18 Tricks to Teach Your Body
What a great article from Men’s Health - it’s practical advice for hacking your body’s natural functions towards your own purposes. Draining your sinuses without drugs, preventing getting stitches in your side when running, beating a brain freeze into submission… there are tons of great tips here. 18, in fact. Funny, that.
This GYM Thing is Just Silly
This idea of not mentioning GYM (Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft) in blogs is just silly. Just talking about it defeats it’s own purpose - each time I see “GYM” in the title of somone’s post, it makes me cringe; it’s self-defeating!
Memories of Expo ‘86
In one of those random, serendipitous moments of web browsing, I happened across this retrospective of Expo ‘86, the last North American world’s fair that happened here in Vancouver, British Columbia. I was 11, and was lucky enough to get to go a few times. The site brings back tons of memories, and I find it odd to feel so nostalgic for something that occurred less than 20 years ago. But the sheer lack of remnants from the fair is somehow overwhelming. Aside from the large structures that have become part of Vancouver’s landscape, like Science World (always a favourite place to visit) or the Plaza of Nations (I once saw the Dave Matthews Band play there - best live musical performance I’ve ever seen), there’s really not much left. The “whatever happened to” page is great, as is the page dedicated to the site 15 years later, full of photos taken in 2001.
For a fun (and somewhat creepy) story of how some folks paddled out to the final resting place of the McBarge, broke in and took some photos, check this out. At least I now know where to go if I ever need a crapload of McDonalds trays!
And I should point out that all of this is courtesy of UselessDegree, who’s post I found while searching Technorati to see if anyone else had noticed that GOOGLE IS FREAKING DOWN!
Technorati Tags: google, google down
Google Down?
This is really creepy. When I start my browser (Firefox, of course), the first two tabs that load are my personalized Google start page (www.google.com/ig) and Gmail. Both are currently down (as is plain old google.com). I’m getting a timeout error on all of them right now, whereas 10 minutes ago I was at least getting a Google-generated error page for Gmail - I think it was a 350 error.
I don’t know if this is a localized phenomenon, but it sure feels like the internet is broken right now.
[UPDATE] Looks like it was only unavailable for a couple of hours. Still, weird.
I Can Honestly Not Believe How Bad PureTracks Is
[UPDATE] I received an email from PureTracks today, November 1st, over two months after the original with the following two lines of text, including the typo:
We apologize for the delay in resolving this issue however it is not resolved and you should be able to download the gift order.
Please let us know if you have further questions.
I can only assume that “not resolved” means “now resolved”. Gee, thanks. All I can say is, wow. I had forgotten how angry I was with PureTracks, but help desk support like this brings it right back to the forefront of my mind.
Original post from August 25th:
PureTracks is an online music service a la iTunes. Aside from the fact that is uses crappy DRM (which is why I’ve avoided it until now), the reason I’m complaining today is that as a new user, I can’t believe how much frustration I’m experiencing. I’m a seasoned computer user, and their site so unbelievably hard to use, it makes me want to throw my computer through my window.
There are two tracks that are not easy to find elsewhere that are available on PureTracks that I wanted to download. Since I don’t have a PureTracks account, I asked a friend to download them for me. He discovered that there’s an option to send them to a friend rather than download them himself, and since we were nervous about their DRM scheme, we decided that would be the easiest way to go.
Well. Of course, I can’t just get the tracks - I have to register with PureTracks, which is what I wanted to avoid in the first place. But worse, once I register, the songs are nowhere to be found. I finally discovered that the email address they were gifted to was different than the one I registered with, although it wasn’t obvious anywhere that they needed to be the same, and since I receive mail from multiple accounts to the same location, it didn’t dawn on me that they might be different. Anyway, I change my email address, and now a line shows up in my order history. Clicking it, however, just takes me right to their main page!
After some discussion, I discover that PureTracks does not support Firefox well, so I ought to try IE. Well, in a word, that SUCKS. But I try it. Same deal. So my friend is out $1.50 (they’re short tracks), and I can’t get the songs. PureTracks, I was avoiding you before, but now I want nothing to do with you ever. If you see me coming down the street, you’d better cross to the other side.
[Update] I received a reply from PureTracks’ support over 12 hours after I sent my reply to their initial canned “turn off your popup blockers” message. Twelve hours! And guess, just guess what it said? “Please log in to our support system, as replies to support emails are not supported.” What a steaming pile of crap! It took their system twelve hours to reply with a canned response stating that replies are not supported? I couldn’t be angrier! To make matters worse, when you click the link to go to your support ticket, their site just redirects you to their login screen (even if you’re logged in). So you have to navigate to their help page, then scroll to the VERY LAST FUCKING LINE, to click the link to get to their help desk. And, of course, my call is “on hold”, since I must be a complete fucking idiot.
PureTracks - It’s clear that you hate your customers, and I hate you right back more than you can possibly imagine. You are pure evil.
