Simon Rules!

You know what really pisses me off? Comcast. Oh, you already know this, but I thought I’d share with you another reason why they piss me off:

Picture this: we are watching a movie, and this shows up on all channels (analogue and digital). You cannot switch off the digital receiver, and it stays on for five minutes. The TV programmes currently being watched are not paused, and recordings that are in process get gaps in them. A sharp tone is played at maximum volume, easily able to damage speakers that are turned up loud. The information is not localised in any way; the entire of Colorado sees the same message. It goes away, and then it comes back ten minutes later.

Fox occasionally issues “storm watches” to tell people that they may issue a “storm warning”, which is itself a notice that they may issue a “storm alert” at some point in the future. The annoying thing is that they play a very weird tone over the programme being watched and squash the programme into the top half of the screen so they can show these messages.

Yes, in a state prone to tornados and flash floods, this can be useful, but please localise the information. I wonder if they have ever read “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”.

PS. It’s not raining (yet).

We finally rounded up all of our wedding photos, and they all came out beautifully. I’ve also started work on a new online photo gallery tool, tentatively called “Snaps”. You can see the pics here.

One thing I love about digital cameras is that almost all tag pictures with EXIF data, which contains the date and time each photo was taken, along with the focal length, ISO, shutter speed and other information. In the future when cameras are available with GPS, the precise location will be tagged too. That will have the added effect of tagging each photo with the correct date and time. What I noticed from the wedding photos given to us is that only one person out of five who sent me photos had the correct date and time programmed into their camera. Two of those were from different time zones, and one person had got confused between 12 hour and 24 hour formats. Another had probably forgotten to change the clock for daylight savings time. It wasn’t a big deal because I corrected all the times with a nifty utility called PhotoInfo, because I like looking at all my photos in chronological order.