There’s a few thing that have ticked me off recently that just make me wonder what people are thinking!
News.com.au
The Today Show filmed in the Google Sydney office this week. Naturally we wanted to watch it since there might be some shots of hubby working and playing ping-pong. The segment won’t aired on Friday, but it was up on News.com.au’s video page before that. Also, we missed it on Today because it was on before 7.15am.
Sadly, we can’t actually play the video! We have four working computers (that have monitors/screens, we have two others that are used for storage) and we can’t play the stupid video because three of those computers are Macs, the other is running linux (Ubuntu), the video seems to be streaming in Windows Media Player format. Sure, Microsoft offers Media Player 9 for Mac OS X, but why would I want to infect my computer with their software?
I might have managed to install the plugin for Firefox on linux toplay the video, but I can’t select the video (under News.com.au video, not National video) because it looks like flash still isn’t properly supported for linux. So the menu on the website doesn’t work.
There’s supposedly a plugin for Firefox (which I don’t normally use), but when I went to download it I saw that it’s only a trial version – again, it feels like I’d be infecting my computer with superfluous, proprietary software.
If that video had just played I would have thought News.com.au was pretty cool for providing up-to-date news and interest pieces. Now I think they’re lame and I will be avoiding them.
Apple
Normally Apple products work right out of the box – one of my favourite Get a Mac ads even says so. There are some things that you might need to buy, like a video cable since MacBooks have mini-DVI out and MacBook Pros have DVI out. That’s ok, I can accept that…
What I don’t accept is that the mini-DVI-to-DVI is not compatible with the DVI-to-video. How the hell is that useful? If you have multiple Macs in the house you have to buy connector cables for every single one for every different connection that you need!
What’s worse is that after I discovered that the cable I bought is completely useless to me – discovered it by opening the bag and trying to plug one connector into the other one we already owned – the shop wouldn’t take it back because it was open. Despite the bag actually lying about what was inside.
See it’s missing 4 pin-holes around that long bit?
If I’d read the reviews of the product first I wouldn’t have had this problem, but why did Apple mislabel the packaging?
Mount Franklin bottled water
BUY ME register to PLANT A TREE
Why do we have to register? Why doesn’t Mount Franklin just plant a tree for every bottle of water sold during the promotional period? They donate money to Breast Cancer research/support for every pink-capped bottle sold in October; you don’t have to register for that.
Does anyone else feel this is a gimmick to make people feel better about buying Mount Franklin bottled water and possibly make Mount Franklin feel better about themselves?
