I don't know about you guys but I am wondering if I am the only one with the following experience.

The only reason I did not get an iPhone is that I try to avoid AT&T at all cost due to horrible customer treatment I experienced a few years back. Now many years later it is still only offered for the AT&T network. From what I read Verizon will be offering the iPhone on their network in 2011. Let's see if they offer a data only plan along with the iPhone.

I was trying to make a compromise and get the iPhone from AT&T with a data only plan. After further research I found out that only legally deaf people qualify for an iPhone with data only plan. Forcing customers in getting a voice plan, that I would not need at all, in order to get an iPhone data plan sounds a bit greedy to be honest. Greed is ok in my opinion in moderations but AT&T is a bit extreme it seems. AT&T clearly shows it is not about the customer it is all about the profit. This would perfectly explain the bad customer treatment I experienced a few years back.

Apple, a company that genuinely cares about their customers seems to be the absolute opposite to AT&T in this regard.

For the longest time the McDonalds I lunched in offered free internet, which it should, considering the huge profit margin on the food they are selling. One bloomy summer day I went in and was greeted by a login screen and internet access is not free anymore. You may ask why this is of any relevance to this article at all. Well AT&T got their sticky fingers into this deal and are now asking for money to access the internet. I am sure that McDonalds location gets a nice profit of the sale as well. Well I stopped going to that location and enjoy my free WiFi somewhere else.

It is not about the money it is just about the greed and treatment I have received by the folks over at AT&T.

Merry Christmas :)

I thought this one is worth mentioning and I wonder how much money is accumulated by credit card companies from others in a similar situation.

After switching my webhosting service, I cancelled my account with the old hosting company about 6 month ago. They said all is good and my account will be closed when my term is up and no further credit card charges will be applied.

By accident only I checked my credit card account at Capital One which I haven't used for about 1 year now and discovered a charge from my old hosting company, which assured me no further charges to my credit card.

I called them up and they said they are sorry about the charge and will issue a full refund.

I just checked my account at CapitalOne again and found that the hosting company did not refund the full charge. They refunded everything but $5.32. Enough for CapitalOne to charge me a past due fee of $15.

I called CapitalOne unfortunately it was their way or the highway.

I went ahead and send a message to CapitalOne through my account page with the following content:

" To whom it may concern,

a company falsely charged my accoun $390.80. They apologized and promised to refunding the full amount. For some reason they refunded only $385.48. Now, for a balance of $5.32 you charge me a past due fee of $15. I have initiated a transfer of the balance including your past due fee and my commitment to you ends with this. 

I am officially requesting the closing of this account with you. 

Your services are no longer required, you are fired :) ...

Without a doubt you got the christmas spirit going. So on that note,
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to CapitalOne!"

Update:

I called the hosting company again and asked them why they didn't refund the full amount which they initially agreed on. They then said they didn't find any record of me ever having requested to close the account and refunded the pro rate only. I wasn't in the mood to argue since you never go anywhere. I wonder how they retrieved the information the first time around after apologizing and promising the full refund :) and now suffered unexpected long-term memory loss.

I have come across a problem where mobile devices ( iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, etc.) try to recognize phone numbers on a web page and turn them into links, potentially causing styling conflicts in regards of the overall design. To deactivate the styling of phone numbers put the following code between your head tag:

<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">

Successfully tested on iPod Touch, iPhone, and Android.

To activate phone numbers I recommend doing it manually like:

<a href="tel:1-123-123-1234">1-123-123-1234</a>

Back up at 8:45am getting increasingly aggravated with the retrieval of the driver for this series 4700 Dell system.
One thing I made a habit is not to expose the Windows PC to the internet unless I finished the complete installation/setup.
This aggravation is more of a convenience issue. Personally, having Windows running only within a virtual machine on my Mac, I try to do anything with my Mac before launching my virtual Windows machine. Naturally I tried to download the missing Windows XP driver from the Dell website, put them on a USB thumb drive and install them onto the Windows PC that way.
Dell allows to add drivers to the download list, just to find out at point of downloading, that it requires the Download Manager from Dell, which is not compatible with Mac. Back to the drawing board to download every single driver file manually. Of course the file names are everything but human friendly.For example, the Intel network card driver version 7.1.12 A00 is named: R78727.EXE. NICE! Could at least match the version number, no?I got to get this pest off my chest, mates! Having custom built/installed Windows PC's for years, even with my helpful tools over the years I can't believe the amount of time I wasted on each system, just to get it to the point of desired state.
Ok back tot he installation. Missing drivers, Ethernet Controller, Multimedia Audio Controller, PCI Modem, Video Controller, and Video Controller (VGA Compatible).
Since I don't know the exact series number other than Inspiron 4700, I am bombarded with many drivers and utilities. Lucky me I found a Service Tag number sticker which reads FK4Y61. Well the dell website upon entering the tag number in the requested field returns:

"There was a problem with your submission:
Your service tag was not recognized. Please check your service tag and try again."

I tried it again and now it worked HA!

There seems to be one law that always applies in this case: Trying to find way to make things easier and faster turns into an even bigger mess of exponentially increasing number of problems to overcome! at this point it is 9:30am.

Ok over to the Windows PC to install my new found driver goodies!

10:06am still working on the driver installation.

Of course it doesn't connect to the internet even though plugged in properly and showing proper settings. Another delay. Nice 'New Hardware Wizard' seemed to have crapped up on me LOL ! Even after installing all available drivers it still shows a missing multimedia controller. 10:15am and another reboot!

At this point I am thinking a new computer would have probably been the better alternative.

Installed the same driver a second time and now it also recognized the missing Multimedia Controller.

After working on the internet connection problem, ipconfig turned out to be a life saver once again.

It is 10:46am and the computer is now working as expected and is at the desired state.

I still have to get screwes to mount the once external hard drive. After that I have to transfer the important files over from the infested hard drive ... I am looking at another big chunk of time investment to get this done. I will end it here and spare you the details.

Another aggravation off my chest and the computer will go right back to my friend ASAP!

This whole experience was just pathetic as usual.

Now who has thought it will ever come to this again!
Trying to re-install Windows XP SP3 on DELL due to excessive virus/trojan infestation, for a friend. Plan is to temporarily remove infested drive and re-install on fresh drive. After finding a few hundred viruses/trojans I usually do not bother using software to remove it. A pure waste of time and usually the damage done is significant enough to not even hope your system could be rescued. After installing the fresh version of Windows XP I will be connecting the infested hard to my Mac and copy important documents, images, bookmarks, etc to a USB drive, connect that to the Windows PC, scan the files on the USB drive and eventually copy those files to the fresh hard drive.

No recovery DVD available so I got a retail from the store.

This desktop tower only allows to remove the left side cover only. Initially I guessed IDE hard drive but after opening the tower it turns out to be a SATA drive as primary drive.

I tried using an external IDE USB hard drive but it turned out even though the computer and Windows Installer recognized the USB drive, that Windows Setup won't let me install Windows XP on the external USB drive. A screw driver later, I took the IDE drive out of the external USB housing.
Trying to hook up the IDE drive to the second connector of the primary IDE cable, essentially sharing it with DVD drive.
First boot didn't recognize any drives. Seems like CS (cable select) jumper setting is not recognized ... After setting the hard drive as master and dvd drive as slave, everything showed up properly.

Booting Windows Setup from CD and reaching now the point to format the hard drive. Even though it takes significantly longer I opt to reformat the hard drive without using the quick option. For a 250GB hard drive this will take at least 45-60 minutes! 12:46am and it shows 16%. 1:01am and ti finally shows 43%. Talking about wasting time.
While waiting I thought of checking woot.com just to see they are selling Callaway uPro Golf GPS. Many states experience snow and ice this surely not a product I would have expected to be sold before Christmas HA!
Ok 1:10am and reaching 56%. 1:44am and this hard drive is finally formatted.
Over to the installation process. Windows Setup shows me 39 minutes, let's see what happens. 2:08am and I am getting very tired. Still showing me 13 minutes remaining. 2:22am finally Windows Setup had mercy with me and finished! THANKS!

Last task for today, Kaspersky Internet Security installation. Nice problems with Kaspersky Internet Security installation. YAY 3:11am WTF!

This computer squeaking on 512MB ram doesn't make it any faster. 3:15am re-installation successful, good night everybody!

WOW this is a BIG ONE!

I went to McDonalds drive through and ordered a large fries and a vanilla ice cream cone.

I ate the fries and then munched on the ice cream while I was driving, as I felt something scraping my tongue. I looked at it and at first glance i thought it was one of my beard hairs on the loose. I picked it out and was quite disgusted as I recognized it was not my DNA, it was a metal piece.

I always tried to find a reason to get rid of my fast food fries addiction at McDonalds. Now this did it!

I will post the receipt and a photo of the metal piece shortly.

Sometimes CFDUMP doesn't cut it especially when you need to know the data type of the query column. The following code helps in accomplishing just that:

<!--- Dump meta data to see query column types. --->
<cfdump var="#GetMetaData( qName )#" />

Where qName is the name of the query you want to dump the mara data of.

I met with a few friends and we had a grand old time. I had to be at work at 8AM so I left at 6AM and found a ticket under my windshield wiper. It was a $15 fine for parking between the hours of 3AM to 5AM I believe it was. Later I found out it is because of winter and plowing that the streets have to be kept empty during these hours. 

Would be nice if there would be a sign in a reasonable distance. I couldn't find a single sign anywhere. The ticket stated I can pay Mo-Fr from 9AM - 4:30PM.

I am working from 8AM - 5PM with a 45min drive to and from work. You know what happens when you just started a new job and ask for some time off. So I didn't even attempt that.

As alternative I was given the option to send in a check. DUUUUUUUDE, who deals with checks anymore ? Well long story short I asked a friend to drop off the $15 for me which she did and reported back to me asking for an additional $15.

I wondered why that is. She said after 3 business days of failing to pay the fine doubles. Nice fine print! In my next life I am working for the government. I never earned money this easy. Obviously you can't bitch about it either. The government can do what it wants.

I just wonder where all this 'free' money goes?