that matches its products.
For years, my printer periodically makes horrible ratcheting sounds as it feeds paper. For years, I've looked in vain on the HP site for a solution. The only references are a cleaning kit for PCs (not Macs) and pictures and directions that don't look like my printer.
Today I gave another try at finding a solution. Yay! I found a page that tells about using the HP Utility for OS 10.5 and 10.6. It lists:
Paper Feed Cleaning : If the product is not picking paper correctly, this procedure cleans components inside the product to improve paper picking.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c02019145&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN
Boo! "Paper Feed Cleaning" is not in the items displayed in the HP Utility window on my computer!
Ah! The fine print at the bottom of the web page says, "NOTE: The availability of these features depends on the product model."
But, I found this page by searching the Hewlett-Packard website with the model number of my printer.
Go figure!
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Whatever happened to "The computer for the rest of us"?
Remember way back in 1984 when the Macintosh came out. "The computer for the rest of us" was Apple's primary slogan. The interface was intuitive and almost every thing worked right out of the box. No messy commands to remember. Typing was only for when you had something to write, otherwise it was point and click.
In fact, a joke for a long time and still valid in many situations was "Macintosh users never read the manual."
For many people, Macs are a joy to use right out of the box and many still don't read the manual. Updates often come automagically and when they have been downloaded, the user goes to the Apple menu and clicks on restart.
But then Apple and other vendors forget to co-ordinate their updates. Or one doesn't provide certain features in all circumstances.
One that happened to us was that we could no longer scan with our HP 3310 All-n-One when we reconfigured the AIO to be a wireless printer for two computers.
I've been looking for a solution every so often for a couple of years. I've been to apple.com forums, HP forums, and independent forums. And support articles. Dozens and dozens of people have complained about this problem, but I never found a clear solution.
This week I tried sending a webform to Hewlett-Packard.
Chris of HP Total Care responded. His suggestions might have worked but he only wrote about connections through Ethernet or USB. I wrote back that I wanted wireless.
Michael responded. I tried his suggestions and I noted all the things that didn't work as stated. Still scanning didn't work. I wrote back with these problems.
Priscilla responded. She gave five pages of instructions. I started working through them one-by-one. One of the steps was to download software from Apple. That page was down for a good part of the afternoon. When I finally got the download and installed it, one part of the installation ran over five minutes with "Install time remaining: About a minute"!!!!
Then I had to download some HP software. That process was a bit more automatic than Priscilla described, but the installation began. At one point I was sent to System Preferences to do some selection or other. When I clicked on Scan another window opened. It said "Press scan to start". So I pressed the scan button on the AIO. That gave weird results I won't go into. Aha! I have to CLICK the SCAN button in the window.
Away the scan went, wirelessly, scanning a piece of paper I had on the scanner bed. Whoopee! The first scan in over two years!
OK, let's try a slide. I put in a favorite from Sweden of a big, white ferry dwarfing some apartment buildings on a bluff behind it. It scanned and scanned. But like years ago, the scanned photo had a blue wash over it. I got a better and faster result taking a picture of the slide shown through a table-top viewer. WYSIWYG is really WYSAWYG! "What you see is what you get" has become "What you see ain't what you get!"
Oh, well! At least I'll be able to scan all those pieces of paper that I don't want to file or that I want to email copies of to others.
And finally, despite all these complaints, I'll keep buying the "latest, greatest" Mac every few years. They are still easier to use than the competition.
In fact, a joke for a long time and still valid in many situations was "Macintosh users never read the manual."
For many people, Macs are a joy to use right out of the box and many still don't read the manual. Updates often come automagically and when they have been downloaded, the user goes to the Apple menu and clicks on restart.
But then Apple and other vendors forget to co-ordinate their updates. Or one doesn't provide certain features in all circumstances.
One that happened to us was that we could no longer scan with our HP 3310 All-n-One when we reconfigured the AIO to be a wireless printer for two computers.
I've been looking for a solution every so often for a couple of years. I've been to apple.com forums, HP forums, and independent forums. And support articles. Dozens and dozens of people have complained about this problem, but I never found a clear solution.
This week I tried sending a webform to Hewlett-Packard.
Chris of HP Total Care responded. His suggestions might have worked but he only wrote about connections through Ethernet or USB. I wrote back that I wanted wireless.
Michael responded. I tried his suggestions and I noted all the things that didn't work as stated. Still scanning didn't work. I wrote back with these problems.
Priscilla responded. She gave five pages of instructions. I started working through them one-by-one. One of the steps was to download software from Apple. That page was down for a good part of the afternoon. When I finally got the download and installed it, one part of the installation ran over five minutes with "Install time remaining: About a minute"!!!!
Then I had to download some HP software. That process was a bit more automatic than Priscilla described, but the installation began. At one point I was sent to System Preferences to do some selection or other. When I clicked on Scan another window opened. It said "Press scan to start". So I pressed the scan button on the AIO. That gave weird results I won't go into. Aha! I have to CLICK the SCAN button in the window.
Away the scan went, wirelessly, scanning a piece of paper I had on the scanner bed. Whoopee! The first scan in over two years!
OK, let's try a slide. I put in a favorite from Sweden of a big, white ferry dwarfing some apartment buildings on a bluff behind it. It scanned and scanned. But like years ago, the scanned photo had a blue wash over it. I got a better and faster result taking a picture of the slide shown through a table-top viewer. WYSIWYG is really WYSAWYG! "What you see is what you get" has become "What you see ain't what you get!"
Oh, well! At least I'll be able to scan all those pieces of paper that I don't want to file or that I want to email copies of to others.
And finally, despite all these complaints, I'll keep buying the "latest, greatest" Mac every few years. They are still easier to use than the competition.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)