Why I prefer to hire DIYers

The curse of any DIY job is: you have to do it right the first time. You have no idea what to do, and you can't afford a mistake. You must become as proficient as professionals are, in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost.

So what you do is you learn to learn. You learn how to solve problems the very existence of which you never knew. You think outside of the box, you work beyond limits.

That beats someone who does only the things they were taught to do any time of day.

And Tell Me Stereotyping Doesn't Work

Couple of weeks ago, third generation Mustang driving dude, tattooed, pierced, no shirt, rear-ends my car, gives me a smug smile, offers "Don't worry, this is what insurance is for, ha-ha-ha", and drives away.

So tell me, why am I not surprised to find out that the bastard is hiding from both my and his own insurance company, which, though puts him into a position of "guilty by default", makes me responsible for paying for the damages that he caused?

And don't you ever tell me stereotypes are wrong.

Quote Of The Day: Positioning

Never put another man in a corner where the only way out is over you.

-- here

Android Market Trend: Greed

There was abundance of good Android applications on Android Market from the very beginning, when it was free. Then, paid applications showed up, and "Pro" and "Donate" apps started appearing.

Then, developers realized that the fact that there's been 250k downloads for the free app doesn't necessarily mean that there will be at least 10k downloads for the paid app, you're lucky if you get 10 - sometimes it's the user's greed, sometimes it's just the fact that the app is good enough as free, but doesn't withstand any criticism as paid, and paying for it is mostly a honor of recognition thing.

Then, the developers got greedy and started silently removing features from free applications and offering them only with paid versions thereof. Take into account the fact that you can't downgrade the application on Android (and I suspect that you can't even hold upgrading, Market does it for you automatically if you keep ignoring the notification long enough).

My prediction is that it's going to backfire, this way or that.

Yes, I know that it sucks that people are willing to take your work for free, but don't want to pay (I am a software engineer as well, remember?).

However, whereas more expensive objects' acquisition is decided upon the price and the merits, the price here is so low, it's immaterial in comparison with impression. And if you're pulling features out of your free stuff - not only you're not allowing new Android Market users to see the benefits of it, you're also creating the impression of racket. You're betraying my trust into you, and taking away what you already gave me.

You are not irreplaceable. Even if I was considering making a donation worth a few minutes of my time (longer to process the transaction than to earn it), I'm not considering it anymore. There will be others that will fill the gap created by you, and they will do it better than you and possibly cheaper than you, for they'll learn on your mistakes.

Play nice, will ya?

Screw The Hybrids

With bitter aftertaste, read a note about how Toyota is using patents to slow the growth of hybrid vehicles. Cursed the system for a bit, and then suddenly thought that I can confidently say "screw the hybrids" and not have the green people aim for my throat.

How come, you say? You, with your eight cylinder 4.4L gas guzzler (overstatement, but all right for the scope), how can you have your conscience clear?

Easy.

Instead of engaging into dubious arguments about hybrid battery environmental impact, I just don't drive it, that's all. I have made a conscious decision and gone telecommuting, and now the monster is sitting quietly under the tent six days out of seven.

So I can enjoy my car while attracting the envy, hate and spite of "environmental activists", and at the same time be way more green than they claim to be, driving their always shiny hybrids around (shiny... Do you know how much water and chemicals get dumped to waste during a routine car wash?).

But that's the way it always works, right? There are those who actually do the work, and there are the vocal ones that get the credit for doing it...

Antec Warranty: You've got to be kidding me

Remember, I was furious about dead Antec Phantom 500?

Finally, they did send up a replacement. They notified me about that a day after I, completely pissed, decided to bite the bullet and bought the replacement, Corsair CMPSU-750TX.

Another two weeks passed by, and finally the replacement from Antec came (by the way, I was never notified of a tracking number). The computer where Phantom died was operational again, so I was not in a hurry to open the box, and it was just laying in the corner.

Today, I've decided to clean up the shop and opened the box. And you won't believe what I've found inside.

Antec NeoPower 650 Blue.

I' missing something here. I've sent you a FANLESS PSU. You send me back one WITH A FAN. Could've had some common decency and told me upfront that you don't manufacture Phantoms any more, and can't send it back. I would've understood, or maybe would've asked for some sort of redemption - all in all, I've decided not to buy Antec PSUs any more. But no, you had to sneak up on me and make me exert extra efforts to call your RMA department (See Figure 1, also here) and figure out whether it was a mistake and Antec does have some spare Phantoms and they will fix it (provided I pay for shipping, both ways, of course), or I've just been had and now I'm stuck with this Blue <censored>.

I think I'm done with Antec for real this time. Not just the PSUs, everything.

UPDATE (2009/08/03): fail. Less than two months.

Unorthodox Love

The Other Side of You

The Way They Think

A few years ago I've started working at a new place. Several days later, a guy (that I knew by then was driving E30 M3) approached me, and the following conversation followed:

- [him] I saw your car.
- [me] And?
- I looked inside.
- And?
- You drive a stick.
- And?
- Otherwise I would've had to stop talking to you.

Google as Janus, Janus as Google

Google taketh away, Google gives back with abundance.

Whether the right hand knoweth what doth the left, is irrelevant. The result is more than slightly amusing to watch.

I can just imagine the magnitude of quirks of power plays that we, regular mortals, do not see.

UPDATE: The demand turned out so high, the Measurement Lab had to redesign their web site and get rid of images - I guess the bandwidth consumption went through the roof. Nice to know there's many of us who care.

Open Letter To BMW Dealerships

To whom it may concern:

I just called the <witheld to protect the guilty> dealership to verify what part numbers I need for a specific repair, and was told "We do not give out part numbers, only prices".

I was understandably shaken, because, you know, BMW is a pretty complicated car, and it is kind of difficult to make sure that you are not spending hundreds, and even more often, thousands of dollars just to piss off the seller even more when it turns out that the part you've bought doesn't fit, because it is not the part you actually needed, or the car the part is for is not the car you have (and I don't have to explain to you how many different sub-revisions BMW has).

When I got over the shock, I said, "Why?" and got the answer "Because people call us just to find out part numbers, waste our time and then go buy the same parts on Internet".

Well...

Tough shit.

You were not shy to leverage your unique position of the seller of "The Ultimate Driving Machine" when you were selling the car to us.

You were not shy to gouge us by upselling expensive options that you knew would be wrong or deadly (rear side airbags in a sedan to the family with two kids about five years of age - you knew they will come disabled, with a big red sticker, right?)

You were not shy to repeatedly screw us over by providing substandard service (any BMW owner knows the difference between "BMW quality" and "BMW service quality").

While doing that, you were not shy to charge exorbitant prices for parts and service.

And now you are complaining?

Well, tell you what - you keep doing that, and I will sell my BMW to anyone stupid enough to buy it, given all the above, never buy a BMW again, and switch to a brand that is customer friendly. I've had just about enough of your attitude.

Oh, and I have a suggestion for you - you are in a best position to compete with independent parts retailers because you have direct access to *the* original equipment manufacturer, and you already have distribution channels set up. Why don't you actually start leveraging your competitive advantage instead of screwing us over?

And then, maybe, just maybe, the artificially inflated price becomes appealing enough that somebody will part with their hard earned money and buys the product you're selling, and you, yes, you don't lose your job.

What The Cake, Indeed?

First, an intelligent person with a sense of humour and purpose in life does a useful thing and publishes the Cupcake app, the lightning rod for idiots and trolls. Hats off for that.

And then, this masterpiece gets published, with derogatory remarks towards the author of the above app.

Well, let me just say that I'm going to revisit my opinion about phandroid. Either I lost my sense of humour, or someone's just had a lapse of judgement.

Am I missing something?

Google Sync Fiasco: And this is all I get?

On November 19th my phone gets crippled by Google Sync update, along with countless others.

On December 1st there is the first sign of recognition coming from Google, in a form of employee posting on a help message board.

That'll be 13 (thirteen) days to acknowledge a problem that is usually classified as Severity 1 (data loss, customers affected), and, in a way that does not reach the customers that may be affected.

I don't know what to call it - incompetence? arrogance? sabotage?

All this time, clueless (not necessarily stupid, but simply uninformed) people flocked in like moth to the fire, attracted by long awaited contact synchronization feature. Only to find it breaks their phones, renders them next to unusable, and loses their data in the process (no backup? we told ya, look up terms of service!).

It is still happening, even now. Sync hasn't been pulled off.

Time to invoke Hanlon's Razor?

Google Sync 0.5.11 for BlackBerry: no, make that a fail

Contrary to what I thought, all the problems brought in by Sync 0.5.9 are still back.

The address book is still botched on the device, there are entries with no information present whatsoever (though I checked them before doing the sync, and they appeared to be fine after the sync).

Sync doesn't appear to honor the "sync manually" option and is doing something in background, destroying address book entries in the process.

Most ridiculous is that the problems with 0.5.9 were never offically acknowledged, and 0.5.11 never officially announced. Tsk-tsk-tsk.

Google Sync 0.5.9 for BlackBerry: What A Royal Pain

For the last four days, I'm dealing with the consequences of upgrading my BlackBerry Curve to Google Sync 0.5.9, with Contacts.

Even though the Curve is now gone to a different user, and I'm working with GMail and G1, but the consequences of a botched release are still biting me in the back.

Over two hundred entries in the address book, most of them with 7 or 8 postal address copies. Yes, for some reason it is either seven or eight - guess that was a number of attempts the sync application made before I realized that each new attempt is making things worse and shut it off.

Same for phone numbers - there's lots of duplicates. Each notation for a number (999-999-9999, 999.999.9999, (999) 999-9999, you name it) gets a unique entry.

I'm not even talking about NullPointerException.

Good thing I don't have to deal with the BlackBerry address book anymore, I can only imagine how much time I would've spent on putting that in order.

But still, it's bee quite a few hours by now, and time is money. And I'm not the only one affected, and there's a lot of people that are much less capable of fixing this problem, or having enough time to deal with it.

And four days later, Google is mum. As if they've released an update on Friday night and went on vacation. But wait, it was Wednesday.

I would say that this is a black eye on Google's PR. There's no update, and there's no apology.

Nothing is going to bring back hours of my life that I wasted on fixing Google's screwup, but a little "we're sorry" would make me feel just a little bit better.

Attitude

My kid decided to show me how grumpy he was by shifting his teenage weight while being perched upon the (pictured above) miserable product of Chinese design and manufacturing genius. With some obvious and some non-obvious consequences.

The obvious consequences were that the said product, predictably, cracked.

The non-obvious were that he was grounded until the product was fixed.

The latter took him getting some familiarity with woodworking tools, seven layers of paint, a few sanding runs, and lots of time.

I don't think he'll be showing attitude anytime soon.

PS: Click on the photo to see some nice design decisions.