OK. I am curious.

No. Not Yellow. Or Blue. Or even George.

I’m curious about this fad that’s shown up in a lot of online (and, I presume, TV and print) advertising lately. The fad for running single words into two or more lines. I’d like to know where it came from and, if I step on it hard enough, can I kill it?

Like in the ads for the energy drink (not the most potent one, water):

TH
AT’S
G

Or the ones for the latest exercise in useless environmental handwaving:

HOPE
NHA
GEN

I can only assume that, late one fine 11th hour before a deadline on Madison Avenue, a stressed graphic artist tried to run too many letters into too small a text box, thereby:

A. Revisiting the joke about planning ahead that has to be at least as old as the wooly mammoth;

B. Reliving the experiences of a gazillion ten-year-old kids and their first experiments with fonts in The Software That Shall Not Be Named®.

The graphic artist, being desperate, pitched his broken-word “design” to the client – who bought it.

And now it’s spreading faster than H1N1.

It has to be stopped. Has to be, I say. Before it catches on in the blogosphere.

I mean,

CAN
YOU
IMA
G
INE
IF
SOM
EON
E
TRI
ED
TO
WRI
TE
A
WH
OLE
POS
T
LIK
E
THI
S?

Hey. Let’s try this out on Twitter …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Damn it, dude!”

“What now, dude?”

“I’ve been telling this browser upgrade message to go away for weeks. My web browser’s been working just fine, thanks, and I don’t want any upgrades messing up my stuff. But now it won’t take ‘no’ for an answer!“

“Well, dude, you do have a choice.”

“Yeah?”

“You can throw the computer away, and go back to reading books instead of websearching, and playing cribbage instead of Doom.”

“AAACK! What’re you tryin’ to do, dude? Give me a heart attack? OK, I’ll do the upgrade.”

“OK, dude, but …”

“But what … Hey!“

“Hey yourself. I’m not your fodder.”

“Not now, dude! I got this browser uploaded OK, but it wants me to upload this player because, its says here, the old one pokes all these security holes in the new browser.”

“‘No one puts new wine into old wineskins …’”

“And just what’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m afraid we’re going to find out. Unless you want me to get out that cribbage board …”

“Download in progress, dude … Now what?!?”

“More upgrades, dude?”

“Seventeen of ‘em. All of ‘em absolutely required by this player upgrade I just downloaded, on the insistence of the browser upgrade I just downloaded, in order for any of ‘em to work properly. I’m going to be here for hours …”

“Maybe less than that, dude. Or more, depending on your point of view.”

“What are you tryin’ to say, dude … Jesus this laptop’s gotten hot! And what’s that racket?”

“Y’mean, the hard drive spinning out of control?”

“I’m glad somethin’s spinnin’. The screen’s so slow, it’s like there was a human in there moving each pixel by hand. I’ll have to get a new hard drive to speed things up.”

“I wouldn’t bother, dude.”

“Why not?“

“Because if you try to speed up your computer with a new hard drive, you’ll discover that it can’t handle all the upgrades unless you also upgrade the RAM. And if you upgrade the RAM, you’ll discover that it can’t handle the upgrades unless you can somehow replace all the busses. And if you’re geek enough to replace all the busses, you’ll discover that they can’t handle all the upgrades unless you replace the chip … Aren’t you going to look at that popup window?”

“What popup window? I frickin’ disabled the popup windows. What are these upgrades doin’ to me?”

“Pushing you into the market for a new computer, dude? One that can handle all the upgrades you just downloaded? For maybe six months? At a cool five grand?”

“DUUUUUUUDE!! I don’t got five bucks, never mind five grand!“

“Guess you’d better start pounding out those pay posts, Mr. Payperblaug.com.”

“With what?!? My machine’s frozen solid, won’t let me do anything except stare at that [expletives deleted] computer ad! What do I do now?!?“

“Cribbage?”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

For at least the last year or so, if I’ve wished to get from somewhere to somewhere else here on O‘ahu, I’ve pointed my browser at Google’s transit service. Type in a “to” and “from” address, hit “return”, and presto, an itinerary appeared, complete with bus schedules and transfers and a map of the journey. It even presented me with driving and, if I were crazy enough, walking directions. It must have been a pretty good system, because the Honolulu bus system website took away most of its own online travel advice section and pointed its riders to Google.

Did you pick up on the past tense? “Appeared”, “presented”, “must have been” …

Because it’s gone now.

Oh, you can still type in the URL and the transit website appears. You still can type in your addresses and hit “return”, and presto …

Nothing.

No, sorry, not nothing. “We have no bus schedule information for these addresses on the date you specified”. Oh, c’mon! I’ve been using these same addresses for the last six months! Hell, the browser even types them in for me. Whaddaya mean you “have no information”? Did somebody forget to pay a bill? Is theBus going broke?

Or, is Google?

In case you missed it, Google has invested heavily in online data management services. Calendars. Document storage and retrieval systems. Secure (they claim) corporate communications networks. During 2008, it seemed that the Googlers were coming up with a new wrinkle every week. And users flocked to their systems.

If the plug were pulled tomorrow …

Yes, you may call me Eeyore. Even Chicken Little. As loudly and as often as you like. But before you start tuning up, let me ask you. How many times in the latter half of 2008 did you hear politicians and economists of all persuasions (at least, those persuasions who had access to the mass media) pooh-pooh worries that We might descend into a repeat of the Great Depression? “We know too much”, they said. “We know how to handle this. It can’t happen to us.”

As of today (3 March 2009), the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dipped below 7000. Both the current unemployment rate in the United States and its rate of increase almost exactly parallel the numbers observed in 1930. President Yeswecan sees no end in sight. Even Toyota is begging for handouts. And the Dust Bowl looms in California.

What can’t happen to us?

Just remember, when the blogosphere goes dark because all the service providers have gone the way of General Motors, you read about it here.

If you can spare a thought for such things while you’re waiting in the bread line.

See you there.

UPDATE 3 Mar 09: Back in January, the same thing happened to Google Transit in Providence, RI. In that case, Google had “lapsed” data from Providence; a few days later, the link was restored. With luck, the same thing will happen here.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Poor Quilly’s Vista machine keeps cutting out on her. This weekend, she’s had to use my old Mac …

============

“Having fun yet, dude?”

“&$*(#*^*#@&!!!!“

“I take it that’s a ‘no’?”

“How the hell do you go through the day without taking a bite out of this Apple? Or a hundred of ‘em, more likely??”

“But, dude! On this machine, everything works. Most of the time, anyway. Unlike some operating systems I could name. And besides.”

“Besides what, dude?”

“You leave my RAM alone.”

“The only good your RAM is doing is making me feel sheepish. What difference does it make if everything on here works beautifully if I can’t find any of it?”

“So you can’t even drive on five percent of the roads?”

“Leave my driving out of this! The desktop, the file management system, the Utilities programs, it’s all weird, man!”

“You own a machine where you push the ‘Start’ button to shut it down, and you’re calling my box ‘weird’? Listen to yourself, dude! You know, of course, that Bill Gates had to make his stuff look different from the Mac.”

“For why, dude?”

“Copyright infringement, dude.”

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“Copyright this.”

“Dude, sometimes I’m glad we don’t do video.”

“I want my Windows back!!“

“In the hope that you might actually be able to open some of them? Well, I suppose you could always try that new Mojave thing.”

“Now you’re talkin’, dude. I have been to the desert, and I have seen the light!“

“Sheesh. Next trip out, dude, remember to bring the water.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions expressed are mine, as a private citizen.

Some of you who are regulars with Quilly, and have visited here, may remember when Quilly and I started wrestling, unsuccessfully, with a new printer we’d bought. A lot more folk visited the blistering review I wrote, so much so that the review post is the second most popular of all the entries on this blog. The Lexmark people boasted that their x4850 box would print and do all sorts of other things wirelessly, possibly with the exception of slicing bread. And we could not get the thing to talk to our computers without a wire … and sometimes, even with a wire. For ten months, we got nowhere …

Until today. Today, everything works perfectly.

No, it wasn’t sunspots, planetary alignments, Murphy taking a holiday, or even Jesus.

It was a dead router.

Y’see, a couple of days ago, the router we’d been using for our abode’s wireless network stopped delivering wireless. Picked it up, it was hotter than a Macbook on your lap hell, and though the lights were on, there was nobody home. The thing was dying of old age – and it hadn’t seen its first birthday yet.

We two were less than pleased about being dumped into the 21st-century equivalent of the Dark Ages by a device that had a far shorter concept of “lifespan” than we did. So, willy-nilly, we ventured into the roiling Black Friday Weekend waters in search of a geek store that had routers in stock. We found one, we got one, and we got out alive. To spend a good chunk of that evening plugging wires in and out, filling out virtual forms, and pattering around with passwords. Finally, Quilly was able to post and read her emails. And it wasn’t even close to sunrise.

The next day (which, it happens, is today, 30 Nov 08 CE), it occurred to me to try the old printer on the new network. Of course it wouldn’t work on the old network, it never did and now it never would, since that was the network that was, and now wasn’t. Naturally, I’d long ago lost the printer’s setup utility, and there was no way to get it back without, for the 5,932nd time, downloading the x4850 printer driver.

Download. Expand. Install. Configure. Print.

Well I’ll be [expletives deleted].

The whole thing went flawlessly, and took less than 15 minutes.

To judge from the traffic that the old post continues to get, I reckon lots and lots of people are having trouble with the wireless setup on the Lexmark x4850. Our lesson: check your router.

The NetGear WGR614 v7 works.

The Belkin F5D8233-4 doesn’t.

Who knows what other do / don’t combinations are out there.

Dammit, we almost had it right away. From the original post:

OK, it’s the router. Don’t know where the router instructions are, don’t have the patience to dig them up. Bedtime.

Big mistake.

Of course, if there had been any indication from Lexmark that router incompatibility might be an issue …

– O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This blog entry was first posted on Felloffatruck Publications on 23 February 2008. It’s the only review that ever appeared on this site. I reposted it on 27 July 2008, firstly ’cause it attracted a fair bit of interest at the time, including from a person at Lexmark, and secondly ’cause, after six months, things had only gotten worse. And traffic on this post and elsewhere on the Web suggested that lots of other people were having trouble too. Naturally, after more than 10 months, we finally got the thing to work. If you’ve found this post while searching for up-to-date comments on this printer, read this post first. And if you’re having connectivity issues, be prepared to check, and possibly replace, your wireless router.

==============

First, the review. Then, my explanation for why I’m doing it here.

The Lexmark X4850 Printer is one of those “inexpensive” (a duke’s ransom instead of a king’s; the street price would still, even with what’s happened to food and fuel prices lately, buy a couple of week’s worth of groceries for a family of four) 3-in-1 jobs – copier, printer, scanner. Its extra wrinkle is that it’s supposedly wireless. Set it up and send your print jobs from anywhere within the range of your wireless network. Sounds like a great idea if your home or office has a wireless network already going, eh?

BZAAAAAT!!!

After two weeks of wrestling with it, with both a Mac OS10.4 and a Windows Vista system, I can safely tell you, that, if you’re in the market for something like this, buy something with a good old fashioned USB or Firewire connector, and forget about spending the premium for a wireless connection that DOES NOT EXIST.

I must have tried to install the printer driver for this thing about seventeen times. The actual driver installation was flawless, so far as I can tell. The problem came with the wireless setup. Half the time, the Setup Utility for wireless would tell me that the configuration failed. OK, back up and start again. Uninstall, reboot, reinstall, fail, uninstall, reboot, reinstall. Oh, it worked! Cool. Print something.

Y’think? “Word cannot find the printer.” If Word (or any other utility that will allegedly print a page) doesn’t just simply hang. Force quit, uninstall, reboot, reinstall. Troubleshoot. Computer in wireless mode sees the IP address of the printer, all other systems are supposedly GO. Fine, machine, so Print something. Nothing.

OK, it’s the router. Don’t know where the router instructions are, don’t have the patience to dig them up. Bedtime.

Which is where the situation got left until Quilly tried to print with her Windows Vista machine. Same problems, same conclusion. Until she hooked up her computer to the printer via USB, printed a page, and two came out. The printer had read the file in wireless mode and placed it in the print queue, but refused to activate the queue until it was wired to a computer.

It so happened that Quilly’s problem was solved by rebooting the computer and the printer enough times so that both machines stopped standing at opposite ends of the room, arms folded and looking anywhere but at each other, and condescended to communicate.

But meanwhile, my Mac got a case of the dreaded flashing question mark and had to go to the shop, from which it returned with a new hard drive, a new Mac OS 10.5.1, and not much else. It didn’t need all that ruddy inconvenient data and software anyway. Including the 4850’s printer driver. Which I reinstalled. For all the good it did. The computer and printer still won’t talk to each other via wireless. And now, they won’t talk to each other over the USB cable either.

Just maybe some one of you out there has a high enough geek quotient to understand what’s happening and what to do next. My experience with people paid to have such a geek quotient can be summarized by “ka-CHING for him, wasted time and money for me”. And a recent websearch suggests that I’m far from the only one who has had this experience lately. The only thing I’ve worked out to do that doesn’t spit in the face of the law of diminishing returns is:

a) Don’t buy Lexmark products again.

b) Tell everyone not to buy Lexmark products – certainly not this one.

Now, silly me (the “explanation” part of this post starts here), I thought the place to post this review was, not on my blog, but on one of the many “product review” sites that are out there. After all, type in “lexmark X4850 review” on your favorite websearch engine, and these sites are what come up first. And, begging your pardon, I don’t want to tell just you regular readers “Don’t buy this piece of crap”. I want to tell everybody.

So I start writing down on one of these sites just what I told you.

Then I looked down at the bottom of the page …

“Please register to post your review.”

Oh no you don’t, donkeybottoms. I know a ka-CHING when I see one. Not to mention a spam gateway. You can keep your filthy, sewery hands the [string of expletives deleted] out of my pockets. You’ll disturb the moths.

I must have looked at half a dozen of these sites. Same thing every time.

So, fine. The review gets posted here. For all the good it will do. Might as well be a gnat in the basement of the Lexmark corporate offices. But, for all you “glass half full” people out there, I guess I got to tell somebody. Lucky you.

Why do we put up with this stuff anyway? I mean, how many times do we have to hear about people making more money than most countries from computer products that don’t work?!? In case you didn’t know:

Bill Gates, according to the 2007 Forbes magazine estimate, is worth, by himself, around US$56 billion.

The 2006 gross domestic product for the State of Hawai‘i – the entire frickin’ state – was $58 billion. Fourteen US states – and 125 countries – had 2006 GDPs less than that of Hawai‘i.

The If Windows were a car gag has to be a decade old now if it’s a minute (see also here, and tell her Quilly sent you), but what’s changed from:

Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

Eh? Especially the “you would simply accept this” part?

Quilly and I had a conversation not long ago about a blog post from a person who was complaining bitterly about the price for her season tickets to some sports team or other – not to mention the parking, the concessions, the this, the that. “When”, this person asked, “is this all going to end?”

The two of us came up with the same answer at the same time.

When you stop buying the tickets.

Excuse me while I shut this blog down, turn off the computer, toss it in the bin, and go look for pencil and paper.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

It wasn’t even a month ago, as those of you who read Quilly’s blog will remember, that she shelled out some of her hard-earned dinero for a new laptop computer. And you’ll remember how excited she was to have it.

Well, the machine has repaid her devotion.

With the blue screen of death.

Yeah.

The [expletive deleted] machine isn’t even 30 days old, and the hard drive is gone. Taking with it that lovely library of photographs (like those here and here and here and here) that she’s been accumulating over the last month. And Quilly knows what else.

And all this after constant battles with Windows Vista Home Premium that, after it was too late, I’ve found echoed in the weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and cries for continued support of Windows XP (or else), that are splashed like the blood of the innocents all across the Internet.

Quilly was far too polite to mention it, but we spent considerable bandwidth, in the days leading up to the purchase, debating what to get. As a confirmed Macaholic and Windowphobe, I was (to say no more) uncomfortable with the purchase of a PC-type machine – any PC-type machine – but I couldn’t argue with the fact that the PC-types are cheaper. Not to mention more abundant (and hence easier to network and get WiFi for).

Quilly was also far too polite to mention that her first attempts to buy an inexpensive laptop computer, at an electrical metropolis that shall remain nameless to spare the blushes of the offenders (I’m catching Quilly’s spirit of charity, sorta), were obvious bait-and-switch ploys.

Well, the call’s been placed (a real person actually answered the phone in real time), the problem’s been diagnosed, and the solution reached. The laptop will be repaired or replaced by the manufacturer, and delivered unto my co-blogger.

In three weeks.

Three ruddy weeks.

And my machine will be working – the class I teach starts tomorrow today (16 July 2007).

There are community computers here at the Friday Harbor Labs, which Quilly is welcome to use as a member of the FHL community. So, I trust, she won’t be completely cut off from the Internet during times when I and my laptop are away. But spare her a thought anyway … and drop her a line. I can at least read to her any comments that show up here …

Get a Mac!

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.