Microsoft delays next beta of Windows VISTA: Now in 2006. Read about it here.

Excellent summary story of Sony's hubris in the CD DRM fiasco. Thanks to Cpt. Spaulding for alerting me to the story here.

Advances in Browsing the Internet: Firefox 1.5 is due out this afternoon. Get it here. Which sometime this afternoon (November 29, 2005) will redirect to the Firefox 1.5 download page. Available as of 3:30 PM CST here.

Followup: Installed, and loving it! I love the tabbed browsing! FAQ on Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is here.

Apple's future plans?: Apple has worked hard to prevent leaks, even suing some folks, but the "rumors" continue, usually pretty accurate. One of the best places to get predictions is here.

On the Xbox 360 front (glad I don't have one) more reports of their crashing are posting, and a possible solution. Some sources say its due to an overheating powersupply,
so put the large brick of a powersupply where its not on the floor.

The grief of being a Diabetic. Read this

Give yourself a stock market tip today: Drive by some retail stores and note which ones have full parking lots with people streaming out of the store carrying many items, and which ones have half empty parking lots with folks walking out empty handed. Call your cousin over 1000 miles away and see if the situation is the same by them.

The Bleeding edge: Some of those that had to be first with an X-Box 360, are paying the price. Reports are coming in of crashing units. The rest of you are advised.

Beat the Customer Service System: Major corporations are being penny wize and pound foolish by trying to cut corners on customer service. Most annoying is the difficulty getting past an automated phone system to a human being. One web site has a list a "secret numbers" to get past the system. Merely getting past the automated system doesn't help with most companies. The frontline CSRs have near zero authority, and have handle time limits, quotas on # of escalations, and quotas on upsells. Often they happily lie to you to get you off the phone so the phone call is short. Worse yet they may be in India, and barely speak understandable English.

One gets FAR better results starting at top, rather than at bottom. This is where GOOGLE saves the day. Google "name of company Executive services" or "Name of company presidents office", google both the web and groups.

FOLLOWUP: It's been suggested to me that it may not be appropriate to suggest harrassing executives. To which I reply and further explain:

The people I suggest getting to are most certainly not executives, just sometimes labeled as such, merely third level support people that often:

1. Do have the authority to ignore stupid guidelines, or grant compensation.
2. Are not subject to handle time limits.
3. Will take ownership of an unique issue.

The "top" I referred to is top of the telephone support chain, not top of company chain of command, I regret any confusion. And where did I say harrass anyone? Any more than talking to a support person when an automated telephone system might more readily find your answer isn't also "harrassment"???

TIME Magazine person of the year for 2005: My nominees:

1. GOOGLE
2. A chicken with the flu in China
3. ipod
4. Valerie Plame

Cardinal arguing against evoluton doesn't know squat about science: "Common sense tells us that matter cannot organize itself" says Cardinal Scoenborn arguing for "Intelligent Design". Since he apparently never took a collegiate class in Geology or heard the lecture in week 2 about minerals and crystals, he doesn't know that matter certainly does organize itself, and all the time. It's the very definition of a mineral "A substance with definite chemical composition and characteristic physical properties", or another definition includes "orderly internal structure" such as the organized way atoms arrange into molecules, and can be so identified by crystal shape, hardness, cleavage or x-ray. Some of us learned Moh's hardness scale: Talc, Gypsum, Calcite, Fluorite, Apatite, Orthoclase, Quartz, Topaz, Corundum, Diamond. Or for the layperson, how about how carbon organizes itself into the mineral "Diamond" ???? These aren't theories, they are established fact. And matter certainly organizes itself when DNA replicates.

Ban drugs with side effects?: If you really want to ban drugs with potential dangerous side effects like Vioxx, then maybe ban ASPIRIN too. Story here.

Just say no to Microsoft - How to ditch Microsoft and why it's not as hard as you think. That's the title of a new book, available at discount from Amazon.

Warning for Roadrunner Subscribers in Houston - You heard it here first. Warner cable is going after folks for theft of cable service. That is their right, problem is what will likely happen is their auditors will spot taps into their lines going to houses not subscribed to Cable Television Service, and they'll file legal charges against some folks that have Roadrunner and not Cable TV. Such situations are not new, and I guarantee some innocent folks will get hurt again this time.

OS X 10.4.3 upgrade grief: My Macintosh crashes
panic(cpu 0 caller 0x000E7FF4): vnode_put(371a108): iocount < 1
Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
Backtrace:
0x00095698 0x00095BB0 0x0002683C 0x000E7FF4 0x000E7FA0 0x000EE960 0x000EECE0 0x000EED80
0x002A9BF4 0x000ABE30 0x0043006F
Proceeding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x2EEB2500)
PC=0x90021A4C; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0x038B0018; DSISR=0x40000000; LR=0x918F7F7C; R1=0xBFFFF410; XCP=0x00000030 (0xC00 - System call)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.3.0: Mon Oct 3 20:04:04 PDT 2005; root:xnu-792.6.22.obj~2/RELEASE

_PPCModel: PowerMac7,3, BootROM 5.1.8f7, 2 processors, PowerPC G5 (2.2), 1.8 GHz, 1 GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon 9600 XT, ATY,RV360, AGP, 128 MB

Nothing I try works. Not either the Combo or Incremental Update to 10.4.3, not turning off Norton antiVirus, not deleting all third party widgets, not uninstalling Stuff-It Deluxe. 30 Seconds after a Boot-Up finishes, it crashes.

FOLLOWUP:
email to Support@apple.com brought an automated form letter answer telling me to go away, but a Google search of "panic(cpu 0 caller 0x000E7FF4)" led me to the Ars Technica forum where a poster wrote that it was a "permissions" issue, so running Disk Utility from my backup drive to "Repair Permissions" on the crashing drive, brought 2 pages of repairs, and a reboot of original drive now works. With 100 repaired permissions, no telling which one(s) fixed it, but all is OK now.

New larger capacity Cingular SIM card: FREE: While I was on the phone last week with Cingular's "Office of the President" getting in writing the status of International Calling on my cell phone (I had it turned off so if my phone is lost or stolen, a multi-thousand dollar bill couldn't result from International calls), I complained about their somewhat dishonest commercials, which tell of the new improved Network resulting from the combination of AT&T Wireless and Cingular. In point of fact one needs to replace their 32K SIM with a 64K SIM to achieve the new improved coverage. Phones sold by Cingular before the merger had 32K SIMs, now they all have 64K SIMs. Oh, by the way, Cingular wants $25 for a 64K SIM if you don't have one. I suggested I should get one for free since the commercials said I had better coverage now, which I don't with my former 32K SIM, and it was agreed I'd be sent a 64 K SIM for free.

Digital output from DirecTv with TiVo units: These units record digitally but if you want to save or archive a recording, the output goes through a digital to analog conversion that adulerates the quality. Luckily with millions sold, and the TiVo boxes being programmed in Linux, some folks have figured out how to add software to their boxes to allow for "video extraction". And in some cases the procedure for doing so has been carefully documented, or even automated. A simple Google search can find it.

Is Sony finally getting a clue? Sony has now agreed to swap out its badly protected CDs for normal ones. Story here.

Arrogant Web Programmers: I go to pay my Car insurance on the web, and am presented with : "Sorry. The application is unavailable at this time. Please try again later. Click here to return to the our homepage." So I call their 800 number, and am told: "I am showing that the Auto Policy should be viewable and available for bill pay.", Well it wasn't. An hour later, I get an email telling me I must use Browser "Q". Why they would want to limit their customers that way is beyond my comprehension. It's certainly customer unfriendly. It's also obvious their programmers never visited http://www.anybrowser.org so they could learn simple programming techniques to make their web payment Browser independant.

DirecTv and their Bedbug letter: Tradition has it that the first boilerplate form letter was sent by a Railroad to a gentleman complaining about finding bedbugs in his sleeper compartment. Attached to the apologetic letter he received was the note: "Send this jerk the bedbug letter".

So when DirecTv wrote me back when I complained that after 2 months a promised call from the Presidents Office had never come, the letter contained:

Thank you again for contacting us, and I'm sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Sincerely,

Jennifer
DIRECTV Customer Service


Thank you for writing. <<ADD EMPATHY STATEMENT>>.