I’m working from home today, and I have some sensitive graphics work for my Microsoft job, so I have to make sure color is dead on. I pulled out my trusty Spyder2 to calibrate my monitors on my Mac Pro as I haven’t done that since I got new monitors and hit an immediate fail. The Spyder2Express software is PPC only, no Lion! What to do?

Well, with a little bit of research, I found out that DataColor was nice enough to allow us Spider2 users to download Spyder3Express for Intel and I am happy to say that it worked flawlessly. I still had to do my dual monitor hack to do both monitors, but it worked flawlessly. If you have the Spyder2 and OS X Lion, head over to DataColor and download the new software.

I just finished another long frustrating chat session with Comcast. I should know better and just call them, but calling Comcast is it’s own losing proposition I guess. Today I wanted to turn on Xfinity Streampix to check it out. It seems simple enough. Here’s what happened, along with what I would have expected to happen as a reasonably savvy online shopper.

Don’t Hide The One Thing You Want

I go xfinity.com/streampix to order it, just as directed by the commercial I saw on television. One would expect a big fat “ORDER NOW” button to click. Unfortunately there was not. I had to search for it and instead of taking me directly to a page, I was returned a list of possible results.

I clicked the one that seemed likely, and it was the right one.

Ask For What You Need When You Need It

It asked for my address to see if I was eligible and after verifying it, requested a long form of information including account number, date of birth, social security number, address, phone, etc.

It seemed like that should be all populated, so I logged in to my account to see if it would be easier signed in. I got the same exact form.

I filled in all of the requested information, submitted, and up popped a chat window to “confirm” my order.

Don’t Make Me Repeat Myself

It took nearly 10 minutes before the representative showed. He asked me to verify my address. He asked me for my account number. He asked for the last four numbers of my social. He asked me to confirm what I had asked to order. He basically asked me to fill out the form I had just filled in again.

10 minutes after he came into our chat, we were done. I was finished.

It’s All Sort of Obvious, Right?

Now I am pretty sure can sign up for Netflix in less than 5 minutes from scratch. It takes me 25 minutes to make a change to my Comcast account and I’m already a customer.

For a moment, forget about my time. Think about their time multiplied by all of the other customers who decided to subscribe to Streampix. It seems like Comcast enjoys frustrating their customers, and enjoys it so much, they are willing to throw away money to do it.

I can change my AT&T account online. I can change banking services online. I can manage my 401k, do my taxes and add cars to my insurance. What is it about Cable Television that is so sensitive I need to have a chat session to confirm my changes?

We’re talking about a $4.99 per month service. I borrowed thousands from my 401k for a house down payment without a chat or phone call. I ordered half of  the gear in my studio online without chat or phone confirmation.

It just doesn’t  make any sense. Requiring chat in the name of security doesn’t pass the common sense test. Here I am annoyed that I wasted 30 minutes of my night while they just paid some guy for the time he spent wasting mine.

Asleep at the wheel, that’s the only logical explanation. Anyone with some common sense and fiscal responsibility would kill this process as soon as possible.

If your Launchpad was a mangled mess with 8 pages of everything that could possibly be ran as a program on your Mac like mine when you upgraded to OS X Lion, you’re annoyed you didn’t find this before you spent a ridiculous amount of time organizing it to accomodate your OCD tendencies. Wait, maybe that was just me. Either way, it would have been nice to know this before, still glad I know it now though.

Run this command in Terminal.app to wipe Launchpad clean

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db "DELETE from apps; DELETE from groups WHERE title<>''; DELETE from items WHERE rowid>2;"; Killall Dock

Run this command in Terminal.app to rebuild the default database

rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db; killall Dock

Thanks Macworld!

This morning I looked at my phone on the way to work to see what day it was. This was what I saw:

Thinking it was odd, but dismissing it as part of the beta possibly, I just unlocked and looked at the calendar.

A little later I was curious so I woke it up again. This time:

Really? “I want a parrot?” It also occurred to me that I only had the beta on my iPad, NOT my iPhone.

When I got to work I did some search engine work and came up with nothing. I was starting to wonder if my phone had been hacked but it wasn’t doing it anymore.

Then when I searched the Octopus line again, it came up with Mastodon. My memory clicked in that it was what I was listening to on my drive to work. “I want a parrot” is a song from the new Aristocrats album.

Mystery solved, but begs the question.. is this the best way to reveal the song title? Remove the date and put no indication that it’s a song title? The music was new so I didn’t recognize the songs.

Confusing.

This weekend I embarked on Major Suckage. I had outgrown the OS drive on my laptop again, and decided that it was much safer to reinstall my entire system from scratch rather than just clone my hard drive for the 3rd time.

I ordered a 750GB 7200rpm drive from Other World Computing and when I got home from work Friday I began the process. I immediately realized a huge problem with OS X Lion as an upgrade.

I had to install Snow Leopard, download 3GB of updates to get it up to App Store compatibility, then immediately upgrade it to Lion.

That’s right, my goal was a clean start and before I installed my first application, it was already upgraded. Grrrr.

I get it was only $30, but I was really missing the disc and only on principle. I am sure the upgrade went smoothly and all is well, but I’d rather not start a new computer build with outdated stuff potentially scattered on a brand new drive.

This laptop is used for music and video production and by the time I got everything back to status quo I had spent 20 hours and reduced a 750GB hard drive to 370GB without a single bit of my own data on it. Yikes.

I am ok with delivering the upgrade through the app store, but there needs to be some way to go to Apple.com and download a burnable or thumb bootable ISO you can use to install from scratch. Asking a user to recover from a hard drive failure or data swap by having to install, update then upgrade is more hassle than it should be. Agree?