Plaidophile

For the first time in a while, I decided to buy an album off the iTunes Music Store (since it was the only place it was available). Actually purchasing it required:

1. Logging into iTunes
2. Accepting updated terms and conditions
3. Logging into iTunes again
4. Enabling a bunch of wish-it-were-two-factor authentication questions (with the usual problems the pre-set questions always have, and no way to set custom questions)
5. Logging into iTunes again
6. Being notified of the download on every iOS device in my house simultaneously (some of which I didn't realize were even turned on)
7. Being asked if I wanted to turn on automatic downloads of purchases (why yes I WOULD like to actually download this music I just paid for!)
8. Finally, logging into iTunes again

At that point it finally downloaded the album.

As always, the last 10% of the project ends up taking 90% of the time. Also, quite a lot more money involved too — I'm not even going to total it up because holy cow. (Let's just say that I'm certain that I've spent more on this kitchen update than I paid for my car.)

So I just got a gigantic (thousands of dollars) bill for my CT scan a month ago, with an "uninsured discount." This means that Sutter's billing department has most likely either forgotten to bill my insurance, lost the information outright, or made a stupid data-entry error which has caused them to believe that my insurance isn't valid. Either way, this is going to be another giant headache that takes another fucking year to take care of. All for a test that found nothing.

And this is why I should just stop caring about my health.

As part of my ongoing crusade to get Google out of my life as much as possible, I have switched my search engine to DuckDuckGo. It is mostly pretty good (and a lot easier to do in Firefox by installing the search plugin), although there are still a few rough edges.

One of the more annoying things is that it still tries to overcorrect things that it seems as errors, which can make it pretty difficult to look up pages on programming things.

However, there is also a pretty troubling thing in the way that they've implemented SafeSearch; rather than simply filtering the search results to remove adult content, they also remove potentially-adult-material-generating terms from the search phrase itself. They try to whitelist non-adult-oriented uses of words based on phrase matches, but it's pretty clumsy, and anyway it's a pretty stupid way to try to sanitize results. Annoyingly enough, it's also all-or-nothing; you can turn off SafeSearch entirely, or you can try to figure out how to get a phrase through the rather arbitrary filter.

So of course I've taken screenshots of what I'm talking about.

I was using 5ite.com as a cheap VPS for my email hosting. Over the several months that I was using them, I was constantly plagued with frequent outages, and my uptime was nowhere close to the guaranteed 99.9%. No matter how much I complained about this, they did nothing to rectify said guarantee. Often they would go down for a whole day at a time and not respond to any customer emails or even say what was going on via Twitter, nor would they provide any information afterwards.

This morning was the last straw, however; there was another protracted outage yesterday, and when I opened a ticket their response was that they were undergoing "emergency maintenance." Today my server came back up, but lo and behold, the file permissions were all completely broken; it looked like they had done a hamfisted system restore because everything was owned by root:root. User files, temp files, device inodes, everything. So of course, very little of the system actually worked.

Fortunately, I happened to have a backup from several hours before the outage, and was able to restore all my files. To LiNode, where I am setting up e-snail.us anew.

It'll take a while for DNS to propagate for the new mail.e-snail.us address, but hopefully when it does I can hit the ground running with a working email system, modulo the likelihood that I've forgotten to migrate some config files or SSL certs or whatever.

I had to reinstall Windows XP on my netbook, and of course it's asking for the product key, which I am supposed to enter from the 'certificate of authenticity' that is attached to the bottom of the laptop. Attached specifically to where the computer gets REALLY HOT, and the label has a thermal 'feature' that makes it turn black if it's heated up.

Time to just use TinyXP instead.

Just because I have a working theory for what's going on doesn't mean I don't have a lot of ridiculously high (post-insurance!) medical bills from the ER visits I had earlier. Sigh.

It wasn't enough that their best phone (the Motorola Triumph) had a terrible touchscreen and problems with battery life.

It wasn't enough that, despite it being an unlimited-access pay-as-you-go service, they didn't allow forwarding to third-party voicemail providers, and didn't provide any decent application-based voicemail of their own.

It wasn't enough that the data service was slow and the voice service horrible.

It wasn't enough that they never updated the phone to anything even remotely recent Android-wise, and never released the kernel source allowing the modding community to take it into their own hands.

It wasn't enough that they didn't anticipate that my expiring credit card would cause a problem and prompted me to update it instead of freezing my service when I was out in the middle of nowhere and needed to get in touch with people, and didn't give me any way of finding out what had happened until I got home.

What really pushed me over the edge is that they remotely disabled all of my phone administration applications (Astro File Manager, Gingerbreak, Superuser) and limited my access to my own filesystem.

(Of course, all the stuff above didn't help either.)

So I was doing a Google search and the damn thing started pointing me to the "+You" button like it was the end of the world if I didn't click on it. So I clicked on it, just to make it shut up, and signed up for Google+ again from my one and only GMail account (that I have only for my Android phone and YouTube account at this point). I figured I'd make a token effort at filling out a profile and adding suggestions to my circles, and at least reconnect to the Song Fight friends on there.

It was, of course, taking those suggestions from my email address book, and after all the people in my address book who are already on Google+, it also asked me to add/invite everyone else in it too. And then it kept on making suggestions on the feed sidebar. The top two suggestions were myself (via the name and email address that had gotten banned to begin with), and my grandfather, who as previous readers of this blog know died a bit over a year ago.

There was no way to opt out of this.

Stay classy, Google.

After going disc-only on Netflix I decided to go ahead and turn Blu-Ray discs back on, since a significant portion of my queue is actually in that format now. I have very quickly learned to loathe Blu-Ray's advanced "features," which are of course being used for nothing but advertising now.

For example, in Where the Wild Things Are, there are about 15 minutes of unskippable, un-fast-forwardable trailers for other movies. Any attempts at getting out of those and into the movie are met with the trailers being completely restarted from the beginning. (This may have also been because it was the "rental edition" of the movie, which had no extra features.)

Next, The Blues Brothers opens up directly to the main menu — which doesn't load until it downloads a bunch of content from BD Live. All ads, of course. Until that happens, you're stuck with a repeating montage of the key scenes from the film. At least on my BD player it's possible to get past this by pressing "disc skip," but then as soon as the BD Live content finishes loading, it boots you back into the main menu. Absolutely irritating, and completely pointless. The BD Live content it was waiting for wasn't even anything related to the movie — it was all banner ads for other things coming out on Blu-Ray.

As always, piracy is the more consumer-friendly option.

So I've been having some minor hearing trouble with my left ear, and last night it became pretty obvious that it's due to an infection or the like. So I figured I'd go to a Saturday clinic to get it looked at (I am between doctors right now). Of course, St. Luke's Hospital (whom I've ranted about so many times in the past) no longer lists their clinic hours on their website, and only provide a phone number; calling that phone number just results in a message that says, "Our office is now closed. Please call back during business hours." They never state what those business hours are.

My health insurance provider's website also doesn't provide hours of operation for any of the doctors in their directory. Searching the Web is an exercise in futility; San Francisco has so many special-purpose clinics that those dominate the search results for any search on "clinic" (Saturday or otherwise), and searching Yelp for "doctor open Saturday" finds a bunch of restaurants which have one or more reviews including the word "doctor" or "Saturday" (e.g. "went here for brunch on Saturday") and plenty of other non-doctors (e.g. chiropractors).

It's like this xkcd, except about things in real life.

So for obvious reasons I'm moving my crap away from Google. I'll keep my main gmail.com account for use with my Android phone (because there's no reasonable substitute on the Android side) but for everything I care about, I'm going back to self-hosted über alles.

Dreamhost's shared server offerings are no longer adequate for my email needs, though. As such, I will probably switch that to a VPS. I've gotten a few good recommendations for Linode. Any others I should look into? Normally I'd just sign up for Dreamhost VPS but I've heard bad things about them lately, and also bad things about Slicehost.

It'll be nice to have sane bogofilter-based filtering again, in any case.

The other main thing I use Google for is RSS aggregation. Are there any good server-side aggregators with decent user interfaces? My usual fallback is FeedOnFeeds, but there's something that always causes me to get fed up with it and switch back to Google Reader. I have no idea what the hell that reason is, but it always becomes a giant "oh yeah" thing when I start using it. The only thing I seem to have written up was the last time I switched back to FonF after Google pissed me off the previous time. (Someday I'lll learn that he doesn't hit me out of love.)

It'd also be nice to have a decent CalDAV server, since I occasionally use my Google Apps ones for various things. So that's another thing to put on the VPS (Dreamhost's WebDAV doesn't have CalDAV extensions). I assume that I can find such a thing via, er, a search engine.

And ON THAT TINY NOTE, what should I use for searches instead of Google?

• Ex-Google employee who was suspended from Google (the attitude involved played a big part in her leaving the company) — plenty of comments there from people with similar stories
• My Name Is Me: A clearinghouse of stories for why Internet identity ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT be tied to legal identity
• A friend of mine in the UK has started an EU investigation on Google for their flagrant violations of anti-discrimination and privacy laws
• Google+'s own VP isn't even using his real name on his profile. Hypocritical much? (also Scoble — allegedly also not his real name — is a terrible sycophant)
• Somewhere some Google higher-up said something to the effect of, "Maybe people who are trying to hide from their abusive stalkers shouldn't be using Google+." Anyone remember who said that and where? More attention need sto be brought to this sort of arrogant attitude.

I'm actually surprised it took this long, but I've been suspended from Google+ for "violating community standards." Of course, to reinstate it they want me to change my name to my legal name and provide a copy of a driver's license, or otherwise show that the name that everyone knows me as is my real name from a "reputable source" such as "Facebook, LinkedIn, or a news article."

I was already having a more or less apathetic relationship with G+, and now I guess this settles whether I'll be using it anymore.

In other news, other parts of Google are much the same. "Do no evil" just isn't good enough, guys.

Many, many years ago when I was trying desperately to get a job after grad school, I put my resume everywhere I could. As a result I ended up on the mailing list of Aikon Technologies, a bunch of ridiculous spammers who are the embodiment of the worst practices of tech recruiting. I constantly get job listings from them for things I have no interest in and which aren't even listed on my résumé. Oh, you want me to take a 6-month short-term DBA contract in Cleveland?! SIGN ME UP.

Every week it's a different name and email address contacting me with the exact same form letter. They have an unsubscribe link which does nothing. When I send email to the recruiters to tell them to unlist me, they don't respond (or if they do, it's just to send me the exact same job listing).

A lot of tech recruiters act in this way (using a shotgun approach to trying to recruit talent and find jobs so that they can get that delicious referral bonus), but most of them at least try to target based on résumé keywords, and will remove me from their database if I ask once or twice. But not Aikon Technologies.

Trying to spam filter it is a difficult thing though. I'm worried that if I mark the individual messages as spam, ALL recruiter emails will appear as spam, and there's no way to just mark an entire domain's crap as being spam (you can have it delete all emails from a domain but that's not quite the same, and also not what I want).

So it's just time to get the word out: Aikon Technologies are a bunch of spammers with absolutely no ethics when it comes to candidate placements, and no company in their right mind should take them seriously as a tech recruiter.

Nice to know you guys are on top of things, and are registered Apple developers so that you can receive pre-release GM builds of upcoming operating systems so you aren't blind-sided by major operating system upgrades that people have known about a year in advance. Oh, wait.

What is it about pro audio vendors that makes them think it's okay to hold off on updating their software for major changes to their customers' platforms?

It's not just you guys, of course. Native Instruments and MOTU are even worse. At least you guys continue to support your products more than two months after they come out. But still.

I mean, sure, I could just hold off on updating my OS until the driver gets updated, except that this doesn't help me with the new Mac I just bought for my studio, because I'd been waiting to upgrade until Lion came out because Apple was withholding hardware upgrades until that happened. I'm not going to have any way to NOT run Lion on it. I guess I'm just going to have to use a cheap USB audio interface in the mean time.

I understand there being some brokenness and some beta-quality nature to various things when the OS actually comes out, but for a professional-audio hardware company to not be willing to get a single ADC developer license so that they can be prepared and be ready with SOME sort of driver upgrade when the OS itself is in beta - much less after it's actually been released to retail - is just ridiculous.

Apple is VERY GOOD to developers when it comes to keeping them ready for major OS changes. You guys really dropped the ball, and now I'm going to think twice about buying another PreSonus product in the future.

The MPAA and RIAA are at it again. Here is the letter I am sending via that page's form:

I am a constituent and I urge you to reject S. 978, "A bill to amend the criminal penalty provision for criminal infringement of a copyright".

This bill is overly-broad and only serves to further cater to the monopolistic practices of the big media cartels who operate as part of the RIAA and MPAA. It further erodes the rights of artists set forth under the fair use doctrine, and provides a chilling effect on free expression and active participation in common culture. It does not protect the interests of the RIAA or MPAA, and will only be used to criminalize everyday activities.

Further, given that RIAA members have copyrights on specific renditions of silence and other fundamental sounds, as well as songs containing every word known to every language, it is likely that they could use this to stifle creative free expression even from those who aren't infringing on the bill, simply because any new song written by a non-member could be shown to be infringing on SOME property. Or are the courts capable of determining whether the two-second silent pause in any random YouTube video originated from track 65 of Blur's "Modern Life is Rubbish?" Could any use of the word "bird" be construed as infringing on the composition rights to about half of the early Beatles catalog?

I urge you to reconsider this bill, and all others like it.

If you're reading this, you probably know me as "fluffy." You might be aware of what my real name is (or at least my real first initial), but that's probably not the way you think of me in terms of my identity, unless you're one of the few real-life friends who calls me by my real first name (usually because you're a coworker or family member or the like).

I am of course now on Google+, but Google+ has done something insidious: they've taken the same route as other social networks where they champion the real name as being a much more valid identifier than the way that people actually know me. They've always required a "full" name (so I used the standby "fluffy <3" for that), but now they also specifically prevent non-letters in the fields. Sucks to be you if you're one of the people who have legally changed their name to a mononym or to include a numeral; also sucks to be you if you're one of the people who don't want to broadcast their real name to the Internet.

Google's public policy blog shows that they understand the need for pseudonymous identities, but they seem to have completely forgotten that such a need extends to Internet social circles (despite one of their top examples of such a need being Twitter). In particular, while most fields have a "restriction" field (to show who gets to see it), the real name field does not have such a restriction possibility. Just as with Facebook, your real name is your Internet name.

But even worse, when you change your name on Google+, that applies to all Google products, so suddenly GMail and Reader Shared Items and +1 and so on would refer to me by my legal name. I'm concerned that when my GMail for Domains account is finally merged with my apps account, suddenly my email will be sent with my Google+ name instead of my separately-configured email name. It'll also apply to any other identity-based Google services which may come about later. It's very insidious.

It's also a bit interesting how for all the talk they have about the fine granularity of "circles" for item sharing, they don't apply that granularity to the profile information. There's no way to restrict, say, your phone number or your mailing address only to your "friends" and "family" circles, for example — if someone is in a circle then they get all your information. Maddeningly, this is something even Facebook got right.

Oh well. At least they allow a gender of "other." For now, anyway. Who knows when some product manager will get a hair up their butt about being binary-normative.

See also: The case against drop-down identities, which I just found while searching for other thoughts on this issue. It's only going to get worse.

While waiting for CreateSpace to validate my art assets, someone on Song Fight mentioned Mixonic, which I hadn't looked into for a few years, since the last time I checked they were better than CafePress but still pretty terrible, pricing- and feature-wise. Their current prices are pretty good, and beat all the other short-run manufacturers I'm aware of.

However, I have so far had nothing but problems with them, and I will not be using them or recommending their services.

I thought I'd had all the bills settled from my endoscopy last year. So of course today I just got another bill from St. Luke's for $713.72 with no reason given aside from "balance due," saying that there is no more insurance payment forthcoming on this account. The only contact option given was either calling their toll-free number or "access your account online." Knowing that the online access is useless I called the number. I was greeted with an endless cavalcade of data entry, which ended with "our office is now closed; please call back during regular business hours." They could have said that BEFORE I spent 5 minutes entering every bit of information they wanted. Ugh.

Meanwhile, I have no idea what this amount could be for. I am pretty sure that I have paid every bill that came to me. All this shows is: Service date June 24 2010 (the endoscopy), total charges $6430.07, $4044.56 in payments, a $-1671.79 "adjustment," and a balance due of $713.72. I am pretty sick of this whole stupid situation.

And of course my employers moved me over to a new insurance provider this year so who knows what the hell the status is of my previous insurance vis-a-vis handling this issue. Obviously my new insurance company wouldn't be held accountable for this.

St. Luke's billing department is the embodiment of failure and a shining example of what is wrong with the American healthcare industry.

Or, in short, St. Luke's hospital FUCKING SUCKS.