Category: technology

Big corporations have their own problems. And if they don’t have them, then they create them. Like hiperos.

Imagine people reading a couple of Franz Kafka novels, putting them down and then proclaiming: “Hey lets build this (badly) and slap a web interface over it”
Of course they were intrigued by all the horrifying concepts and scary details in those nightmarish (yet awesome books) of that bohemian insurance clerk.

I wonder how much productivity gets lost by people waiting for hiperos to load, or trying to decipher what those random popups mean, how to find what
is missing in which form, etc etc etc.

Amazing how bad some things look in light of the second decade of the 21st century.

Today’s story on flight MH370 is that pings got picked up by a Chinese ships. Blackboxes seem to emit a signal every second for a couple of weeks.

Maybe it would be better if these devices would send a ping not every even second. Technically it should be easy to give black boxes a fix random
ping frequency. I probably would help that the device you are looking for emits a ping every 1.345 seconds.

And bigger batteries are probably a good idea as well.

I tried to download an online statement from the Wells Fargo today. What fun!

While I could do so for one account – on the one I needed I got nothing. I could select the year, or click on “Recent Statements”.

I called Wells Fargo. After ten minutes the first human I was able to talk to told me that I would need to speak to the online department for that.

So I was put on hold for another ten minutes. ( 1 800 956 44 42 would be their direct number). WF hold music cut deep grooves in my auditory system in the mean time.
It is the most obnixous loop one can think of. Amazing how they can literally have humans listen to this junk for years each day and nobody complains.

Once there was a human on the other end he was able to ‘enable online statements’ for the account in question. Not sure why that was not on in the first place.
After signing off and on again I did indeed my past records. Which is awesome.

I friendly declined the second offer from the WF operative if he could sell me any additional services at this point. That’s a bit like trying to sell timeshare junk to people
having a root canal.

All this would not be worth wasting any ink over. It’s just corporate America how it slogs along day after day extracting billions from people trying to get by (and from me too) .

When I clicked on the actual download link all I would find is a file called

session.cgi

Turns out that WF online puts the PDF statement into file with that name.

Renaming to

anything_you_like.pdf

made it accessible. I decided not to spend another 20 minutes in the Wells Fargo phone loop to tell them about this unfortunate bug.

I moved five months agao and had not installed the nest yet. When I hooked it up it only showed

a red blinking light

On top of the unit. It turned out that the device needed to get charged via the mini USB adapter in the back. After about 5 minutes, a small dull nest home screen showed up.
After maybe another minute the screen said:

Please attach display
to its base

It turns out that this message tends to be over optimistic: After connecting the device
it fell back into the red-blink slumber.

I gave the device 10 more minutes of USB charge. I used an actual physical charger, not a USB connection from a computer. The ampere that the unit sees can be quiet different.
A drained rechargeable battery certainly appreciates the flow a nice and solid current.
After said 10 minute charge things got better: the thermostat started ‘boot’ while being connected and it was able to operate the heat pump. At this point it still said

low battery

in the Wifi and other connection related screens. Since this did not change for an hour I gave the display another 30 minutes on the USB charger and then was able to set up the network connection as expected.