getwired.com

This morning I spent 20+ minutes on hold. With Earthlink. You see, I had grand plans to kill off my dependence on Time Warner, and switch to Earthlink+Dish. I’ve had Earthlink before – and they were not bad – basically just reselling TW’s cable service and riding their lines. But at the end of the day, I compared TW and Earthlink, and the price was a draw – with a contractual obligation. Anyhow – I decided to cancel the Earthlink before I even got it installed (also going to cancel the Dish order – TW may be annoying and overpriced, but they are reliable, and I don’t have to get new holes drilled in the house). Cancelingwas one of those incredibly unpleasant experiences. Like a tooth extraction:

• Me: I want to cancel my service
• Her: Why?
• Me: Because I got a competitive price from TW
• Her: I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear that (admittedly, we had a bad connection, but NOW you can’t hear me?)
• Me: I priced it out and realized I was going to pay less for the same service with TW
• Her: But your service is only $29.95 for the first 6 months, then only $41.95
• Me: I know. Which is more than I was going to pay for TW for my existing service
• Her: But do you have computer protection
• Me (frustrated): YES. YES, I DO. I WANT TO CANCEL MY ACCOUNT
• Her: Please hold while I verify your account (2 minutes of silence)

Ow. I spent the day out with my daughter – and got schooled several times by my iPhone. With the EDGE iPhone, I experienced Safari crashes maybe 10 times over the year. I’ve experienced at least 20 since I got my 3G. I’ve become uncomfortably familiar with the feel of Safari right before it hits the floor. The keys on the keyboard stop responding as quickly, the address bar seems “sticky”, then POOF… Safari is gone and I’m back at the front page of the phone. I wasn’t as much of a cynic as some that Apple had shipped a “beta” of 2.0 – but man – Safari is extremely unstable! I still love my phone, but what the heck is going on?!?!?!

You never realize how much you miss something until it’s gone. I’ve been having two problems with my Macs for a few weeks. The first is Office 2008 crashes – across all the apps. Only the second app launched (not the first) and only towards the tail end of the day, not when I first log on. Just one quick bounce on the dock and the app is gone. I hate having issues like that – you feel like an idiot telling someone “it only does it if the machine is facing north and it’s after 2 PM on Thursday.” But seriously — that’s the issue. The second was as of yesterday (suspiciously after installing VMware Fusion Beta 2 – now removed from the suspect list), my context-menu for right-click completely disappeared. Poof. Gone. Histoire. You do NOT realize how much you need that context-menu until it won’t show up. In speaking with a co-worker, he highlighted the fact that I’ve got eye-candy gunk (Candybar) that does some hacktastic things to make the desktop purty. Sure enough, I disabled the themeing, and now the context-menu is back. We’ll see if the Office issue is better now too. I’m optimistic that it is. On an up note, VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 is AWESOME. Ever so much closer to my beloved VMware Workstation on Windows (oh how I miss it’s features). In fact, I’d say that there are not many apps that I actually miss from Windows – but there are a few. I’ll try to post them. But VMware Workstation is one. It’s funny for me, since I’ve been a VMware fan/user for so long (since it was the virtualization standard AT MICROSOFT), I’ve watched Workstation grow up. Today, Fusion is really an analog to a Workstation version 3 or 4, IIRC. More than one snapshot being there in 2.0 is critical to me – so it’s nice to see that. Now, I just wish they’d add private networking. But I understand that the “nerd features” that make it useful for me as a software development tool in Workstation don’t always help sell Fusion, which seems to be hardcore targeted at consumers for now (not that that’s bad).