Friday, November 25, 2005

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Why do legitimate eCommerce sites, like Travelocity, insist on being evil? It is one of the few sites that manages to sneak pop-ups past Google's pop-up blocker. I do business with these people, why do they think annoying me is worth the neglible incremental revenue they are going to get??? 12:35:29 PM    comment []

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Reasons to Loathe Adobe Acrobat Agonizingly slow to load. Frequently bugging you to upgrade. New "feature"--allows creator to make text un-selectable. Absolutely maddening. Worst part--it must be turned on by default, so that it is used in cases where there is absolutely no justification (protection of intellectual property) for doing so. Such as the travel itinerary I received from American Express Travel. Its very existence encourages content providers to take the PDF path, rather than taking the trouble to convert to HTML, the native language of the web. I know, this is a weak argument, if Adobe didn't do it, someone else, like Microsoft, probably would. Still, it doesn't endear Adobe to me. 12:28:42 PM    comment []

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Home Voice Mail Feature: Send to Mail I don't like taking message for other people (family members). Likewise, when leaving voice messages, I would much prefer to leave a complicated message with voice mail--where I know it will be recorded faithfully and reliably--rather than with the person who happens to have answered the phone. So I would like to have PBX-style integration between my home phone and voice mail system, so that I could push a button and have the caller be transferred directly to voice mail. AFAIK, this feature is now generally available. I could be wrong, because I haven't experimented with home voice mail--the dedicated answering machine seems simpler, and cheaper. But to really work well, it would require integration with the phone--I don't want to press *2 to direct the message, I want to press a single, Send to Voicemail button. Extrapolating to a larger pattern, this is yet another example showing that all programmable devices should be addressable via a common, PC-based interface, as well as a common, general-purpose remote control. 12:13:25 PM    comment []