Gripes

I just got a Lenovo S10 Netbook computer and couldn't have been more enthusiastic about kicking the tires. As I've written before, I think Netbooks will be very big, and this was to be my first.

So this posting should have been a first look. I should be offering my opinion on whether the keyboard is too small, what it's like to use Windows XP on such a small screen, and how hot the thing gets. But I didn't get that far.

After a delay in getting the machine the box arrived all beat up. Not … Read more

Twice this year I ordered a computer directly from Lenovo and they shipped it via UPS. Both shipments got screwed up.

Back in January I wrote about how UPS lost my computer. That machine, a desktop, was supposedly delivered to the wrong address. Lenovo built and sent a replacement computer and a few days after the replacement computer arrived, and roughly a month after the first one was shipped, the first machine magically showed up.

On October 8th Lenovo shipped me a new S10 Netbook (see The Lenovo S10 Netbook is here, count me in. On the 9th, I checked … Read more

Things aren't going well at Ford Motors.

The automaker just reported that September sales were down 34.6 percent compared with the same month a year ago. For the first half of 2008, Ford posted net losses of $8.6 billion.

Ford blames a weak economy and a tight lending market. But there may be another factor at work--unhappy customers.

In August, I rented a Ford Fusion from Hertz. When I saw a Microsoft logo under the dashboard, I suspected trouble ahead. Sure enough, it seems that poor design choices, so common in the computing world, have migrated to … Read more

Robert X. Cringely writes a technology blog for PBS, which I've read for a long time. In his August 29th posting, What Did You Say?, he discusses his unpleasant experiences as a new iPhone owner/user.

I have no iPhone experience, so I can't judge his opinions. However, Cringely's blog is always thoughtful and, to me, he is a very credible source. Plus, he has an excellent perspective owning two iPhones, a Samsung AT&T phone and having just switched from two other cellphone companies to AT&T.

In a nutshell, he says that the … Read more

Slate recently published a great article Take That, Stupid Printer! How to fight back against the lying, infuriating, evil ink-and-toner cabal by Farhad Manjoo. The title is a bit meaner than the article, which makes for interesting reading.

If you own a Brother HL-2040 printer, the article is especially relevant. The author suspected that the printer was lying about being out of toner and he figured out how to lie back to it, making it think there was a new cartridge. Sure enough the printer had lots of toner left, as Mr. Manjoo puts it "At least eight months … Read more

What are they thinking at Mozilla? How could they devote time and effort to eye candy like new icons and drastically reworking the address bar when Firefox so often fails at printing.

How did printing get pushed to the bottom of the priority list?

I read lots of Web pages in hard copy and from the get-go (version 0.8 or so) Firefox has underperformed when it comes to printing Web pages. That issue and the slow start-up time are two constant annoyances endured by devoted Firefox users. It's been quite awhile now, and I think it's time … Read more

Following with the theme of my recent posting, Some companies you can trust, and some you can't, I ran across a blog posting from Alan Shimel of StillSecure (More frustrations with web infrastructure) that details how GoDaddy and Typepad let him down in his time of greatest need. Mr. Shimel was the victim of a cyber crime - his blog and domain were stolen out from under him.

GoDaddy

The first indication of trouble came to Mr. Shimel as an email message from GoDaddy stating that his domain was switched from a locked* to an unlocked status, a change … Read more

As is so often the case with networking problems, the firewall was source of the Verizon DSL problem I wrote about recently.

I had experienced problems making outbound connections at two Verizon DSL business customers and was told by another Verizon DSL customer that they too had a similar problem.

The problem first came up when trying to use NetMeeting from a Verizon DSL customer to remotely control a computer. Despite there being no firewall on the receiving computer NetMeeting still couldn't make a connection. Even a simple ping of the target computer failed.

I suspected Verizon was the … Read more

Recently, someone at a small business with a Verizon DSL Internet connection couldn't connect to my computer with NetMeeting. I've done this often enough to know that NetMeeting wasn't the problem, so I asked them to ping my computer - and it failed (timed out).

The TCP/IP ping command is a network debugging tool available on any operating system with TCP/IP (which is just about every operating system). It sends a simple command to the target computer which answers with a small amount of data. As the name implies, ping is just a tap on … Read more