Day At The Newseum

Had a good day visiting the Newseum in Washington DC.  Of my favorite exhibits was the Pulitzer prize-winning photographs.  Of the photographs I took there, this one is my favorite.  It’s black and white HDR for those who know what that is.

First Amendment

After 5 years Safari finally gains extensions

Welcome to the real world Safari… Extensions.apple.com is pretty cool, the list of extensions is not as expansive as Firefox’s but it’s a great start with very solid extensions already listed.

Lisboa – Church of Santa Maria Maior – Organ

Having just gotten back from Portugal I keep thinking of an image that might represent Portugal well. There are too many to count, and certainly there is more to Portugal’s aspect than churches and cathedrals, however, that certainly is one of the most important things of the Portuguese culture and heritage. The image to the left represents the Church of Santa Maria Maior in Lisboa (Lisbon). At the time the organist was playing a beautiful piece of music that really filled the church and all it’s grandeur. Perhaps the image doesn’t do full justice to the beauty of this church and this organ, but it’s as close as I could come to it.

R

Why is Audi’s service getting worse?

For the past few years I’ve owned Audis. I recently got a new 2009 Audi A4 Avant with all frills and thrills. Sales department was great all the way to purchase etc.

Since getting this car last October, I’ve had nothing but steering-related problems with it. Perhaps it doesn’t help that I have the fancy Drive Select, but you figure if it’s in there it must work. The issues I’ve had are varied including:

• Very weird sound from inside the steering column
• Steering Vibration at 62-65 mph
• Very bad vibration when parking he car and maneuvering at real slow speeds. The vibration feels like the wheels are slipping when you turn on a concrete floor (if you’ve done that before) but much more pronounced.
• Rattling noise from the back of the car in the trunk area

I buy Audis because they’ve had one of the best reliability records, for me at least, in the last 8 years. My previous Audis I’ve taken to the shop for regular maintenance and perhaps a blown turn signal bulb. This one sees the shop once a month.

The issue for me is not so much the inconvenience of taking it to the shop, it is that I have to keep taking it, and this dang shop can’t fix the problem. I don’t know if it’s the shop’s fault or not, the folks there seem to be honest enough, and they’re certainly trying, but something is just not right. You don’t take a car into the shop 8 times or so and not get something completely done and taken care of.

The first issue listed above was taken care of when they changed the steering box.
The last issue turned out to be the top cover of the trunk that was rattling and they’ve been trying to jerry-rig it in various ways so it stops doing it. They’ve had some success, but it still does it from time to time. I know it’s a slight rattling noise, but when you fork over 40+k on a car, you expect quality in workmanship and design. This isn’t exactly exemplary of what’s consider good workmanship. Why the dealership didn’t just change the piece, I don’t know. I’ve asked, and got no concrete response.

The middle 2 issues are an ongoing problem. The dealership has even sent my wheels to a special shop to straighten them claiming that aluminum wheels are sensitive to bumps and they bend. OK really? I’ve owned Audis with Aluminum wheels, 18″ all of them, and never had this problem. Dealership claims they were bent and that was the cause of the vibration in the steering. OK. I take the car home, drive it, seems fine. I go on vacation and come back, vibration is back. Are the wheels sensitive to parking? Come on.

The thing is though, as I search the web forums I can see others with Audi A4′s and A5′s complaining of the same thing and that Audi had a recall on the rack and pinion to fix it. I’ve mentioned it to the dealership and got the usual “We have to look at the VIN to see if there’s a problem reported and a recall posted”. Yet those posts on the web seem to say their dealership fixed their problem.

The issue with the slow speed maneuvering… again an issue talked about on the forums and fixed by other dealerships… there’s where I am completely losing my patience and am at a loss. The dealership says they can reproduce the problem. They say there is no recall for my VIN number, so it’s not related to any other recall I guess. They say they contacted Audi who gave them a Technical Service Bulletin (TSB) saying this is a reported issue, however, Audi doesn’t give them a fix. So, they send me home with “We’ll call you when Audi tells us how to fix it”. Really? What is problem, or the way it’s dealt with any different from other car owners who’ve had this problem fixed? Is my VIN not worthy?

What happened to fixing cars? Did cars get that complex that shops can only:
1- Look at the onboard computer
2- Look for a recall by VIN
3- Contact mother ship and ask, get an TSB with no solution
4- Send customer home

I mean can a dealership not try to troubleshoot the problem themselves and fix it? Take a wild guess, replace a part see if it fixes it? What happened to customer service Audi? Is this a problem with all dealerships and car manufacturers now? If the cars are getting that complex, should we not be improving the technician’s training so that they can actually troubleshoot and understand the damn cars? If cars are getting that complex, are we to believe that great companies like Audi and BMW don’t put in enough thought into how something might get repaired if it broke and make the technician’s life easier?

I got one of those surveys after you take the car in to give them my opinion. The last time I filled it out and complained, everyone at the dealership fell off their chairs and were begging me to let them fix it and they were almost at my mercy. Those surveys seems to affect people’s income, and the dealership’s status with Audi. So I contacted my service guy (who btw seems to never return calls when you expect them to) and left a voicemail (surprise…) letting him know I have the survey, and unless there’s a solution to this problem, I’m going to be voicing my opinion, and they can all got to hell.

This is really disappointing. A consumer shouldn’t have to come to this point, and a car company should be more responsive/responsible.

Best.
R

ps. My dealership is Audi of Alexandria in Alexandria VA, which according to some google comments seems to have many problems with their service department. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten better response from other dealerships since I didn’t buy the car from them.

NetNewsWire or Google Reader

I stepped on google reader for rss reading about a month ago, and yes I know it’s been out for a lot longer, and decided to give a spin. I’ve been using NetNewsWire for a few years now, and saw it grow into a pretty mature and quite easy to use RSS feed reader.

If you haven’t used it yet, google reader is at http://reader.google.com.

Google reader took a bit of getting used to. Getting setup was fairly easy though, I exported my feeds from NNW including the sub groups so I can maintain folder structure and grouping and imported them into google reader. Easy enough.

At first glance I think google reader can be a bit busy and overwhelming, but I think it’s just because the layout is in a browser as opposed to an actual application with a standard Mac OS UI. Reading the news at a glance was fairly easy. I liked the various options of tagging and sharing the info with others. It was interesting to add notes to items you share, though I don’t know how often folks would do that. It seems pretty time consuming, and to me an RSS news reader allows me to fly through info without having to slow down or think about much of anything else. So having to stop to add notes just kind of breaks the rhythm of digesting information. But I’m sure others do their own thing.

The major difference I found between NNW and Google Reader is that in NNW I can use the keyboard to navigate through my feeds while drinking my coffee and further, and more importantly, I can just right arrow to add the news item to a list of news items I want to read once I’m done scanning the headlines. In NNW that shows up as a bar on the right hand side with small screen representations of the page I want to read. There is no way to do that in Google Reader. You can star the item, or you can click on the >> button to go to the news page and read there. I found that to be incredibly inefficient. I guess if I wanted to simulate the same thing, I could hold down the command key (on a mac) and click on the >> and that would add a tab, but then again that means using 2 hands to do the same thing as [right arrow].

Google Reader does have an advantage and something I enjoy: Top Recommendations. There is something to be said for the reader to look at your feed and determine your interests, and then suggest other feeds you may not be aware of. I’ve discovered a couple of interesting feeds I am keeping my eye on that way.

So what’s preventing me from switching to google reader? Strangely enough it has nothing to do with the features of Google Reader itself. I run my own domain using google apps, and therefore I have my login with my own email address etc… on the google servers. When you use google reader, it seems to ONLY log you in with your gmail account, and not your own domain account running off of google. To me that’s just silly. I want to have a Start Page portal from my domain google account to include my reader, and I can’t because of that lacking feature.

It’s really a bummer, because I’ve noticed a few google services lacking that interaction, and I would be using more google stuff if they get their butts in gear and integrate such good and useful applications into the individual, domain-based, google services.

In the end, I’m still in NNW and enjoying it, perhaps one day when google gets around to it they’ll add more integration, perhaps allow you to control Google Reader with a keyboard and add a shortcut so you can quickly cue up news items you want to read while you’re perusing headlines.

One more thought to note. I use NNW and Google Reader on my iPhone and google has done a tremendous job with that interface, and definitely trumps NNW in ease of use. Sadly because of the previously mentioned issues, I have to stick to NNW right now because there is no way to keep both readers synchronized.

R

Town Hall my ass…

1 hour;  That’s all I could take of this Town Hall presidential debate.  This thing is ridiculous.  How much more can McCain lie and mislead people?  How many more times do I have to listen to McCain call me his friend? “My friends, we can do this, we’re the greatest nation on earth, we’re the hardest working people on earth,” sorry not anymore my friend and you helped put us there.  How many times do I have to hear him repeat like a broken record that he’s reached across the isle?  What did he do, squeeze a senator’s butt?  I am so fed up with this guy it’s ridiculous.  I keep thinking maybe he’ll say something that gets my attention, but he didn’t once answer the question and take a position on anything.  Even when choosing to prioritize 3 of the top issues in the country, he said he’d do all 3 at the same time.  What?  With what money and budget?  One moment he wants to spend on buying out mortgages, the next he wants to cut spending.  Which is it McCain?  I really think that McCain doesn’t think a good majority of voters look up facts these days.  I think that he can keep throwing wrong information and that we won’t notice it, when places like Fact Check dot org have clearly made the case over and over that McCain is way off the mark more often than not.  And finally, he sounded like he could barely breathe and finish a sentence, he had to often breathe in the middle of a short phrase, what’s up with that?

To be fair, Obama was wearing on me too tonight.  At least I can tolerate listening to him, but Obama and his “Let me say one last thing about this” was getting tiring.  I didn’t like that he also seemed to have to constantly defend himself.  I think he let McCain drive a couple of times, but he did manage to put him to shame on some of the incorrect statements.

The whole thing in fact was like a broken record, and Brokaw couldn’t moderate this Town Hall meeting, he got run over by the straight talk express.  Neither candidates offered anything new.  I didn’t see the point of this whole thing except to take up valuable air time.

lame…

R

Using Word Press as a Web Site with your root www domain

Ok so this is not a total trick, but if you have what I have, it might help you get by with pointing a site with www.yourdomain.com to your wordpress log, and have the home page show up right.

So first the forward.  I, as a Mac user, have a me.com account.  If you use me.com with a combination of iWeb, you can build your site there.  Once you upload your site to iWeb, what you can then do is simply go in iDisk, look for the web -> sites director and in there you’ll see an index.html.  If you edit the index.html to forward to your blog on wordpress, then you’ll effectively have the www as your root domain for your wordpress blog.  Just try it with this one:  http://www.therecordingroom.com.  Now, keep in mind that if you ever publish your iWeb site again, the index will change, so you’ll break that.  So while not a total solution, it is nevertheless a workable one that is reliable.  You can try that with many different free hosting services of course.

Second, as I wanted to have my home page show up first, as opposed to my blog, you can easily set that up in wordpress 2.5 under Settings -> Reading and then choose what page is the page you show, and what page is your blog page.  As per the instructions, you just create a blank blog page in wordpress and set that as your blog reading page in the Reading section.  Then setup a Home page with what ever you want in there, and set that as your start page and voila.  However, there remains a problem:  Some of the templates on the wordpress site will show a double Home tab at the top or even in the Navigation Widget.  There are many suggestions on how to make that work properly around the web, but I found that even with those solutions, the highlighting of tabs gets all screwed up where essentially you get 2 tabs highlighted.  I get around that in a bit of a funny way, but it works.  here is how:

Create a page and call it hidden.

Create a sub page for your Home.

Publish both.

Then go to Settings -> Reading and make the Home page your main page

Edit the hidden page and mark it as unpublished and save.

When you look at your home page now, you’ll see the tabs, and when you go to other pages the highlighting is OK.

This works like that thanks to the fact that WordPress doesn’t seem to update the preference of which page is your home page regardless of its published status (bug?).  So if you first set the hidden page to unpublished, and then add the Home page under it, you won’t be able to choose it in the dropdown of which page is your main page.  However, if you first publish the hidden page, then hide it, the setting for which page is your Home Page doesn’t get affected… until you go in and try to change it again.

Kludgy in both cases, but it works well.

 

R

Palin… Seriously?

I’ll make this brief, there is enough going around on the web about it, but I wanted to kind of unleash a frustration and that’s what blogs are for.

I simply can’t believe the media has given her such an easy pass.  Her debate was not any better than her interview with Catie Kouric, she was coached a little more, but that’s about it.  Have we set the bar so low that we don’t care about who’s up in the white house anymore?  Only 2 weeks ago the media was screaming about how she is “one heart beat away from the presidency,” and now we’re just giving her a free pass because our expectations were SO LOW that she passed, that we are breathing a sigh of relief that she is not as bad as she could have been.  Seriously?

Palin is dense and disrespectful, she’s not an expert in the environment, nor is she an expert in anything worth mentioning.  Judging from her language skills, her lack of basic high school education is sorely apparent.  Suddenly we think that Joe Six Pack, and Hockey Mom are endearing terms which helps us connect with her?  Have we suddenly all turned into hicks?  If I use the word hick does that endear you to me?  And what’s with making a shout out to 3rd graders?  Can we blaspheme this debate and election process anymore than she has?

She unfortunately symbolizes the mediocrity we have come to accept, and she symbolizes everything that is wrong with us.  Bush has set the bar so low, anything looks better, and I guess especially if that person is wearing designer glasses.  McCain picks her and he’s a Maverick??? Are we seriously that brain washed as to think that this is a good pick for ANY Vice President position? Carly Fiorina, who advises McCain, doesn’t even think either of them can run a corporation, so we’re OK with her being the VP of the company?

If we all got our collective heads out of our butts, including the media who for some reason is running scared instead of feasting on this like hungry wolves, we might know just a little more about the rest of the world, and would think twice about being ok with someone in any administration just clicking pretty red buttons to blow whole civilizations to smithereens because we were wronged, and claim that we can win anything. Our understanding of things as they stand in the middle east and persia is so far off reality, that no one really knows what they’re saying anymore. We’ve lost focus of the important things, and we’ve let the ruling parties do away with anything that made me love the place I migrated to 24 years ago. It’s a shame.

Folks are afraid of Obama.  Why?  Because we were brainwashed into thinking he’s an extremist muslim?  The guy is a Christian, and the fact that he’s had a muslim background only makes him that much more diverse… LIKE THIS COUNTRY…  And that also perhaps makes him a little more balanced into his thinking and understanding the whole picture of what we need to do to go back to where we were.

Government that have this kind of control over their people, manage to divide them, divide families and their opinions, confuse everyone so no one knows what’s going on, and in the end, ‘We The People’ lose.  Folks, if we don’t get the right person in the White House this time around, remember what happened to Russia after the fall of the Berlin wall, and how long it’s taken it to come back to any level of respectability amongst nations.  Expect a lot more and worse of the same.

R

MobileMe – The Saga Continues

Is anyone tired of this yet? I don’t know that I’ll have many more posts to throw up about MobileMe after this one because I am getting real close to giving up.

So in my quest to figure out if I want to use Google Apps for all my stuff or MobileMe, I decided to give MobileMe’s mail fetch feature a try. The feature is where you can point your mobile me account to another account and have it fetch your email over pop3.

So I went to MobileMe, mail preferences, and decided to setup the fetch feature. I entered all the information as I would have for gmail in my Mail.app account, I tested it from there to make sure I did that right, clicked save, and waited. OOPS, MobileMe can’t connect to gmail mail. So I checked gmail to make sure I had pop3 enabled, and I did, I checked a bunch of settings, setup Mail.app to make sure it could connect to gmail, and it could. Spent a good 40 minutes chasing things down… no joy.

So thanks Apple, you made my decision easy, Gmail for everything, MobileMe for my image gallery. I know it seems silly to keep MobileMe just for the image gallery, but the thing is that I have a family account and we use 3 of the 4 accounts. Because of that it’s actually cheaper to use MobileMe than it normally would, and when they fix everything, then I’ll re-enable sync services and all that good stuff. I know I could use Picassa, but I don’t like their layouts and presentations. I like what iWeb does, and I like that I can organize my albums from Gallery using Aperture (when they fix it), and it makes my workflow real simple. In the end I end up with a very nice looking web site, with very little effort (when they fix it)

Apple need to take MobileMe to the next level, and they need to match up to what Google does. They don’t need to do everything google does, but here are the things they should do:

• Allow for multiple Fetch accounts, right now you can only do one
• Allow for more domain mappings. Let me map mail.domain.com and have it go to mail on mobile me.
• Allow me to reply from the account the email was addressed to, not just somename@me.com
• Allow me to map gallery.domain.com to go directly to my gallery page like www.domain.dom forwards to the home page
• Give me a feature where I can link songs to build my music page, for songs I write, from iDisk. That may exist already, but it’s not obvious, I need to dig around in iWeb to see what it can do.
• For the family package allow me to host multiple domains so that other family members can get emails to different domains if they wish.
• A real blog feature like WordPress (hope I don’t get kicked off) and not like the blog page they claim to have in iWeb which has no way to accept comments.
• A way to build interactive database-backed websites. Perhaps an AJAX web version of WebObjects with a 4GL-Ajax interface?

Those would make MobileMe some real compelling reasons for folks to use it. Don’t charge extra for it, make it part of the dang service. Don’t nickel and dime people.

Of course if you really want to take it to the next level, provide a web-based version of the whole iWork suite in Pages, Numbers and Keynote, and don’t charge extra – like google. If you add that, then it would be necessary to integrate groups with those so that we can share all this info.

Everything I list here is not new or innovative, you can find it all in various places just not all in one convenient package, but if you want to compete against a free service like Google, then you’re going to have to match up to some level if you want people to pay. Apple has the advantage of offering sync services, push calendaring/email (when they fix it), and very very nice integration with Macs, so they can gain the upper hand quickly if they just do those simple things.

R

So one thing goes right with MobileMe

So I wanted to see how the domain hosting would work on MobileMe. I edited my account, pointed the domain to www.therecordingroom.com, made a cname change on GoDaddy and waited.

At first I got an error page. I didn’t understand why because the domain was going to Apple’s site, and the error page was very cryptic. After about an hour of fumbling around and looking around the web, I figured out that the page was complaining that I didn’t have a default iWeb page.

Ok I wasn’t pissed. I had iWeb, so I created a simple page and published. Suddenly it all worked.

Do I like this setup? Not sure yet. I was actually impressed with iWeb though. What I really wanted is a link to Gallery on me.com but that doesn’t look like it’s possible, however there are other ways to do all that in iWeb, and that might not be such a bad thing after all.

R

Ps. Posted from iPhone using the very cool WorsPress app! Gotta love open source.