Benz Blog

Logging out of IMDB’s website resulted in this message:

Then when I tried to log back IN, I got this:

Several weeks ago, I made some changes to my FiOS account, and noticed that my last bill was not automatically paid by their EasyPay system. With the next payment being due today (9/28/2011), and still no activity on the account, I had to give them a call. The website stated, clearly, that I was still enrolled in EasyPay. That is, when you could actually get that page to fully load – the EasyPay section would display a custom spinning animation while I waited and waited, and if you click to leave the page, you get a popup asking you to take a survey as to why you didn’t enroll in EasyPay. (I filled it out once – use your imagination as to what I wrote.)

While attempting to connect to an agent on the phone, their automated system asked me to enter an account number from my most recent paper bill. I haven’t received a paper bill in months, and the website was displaying THREE different account numbers:

1. In the upper right, my phone number was labeled as the “Account Number”
2. In the lower left, there was some text indicating to give a different number if asked. The number was roughly 15 digits long, with the 10 digits you were supposed to give in bold.
3. In the lower right, there was yet another number labeled “Verizon Online Account Number”

Of course, none of these were accepted by the automated system. Thankfully, once I got through to a human, the remainder of the experience was positive. The rep told me the website was wrong about my enrollment status, instructed me to make a one-time payment via the web minus the $7 late fee they charged for missing the first payment, and then had me re-enroll in EasyPay.

One last somewhat unrelated dig: the URLs for the website are all .aspx. Now I’m not going to bash MS here (as much as I enjoy doing so), but I will say that in my experience, sites built with this technology (ASP.NET) always seem to exhibit these types of problems. It’s rare that they don’t. I fully believe that you can write quality code in any language targeting any platform, but I’d wager that ASP.NET makes it really easy to write bad code (just like VB and PHP), so therefore it’s really easy to end up with crappy websites like the Verizon site. This technology tends to attract developers who either don’t care about quality, are ignorant of how to build quality sites, or are just plain bad developers.

Brilliant piece of user interface genius right here. Wanted to select backup format to send to my accountant, and around and around we go. I get that a portable/backup format must be selected on the first screen, but to just send the user back there from the 2nd screen is absurd.

Testing 1 2 3. This post is being done from MarsEdit 3.1.5. Please do not be alarmed. This is only a test.

Here is more test text.

Here is a bulleted list:

• Item 1
• Item 2
• Item 3

Ooo – fancy! this is quite a nice program from what I can tell so far.

This text has been “block quoted”. Do not be alarmed – for it is still only a test. Please calm down and make your way to the exits in an orderly fashion. Thank you for shopping with us. Please come again.

That was some very nice block quoted text, wouldn’t you say?

Launch MS Auto Update program for MS Office 2011. Update found. Download update. Update runs, tries to install, then tells me I need to quit MS Auto Update to continue.

Their attention to detail is simply stunning.

Love that hole in the title bar. Isn’t it divine?

Everything was going relatively smoothly on the first leg of the 2010 PCA Sunrise to Sunset Rally from Melbourne to Clearwater, in spite of our lack of sleep thanks to a screaming baby and people partying out by the pool at the Crown Plaza Hotel. Then we got horribly lost. But we just didn’t get lost: we didn’t know we were lost.

Click the map in order to view it in its entirety while reading this section next section…

We were headed south on S Bay St, also called SR 44 / SR 19, and Step 69 in our instructions was “Right turn onto Lakeshore Dr CR 452″. Now you’ll notice that comes up right at the top of the map, and that’s the road we wanted, but if you happen to miss the sign as we did (which was partially concealed behind some trees), you’ll continue going south and you won’t realize it but S Bay St turns into W Old US Hwy 441. Now as the road bends to the east, you’ll pass the Tavares Rd. intersection, and then lookie here: Lakeshore Dr CR 452! We initially went too far on W Old Hwy 441 into Mount Dora (not shown on the map), and so we backtracked and found that 2nd Lakeshore Dr.

Now here we are tooling along the wrong Lakeshore Dr, and step 70 says “Right turn onto SR 19″. The only thing that wasn’t adding up was that Step 69 also said that “Lakeshore Dr becomes Lake Eustis Dr”, but in our case, Lakeshore Dr became W Main St. However, we did eventually get to Rt 19 and made a right. At this point if you go back to the first Lakeshore Dr, follow that to SR 19, you’ll see that making a right onto SR 19 takes you south, but our right onto SR 19 took us north.

Now we were utterly confused. Also not helping were the ridiculous road names. Look at those white numbers near the middle of the map. That’s right, folks, that one stretch of road is known as SR 44, SR 19, CR 441, and SR 500! We pulled over, broke out Google Maps on my iPhone, and then discovered our mistake. Overall, we lost about an hour and a half, and were in no mood to participate in the lunchtime autocross event. In fact, we decided that we would skip the dinner in Clearwater and head straight home after finishing the route, but then about 30 minutes after departing the lunch area, a voicemail popped up on my cell phone. I looked down to see who it was from, and I said out loud: “voice mail from Chris Bienick?”. Chris gasped: “Oh my God, I left my purse at the lunch area!”. So we wound up having to go to Clearwater after all to meet up with the very kind gentleman who picked up Chris’s purse.

We spent a total of 9 1/2 hours in the car that day. When we got home I felt like driving the car into the lake.

Big, big changes happening. No more whining or complaining. I’ve decided to take a year off and focus my efforts on Mac/iPhone/iPad programming.

I’ve been asked to relearn my career again and make a modification to an in-house application written using ASP.NET/C#. When I last used Microsoft’s development tools, the Java tools of the day weren’t in the same league. My how times have changed. A few quick impressions:

1. Constantly, while editing code, the Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger pops up. It seems that the typelibbuilder.exe is crashing. I quick Google search reveals I am not alone with this problem, and I’m not sure if completely disabling the JIT debugger is the answer. Needless to say, this is most annoying.

2. JavaScript, oh – wait – excuse me – JScript (assholes) support is pretty bad. It’s due to be improved in VS 2010, but – hello? What year is this – 1998? This is incredible.

3. Spend one hour with IntelliJ writing Java code – witness how it automatically manages import statements, then come back and laugh at how this is handled in VS.

I’m sure it’s not all bad, and I’m sure that once I got used to it, I would really like C#, but I expected much more from Microsoft’s flagship development tool.