Degutis Insights » fail

No customer service at this time

Al — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:45:18 +0000

I was on the phone trying to get in touch with the Customer Service group of Other World Computing about an order. As is too common nowadays, they use an automated phone menu system, but this one forces you to talk to it which I particularly don’t like. I had to grab my voice recorder to capture this after my first attempt:

Customer Service phone call attempt (MP3)

Ironically, in a different part of the menu it did have the option to “customer service.” Unfortunately, I had stopped recording and wasn’t going to go back into menu hell to capture it.

- Al Degutis

What iTunes 7.7.1 broke for me

Al — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:21:35 +0000

I’ve been one of the lucky ones. I’ve had pratically no problems with the 3G iPhone and only minor issues with a couple of apps since Day 1. Then I installed the iTunes 7.7.1 update when it came out. That’s when the troubles started. Luckily, the iPhone itself hasn’t been affected but the iPhone with iTunes experience has degraded.

It started with a constant and reproducible crash of the MDCrashReportTool. The following sequence causes the crash:

Launch iTunes 7.7.1
Connect the 3G iPhone
This error comes up:

Next, I’ve had random errors when iTunes tries to update programs to newer versions. This is only one screen shot of the three I’ve seen so far in the last week.

Lastly, when there are app updates some apps will display multiple times on the App Update Screen in iTunes. Unfortunately, I didn’t grab a screen shot of this so I’ll have to wait until another app update is available.

All of this leaves me impatiently waiting for iTunes v7.7.2 which (hopefully) will “includes fixes to improve stability and performance” as Apple stated in the release notes for v7.7.1.

- Al Degutis

3rd party apps must make up for Twitter’s incompetence

Al — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:55:32 +0000

With Twitter continuing to be so unreliable, I think third party applications such as Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twitterrific and possibly FriendFeed(?), just to name a few, need to add the option to keep a local copy of messages and your Following and Followers list. TweetDeck is already ahead of the game as it keep messages in a local database. But, with Twitter’s latest screw up, in which they inadvertently removed people from following others, the ability to have a backup, export or offline copy of your Following list is very important.

Who is up for the challenge?

-Al Degutis