Dissociated Press

The tech industry moves fast — so fast, that in many cases, companies assume that a two or three-year-old product is obsolete and no longer requires online documentation or replacement documentation to be available.

So, I was a bit apprehensive this morning when I went to search for a manual for my six or seven-year-old Brother 1270N networked laser printer. I was quite pleased to find that the Brother site is not only fairly easy to navigate, but they still have PDFs for this model printer available online. Rock!

Also, kudos to Brother for selling me a laser printer that has stood the test of time. I bought this printer in 2000 or 2001, and it’s still going strong. I’m only on my second toner cartridge, though that’s partially a function of the fact that I don’t print things out unless absolutely necessary.

Finally, this thing rocks with Linux no problems at all these days, and it wasn’t that hard to set up when it was new. (I seem to recall something about editing text configuration files, but I have forgotten exactly how much setup was necessary…) When and if this one gives up the ghost, I’ll be strongly motivated to look to Brother for my next laser printer — maybe a color one this time — and to recommend their stuff to other Linux-using folks.

Let me add one more pet peeve to my running list of PR pet peeves — PR folks who send out press releases with the SUBJECT LINE IN ALL CAPS.

I think all caps was the custom back in the day of, oh, I dunno… lead type, Western Union, and really primitive computers — but we’re in Web 2.0 land now, folks. All caps doesn’t make your release look more important, it makes it look like spam. And I usually treat it as such.

I’m actually surprised that many of these releases make it through the spam filters (some don’t) — because I tend to associate all caps with 419 fraud, rather than legitimate press releases.

In the past couple of years, I’ve flown in and out of Florida several times, to Seattle, New York, San Francisco a couple of times, Kansas City, Boston, Columbus, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Sydney Australia. I’m probably forgetting one or two…but the point is, I fly quite a bit. Not as much as some of the “road warriors” out there, but certainly enough that I’ve gotten a feel for some of the major airlines and which ones are better overall.

When I have a choice, I try to fly Frontier whenever possible, and avoid United like the plague, and here’s a good example why: A man recounts the ordeal with United after his wife broker her leg and needed extra legroom on a United flight:

When we got to the gate in Denver, the agent refused to change our seats, instead summoning an “SD”, apparently some kind of manager, at my insistence. Scott (”With two t’s. Make sure you get it right,” he snidely instructed me as I wrote down his name) was pompous, arrogant, and entirely unhelpful. He claimed the flight was full and refused to do anything but put us on a different flight, if there even was one. At this point my wife was exhausted and sobbing, which affected him not a bit. Finally, another supervisor “found” her a bulkhead seat, but United sells these seats as “Premium Coach” or somesuch, so I had to fork over $54 to seat her there. He then miraculously “found” me another seat next to her and ahem, generously waived the fee for my seat. When we boarded the plane, there was still insufficient leg room for her, which was slightly alleviated by angling her leg into my seat space.

It turns out the plane was only about 60-70% full (our six bulkhead seats had only two others sitting in them), and they could have easily given my wife an entire row to use by only moving one or two people. It would have cost United not a penny, and it would have earned our eternal goodwill.

The final insult came from the flight attendant, who insisted that she not use her backpack to prop up her leg during takeoff and threatened to call the captain if we did not comply. We did; she and I spent the next fifteen minutes holding her leg up with her hands.

I’ve never had to fly United with a broken leg (or anything else) but this is totally United’s MO: They are super-rigid about billing the living hell out of you for an emergency exit row seat or any seat with additional leg room. $54 for a single leg of a flight for five additional inches of leg room… it boggles the mind.

In my experience, they have the world’s worst flight attendants and customer service reps — they seem to take great joy in making the experience as unpleasant as humanly possible, and it takes some creative bitchiness to make air travel even more unpleasant than it already is these days.

I’ve actually had CSRs ignore me when speaking directly to them to try to figure out what’s going on with a flight, and you can forget about getting an upgrade to exit row or whatever unless you’re one of their super-special frequent fliers.

Contrast this with American Airlines and Frontier… this weekend, on the way back from Florida, I asked for (and received) an emergency exit row seat without any hassle or fuss from American Airlines, and I don’t even have an AA frequent flier account. (But will probably sign up for one post-haste.) Nearly every time I fly Frontier, as long as I am there early, I can ask for and receive an upgrade to the exit row aisle seat I prefer.

I have also had the same experience with United flight attendants and “personal items” that must be stowed away. I usually carry a small bag or backpack that has my iPod, books, Moleskine notebook, reading glasses, and other assorted necessities for flying. I prefer to keep this in my lap for easy access. Nine times out of ten, flight attendants have nothing to say about this. Whenever someone does choose to make an issue out of it, it’s invariably a United flight attendant — who usually walks by five women with purses the same size as my bag in their laps — to scold me for not “stowing away personal items for takeoff/landing.”

You know what? If we have enough turbulence that it would cause the bag to fly from my hands, passengers are going to have far more to worry about from the weak-assed latches on the overhead luggage compartments popping open than from my iPod or Moleskine smacking them in the back of the head. If the plane crashes, well… I really think whether or not people have stowed their personal items is going to be irrelevant.

All airlines screw up from time to time, and have unpleasant flight attendants and CSRs, of course — but it seems to be company culture with United, not an exception to the rule.
If you must fly, I strongly recommend avoiding United at all costs.

Look, just because I followed a link to a Web page does not mean I’ve given consent to have audio or video content inflicted on me automatically. This may come as a shock, Mr. and Ms. Web Designers, but I have been known to — on occasion — actually have music playing on my computer while browsing the Web. I’d really rather not have your Flash-driven site conflicting with the music I actually chose to listen to, so please knock it the hell off with Flash embeds that start playing as soon as I load your page.

I’m particularly surprised that the clueful folks over at Magnatune don’t know better than this. A Flash-based album preview is very thoughtful, but please don’t set it up to play automagically when I browse to the album preview page, mmmkay?

(Yes, I know all about Flashblock, no I don’t feel like installing it on every system that I use just because some people/companies practice poor Web design hygine.)

that contributes not one bit to productivity: motivational cat posters.

I love the Overkill poster. Just. Freaking. Love. It.

(Ever notice that the ratio of cat to dog pictures on the Intarweb is about 100 to 1?)

I’ve seen a few articles speculating on the “meaning” of Apple’s schedule slip for its next OS release. AppleInsider speculates that it’s due to “top secret features.” Apple’s official reason is that it needed to pull talent off of OS X to get the iPhone ready for shipping in June — which, to me, seems odd.

Isn’t that basically the same as Apple admitting they don’t have the ability to walk and chew gum support two complex products at the same time? It doesn’t seem like something Steve Jobs would admit to readily, and I really can’t imagine a competent PR person who gives a flying frog’s butt about the stock price clearing that statement. (Not that Jobs has to clear his statements with Apple PR, I’m sure, but I suspect there’s some coordination before major announcements.)

So, is OS X going to have some super-secret goodies, or did they really just need extra polish time? Maybe Jobs is waiting for the Free Software Foundation to finish the GPLv3 so that Apple can license everything under GPLv3. Hey — Sun has been talking about licensing Solaris under a GPL (not quite sure if it’s GPLv3 or GPLv2) and Apple is showing interest in ZFS and DTrace… so why not?

In all seriousness, though, I think this is another validation of the open source model. All the Apple fans are waiting for Apple to tie everything together and ship it as a coherent product. You can do that with something like Ubuntu, or other open source projects — or you can dig into the beta tree and start using software long before it’s officially blessed by the project or company behind it.

You can start using updated applications immediately, in most cases, without waiting for the entire OS to ship. For instance, KDE released two point releases (if memory serves correctly) during Kubuntu Edgy’s lifespan — which meant I was running the new KDE within a day or two of its upstream release without waiting for Kubuntu Feisty. I was using the new Amarok releases a day or so after they were finished. Wouldn’t it be nice if Apple users could start using the new, oh, Mail.app right away instead of waiting for it to ship later?

I won’t even go into Windows Vista, except to say that if Microsoft shipped in a similar fashion to open source projects, it might not be quite so embarrassing how lackluster Vista adoption has been so far — nor would customer expectation have been built up so much as Microsoft slipped deadline after deadline after deadline.

It’s also clear that ship dates are clearly an art rather than a science. If you’re going to promise feature A, B, and C on a specific date, you’d better almost have them in the can now, or be very, very lucky. I think GNOME and Ubuntu have it right — a ship date every six months, but with the idea that they’ll ship what’s ready when it’s ready, and if something doesn’t make the cut for the six month release, then it gets held back.

I go to plenty of Linux and FOSS-related shows, but there are the shows that I go to and then the shows that I look forward to going to. LinuxFest Northwest is one of the shows that I am very much looking forward to going to.

If you happen to be in the near vicinity of Bellingham, Washington on April 28 and 29, I strongly recommend that you make plans to attend LFNW. I’ll be giving a talk on Vim, and lots of other interesting speakers will be there — not to mention a whole crowd of open source and Linux enthusiasts. Allison Randal, Jesse Keating, Ted Haeger, Brian Aker, and a slew of other FOSS luminaries are going to be in attendance, and you know you don’t want to miss those folks.

Joe Barr wrote up a piece for Linux.com on the show, and what you have to look forward to. Oh, and have I mentioned it’s free? So there’s no reason not to show up. I’m not a drinker, but I hear that there’s a strong possibility that beer may be involved in some capacity. I hear that goes over well with many FOSS folks… See you in Washington!