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Archive for the 'Rants' Category

WTF - Password required to read SL Blog?!?!?!

Jun
18
2008 in Rants, JIRA, off topic, Epic Fail, WTF and Second Life.
6 Comments

Check out this dialog I was just presented with when I opened Firefox to read some of today’s blogosphere buzz :

ll-password-request-rss

Okay…  "Apparently there’s a picture or something in that blog post that is hosted on JIRA, which is causing the browser to ask me for my password", I thought to myself, "I should go to the actual blog post and mention that fact, I bet they’d appreciate that".  Well, easier said than done :

ll-password-request

Naturally, comments are closed.  Well, it’s not my problem, and I don’t have any real responsibility to try any harder than that to tell LL when they screw up, but I would like to point out the irony of a blog post about Payments by Bank Wire which appears to be phishing for my password :)

PS: The authentication dialog looks the way that it does because I’m using Firefox 3 with the Nasa Night Launch Theme.

Popularity: 40% [?]

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Albertsons.com - Took my money, ‘lost’ my order

Jun
04
2008 in Albertsons, Rants and WTF.
3 Comments
NOTE: This is a personal rant, not relevant to my Second Life or Combat: Samurai Island in any way, it just gives me a way to voice my dissatisfaction with a company knowing that Google will index it and make it available to others with the same complaint, as there are apparently quite a few of us, and may perhaps help someone in the future who is trying to decide whether to use Albertsons online by looking for customer reviews on the web.  All my Second Life friends are encouraged to ignore this and move along :)

A few years ago, I discovered that Albertsons had entered into the home grocery delivery business, and took orders online.  Perfect for a super-busy and super-geeky guy like me who truly hates shopping, right? 

Not just Albertsons, either; Safeway also does home-delivery, and at the time a few others did too, like HomeGrocer.com and a few others that are long since out of business.

So, I’ve been relatively spoiled until now.  Sure, there were a few problems here and there, a few items not delivered or of lower quality than I would choose were I to do my shopping in person, or a substitution made that I would never have approved of, but overall it was just so convenient to order online that I’d always emphatically recommend it to friends and family.

But quite frankly it’s been going downhill a LOT lately.  Safeway kept delivering moldy bread, so I switched to Albertsons exclusively, despite the fact that the Albertsons is excruciating to use - I’m a web dev in RL, so I hate that website all the more knowing that almost any team I’ve worked with in the last decade could do better.

But today just takes the cake (haha, see what I did there?  I’m so funny.  Okay, maybe not).

After waiting 5 hours longer than the delivery window I selected, I phoned the Albertsons customer support number, where I was gruffly told that they’d lost thousands of customer orders today and was just "one of many" with this complaint.

I guess I believe them, since I went to the site to gather information to file a formal complaint, and this is what I was presented with:

albertsons-can-kiss-my-ass

What happened is, apparently, that I made my order, received the confirmation email, had my MasterCard charged, and…  Didn’t get my order because it was "Lost".  Customer service tells me that my card "will not be charged", even though I’m looking at the statement right this minute on my other window and I can see that it has been charged. 

Whether my debit card provider is waiting for the charge to be "finalized", or it already has been, is at this point in time not simply not relevant to me.  The money (nearly $700 dollars) is not available to me, meaning that I cannot feed my family until the issue is resolved.  I’m told it can take 7-10 business days to get my money back, so as you might imagine I’m pretty FUCKING PISSED OFF!!!

Yes, I do understand that bad things happen on the technical side that can’t reasonably be anticipated, but that doesn’t justify the extremely poor customer service I received while trying to resolve this issue, nor does it explain the resolution process Albertsons employs (wait until the money is refunded, then resubmit your order via the "Shop my Past Purchases" page).

This is unacceptable, and is the final straw.  Not only will I never shop with Albertsons online, but fortunately for me there are 6 major grocers in the nearby area that are as close or closer than the local Albertsons physical location, so I can safely say that they have lost me as a customer for all time, and it’s not in any way inconvenient to me to express my displeasure with them by going to the competition.

/rant off

 

Popularity: 23% [?]

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WTF is the ‘Release Keys’ button for, anyway?

May
01
2008 in JIRA, Rants and WTF.
8 Comments

I’ve been reading a very disturbing thread on the SL Forums (registration required) that points to a new type of inventory loss bug : VWR-6610 - Detaching a HUD could lead to the permanent loss of the detached item.

There are multiple ways to detach a HUD, of course, but far and away the most common ‘accidental’ detachment comes from the Second Life® viewer’s damned stupid user interface design.  When you click the ‘Release Keys’ button, it blows off every attachment that has scripted access to your movement key.  This could include nearly all animation overrides, C:SI swords, most in-world weapons of just about any flavor, and even the key display HUD that I created for Aimee.

And it makes me wonder, just why the hell is it necessary to do that?  Why is it necessary to have a button taking up valuable screen real-estate, and even sometimes (depending on what viewer version you are using) intentionally placed as if to encourage accidentally pressing it?  If the devs over at The Lab deem it to be such an indispensable feature, even though it’s almost certainly very rarely used once a person finds out how horrible the results are, couldn’t they at the very least place it in the Tools menu alongside the nearly-useless ‘Stop Animations’ item?

/rant off

Please note that the JIRA issue mentioned, while it gave me a chance to rant about something that irritates the crap out of me, is not limited to problems encountered using the ‘Release Keys’ button : It would appear that under some (unknown) set of circumstances, detaching a HUD by any means could result in the permanent loss of that HUD and all of its contents, which may include very expensive animations.

Popularity: 45% [?]

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I’ve just about freaking had it (grrrr)

Apr
29
2008 in Rants.
11 Comments

damaged_box-t Okay, seriously….  For the fifth time today I’ve had to log in to Second Life to pass along a sword that didn’t get delivered in-world, and this is probably at least the twentieth time this week.

This is not because the vendors are broken, it’s even happening to the vendors that I’ve used for nearly two years now.  The problem lies in the fact that the Second Life system is currently extremely unstable and fundamentally incapable of scaling to serve the current load.

I simply cannot afford to log in 5 or more times while I’m supposed to be working, I steal quite enough time from work for Second Life as it is.  And this really puts me in a bind because I pride myself on being as responsive as possible and not making people wait until after the end of the business day in my time zone before they get the product they’ve purchase.  I know I certainly wouldn’t want to wait up to 8 hours before something I buy is delivered.

So among the other twenty things I’m working on, I guess I’ll add some research into how to make my own delivery system more robust in the face of an unpredictable and pathologically fragile grid.

/rant off

Popularity: 41% [?]

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