I purchased the TV (with a Sony Bravio soundbar and some HDMI cables) online and for in store pickup. My coworker, Mike, has a truck so we were going to pick the items up at lunch and take them back to my apartment. I get an email shortly after 9:00 AM telling me my order was ready for pickup. At 11:30 we decided to head on over to pick it up. Of course, they didn’t have the order together, even though the email stated it was ready. 20 minutes after arriving to the store they start bringing the order to the front. There is no reason that should have taken that long, especially for an order that was supposed to have been ready by now. Oh well, I have my new TV, time to get it home. We take the TV to my apartment (20 minute drive from the Best Buy that actually had the TV) and take it out of the box and begin to put it on the included TV stand. This is when problem number 2 arose. The screws that were supposed to be included to attach the TV to the stand, weren’t. Not Best Buy’s fault, but annoying that I’d have to make another trip somewhere to get screws.

We decided to head back to the office when we noticed something wasn’t right. Looking at the TV it looked a bit small. We looked at the box, and sure enough, it’s a 40 inch TV. Now, I know I should have looked at the box carefully before we left Best Buy, but come on. It’s their job to hand over the correct product. The box was quite large so I assumed it was the correct TV. At this point I am extremely pissed. I call Best Buy and they tell me they will call me back. They have to verify that I do indeed have the wrong TV. They need to count their inventory to make sure I’m not a liar. About 5 minutes later they call back telling me that I do have the wrong TV (thanks for confirming what I already knew!) and that I can bring in the wrong TV and exchange it. I told them this would not be possible and that we came in over our lunch break and I would not have access to a truck. They need to deliver the new TV and pick up the old one or lose out on a sale. They were going to have to call me back. 15 minutes later they call back saying they can send someone out to deliver and set up the right TV and pick up the wrong one. They wanted to come right away but I explained I was at work and wouldn’t be home until after 5:00 PM. They said they would have to call me back. Again. They do call me back and confirm that an associate will be at my house around 5:00 for the delivery and hookup. Long story short (too late) he gets there around 6:30 and I’m hooked up and playing Heavy Rain on my PS3 by 8:00 (I had to run an errand in between hook-up time and TV enjoyment time).

I’ve long heard horror stories about Best Buy on The Consumerist and was expecting my story to wind up there. Fortunately, this wasn’t one. Yes, it was something should have never happened. Yes, it was an inconvenience to everyone involved. The bottom line is that Best Buy did everything they could to make it right and keep me a happy customer. All in all, the story wound up with a happy ending.

I downloaded and tried the Rivet demo and found that the app was easy to use. It required very little set up. I turned on my PS3 and found that my designated folders were showing up on my PS3. I was able to listen to music and look at my photos. Then came the true test, AVI files. I navigated to my videos directory and tried playing an episode of How I Met Your Mother. No luck. Six Feet Under didn’t work either. The Sopranos was next. Needless to say, it didn’t work and I decided Rivet should sleep with the fishes.

Fast forward a couple months and I decided to try giving Rivet another shot. Downloaded the demo again (it gives you 25 free video streams). The configuration was just as easy as before and it was showing up in my PS3 within seconds. So here comes the ultimate test, part 2. I played The Big Bang Theory. Success! I played Battlestar Galactica. Success again! I played an episode of Scrubs XVID encoded. Success again! So Rivet now works flawlessly with my PS3 and the videos look great on my TV. I don’t think I could be any happier with it. Minutes after installing I purchased the app for the low price of $19.95 and haven’t looked back since. So if you’re looking for a media streaming solution from your Mac to your PS3, I highly recommend Rivet.

One issue I came across was how my iMac wouldn’t stay asleep.  I never messed with the default settings on my MacBook, but on my iMac I wanted the computer to stay awake longer than I would a desktop.  I changed the settings and all was well for a few days.  Then one day, the computer kept waking up. It appears that it was because of the SMC.  My air conditioning went out one day and when they were fixing it, they shut off power causing the iMac to shut down improperly.  Resetting the SMC fixed the issue.

The second thing that bugged me was the Mighty Mouse.  I gave it a fighting chance, using it for weeks before giving up on it.  The mouse feels cheap in your hands and felt like I was going to break it just by clicking.  Not to mention it didn’t always recognize the right click when I would press down on the right side.  I went back to my Logitech mouse.  It worked out of the box, but it wouldn’t let me configure the buttons, so I downloaded the Logitech Control Center for OSX.  What a piece of crap that was.  Luckily, I found a great solution: Steermouse.  Steermouse gave me all the configuration options I needed for my Logitech mouse.

I’ve also found some new software I didn’t know about or use on my MacBook.  Google’s Quick Search Box is a great alternative to QuickSilver (if you are like me and all you used QuickSilver for was an app launcher). Boxee on the Mac is awesome.  It is such a nice media center and works much better than the Windows port.  There is even an iPhone remote app to control the media center wirelessly.

Bottom line is, I’ve had my iMac for several weeks and have done everything I’ve ever done on my PC (and more) and have not had any show-stopping issues.  In fact, in the course of a few weeks on Windows I would have had several problems pop up in normal use.  OSX has proven to be a much better OS for me under heavy usage. I’ll never switch back to Windows.

I know my sisters are going to get on me about this, saying I don’t need another computer, but I purchased an iMac. My Windows Vista desktop has been giving me a lot of trouble over the last few weeks. I even reformatted and reinstalled Windows and it still kept bothering me. I’ve had enough. This morning I bought a 24 inch iMac to be my primary machine. I’m excited to get it because I love OSX and the apps that run on it so much. In my opinion, and in my uses, it is a much better OS than Vista (or XP) is. I can’t wait to get it and set it up.

When the merger took place I noticed a reduction in quality of their online streams. We later find out that’s because they were going to start charging for internet streams. Charging more money on top of the ~$12.95 a month customers pay to listen to the service in their car. It’s always nice when companies take away an included service and tell you that you can have it back for an additional fee. Of course, through the length of your contract (I signed up for a year) you can listen to the lower quality stream for free. It doesn’t stop there though. I also noticed, and I have no way of confirming this, that the quality of the broadcasts in my car have gone downhill and I think it’s due to them cutting back the number of terrestrial towers broadcasting the satellite signal. I used to get a strong signal everywhere I went, and if the satellite signal was not strong it was backed up by towers bouncing the signal around. Now if I get near a building (like a drive-through for example) I lose signal. I even lose signal under the thin roofing of the covered parking in my apartment. Before the merger I never experienced a loss of signal unless I was in a parking garage (which most of the time I still got the signal) or a long tunnel. They must have cut back on the number of towers in service to save more money and deliver inferior service.

Now, after much delay, they have released an iPhone/iPod Touch app that can stream their service. But guess what, they want to charge you a monthly fee to use it. You must pay an additional $2.99 a month for the premium stream to listen using the app. I think I’ve had it with them. They keep pushing for more money and continuously deliver degrading service. If the quality stayed the same throughout the year and a half I’ve had them, I might not have a problem with this. But the fact is, they have degraded their signal, on both satellite and the internet, a noticeable amount, enough for me to think the money I pay for their service isn’t worth it. Even though I love the stations on XM, when my year is up I will not renew.

After I installed the update and my phone rebooted I was excited to start testing out the new features. There was only one problem. After the update my iPhone was running slow. Very slow. Safari would freeze, applications would crash, and it took forever to find my AT&T signal. After about 15 minutes and multiple restarts, it started behaving again, and in some cases sped things up.

Copy and paste was something that I thought I would never use or if I did use it, it would be on rare occasions. I probably used copy and paste more than anything else yesterday. It is great with the Tweetdeck iPhone app. I wanted to copy a url and paste it in for a tweet and it worked perfectly. The part where it came in handy the most was setting up my Google Calendars.

With OS 3.0, you can finally add Google Calendars using CalDAV. I can’t use Google’s Exchange sync because I have my work’s Exchange account on my phone and you’re only allowed to add one Exchange account. I added my first Google calendar filling out the normal credentials, but it only syncs the main calendar on your Google account. If you have multiple calendars, what do you do? This is where the group calendar comes into play thanks to great instructions here. You add the calendars the same way, but when you are finished you go into advanced options and replace your email address with the randomly generated email address that Google creates. If you have ever seen this email address, it is quite long. Luckily, I could copy the address on my desktop and email it to myself, then open up the mail app and copy it from the email and paste it into the calendar settings. Cross app copy and paste ftw! Also with copy and paste you can also finally email multiple pictures instead of sending a separate email for each image. Awesome.

OS 3.0 is a solid release that brought a lot of long-awaited features. It will be even better once AT&T get their act together. The only thing that I really want to use right now but can’t is MMS. AT&T really dropped the ball on this one. They are trying to hide the fact that their network is not all that great. How can they not be ready for iPhone picture or video messaging when every other phone on their network has the capability to do so already? The only answer is their network can’t handle it. That has to be the same reason tethering isn’t available yet. I’m glad that Apple make the snarky remarks during the WWCD singling out AT&T. This must be a PR nightmare for them. There are a lot of angry customers.

“Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction. The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment — same piece of hardware — paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that’s a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.”

What Ballmer doesn’t understand is that is not the only reason people buy Apple products. If you could (legally) buy any PC and run OSX on it flawlessly for the same price as a PC with Windows, I’d be willing to be that Microsoft would see Windows’ OS share drop dramatically. People aren’t buying Apple products for the logo. They aren’t spending more money on hardware. They are spending more money on a great OS, great support from the manufacturer, and an all-around great computing experience. That is what Microsoft doesn’t get.

There’s always going to be someone who will try to duplicate what Twitter did in a new way. Plurk tried, and last I checked they had quite a community but I don’t know anyone who actually uses it (at least not anymore). Even if something better comes along, that doesn’t mean users are going to jump ship. They’ve already invested time in Twitter. It will be hard to leave. How else do you explain how MySpace is still popular? I’m betting it’s because that’s where the cool kids were, then it became popular and that’s where people have set up homes. Twitter is the same way. That could change though. If you use Twitter you might have noticed that as each month passes the amount of spam followers seems to increase. Some days these spam bots follow you as soon as you post an update. Twitter needs to do something about this problem if they want to continue to grow. MySpace used to have the same problem. It has been several months since I deleted my MySpace profile so I don’t know if the problem is still as rampant as it once was. The point is, it may eventually drive users away, or make the move easier when something bigger and better does come along.

Another problem I have with Twitter is now that it’s popular it’s being inundated with another type of spam. The new spam are not pre-programmed robots, though one could argue differently when you look at their updates. I’m talking about the so-called social media experts, mavens, and enthusiasts. These are the people who do nothing but post links to their site/product/service and retweet other more famous people. They bring almost no value to Twitter and actually, in my opinion, lower people’s opinions about social media and what it can and should be. Social Media Experts are to today as SEO Experts were to a few years ago. Yeah, there might be a few people who honestly “get” it and can actually help you, but most are trying to peddle their goods and services that you don’t need. Just because you’re on LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter doesn’t mean you’re an expert. It means you use the internet. In fact, I’m betting there are 14 year olds that know more about social media than you. I’ve actually had many of these human spammers follow me then when I don’t follow them after a day or so they quit following me. 7 times out of 10 they are back following me the next day. Is that because my updates are so great? Not at all. It’s because they follow anyone and everyone to try to pump themselves up more.

Along with the so-called experts, you have real companies on Twitter. Some of the accounts are good. There are some that try to help customers out and provide valuable information. There are also some that will jump all over you because they are watching if anyone says something bad about their company or product. Then you have something else entirely. I think everyone remembers the Skittles mistake. Skittles decided to make Skittles.com pull in anything anyone was saying about Skittles from Twitter and display it. Of course obscenities were rampant once it launched. It was funny for a few minutes, then it got old. It also made Skittles abandon Twitter for their homepage to Youtube. I bet they will actually think before they implement something like that in the future.

The last thing that bugs me and might not cause Twitter to fail, but it’s not helping. These are users that use Twitter as a lifestream. Now, it is your account and I can’t tell you how to use it because Twitter is what you make of it, but do you really need to use it as a lifestream? Twitter wasn’t meant to be a lifestream. That’s what Friendfeed and other applications are for. I do not need to know where you are every 5 minutes, so stop posting your brightkite status. I also don’t need to know every time you’re listening to a new song, so please don’t update me with your blip.fm status. It’s cool if you want to post these things every once in a while, such as when you find a great new song or if you need other Twitter users to know where you are for a meetup or if you have a new blog post, but when that’s all your updates are then chances are you won’t have many followers for long.

To leave on a more positive note I’ll tell you one thing that I love since Twitter hit the mainstream. Celebrities. I’m not talking about Britney Spears or Barack Obama and I’m not talking about celebrity gossip. I’m talking about the celebrities that are actually fun to follow on Twitter. People like Michael Ian Black, Rob Corddry, Jimmy Fallon, ?uestlove (of The Roots), Demitri Martin, etc. are great because their real life personalities transform so well onto Twitter. Even Shaq has some of the funniest updates on Twitter.

So, if you are someone who likes to download a lot from iTunes, Amazon.com, watch movies and TV on Hulu and Netflix, play online games like World of Warcraft, do offsite backups with services like Mozy or Jungledisk, don’t be surprised if you use up your allotted bandwidth quickly. And of course Charter does not provide any sort of bandwidth meter tool to see how much you are using. At least Comcast provides a more reasonable 250gb a month cap. I really can’t wait to be done with Charter.

Please stop using the horrible piece of software that came pre-installed on your PC known as Internet Explorer. Not only do you make the job of web designers a lot harder each and every day you use it, but you also leave yourself more open to attacks from malicious websites. I recently spent several hours over a few nights fixing a computer for my sister and brother-in-law because they were infected with a nasty bug that they got while using Internet Explorer. If they were using Firefox they would not have installed the ActiveX and gotten the bug, but they weren’t so they did. IE fails at security and fails at complying with web standards.

My beef used to be with the people who still use Internet Explorer 6, even though 7 has been out for well over a year now. Now my beef is with anyone who continues to use IE at all. I’ll tell you why. Microsoft had the chance to make IE7 standards compliant. What that means is it would properly render pages that were coded to the standards and rules set forth by the web development community to make the best looking and most usable websites possible. They didn’t. While it was better than 6, it was far from the other web browsers, such as Firefox or Safari. The first release candidate of IE8 recently came out. Again, they had the chance to make it standards compliant. They failed again. That makes the job of web developers harder. Now they have to support 3 versions of IE, each one supporting different standards that Microsoft decided it wanted to follow, and not true web standards. Please do yourself a favor and see the web the way it was meant to be seen. Use Firefox (or Safari, Google Chrome, Opera, etc). Thanks.

Your friendly neighborhood Web Developer and Family Computer Help Desk,
Mike Schepker

It is no secret that Vista was a failure. Businesses have held off on installing Vista, so much that the big PC manufacturers have gotten Microsoft to extend the life of XP several times. Consumers, many of whom only got Vista because it was preinstalled on their new PCs, have been unhappy with Vista’s performance. It has turned me off of Windows so much that my next desktop computer will be an iMac, and I already have a MacBook. Microsoft needs to do something to please the customers or many more will jump ship.

Since Microsoft has said that Windows 7 will fix all the complaints with Vista, Windows 7 should be an extremely cheap (less than $100), if not free, upgrade for Vista users. Really, when you see how terrible of an OS Vista is compared to XP, Microsoft should look at all Vista users as beta-testers for Windows 7, because essentially, Vista was no better than a beta product. So, when Microsoft releases the “best version of Windows ever” (which they also said about Vista), they need to hand it out as a free upgrade to all Vista users. If they don’t do something to save the public image of Windows, they are going to create many more Mac users.

Last week my Gmail account was hacked (still not sure exactly what happened) so I wanted to create a new email address to start using to replace Gmail. I will probably never stop using my Gmail account, but I will use the new email address I created for my more pertinent information. I decided to sign up for a Mobile Me account. I never would have even considered paying for an email account in the past, but since I got my iPhone I’ve been looking for an easy way to keep my calendars, email, and contacts all in one place. I could sync the calendar on the iPhone with Google Calendar, but only if I synced it with my MacBook first. I wanted something that would sync my calendars over the air. Mobile Me became that answer. I still have to open up my MacBook for it to sync with Google, but I don’t have to sync my iPhone to it anymore. Now my iPhone syncs with my PC only.

I decided to setup the Mobile Me account on my PC in Outlook and have it sync my contacts and calendars as well. While the Mobile Me website is a nice looking website, I don’t want to have to log in to webmail whenever I want to check email. In the past, using Gmail, I didn’t mind because Gmail login was integrated with all my other Google services and I have a Gmail notifier installed in Firefox. Outlook 2007 is much better than I would have ever thought. After all, it is a Microsoft product and I am beginning to loathe everything about Microsoft. They actually did do something right for once though. Outlook 2007 is better than 2003 by leaps and bounds, and Mobile Me works quite well with it. There were a few weird inconsistencies with deleted items appearing with just a line struck through it, but I believe I fixed that issue and everything should be working great now.

This past weekend I finally had time to take it to West County Mall’s Apple store to get it fixed. I made an appointment with a Genius and they took a look at it, gathered information and grabbed the part from the back before anyone else could. The Genius told me it would be ready in 2-3 days. I was kind of bummed because I heard reports of it taking 20 minutes if they have the part in stock. Apparently they were quite busy with repairs. So, I leave expecting it to take 2-3 days. 3 hours later I get a call from the Apple store telling me it’s ready to be picked up. I hate fanboys as much as anyone, but I can see why people like Apple so much. People rave about the customer service they experience when buying an Apple product and now I can too.

I added the applications, music, and podcasts back into iTunes. The problem was knowing what songs were deleted from the iPhone. I add only checked files, but that doesn’t always work (because iTunes sucks). So sometimes I have to add them to a playlist in order for them to sync, even though they are checked to sync. Trying to figure out which ones were in a playlist or already on the iPhone would take forever. That’s when I decided to do a little searching. That’s when I found this post. Basically, what I did was create a smart playlist that included items that I check. As soon as I check an item, it is added to the playlist. If I uncheck, it is deleted. I set up my iPhone to sync that playlist, now every song that I check is synced with my iPhone. It’s the easiest way I’ve found to manually manage the music to sync. So, iTunes breaking and not doing things right made me find a solution that I never knew about that will save me a lot of time. Of course, if iTunes “just worked” I wouldn’t have had to search for a solution in the first place.

I was off for a few days last week so I decided to head to the Charter office to exchange boxes myself, still keeping the Wednesday appointment in case the box switch didn’t work. So, now I’m driving out of my way to fix a problem with their equipment myself. Awesome. I get to the office and there is quite a line. Most of the people in front of me are there to complain about billing. The lady that was working was extremely rude to the customers with billing questions. She even told one guy that the previous Charter employee he talked to lied to him! Wow. Nice way to salvage the reputation of your failing company, tell customers that the employees lie to customers. I don’t believe the previous Charter person did lie, because it was about a package that I had seen advertised quite often, yet the lady in the office refused to believe the price and called the customer and other employees liars. I really can’t believe this company. Finally, it’s my turn in line and the lady is just as rude to me as the other customers. I get my box and take it home.

I hook it up and follow the directions on the sheet they gave me to reset the box so it knows what channels to get. I got 3 channels. I call Charter. They send a signal to reset. I still get 3 channels. 2 hours later I call back, the lady sends a signal and tells me I will have to wait until my Wednesday appointment. I tell them this is unacceptable because after going to replace their equipment because they didn’t send one on the technician’s truck before, I deserve someone out that day. She says they can have someone out the next day. I ask to talk to her supervisor so she puts me on hold. She comes back about 10 minutes later and asks for some information, like where the box is, the serial number on the box, etc. She finds out, by asking this, that the new box wasn’t put into the system under our account. So, dubmass bitchy lady at the office didn’t even do her job right. Then again, neither did the first Charter person I talked to. You’d think that would be a standard question they would ask to make sure the equipment is in the system, especially if it’s obvious you’re not getting a signal to your box.

Charter is a completely useless company. Rumor has it they will be filing for bankruptcy soon. As if that’s hard to believe.