Idle State

Last week a friend asked me to help him buy a computer. Instantly, I suggested that he buy a MacBook. I always do this. Call me selfish, but I prefer going to the beach than spending countless hours diagnosing, recovering or teaching my friends the vagaries of a clumsy-at-best operating system.

Alas, my friend didn't have enough cash to buy the MacBook so we purchased an HP dv2-something or other. A reasonable machine. It was bundled with Vista

(cut, interior, friend's house, several frustrating hours later)

Ok - I now have this sinking feeling. What takes 10 minutes to do on the Mac (start and register the machine) has now taken about 2 hours on the Vista box. I was amused when the while-you-wait slideshow mentioned something like: "Vista gives you more time for the things you enjoy". At the bottom of the screen, we were advised to: "Please wait."

Then there's that annoying security checking all-the-freaking-time.

Already - I confess - I've learned. It's the last time I'm going to be an accomplice to a friend buying a PC. (Unless of course, they're going to return the OEM OS and install Linux).

Back to the beach.

Useful Links:

• When Is It Time To Buy A New Computer
  

Technorati Tags:
Bits, Peeves

In a flurry of less-than-idleness, I decided in the last week to visit a few web sites for Employment Agencies and Employers in the region. Most of the agencies require you to register on line which is absolutely fine - I'm a digital boy. After registering on the third site I was beginning to see red. ie. <style="face-colour: Infuriated Red"> Clearly these people do not ever actually use or test their client web sites.

I sent Clarendon Parker Support a bunch Javascript errors which were occurring while using Firefox on their site. The site does not work using Firefox, Safari or IE on my Mac. They responded indicating that I should use IE. Hello!!! McFly!!! Did you even read my email?!? Anyone who has ever worked for me would know that a response like this to an end user would be a severely career limiting move.

Firefox has 15% - 30% (it's debatable) market penetration now. Even at 15%, that's a fair amount of business to lose because you can't be bothered supporting a browser. Browser Statistics

Emirates Careers is totally broken with everything I tried to use from a Mac. It leaves a little immovable "Please wait..." popup on the screen right on top of form fields even when the page underneath has finished loading (Aaarrrgh!) The submission system becomes very confused if you update your details or CV or apply for a second job.

Etihad have quite a nice online job application system. The biggest pitfall is when applying for a job, the submission screens time-out without warning, causing all your work to be lost. If you are busy typing a fabulous answer into a field and spend a little time editing it, trying to save results in a page reload and all your work gets lost. After this happened twice, I had textedit open beside the browser so that a least the text field answers could be re-inserted quickly. Too bad for the drop down boxes though.

Qatar Petroleum career website was also totally broken for Safari, IE and Firefox on the Mac. Once again, I emailed their webmaster but QP didn't respond at all.

Qatar Foundation have a completely unusable fill-out-20-pages job application site - with mysterious terminology for various things which aren't explained on the site at all.

Most then require you trawl through unnavigable search tools to find a list of several hundred jobs of which approximately 10% are remotely relevant. (You need to make the search terms broad because the search engines are a mess).

Lastly - and this is the most heinous web site crime from all the employment sites - e-Jobsearch.com - you spend a good hour or two filling in the profile and massaging your CV into their format - and then you find out that payment is required to get them to submit it to any potential employers. What's wrong with this model?!? Everything.

In the case of Employment Agencies, once a relevant job is found, you then apply for the job at which point the employment agency may review your CV and online profile. Or may not. So much for service. It seems to me that there is a very low value add with these employment agencies - a classic case of Ritzer's McDonaldization Of Society.

With my web Zen completely depleted, it seems I'm going back to the old way of finding a job - reading the newspaper and visiting potential employees personally. Back to polling or better yet, turning up at HR offices for the companies I really want to work for. Anyway, reading the newspapers are a great way to idle away the morning.

What would be really neat is for employers and employment agencies to accept XML CVs. That would save everybody's time. Now we just need to get some agreement on the DTD...

Back to the beach.

Postscript: And on the subject of web site peeves etc, here's a few more:

Qatar Airways

• The menu bar doesn't render properly when using Firefox. User font size adjustment don't work very well. To be fair, this web site is vastly improved on what it was a year ago. I can actually use it with Firefox now.
  
• Flight stats take forever to get updated for Qatar Airways flights - more often than not well after the flight lands. What's the point?

Qatar Airways [Slightly Off Topic]
Third request and you don't honour unsubscribe requests for your advertising spam. Tsk tsk tsk.

Standard Chartered Middle East

• iBanking launches a separate window and resizes my browser. Grrrr.
  
• The navigation is not at all intuitive and generally difficult to find what I want.
  
• When doing an online transaction, the only information in the confirmation is the confirmation number itself - no information about the transaction amount, the recipient or account used. Not at all useful retrospectively.
  
• The site's certificate expired in October 2005.
  
• Lastly, messages from the bank do not change to the unread status after reading them.

HSBC Middle East
Sigh. Internet Banking opens 3(!) new windows. One redirect window, then one to tell me that it's loading another window. My browser tells me that without needing some crumby bit of javascript animation pretending it is talking to the remote server. Get rid of it.

Technorati Tags:
Peeves

Funny thing. Last week I sent email to Qatar Airways asking them to remove me from their email marketing. I've tried clicking on the link at the bottom of the spam <cough> I mean, marketing emails approximately 10 times over the last two months, but they still keep sending me the rubbish. The emails are typical marketing guff - stuff which I prefer not to receive. For example, Qatar Airways wrote a lovely email to me explaining that they will be to flying to New York from July 2007. Unfortunately, they are actually flying to Newark Liberty and not JFK or La Guardia. So - not really New York. Granted - It's close. And, hey, geographical accuracy isn't that important when you're running an airline, is it? Anyhow - I received the response below. Just to be sure it wasn't actually my problem, I emailed on more than one occasion from a few different email addresses - to ensure that this wasn't an incorrectly reported transient failure, due to, say, Sorbs et al. On checking, there was no listing for my IP address with any of the black listing sites. So, it seems they've mis-configured their exchange(? - I think the state 13 message is courtesy of exchange) server so it is not recognising externally originated mail for either their own domain (less likely) or for websupport@qatarairways.com (more likely). That's pretty fundamental stuff to get wrong. Configuring a mail server correctly nowdays is not rocket science. It's run-of-the-mill work that most of us can do while sleeping. So really - there is no excuse at all for getting it wrong. Unless of course, for appearances, you wanted to make it look like you are happy to accept comments via an email address but in actual fact, you don't really want the bother. This begs the question - if they can't carry out something simple like configuring their mail servers properly, how well are they doing something complex like maintaining their core business equipment?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:     Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Date:     Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:02:25 -0700 (PDT)
From:     Mail Delivery Subsystem 
To:     xxxx@gmail.com

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

     websupport@qatarairways.com

Technical details of permanent failure: PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 13): 550 Relaying denied to 

   ----- Original message -----

Received: by 10.140.186.18 with SMTP id j18mr1817170rvf.1183492940782;
        Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:02:20 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: 
Received: from 
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id k34sm18206973rvb.2007.07.03.13.02.12
        (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-MD5);
        Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:02:14 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <468AAB35.9050001@gmail.com>
Disposition-Notification-To: Campbell M 
Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:01:57 +0300
From: Campbell M 
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 (Macintosh/20070604)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To:  websupport@qatarairways.com
Subject: Remove my email address from your marketing lists immediately.
X-Priority: 1 (Highest)
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

yada yada yada.

Technorati Tags: Bits, Peeves

I have been doing a large amount of reading on ODF vs OOXML over the last few days - particularly as the verdicts of various countries' standards bodies become finalised. There a quite a number of publicly available analyses of the ECMA-376 Office Open XML Spec available for reading on the internet - comments on Groklaw and the British DIS 29500 Wiki are particularly comprehensive.

Several thoughts strike me as I read though the wealth of material:

Where are the safeguards that prevent interference in standards organisations' decision making processes? Incits would appear to have been stacked over the last few months to create a favourable decision for the proposer of the standard. Surely the composition of voting rights should be decided at the outset of the consideration of a particular proposal. The least of the problems is that the composition of voting members becomes unrepresentative. Other concerns are that a voting member who joins in the last few days prior to an actual vote has not undergone the same exercise in diligence of the proposed standard as the other members.

Furthermore, in the case of documented interference (see www.noooxml.org) there needs to be some mechanism of automatically registering a "no" or "yes" vote, for the standards body in the country that has been interfered with, to counter the interference. This cannot be at the discretion of the standards body of the country involved since their vote is possibly tainted. This effectively immediately removes the sting from any attempted interference.

It would seem that the standards processes are ill-equipped, possibly naïve, for dealing with the intense lobbying and influence of commercial interests. Standards and Standards processes must have unyielding integrity.

Secondly: What the hell were ECMA thinking? They should be downright embarrassed. Given the lack of quality, lack of clarity and lack of technical integrity of the document that they have proposed as an ISO standard, clearly ECMA have failed in their duty at being a trusted source for candidate standards. ECMA should no longer have right to submit a proposed standard for fast tracking.

Thirdly - and this is more a personal note - the countries which I am closely related to - Australia and Qatar - are distressingly quiet on this issue. The Qatar Government is an entrenched Microsoft shop. It's IT environment is immature and somewhat subservient - so I guess it's not much of a surprise that not a wrinkle has emerged from here. Australia's response which amounted to "we're not completely happy with this proposed specification" is insipid in the extreme.

Lastly: Is ECMA-376 indicative of the quality of work that is carried out within Microsoft? The poor workmanship of the ECMA standard speaks volumes about the quality of processes, thinking and product created by Microsoft. It serves to demonstrate yet again that Openness (Source and Standards) yield quality whilst closedness leaves you with a steaming pile of crap. After this demonstration we get a deeper understanding of why Microsoft do, indeed, have reason to fear Open Standards and Open Source.

Back to the beach.

Technorati Tags:
Peeves, Software

It's true. Believe it or not. Our dog (Afghan puppy named Dylan) managed to render my GPS completely useless by attempting to eat it.

I blame Garmin. Really. If they hadn't made the leather carry case quite so inviting with it's fresh leather "this smells like it probably has lots of tasty flesh inside it" odour then it might not have been subject to the oversized-puppy equivalent of a ram raid.

Either that - or Dylan took exception to the strange small box that kept speaking with a female American accent and very sloppy diction - which is perfectly understandable.

I did a quick web search and found some guy who's cockatoo had eaten his GPS... so it's not the first time animals have viewed GPS' as tasty morsels.

So my month old Garmin Nüvi 310 ended up with a cracked touch screen - the cracks starting in the bottom corner, from where it was incised by a canine tooth, radiating pretty much across the entire screen. Now you need the touch screen (which is normally excellent, by the way) to do virtually everything on this unit which left it, as I said, completely useless.

Needless to say, I was reasonably annoyed about having almost brand new but non functioning GPS. Particularly in Qatar where navigation is a challenge at the best of times, streetnames and numbers are not well used even when they do exist and it's easy to get trapped in one-way hell.

BTW - the Nüvi 310 is a great little addition to my Jeep - I'm very impressed with it. It's great value for money. Along with standard GPS stuff, it has a bunch of other features - like:

• Bluetooth handsfree for your mobile.
• MP3 player
• Flash card slot
• Clocks, calculators, unit converters etc

Here are details of the box from Garmin's Web Site.

Stuff I do and don't like about the Nüvi 310...

Menu navigation is very responsive and the touch screen is accurate. However, the actual navigation is crap. I have to back out of menus and into others to achieve stuff. (I should be able to get to a map from any screen since this is the primary function of the unit.) Sometimes extra options are provided on another screen. For instance, when making a phone call - why not just put all the call controls together on one screen? The positions of the "Back" and "Done" buttons are not consistent. Some options are not easy to find (setting the time zone, for example).

Volume Control The audible navigation, hands free phone and MP3 player all need independent volume controls. For fairly obvious reasons.

MP3 Player is pretty good. It doesn't seem to respect volume settings embedded in the MP3 file itself though. The volume control needs to be on the MP3 controls page rather than another "click" away.

Suction Cup Mount Why do people make these? They don't work. Find a better way.

Petrol Stations It knows where the closest Petrol Station is. Golf Courses as well. All very cool stuff.

Garmin Support is achingly slow. It took several weeks for them to respond to me despite the web site saying they would respond within 3 days. The knowledge base is half hearted at best - I had to ask a question which really should have been on the knowledge base and then wait two weeks for the answer. The trouble ticket system doesn't play well with Firefox.

Product Documentation is pretty weak - in the fashion of Apple Documentation. The font is lovely but the content is thin on the ground. The manual, for instance, refers you to the web site for more detailed specs. The web site content isn't that much more comprehensive than the manual specs though. Try finding out the maximum size for the removable flash memory... (it's 2GB on the 310, by the way).

How to repair a GPS that your dog has tried to eat.

Originally, I sent a request to Garmin asking for the price to replace the screen. A couple of weeks later, Garmin replied to me, asking me what the problem was, when I had purchased the unit, what the damage was and so on. They also suggested recalibrating the screen. Some of the information requested seemed a little redundant since the already supplied serial number was registered with most of this information. Nevertheless, I duly replied and then received what must be the stupidest technical support response ever:

Dear Campbell,

Try a hard reset, that should cure the problem. Follow the prompts on the attachment.

Thank you for contacting Garmin(Europe)Ltd.

Kind regards

Garmin (Europe) Ltd
______________________________________________________________

Original Message Follows: ------------------------
Hi,

The touch part of the screen is cracked so it is not a recalibration issue.  The LCD proper and backlight work fine...

Sigh.

Sigh.

Fortunately, Al-Lingawi, the local Garmin reseller here in Qatar were completely on the ball. They said that the unit could be replaced for a cost of about 40% of the new purchase price. I turned up at the shop, paid the money, and was given a completely new unit - all in the space of about 15 minutes. So I'm happy again.

Kudos Lingawi. By the way - if you're in Qatar and looking for a GPS unit (or fishing tackle, for that matter) the guys at Al-Lingawi are always really helpful.

So the moral of the story... If you're going to buy Garmin, make sure that the guys you are buying from have got the support base covered. And keep your dog away from it.

Back to 25° 41' 37.75" N 51° 30' 33.16" E.

Here's one little feature of Firefox that falls into the category of "it's pretty good - but it would be so much better if it could read my mind". AutoFill needs a quick and easy way to manage it's entries - such as About:AutoFill which would be a page allowing you to edit/add/remove various entries. As others have mentioned, after a while AutoFill gets too many entries to be useful.

It turns out the less than obvious Shift + Delete removes entries if you are focussed on them. This was recently pointed out courtesy of Winds Of Change.Net and MacLive.NET.

While we're on the subject of Firefox features - "I want a Firefox Extension to" lists loads of extensions so you can go crazy.

By the way, if you don't use Firefox as your browser already, click on the button below to make the switch:

This is the second abject-lesson-in-mediocrity meal experience that I have had at the The Butcher Shop & Grill in Doha (located in Villagio Mall in the food court area). You would have thought that I would have learned the first time. The menu does indicate that patrons should be prepared to wait for their meals as "consistency takes time". Unfortunately true, as the restaurant was consistently bad with both visits.

Ultimately, the food is stunningly overpriced. Obscenely overpriced, actually. The service amateur. The ambience is fine, if you like the noise and ambience of eating in a tiled bathroom with 100 screaming kids echoing around the cold impersonal walls, although if you prefer to have any warmth and intimacy suited to dining with friends, eat anywhere else but here. The overall experience, despite great company, was mostly underwhelming.

The Food
The menu is extensive and lures the unsuspecting punter on a promise. Soup of the day: mushroom. It was pleasant enough - about as pleasant as soup from a can - and nothing like the Mushroom soup to be had at neighbouring restaurant Le Petit Quotidien or the simply superb mushroom soup from Biello, across town.
Between us we had the seafood platter, lamb shanks and the double roasted lamb for main courses. The seafood platter lacked variety which is fairly inexcusable in this part of the world. The lamb shanks and double roasted lamb were appreciated. The portions seemed overly large at the expense of really well prepared and presented food. What we received was really on par with a pub counter meal or cafeteria style food.
Although it is advertised that meats may be selected from the Butcher (located in the centre of the restaurant) on both occasions that I visited, the butcher shop was embarrassingly empty with no fare at all being displayed.

Service
The service was poor, as it is in many Doha restaurants. Staff with little or no training, that forget to bring dishes (still waiting for the baked potato...), that interrupt conversion at the table, clear dishes away before all the patrons are finished (and even clearing a soup plate from which one of our party was simultaneously trying to eat!), not knowing who had ordered which drink or meal and staff who mistake constant interruption nervous "is everything ok?" queries as being good service.

The bill includes a non-optional 10% service charge on top of already exorbitant prices - which riles me no end - particularly if, as in the case of The Butcher Shop, the service resembles a country circus act rather than service for a pleasant dinner.

The Ambience
Here is where The Butcher Shop & Grill really fails to shine. The restaurant is located within a food hall - a cavernous tiled featureless space with few redeeming features. There is no division between the restaurant space and the thorough-fares of the food court leaving the restaurant patrons feeling uncomfortably exposed. Less than twenty metres away are the gaudy signs and less-than-fragrant smells of a number of well known fast-food establishments. The tables have a ridiculous molded bevel (as wide as a paperback) around them making them completely impractical for sitting comfortably without continually feeling like glassware and personal items are just about to slide off onto the floor. Most of our party were overly, uncomfortably cold, even while wearing sweaters and outdoor jackets inside.

The Bill
As I mentioned earlier, The Butcher Shop and Grill is simply overpriced. Similar meals in more comfortable climes around Doha may be had for less than half the price.

Overall - it's not surprising that the restaurant was not particularly busy. It has few redeeming features and you certainly won't walk away from dining at The Butcher Shop feeling satisfactorily well fed.

And one more thing: The Butcher Shop & Grill is hardly the "one and only" if it's franchised all over the place is it? Sheesh.

...so if this pos.t isx a l1ttle sl0 and hard to reqd it's becase Im tping from the Mddle Est. Not really. The sand storms are making it hard to read my screen. (No kidding - it's really windy and cold here at the moment.)

In the last two days, some dudes in ships have "accidently" dragged their anchors through three submarine cables providing network to us here in the Gulf and some of India.

See Blogger News Network

So for the past few days the internet has been noticeably slower than it's usual Middle East 'net slowness. All my favourite sites are timing out fairly frequently the international telephone is fairly unreliable. Strangely I don't feel particularly disconnected from the rest of the planet although it would probably be different if we had no connection at all.

Side Note To App Designers In The US: not everyone has the benefit of the speeds that you have for net access. A few infamous web applications that constantly run into trouble because their designers underestimated the response times in locales like ours: Facebook (interminably slow), Google Reader (constantly times-out too quickly on Ajax requests), Blackberry by Etilasat (DNS lookups can take time - be more patient and get the freakin' email delivered rather than just giving up), DVorak.org (so much crap on the page that it takes forever to load - and then you have to reload the page because the cretins don't give you the content until your referer is their own site !?!)

Oh. And while I'm ranting, all you in the US who think US $10 per month internet is expensive: Here in Qatar we have an entrenched carrier and we pay over US $100 per month for 2048/512 DSL that has about one 9 and four zeroes reliability. So quit griping.

There's probably some fabulous CIA or anti-terrorist plot or another price-of-oil conspiracy theory or maybe there's just a a coincidently high number of sailors with particularly bad seamanship in West Asia at the moment. Not sure. Anyhow, if you can't contact your local bank's outsourced call centre over the next few days, that's why.

Update: I received loads of traffic from searches for "cable cut conspiracy". Seems like there's now a fourth cut cable and Egypt are claiming that there actually wasn't any ships in the area that where the cable runs. As far as I can tell, it probably is one of three things - damage caused when the spy submarines were tapping into the cable offshore, built in obsolescence (anyone seen an Alcatel salesman hanging around?) or maybe it's the reverse vampires. "We're through the looking-glass here, people".

More Here

Been meaning for such a long time to work out how to remove this (uncharacteristically for Apple) naff picture from my login screen:

Needless to say, it's not really my cup-of-tea. I'm surprised Apple didn't use a photo of their Dear Leader - although the actual login window would probably have covered Steve's face.

I hope that Tinkertool add the ability to change this (plus perhaps a few more Dock configuration bits and pieces would go astray).

In the mean time, if you want to change the picture, you need to go under the bonnet and replace this file:

/System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg

with the image file that you'd prefer.

There's a longer description on how to do it here.

With the tubes running at less than dialup speeds lately, here in Qatar, I decided to do some purely academic bittorrent download benchmarking. Here are torrents for three CD size images:

Yes - it does read "20 days", "90 days" and "95 days" - slight down on the maximum of 145 days earlier today.

This is due to some fairly impressive failures of submarine cables in the last week. It would be fair to ask why I am clogging up the pipes trying to download torrents when things as basic as porn web sites are downloading very slowly (I'm told). Something to do with net neutrality I guess...

This is naught, nonetheless, when compared with the catastrophe of me running out of Vegemite today, and, the yeast-extract equivalent of the Nectar-Of-The-Gods not being available anywhere - I repeat - anywhere in Qatar.

The last bottle I purchased here, several months ago, was actually the last bottle that I have seen on the shelves here in Qatar. It cost me QAR 30 (US $ 8.25) for 175 grams. If we presume the net weight of Vegemite is 150 grams, the that works out at about 5.5 cents per gram - but every glorious gram worth it.

Like some junkie facing imminent withdrawal, I have been cotton-shooting every last scraping of Vegemite, eking it out of the jar for my morning toast; I have hunted all known supermarkets for the goods; pleaded with friends to have some of their stuff; and tried to be satisfied with the methodone of condiments, Marmite, but there is no substitute.

This is a disaster.

<sniff>

I'm always amused when I visit Costa Coffee here - right in the middle of Arabia - to be served "traditional coffee". Partly because Costa started in the London, not Italy; a little because coffee in Arabia preceded coffee in Italy by around 600 years and preceded Costa Coffee by about 1000 years; and slightly because there's not an Italian (or Arab for that matter) anywhere in sight preparing my coffee. Just goes to show that globalisation and marketing without adapting the local franchises to the local market is just plain brain dead. Of course, if your local market, on the whole, are not very discerning and fairly subservient to imperialist consumerism and not so then it probably doesn't matter anyway.

Stacks in the Dock on Leopard are great - incredibly useful and easy to use. But subfolders in stacks revert back to the Finder which I find quite frustrating.

If Apple wanted to be even more cunning, I have two idle thoughts...

First: I would be able to click or hover over a subfolder and see it's contents - but stay in the Stack view of things. The modal change is too quick at the moment - it's like Stacks were only half implemented and you have to do the rest with Finder.

The second problem is that - whilst they're great for finding stuff and dragging stuff around - filing a copy back to Stack from a Save Dialogue is just as slow as it has always been. I often use Stacks to access deeply-buried-folders - so they can stay sitting in their rightful place - but readily available as a Stack for quick and frequent access.

When I use an application and I want to, say, save a new copy back to the location of the Stack I still need to navigate to the location of my deeply-buried-folder. What would be ideal would be a "Stacks" group in Finder (and File Open and Save dialogues) - which always shows me which Stacks I have on the Dock. So then I'd have quick access for both retrieving and creating.

My two year old passport is just about full and I've realised why. In the last 7 days I've been to three other countries besides Dubai - racked up about 20 hours and 10000 nautical miles and been through about what must be about 20 security checkpoints.

What I've realised is that this has become normal for me - hence the full passport.

So - frustration with waiting, queueing, being "screened" and flight safety videos abounds.

I have had an ongoing argument with Skype for over a month now.

Skype chose to cancel a transaction I made with a credit card for SkypeOut credit - sometime after the fact. However, they still charged my card and are claiming that it is just an authorisation on card and not a real charge.

WRONG WRONG WRONG.

After trying to patch my copy of Adobe Reader to 8.1.2 several times - unsuccessfully - I then tried to install Adobe Reader 9.0. This is the result:

A fabulously descriptive error message - wouldn't you agree?

I have just fought with a Windows XP machine to try to get HP Scanner software to install properly. I have installed the software 3 times - twice from the disk provided and once downloaded from HP. I have rebooted the machine probably over 10 times and plug and unplugged the scanner probably about the same number of times.

The result is that only the Twain driver is working. None of the actual HP Software for the scanner works. For a non Administrative user, some of the software just gives an error dialogue when you try to launch it. For all users, the HP Solution Center [sic] software doesn't launch at at. So much for a "Solution Center".

I've just noticed that one of my dining reviews has been half-heartedly plagiarised by a restaurant review blog. I wouldn't mind if they had credited me or linked to my own blog - since I went to the trouble of actually thoughtfully writing my own review.

That's just common courtesy.

Thief.

© Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

Just logged onto Facebook and inexplicably received this message:

It's confusing and nondescript. As a user who logs in daily - sends a few birthday greetings, gets a message or two a week and pokes a few friends overseas now and then (basically - keeping up with my friends!) I'm at a complete loss as to why I should receive this.