Tuesday was somewhat of a disappointment to me as a consumer.
1. Claro Argentina (my mobile phone operator)
I tried to send a text message to a friend on tuesday, only to get an error message. This happened several times. I had checked my account balance a few days before so I was positive I had credit. I had more than enough credit. Yet, when I checked my account again it said “credit expired”. Outrage! I plugged my phone to the charger, put the hands-free heasdet on and dialed customer service. About 25 minutes later I managed to get someone to talk to me.
“– I’m sorry, sir, your credit expired a week ago”
“– Um… what? It’s not been 90 days since I added credit. It’s not even been 60 days.”
“– Our policy changed last May. Credit now lasts 45 days for a refill card of that value.”
“– wtf… Ok, fine. I’m not happy with this but I guess it’s my fault for not checking the expiration date.”
(I still can’t bring myself to yell at a CSR, even though I’m always pissed off when I call)
So I got a new card and redeemed it. I noticed two things. Unlike previous experiences, my older credit was completely lost. And my new card expires in 30 days (since it’s a $30 card instead of the $50 I got last time). This pissed me off even more than losing my credit. This company is trying to scrap as much money from me as they possibly can! No, I’m not surprised by it. But I’m still pissed. And I even more pissed about the fact that I have no choice. Their competitors are excactly the same.
I don’t mind paying more for a good product or good service. That’s why I buy my phones unlocked and I have a pre-paid line. It costs more but I can spare myself from a lot of the bullshit involving having a cell phone. Anyone wants to join me into starting a no-bullshit mobile operator? “We’ll charge you more, but you won’t feel like we are raping you from behind”. Sigh, one can dream…
2. Apple
I’m in the market for a new laptop. I’m a Mac user, which means I don’t have much to choose from. And that’s ok, because even though Apple thinks that consumers only want small screens and professionals only want big screens, I still get the choice of a good pro-spec machine. It costs more, but I was considering going for a Macbook Pro with it’s larger, matte screen.
Well, till last tuesday.
There are new Macbooks. And I most likely won’t be buying one. Not because they’re a bit ugly in my opinion (that’s not gonna affect my decision, positively or negatively), but because Apple removed the matte screen option from its professional line. This in itself doesn’t affect me much; I don’t need *that* much color acuracy for my work (my desktop monitor is VGA, for pete’s sake). What affects me is that Apple seems to be abandoning the professional market and focusing on the consumer market.
WTF? They show a computer editing video with a huge reflection on the screen? Wouldn’t that make color and contrast correcting a pain in the ass? Apple used to believe that:
MacBook Pro offers an antiglare widescreen display that’s perfect for color-minded professionals. For a more immersive viewing experience, you can configure the MacBook Pro display with a glossy finish. This gives everything you see a richer, more saturated feel.
— archived version of the Macbook Pro page on Apple.com
while the copy on the new page seems aimed to the consumer market:
The moment you open your MacBook Pro you’re greeted by glorious, full screen brightness. But that’s only one gleaming quality of the glossy LED-backlit widescreen display. The picture is brilliant and sharp from corner to corner. And anything you view — including the ultrathin display itself — is a spectacular experience.
“No matte = no buy. I’m looking at Windows laptops now. I can’t trust my business to a company that clearly abandoned the professional market for the consumer market.”. That’s the feedback I gave to the company that makes a tool I like about why they may lose me as a customer. I don’t like Windows as much as OS X, but I’m starting to look at Dell Precisions and Lenovo Thinkpads.
10/11/08
Tea
Turns out that there are very few stores that can easily make me part with my money in an impulsive way. One of them is a tea shop.
15 minutes and almost 50 pesos after entering the store I was out the door carrying 150 grams of tea*. And that’s because all I had on me was those 50 pesos. But my god, the Chocolate Chai blend has an aroma you would not believe. Mmmm.
*As a reference, that much money will buy you over 500 teabags of a regular brand here. A teabag has about 2 grams of tea.
I’ve done this sometime in the past (a few blogs ago — yes, I ignored a couple of blogs before this one), but Cat tagged me so it means I have to do it again. I’ll try not to cheat and repeat what I used last time. Or maybe I’m too lazy to go look for it.
- I’m extremely easy going. I don’t snap often, even if things don’t go my way. And even when I do snap I’m not the kind to bitch and moan about it a lot. People whose only reaction to a problem is complaining annoy me to no end.
- Driving is one of my favorite things in the world. Yet I’ve never owned a car. And if I had to buy a vehicle right now I’d probably buy a small scooter or a moped.
- I used to love writing when I was a kid. I’d take the family’s old typewriter and create silly short stories (my mom may have a few saved, but no, you can’t see them!). I don’t remember when I stopped but I’m regretting it.
- Much like writing, I love music but I cannot generate it in any way. I’ve long ago given up on the idea of playing more than a couple of chords on an instrument, and I most definitely don’t have a voice for singing.
- I went to a bilingual elementary school: regular spanish classes in the morning and english in the afternoons. And twice a week we had an hour of french, but I hated it and never learnt much. However, I must have hated it less than my classmates because I got a prize for finishing among the top of the class. Now I signed up for a basic french course which may come in handy since I seem to end up in Québec at least once a year.
- I used to drink insane amounts of Coca-Cola. I’ve gone down to normal levels now, maybe once a week when I get together with friends. My new drink is tea. I have enough tea to last me for a few months, yet I keep buying more.
Now the rules say I have to tag 6 people. Let’s see… Rob, Lola and Jill, you guys haven’t blogged in a while, so get to it! EvilScienceChick, cuz I’m sure she has a lot of evil science random things to share. Laurent, because he’ll do it in french :). And Ahmed, because for a guy who’s online so much, there aren’t many random facts about him out there!
These are the rules:
- Link to the person who tagged you.
- Post the rules on the blog.
- Write six random things about yourself.
- Tag six people at the end of your post.
- Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog(or sending an e-mail).
- Let the tagger know when your entry is up.
Yesterday I found a bunch of mix CDs I made before I even owned an mp3 player of any sorts. I played this particular one on a drive to downtown, it’s called #7 (yes, I numbered them - #1 I think was a mix tape) but it might as well be called “The early days of podcasting”. Tracklist:
- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Upon This Tidal Wave
- Jonathan Coulton - Ikea
- The Honorary Title - Bridge & Tunnel
- Freddy - Apart
- The Porcelain Gods - One And a Half Years Ago
- Superbeing - Conversation Piece
- Hydrofoil - Stamina
- Plain White T’s - Take Me Away
- The Bloody Irish Boys - Drunk Tonight
- Greg Dulli - Cigarretes
- Statistics - Another Day
- Betablokka - Scared - The Difference Between
- Becoming Wheels - Pipedreams
- 13 & God - Men of Station
- The Domino Parade - My Sleeve
- Christa Couture - Day 04
Hi. Welcome back. Excuse the mess, this blog has been unattended for several months now, but now once again you get to enjoy a breathtaking display of literature by yours truly. Ok, it’s more like a few words coughed into my keyboard, which I’m hoping will make any sense, but I know they most likely would make all my english teachers curl into a ball and cry like newborns.
What better time than 4 in the morning to clear the cobwebs from the Wordpress backend and drop a few lines here, eh?. Specially since I have to be up in a few hours, and preferably not looking like I wish I was still in dreamland. But for some odd reason I felt the urge to bring this blog back from the dead now. I guess I’m just weird like that.
I spent last weekend (a long one, 4 days) in Chile. Holy mother of god was it a fun fun fun trip! Me and a friend spent two crazy days in the city of Valparaíso, where we partied with crazy hostel people from around the world (mostly north america really) and walked up ridiculously steep hills to see Pablo Neruda’s house. That cop wasn’t kidding when he said “but you want to take a cab up there!”. The remaining 2 days we spent in Santiago, where even more hills awaited us. We decided to walk up or down most of them. You’d think we were freaking masochists. But at least we also met a really nice fellow from New Zealand who just happened to be paragliding across south america. He and his fianceé were taking a friend for her first flight, and they asked us if we wanted to tag along. Hmm, let me think… DUH!!. I love that sort of crazy experiences.
I also got to introduce my friend to the Starbucks iced white chocolate mocha. We picked up two large ones (large as in really big, not as in the stupid Starbucks cup size names) at the airport, and I’m now thinking it may have been a bit too much, as we boarded the plane in a sugar-rush induced giggles fit. We were like stoned schoolgirls, only smellier and gnarlier and… nothing like schoolgirls really. This incident made my friend come up with the name Mocha loca, and you can imagine how much that silly thing made us laugh.
There are more pics on my Flickr, and there are some videos that I may use to bring the vlog back to life as well. Could you start seeing some more regular activity on this website? Maybe, just maybe…
The home page of this website shows most of my online activity, but the RSS feed was lagging behind; it only showed the blog posts. Both Flickr and Del.icio.us provide RSS feeds, so how hard could it be to mix the three in one big feed? Turns out not at all, thanks to Yahoo Pipes
I had heard of the service but never tried it. I never really had a use for it. I have to say the interface is extremely cool. Being a visual guy I was very impressed with how you can manage your feeds easily as a diagram, pipes included!. What I did was the following:
- Grabbed the Wordpress blog feed with the “Fetch feed” module.
- Run that through the “Regex” module, to add “Blog post:” before the title. The syntax I used (I got it from somewhere else, I have no idea about regex!) is In title replace (.*) with Blog post: $1.
- Repeated the process for both the Flickr feed and the Del.icio.us feed.
- Merged all 3 feeds with the “Union” module.
- Run that main feed through the “Sort” module, to sort all items by published date. The string I used was Sort by y:published in descending order.
- Sent that to the Pipe Output, save the pipe and run it through Feedburner, replacing my old feed.
I wanted to do an extra step, adding the link URL to the description on the del.icio.us feed, but I couldn’t find a way to do that from within Pipes. I probably could with an extra step (maybe run it through Feedburner first?) but I don’t want it to get too complicated.
So if you notice some glitches on this feed it’s because I did all this. It should be pretty seamless though.
Edit: the only problem is that the feed title links to my Yahoo Pipes page instead of my website. I think you can change that on feedburner, but I can’t find it (anyone?). If I can’t fix this I think I’ll have to drop Pipes and use only Feedburner to merge my feeds. For now it’ll be pretty much the same, but I’m planning to add another feed in the future and it would be tricky withouth Pipes.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo Pipes, Feedburner, RSS feed, RSS, RSS merge
Well, actually I have been back for 5 days now. But I haven’t had time to write anything. I wanted to have something else than the latest post showing up on the home page so I figured I’d take 5′ and write some lines.
Podcamp Boston was awesome. So was New York. This was more of a people trip than a places trip. My goal was to see people; new friends, old friends I haven’t seen since PAB, and old friends I had never met. I was going to do some name dropping but after the 4th time of realizing I was forgetting someone I decided to refrain from it. I’ll just say that it was more than worth it the 30 hour trip there and the 26 hour trip back. I’d… no, I will do it all over again!
Photo by Bob. Saturday night at the Hilton Logan, calling canadian podcasters. Lots of fun :)
I’m now communicated during my stay in the US, courtesy of Virgin Mobile (well, I did have to pay them…). Reach me at
(617) 304-5543
I also get Twitter direct messages there.
Podcamp Boston 2 is underway!!
Technorati Tags: Podcamp Boston 2
Thursday at around 10:30 am the shuttle picks me up to take me to the airport. I’ll arrive there at 3pm, check in, and get on board by 6pm when my flight takes off. Friday at 8am (which would be 9am at home) is when the flight arrives in NY. I’ll get my bags and go straight to catch the first shuttle to Penn Station. Once there I’ll get on the first train to Boston. There’s one at 2pm but hopefully I’ll make it to an earlier one. I should be arriving in Boston around 6pm at the latest, 32 hours after leaving home. Then I have to go straight to the hotel, hop in the shower quickly and head down to the convention center for the Podcamp kick-off.
But you know what’s the worst? I actually like this shit…
Edit: I couldn’t make a train reservation because stupid Amtrak refused to take my card. I booked a flight instead. Not much more expensive, no dragging my bags through half of NY, free wi-fi at JFK courtesy of JetBlue and the total travel time goes down to a tad uder 30 hours. Not bad at all.
Two separate people today told me how much they still appreciate the work I did for them a long while ago. :) I love my job. 
