Wednesday, 26 December 2007

Don't Buy at Best Buy

I don't like to drive in LA and so I was wondering if I should start shopping certain electronic stuff at BestBuy rather than driving to Fry's which is roughly an hour away. Well, they made that choice quite easy and I will not go there and buy anything even if it is the only thing in the whole wide world. It is not enough that there Geek Squad became famous lately as Porn Collectors but their return policy is quite ludicrous.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 12:23 PM in Annoying

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TomTom GO 720: Don't Buy

I just wasted $60 bucks on a TomTom GO 720 because of the BestBuy return policy but I have to say that even without that I would not recommend it. Especially if you don't have Windows at hand please don't waste a minute thinking about it. Strangely enough because TomTom uses a Linux kernel on its device.

One reasons why I don't like it is that I doesn't list Starbucks. I shows the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Company but not Starbucks, how come? Then you must have Windows in order to use their feature like Map Share and finally you need to register within a month of the purchase and then you get one year of free updates. After than you buy their update service.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 12:22 PM in Annoying

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Wednesday, 28 November 2007

A New Kind of Bitch: the Apple Store Service

As you may have noticed it Apple appears quite often on my blog and often I give it a bad rap. My relationship with Apple is like the Opera Director and his Diva. He needs her and he likes her performance but he gets nuts about her attitude and ego. The same applies to Apple where I like their hardware and mostly ease of use of their OS but when it comes to service I could kick their ass. This time I got double charge from the UTC Store in San Diego and quite a heap of money, too. There I bought my Apple 30-inch monitor which is quite a gem but during checkout the transacti  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 5:37 AM in Annoying

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Tuesday, 27 November 2007

Verizon FIOS: Update

You could maybe guessed it already from a little bit faster download of this blog that I finally could switch over to Verizon FIOS. That said it needed some heavy guns to get the necessary info from Verizon. At the very end I had to call up an account representative and request that my service will be cancelled with an angry ton to stress the point and finally they were able to find a tech support gal able to find the right answer. And the answer was dead simple - I just had to look for Static NAT on their firewall settings. I never thought that IP forwarding could be found under firewall settings. Still Verizon is not able to provide a manual for their ActionTec router and so when I have another question I just have to get angry, call the account guy and demand a tech support guy/gal.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:17 PM in Annoying

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Tuesday, 20 November 2007

Verizon FIOS: Hurray - What? - Fuck!

Yesterday I finally had fiber optic internet service (FIOS) installed at home but, of course, I need a static IP address to run my web and mail server. The euphoria started to go down as soon as I realized that my installer did not have a clue how to install a static IP address. At the end he left me with a barely working internet router that only worked to the point that I could access it with a DHCP client. I tried for several hours to configure the router so that I would be able to use my static IP addresses on a client of that router but to no avail. I am not a hardcore Internet expert but so far I mostly got around things. But this time I failed not only because all the names on that box where quite different to the equipment I was used to but also because I was not able to set a static IP address on the LAN side of the router. If I switched that side to a static IP address everything went south.

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 11:24 PM in Annoying

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Tuesday, 30 October 2007

Microsoft's XBox 360 Support: Ahh, these Annoying Customers

Quite often in the US the website that wants to sell something is flashy with a lot of eye-candy. But as soon as you need some support then you enter the grey area which seems to fit quite nicely with the upcoming Halloween: Who has the scariest Support Web Site. Of course, our friends at Microsoft don't want to stay behind the trend. This is the XBox website:


XBox.com Website

  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 3:49 PM in Annoying

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Thursday, 18 October 2007

No Advertising through Comments, Period

Even though most blogs have ads on the side of their blog web pages I still resist that but even if I would I am not going to approve any advertising through comments, period. That said if someone participates in a discussion and contributes to it I will give him / her the chance to mention their product as I did for Boris Kraft and others. Because I have comment monitoring switched on I am just going to disapprove an unwanted comment hoping it would discourage these low riders. Yes, low riders because they want to make a buck out of highjacking a blog for their personal g  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 8:21 AM in Annoying

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Tuesday, 16 October 2007

Ohh, for Christ's Sake -- F*** Maven 2: Part II

My Woes with Maven 2 don't seem to stop. Today I downloaded ServiceMix 3.1.2 and tried to build it from the source. Well, after Maven started to build it finally aborted with a strange error inside the ServiceMix Script component:

[INFO] Trace
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: edu/emory/mathcs/backport/java/util/concurrent/atomic/AtomicBoolean
at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredConstructors0(Native Method)
at java.lang.Class.privateGetDeclaredConstructors(Class.java:2328)
at java.lang.Class.getConstructors(Class.java:1446)
at com.thoughtworks  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 5:12 PM in Annoying

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Friday, 5 October 2007

Ohh, for Christ's Sake -- F*** Maven 2

As most of you already know I don't like Maven2 / Maven 2 but the more I have to use it the more I hate it. It is 10:45pm I tried to compile the JBoss Deployer for ServiceMix. Because I ran into issues with incompatible classes I wanted to upgrade the deployer to the latest ServiceMix and my current JBoss version 4.0.5.GA. The freaking POM is not that long but I was unable to compile because of missing dependencies and plugins.

I realized that ServiceMix matured away from an incubating project so I updated the repository and version numbers appropriately. But then the problems star  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 11:06 PM in Annoying

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Wednesday, 26 September 2007

Here you go, you Spammers

Well, to all the spammers that tried to sell me all their junk through trackbacks:

Shop is closed, no more Trackbacks

You wanted to annoy me and you succeeded. Even though no spammer's trackback were ever allowed to show up on my blog you still kept on trying it. Finally I had enough and pulled the plug.

Have fun now - Andy

Posted by schaefera at 11:14 PM in Annoying

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Saturday, 22 September 2007

FIrst-Class Mail should be renamed Snail-Mail

Today I got a check for an invoice that was sent 7 days ago from somewhere in Michigan. I cracked me up when I saw that the post stamp mentioned First-Class. Maybe the US Postal Service should call it Snail-Class or just Snail-Mail instead. Even a bulky package transported by UPS or FedEx does not take that long.

Have fun - Andy

Posted by schaefera at 5:01 PM in Annoying

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Friday, 17 August 2007

Glassfish: Way too complicated for Me

Today I had a look if I could deploy our JBI components on another JBI compatible server than ServiceMix. Back from my days at SeeBeyond I knew that Glassfish has some quirks but today I got confirmed again that I don't want to use Glassfish except a customer asks for. I know that my knowledge of JBoss give me an advantage on how to install, start and deploy applications on JBoss but if I am struggling for hours just to access an object from Glassfish' naming server then I don't want to imagine what other people do.

Even in JBoss retrieving objects from a JNDI server on a remote JV  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 7:59 PM in Annoying

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Thursday, 26 July 2007

I could fix Apple's Screw Up on my MacBook Pro

Like many others after installing the last update some applications stopped working for me. I finally could fix it without any help from Apple as you can see here. It seems Apple is too busy counting their money and it was especially annoying when I got an email from Apple today telling me that I could buy a preview to Mac OS X Leopard :-(.

Have fun - Andy

Posted by schaefera at 3:53 PM in Annoying

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Monday, 23 July 2007

iPhone: mostly great but also some annoyances

After using the iPhone for now 3 weeks it is still a joy to use it. Even though I did not expect the iPhone to be perfect I was surprised how a problem with the iPhone would manifest and how difficult it was to find a solution. I use the iPhone everyday and I did not restart it since I bought it. A few days ago I started to notice that from time to time the iPhone would go back to the home page when I was using the Safari browser or the Maps application. Now yesterday this became so prevalent that I could not use Safari or Maps at all. Worse of all any entered data was lost and I had to re  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 8:33 AM in Annoying

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Tuesday, 17 July 2007

What makes One Drunk Driver plus one Traffic Jam

Well, that makes:

  • Two spoiled evenings
  • One (nearly) totaled car
  • Two damaged cars
  • One person probably in Jail and later driver license revoked
  • All happy that nobody got hurt

No, it is not me who was drunk so my car was totaled but I am still happy that it was only property damage. It depends now if the car is totaled or not on how long I have to wait until I get my car back. I sure hope that I can transfer my car pool sticker from my crashed Prius to a new one otherwise I really get angry. At least it was a good physics experime  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 10:50 PM in Annoying

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