23 posts tagged “bugs”

Tonight, each time I saved the previous post, Vox shut down my entire browser. Anyone else having this problem?
   Like Unikfrek, I can break programs or sites through normal use. It is not unlike that time when I Googled al-Jazeera (whether as two words or one word, with or without the hyphen, regardless of browser, regardless of computer in this office), the browser would crash.

Note to Vox: an auto-save feature, please, considering Maxthon crashed just as I finished the original and superior version of this post. Dammit, I really, really hate retyping. Here’s the short, short version.

   Right: ordered. Amazon. Saturday. Mission: Impossible, fourth season. Still good. But Martin Landau has left because he asked for a pay rise and Paramount said no, and they kicked out Mrs Landau, Barbara Bain, as well.
   In came the other guy who auditioned for Spock but won, but even Leonard Nimoy, playing the new master of disguise, began getting itchy feet and buggered off to England to play a racing car driver who solves crimes.
   Spock’s called Paris—like Kramer, before we found out his first name was Cosmo, we never learn if this is his first or last name. In this season, the IMF was still combatting spies and undermining régimes in the good ol’ American way, before anti-Vietnam types scared the producers into forcing the good guys to combat local hoods and finks in the sixth and seventh season. (Capt Kirk played one in 1971, but Spock had gone by then.)
   You wondered why the IMF was even involved when the US Government could have sent in the Feds, Popeye Doyle or even Popeye.
   Script quality for Mission: Impossible is inversely correlated to the size of Peter Lupus’s sideburns. His sideburns are growing in 1969 when the fourth series began airing, so there was basically one more year tentatively before the rot really began setting in.
   Amazon UK. Sunday. Discussed before: Dempsey and Makepeace, first series. Script quality inversely correlated to how typically ’80s Glynis Barber’s hairstyle got. Plot summary: a New Yorker (Michael Brandon) and a South African (Glynis Barber, née van der Riet) are teamed up. ‘Will they? Won’t they’ in the stories—‘they did’ in real life. They spar off each other verbally to see if Michael will say, ‘Thomas the Tank Engine had a hard night’s shunting,’ or if Glynis would go relapse into an Afrikaaner accent.
   No, actually, they both play cops: Brandon’s character is from the NYPD and Barber’s is an English aristocrat sometimes in various states of undress during the series. (Like Diana Rigg on The Avengers, she could beat the s*** out of someone, but did so wearing less PVC.)
   Best scripts from Murray Smith (The Paradise Club—sinfully still not on DVD) and even Ronnie Blythe appears in one episode but as a very evil villain.
   Darn you, Google: I was checking for the name of the actor who played Ronnie Blythe when Maxthon crashed. I won’t be checking again.
   Bets are that despite having a longer distance to cover and having been ordered later, the British package will arrive earlier thanks to Royal Mail being more efficient than the USPS.

Many people know I believe Microsoft Word to have been concocted by skinheads, the writers of the Michael Fish hurricane gag and William Shatner’s toupée.
   I am one of the last remaining people using WordPerfect because on WordPerfect, I can set the typeface and point size (i.e. font) and margins, and type away. Miracle of miracles: the text stays in that font and with those margins until I tell it otherwise!
   Every time I use Word the margins can change, the font can change, even the entire formatting (I will be doing a bulleted list, for example, and it decides for me that I no longer am doing one) will change.
   Sometimes I want to enter my own paragraph indents but Word adds them for me, which I can see would be helpful to some—but not when that text gets imported into InDesign or some other program. It totally warps the layout. And if it adds indents, why doesn’t it add one to the paragraph before? No: it leaves that one with the manually inserted indent so you can’t do a global search-and-replace.
   Of course, since people send me Word files I have no choice but to do the odd piece of work on the Microsoft program.
   MS Word trainers look at me like I am a completely helpless incompetent and swear black and blue this never happens to them, but I think this is part of the skinhead–Fish–Shatner conspiracy.
   I can show any of these experts that this crap happens to me every time I use the program. Set typeface. Set point size. Set margins. Type. Word decides after one or two paragraphs that it does not approve of my style and that Times New Roman 12 pt with one-inch margins is superior.
   There is no freaking way on God’s great earth that Microsoft Word is the most efficient way to word-process (we used to say compose or type).
   And answer me this, Word-trainers, what heck is going on here?

   Here I am, responding to some interview questions. Each time I type magazine (I did it a few times to be sure), the I is capitalized! (They’re the two redlined words. No s***, I know it’s wrong. But I typed it correctly.)
   And no, I did not feed in an automatic replace setting. There is nothing in there (that I can see) that would suggest that the word magazine should be replaced by magazIne. Yes, Word buffs, I have gone in to the Autocorrect menus.
   I am going to import this text into WordPerfect, answering it, then exporting it back into Word format.
   I guess no one has ever had to type the word magazine in Word in the history of word processing for this not to be picked up.
   For all those pedants (like me) complaining about young people and all their weird capitalization, trying to make things look “trendy”, don’t blame them. It’s the software doing it.

The day I photographed this pre-production Audi R8 in 2007 was also the day Audi dealer staff were pushing a car they could not start to the workshop.
   I didn’t post those photos as I didn’t want to embarrass Audi, and the fact is that this was a pre-production car, not the final thing. Who cares if it didn’t start? Its purpose was to look good in showrooms to entice people to put down a deposit.
   In the Murdoch Press today, I notice that our old mate Philip Glenister—DCI Gene Hunt—has been test-driving one of these babies. He writes:

You need to put your foot down on the clutch before you can start it, so I spent a good 15 minutes trying to get her going, thinking that I had a flat battery. Not a good look. Once you do get going the thing you notice instantly is the sound of the engine. It’s in the back of the car, very close to you, and that’s all you can hear: this massive V8 revving behind you. You think: “S***! This is rather powerful.”

   I have to say that the above is what had happened. And I didn’t think of suggesting that the dealer try this, or read through the manual to figure it out. I was, after all, a bystander who had just returned a lovely S3, on his way home.
   Nor would it have occurred to me at the time. I always, habitually, start a car with my foot on the clutch, and wrongly assume that everyone else in the world does the same (providing their car has a clutch).
   I think of the poor chaps tearing the Audi apart, as it was assumed that prior to the push, there was something wrong with the computer inside it. All the diagnostic information probably showed nothing wrong, and to think I could have hopped in and pretended I had the magic touch and saved the day. 

Why is it that when I watch Alias in New Zealand on TV2, Jennifer Garner and the rest of the cast are really, really fat?
   I am serious. The programme airs with the wrong proportions for the TV screen almost every week, for between, say, 10 seconds to the first 10 minutes. Everything is stretched so wide it’s basically unwatchable. It’s like the computers stretch everything at TVNZ and then someone figures out that some button hasn’t been pressed and shrink Garner, Garber and everyone back to size after the ad break.
   I’m not an Alias fan but still, this isn’t good enough.

I love Vox. I was an early Vox beta tester. And you guessed it: I’m going to criticize it.
   Not badly. It’s just that I clicked on the Try our new features link in the top right-hand corner. I got a new design that lost the functionality of this present one, with the little arrows next to My Vox and My Neighborhood (sic). I like those arrows because I can get a pull-down menu and see other stuff I can use. This new design is just “flat”.

   I took the survey and it began talking about content modules or something, and verticality, and some other stuff which I cannot remember. Well, I have no idea what they are talking about. It asked me which tab I found most useful and proceeded to list four things that I could not see anywhere on my screen.
   In other words, I am definitely missing something. Anyone know what Vox is going on about? I have made notes in my feedback so I hope they can answer, but right now I am at a total loss about these supposed new features that aren’t anywhere to be seen. Or is it just really bad design: all these things are there, but you need to be a psychic medium to detect where they can be found?

I’ve just tried setting up a Lucire social network at Ning, the service started by Marc Andreessen. I have got through part of it but have found adding photos from Flickr impossible. I follow the instructions, get to the bottom of the page, click the save button, and nothing happens. Anyone know how to use the site?

The top of my Google web search results’ page now reads Web Images Products instead of the more convenient Web Images Video. Anyone else suffered this change?
   Does Google even care about how we search for things and what we like and dislike?

Yep, I was right about MySpace being leaky when it came to security: another Macy’s $500 card ad came through from a friend’s account. And here’s what MySpace had to say about these things.

What do I do about the weird spam bulletins being posted through my account?

Solution:

Simply change your password and make sure you are always logging into MySpace.com.
For more information about phishing and internet security, please check out the following links:

Spammers posting bulletins
Phishing sites
The Safety Tips page.
You can also report phishing websites to MySpace.com here.

I find it concerning that there’s even a page like this, because I am reading it thus, between the lines: if you stay logged in, someone will get your password. In fact, someone will get your password anyway.
   I know it’s not what it says but that’s three comment spams in two weeks.

[Cross-posted] One glitch aside (in the notes below) I think we might be ready for prime-time—this is the public announcement (rather than the private one sent to Voxers earlier). Lucire has a blog—after I resisted it for years. The idea: to write about some behind-the-scenes stuff. I see no reason about having any “mystique” behind what we do. We work—hard.
   Some of you in the marketing world will know that I did not think much of blogs originally. And that led to my refusal to go with a Lucire blog—after all, the forum was pretty successful from 2002 to 2005 before our hard drive conked out in 2006 and a lot of the data disappeared (they’re buried on the server somewhere, I am told by the team).
   But the world has moved on, too, since 2005, and putting the occasional op-ed in blog form doesn’t seem too bad an idea. As long as it contributes to the community and allows us to talk to our readers, why not?
   It’s been repeated in the first post of the new blog, where Lucire ‘Insider’—the name comes from the print edition, though I did toy with ‘Oracle’—is stated to complement the Forum and Facebook group.
   What I am wondering is how long my MySpace opposition will hold out, now that I am eating humble pie on this issue. As mentioned, the idea of a JY&A Media publication appearing on a Murdoch Press site feels funny.

Note to Maureen: we weren’t able to fix that earlier glitch you mentioned as nothing in the coding shows up (especially harder since it can’t be replicated on our computers), though there are some oddities (the Digg.com, Del.icio.us, etc. links only show on some posts, and there is no logical reason for them being “selective”). But who said computer programs were logical?! One entry aside, only a few dozen people are visiting the blog at the moment as we haven’t exactly made it obvious, so maybe with a bigger sample we might be able to track down the error. Please do bear with us!
   If anyone else cannot see parts of the Lucire ‘Insider’ comment form, viz. if the name, email and blog fields disappear, please send me a comment here. Especially if you have theories on why this happens!—JY