Categories
people rant

wtf is with recruiters?

Today one tried to hire me and one was supposed help me hire someone. Both wasted my time. Both added no value to the process. Kind of like realturds, err, I mean realtors. I’m going to generalize, but wtf is wrong with people in both of these professions?

Categories
etc. people

wtf porsche (and contextual advertisers)?

paul walker porsche ad
poor taste porsche ad

This is what happens when contextual advertising goes horribly wrong. Paul Walker just died in Porsche and the article talking about his death has two Porsche ads. Way to go Porsche! Crash your Porsche and turn it into a fireball that kills your friend – never fear, you can lease a new one for just $984/month. WTF Porsche? You may want fix your ad targeting so it doesn’t promote you on articles talking about people burning to death in your cars.

RIP Paul Walker. I always enjoyed your movies. Sad to see you go so young.

Categories
companies food rant

wtf dominos

Over the past two months I’ve attempted to order from domino’s pizza 3 times. None of them was successful.

Attempt #1 – shoprunner broken. the only real reason to have shoprunner is free domino’s delivery
Attempt #2 – after wasting 30 minutes trying to order, I try another browser and it tells me my location isn’t taking web orders and every other location is carry out.
Attempt #3 – once again, I go to checkout and the little progress bar shows up on the screen. And stays there. A few minutes later an error shows up saying that if the problem persists to call a phone number. I try again. Same problem. Okay, let’s try another browser. What do you know, the store isn’t taking web orders again.

wtf is wrong with my local domino’s? After ordering online for years it is now completely screwed up. Of course every time I try to order I’m in a hurry and you waste 30 minutes of my life. And then I have to deal with a house full of starving, grumpy people. You suck. Get your act together. Roll back your code to when it worked. I will never know if you do, though. I’m done. Even though I like the taste of your pizza better, I’m ordering from Papa John’s or driving to Little Caeser’s from now on.

Categories
companies rant

Sprint, wtf does “everything” mean to you?

I was helping someone get a new cell phone / phone service so we were looking at Sprint. They’ve got the new Samsung Galaxy S III so why not give them a shot. Amazon Wireless is the place to get a cell phone / plan, so add the phone to the cart. Ok, now to pick the plan – well, 450 minutes is plenty. Let’s check the coverage. Sprint says everything Hmmm, well the phone is 4G LTE, but Sprint only has 4G LTE in a few cities in the middle of the country – mostly the have Wimax. So the phone will be using 3G because there is no LTE for most of the country on Sprint. Oh well, I’m sure they will eventually add it. Ok – we select the 450 minutes “Everything Data” Plan for $69.99.

 

Now on to select options…

What’s this? A box is prechecked and I can’t uncheck it…
Sprint's Premium Data Fee
WTF Sprint? When I select “Everything Data” I thought it meant EVERYTHING! Their explanation – “The Premium Data add-on charge is required for smartphones… because smartphone users use 10 times more data than customers with basic or feature phones.” No kidding. Really? A smartphone uses more data than a phone that can only make phone calls? WTF would a person with a phone that can only make phone calls need data for anyway? And by the way, 3G isn’t exactly “premium data”.

Categories
companies people

wtf is with the bait and switch nations choice mortgage?

mortgage scam
the nationschoice for mortgage scams

Here is what it’s like to work with these turdburglars if you want to (try to) refinance your house:

Sign all the initial applications. Send over all the normal (full) documentation. Verify rate is locked. Sign GFE and a whole bunch more documents confirming your rate, fees, costs, etc. Pay for your appraisal. Schedule your appraisal. Day before the appraisal receive a call saying they aren’t making enough money on your loan so they need to raise the rate a quarter point – then try to convince you that you are still getting a good deal. When you point out that rates have dropped since you started the whole process they make up a lie about the treasury rates (which takes two seconds to look-up and verify the lie if you are by a computer). Then they get an attitude when you point out the bait and switch b.s. they are trying to pull. Then they still try to convince you (while giving you an attitude) that you are getting a great deal. Then tell you what’s the big deal – it’s only an extra $30/month. I’ll tell you what the big deal is – that $30 multiplied by the 360 payments is $10,800 you jackass. Oh yeah, and we signed a contract a quarter point lower. WTF nationschoice (aka fisher financial group)?! It’s really sad that you are still trying to pull this type of crap. The even sadder thing is that it must be working because you are still in business. And the mortgage industry wonders why it has a bad reputation!

But don’t take my word for it, see what others have to say:
NationsChoice Mortgage Complaints
NationsChoice Fraud
Or the 49 complaints at the BBB.

Categories
companies products

wtf is with the thunderbird 5 theme?

Mo-updates?
Mo-updates?

Holy crap, you can’t see anything on the menu. The new theme is complete garbage. I’ve been using thunderbird for 8 years and for the first time I want actually considered switching. WTF is with switching to some aero theme by default with the latest upgrade? At least I’m not the only person who hates the new thunderbird theme, so hopefully the devs will fix it. I think I need to remember an old saying – If it ain’t broke, don’t update it.

And while I’m complaining about Mozilla products – wtf is with this rapid [and buggy] release schedule. I really can do without updates and restarts every few days. I don’t need new features/redesigned layouts/new themes every two weeks. I would love a browser that is stable and that follows web standards. Is that too much to ask? And with all of these updates, how are add-on devs supposed to keep up?

I’ve supported Firefox and Thunderbird for years, but the last few months are making me start to question my loyalty.

——————————-

UPDATE: I added this as a comment, but figured I’d add to the post too. How I made thunderbird useable again (see full instructions in the comment) – update userChrome.css to include the following:
/* disable Aero transparency for toolbar and menubar */
window, page, dialog, wizard, prefwindow {
background-color: -moz-Dialog !important;
}


#toolbar-menubar {
-moz-appearance: -moz-win-browsertabbar-toolbox !important;
}

Categories
politics rant

wtf gov brown and the entire ca legislative branch

Elected officials of California, you are idiots. You have no clue how amazon’s associates program works. Did you really think Amazon would go to work as your tax collector? The stupid Amazon tax you added to the new budget will not get you another cent in your coffers. In fact, I bet you will be worse off. Amazon will not collect a dime for you. Amazon’s associate program has already terminated their agreement with CA residents. California’s economy is already in the toilet and you just helped to destroy 25,000 small businesses that used to earn a living working with Amazon. Great job working to get the unemployment numbers down you jackasses. So not only will you not collect a dime in new sales tax revenue, you are going to lose out on the $152 million in state income taxes those affiliates paid last year. Bravo. Once again the government has demonstrated just how out of touch they are with reality. Did you miss that Amazon and Overstock have terminated their affiliates in every state that passed one of these laws? There is already a law on the books that requires CA residents to pay the sales tax even if an out of state online retailer doesn’t collect it. Exactly what resources of the state of California does Amazon use that they should be subject to CA taxes? I guess you passed this all in the interest of fairness to Main Street – if by Main Street you mean Walmart and Best Buy’s lobbyists and lawyers. WTF? You just screwed over 25,000 small businesses in CA to help out Walmart and Best Buy.

Categories
companies products

RROD wtf microsoft

I guess I knew it was bound to happen. I don’t touch my xbox 360 for months and then I go to power on and what do I see? The beloved RROD. Even though I had come to expect it I was still screaming WTF Microsoft! I didn’t even get a full red ring. Just a 3/4 ring. Maybe it’s not fully dead. Eventually I will try to reflow it and see if that’s the case.

At least I still have my PS3 – oh wait, the PSN is a complete disaster and I don’t have any games for it.

Oh well, I guess there are better uses of my time anyway. Happy Memorial Weekend everyone!

Categories
companies products

wtf sony?

Holy crap! Sony has gone crazy and a judge is letting them run amuck with subpoenas of everyone and their mother if they ever even whispered the phrase jailbreak and ps3 in the same sentence. I own a PS3 and thought it was a little odd when Sony used a software update to remove functionality they used to market the PS3 (in case you are wondering – they removed the ability to boot a PS3 with a different operating system like Linux). Kind of shady to sell it with features and then remove the features if you ask me. I don’t really use my PS3 for anything more than a media center (which it is great for – actually works better with windows media servers than the xbox360 – strange, but that’s a story for another time) so I didn’t really care too much about losing functionality I paid for.

Well, there was a guy named George Hotz who did care and lucky for PS3 owners he happened to be skilled with technology. He restored full functionality to his PS3 and then told others how to do it on his website. After all we did pay a couple hundred dollars for the hardware and we should at least be able to use the full feature set we were sold, if not be free to use the hardware how we like (since we did buy it). Not so says Sony. Not only do they not agree, they will sick an army of lawyers and the federal court system on you should you try. That is just what they did to George Hotz. Rather than embrace the hacker community to see just how far it could take their system, Sony decided to make an example of Hotz. For a second I have to pause to commend Microsoft for going the other route with Kinect by offering an SDK (although they almost went the Sony route initially). It is really interesting to see how people are already coming up with innovative new ways of using the Kinect hardware.

Anyway, back to Sony. So they have been using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other laws to try to bleed Hotz dry. In an interesting turn (at least to me) Sony isn’t content to stop with Hotz. Wired is reporting that federal magistrate Joseph Spero is granting Sony’s subpoenas for all kinds of information about the people who accessed information about the PS3 jailbreak on Hotz’s website, his YouTube channel, his Blogger site or his Twitter account. The subpoenas are ridiculously broad. For example, the YouTube subpoena demands data to identify who watched Hotz’s videos and “documents reproducing all records or usernames and IP addresses that have posted or published comments in response to the video.” WTF is wrong with Sony? (I guess people don’t just want to copy Apple’s products, they also want emulate their heavy handed legal tactics)

Even though the functionality isn’t a big deal to me, Sony’s crappy attitude about the situation is. Like I said, I own the PS3. I also own one of their XBR series TVs. I’ve been completely happy with both. I happen to be in the market for another TV. Will I consider buying another Sony — not even for a second. Some day I hope they learn that treating their customers like their adversaries has consequences to the bottom line.

Categories
companies

wtf safeco – process my damn claim

safeco logo
image from mike pellegrini

Having Safeco Insurance is a disaster – except it is entirely preventable. So call up you insurance agent and make sure you policies are with someone else. An ounce of prevention will go a long way to making sure you don’t find yourself in my position.

You see, Safeco doesn’t see it as part of their business to process or honor claims. Which leads me to ask, wtf do I pay them over $1,000 a year for?
They also don’t like to return calls or follow up on emails. They are however good at making meaningless excuses and making people jump through hoops for nothing.

I’m too tired tonight to write details about my ongoing experience dealing with them, but let’s just say police reports and witness statements aren’t enough proof for them.

At least I’m not the only one wondering wtf Safeco’s problem is: