I’ve been frustrated for a while trying to use various products and services. I thought I’d compress all of them into a single post.

Click through to read this collection of rantings…

First Rant: Three’s Online Store

I’m leaving Telstra, so I’m losing access to the staff plan. Plus, I’m moving to Sydney, and won’t have my own place for at least a month or two. So, I need a new mobile, and having some sort of broadband would be great.

After going through all the available options, I think Three’s $29 Cap, plus X-Series Gold would be the best bet. 

I get onto the Three website, and decide to purchase online (for an additional $50 credit). I select the phone and plan I want, and  enter all my details (including my medical history and what I ate for breakfast for the last 4 years). After clicking submit, I get an error message saying “Please complete all required fields marked with a red asterisk”. I go back over the form, but can’t immediately see anything incomplete (there’s about 80 questions on the page). 

I pull out Firebug and review the Javascript, that quickly points me to this handily displayed error message: “Please tell us the time you have lived at your current address”. Which I had set to “5+” years.

Except that it still wants you to select the number of months too. Given I’ve been here for about 8 years, I don’t know how I can fill that in correctly.

Anyway, in the mean time - I’d taken too long to fill out the form, and so it’s forgotten what I’m ordering (hint guys: don’t use sessions for big-ass forms, save the details to DB or cookies or form variables). I go back to the start and fill in all the forms again.

This time, I get through the process Ok, confirm my order and…

Sorry, ThreeStore cannot process your order at this time. To order now:
- Call 131 683
- Visit a Three Store

Just to rub salt into the already gaping wound: Their phone sales line isn’t available at 7:30PM on a Saturday night. 

Second Rant: Valve / Steam and Offline Mode

I think Valve make a few really great games. Their online game distribution and community system Steam, is a really great concept. It’s just that the implementation has… lets just say room for tmprovement.

My main gripe with Steam is that it’s very network-dependant. Folks in the US might have a higher broadband penetration, but they still don’t have internet everywhere. Steam’s Offline mode is provided by Valve so that you can play Steam-protected/distrubuted games when an internet connection isn’t available.

The problem is that Steam Offline mode doesn’t work, unless you specifically set it to start in Offline mode. And this is only possible to do if you have an internet connection. Valve support insist that it will start in Offline mode if you have it set to remember password, and log on automatically - but experience has proven them wrong.

Clicking Start in Offline Mode gives this little gem:

Third Rant: Melbourne Skybus’s Website.

A few weeks ago I was organising my itinerary for going to Paul’s Wedding. Due to a quirk of distance most of that Journey will be on a V-Line train from Melbourne out to Drouin.  But, to get there I needed to use the Skybus service from the Airport. They don’t list timetables, and instead insist that you use a search based function. This doesn’t work quite so well, as can be seen in the screenshot I took at the time:

Last Rant (for the moment):  Vista, or specifically it’s behaviour around Sleep mode. Plus a quirk regarding multi-monitor displays.

I have a reasonably new Dell laptop, and I run Vista. For the most part, this is a happy setup - but there’s a few strange quirks. 

Quirk #1: It (sometimes) doesn’t go into Sleep mode when the lid is closed.
This is semi-random, and unless I ensure that the thing has actually gone to sleep I will occasionally pull the laptop out of my bag 2 hours later to find that it’s trying to bake itself in my laptop bag.  It doesn’t seem to matter if I have external things plugged in (like power, mouse, drives, etc) or if I’m running in a particular power mode.

Quirk #2: Upon opening the lid after putting the laptop to sleep, it will occasionally refuse to do anything.
The laptop comes out of standby, turns on the screen and Wifi/Bluetooth, and spins up the drives… but thats it. I don’t see anything on-screen, and I have tried leaving it for 2+ hours. I have to force the power-off (it won’t gracefully shut down or go back into sleep mode.  Vista appears to be doing *something* (as evident by disk and limited network activity) but doesn’t grace us with the knowledge.

Quirk #3: After forcing the laptop to power off, without shutting down (Usually after the previous two) - Vista plays silly buggers by reading/writing huge amounts of data to disk, and also occasionally using 100% CPU indefinitely too (NT Kernel and System uses 100% CPU - yeah, both CPU cores).

This is something very strange. It appears that it’s doing some sort of ‘cleanup’ after a forced shutdown, but it also appears to be reading all the files on the drive (eg: photos, videos, etc).

Either way, the only thing that fixes it is killing the power (it won’t shut down nicely, and it’ll stay in this broken state indefinitely too), NOT logging on, waiting 30+ mins until disk activity stops, and then logging in. Failure to wait until it’s finished thrashing the disk, means that you won’t be able to connect to a wireless network (wired only works if you’ve got a staticly configured IP), and all apps will run slow (due to disk thrashing and 100% CPU utilisation)

The other two quirks are annoying (particularly if your battery has been used up in the process of baking the laptop), but the last one really pisses me off (usually because it happens right when I want to do something).

Quirk #4 is related to multi-monitor setups.

I have a rather nice Dell 24″ LCD Display at home, and I usually plug this into the laptop so I can play movies/etc on the external display. Also, because of the physical arrangement - the external display is actually above the laptop.

So, I like my display setup like this:

So I can drag things up to the external display. Unfortunately, for some reason Vista keeps forgetting these settings. For the first two weeks it kept resetting to display at the right hand side, and also not extending the desktop. Now it seems to remember the setup - but it will still randomly reset this. Very annoying!