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New iGoogle page: bad idea, or worst idea ever?

So Google is running an experiment on users of their portal page (iGoogle); if you've been selected for the experiment, you can't opt out or in any way revert to the old version. I appreciate the attempt at scientific rigor, but the new features are pure crap. In the spirit of enlightened discourse, I'm filling out their survey instead of just flaming them.
This is straight from my survey responses about the new iGoogle experiment:

What if anything do you find frustrating or unappealing about iGoogle?
What changes or additional features would you like to see for iGoogle?
The whole point of using iGoogle for my home page was that I could get information about many different things at a glance (e.g., I could see if there were new things to read in an RSS feed, see the weather in multiple cities that I care about, see my travel alerts). Now that you've made each widget into a 'full page or nothing' deal with your update, I can only use one thing at a time. If I can't aggregate multiple pieces of information on a single page, why use iGoogle at all? I could just bookmark each separate page and have them all open as home pages in Firefox. I think you've missed the point of a portal home page.

What do you like best about iGoogle?
At this point, pretty much nothing. You've made the entire left side of the page useless to people who have only one tab, you've made the concept of multiple widgets on a page useless, and everything I open uses half the page to recommend more widgets to me that I can't use.

What if anything do you find frustrating or unappealing about the links on the left? What changes or additional features would you like to see for the links on the left?
I only use one tab; that means that a huge chunk of real estate on the side of the screen is blank. And the integrated chat (which I don't need, since I use Google Talk) doesn't even work. (Incorrect status of me and my contacts; sometimes the messages just don't send.)

What if anything do you find frustrating or unappealing about the modules that expand to full width? What changes or additional features would you like to see for the modules that expand to full width?
If a module must take up the whole page for me to see any information in it, how is it different from a 'web page'? I would get exactly the same functionality from a set of bookmarks sitting on the left hand side of my browser (which all browsers already have). The point of the 'modules' (or widgets) is to have them display some information in a section of the page.

Look, I used to be able to see what the weather was like in three different cities just by loading up my home page. Now I have to click four times to see that same information, and I can't compare it side-by-side. But each city does take much longer to load, since it has to pull up a map, 5-day forecast, satellite data, and a bunch of other crap. If I wanted that much data, I'd go to weather.com.

What if anything do you find frustrating or unappealing about the chat feature? What changes or additional features would you like to see for the chat feature?
Why can't I turn it off? It's slow, and doesn't really work that well. Also, I have Google Talk installed. And half the time, the damn thing pops up in my Gmail tab, too (even though I turned that off). I don't need three copies of the same message.

Porridge vs. Gruel

I'm on the home stretch of recovering from a gum graft - a procedure not as unpleasant as I'd anticipated; the big problem isn't so much the pain (which was gone in a day) as the dietary change. It's been difficult to eat anything that required a lot of chewing for about a week, which meant I needed alternatives. Living on smoothies was out of the question, too - straws are strictly prohibited. I'm not clear why, but I imagine jamming a straw into the stitches at the top of my mouth would, well, suck. So better safe than sorry.

Anyway, my diet for about a week has consisted mostly of soup and oatmeal. This led to at least one good find - the General Joe's Soup at Tokyo Joe's is awesome; I never would have tried it without these restrictions. It also led me to wonder about well-known non-chewing foods like porridge and gruel. More specifically, I wondered what the hell they were. I've heard the words for ages in different stories (Goldilocks, Oliver Twist, etc.), but I'd never really bothered to learn what they were.

Turns out the porridge is basically boiled oats in water or milk - in other words, the Quaker Oatmeal I've been eating for breakfast all week. Gruel is a thinner, watery version of porridge; the main difference appears to be that you drink it more than eat it.

So now I know. The stitches are supposed to come out tomorrow, and pretty soon I should be back to eating Qdoba nachos for every third meal. They haven't seen me for a week, so they probably think I'm dead or something.

Sad

I'm very sad. You know why?

Because I just heard the song 'Blister In The Sun' by the Violent Femmes as the background to a Wendy's commercial.

And it wasn't even a clever or funny commercial.

I now officially boycott Wendy's. This boycott will be lifted when Dave Thomas makes a personal apology to both myself and Gordon Gano.

Reasons To Be Pissed Today

1. Apparently, every damn online sporting goods store (including MVP.com, Dunham Sports Sports Authority, and at least 4 others) runs the same piece-of-shit e-commerce system. I can tell because they all look the same (shitty forms with some crappy co-branding, and they all show the same item ID in the querystring for the item I'm trying to buy). They all also have the same damn bug that sends any browser other than IE into an infinite loop of page reloads (each page having dozens of charming CSS and JavaScript errors). And up until today, they had some bug in IE that didn't allow me to actually give them any money. Apparently they have that fixed, which allowed their crappy system to finally take my money, but only after redirecting me to another system that pissed me off:

2. "Verified by Visa" - in order to give me more online "protection", I'm now required to submit most of the credit card info twice. And I get a new password to remember, which shouldn't be hard, since it only allows letters and numbers, and only 6 to 8 of them.Six to eight characters I might be able to deal with - maybe space in the database is precious, so you really have to limit the number of characters. But only letters and numbers? What kind of Mickey Mouse, "all of our database queries are done with SQL strings so characters scare us" kind of bullshit is that?

3. Also, Apple saw fit to shit out a new version of iTunes for Windows. The upgrades? The only thing that appears to be an actual upgrade is the option to flip through your album covers like they were in one of those jukeboxes they used to have at the tables at Pizza Hut. Other than that, they seem to have removed the "leave this iPod in the playlists" feature for the Shuffle, so dragging things onto my Shuffle is now agonizingly slow; every single operation appears to lock up iTunes (apparently these fuckers missed the UI class where they teach you how to put the little hourglass on the screen during operations that take geologic epochs to complete); about half of my preferences got lost; an already ugly-ass product is now uglier (goodbye brushed metal; hello, flat gray); and finally, the random-looking buttons they slapped on the top of the interface put you into new browsing and sorting modes that you can only sometimes change out of.

On top of that, that damn bug where playing a video in iTunes turns off my screen saver until the next reboot is still there. And motherfucking Quicktime is in my motherfucking startup again, so I have to go edit it out of the motherfucking registry. Again.

I'm a Liar

For the first time since I tried to become a Chase Bank customer, I'm giving out the Platinum TeaBagging award. This time, the lucky winner is Comcast. I know that pointing out how much their customer service sucks is more or less like blogging about the sky being blue, but they pissed me off and sucked away a couple of hours of my life, so I'm going to use some of their bandwidth to bash them. It may be cliched, but I'm already a guy with a themeless web site that he hardly ever updates; being a web cliche is something I've accepted.
We (my roomate and myself) recently moved. Not far, just a few blocks away from the old place. Under the (misguided) assumption that an "ISP" might have some way to change the address of our service on "that InterWeb thing", I searched Comcast's site for about half an hour; the best option I could find was to cancel the existing service and set up a new one at $10 a more per month. Since we already pay out the ass for cable and Internet, we weren't thrilled about an increase. So we went to the Comcast office.
Apparently, they like to see our smiling faces - going into the office to change our service resulted in a big price reduction for the first three months. The previous tenants had the same service, so no visit from the cable guy would be necessary. In theory, we could simply hook up our existing equipment and give them a call; they would turn the new service on and everything would be hunky-dory.
Not so. Their system inexplicably (I can only assume this is left over from the days when they didn't have a monopoly on all cable in the city of Boulder) binds an account not to the person paying the bill (my roommate) or to the equipment (even though you can't access the network without a specific MAC address), but to the address. Which, as I would soon find out, the lady at the Comcast offices had mistyped.
The phone call that was supposed to activate our connection turned out to be useless - whatever first-tier CSR we got just told my roommate to hook the cable modem directly to his computer and run the installation software. There were several problems with this:
1. The cable connection is in the living room; the computer is in his bedroom. Here in the aughts, we use that fancy "wireless" technology.
2. No one had given us a copy of the installation software.
3. Even if we had the installation software (which, to be fair, you can download from Comcast's "Walled Garden" without having to activate your account), it installs multiple pieces of hard-to-remove spyware on your machine when you run it. Beware of any installation program that tells you to disable popup blocking, firewalls, and anti-spyware software before running it.
Now, a couple of years ago you could get around this crap by mucking around with proxy settings in IE (naturally, their site doesn't work for shit in any other browser) and going directly to whatever SAS server is appropriate for your region. But that process doesn't work anymore - browsing to the SAS site doesn't automatically redirect you to the account activation page anymore. Since I don't know the exact URL, I was boned as far as that method was concerned.
So, frustrated and fed up with this bullshit (I'm not backing down and letting these assholes install crappy software just to activate an account we're already paying for), I just called the fuckers up and lied my ass off. The magic word here is "Linux". Apparently they're too scared or incompetent to support Linux in their installation software. So despite running nothing but Windows around here (barring the Tivo), I called customer support, impersonated my roommate, and told them "we're running Linux, so we can't run your installation software. Would you please just provision our cable modem for us?"
Worked like a charm - the woman on the other end said she'd be happy to provision the modem. But after she got the account details from me, we ran into a problem - the mistyped address. Seems the lady at the Comcast office had type a "1" instead of a "3" for part of the apartment number; the address would have to be updated before they could provision the modem.
This is where things got really annoying. Though the lady at the Comcast office was able to change our address in 15 minutes, apparently the crack team of phone monkeys at the Accounts department of Comcast's call center can't do it in less than an hour. A solid hour of the shittiest hold music I have ever heard - nothing but John Tesh and Kenny G on what I can only assume from the static was an old FM radio with a broken antenna that someone had plugged into the phone switch. Music designed to enrage. Occasionally the helpful CSR would pop in to say "Still there? Yeah, we're still working on changing that address. It's a pretty involved process." Clearly.
Eventually, the address all sorted out, I was bounced to some other rep who provisioned the modem for me. Then he asked me for information to open a trouble ticket (why? No idea. As far as I could tell, there was no more trouble.), including an email address. After several minutes of back-and-forth about which email address to use, it became clear to me that he had to use a comcast.net email address. It would have taken less time to come to this conclusion if he had answered the question "Do I have to use a comcast.net email address?" with the word "Yes" the first couple of times I asked. Of course, I pointed out to him that I have never checked any comcast.net email address and never would in the future, but that didn't seem to be an issue. So he opened the ticket, and half an hour later we got to start using our own connection again. (Special thanks to the folks with SSID "Actiontec" who helped us through the rough period when we didn't have our own access.)
So there's my Comcast customer service story - complete with bureaucracy, incompetence, deception, and Kenny G.
Tags: Comcast, deception, broadband, customer service, Kenny G

While I'm coming up with new terms . . .

I'd just like to salute the phenomenon that I like to call 'bike cleavage'. It's what happens when a girl wearing a tank top or other low-cut shirt is riding a bike and thus leaning forward. Even girls who don't typically have a lot of cleavage get nice bike cleavage. Yet another reason to love summer.
Tags: neologism bike summer

I wonder . . .

If someone gives away the ending to a suspenseful movie before you've seen it, is that a Hitchcock-block?
Tags: suspense Hitchcock neologism