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A Stupid Navigator Tip

I’ve spent a lot of time on this site bashing Time Warner Cable’s Navigator DVR software, and with good reason. It sucks.

But in the interest of fairness, let me share this tip with you I picked up the other day:

To quickly move to a future date in the Program Guide, simply press the right arrow key and then (quickly) press a number button for the day you want to skip ahead to. For example, if you want to skip ahead 6 days in the guide, just press the right arrow key and then press 6.

It’s kind of neat, and saves keypresses over using the “Day” button once you go over two days.

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First News Dump of 2010

– A South Dakota woman named Marguerite Engle tried to break the US intoxication record by passing out in her truck with a blood alcohol content of .708, which is nine times the .08 limit to operate a motor vehicle in most states. Hell, .50 is fatal for most people… but not Marguerite! And lest you think there was some kind of error with the Breathalyzer machine, the cops took a blood sample from her once they got those crazy readings, and the lab confirmed the .708 reading. Marguerite just barely missed the record – .720 – set by a woman in Oregon in 2008. Read more about it here.

– It might seem like a basically harmless prank, but the latest food trend sweeping the nation might actually be a serious felony. It seems that pranksters are adding copious amounts of baking soda to half empty ketchup bottles in restaurants, causing the condiment to explode on the next hapless diner who opens the bottle. Although no one has been injured (aside from ruined clothing), tampering with foodstuffs is a felony offense in many states. So think long and hard before pulling this prank yourself!

– The year 2009 might be remembered for many things, but it will also go down as the first year video games outsold movies in the UK. According to the latest figures, British consumers spent $2.8 billion on video games and $1.93 billion on movies (which includes all DVD\Blu-Ray sales and box office receipts).

– Have you ever seen outrageously mispriced items on Amazon and wondered what it would be like to actually order them? Brian Klug has, and when he spotted the copy of the Discovery Channel’s ‘Cells’ CD-ROM for sale at the low-low price of $2,904,980,000, he decided to order just for kicks. Amazon has already charged his credit card for shipping, but not for the CD-ROM disc itself, which is not sold by Amazon but rather a reseller, suburbanbooks. This article has the lowdown on the story, complete with humorous exchanges from Reddit.

– Google’s Street View cameras catch everything… even a man picking up hookers!

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A Consumer Rant

There’s nothing like Christmas to bring out consumer angst. Here are a few encounters from the past few days that have really been pissing me off:

1

As far back as I can remember, and until I turned 30ish, most retailers would allow you to exchange items. If you bought something that was damaged, or in the wrong size or color, you just went to the customer service desk, and they’d swap it out for you. But sometime in the past 10 years, most big retailers decided to simply have the customer service desk refund your money and let you pick out a new item, resulting in multiple transactions on your credit\debit card (the original purchase, the refund, and the new purchase).

This works out OK for most things, but it sucks for large purchases… and gifts. If you buy an $800 HDTV with a debit card and get it home and find out that it doesn’t work, the retailer’s “new” policies mean that $1600 is now tied up on your debit card, at least for a few days until the refund goes through.

That sucks, but what really sucks if when you get a gift.

My parents gave me an external hard drive for Christmas. I didn’t open it until I got back home, where I found the drive’s back cover warped. The circuit board where you plug in the power adapter and USB cable was also misaligned, and while it probably could have worked, I’m not trusting my data to a drive that looked like it had some rough handling in transit.

Continue reading “A Consumer Rant”

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-10

  • R.I.P. Brittany Murphy 🙁 #
  • We'll miss you, Luanne Platter! #
  • FINALLY! Woo-Hoo! BTW – is it just me, or is Dick Stockton losing his marbles? #

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The Last News Dump of 2009

– You’ve probably seen, or perhaps even purchased, items carrying a Royal Warrant. This is a stamp on the product with the Royal Coat of Arms that usually says “By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen” (“By appointment to HRH The Prince of Wales” or “By appointment to HRH The Duke of Edinburgh” exist, but aren’t nearly as common, especially on products sold in the US). Royal warrants are taken seriously in the UK, and there is a whole system of rules governing their use (example: the Royal Family must purchase a product for five years before it can become eligible to receive a warrant). Royal Warrants are great advertising for companies (“Hey, our product is so great that even the Queen uses it!”), and many use it only as that. Other companies take the Royal Warrant far more seriously. Candy giant Cadbury, first awarded the Royal Warrant by Queen Victoria in 1854, produces a special batch of chocolates for the Royal Family every year. These candy bars, produced on a special production line that lies dormant the rest of the year, are hand delivered to Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Sandringham. They cannot be purchased by anyone else for any price. In fact, this is the first year that the special chocolates were even photographed. This article at the Daily Mail takes a damn interesting look at how the chocolates are made, and the secret world of the Royal Warrant holder.

– People in the United States look at Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as just another utility to be hated along with the power and gas companies. But this isn’t necessarily true in the rest of the world. Some ISPs have fanatical followings in South Korea and France, and this article from Ars Technica looks at some of their practices and talks about how US ISPs could become more user-friendly.

– Speaking of ISPs, this article at Ars talks about how the so-called “bandwidth-hog” might be as fictional as unicorns and leprechauns. Heavy downloaders are often the excuse ISPs use to throttle service, increase rates, and\or block services on their networks. Benoit Felten, a Yankee Group analyst, seems to think it’s much ado about nothing.

Continue reading “The Last News Dump of 2009”

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The Wisdom of Crowds

I was hanging around ESPN’s SportsNation site yesterday when I came across this:

SportsNation Orangle Bowl
(click to enlarge)

Let’s hope that the hive mind is right! After all, they were certainly right about this one:

SportsNation Yankees
(click to enlarge)