The Smartphone Age is a great time to learn chess!

I'm excited to report that the portable chess problem has been solved, and the solution is called a "smartphone" (aka iPhone 3GS). As a result, there is no reason not to learn this fabulous game.

My reintroduction to the game was made by my iPhone courtesy of Deep Green, but only really deepened with Shredder Chess (a total steal at $7.99 - the desktop version starts at $50) particularly thanks to the puzzle feature. "Puzzles" are generally mid-game problems with solutions from 1 to 8 moves in length. They are fantastic "aha!" teaching moments, and they are fun to solve. I've learned more about forks, time, and pinning from these puzzles than in years of casual play. I can apply these lessons directly to my normal games.

• Click here to get a sense of a shredder chess puzzle (updated daily).
• Click here to play against shredder free online.

The great innovation here is two fold. First, portable computer chess finally has found a great platform: the smart phone. Most people's interest in chess isn't high enough to justify a separate device, which have been sold for years. But it's enough to sustain an app on a phone you carry anyway. Forget Doodle Jump - play chess when you're waiting around for something! The second innovation is Shredder Chess' concept of a Chess puzzle.

Chess puzzles highlight the beautiful parts of a chess game. Openings are about memory and style, end games about mathematical certainty. But mid-game situations are where that big advantage is won or lost, and so where the game is won or lost even if it takes another 30 moves to knock over the king.

Shredder's software execution is all but perfect, particularly the ability to play the puzzle then switching to play the position against the computer, allowing you to test out alternate theories from both sides. That is, the solution to the puzzle is only the start. You can regress the game and ask the all-important question: I beat my opponent this time. How could he have avoided this fate?

Without a single word, these puzzles say so much! What a perfect way to learn the game: rather than memorize and apply the insights of masters, this method encourages you to make your own insights, which in turn makes the game in a very rewarding game of discovery rather than a boring game of regurgitation or application of theory. The insight of masters are invaluable, but to really appreciate them you must have your own framework of understanding. (Many Go teachers say that you should play at least 100 games of Go, before studying theory for this very reason.)

I should add that while you generally don't have to play out the puzzle game to it's end, I often do, as my end game is (was?) a big weakness. I might be up a queen and still lose in my rush to end it. But now I really understand the significance of a passed pawn and the slipperiness of the King and the need to be thoughtful and careful even when you have an enormous power advantage. Carelessness kills.

I can't say enough about Shredder on the iPhone, but there is one thing missing: openings. Very few of the puzzles occur in the opening, and most of those take advantage of fairly obvious opponent mistakes. Shredder has a cool feature where it identifies and names your opening. But it would be nice if it had an "opening drill" feature to help you memorize openings (and understand their implications for the rest of the game).

Not to take away anything from the amazing and innovative new kinds of games like Flight Control, Doodle Jump, Angry Birds, or Spider but why not kill two birds with one stone (or two stones with one bird, if you play Angry Birds). Chess is an aristocratic game of kings. It's good for the brain and a lot of fun, and perfect on this platform.

Make yourself happy and avoid the Nexus One

In the end, there are two reasons I cannot recommend this phone:

1. The display is unreadable in sunlight. If you like the outdoors, like I do, this is a deal breaker. (If you're a vampire, read #2)
   
2. The buttons along the bottom of the Nexus One do not work. Or rather, do not work all the time, which is actually worse from a usability standpoint.

Regarding the first point, it is astounding to me that anyone would sell an electronic device that completely fails in sunlight. The sun remains the world's most important light source, and to make something that doesn't work in the sun is outrageously stupid. Only those who never leave a building should consider this phone, and that includes using it in your car. And I don't like to disrespect the sun on general principle.

(I can't help but wonder what this implies about the Google culture and possible vitamin D deficiencies there.)

As for the second point, well, the buttons gotta work. Every time you hit a button and it doesn't work, your expectations are blown, and you cause feelings of fear and anxiety in the user. They are small feelings. But they add up. Eventually, the user is all but flinching before touching a key. They look for ways to avoid touching the offending keys. This is usability 101. But you have to stab, cajole, pray, and otherwise beg the shitty Nexus One buttons to register a tap.Absolutely unacceptable. Apple has shown how to do great touch UI with an absolute bare minimum of buttons. The back|menu|home|search buttons on the Nexus One are worse than useless: they actually eroded myexperience to the point where I just don't want to use the phone anymore.

And since point 1 rules out all users except vampires, that means point 2 is going to mean Google has to deal with a lot of pissed off vampires. Maybe someone can get Stephanie Meyer to chronicle the inevitable vampire assault on Mountain View. In the meantime, I'm selling my Google stock.

I'm sorely tempted to eat the $45 restocking fee and return the thing, but I need an Android device for a business project (which doesn't rely on the display, luckily). So I'm gonna keep it, but I'm not gonna like it.

(For the record, there are three good things about the Nexus One: Google Voice, Live wallpaper, and strong syncing tools. And, to be honest, when you turn the brightness all the way up the indoor display is quite fetching.)

The Joy of Shopvac

Yesterday I bought a small ShopVac from Sears [correction: it's a Craftsman brand. But like Kleenex, the brand name is also used as the generic]. It's a 2 gallon, 1.5 hp model that cost me $25 + tax. And it's awesome. It is surprisingly powerful.

Why? Because it solved a hard problem: cleaning my bilge. And it will solve other problems, like cleaning my cushions and the deck. And I can use it to inflate the Avon. And it's small enough to put anywhere.

Fantastic.

Book Review: The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I cried 4 or 5 times reading this book. It is an incredibly heart-wrenching tale of cowardice, remorse, loss, good, evil, and ambiguous redemption. There are heroes in this book, but they do not succeed in the traditional way. Against violent opposition, saintly people die. It's enough to make you really want to believe in heaven.



This book is also a badly needed humanization of Afghanistan, a reminder that there was a strong community living there before the Russians and then the Taliban destroyed what was there.


View all my reviews.

Book Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
What an amazing book. I don't normally go for Pullitzer Prize winners, Oprah Book club stuff, but this book was amazing. The book is not fantasy or science fiction (although you could argue there's a dollop of urban fantasy) but there are quite subtle inside references throughout to LOTR, Dune, the Watchmen, and Akira. This was just the icing on a vibrant, multi-lingual narrative that was so juicy Jonot could have kept me interested describing how grass grows, in real time.

Of course, the actual story was much more intense than the growing of grass. The central character, Oscar, is perhaps the ultimate nerd, the ultimate ne'er do well outsider, and Junot goes to great lengths to put him in his time and his circumstance, and manages to pull in 3 generations of his family and the terrible history of Trujillo and the Domincan Republic, and the life of DR immigrants in New Jersey.

The narrative begins and ends with Oscar, but Junot does something only the best authors can - he interrupts his narrative, sometimes quite abruptly, introducing new characters who manage to hold one's interest even more than the last characters. What makes this even better is that the new characters are often younger versions of supporting characters in previous pages, and this time seen in a very different (always more sympathetic) light. It's as if he's explaining "how they got that way". This is particulary true of the mother, Beli, who is first presented as a terrible force in Oscar's life, hard and relentless, and later painted as a little girl, conceived at the tail end of her great families fall, taken in by monsters, saved by distant family, and destroyed by her powerful ability to love.

I feel like I should say "This book changed my life" but really, it hasn't. I am relieved to report that this book does not have any life lessons, except perhaps for the oldy but goody that you should be grateful for what you have, especially something we take for granted, political freedom. Bush may have been bad, but let's face it, he was no Trujillo. I think that our own complaints sound very tinny and small next to the brutality in this book.

Live your life, speak your mind, and maybe you can write a book like this someday, my love.


View all my reviews.

A really neat thing

Sometimes it is hard to transform non-linear thoughts into linear text. This is one of those times. I've been struggling with the concept of "smoother" transitions from concept to implementation in software, such that information is not lost in the transition. Take, for example, the use of unusual typefaces in a web page. If you create a raster, you've lost information - the original text.

The other day I ran across SIFR, which does in-place rasterization of type. This is consistent with smooth software development along ever decreasing entropy. Interestingly one of my favorite sites, hulu, uses it.


Drag and drop of page elements - the ubiquitous use of absolute positioning!
http://www.roxer.com/
http://javajosh.roxer.com/ocjug (with domain support!)

Oh, and here's one that uses sifr, called doodlekit. (really great site design, but requires a native plugin to work, which I am loathe to install. See the techcrunch review that puts it side-by-side with some other tools, including Google Pages). What's shocking is that they charge so much for their service. $14/mo is really too much for a one-time use of a tool, and occasional other uses. The free version sucks because it plops ads on your page. I basically think this is not a viable thing).

But I love the idea of drag-n-drop through-the-web design.

Jing: A SnagIt alternative for Mac OS X

Wow! One of the big things I've been missing in the switch to OS X is an alternative to the excellent SnagIt, by TechSmith. And I have found it in Jing - a free (SnagIt costs $50) utility that is actually much better than SnagIt. Sweet! (Interestingly TechSmith makes both products.)

There are a couple of features that I rather like above and beyond SnagIt:

1. A nifty sun on the upper left of the screen that invokes it.
   
2. In-place editing of the image
3. Coordination with IM, web, blog, and email. (capturing and sharing video is particularly slick)
   
4. History! (This is an incredibly useful feature that shows all the captures you've recently done, whether to disk or to clipboard.)

Alas, there are two important features missing.

1. Crop.
2. Capture window contents.

There are some other SnagIt features that I barely used, like funky capture profiles (capture to printer), scrolling capture, and no doubt a few other things.

But overall I'm pleased.

[I would use Jing to show you how it works, but unfortunately it doesn't capture itself! ]
[I found jing by googling "screen shot osx" and reading a macrumors.com page.]

Of Linux Haters and the GUI problem

Just ran across this rather unusual blog, that purports to hate Linux. But it really reads like a series of letters from a jilted lover who would probably be taken back in a heartbeat. (Cue Joan Jett's "I hate myself for loving you"). Of course, this end of the relationship is a human, the other is the rather nebulous cloud of "FOSS" - or free open source software, so a reconciliation may be fundamentally doomed.

That said, these 'letters' are profane, funny, technical, and insightful. Nothing on the internet highlights as clearly the irrational attachment to FOSS in general and Linux in particular that some people have. (Indeed, one could spend a lifetime making fun of people's irrational attachments. And some do.) The key theme, at least for me, is that there is a jolt of rightousness that comes with using FOSS that can render one's perspective dangerously opaque to weaknesses. (I see the same thing with the iPhone.)

What's really interesting to me, though, is that his posts focus heavily on UI issues. For example, in a post of about Samba he complains that he's had to learn smb.conf 20 times over the years, but then quickly forgot it. I know exactly what he means. He then talks about his options for a GUI, Fedora and Webmin. But wouldn't it be cool if you could create your own GUI for this kind of stuff? Or even better some record of what you did?

I ask because I think the poster is wrong - the problem is not silos. Breaking down silos can be a good thing, but there's no reason why file sharing ought to be coupled to a GUI toolkit (as he seems to be advocating).

You may be thinking, well, even if there was such a thing it would be a mess - so many GUIs, it's the whole "there are too many choices" thing all over again. However, I'm pretty sure that would sort itself out, as great GUI creators would rise to the top, and thanks to decoupling, could be tried without fuss.

Jury Duty

Well I have to say that so far jury duty is actually pretty slick. There's top notch wifi access, bad coffee, and public-library level quality seating. It's like a coffee shop where no-one talks to each other. (Which is a pity because where else do you get to connect with people on a purely "citizen" level?)

The only thing is - I forgot the little detachable thing to my power supply (missing thingy pictured)! I really ought to keep one of those things in my bag. I'm sure there's one available not too far from here. Not sure if they'll let me leave though.

Dashcode for iPhone web development

Interestingly Apple is applying the Dashcode IDE to iPhone web development. Although Dashcode was designed for makeing Dashboard widgets, this makes a lot of sense - I've written before how similar mobile and widget development is.

The nice thing about Dashcode is that you can get a working prototype going quickly. And it has lots of juicy iPhonish assets right out of the box - saving considerable Photoshop time.

The naughty thing about Dashcode is that it's just not a very good IDE, and the code it generates is rather awful, especially for mobile deployment. I mean, if you want to write a mobile app that degrades to a non-Javascript version, you are essentially out of luck. Additionally, the pages it creates are really heavy, and feature lots of inline JavaScript (which can't be cached.)

Granted, I just discovered Dashcode yesterday, but so far it looks like I'll just be pulling assets out of it and using my old stand by tools.

(Sorry about the lack of hyperlinks - feeling a bit lazy. Use Google!)

Vista vs. OS X Leopard

I've had a bit of a wild ride this last week on my quest to find a good computer with 4G (or more) of usable RAM, and a better CPU, primarily for software/web development. (Eclipse + FF + MySQL + everything else is a bit of a hog.)

My first thought was to go with Vista 64-bit running on a quad-core speedy machine. The first machine was very fast, but very big and noisy, so it went back almost immediately. The second machine was a very nicely made Gateway machine running Vista Home Ultimate 64 bit edition. The machine was good enough that I was able to keep it long enough to realize how bad Vista really is.

The key problems with Vista were very poor driver support, very poor application support, and file manager and system preferences that are impossible to navigate and butt ugly. And then the sheer sum of minor niggles was very long - UI elements were moved apparently at random, and most menu bars were removed. Many of my utilities from XP wouldn't run. I spent some time trying to address these issues individually, but in the end I gave up, mainly because I knew it didn't have to be this hard.

It's true that I could have installed Linux (probably Ubuntu) on this machine and been happy. But then I realized how crazy the whole idea of moving to a desktop was (I like to move around too much), and how important usability was, and how there's a little company in Cupertino who makes products for people like me called Apple Computer.

And you know what? I bought one (white MacBook 2.1GHz 1G 120G Penryn, home-upgraded to 4G, 200G 7200RPM). And I'm quite happy so far. The system is pretty and quiet and unobtrusive (very different than most PCs! Even the Thinkpad, by far my favorite PC, has a rather muscular, angular look in comparison). But what is really a breath of fresh air is the OS, OS X Leopard. I've come to understand why we pay people to improve the usability of software products - they earn their money, many times over, both literally and, I would like to think, spiritually. I mean, after all, isn't it nice to create things that leave people feeling happier, or, at the very least, no worse off than when they started using the product?

I think the key ingredient to Apple's success is simply this: they got the drivers right. To have a relatively stable platform to develop for has got to be wonderful. As any web developer knows, it is a sheer delight to write an app that only has to run on a single, modern browser (that isn't IE). I am sure that the same holds true for operating system programmers. One can really optimize the experience when you know approximately what hardware the user has to work with. And this frees programmers and UI people to do what they do best: a strange combination of "thinking outside the box" and obsessing over details that yields beautiful, functional software.

There are several simple things that Apple gets right with OS X. For example, the whole "disk image" thing, or dmg, for installing software is really sweet. The Windows notion of treating zip files as psuedo folders (introduced in XP SP1, I think) is brain dead in comparison. Having a real command line is huge for programmers (and end users benefit too because a happy programmer makes happy programs). I can't tell you how glad I am to get past Cygwin - not that Cygwin itself was bad (it's been too useful for me to call it that), but that terrible terminal and the file system skew drove me batty.

What's really interesting (and wonderful) is the sheer lack of things I have to install. For example, I no longer have to install ctrl2caps because you can remap the caps lock key using built-in and easy to use system preference dialogues. I've not had to install a firewall, anti virus (although I may install that), spyware blocker, or any of those sysinternals utilities designed to help make up for and recover from Window's deficiencies (although I have to add that a process explorer equivalent would go nicely). I don't have to install any "helper" software for multi-display or network setup (e.g. the Thinkvantage utilities that come with the Thinkpad) - the built in stuff works about 10x better anyway.

Then there are the pile of peripherals I don't need to buy or configure. Wifi is built in of course, but so is bluetooth and a webcam - and the last two are far from common on PCs. I won't need a firewire adapter if I get into video. And there are a bunch of utilities I don't need, like CD burning software because the Mac software just works. I don't need to install a better Explorer because Finder works. I may not install Thunderbird because Mail works (well, a lot better than Outlook anyway). I don't need DVD playing software because the Mac utility just works. (And I can't say the same for the Windows equivalents).

That is not to say the Mac is not without it's issues. Some sort of media reader would make a lot of sense (particularly an SD card slot). But more seriously, the way the mouse moves needs to be more adjustable. I'm used to a very linear mouse response curve, and the Mac seems to demand that you use a lot of acceleration - I do hope to find a solution for this as my hand is already aching. It would be nice to have some sort of docking port for the Mac, so that the tangle of cords (well, the power and external monitor cord, anyway) would be both hidden and easy to (re)connect. A second mouse button on the laptop itself would be greatly appreciated. I would like an easier way to move windows around, along the lines of the (sadly buggy) NiftyWindows for Windows. And there are some Windows things, like the excellent Fiddler debugging proxy and SQLyog, that I know I'll have to run in a VM (I hear Parallels is good), if at all.

Flavors of Entanglement Review

Alanis Morissette
Release: June 10, 2008

Alanis and I go way back, and I was very curious about her latest when I heard that she was going to try more electronic arrangements. She's never been afraid of technology - word was that she recorded "Jagged Little Pill" on home-studio ADAT recorders, state-of-the art for the time. Regardless, it was a revelation to the music world - here was a singer/songwriter who was bold, sexual, and angry. Her second album, "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie" filled with interesting music and the insightful, if self-absorbed, lyrics of a young woman finding herself through repeated glotteral stops. My respect for her only went up when she released a hilarious Fergie/Humps parody, and when she revealed in an interview a fondness for Triumph motorcycles. Alanis' music is often about herself, or close observations of others, but is a record of her growing up.

"Flavors of Entanglement" is the 3rd album of hers that I own - it's the first album I've ever pre-ordered off of the iTunes store. I got a few bonus track and a special pre-order track (and those tracks are very important, as they eclipse the quality of the rest of the album!). But I also only get 128kb tracks, and no art. Not too sure about this iTunes business yet.

The first two tracks, "Citizen of the Planet" and "Underneath", are forgettable. They simply did not hold my interest. The third tack, Straitjacket, made me raise my eyebrows. A dance track? Dropping the f-bomb? The instrumentation is all saw-lead synthesizer, run through a limiter. The vocal track is heavily harmonized. Very strange. "Versions of Violence" is more of the same, although less dancable.

"Not as we", the 5th track, is more Alanis back in the "Joni Mitchell" confessional mode.

"In Praise of the Vulnerable Man" is Alanis back in "singing a letter" mode, similar to "Unsent" or "Head over Feet". But then a minute into it a saccharin backing synth that puts it more into Donna Lewis territory. I couldn't finish listening to this one.

"Moratorium" has the lyric which contains the albums name, and is a kind of eerie-sounding self-excoriation. Not bad. "I declare a moratorium on things relationship. I declare a respite from the toils of liaison." I know the feeling!

(OK, honestly I'm listening to this album as I write the review, and I'm on "Torch" and growing impatient. "Torch" is a down-tempo melancoly break-up song. I find myself wishing she would stop moaning about "missing his warmth" and start taunting him about whether or not she'd go down on him in a theater.)

"Giggling again for no reason" is a song about getting away from your life, driving down PCH without telling anyone where you're going, or even that you've gone. The content resonates with me deeply, but the music is not engaging. It's a great subject for a song, though.

I quickly skipped to the "Bonus Tracks". I'm glad I did! The 5 tracks here are uniformly better than the rest of the album. I was concerned for a bit that I'd wasted my money, but these tracks save the day! I really like "Orchid", "Madness", and "Limb No More". I could do without "On the Tequila" but it's a fun song!

Because I pre-ordered, I got a "Bonus Bonus Track", called "It's a Bitch to Grow Up". Musically, it's a good track, and the lyrics particularly resonate with me, so I'll wrap up this review with some of those lyrics:

...
It's been 33 years of restraining,
of trying to control this tumult.
...

[chorus]
I feel done.
I feel raked over coals.
All that remains is the case: that it's a bitch to grow up.

I've repeated this dance
There's still something to learn that I've not
I'm told to see that this is divine perfection
But my bones don't feel this perfection

...
I've known through the kicking and screaming
that there was no other direction to go
[chorus]

Places to avoid: uBid.com

This place is really bad. I placed an order for a computer, titled "Gateway E4610 Intel Duo Core Computer DVD CDRW XP Professional"

About 30 minutes later, I read some fine print saying that this was an Pentium D CPU, not a Core Duo. I immediately canceled my order. The next business day they charged my card and shipped anyway. I contacted them twice via their support form, and never got a response.

For a variety of reasons I did not pursue this - primarily because I needed the PC fast and didn't want to fuss with all the rigmarole of a return, and it was only $278 shipped. However, I will never shop at uBid again.

Review: Amazon Affiliates Program

I don't use it all that much. Why? I can never remember my affiliate code, and even if I did I'd probably be too lazy to put it on the links. It could be a nice source of revenue, as they pay 4% on general stuff, 6% on gift cards, and 10% on Kindle stuff.

• Overview. (once)
  
• Signup. (once)
  
• Signin. (rarely, this is where you see your affiliate id, and get reports
• Build Links and Widgets (often, optional)
• Put links in stuff (often, varies)
• Modify Widgets (rarely)
  

My Affiliate id is adventuinbaby-20. I'll go ahead and add a few widgets here.

(Note that this greasemonkey script would be very easy to adapt as a template script that would add your affiliate code to all Amazon links in the page. However, I like the idea of just inserting the product name into the search widget. No, you don't get a pretty picture but you make the process simple for the author.)

(Note: adding widgets to this post made the entire blog not load correctly. It seemed like an HTML parsing problem on Blogger's side.)

Review: TheServerSide.com

From the about page: "TheServerSide.com is an online community for enterprise Java architects and developers, providing daily news, tech talk interviews with key industry figures, design patterns, discussion forums, satire, tutorials, and more."

The meat of the site is Enterprise oriented social media, with some (generally pretty good) original content. I particularly like the Tech Talks which are videos of presentations and interviews with JEE luminaries.

I don't hang out there very often anymore, since I'm mostly doing internet development these days, but it's on my radar.

I've been a member since 2004 or so. My username/password are:

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Review: Kate Bush holds up well. Very well.

Kate Bush wrote and recorded Hounds of Love in 1985, and there is not a bad track, and several magical ones - including "Under Ice", "The Morning Fog", and "Waking the Witch". Some of the instrumentation sounds a little dated, but it's not distracting at all. Highly recommended.

(I should re-rip this in lossless format.)

Review: My Mouse (Logitech MX610)

My mouse is a Logitech MX610. It's a right-handed, wireless (2.4GHz) laser mouse. I generally like it and thought it was time to review it after using it for about 18 months. (It's funny how people always want to review things when they're new, rather than when they're old; it seems like a review is more useful in the latter case.)

Links:

• http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/428/170&cl=us,en
• http://logitech-sjca.navisite.net/web/ftp/pub/techsupport/mouse/setpoint424.exe

It's a good mouse; wireless, laser. Some quirks, of course:

• Ugly transciever sticks out of the computer (needs bluetooth)
• Uses batteries pretty fast: 2 AA every month or two (needs recharger)
  
• I sometimes hit the special mouse buttons on accident (needs fancy buttons removed)
  
• I never hit the special mouse buttons on purpose. (needs fancy buttons removed)
• Occasionally disconnects for no reason; powercycle is a workaround (needs better QA)
• Logitech's product page is very hard to find, and when you do find it and click "support" you have to select your mouse all over again from drop-downs! Quite annoying, and it affects all of Logitech's products, apparently. (They could fix this with a small amount of JavaScript on their support page that can infer a product from referrer.)
  

For the most part I've been running quite happily without SetPoint, Logitech's driver/utility package, quite happily. I just installed it and it remains to be seen whether it's worth the cost (11M of RAM, and a taskbar icon). I'm pretty happy with it's ability to remap buttons to things I actually need; I'm VERY happy with the ability to horizontally scroll (equivalent to left and right arrow keys). I'm thinking key remapping will be a useful in Photoshop.

You can get this mouse for about $40-$50. There is a new version, the 620MX, and it looks like the only difference is the texture of the mouse wheel.

iPower: The worst Registrar ever?

For the love of God, don't do business with iPower (or iPowerWeb as they are also known).

What a horrible registrar. I wanted to transfer a domain away from them, so I got the login information from my client. I login and search around for a while (20 minutes or so) looking for the transfer authorization (EPP) code. It is nowhere to be found. So I check the help documents. There's plenty of info on transferring domains...in. NOTHING on transferring them OUT.

So I call the "24 hour customer service" line. I am on hold for 40 minutes. I get a kid who sounds like he's 12, but happy to help. He gives me an EPP code over the phone - a 5 digit number. "That doesn't sound right" I said to him. "Normally they are much longer, and consist of numbers, letters, mixed case, etc." He assures me it's right. "Oh," he says, "you have to unlock the domain from opensrs. I'll send a DIFFERENT username/password to the account holders contact email." "Fine," I said. Privately I had misgivings.

So I get off the phone and contact my client again - and ask him to forward me the new email. He does, I plug them into OpenSRS. They don't work. Oddly, they are the exact same crednetials as for the ipower.com site. Basically, that kid didn't know what he was talking about, and I resign myself to calling them again.

And I do call them, and this time the wait is 50 minutes. But it seems the person knows what they're talking about (he sounds like he's early twenties which is an improvement, I suppose). The end result is that he sent the OpenSRS credentials to my client's email address. But by now it's too late to call, so I'll have to wait till tomorrow to ask him to forward the email.

Even godaddy's process isn't that messed up, and that's saying something.

(I discovered I'm not the only one who had a bad experience.)

[Update: I had to bother my client to check his email, and it turned out that NO EMAIL EVER ARRIVED from iPower. So now I'm on the phone, and on chat, hoping to get this resolved. This will be my third and final attempt. I'm thinking that I'm not getting paid enough to deal with this bullshit; alternatively, I could/should have told my client to get the EPP code himself, as he's the one who picked this god awful registrar.]

[Update: I finally had an epiphany: I should update the admin email so I don't have to bother my client. I got on chat, and after a 2 hour 40 minute wait (!), I got someone to email me to the new password, and it works! But get this, because the initial clueless person gave me the WRONG EPP code, and I initiated a transfer, I have to figure out how to stop the transfer with the bad EPP code and restart it with the new one. Lovely. But at least I don't have to deal with iPower ever again. And hey, at least now I know.]

Discover: Beautiful hand-made gifts at Etsy

Courtesy of the Crunchies, I ran across this great site featuring hand-made stuff; you can also search for things made locally. A great resource for giving unique gifts. I was taken with this writer's journal featuring 96 pages of luscious hand-made paper bound in wood: