To: sppartner@microsoft.com
Subject: MAPS digital distribution – broken link?

Hi there,

Following the email I received today (Subject: “Important: Action Pack software now available digitally”), I tried to follow the provided link to access my Microsoft Action Pack Subscription content online: http://partner.microsoft.com/MAPScontent

This link seems to direct me to a survey about my company’s marketing activities—a survey that I was unable to fill out because it is badly broken. Not only is the layout broken (screenshot), but it would not accept my answers, complaining that I hadn’t answered all the questions. In the end, I had to select ‘no’ for every answer in order to get it to accept my submission. This then took me to the Partner Marketing Center home page, where I could see no sign of my MAPS digital content.

I continue to be amazed by how horrible a job your web team does. Why would we ever take marketing advice from Microsoft?

–
Kevin Yank
Technical Director, sitepoint.com

I have previously written about Streetwise, an Apple Authorised Service Centre, and its policy of holding onto computers while they wait days for replacement parts to arrive so that they can maintain a high Apple Service Rating.

That original post came about when I had to get the palm rest of my MacBook replaced under warranty, and in the past week another shocking outcome of that repair has come to light: when the Streetwise technician replaced my palm rest, he did not transfer my MacBook’s serial number sticker (which is attached to the underside of the palm rest—inside the battery compartment).

When I contacted Streetwise about this last week, service manager Jedda Wignall was appropriately contrite. “It is incredibly unfortunate that you have been hit with this inconvenience, as could have been put in a precarious situation as a result,” he wrote (sic.). “The technician who performed the work is no longer with the company, and I would like to think that this situation would not arise again.”

The precarious situation to which he refers would occur if damage or malfunction left me unable to turn on my computer to look up the serial number in the operating system. In effect, I would be unable to prove the identity of my computer, and thus unable to obtain warranty service.

In order to make it up to me, Wignall offered to waive the cost of labour on any future repair work I might require. I turned him down: “I’m afraid that it’s reached the point where I would rather pay the labour costs than leave any of our computers in the hands of Streetwise staff again.”

At the same time, I advised everyone else here at SitePoint to avoid using Streetwise to service their Macs. Streetwise would not be getting near any of our computers again … except for one.

While this exchange went on, my colleague Andrew Krespanis was also struggling with his own Streetwise horror story. He had left his MacBook Pro with Streetwise for warranty repair of his display, and when he insisted on taking his computer back while Streetwise awaited the replacement part, he discovered that the screen’s case had been bent and the computer would no longer run on battery power!

It took many phone calls and more than a few trips to Streetwise to do it, but Andrew finally got his MacBook Pro back from Streetwise this morning. It’s in perfect working order … but it has no serial number sticker.

Yes indeed. Part of the repair work Streetwise performed on Andrew’s MacBook Pro involved replacing the palm rest, and just as they did to my machine they again failed to transfer the serial number sticker to the new part. So much for Wignall’s assurances that this would not happen again!

Discovering this, I called Wignall personally. He thanked me for bringing it to his attention, agreed it was absolutely shocking, and promised to take steps. He also dug Andrew’s old palm rest out of the trash and peeled the serial number sticker off of it for us.

My advice? Avoid getting your computer serviced by Streetwise at all costs. If you can’t avoid it, or have already left your computer with them, be sure to check for the serial number sticker when you get it back!

Streetwise replied almost immediately to my email complaint:

Hi Kevin,

I’m not sure why the technician on Saturday would have told you that – perhaps there was some sort of misunderstanding.
I do apologise if you felt that was inappropriate in anyway.
I can confirm that the part to be fitted would not be an issue and you can use your machine normally while we wait for the part.
As the technician is not in today – I will discuss the matter with him when I see him and to see if we can resolve this one way or another.
We will attempt to call or leave a message when the part actually comes in. Do you wish me to order the part for you?

Best Wishes,
Gary Chee
Service & Returns Manager

Quite the reversal. I asked Streetwise to go ahead and order the part. Two days later:

Hi Kevin,

The top case has arrived today. Could you please drop off your Macbook so we can install it for you?
Please allow us at least half a day turn around time to sort it out for you.

Thanks,
Gary

Still no explanation for the original incident, you’ll note. I queried this in my reply:

Thanks. Will do!

Has any explanation for the original mixup been forthcoming?

–
Kevin Yank

http://www.kevinyank.com/

Streetwise’s reply was about as vague as can be, but reading between the lines I believe my complaint was taken to heart:

No worries Kevin – I’ve spoken to the tech and he said there was a small mixup – but I hope that’s been cleared up.

Cheers,
Gary

The repair was completed the same day I dropped off the computer. In total, I was without my MacBook for about four hours. Not bad at all!

The next day, I received an automated email from Apple requesting my feedback on the support experience I had had with Streetwise. As you can imagine, I was very forthcoming, and ticked the box that said ‘You may contact me for more information about my experience’. Two months later, I have not heard from Apple on the matter.

Unfortunately, my MacBook is in need of a little in-warranty TLC (a crack has a developed in the casing, a common defect). So today I dropped by Streetwise, an Authorised Apple Service Centre, to get it looked after.

I discovered that, in an effort to gain the highest possible “service rating” from Apple, Streetwise has decided to make it really inconvenient to get a minor problem with your MacBook fixed. I therefore walked right back out with my cracked MacBook in hand.

Here’s the note I just sent to Streetwise.

Hi there,

I visited the service department at Streetwise today to seek in-warranty service for my MacBook (Apple case no. XXXXXXXX).

When I spoke to Apple regarding the case, they informed me that I would merely have to take in my computer to an Authorized Service Centre like yours to confirm the problem so that you could order the part, and then arrange a separate time for me to bring in my computer for it to be installed.

I got a very different story from the person who served me at your service department today.

I was informed that, in order to maintain a high “service rating” (I assume some metric calculated by Apple based on how long a customer service case is open with you), you required customers to leave their computers with you for several days while you ordered the part from Apple, awaited its arrival, and then installed the part.

It seems customers cannot be trusted to return in a timely fashion once a part has arrived, which damages your “service rating”. Consequently, you have adopted a policy of inconveniencing your customers in order to satisfy an artificial metric of service quality.

I would ask you to reconsider this policy, so that I might reconsider my decision not to frequent your business. If there is someone at Apple I can contact to lodge a complaint about how its “service rating” is affecting your ability to provide meaningful customer service, please let me know so that I may do so.

In the meantime, if there is an Apple Authorized Service Centre that has a lower “service rating” that you can recommend, I would appreciate the pointer.

Sincerely,

–
Kevin Yank

http://www.kevinyank.com/

Update: Streetwise replied to my message.

Thanks to the pervasive tweaks to the user experience in Leopard, using my Mac is a more uniformly pleasant experience … with one major exception: the display of docked folders (now called “Stacks”). Thankfully, I’ve found a work-around.

As explained in detail in Ars Technica‘s excellent review of Leopard, folders placed on Leopard’s Dock will only display their icon when they are empty. For folders with files in them, the icons of the folders’ contents are stacked one on top of the other to produce, in the vast majority of cases, a completely useless result.

In the above screenshot from the Ars Technica review, the folder on the far left is the user’s Home directory. What is displayed is a stack of folder icons, with the front-most icon that of the Desktop folder. At a glance, then, the Home folder looks like the Desktop folder when placed on the dock. The other folders that you would typically expect to find on the dock are similarly difficult to identify.

The most convincing example from the article is the following screenshot, which shows the Downloads folder (containing a disk image) sitting next to an actual disk image on the Dock. Can you tell which is which?

And of course, there is no preference (hidden or otherwise) to control this icon insanity.

Thankfully, after dealing with this horrendous situation for 48 hours, I’ve found a work-around that restores (mostly) the pre-Leopard behaviour of docked folders. Instead of placing the folder itself in the Dock, create an alias to the folder, and place that on the Dock.

Here’s the procedure in detail:

1. In your Home folder, create a new folder named Dock Aliases.
2. One at a time, Cmd-Option-Drag each of your “special” folders (Applications, Documents, etc.) into the Dock Aliases folder, to create aliases there.
3. Open the Dock Aliases folder. You should see the aliases you created. You can tell them apart from the originals by the little black arrow in the bottom-left-hand corner of each icon.
4. One at a time, drag each of the folders you want to your Dock.

Here’s what you’ll end up with:

Clicking on any of these docked aliases will open the corresponding folder in a Finder window. The only thing missing from the pre-Leopard behaviour is the ability to browse through the folders by right-clicking them.

Ideally, one could choose to benefit from the Fan and Grid views provided by stacks without having to live with the horrendous Dock icons, but at least this work-around gives you one more choice than Apple saw fit to provide!

The feature blog post in today’s issue of the newsletter is Debug JavaScript with Mozilla’s free debugger. At first glance, I assumed this must have been a typo, and that Mozilla had been falsely credited for Firebug, the excellent and free JavaScript debugger developed by Joe Hewitt and recently adopted by Yahoo!

But no! The article does in fact recommend in glowing and authoritative terms the obsolete Venkman debugger produced in the days before Firefox. Venkman has gone through long periods of stagnant development and incompatibility with current browser releases, and these days just barely runs under current browser versions (with documented problems).

It’s one thing for a misguided novice to mention Venkman in a personal blog entry, but it’s quite another for a site that bills itself as a reliable source of developer information to publish a lengthy article like this that will send beginners down the wrong track! As educators in the web development field, we have our hands full with all the old books and articles out there that still promote the wrong way of doing things—we don’t need new articles from supposedly reputable sources further misleading beginners.

This is the comment I left on the story:

You can’t be serious…

Venkman is an outdated piece of abandonware. If you can even get it to run in current versions of Mozilla and Firefox browsers, its behavior is buggy and its interface obtuse.

Firebug is the current JavaScript debugger of choice for the Mozilla stable of browsers.

In my view, publishing this sort of article is both careless and irresponsible. Beginners rely on this sort of article to learn the right way to do things, and by leading them astray you not only waste their time but make web development as a discipline less accessible to the masses.

This would be enough to make me finally unsubscribe from TechRepublic’s newsletters, if I didn’t feel compelled to keep an eye on them for future crimes against education.

British Airways failed to get our flight off the ground today due to “maintenance requirements”, which I can only assume means that someone broke the plane. After hours of waiting in the departure lounge to learn our fate, we patiently accepted the proferred meal vouchers, and then listened to the announcement: British Airways staff had been desperately attempting to find us accomodation for the night, but all the hotels were full up due to the NRL Grand Final. A crowd gathered, the shouting began.

On the bright side, I had the company of fellow stoic travellers Molly and Andy to dispel the boredom. Charming to the last, they befriended the lingering security guards by showing them photos of Simon Willison, then hopped online via the wireless hotspot to learn the truth of the situation: there were hotel rooms available, they just cost some $300. Rather than wait out the angry mob, they quietly booked their own accomodation online.

Meanwhile, the private Web Directions after-party was still going on, and when people there learned of our predicament I had plenty of offers of spare beds, so I made my way back through immigration and customs with with Molly and Andy.

Of course, many of the other people on the flight had no such resources, so we found the baggage carousel that had been assigned to us stacked high with unclaimed luggage, blocking the emergence of our own meager posessions. Clinging to the tattered remains of our good natured enthusiasm, we set about plucking bags from the carousel and neatly arranging them on the floor nearby.

No sooner had we begun to recruit other weary passengers to our task than a British Airways baggage agent appeared as if from nowhere to demand, “Are those your bags?” “No,” we replied in the most positive of tones. It was the same tone in which Superman would say “Happy to be of service, ma’m.” before streaking off into the sky to right another wrong.

“What you’re doing is illegal,” she replied sourly, and pointed with her walkie-talkie to the impressive arrangement of luggage. “You’ll have to put all of those back.” The last of our sunny demeanour exhausted, we set down the bags we were holding and walked away.

To add insult to injury, British Airways managed to briefly lose one of my bags, which I had checked in at the gate. I had to stand around for fifteen minutes while someone tracked it down, carried it down to the baggage collection hall, walked straight past me and added it to the mounds of luggage still circling on the carousel.

“DID NOT DEPART”, read the stamp on my arrival card as I handed it to the customs officer and stepped out into the cool Sydney night. “WOULD NOT DEPART”, I mused, would have better described British Airways’ attitude to me as a customer that night, as if I were some unwelcome guest that just wouldn’t take the hint.

Espresso Drinks:

• Mindsweeper™
• Black Tiger Mocha
• Slammahamma™