Lonnie Knows Everything

“Whyerhead” is an old friend of mine from way back, so when I read the consumerist article, I just HAD to ask ..  I first asked him if it was near his house, the conversation went like this

whyerhead: no.. north carolina..

whyerhead: me and another consumerist user tracked them down through a combination of google, google maps, and their own stupidity.

Me: like a youtube username?

whyerhead: yep!

whyerhead: a friend that had linked to her profile, googled the friend, tracked her down through myyearbook, and was able to determine landmarks from a video and google street view maps

whyerhead: dominos chief of security wasnt even able to figure it out.. but.. dominos offered us some rather nice swag for taking care of business.

SO .. if you’re ever in North Carolina … you might wanna go for Pizza Hut instead .. jk .. I’m sure that location will be on top of things, for a while at least… if you’d like to check out the original consumerist article .. go for it, it contains the videos in question!  YES I know I didn’t reveal the exact store ..  I figured that’d probably be best, but you’re armed with the tools to find that on your own ..  The “how” has been revealed..

Today was nothing short of a bad day, no geek story here .. just general ranting

The past month or so has been filled with crap to begin with, but today decided it would put the cherry on top (god I hope it’s the top) ..

I arrive at work and get out of my car in the pouring rain and I notice the very very strong smell of gasoline, not only that, but I can see a discolored trail all the way from the street, right into the lot up to my space, so I’m thinking woah, that can’t be good .. this wasn’t a splotchy, drippy looking stream, this was a 2-3 inch thick constant stream of fuel ..

At lunch time I decided to go some place near by, right around the corner… still a stream of fuel ..  so I leave early to get this taken care of quickly.. first I stop at Firestone and have them take a look, an hour and 45 minutes later – NOTHING .. they found nothing, so $55 spent and no resolution… I drive 10 yards or so, stop .. check .. yep fuel on the ground.. so I go over to Goodyear and have them check .. half hour or so later ($84.00 for the inspection) .. they find the issue and show me, a broken seal on the side of the tank, the “filler to gas tank” seal, whatever that means.. clearly broken though … they have to order it, so that’s $22.00 .. and labor will be $168 on Friday to put it on.. keeping track? $55 + $84 + $168 = $307 so far ..

So I get home, at least glad to have probably resolved the car issue (come Friday anyway) … I decide I better file the lame R.I.T.A tax (a stupid thing here in most Ohio counties) ..  it comes to $0.00 every year so I always find it to be an insane waste of time, I don’t work in a R.I.T.A county but I live in one, so I have to file … so I’m going through it, I get to the end … I owe over a grand, on top of what I owed for Federal and everything else .. so I file it and submit a payment, forgetting I just doled out over $300 earlier today ..

Awesome … My checking account is officially empty ..

To make things worse, I’m about to inherit, I’m sure, a 20k+ debt .. 

Soooo .. I think I’ve decided to take a job in Canada and officially say fuck my life here, I’m not married, no girlfriend, no kids .. I have no ties, so I may as well just leave the country and change my name to something cool … like .. Trent

Ok so I was waiting to expand on this to really hear more word about it and it seems to be true, no MMS support for your 2g iPhone, and the reason given is that the iPhone 2g hardware does not have the capability to support it.

I can understand holding back a feature to get people to upgrade their phones, really I can .. but to flat out lie about the reason is terrible, certainly a very large number of people are aware that the iPhone can in fact do this because those with a jailbroken iphone ALREADY can do it..  I’ve been using MMS now for a long long time on my 2g phone via SwirlyMMS, the only reason I was excited about iPhone 3.0 is because I assume it will support proper rendering of the messages as well as what we just found out, it supports video properly as well ..

The reason for excluding MMS for 2g is purely a marketing move ..  some have said “What do you expect? that they just give out major updates to make the old phone do what the new one does?” … no software update will make your 2g iPhone have 3g capability, you will not get the faster speeds, you will not get the real GPS ..  those are the reasons most upgrade…

Again I say that if they simply decided to say “No, the MMS capability is a 3g feature only” without going further to claim the 2g hardware isn’t capable of supporting MMS .. I’d not be nearly as offended.

My hope is that the iphone dev team can get this functionality operating on 2g phones, it will no doubt be a hot item for many.

I was doing work for a client who sells items online, they had a custom made order management system and a custom integration into an online store..  the people who developed it for them, got out of that business and moved on .. 

One of their biggest requirements was multi-ship-to .. for gift orders to several people at once (they make candy) ..

After searching high and low for something that fit, we came to M.O.M and SiteLINK .. We requested the SQL version so we could have better access to migrate data into it.. They ended up giving us the foxpro version, which was awful .. they did not respond to us hardly at all for months until after our money back period was over, then they gladly replied.. 

After a chat with the CEO, we got them to give us the SQL version at a “discount” .. which translates to 15 thousand dollars, yep .. 15k for the switch to the SQL version of MOM, outrageous ..

So we get it going, and for the first few months we run into problem after problem after problem, but the dydacomp guys are fairly responsive.. albeit, not that helpful usually … the SiteLINK support guys are absolutely HORRIBLE, they usually don’t reply at all .. and when they do, they come off sounding pissed off or arrogant.

So this gets better… we had the unuseable foxpro version for a few months without being able to get ahold of dydacomp to correct the mistake, that time period where we had the unusable version counted against our support contract, much to our surprise and dismay..

Let me tell you, when your support runs out, it runs out hard… they won’t respond to you other than to say you’re support is up .. and what’s WORSE  than that is that the 15 thousand dollars you spent only gets you bug fixes/updates for that year ..  the 15 thousand dollars won’t allow you to go from 6.1 to 6.2 for example, I think that is unethical and I don’t mind saying, a touch of evil ..  if I spend 15 grand on a piece of software, I expect updates at LEAST through the 6.x life span.. fine, don’t give me 7.0 .. that I can understand.

So lets talk about the support contract… it’s over $6,000 for a single year of terrible support.. enough said

SAVE YOUR MONEY! they are not worth it.. they will rip you apart with fees, and the $6,000 support is worth about 10 cents..

Check out www.stoneedge.com .. I’ve not used it, but I hear good things…   and if for some ungodly reason you MUST use MOM, stay away from SiteLINK .. look into something like CommerceV3 ..  oh, and if you need support for MOM, outside of updates ofcourse… check out www.momhelpers.com … again, not used them but I hear good things..

Comments and personal experiences… are welcomed