Argh II: The Suckening

Eighteen hours into the TWC outage and according to their perkily apologetic Twitter feed, service will be restored to the Upper East Side sometime between Friday and five minutes ago. Meanwhile 150,000 UES residents are overloading the TWC phone system and swarming the coffee shops and McDonald's that have other providers. At the moment I'm in a midtown Starbucks below the outage but there are no seats and no power outlets. Of course. I shall safari further...

Tap, Tap, Tap...Is This Thing On?

Sorry about the last several hours of radio silence, which was brought to you by Time Warner Cable.  Did anybody legalize gay marriage while I was away?

Fast Food Evangelism

There's really no escaping them.

Daily Grumble

You'd think that at a giant convention for thousands of blogger/journalists there'd be ample and easy internet access. If you thought that at last year's Netroots in Vegas, you were wrong then too.

Everybody Hates Taxi TV

Gothamist reports that the thing New Yorkers most hate about cabs (other than high fares) is those miserable televisions that won't even turn off half the time. And if you take multiple cabs in one day, as I usually do on weekends, you get treated to the same five 30-second news stories plus ten commercials. Ditch the TVs and bring back those audio safety announcements. "Hi, this is Mary Wilson of the Supremes! And I want you to Stop! In The Name Of....Safety."

Daily Grumble

The CVS on my block has completely done away with humans and you must now use the miserable, annoying, never-works-right self check-out. Place your scanned item on the tray. Place your scanned item on the tray. My motherfucking scanned item IS on the motherfucking tray. I always scream at the attendant, who shrugs and wanders away. Seniors, of course, are completely flummoxed by the machines, so checkout times are much longer. Congratulations CVS, you make the eye-rolling cashiers at Duane Reade feel like the fucking Welcome Wagon.

Afternoon View - Netroots Nation

Netroots Nation 2010 officially opened this morning and of course, interwebs access here is completely borked, hence my radio silence for the last few hours. Paid access in the hotel rooms is extremely slow and the free wifi in the convention center just isn't working at all. Several thousand very frustrated bloggers and digital activists are wearing out their refresh fingers or trying to score access to somebody's phone signal. I don't know whose signal I'm on right now, but thank you LeftyGirlPDX, whoever you are.

Spirit Airlines To Charge For Carry-Ons

Spirit Airlines announced yesterday that they will begin charging passengers $20-$45 to place carry-on bags in the overhead bins. SRSLY.

The cost depends on whether passengers are members of the airline's ultra-low fare club and whether they "pre-reserve" their carry-on bag in advance. Each passenger will still be able to bring one personal item that fits under a seat for free, such as a purse, briefcase, backpack or laptop computer. They also won't have to pay extra for items such as diaper bags, pet containers and cameras. Airline officials called it a "bring less; pay less" policy that would ultimately benefit customers. "In addition to lowering fares even further, this will reduce the number of carry-on bags, which will improve inflight safety and efficiency by speeding up the boarding and deplaning process," Chief Operating Officer Ken McKenzie said in a statement.

The new policy goes into effect on August 1st.

The Marketing Terrorists Have Won

Enabled by the advent of text messaging and social media, for about ten minutes, a few years ago, flash mobbing was a little funny. Like when 300 people randomly showed up in downtown San Francisco to hoot like owls and spin in circles in the middle of Market Street, then silently disburse. That was...kinda cool. And even once the fad got co-opted by advertisers, there were a few more moments of amusing absurdity. But really, stop this. Stop it now.

Morning View - Jackhammer Hell

The co-ops behind my apartment building are removing several thousand square feet of concrete patio in order to put in a community garden, probably so they can feed themselves during the coming End Times. So I've got a month of 30-feet-away multiple all-day jackhammering coming. I am rather cranky about this.

Daily Grumble

The horrible shrieking noise that startled most of Manhattan last night was the sound of tens of thousands of gay men when Time-Warner Cable's Fox signal fucking froze during the last fifteen minutes of the season finale of GLEE. This was at least second time that's happened during GLEE. TWC is clearly anti-gay. Or at least, anti-show queen.

Daily Grumble

Realizing that complaining about one's cable provider is as fruitless as complaining about the weather, I still must vent about Time-Warner's "paperless" billing system. In addition to providing your 87 digit account number, to pay online one must also enter a "customer code," which, hello, is only available on the paper bills. And of course, to get your customer code you have to call them and spend 20-30 minutes navigating useless menus before finally getting a real person in Bangalore to scream at. Aside from the idiocy of requiring two unique codes to pay one's bill, requiring a phone call to get one of those numbers defeats the point of "online" billing, dunnit? The icing on the cake was the below message I got when trying to send an annoyed email. When is our communist/socialist leader going to nationalize the cable industry? I'm standing by.
UPDATE: Almost forgot. To pay by phone, as I finally did, Time-Warner charges a $1.99 "transaction fee." Five minutes later, I got a robo-call survey asking what I thought of their "customer service."

Photo Of The Day

Santa Kong and the Rockettes shared a photo-op atop the Empire State Building. This post is just an excuse to complain about the incredibly annoying earworm jingle for the Radio City Xmas Spectacular, which has been running about every three minutes on every station for the last month.

(Via - Gothamist)

Boomtown Rats

Hmm, something went screwy with the dozen posts I considerately wrote a day early for you so you'd have something to look at while I was sleeping off Remember The Party 2009. Vanished! Annoying! While I figure out what the deal is, here's two ladies fighting on a San Francisco bus.

Comment Count Wonky Again

Obviously, Haloscan is having another bad hair day. All comments are being recorded and can be viewed instantly, but the comment counter is often at zero or way off. I'm riding this out as Haloscan is in the process of transitioning to its new platform which will include numerous new features. You'll able to drop in YouTube clips, vote individual comments up or down, and there will be a WYSWYG text editor. Muddle through, folks. Sorry.

Comments Counter Not Updating

Haloscan is having its quarterly hiccup and the comment counters are not updating on today's posts. You can always use the "notify me" function and follow-ups to your comments will be emailed to you directly. We're all still waiting for Haloscan's much-touted upgrade, which was promised to us months ago.

UPDATE: The Haloscan glitch continues for all users. Your comments are being posted, but some of you may not see previous comments until you post one of your own. My apologies.

Video Fix

Adobe has just released a Flash update that will resolve an intermittent problem some are having with embedded videos playing in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (but not IE, for once.) If embedded videos are freezing at the 2-second mark, the recommendation is to uninstall Flash and either revert to an earlier version or update to the beta version of Flash 10, which has the fix. The bug appears to be in Flash 9, but it doesn't happen on all sites and on those that it does, it doesn't happen all the time. Confusing!

Haloscan, Again. AGAIN.

Obviously the comments counter has been broken all day. Your comments are being saved but the counter isn't updating. Haloscan's new owners, JS-Kit, have been unresponsive to emailed requests for status info and to comments placed on their help forum. It's seriously time to get another commenting system. I'd hate to lose a half-million comments or whatever, but what are ya gonna do?