"Maddy" claimed that we would have uninterrupted service (aside from the momentary blip of the switch). We lost our connection overnight and the support person I spoke with this morning told me I should expect it to take until 6PM for them to connect us. That's a pretty loose definition of "uninterrupted" -- and that's assuming the claim is correct. By 6PM the business office is closed, so there's no one to escalate to.

The claim that I could create a temporary account and thereby get my router settings last night was, near as I can tell, utter fabrication, though it is possible that "Manu", his supervisor (whose name I couldn't parse through the accent), "Rauel" (this morning), and "Linda" (escalation this morning) were all wrong about that. All of these people told me, last night or today, that I would have to connect a single machine to the modem and setup would be automatic from there, and after that I could put the router back and it would work.

Err, what? Are they claiming that somehow, once I put my password-protected router back on the net, their software is going to reconfigure it? I don't think so. Everyone has been utterly unwilling to just tell me the configuration information I'll need (e.g. DNS servers). I predict that what they are actually going to do is configure a single machine and leave me to fend for myself from there (examine what they did to that machine, use the info to configure the router, and undo what they did to the machine).

"Linda" was supposed to escalate this and said someone would call me back on my cell phone "ASAP", but that hasn't happened yet. (That was at 9:30.) I guess I get to play support roulette tonight when I get home. (I'm posting this via email from work.)

One minor thing in my favor: if I have to connect a single machine to the modem anyway, it's going to be a Mac. I don't know Macs particularly well, but it seems less likely to get me routed to the undertrained, underinformed, English-limited support pool. (This morning I chose "Mac" on the phone tree and got to "Rauel", who seemed to actually know what he was doing -- but, unfortunately, he couldn't make them connect my service.)

If FiOS ever comes to my neighborhood I'll be thrilled. As soon as Verizon switches me over to it, I'm going to turn around and transfer my account to Nidhog (who now does FiOS but not DSL). Nidhog knows how to take care of customers!

( small rant about sloppy software (and business practices) )

It's 2007. Not only have enough people to matter abandoned IE, but Firefox has been significant for years. Why is Firefox special? Because its extensions allow people to customize their browsing experience to their hearts' content. That, and tabs.

What does this mean for you? Simply that you cannot make assumptions about the browser any more. We've been blocking pop-ups for close to a decade and selectively blocking Javascript (via NoScript) for at least a couple years. We use GreaseMonkey scripts to add content to your pages (we don't care if you like it), AdBlock to remove some of the annoyances, and Stylish to rewrite your CSS. Get used to it.

If you want to win, then -- short of being a monopoly, and good luck with that on the web -- you'll have to learn to cope with this. The users -- your potential customers -- are not going to switch browsers, disable security settings, or even just turn off things we like, just to use your site, unless you're really, really important to us. Do you really want to place that bet?

No, it's not fair; my problem in using your site could well be in one of my extensions. But you know what? That doesn't matter; if it only affects your site, to me that will not seem to be my problem. If I like you a lot I'll try to debug it; if I don't I'll move on. Your only recourse is to bullet-proof your web site. Use fewer bells and whistles, and make them optional. Stop with the gratuitious Javascript (and Flash, for good measure). Do at least some testing of your site with the common Firefox extensions. Heck, write your own monitoring extension (that tracks and reports problems with your site) and offer it to your customers; we might help you out.

You do not need to use every new-fangled browser-thwarting doodad that comes along. Every time you do, your site breaks for a few more users. Designing resilient sites is not rocket science.

I am offended by the presence of this option. It wasn't as glaring on the old machines, where the entire option space was in front of you and you watched the affected levers go ka-chink, but it was still wrong. My ballot this morning consisted of six screens, so I could have pressed that button without even looking at the effects. (Yes, there's a confirmation phase, but it's easy to just hit the big red "vote" button at that point.)

I don't want it to be that easy for people to vote for people whose names they won't recognize two minutes later. If you want to vote a straight Democrat or Republican or Pastafarian ticket, you should have to touch every lever, button, or check-box. Voting is a responsibility in which you should invest more than a few seconds' worth of thought. There were ballot items I skipped this morning because I did not feel well-enough informed; that should be more common, and the party-line button makes it less likely.

If we want a parliamentary government where you vote for parties instead of people, we should make one explicitly. I've heard the argument that taking away this option would disenfranchise some voters. Well, yeah -- if you don't want to look at each ballot item on which you're voting, you should be disenfranchised. If you've gone to the polls at all, the incremental cost of facing the candidate's names (and parties -- you get that information) does not seem at all burdensome. If even a few voters look at a name and say "hey, wasn't he the one who was indicted?" (or whatever), it will have served its purpose.

Wednesday Dani's phone died. (Mine is fine so far, so we don't immediately suspect that the battery did damage.) We have no particular reason to change providers, so Thursday over lunch he went to a Verizon store downtown to look at phones and ask some questions (namely, is this a use-it-or-lose-it upgrade event for me too if he upgrades?). He came back from that with the information that there would be financial benefits to upgrading together, so last night we went to the Verizon store in Monroeville to do that. That's where the trouble started.

( Read more... )

Verizon is currently sending me small Amazon gift certificates in exchange for customer feedback, so I think I'll see what they have to say about this. I wonder if I'll still be welcome in the focus group next week. :-)

Predictably, this has spawned a few threads on SCA discussion lists. One is about the concern that this will drive away prospective volunteers; it's an imposition (and who exactly is paying for it anyway?). Some people already complain that we don't do enough age-appropriate stuff for kids; I agree that this will make things worse in that regard. My suggestion, since the policy is about "children's activities", is to say we have no such thing: anyone is welcome to join us for coloring and nap time. That most adults won't be interested does not make it a children's activity on the books. (And why become an officer when you could just informally work with parents? There are no perks to being an officer.)

Another thread concerns parents and how if they were responsible and attentive and involved in their kids' lives, they wouldn't need to worry that the guy telling stories or teaching games is going to molest anyone. There are valid arguments on both sides (parents can't be everywhere all the time), and most SCA parents I know are reasonable, but I do wonder whether the requirement for background checks will make the irresponsible parents even more likely to dump their kids while they go off and party. Now the SCA has offered a promise that it's safe to do so. (I am very glad that a particularly problematic family has moved out of our group.)

But the thread that really gets under my skin is the "but think of the poor children!" one. A post tonight started off with this: If these background checks protect even _one_ child in Aethelmearc from sexual molestion or rape, it is worth it. It then went on with emotional appeals about the badness of molestation and abuse. Um, no one is arguing that molestation and abuse are good.

To that person I say (and said): Try this logically-equivalent statement: "If outlawing all motor vehicles saves even _one_ innocent victim from being killed by a reckless driver, it is worth it." Of course you wouldn't agree to that; while we want to minimize deaths due to reckless drivers, we recognize that there are other relevant factors, like the needs for commerce, transport to employment, and so on.

The world is not 100% safe. Any society (small "s") has to balance all of the legitimate needs of all of its members in trying to figure out where the best balance point is. Even if background checks were a silver bullet, you aren't done until you also address the problems they would impose.

(Aside: just this past week we had a local kidnapping case (adult and infant) that happened in front of a large grocery store in a well-trafficked area. Today's paper quoted a resident as saying that Giant Eagle needs to beef up its security so this can't happen again. Are you really ready to pay higher grocery costs to provide a guard stationed in front of the store? (Israelis, I don't mean you; yours is a different problem.))

I am not personally affected by the background-check rule. I'm not a parent (nor a kid :-) ), nor do I have any intention of being an officer in the SCA, nor am I inclined to run child-specific activities. But I think we're all harmed when bad "logic" drives policy. Proponents of more-restrictive policies need to support them with sound arguments, not appeals to emotion.

In my experience, MS Office utterly fails when it comes to accessibility issues. (Or if it doesn't and there are work-arounds, I sure can't find them in the documentation -- which is a different type of failure.) Today's problem: highlighting. When you use the highlighter in Word, it hard-wires whatever color you chose into the document (bright yellow, by default). That's illegible to someone using reverse-video, and there's no way to globally change it in a document. The correct way to do this sort of thing is to have semantic concepts like "highligher color" (1, 2, 3...), and embed that into the Word doc. Then, on the client end, you define your color map. Voila -- everything works. It'd be like system colors, except they'd work. You get your yellow; I get dark blue. For extra points, use the system settings directly for as much as possible; "selection color" probably works fine for highlighting, for instance.

It's not just highlighting in Word; Outlook pays attention to your system colors for some things but not others, so there are things in the UI I just can't see. (I'm told there's supposed to be a status line that tells me about my server connection; could've fooled me.) I frequently get Office documents where some accident changed "automatic color" to black, and I have to select everything and change it back.

This problem is not unique to Office; Microsoft's IM client does the same thing with text color. Your outgoing messages have a hard-wired text color, which might or might not work for the recipient. I have to highlight most coworkers' messaages to read them (they come in as black on my dark background), and they have to do the same for mine (which are white so I can see them as I type). Text color should be set for a user, not for outgoing messages. I want to see everything in white; you want to see everything in black. Half of our conversation shouldn't be wrong for each of us.

These products, like many web sites, tend to specify half of the foreground/background-color pair. If you're going to hard-wire yellow highlighting, you'd better also hard-wire black text. If you're going to hard-wire black IM text, you'd better also hard-wire a light background. But you shouldn't hard-wire either most of the time; you should ask the OS.

MS offers accessibility options in Windows, but it's a sham -- try to use them and you'll bump into stuff like this all the time. Theirs aren't the only products with these problems, but they are the ones who have no excuse for getting this wrong.

HTML has been in common use for more than a decade. The field of UI design has been around for several more. Surely, somewhere in there, most people got the clue that when displaying text, you specify both or neither of text color and background color (with strong arguments for "neither" to give the user some control).

I was a little surprised to find that Sun does not have this clue, until I switched my environment to a reverse-video scheme and then looked at some Javadoc. Tan text on white background -- goody! -- because the HTML sets BGCOLOR=white and is silent on text color. But wait, it gets better -- they also do it for table cells and rows! Now I have to maintain a local style sheet with these three changes, and re-copy it into the output directory every time I geenrate Javadoc, because Sun decided to set half of this pair while fetching the other half from the OS.

There's no excuse for anyone to be making this egregious error in 2006.

The child, four years old and accompanied by his mother, bypassed one four-foot-high barrier and then put his hand through a larger chain-link fence. The article didn't say, but I assume there were plenty of "keep away from the bears" signs too, in case two fences didn't make that point. The child got bitten (not badly enough to require stitches). Mom couldn't identify the biting bear, so both of the bears in that pen were killed.

Rabies is an unpleasant disease, but it is treatable. The treatment is painful, but many people have to undergo it because they have no choice. Sometimes you do something stupid and have to suffer the consequences; sometimes you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time and, yet, you still have to suffer the consequences. Life isn't fair, and sometimes no one is at fault.

Accidents happen, and the kid here is not to blame. For all we know, neither is the mother -- there are conflicting reports about whether she helped him climb the first barrier or looked away for a moment and he did it on his own. But that doesn't matter (except for settling the tort); even if this was completely an accident, a fluke, people have to accept some personal responsibility. It appears that someone made a decision to test the bears instead of treating the kid just in case; I think that decision was wrong.

There was clearly no fault on the part of the park or the bears themselves, so the child's discomfort is not adequate reason for killing the bears. The child, and the mother, could have gotten a valuable lesson about personal responsibility here, but they didn't. It probably didn't even occur to the parents, because we increasingly live in a world where the meme is "protection over everything, and when that doesn't work find someone to take it out on". But that doesn't help kids grow up into responsible adults, and you can't child-proof (and idiot-proof) the world anyway.

We are becoming, and raising, a nation of spoiled brats, who think that if they're unhappy, there must be someone to punish -- as if that makes anything any better. Punishment should be reserved for willful acts (including negligence). When there is clearly no fault, we need to minimize the overall damage, not our personal damage.

By the way, the bears tested negative.