Friends don’t let Friends play Words with Friends
I’ve been playing Scrabble on Facebook for years. It’s fun, challenging and a good user experience. I play on my iPhone and iPad too. All the apps are free.
Recently, people have encouraged me to play Zynga’s Words with Friends. It sucks. Let me tell you why.
So go ahead, invite me to a game of Scrabble on Facebook. If you want to play Words with Friends, well, I’m not your friend.
Apple customer service
Rarely do I expect much from a company’s customer service. Usually it’s endless phone trees with occasional responses by incompetent employees.
Not Apple.
A few weeks ago I walked into my local Apple store with a Magsafe power adapter that no longer worked. This is a common issue and Apple settled a lawsuit because of them. The greeter next to the Genius Bar intercepted me and asked how he could help. I told him my power adapter didn’t work, and he looked it quizzically for 10 seconds. He then went into a cabinet, pulled out a new adapter, handed it to me, said “here you go!” and I walked out of the store. That was too easy.
For my Dad’s birthday, I bought him the SlingPlayer app for his iPad. When he tried to run it, it reported that his SlingPlayer hardware was not compatible with the app. In fact, the app only support their latest two models, not any of the ones before that. Boo! The app page actually explains this, but I missed it.
I emailed Apple via their Express Lane site and explained the problem. The confirmation page said to expect a response within 48 hours. 12 hours later, I got an email with a full refund. A day later I got a followup email asking if I had any further issues.
Now that’s customer service.
Apple, you’ll be getting more of my money in the future because you actually seem to care about my experience with your products.
2011 World Series Prediction: Rangers have a shot
Now that the Red Sox are out of the playoffs (painfully so), I can be completely objective about who I think will win the World Series.
Some people would use matchup history, batting averages, ERA or even run simulations based on individual players to come up with a prediction. I’ll use another metric: deadliness of the team name.
So let’s assume that the name of each team was put into a death match with the other team. Here’s how it would come out.
ALDS
Rays vs Rangers
Now if the Rays were still the Devil Rays with their stingy pointy thing, then this could turn out differently, but a sun ray against a ranger? Assuming the Rangers come well-hydrated and don’t forget their hats, the Rangers should come out with nothing more than a sunburn.
Prediction: Rangers
Tigers vs Yankees
I’ll say these tigers are not well-trained or at least not well-fed so anyone of the Northeastern United States would be a tasty snack or make for an entertaining maul, especially since a yankee wouldn’t be expecting a tiger, them not being native to the northeast and all.
Prediction: Tigers
ALCS
Rangers vs Tigers
The thing about Rangers is they tend to have guns. Tigers, while ferocious do not absorb bullets well. Bonus: the Rangers will have a nice meal that night.
Prediction: Rangers
NLDS
Diamondbacks vs Brewers
This is a joke right? Drunk beermaker vs deadly snake? Venom poisoning beats alcohol poisoning every time.
Prediction: Dbacks
Phillies vs Cardinals
“Phillies” are apparently upstanding citizens of Philidelphia. Let’s ignore that bizarre mascot, the Phanatic, which would be toast in fight against a toaster. While I’m sure a cardinal could give you a pretty good peck, even a Philadelphian might just be smart enough to survive a cardinal attack. It might be a different story if this was a scene from The Birds, but assuming this is a Phillie and an cardinal, mono a mono, I see the Phillie surviving.
Prediction: Phillies
NLCS
Diamondbacks vs Phillies
While a sober Philadelphian (is there such a thing?) might be a bit more of a challenge to a pissed off deadly snake, unless that Philadelphian is really fast and an expert stomper, I’ll give the snake 10:1 odds.
Prediction: Diamondbacks
World Series
(Where the “World” consists of 29 teams from the United States and one other just a few miles from the Northern US border)
Diamondbacks vs Rangers
Well, shooting a tiger is one thing, but sniping a snake is another. Perhaps if the ranger brought a shotgun, it might be a bit easier. Then again, if the ranger is not a military man, but a crunchy park ranger, it would be all over. It’s a close one, but I’ll root for my fellow mammals on this one. Yay, guns make us better than all the other animals!
Prediction: Rangers
There you have it, the Rangers winning their first World Series after failing last year. It should be fun to watch, even if the Red Sox will be watching from their couches, just like me. It’s really too bad – a sock could very effectively contain a diamondback.
WebEx, preschooler edition
My primary email address has been around a long time and so I get a lot of spam on it. I’m used it. My kids’ email addresses (they forward to me) do not get much, well mostly because they don’t use email.
The other day I got some spam from a big company (WebEx, owned by Cisco).
My response:
Audrey would love to talk to you. She’s at preschool right now and then has to have lunch before naptime. Does 4pm work for you? She does like to use Skype to talk to her Grammy, so I’m sure she’ll take right to hosting meetings on webex. Saving money will be great for her as she just got a piggybank.
We look forward to hearing from you,
Jeff (Audrey’s father)
No reply yet.
The sad state of REST and Javascript in 2011
At work, I’ve been building a a tool that does a bunch of JavaScript interaction with REST services. It should be able to use GET, POST, PUT and DELETE and be able to send custom headers.
No big deal, right? Well, the service isn’t running on the same host as the client is served from. While I could change that, I don’t want to for various reasons.
I’ve surveyed my options and none are ideal.
CORS seems like the ideal solution if it was available in all browsers.
If the client flash proxy wasn’t limited to GET and POST and didn’t require crossdomain files all over the place, then maybe I would have gone with that.
Instead, I decided on jsonp, with a servlet filter that emulates other HTTP verbs, Content-Type and request body. At least this way my REST service doesn’t have to change. I’ve only built an adapter for JavaScript’s silly limitations.
It’s enough to make me want throw up my hands and start writing Objective-C.
My Browsers of Choice, 1994-Present
Lately, I’ve been using Google Chrome. As much as I hated the fact that Google decided that none of the other browsers were good enough and had to make yet another to make web developers’ lives that much more complicated, they’ve done a good job. Chrome is fast, compatible and stable.
That got me thinking about how browsers have improved over the years and what my browser of choice has been.
1994-5: Lynx & NCSA Mosaic
I used both back when the web was born. Mosaic had graphics, but Lynx sure was fast over a modem.
1996-1998: Netscape Navigator
The commercial version of Mosaic, frames and JavaScript (nee LiveScript) made Netscape awesome.
1998-2003: Internet Explorer
When IE 4 came out, it was simply better than Navigator. It was faster, less crashy and pages looked better.
2003-2009: Firefox
Extensions, less bloat and better compatibility made Firefox great in its day.
2009-Present: Google Chrome
Firefox got more and more bloated over the years and its performance suffered. It seemed to be always using ridiculous amounts of CPU when it was doing nothing. Chrome was a welcome alternative with plenty of extensions and notably faster performance.
Safari is a strong contender these days as well and will get better as more extensions become available for it. For now, I’m pretty happy with Google Chrome.
The pace of browser improvements over the last 16 years has been impressive. I’m sure what we have today will still be laughable compared to whatever my browser of choice will be in 2026.
Farewell, Signal
Another significant event occurred this summer – we became catless.
Before I left for Europe, I brought our 6-year-old gray cat to live with my parents for a few weeks who kindly agreed to host him.
I left and after a few days he actually started to get along with my parents’ cat, Moxie. But then they had to try to get him in his crate. He freaked out, busted through a screen and ran outside. He evaded my parents’ desperate attempts to catch him again and has not been seen since that day in early August.
Having been an indoor cat all his life and not also not being the smarted animal we’ve met, I doubt he’s still with us, especially with other wild animals roaming around rural New Hampshire. Sometimes you hear stories of animals who journey hundreds of miles home to find their owners. With Signal’s apparently-limited intellect, we’re not holding out for that possibility.
My parents felt terrible about the whole thing of course and put up posters all over the place. He is chipped so if he did end up at a shelter they would be able to find us, but no one has called.
Anne and I were a little sad about about it, mostly for how scared he must have been. For us, it was something of a relief. With two kids, paying attention to a cat was the last thing on our minds. I’m sure he knew that and would sometimes be very aggressive at getting our attention. He was never mean, but seemed lonely, especially after Pixel went away. We were tired of cleaning up the fur and replacing furniture he clawed.
Our biggest concern was how we would explain it to Audrey. Our solution to that was “don’t ask, don’t tell.” She never asked and we never told her. By the time she returned from a month in Europe I think she had forgotten all about him. She wasn’t particularly close with him, but explaining where he went might have been disturbing to her. At this point, I don’t think she’ll ever remember we once had cats.
So farewell Signal, I hope you enjoyed your big adventure outside, for however long it lasted. 
I think I survived the Summer of 2010
Tomorrow is the first day of fall and the end to what may have been the busiest summer of my life. I’m just happy to have survived it. A summary of my life events over the last 3 months:
Work
Kids
Fun(?)
I don’t think I’ve forgone so much sleep since college. It was challenging, but ultimately rewarding.
That said, I’m hoping for a relaxing and uneventful fall.
Replacing a MacBook display and a little hacking
Last week, Anne dropped her bag with her MacBook in it on the floor. She didn’t think anything of it until hours later when she went to turn on her computer and the LCD display was cracked inside. Lots of scary broken lines appeared with only a small section on the left actually working.
I did some research and found the cheapest way to get this fixed was to buy a replacement screen. I picked one up on eBay for $75 from iReqQ.com. For some reason they sell them for more on their own site (?).
It shipped quickly and I had it on Thursday. I followed the helpful video from iResQ to take the machine apart and install the new screen.
The most difficult part by far was getting the inverter cable plugged in as it’s behind the hinge. My Dad helped by pulling the hinge back and keeping the video cable out of the way.
A random magnet fell out of the side when I took out the display. Apparently it’s a “sleep magnet” which, when closed with the lid, activates the computer’s sleep mode. It took me a while, but I found the spot in the lid where it went in, coming down just to the left of the fn key.
More annoying than difficult was getting all the little clips around the edges back in place. I found it helped to arch them a bit and then spread them back out again once they were in. All in all, it probably took me 2 hours to complete.
While I had it open, I made one little extra modification I read about online. Apples should be red, right?
What I was looking for was a piece of cellophane, but we didn’t have any. I searched around and found something that worked just as well – a piece of red plastic from a bag of frozen french fries. I cut it to size, taped it in, and now Anne has the coolest MacBook (with working display!) on the block.
Apple’s MacBook Pro Design Flaws
Last week, I finally got a new laptop, a shiny new MacBook Pro. (Thanks, boss!) It replaces my 44-month old one which is well past its glory days.
The new one has some nice upgrades too:
The screen upgrade is great – the 1680 by 1050 resolution gives another 468,000 pixels which means a lot less scrolling.
Apple has redesigned the MacBook Pro since I bought mine 4 years ago and it’s interesting to see how their changes address my old machine’s current maladies.
The Screen
My current LCD screen seems to have a yellow tint to it and there are some smudgy-type blemishes in various parts of the screen.
The new ones have LED, which is hopefully less susceptible to this kind of thing.
The Case
My old case is dented around all the corners. The plastic edging is broken off in places. A few screws are missing. Three of the four feet on the bottom have fallen off. I’ve got big wear marks where my palms apparently rest.
The latest model has a case which is almost entirely one piece. It will be hard to dent or break off pieces. That said, I already have a few hairline scratches on the top. The case seems to be made of a solid piece of material and does not appear painted, so I probably won’t be able to wear through the top of this one. 
The Trackpad
While my old trackpad was definitely worn, the most annoying part of the old trackpad design was that things could get under the button and make the button sticky.
Well, they fixed that one by removing the button! The whole trackpad is one big button. Nice.
The Latch
The lid latch on my old machine is uh, a little broken. To actually open mine, you need to push the top lid right a bit, then hit the button to pop it out. Anne can’t open it. I call it a security feature.
Once again, Apple’s solution to this problem was to remove the component altogether. It’s just held together magnetically like the MacBooks are.
The Power Cable
Apple’s magsafe connector was pretty cool when it came out. It solved the problem of people tripping on the power cord and throwing your computer to the ground. It works a little too well on mine – my cat often pulls mine walking by. The big problem with these was that the wire would become frayed as it pulled out of the connector. Eventually, they stop charging at all. I had this happen to a bunch of mine. With some persistence, I was able to get the Apple Store to replace all of them for free.
The new cables have the wires come out perpendicular to the old ones so there’s less pressure on it. Hopefully this helps.
The Battery
I’m on my fourth battery for my trusty old MacBook pro. I found that after about 6 monts or less, I could get less than an hour out of it.
Apple claims 8-9 hours of life with the new built-in batteries. I’m skeptical. I’m not thrilled that the battery is neither swappable nor intended to be replaced by users. We’ll see how that goes.
Some other stuff
My old machine can’t burn CDs anymore. The C key doesn’t pop up anymore after the rubber piece under it broke. I had to lubricate my fan after it started making horrible noises.
It’s unclear if these problems have been addressed in the new machines. I guess I’ll see in a couple years.
Now, one could argue that these are not improvements, but fixes to Apple’s poor design choices. That might be fair, but it’s hard to argue that the current MacBook Pros aren’t very nicely built, small, powerful and efficient machines.
I should also note that I’m pretty hard on my laptops. I literally never turn them off. They only reboot for system updates. I probably use them 10 hours a day on average, so I’m probably pushing them to the extreme.
I do like my new machine though, so here’s to hoping it survives my abuse for the next few years.
