Wayne D's Blog

I have formally given up on trying to pay my Rogers bill online at Rogers' website. It used to provide as good of a bill paying experience as one could expect. You could postdate your payments using your credit card so you got points on your card. The Rogers made some "improvements" and removed the ability to post date payments. I continued to pay my Rogers bill there to get the points on my credit card. Over the past couple of months they site seems incapable of processing payments. Today everything seemed to work but the payment confirmation page was blank. The same thing occurred last month and I had to go back a couple of days later and try again. I finally gave up and paid the bill at my bank's website. It does give you pause when you ISP can't get their website to work properly.

About a month ago my wife lost her keys including her Esso RF fob for buying gas at Esso. After about a week I decided I better cancel it before I received a huge credit card bill. I went onto the Esso website and clicked around until I found the proper form to use to cancel the fob. I was then asked if I wanted to replace the fob I had reported as missing. Instead of using the information from the old fob it then took me to a page asking for all the information as if I was applying for a new fob. I could see them asking if I wanted to change any of the information from the old fob but makig me enter it all again was too much and I bailed. I figured I'd call them up and get it done over the phone in much less time. So far a month has passed and I haven't bothered. I guess my wife has been buying her gas with her PetroCan fob instead because she hasn't complained. Come on Esso Canada, do a quick usability studies on your website and save me some aggravation.

Yesterday I foolishly tried to install a linux video chat client on my EEPC. After running apt-get and watching the EEEPC install a whole mess of .deb's I ran the program and it didn't work. I had an inkling of the trouble ahead when I opened a console window instead of the familiar black window I instead was presented with a white window. I rebooted and the system went into an endless reboot loop. Following the helpful info at the EEEPC wiki I managed to get all my data off using an external USB drive and the EEEPC rescue mode before I restored the EEEPC to it's factory settings. After reinstalling xchat and Firefox 3 I ran into a major wrinkle when trying to get Flash 10 working again. Flash 10 requires glibc 2.4 or greater and the EEEPC ships with glibc 2.3. I can't remember for the life of me how I got it to work in the past. The general consensus on the web is that updating to glibc 2.4 will break most of the applications on the EEEPC. (updated Dec. 21) I have come to the conclusion that I must have been running the release candidate that didn't have the glibc 2.4 dependancy requirement. See Flash 10 for the EEEPC, flash camera support without flashcam for two workarounds for the Flash 10 on the EEEPC problem.

I now feel guilty for telling people that Flash 10 will run on their EEEPC when I can't get it going myself. Back to the trenches I go to try to resolve this knotty problem. As soon as I figure out what I did before I'll let you know. Unfortunately resetting the EEEPC has wiped out any of the things that I didn't back up so the trail is now quite cold.

I took my ISP, Rogers to task back in August for hijacking DNS lookup errors and replacing them with a sponsored search page. Image my displeasure this morning when I fired up my Rogers Yahoo web based email and found a large garish ad on the right side of the page. After we had two computers in the house it became more convenient to use webmail so I could access my email from any computer. That was a few years ago and it has worked out well until now. When I got the EEEPC using the Rogers Yahoo webmail client was a bit difficult because of the smaller screen size but it was still usable. With ads it's totally hosed.

I have had a Gmail account for a while but never really used it. Today I decided to change that and drink the Google Koolaid. Gmail is very EEEPC friendly and their ads are much less obtrusive thsn Yaahoo's garish Flash based monstrosities. I have included a couple of EEEPC screenshots below to show the contrast.

I really should thank Roger's Yahoo for making me upset enough to overcome my inertia. I do wonder why Rogers didn't let us know that this change was coming in advance, I bet they didn't think people would be happy about it. If you are also a disgruntled Rogers Yahoo email user Gmail provides a very nice Mailfetcher utility that will suck all your old Yahoo mail in for you.

(updated Nov. 17th) Things became a bit clearer today when I found this Paidcontent.org story on Forbes.com. Turns out Rogers and Yahoo agreed to shift from a fee based deal to a revenue sharing model. Yahoo and Rogers will split revenue that Yahoo can get for advertising to Rogers customers. This probably means that we can expect to see more ads popping up on Rogers Yahoo cobranded properties. My guess, the Flickr Pro accounts we have been enjoying are next. updated May 15th 2009 As predicted our free Flickr pro accounts will soon be history, see the post for a handy tool for downloading your pictures from Flickr.

I was pretty hard on twine.com last time I wrote about them. My views have moderated somewhat since then. Those of you who know me well know that I have a short attention span, a website has about 5 minutes to convince me that it's useful before I move on. Twine has filled a gap for me that has tormented me, sharing bookmarks. Up until I started using Twine.com I would end up emailing bookmarks to colleagues when I wanted to share a website. A couple of times I have bookmarked something at home and wanted to access it at work. I tried to use delicious but then I have to remember to make my bookmarks private so the whole world can't see them. Delicious also doesn't make it as easy to separate bookmarks into categories. A twine is a collection of things, websites, notes comments. Twines can be set to private or public when created. Twine.com provides a helpful bookmark applet you can drag onto your button bar that is far less intrusive than the Delicious.com bookmark too. The best part is that the bookmarklet applet lets you chose which twine you want to add an item to. I suspect I could do the same thing with the delicious.com tool bar but the five minute rule holds, if I have to spend more than five minutes trying to figure out how to do something I am likely to move on.

Though I have found Twine useful I also find it infuriating. The user interface is nonintuitive, it can be slow to respond. I think Twine.com has potential so that's why I'm sticking it out and seeing if it improves. I've documented my concerns on the twine user feedback thread. If you want to sample one of my Twine's you can check out Wikipedia exposed. I had another one I wanted to share but it was originally a private twine. When I changed it to a public twine all of the items I created in it retained their private property and I haven't figured out how to change it yet. If I didn't think Twine.com had potential I'd throw up my hands in frustration and run away but I'm prepared to give them a chance.