google stats

ok, they are free, the google-blogger blogs and the stats they provide, so this is only a semi-complaint because, after all, we get a whole lot for free from google-blogger and if a feature is not working, well, many free features are... i just want to record my semi-complaint about the google stats on blogger, specifically, the "Don't count my own page views" feature... this is the feedback i sent to google:

The "Don't track your own page views" seems to have a very short term cookie and it is very annoying to have to reset this feature regularly. Even more annoying when it must be done blog by blog for multiple blogs. I know this is free, but the stats lose their meaning if they are constantly reset to count my page views when I do not want my page views counted. Why have the feature at all if it isn't going to stay "on"? So two feature requests:

No expiration date for the cookie that controls "Don't track your own page views"

and

an "all blogs" feature where a change in settings can be done across all blogs with one change.

Thanks for the free blogs, I hope these suggestions will be considered in your next update.

there are a whole lot of other ways they can improve their stats, like list more than the top ten of everything, but for as much as i use the stats (and as much as they mean to me), this is the one feature i wish they would get right... anyone who makes use of the stats on blogs here, feel free to enlighten me as to how you use them because other than amusement, i don't find much use... thanks and may all our complaints be this light :)

windows defender

excuse me, windows defender just interrupted my conversation with a friend and other computer usage for no apparent reason... it did not scan, perhaps because i was typing as it popped up... i never even used it, it was disabled when i installed my anti-virus software because it is not compatible... but recently when firefox crashed one time too many i opened internet explorer and suddenly windows defender is scheduled to run daily... it doesn't matter what i am doing, it interrupts... another unnecessary annoyance from the idiots at microsoft who can't seem to understand that my use of my computer should be the priority and microsoft software should not usurp control over my computer (unless they'd like to pay for it)... dang proprietary software codes, when will they ever learn they will never have satisfied customers unless they start respecting customers...

and they wonder why so many say microsoft sucks... like they care with their billions...

quibids is a scam

it works like a casino depending on the majority of people losing their money so a few can appear to win big... each "bid" costs 60 cents and each "bid" is counted as 1 cent when used, so when something is sold for $10 the quibid company actually makes $610 plus shipping and handling for the item... those $10 worth of bids actually cost customers $600... in other words, a $200 item appears to be sold for $10, but actually the company racked in over $600... the stories of iPads selling for $40 sound great, but the quibid company sold those 4000 bids (that they equate to $40) for $2400, add the $40 that the "winner" pays and shipping and handling and quibid makes almost $2000 profit on a $500 iPad... the "winner" might have used at least 500 "bids" to win (often a "winner" uses a lot more than 12% of the "bids" to "win" a product) that iPad and the "winner" had to buy those bids at 60 cents each so the very lucky winner actually paid close to $400 for that iPad - and if they used more than 600 bids they paid list price for that iPad...

they there is the bait and switch... two of the items i "won" on the site were "no longer available" and they offered a gift card to walmart or another store for what i spent - so i wasted my time to break even?... and they never sent the gift card so they flat out ripped me off on the "wins"...

additionally, the site also collects valuable information about your purchasing interests and your consumer weaknesses among other personal information... for instance, a tech support rep was not only able to tell me what computer, operating system, and browser i was using, but that my other browser (chrome) would work better with the site...

worse yet, though harder to prove, is that the quibid computers are rigged (which consumer regulatory agency has checked them?)... you don't win unless you invest a lot of time and money in the company... repeatedly i watched very suspicious timers lagging at just the right second to prevent me and others from "winning" while robot bidding was allowed to continue to bid the price of the item up... at least a few times i watched the same bids appear on two or even three different products at the same time, which means someone clicked two or three buttons simultaneous;y at the precise second needed which is impossible unless the quibid computers are making the bids for the alleged customers...

but like the rest of the gambling industry, people become addicted to the pretense of winning and the idea of getting something for nothing... casinos are packed and people know the games heavily favor the house... believing they are actually buying stuff at substantial discount is an even bigger draw for a culture addicted to consumerism and gambling... it took me $30 to learn the scam... hopefully you won't be ripped off for more...

brighthouse does it again

ever since the move, just like the last time we moved a few years ago, brighthouse internet has been intermittent anywhere but in the same room as the router... it took several home visits and changing routers and changing the wall connection and changing the external connection to get the service to produce a strong enough signal to actually provide internet through the 1200 square foot space... way too much of my time was taken up by the crappy brighthouse fixes... and here we are again... i've got to set up a service call... the green light on the router that is supposed to stay on steady is constantly blinking... the internet connection is intermittent... and cable is down again...

brighthouse is terrible service... the cable continues to have the same problems over and over and over and over (and those are just some of the records of the complaints) ... we need the internet for our jobs and it will not work consistently... i so do not want to spend hours working for brighthouse for nothing like i did after the last move and other times... we shall see if the compensation for my time, inconvenience, and frustration is worth my time or if i finally give up on brighthouse and try a different cable and internet service...

brighthouse roadrunner broadband turbo internet (updated 3/18/13, trending downward):

working near perfectly working adequately not working properly not working at all

5% of the time 5% of the time 85% of the time 5% of the time

no problems slow downs intermittent connection, reboot requires a call to tech support or repair visit

brighthouse digital hd cable tv (table updated 3/18/13, still trending downward):

working perfectly working adequately not working properly not working at all

0% of the time 0% of the time 85% of the time 15% of the time

no problems delays, box/channels reset occasionally, software does not adjust aspect ratio and picture size automatically sound does not go on at start, box resets/blinks every 60 seconds, aspect ratio and picture size are off box/channel resets every 10-15 seconds or other issue requires reboot, call to tech support, or visit

microsoft and so on

Adobe has yet another update it wants to install... and once again it failed... Java has yet another update it wants to install... and once again it failed too... Windows has thirteen, yes 13 "important" updates it wants to install... it's been trying to do that for five minutes... so far the software companies have oqned this computer for fifteen minutes... is it just windows vista that sucks or does adobe and java and all windows updates that suck, who knows (somebody must know, so feel free to suggest why updates fail and why they want to update so often and why they take so long to complete when they do update and yes, i turn everything off except for this notebook text box... and i am bored since i sat down here to use the computer but microsoft will not let me use this computer as i would like to... time to shut down the computer because microsoft wants me to...

so now forty minutes into this annoyance, update does not pop up again after the computer finally reboots... Adobe apparently succeeded once i went to the website after restart... so i open windows update and it tells me no important updates need to be installed... and yet, when i look at update history, four of the "important" updates failed... but there's no way to try to reinstall them... so i click on a few things and no help... i finally get to the microsoft website and it explains a "what if" scenario involving Office 2013 that i don't have and no help... so i send the error messages to microsoft and i am left with four failed "important" security updates... and an hour passed working for mocrosoft, adobe, and java... and adobe insists on installing google crome... and java insists on installing the ask toolbar... and microsoft, well, microsoft is in a category of inconvenience, annoyance, and intrusion all it's own... an hour of my life gone... i suppose that's my payment for their free software, but then, they should not get to advertise on software i pay for...

well, at least brighthouse is happy microsoft came along today (though the internet connection here continues to be more problemmatic than it was at the last location)... someday computers will actually work logically and reasonably like other products we own... wouldn't that be spacial...

brighthouse shut me down again

and once again i am in the middle of working on internet research and in the middle of watching something on tv and the crappy brighthouse service that i pay $130 a month for decides i can not do what i want to do and will i be compensated for my time?... the reboot started automatically about ten minutes ago and it continues... does brighthouse really care?... is brighthouse really a friend?... don't believe the bullshit commercials, they do not care and are not your friend... they continue to tell me that this should not be happening and continue to ask me for my time and my services without compensation - and they continue to provide a mediocre product with ineffective service...

and during the last service call, just two weeks ago, i told the tech what was going on and he suggested getting the new box... in other words, call for service again... and talking to two csrs on the phone to set up the service call (the first one was "disconnected" somehow), i explained all the issues and what happened?... nothing... the service tech had no clue...

so now this latest brighthouse-initiated reboot that interrupted my service took fifteen minutes and turned off my tv twice and now my tv will not go on... whatever signal was sent to the tv apparently rebooted my tv as well... and of course it turned off the cable box so the channel was reset... so now, twenty minutes later the tv is trying to connect to the but and on comes what?... not the channel i was watching (not that i want to watch a show after brighthouse forced me to miss 20 minutes of it), but the first-on channel and, of course, without sound... worst of all, the internet service has gone downhill since the move and it was the internet that was keeping me... the neighbor's dishes are looking more attractive once again...

brighthouse is amazing

after waking to no internet again and giving my unpaid time and service to brighthouse, i decided to ignore the meaningless complain it might have been and just mention it as i mention most everything in my daily blog where i mention most everything just to mention most everything for whatever reasons i might have at the time (and brighthouse will not alter my good mood this time)... but now, just a couple of hours later, the cable box decides it's time for yet another reboot - as if it doesn't matter that i pay for the box and the service, it and brighthouse arrogantly believe it is ok to control it in my home... no respect... no is it ok if we interrupt your activities in your home right now and shove yet another reboot up your ... tv?)... ... the lack of customer consideration remains amazing... astounding...

ridiculous...

to brighthouse techs, csrs, and management: click here and read this before you comment if you are not just SPAM commenting... simply, if you want more of my time and energy, pay me...

most consistent complaint: no sound at start up... random re-boots...

only acceptable solutions: service that works... pay me for my time...

brighthouse digital hd cable tv (table updated 2/5/13):

working perfectly working adequately not working properly not working at all

0% of the time 0% of the time 95% of the time 5% of the time

no problems delays, box/channels reset occasionally, software does not adjust aspect ratio and picture size automatically sound does not go on at start, box resets/blinks every 60 seconds, aspect ratio and picture size are off box/channel resets every 10-15 seconds or other issue requires reboot, call to tech support, or visit

the tech who installed our service here last week suggested getting the other brand of cable box, samsung again... other techs have suggested this sysco cable box when we had the other brand... their answer is always just give us more of your time (without compensation) and try something else (that won't work)... we watched the superbowl at a friends on century link and it worked fine... most neighbors here in our new place have satellite dishes so we'll be talking to them about service and reception as we meet them... brighthouse just does not seem to get the message...

waiting for the brighthouse connection

i occasionally get a message here or by phone from brighthouse sales or technicians that appear to be efforts to resolve the on-going service interruptions i frequently experience, a few of which have been chronicled in this blog... today i am brought here due to continued poor service preventing me from enjoying cable programming... in this entry, i will also address why i have stopped responding to the brighthouse calls... the bottom line is this - if the solution brighthouse is offering does not start with a monthly discount for my time, energy, and interrupted service, i am not interested in wasting more of my time trying to fix the continuing brighthouse problems...

now to today's issue...

first, should it take 3-5 minutes to use the remote to use the search feature to find a specific show you want?... when you press your remote, does nothing happen for ten seconds or longer?... when scrolling through channels, does the scrolling freeze and take sixty seconds to get through the first 100 channels?...

when you want to find out when specific shows are on, for instance, which football games are being broadcast on which channels at what time, can you do that in less than 5 minutes without loosing your feed to the game you are currently watching?...

if you can do these things with brighthouse, then you are getting better service than i am... i do not know if it is the converter box or the line conditions or something at the brighthouse connections or bandwidth or something else, but the delays in receiving signals simply switching stations or scrolling through the stations is unacceptably long...

let's look at the solutions and customer satisfaction...

the first solution is change the batteries in the remote... i do that monthly, even more often at times... i do not use the remote daily... the batteries i remove from the remote are still very effective in any other electronic product and testing shows they are still good batteries... i have changed the remote several times... the remote does not seem to be the primary problem...

the next solution is reboot the box (again, a weekly activity which is ridiculous inconvenience and lowers my customer satisfaction a lot)... i do not work for brighthouse... i pay brighthouse for service...

it is as simple as this...

i should not have to provide service for brighthouse equipment unless brighthouse pays me to provide service... to resolve this customer dissatisfaction, i should be paid for each service i provide for brighthouse equipment... my time and energy has value... a $5 discount for each required reboot would be appropriate...

as i manually reboot on average weekly due to lagging service or other issues, a $20 discount monthly is required for customer satisfaction as much as the reboot is required just to use the service i pay for...

this does not include the auto-reboots that the box does when i am in the middle of watching a show - that is an intrusion that is not acceptable and a dollar amount will not provide satisfaction, however a punitive dollar amount might encourage brighthouse to not randomly interrupt the service i am paying for... $50 would be fair, considering the level of customer dissatisfaction and the profit margin brighthouse currently provides... the risk of a $50 refund should be incentive enough for brighthouse technicians to stop randomly interrupting the service i pay for... might as well have satellite...

the next solution to any issue is to call brighthouse... that averages more than 30 minutes and takes me away from work or life activities that of my choosing... essentially, it puts me in the position of working for brighthouse... i should be compensated at $15 an hour for my time when i am required to call brighthouse just to use the service i am paying for...

the next solution is a home service call... that requires a change in my schedule and anywhere 2-4 hours of down time waiting for the service technician... i have experienced at least two no-shows and may have forgotten more... again, a minimum of $15 per hour for the time i give to brighthouse required to use the service i pay for... since the best they do is a 2-hour window, a minimum $30 refund of my money is fair for each service call...

these are very fair wage compensations for my time as i could be earning much more per hour if i chose not to give brighthouse my time... this is also an excellent performance improvement incentive for brighthouse to improve their product and customer service as the responsibility for not paying me would be set directly on brighthouse - provide the service i pay for without glitches and interruptions and you refund me nothing, you get more than $1,000 a year from me...

so, to the brighthouse techs and csrs and managers who may read this, if your proposed resolutions to the issues i have been reporting for the last few years does not include monetary compensation for my time, energy, troubleshooting, and inconvenience... then please do not offer the appearance of a blank check "let me help you" in my comments here or on the phone... your "help" costs me time and money... and the dozens of calls and home service calls i've given you over the years has has not resolved the issues...

keep in mind that what brings me here today is the same thing that has brought me to write every blog entry about brighthouse service, dissatisfaction with the brighthouse product... if there was not an issue preventing me from using the product today, i would not be writing this... i am not looking for money, i am looking for the service in pay for... at this point however; i have given enough time and energy to brighthouse without fair compensation and propose the refund plan in this entry as a last effort to keep me as a brighthouse customer...

as a quality manager myself, understanding the customer's dissatisfaction and needs is an essential aspect of customer satisfaction... hopefully this writing has provided you with the specific information you need to satisfy this customer...

i am likely not the only customer who would approve of this plan...

UPDATE: why should today have only one issue, it's brighthouse service, after all...

I get home and find the show guide is suddenly changed to ridiculously huge letters so the stations can't be read and only the first word for any show name is visible... why am i not surprised that the box reset itself again and now does not provide a useable guide to what is on...

it's not like we have only one issue each day... we have several on-going issues every day... like the cable box still turns on and switches to mute for some reason and we have to change channels a certain way with the remote to get sound... if we actually watched tv daily we'd have a different service...

what baffles me most is how people who actually watch tv daily put up with brighthouse... i know what keeps me is the internet, not the best but the fastest around here... and also the fact that i get a discount some months i spend time trying to get the service fixed... but the fix has not worked in the past few years since i've had the service... we plan on moving early next year and moving with brighthouse does not look likely...

brighthouse continues to suck

so after a wonderful day out playing softball with friends and a wonderful evening home enjoying dinner with friends i decide to give up sleep tonight to watch something i was looking forward to for weeks, a 10 year reunion show for firefly and five minutes into the show for reasons only the intrusive people and computers at brighthouse know, the cable box turns off and goes into some sort of countdown followed by another countdown followed by a reboot and twenty minutes later i am still wondering why i don't just cancel this crap brighthouse service because the show will not go on...

so i will not get back the time or sleep i gave up tonight and i still do not get to watch the show i wanted to watch and brigthouse still charges more than they charged last year for service that gets worse every month... yes, besides exploring alternbative tv services and in spite of offers to help which do nothing to stop the deteriorating service and continuing service interruptions... in fact just it continues to get worse... i started keeping track and the current stats are:

brighthouse digital hd cable tv (table updated 12/14/12, still trending downward):

working perfectly working adequately not working properly not working at all

0% of the time 0% of the time 90% of the time 10% of the time

no problems delays, box/channels reset occasionally, software does not adjust aspect ratio and picture size automatically sound does not go on at start, box resets/blinks every 60 seconds, aspect ratio and picture size are off box/channel resets every 10-15 seconds or other issue requires reboot, call to tech support, or visit

Google Fail

yes, #GoogleFail and also #BloggerFail... I am hating on the new forced on users blogger format... i see less options on the page... more hidden options means more time to navigate and use the page... i do not see all of my blogs on my dashboard without clicking on the 'more blogs' link, extra clicking, wasted time... while every change has a learning curve and it takes time to develop a comfort level with every interface, immediate and obvious inconveniences should not be the first thing noticed...

and apparently all my preferences were reset to google blogger default as i am wasting more time setting up formats and options that i need to remember in order to maintain continuity in my blogs... and obviously the interface is developed for bloggers with fewer blogs than i have... more obviously i need to explore wordpress and other blog options...

it did not help that microsoft vista sucked royally and it's taken almost two hours to actually start blogging tonight...

vista fail

as in microsoft vista so totally sucks and fails it is not funny... yes, #VistaFail is added to the growing list of #Fail hashtags and labels and no, it is nothing new, it is just getting worse and worse and there is no logical reason for software to deteriorate and consume more time and memory when nothing changes on a computer... so i guess i will simply get used to restarting every day and giving up 15 minutes or more daily to microsoft... if the software was free that would be barely reasonable...

i'm so fed up with microsoft vista i don't even want to continue...