Andreas Wacker

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.

On OS X 10.9.2 I got a message in /var/log/system.log like

Google Chrome Helper[23799]: CoreText CopyFontsForRequest received mig IPC error (FFFFFECC) from font server

whenever I opened a new Chrome window. (running version 34.0.1847.131)

Fixing this was surprisingly easy:

1) open Font book

2) select-ALL

3) Validate Fonts from the file menu.

Once I cleared the problematic ones the messages no longer appeared.

I don’t have any expectations if it comes to end consumer support. These days I anticipate phone systems that will try very hard to make you give up. Should you reach a person they seem often not to care about your issues, their job or anything for that matter.

When I ran into questions with a recent Canon camera I called them anyway. I have been massively and positively surprised: After 90 seconds I spoke to somebody who cared. He had the camera I had in hand within a minute.
I sent them test pictures, and now they are looking at them. Regardless what the outcome of this investigation will be: I have the feeling that they care about their product and my experience with it.

As I said: I have not expected this. It will probably be a long time before I would consider another manufacturer. Unless there is a killer feature in a competitors product I will always look for a Canon device. I don’t mind paying more for it.
It might very well be that other companies have awesome support too. The risk to run into issues and they don’t is just to high.

So, yes, every support call is the chance to win a customer for life.

How odd that so few companies seem to understand this.

OK - I really am a laggard. Using Firefox in 2014 was not really the best thing to do. But it got me where I needed to be. Other browsers are of course always part of the mix of things to use. Comes with the job.

But with Firefox 29 today they finally pushed me over. As usually it is a minute detail: I like to have around 20 things 1 click away. Firefox used to be able to ONLY display those bookmarks without the favicon.

Since I identify those things by 1 or 2 letters it makes a big difference if I have the favicons visible or not. With Chrome I never found a way to get rid of them. Now with Firefox they just poppped in.

So I might as well use Chrome, and maybe look for a way to get rid of them there. There is no way that I will invest any of that into a browser that it is declining. These days Internet Explorer actually causes less troubles than Firefox.

Turns out there is a solution for Chrome:

Remove Chrome Bookmark Favicons

It is not ideal since it leaves the space AND the site itself looses the favicon as well, but it is never the less better than Firefox.

I doubt I will ever look back …