Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: rant

  • Rant: Gmail Contacts

    Rant: Gmail Contacts

    It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to have a good ol’ rant in on tech!

    I use Gmail in the browser, like my friend James. It’s meant to be used there. I’ll use it there. But I often get emailed new contact information, and I want to add it to Google Contacts. Here’s the workflow.

    I open the email and click on the ‘add contact’ button.

    Google - Add vcf to contacts

    There’s often no response at this point. The page sits there and I don’t see anything telling me to go to another page. Eventually the browser takes me to a new page in the same screen where I now have a new contact group with the name “Imported DATE” and one user (or possibly two if I clicked, saw no response, and clicked again):

    My new google contact group and my new user(s)

    At this point, I have to click the find and merge to get them back down to one. Then I click what groups I want the new user to be in. Of note, you must press the “Apply” button:

    I have to press Apply to add Obenland to WP

    No ajax here.

    Yay! Obenland is in WP!

    But what about that group?

    I have to delete the group

    Now some of this I can do from the list user screen, but I still have to go to contacts, mess with it, and then delete the temp group. No ajax. No way to add just from within mail. No way to open in a new window.

    It’s just crap.

  • Don’t Be Rude (Except When You’re Not)

    Don’t Be Rude (Except When You’re Not)

    Don’t be rude with devs (hello Mika)

    A mysterious person named John posted that as a comment to a post about WordPress suffering from the inventors dilemma.

    I replied ‘Hello John’ and added “(I’m sure many people feel I’m rude though I have no idea why John does.)”

    From there on, many of my friends replied that I wasn’t rude. Or in the case of Brianna, when I said I was rude on occasion, she replied:

    “on occasion” seems like the perfect amount to me.

    When two people are passionate but have opposing views on a situation, one or the other is always ‘rude.’ This is just what it is. Rudeness is something that is very situational and subjective. We’re talking about a world where we put our hearts and souls on the line with our code or our problems and, sometimes, someone comes back and says “No” or “That’s the way it is” and they’re rightly annoyed.

    This does not mean they were rude.

    Except that it does.

    I try very hard to be polite, especially to people doing me a favor or providing a service, and I try very hard to respect their time. I try to remember that just because someone is terse doesn’t mean they’re angry with me, they’re probably just trying to get through their day. I try to thank people (especially when I call in to anything insurance or travel related). I try to remember they’re people.

    But I know that, when you’re talking to someone who has deep emotions, who feels a great amount of fire in their heart for something, the opposition or the speed-bump can be met with great ire and angst. The person who says ‘no,’ which frankly is my job many times, is the enemy. They’re against you because, clearly, they’re not for you.

    Except that they’re not.

    Am I rude? I’m sure that, on occasion, I come across to someone as rude. I’m sure that sometimes when I bang out a fast answer, my brusqueness is perceived as disrespectful. I’m sure that my unexpected replies feel like a breech of etiquette. And maybe sometimes they are. I don’t always phrase myself perfectly. I’m not patient enough all the time.

    But I’m not a rude person. I’m always coming from a place where I’d like to help people and educate them. I’m generally a smiling, nice, person. When I’m not able to be that me, I shut myself up at home and read and write, I go for a run, I play ping pong, and I blow off steam. You will rarely see the angry, inconsiderate, insensitive, mean, me. That Mika exists, but she’s not allowed to come out and play. The closest you’ll get is if I feel the need to come to someone’s defense. Like calling my friends or coworkers vile names.

    This doesn’t mean I’m a nice, wonderful, polite person. It just means I’m a person, like you. I’m sure I’m rude. I’m sure I’ve pissed people off. But unless I’ve told you so, it’s unlikely I’m actually being intentionally nasty to you. Maybe I was trying to be serious when you were being a little silly. Maybe I was silly when you needed serious. Communication issues happen. We should try to learn from then and move on.

    When we’re thinking about a world that exists primarily in text, our communication woes become more important. The majority of my work with other people is in email, instant messages, and once in a while, video chat. But mostly it’s text. This means I cannot read your ‘tone’ easily. When I know someone well enough, I can hear their voice in my head. Like I read Otto’s email saying “Here’s the thing…” and I know his intonations. When I see Jan message that has “Hah!” in it, I know it’s the somewhat self-deprecating amusement of the universe. When I see James’ “Nooooo!” I know he’s making like Darth Vader. I bet I can even tell which face Jen’s making when her email consists of “Mika.” Sorry about that.

    But these are people I know and work with. Figuring out which emotion is behind a sentence of “You’re not doing that right.” is hard. Was I mean? Was I terse? Was I frustrated? Was I brusque? Maybe I was just tossing that off as the shortest way to explain something. It’s hard to tell. And because it’s hard to tell, it makes the online world of open source development fraught with headaches.

    The best advice I can give you is that if someone says “Can we start over?” to take them at face value and start over. It’s so very easy to go down the wrong path for too long that you get lost. Remember it’s okay to let go and start over.

  • Rant: Worse than a Popup

    Rant: Worse than a Popup

    I hate popup ads. Everyone does. You’re trying to read an article, perhaps on your phone, and these inline popups show up and obscure the content with ads for things you don’t care about.

    We hate them more when they play music.

    We hate them more when you can’t click on the tiny X on a phone.

    But I have something I hate even more than that and it’s Apple’s fault.

    You see, I use Safari sometimes to read on my phone. This is all well and good until I scroll on a slow site (probably slow because of their abuse of javascript laden social media toolbar crap that we didn’t care about to begin with) and my finger accidently brushes an ad. And then the ad opens the App Store to ask me if I want to download some idiotic game.

    I take deep, calming, breaths and then I close out of the App Store, go back to safari, and I leave the page. Most of the time the article remains unread.

    And why is this Apple’s fault? After all, the fault should lie with the idiots who thought that the best idea for a mobile site would be to have a bajillion ads.

    This is Apple’s fault for two reasons:

    1. There’s no way to tell Safari not to open these
    2. There’s no ‘are you sure?’ message from Safari to let you decline

    In fact, in all my research, the only thing you can do is to clear the browser cache and set Safari to only allow cookies from Current Websites Only. But as Apple warns you, that may cause issues with other sites.

    This can be fixed! Apple can simply make it an option (hidden) to hide this. But also you website designers and developers, if someone says they don’t mind the popup ads and lightbox garbage on the mobile site, I want you do to me a favor.

    Say no.

    The web won’t get better unless you make it better. Please don’t make a website you’d hate too.

    Oh and those ‘cool’ floating sidebars with the tweet links? They look terrible when you zoom in on the teeny tiny text on your website.

    Stop it.

  • LastPass? LostPass!

    LastPass? LostPass!

    ModemLoper came up with the name.

    So here’s a frustrating experience. My office uses LastPass to share passwords for things. Secret things. They send me an ‘invite’ for the Enterprise account with my company email. I go to log in with the first-time password thing, and it says I need to make a new password. Sure, because email isn’t secure, so I make a new password the same way I have for the last year. I open up 1Password, make a new account there (LastPass – Work) with the login as my.email@myoffice.com and generate a password. So I have a password stored there you see. I then copy that password and paste it in, twice, to change the password.

    I want to note some things here. I did not have a message about how my master password was super important at this time. In fact, it just said to enter it twice. Also remember this was for an ENTERPRISE account. Not a normal user. Okay?

    So I do that, it says yay log in now! I take the same password, paste it in, no go. Oh, okay, maybe a butterfly farted. I’ll just reset it. Guess what I can’t do? The password ‘Hint’ was useless, since my password was along the lines of dyEno4FfW4EsED and I’d set the hint to “1Password” like you often do. Also there’s no ’email me my password’ or ‘reset my password’ thing I can use. Probably because email isn’t secure. The email where they’d emailed me a temp password just before to create my Enterprise account.

    At this point I tweeted obscenities. I have an account but I can’t use it. I can’t reset the password. I can’t recover the password. I don’t have a ‘One Time’ use password because I never got to the point where it let me create that sort of thing. Ditto with ‘reverting’ my vault. There was nothing to revert to so I couldn’t do that. The official answer was to delete my account and start over. There was more swearing. Most of it public use of the F-word on Twitter.

    But I did delete the account, made a new one, and this time it said “Hey, this master password thing is super important!” and took me to a second screen where I have to re-enter it. Oh, and yes, I used the same password I’d made before. It worked this time. My coworker resent the invite to join our Enterprise account. I do so, set up Two Factor Authentication, trust my laptop, and he shared the folders.

    As I spell out the drama to him, I realize that this may be happening because I didn’t have an account before. That is, I went ahead and used the account and password from the email. Don’t believe me that they sent a clear-text password? Here:

    LastPass email with a clear text password. Proof, I tell you!

    I redacted the account, even though you could guess it. Four hours pass. I get a tweet from the LastPass CEO:

    https://twitter.com/joesiegrist/status/403649508715667456

    to which I replied:

    https://twitter.com/ipstenu/status/403649761212784640

    Everything’s fine now, and my takeaway from this is ‘Make an account before joining an Enterprise’ because clearly their ‘sign up through your enterprise’ thing is buggy. The whole interface is a little janky, and I find that their statement of how they cannot possibly reset your password to be weird:

    Recovery for LastPass is not the same as other services you may have previously used – due to our encryption technology, LastPass does not know your Master Password, so we cannot look it up, send it to you, or reset it for you. This means your data remains secure from threats, but also means that there are limited options when you forget your Master Password.

    I gather they mean “There’s no way to change your password without knowing your current password.” And really this is the ultimate security, isn’t it? No one but you can change it without knowing your master password. The problem with this, and really all these things, is that if I have one master password, it must be easy for me to memorize and remember at the drop of a hat.

    Which means my master password is my least secure password. Check the sticky notes on my monitor.

  • Privacy and Evil and Money

    Privacy and Evil and Money

    Google likes to say ‘You can make money without doing evil.’ It’s right in their Company Philosophy.

    I’ve never bought into that. I mean, I agree you can do it without being evil, but I think that evil is highly subjective and what I feel is evil may not be what they do. Case in point would be endorsements.

    Maybe you’ve noticed when you Google search, sometimes your friends’ recommendations pop-up in the results. Like I searched for fabric stores and got results from my BFF, Andrea. That was amusing, but also disturbing. See, there’s a big difference between search results, and results in ads.

    Let’s step back. Here’s what Google says about their ‘endorsement‘ system:

    Google makes it easy for you to get great recommendations from your friends. For example, when you visit the Google Play music store, you may see that a friend has +1’d a new album by your favorite artist. When you search for a restaurant, you may see an ad including a 5-star review by another friend.

    That sounds pretty cool, right? My friends, people I follow on G+, contribute to my results. That’s sensible, since one presumes I share some interests with my friends. But then you scroll down the page and see a section about endorsements in ads.

    This setting below allows you to limit the use of your name and photo in shared endorsements in ads. It applies only to actions that Google displays within ads; the “Summertime Spas” example above shows a shared endorsement appearing in an ad on Google Search. Changing this setting does not impact how your name and photo might look in a shared endorsement that is not in an ad — for example, when you share a music recommendation that is displayed in the Play Store. You can limit the visibility of activity outside of ads by deleting the activity or changing its visibility settings.

    google_moneyLet me get this straight. People pay for ads on Google, so Google is making money. People click on the ads, so the advertiser makes money. My ‘endorsements’ are posted, without my permission, to drive traffic to those ads to make people money. I am not paid for this service.

    Thanks, Google. Guess what I just unchecked?

    Look, if you want to use me in search results, that’s one thing. Using me in ads is another. If a company took a comment I made in email and used it on their site to say “The Half-Elf loves our cocoa!” without asking me first, I’d be upset. I don’t ever expect to be compensated for my endorsements, but I do expect to opt-in to them. Here’s a real world example. I went to a spa and they had a ‘fill out this card to tell us what you think’ thing at the end. At the bottom was a box. “Check here if we can use your comments, or excerpts there of, in our advertising.” I thought about it, looked at what I wrote, and checked the box.

    But they let me opt in. They asked me for my permission to use me to make more money than the money I gave them for services rendered. I have no idea if they did use what I said, but I liked that they asked (and I liked the services) so I went back a couple times before moving across the country.

    I wish Google understood that sort of respect.

    Have a read of their updated TOS just for fun.