29 posts tagged “complaining”

Receipt

Nov 2, 2009
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This is the receipt for our new clothes washer. I recently needed to refer to it for a rebate. Specifically, I was looking for the two most important pieces of information on the document: the thing I bought, and how much it cost. Those two things are the only information that distinguishes this receipt from the equally large and complex receipts for the dryer and refrigerator we bought the same day.

I highlighted that crucial information for you. Can you find it? Guess what it says.

FRONT LOAD MDS 1599.00T

Was this document intended to be read by human beings? I guess FRONT LOAD means this is either the washer or the dryer, but that’s all I can glean. Why in the world couldn’t a piece of paper this large contain this information:

Electrolux Wave-Touch Washer (Turquoise): $1599.00

Of course, I know why: Sears is still running the decrepit green-screen point-of-sale systems they have been using for decades; it has no idea that product names can be longer than 14 characters, or what lowercase letters and punctuation are. Things like the information anti-design of this receipt and Sears’ amateurish web site are artifacts that seem to encapsulate just how wrong things are going at that company.

Escape from spell checking in Mac OS X once and for all

Sep 3, 2009
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The condescending dotted red underlines were driving me insane. It seemed like nearly every time I typed anything, the computer was chastising me, “WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!” It’s surprisingly out of line with Apple’s usual hands-off policy for users’ content.

WRONG

So few applications allow you to disable spell checking by default, and some (like Twitterrific) even reenable it every time you enter a text field. Nope, I do not want to teach Mac OS X every proper name, username, technical term, foreign word, and whimsical misspelling I may ever use. I do not want to right-click every text field and navigate a submenu before I start typing.

Despeller is a miracle. I can type in peace again. Thank you.

Fruitless

Jul 31, 2009
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So, I clearly need to strengthen my party in order to beat these bosses. Normally, that would mean leveling up in a dungeon, and maybe buying some equipment.

But as all of my characters are exhausted from the excessive leveling up I've already done, and there's only one day left before the full moon when the bosses show up, leveling up is a ridiculously difficult task. We can barely survive against the normal enemies that give us less than 1/20 of one level worth of XP.

And as for buying equipment, there's no access to the shops between where I've saved and the boss. All of the treasure I'm finding in Tartaros is money, which is useless to me.

Awesome! Just wasted another hour trying to beat the bosses, dying 25% of the way through the Hanged Man battle. Strongly considering giving up on this game again.

SONY

Jun 15, 2009
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Oh, hi PSP! I just wanted to check on my PSN account info real quick.

AN UPDATE IS REQUIRED BEFORE YOU CAN ACCESS THE PSN NETWORK. SEE THE DOCUMENTATION FOR DETAILS.

The documentation? Really? I could have sworn there was just some easy downloadable update thingy I could hit. Hmm, let’s look around for it.

Search search search…

Where is that update thing? I’ll check that message again to see if it said anything useful.

AN UPDATE IS REQUIRED BEFORE YOU CAN ACCESS THE PSN NETWORK. SEE THE DOCUMENTATION FOR DETAILS.

Ugh, can’t you just say “Press Circle to update now” or something? Why do I have to look around for it myself? Ohh, here it is, Network Update. Okay, let’s do that.

INSERT A MEMORY STICK™ WITH 52MB AVAILABLE BEFORE UPDATING.

Whoa, I don’t have a Memory Stick™ inserted? Let’s check the slot… Oh! I see! I do have one inserted, but you just didn’t bother to check for me. Is it really hard for you, being a computer, to check whether you have access to storage media?

DOWNLOADING SYSTEM UPDATE

Okay, good, now install it please!

BATTERY IS LOW. CHARGE THE BATTERY AND TRY AGAIN.

Uh… How about I just plug you into the wall? Surely that’s good enough for you to update the system? I promise I won’t unplug you!

Plug…

BATTERY IS LOW. CHARGE THE BATTERY AND TRY AGAIN.

Really? But you’re plugged in! That’s even better than a battery! Urgh, okay…

Charge charge charge…

Okay, now your battery is full! I guess if you insist on using the battery, I’ll unplug you from the wall and bring you to the couch so you can update there.

RESTARTING… RESTARTING…

…

YOU MUST PLUG IN THE AC ADAPTER BEFORE UPDATING.

…Really!? Fine. Back to the wall.

INSTALLING… INSTALLING…

INSTALLATION COMPLETE. YOU MAY NOW DELETE THE UPDATE FROM THE MEMORY STICK.

Uh, thanks, I will…

But why didn’t you delete it?

The Elements of Typographic Style: An Infelicitous Title

May 22, 2009
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The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst is a superb book; I have found it indispensable to my work and my personal pursuits. But I avoided reading it for years, because of its title.

The title is an admitted tribute to William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White's The Elements of Style. It simply adds an adjective to the title of that book, as if this work were nothing more than another application of Strunk & White's potpourri of advice and admonishment, but on a different topic. Chicken Soup for the Typographer's Soul. In fact, ETS is an exhaustive primer, reference, and specimen collection for anyone who works with type. It has much more in common with The Chicago Manual of Style than it does with The Elements of Style.

I came across arguments against Strunk & White at the excellent Language Log before getting around to reading my own copy. Now I am not in much of a hurry to read it; having heard arguments from both sides, I don't suspect I'll appreciate it very much.

This masterpiece of a book deserves a better title.

Fans

Feb 4, 2009
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I never stop being impressed by how dedicated fans of niche works can be when it comes to making those works more accessible to people.

Of course, the Mother fan site Starmen is the premier example of what devoted fans can do for English-speaking fans of Japanese games.

Gemini and Tom reverse-engineered and translated the entirety of Persona 2: Innocent Sin.

Asmodean has created hundreds of technical tools to fix, patch, and improve games in both languages. He has fixes for bugs in the NA version of Ar tonelico 2.

There's also an anonymously-released patch floating around to restore the Japanese voices that were removed from that game.

And the people at A Reyvateil's Melody are hard at work translating bits of Ar tonelico lore and are even planning to relocalize the game to supplant NISA's unacceptable job.

The more I see, the more I think NISA is in bad shape and shouldn't be trusted with such excellent games. The NA version of AT2, beyond bearing NISA's routinely questionable writing style, has serious corrupted-text bugs and consistency problems. There's a show-stopping bug in one of the final battles. And what I think is even worse than the crashing bug, an enormous chunk of the Japanese voice acting from the original game was removed from the localized version because NISA didn't manage to record English equivalents for it (even after delaying the release).

So far there's no official word from the company on any of these problems, and there isn't even an AT2 section on their members-only forum. I'm relieved that I can play the original versions of GUST games and regretful for my friends who can't.

I guess this post started as praise for passionate fans and ended up as a complaint about bad localizers.

Unminty Toothpaste

Nov 8, 2008
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Arm & Hammer used to make toothpaste that doesn't taste like mint. To find a commonly available brand that didn't have that supposedly-refreshing but actually-overwhelming minty taste was pretty, uh, refreshing. I went to get some of it today, and discovered that they now only make mint-flavored toothpaste. This got me to thinking about how some types of competing products seem to all converge on some identical imagination of what the customer wants.

In Japan I was pleased by the wide range of variously-flavored drinks. Juice, black tea, green tea, mildly sweetened drinks, pop, and so on. Most supermarkets or convenience stores in the USA, though, seem to offer only sickeningly sweet pop or energy drinks. Whenever the topic of Japan's supposedly superior quality baseline comes up, I reassure myself that while they have better stuff on average, we have a much wider range of stuff. In some areas, though, it doesn't seem to be that way. All drinks have converged on Mountain Dew and Red Bull; all toothpastes have converged on hyper-minty ultra-whitening in a sparkly package. It's kind of bewildering to look at the shelf and find five different brand names on what's essentially the exact same product.

It's nice that I can go to Whole Foods or some other hippie grocery store for proper bottled tea and unminty toothpaste, but I wonder if normal stores really can't support any niches, and only the one main product model is worth selling.

iTunes 8 Jpop thumbnail

Sep 9, 2008
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I'm impressed with the appearance of iTunes 8, especially the new grid view. But here's the hideous image iTunes 8 uses to represent the “Jpop” genre. I'm pretty glad I don't use the genre feature at all; like the chop-suey Anime label in Azureus, this says late-’80s sweatshirt designs meet circus advertisements more than it says Hello! Project or Ôtsuka Ai.

J-pop

Dear Barack Obama, You Are Cool, But This Is A Picture Of Oregon.

Aug 18, 2008
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Oregon

Delicious Library 2 is not that good

May 27, 2008
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I am doing my best to be impartial. Here are the notes I made as I tried out this app for the first time.

The first thing you see when you open the app is a message that the graphics will not work properly (and they sure don't) until the next OS revision comes out, whenever that is. It's really odd to me that Wil released this app now, with a degraded first impression and a promise that it'll work well on the next OS revision, after delaying for years while waiting for certain OS revisions to come out. Why the rush all of a sudden?
The "Upgrading Library" message appears in front of all apps. Sure, it's movable, but couldn't it be a sheet or something?
The shelves are the same old faux wood pattern that repeats unnaturally every couple hundred pixels.
The initial sidebar width, at least on my MacBook Air, is so narrow that I couldn't distinguish the items from one another.
If you already have a library, you can't even try out many of the new features, because you have too many items. So then you have to manually set aside your version 1 and version 2 libraries in order to try out the app meaningfully.
Searching for anything in Japanese returns completely useless and unrelated results. For instance, when I searched for アルトネリコ, the first result on Amazon's site is the new design materials book, but DL's first result is a Harry Potter book, and none of the results are about Ar tonelico at all.
The Action menu is weirdly unpadded, compared to normal menus.
Hitting the weirdly-colored and sometimes-absent eye icon on an item, or the baffling "Play" command in the Action menu, when a Japanese book is selected, tries to open that item on the USA Amazon site, and of course fails.
There's no documentation. The site and the app both just retain the old 1.5 help, so I can't for instance find out if the "dimensions" attribute is actually supposed to affect the item's appearance, like I have been wanting, or not.
The default friends list based on my last name is kind of dumb: it contains all of my little nieces and nephews in Chicago (who I only have in my address book in order to remember their birthdays), but of course only the ones from my brothers' families and not my sisters', because of their last name. I guess it's just sample data, but it feels kind of awkward to have sample data that's actually clumsily harvested from my own family. I'd rather have nobody at all in that list.
The background removal for toy images is kind of a cool idea, but it fails way too often and too easily with the types of images Amazon offers. I hoped there would be an interface for adjusting the transparent areas (or at least a way to open the image in Preview and do it there), but there isn't.
The horizontal inspector pane is kind of awkward and bad. The three-pane-wide arrangement from before worked great; now my inspector has to be taller than my shelves view in order to see all of the details of an item.
Maybe I missed some retraction, but wasn't the whole point of DL2 supposed to be social-networking type stuff? Where you could find other people who owned similar items or items you were interested in, get recommendations, and so on? None of that stuff seems to be in here.
In preferences: "Subscribe to other's libraries". :\
The shattering animation when you delete something (apparently replacing the burning animation in some previews) is pretty cheesy-looking: the shards shoot straight outward for a while, then fall straight downward, with no arc. That's nitpicky, but the whole point of this app is supposed to be visually rich, exquisitely detailed enjoyment, right? I'd rather have an item fade out gracefully than blow up crappily.
More attention-to-detail nitpicks: the credits in the about box are tiny black text on a high-contrast wood pattern, making them really hard to read. That's a shame because they're actually pretty informative about the work that has been done on the app over the years. The badges on overdue items, with plain black text on colored blobs, are pretty ugly. So is the snarky "OWNED!" stamp on related items results. None of these things is deadly for an ordinary app, as they are just aesthetic shortcomings in a x.0 release. But they are examples of reasons I think DL doesn't really deserve the gushing praise about how gorgeous it is.
Something I would normally ignore, if I didn't know what I know about Wil: I don't think the employee chosen to take the barcode-scanning screenshot, nor her wardrobe, nor the peripheral positioning of the item to be scanned, are coincidences.