Infinite State

I have finally moved off Dreamhost for mail and on to Lux Scientiae. After years of frustration and disappointment with DH’s performance and support, I finally lost it over some disappearing emails and their complete failure to respond to requests for assistance in a timely or helpful manner. I had been using LuxSci for spam filtering and was very happy with them, so I decided to try them out for IMAP…and they have been fantastic. Their support is fast, knowledgeable, and genuinely helpful. Their pricing was a bit more than DH for pure email, but the value is many times greater through their combination of power web UIs, great webmail client, and better quality services (filtering, serving, options). It’s only been a short time, so I’ll hold off on raves more than this, but it’s really nice to move to a more professional group that really delivers better quality service. If only they had a logo graphic I could link to…

I guess that enough years had passed since my last painful Bluetooth experience that I’d regained my optimism. I was foolish enough to think that I could just buy an adapter (Trendnet TBW-105UB) for my Windows XP laptop (HP NC6400) and use my Samsung cell phone (SGH-T719) as a modem on my T-Mobile plan. Easy, right?

Wrong.

The phone works as a modem with the cable just fine. Despite T-Mo’s less-than-stellar data network speeds, it’s workable for email and with a little patience the web is usable too. But I just wanted to get rid of that cable. Why? Some rotten misfiring synapse of geek desire. My loss.

About three hours later I had tried almost every combination of Broadcom drivers (they make the BT chipset) up through the latest (.4000 series), all variations of the DUN dialog options (with encryption, without), and still no success. As others before me appear to have found, I can pair with the phone (good luck with that piece of pain) and then get it to dial and connect. But right after the “Registering on the network…” message, I get the dreaded “Error 734″ about the PPP link failing. Take my advice: give up. I am very bad at walking away from problems, but if after 3 hours of really trying it’s still this hard then what it really means is there’s a bigger problem and it’s not worth your time to make bad parts fit together. I’ll stick with my cable for now.

I’m just in shock that it’s such a painful and buggy process to get a photo book printed on Shutterfly, Snapfish or Ofoto. After wasting a painful hour struggling with each, I gave the nod to Snapfish because I was actually able to get what I wanted in the end. But it wasn’t pretty.

I’ve been a Shutterfly user for years, mostly for holiday cards and occasionally wallet prints for grandparents. It’s been fine. But making a photo book was rendered impossible on top of being frustrating because the software was broken — images wouldn’t show up on the pages once placed so there was no way to see what the pages looked like. The preview mode just blew up without showing anything. I’m running Firefox 2, and this is 2008. QA? I don’t think so.

Snapfish was brutally frustrating because the default layout for a book was a varied layout for the pages so that to get a consistent one-per-page-with-same-background it seems you have to click through each page and set the layout and background manually. I tried the little checkbox for “Apply to all pages” but no luck there. At least the pictures show up as you drag them into place, and adding pages wasn’t too bad. But if you use a picture twice, there’s no indication so it’s up to you to notice. User Experience design? I don’t think so.

As for Ofoto, I was so disappointed in the quality of the printed book I ordered from them a few months ago that I’m not going to give them another chance to show me more poor software.

My daughter suggested that next time we should just print them ourselves and make our own book. She may be right.

I’ve used iTunes on Mac and Windows, and dislike both for their frustratingly simplified interface. Especially when you’ve got thousands of songs to sort through, iTunes still gives you very little leverage or clarity. I stopped using Podcasts awhile back — I just wasn’t interested enough but what I found to favor it over music. But I use my iPod a lot for commuting by subway here in NYC, and it’s also proven useful for moving selected tunes around to various devices that can expose stereo miniplugs for input (e.g. powered speakers in bedroom, radio in kitchen, stereo in car). And I’ve been stuck using iTunes to sync music from my library.

I manage my library of MP3s with MediaMonkey, a pretty good app that comes in free and paid versions. I upgraded for faster ripping and some other features, but it’s cheap ($20?). The UI beats iTunes, and it turns out that it handles iPods very nicely as well. I followed this quick note on how to use it with iPods, and it’s easy.

So now I can forget about iTunes except if I want to sync photos or settings, or something. I don’t have to keep 50MB of iTunes library files around, or remember to import from my library to keep it updated.

Much better.

I just started carrying a Blackberry for the first time, and I am in shock at how awful the user interface design is. I was stunned when I saw the actual message reading UI. And the calendar entry UI. And the message writing UI. Don’t these folks know about fonts? Colors? Readability? Layout? This thing feels like it was designed in 1990. It’s embarassing that they’re the market leader with such a poor product. I’m sure that the screen is capable and the processor is capable and the dollars are there to make it happen but it must not be important to them.

It’s a sad statement when you wish that Windows Mobile would come and eat their lunch.

Ironically, in 1993 I did some software development for RAM Mobile Data, who had packet radio modems built on RIM’s chipset. I built the first Windows and Mac email clients by porting a DOS stack — and got to be one of the few (only?) people in NYC at the time doing wireless email on my Mac and Windows laptops. Blackberry was a ways off, but the RIM stuff worked reliably if slowly. And that’s really the part that still works today — if only they would hire a decent design firm to redo their interface…please.

I recently switched on the new Picasa2 screensaver for Windows. I love it because I can point it to any album in Picasa, or any label — perfect for displaying random photos from a favorite set I’ve tagged already.

But here’s the bad news: Google logos start showing up at odd intervals, superimposed on your images. Not all the time, but not acceptable. As with all things Google, it’s a little awkward to complain about free wares, but I’m torn between having it do exactly what I want and not being able to find a way to stop that logo from displaying as well.

I haven’t decided whether to give it up yet, but I’m going to go looking for an alternative. Given that Picasa stores the album definitions in simple XML files in a known location, it shouldn’t be that hard to write something to read through them.