“Bought a receiver online? Fuck you, pay me.
Oh, you can’t watch the channels you ordered? Fuck you, pay me.
No high def service huh? Fuck you, pay me.”

I don’t know how rackets like the one DirecTV has established come into existence but I have a small clue. I don’t know how they stay in business but it probably has something to do with offering current customers $100 to pimp the service to their friends.

This is what happened in my case. When I moved, I had a choice between DirecTV and Comcast. Everybody around me couldn’t shut up about DirecTV and also, could I please use their account number when I signed up? Ha.

The decision maker for me was the local sports package. I signed up for DTV and that package to watch baseball games from Baltimore (How bout dem O’s hon?).

Baseball games? All blacked out. Nice. I called to turn that service off and went on about my business. Fast forward a month or so. I want my HP monitor to get TV and it only has an HDMI in. No problem, most cable boxes come with HDMI out right? Ha ha, not DirecTVs!

The only DTV boxes that have an HDMI out are their High Definition boxes. Oh I know, I’ll just run to Worst Buy (I should by the Worst Buy partnership) and buy an HD box. Thanks Worst Buy! Get home, start setting it up, DirecTV tells me, they own this box, I just paid worst buy a couple hundred buck to lease it. (Refer to video)

Oh but don’t think you can just use the box with Standard Def service. No ma’am, you’ll need to pay to get HD access for that box to work. (Refer to video)

Well shit. May as well get HD TV right? We’re in the high def age and all.

FFWD a week. DirecTV guys come out and realize due to the fucked up way some person from DTV initially installed the satellite my entire building shares, I can’t get HD channels. NICE. But wait, I still have to have HD service for this bloody box to work when all I want is the HDMI out. (Refer to video)

I decide I’m over it. I call DirecTV customer service and say I don’t want their service anymore. No problem ma’am, that’ll be $400 in early termination fees. (Refer to video)

I email their CEO and others. Turns out DirecTV is wise to the ways of the EECB and will just drop you to their “customer advocate group” (1-866-785-5537) who parrot the same BS regular customer service does. On the plus side, they were able to work some magic to make me not pay for HD service I’m not getting while still allowing my HD box to work. (Fuck you, but only pay me a little less)

Fine. I’m not paying $400 in ETFs (yet) so I give up.

I decide I want to get an DirecTivo to tinker with that DTV does NOT own. I buy one on Craigslist. I call to activate it. Sorry ma’am, the access cards are tied to each unit and customer and we can’t reassign them. Let me transfer you to our access card department where you can purchase another access card for $20. (Refer to video)

Is it any wonder DirecTV is the subject of a class action suit in California?

Final words, reader. If you are trying to find TV service, steer clear of DirecTV. If you must have satellite, go with Dish. If you don’t need satellite, go with one of the myriad other TV providers. If you absolutely have to go with DirecTV, may your personal deity have mercy on your soul.

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Dave Winer just made a post about whoisi.com, singing its praises and awesomeness.

I checked out the site. Cute, another follow this person aggregator. Searched for my “EricaJoy” (if I learned anything at Google, it is branding) and found nothing. Went through the steps to add myself (for uh testing purposes) by adding the site I own (heh, you’re reading it) and waited for the magic.

Nothing happened.

I clicked the “Add another site button” and waited for more magic.

Still none.

I then screamed at my computer (I do that, don’t you?) and closed the site.

What was the cause of my frustration? The fact that here is Yet Another Social Aggregator that wants me to add info into it instead of being smart and finding my info that I’ve already put on the internet eleventyhundred times.

>>>WEB THINGY DEVELOPERS READ ME<<<*

The Social Graph API is your friend. It is my friend. It is smart, charming, sexy, and the life of any party. Other API’s are jealous of it. Here’s what it does:

With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.

Oh ho, what was that? Did that little block quote just say it can use the public connections I’ve already created on other sites to help figure out  “who is I” (see what I did there)?

Let’s see what the social graph API knows about me:

I’ll be damned, look at that. Based off one URL, 6 of my other identities have been discovered.

Lets make like some hypothetically very well done site has used this API and presented me with these 6 sites saying something to the effect of “Hey thanks for adding ericabaker.com, these look like they might be you too. Are they?” to which I respond “Why yes they are, thank you for asking,” by clicking on every single one of them to add to the data about me. Now the site knows that These Sites Are EricaJoy’s and can do another API query to find even more sites that belong to me.

Oh snap. Look at all my identities out there for some smart web site to associate with me. Where is my Staples easy button when I need to press it?

Executive Summary:

I am lazy. Use the Social Graph API instead of asking me over and over and fricking over again where all my profiles are.

*Sorry, that was obnoxious. But effective, no?

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Trust me, I’ve tried the dev mode thing in my hunt for a sidebar. I don’t want the looks of a sidebar, I want the functionality. Here are my wants (from http://www.osxsidebar.com)

* Will dock to the side of my screen.
* Will allow me to add dashboard widgets to it.
* Will allow me to interact with said widgets.
* Will be resizeable.
* Will work in Tiger and Leopard

In response to a lot of people who say they don’t use the dashboard widgets, not to be condescending, but you can’t really feel the frustration if you don’t use the product. Its hard to explain if you don’t use a Mac for work.

When you need to have a to-do list, a calendar, yes the weather (seriously, when you live in NY you need to know when its going to rain), an Adium widget, a notepad (I have a ton of notes in the dashboard), and an RSS reader right there where your eyes can see it while your hands are doing something else (like typing an email), a sidebar is perfect while the dashboard is useless.

I hope that helps define my wants/needs in a sidebar. Oh and to be clear, I don’t want the dashboard to be replaced. I just want a sidebar to be an option for people like me (yes there are more out there).

So theres that. Do you think there should be a sidebar in OS X? Take the poll: [poll=2]

That being said, I would like to know what the pizza delivery industry has against chocolate. There is obviously a vendetta, given the exclusion of one of the most coveted sweets from their dessert offerings. Fruits and sugars and cinnamon can be found in abundance but there is no chocolate to be had. Its not like there aren’t recipes incorporating chocolate and pizza. A search for chocolate and pizza returns 300 results.

Where is the rule that pizza delivery desserts may only include fruit topping, sugar, and/or cinnamon? Who decided this? I should hope that some enterprising world class pizza chain would buck the trend (I’m talking to you Papa John’s) and offer a chocolate based dessert.

Rant over.

Anyhow, I have a bone to pick with Cingular and any other cellular provider that sells the HTC Wizard, better known as the Cingular 8125 or the T-Mobile MDA. There should be a big red sticker on the box of every one of these that says “DO NOT LET YOUR BATTERY RUN ALL THE WAY DOWN.”

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, lets go back to the day before yesterday. How to describe my reaction when my brand-new almost unaffordable phone wouldn’t turn on? Lets say there were a lot of words that I won’t post in my blog flying around. Before you ask, yes I let it charge overnight, yes I reseated both the battery and the SIM card, yes I did all the troubleshooting step I could possibly do to get it to work. I’d given up the ghost, resigning myself to calling Cingular to go through the hassle of getting a replacement. I decided to do one last search and came up with this thread on xda-developers.com and the post that saved my sanity:

“I had the same problem some weeks ago. If the battery go down to much and Wizard switch off then you have big problems because this ppc charge only when OS is loaded!

So if you are not able to switch on to charge it you have to charge the battery outside the phone.

This problem happen to me when i was traveling and i forget my charger at home… I bought another USB cable i cut it to take out the red and black wires, then i take out the battery from the Wizard and put red wire on the pin with label (+) and black wire to the pin (-), the pin label are written on the battery. I put attention to don’t make shortcuts and that wires and pin was touching and let 15 minutes to charge (natually the USB was attached to my laptop). Then disconnected USB cable from laptop, put the battery on Wizard and switched on it pressing the power button few seconds. It booted up and when OS was loaded i connected the normal USB cable to the phone to finish to charge it.

Now i charge the battery before that reach 0%!”

Yes. If I let my battery completely drain, I better have a USB cord handy that I can do some quick wirestripping on. Luckily, I happen to work in an environment that has them laying around all over the place and I got my 8125 up and running. HOWEVER. Cingular, T-Mobile? Bad form. Simply terrible. Please provide some method for charging the batteries without the OS running? Thanks.

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