Breaking up with Angie's List

So here's why email marketing doesn't work and why I'm putting Angie's list on my "blacklist" of emails and am not going to resubscribe to their crappy premium locked-garden review site anymore. I get this delightful little piece of spam this morning.

See that? "Great news!" What's the great news? "Gift memberships." Yeah, I get about ten of these a day from Angie's list, crap like $199 for $300 worth of floor planning supervision or something stupid that has nothing to do with finding out if the guy who's installing my furnace is ripping me off, which is what I signed up for in the first place. (And no, Gmail, it's not "important." Thanks for the useless label.)

So naturally I want to unsubscribe from this thing because I want my "special offers" to consist of nothing but buy-one-get-one Smash Burger or something like that. So I click through to unsubscribe, where I'm asked my email address to "confirm" the unsubscription. Yeah, ever notice how they don't bother ask your permission to send you spam, but they definitely want to triple-check that you're absolutely sure you want to tell them to go away?

Anyway, here's the result.

There. See that? The email address I entered did not match the information in their database. Oh yeah? Go back and look at the first screen cap. See where they sent the spam from the beginning? That's right. They have my information in their database, but they don't want to remove me from their database. They want to keep sending me crappy email "offers" I don't want.

So guess what happens next? I add their email to the filter that automatically deletes stuff from my email before it ever even gets to my Gmail funnel. Then I cancel their service, and when they refuse to do that, I start dispute their charges when they automatically bill my credit card. You guys at Angie's List ought to learn how to take a hint. Being this annoying isn't going to get you any more loyalty from this side of the screen.

An unexpected error occurred (error code -43)

So I'm in the middle of a happy workday when a shared server decides it's no longer going to cooperate.


Whenever I try to mount (or dismount) this server, it spits out the ever-so-helpful alert, "An unexpected error occurred (error code -43)." What could this mean? A Google search reveals absolutely nothing helpful anywhere on the Internet. Force-quitting the Finder won't help. Neither will logging out. The server itself is working just fine. So what's the solution?

Rebooting, of course. Close every single damn program you've got open, close all your open documents, and reboot your whole stupid Mac. It's the only way to get access to the shared drive again.

I'm putting this blog online only so the next time this error occurs, I'll find something relevant amidst the sea of completely unhelpful pages out there.

Find file

It's hard to explain how much I hate the Mac's inability to find simple files. The "find file" feature has been integrated in the Mac OS for a couple decades now, so I have no idea why they decided to screw it up so perfectly a few versions ago (in 10.4).

You used to be able to search for files by name (and other criteria) in a simple window and receive a simple list of results. You can still do this with third-party freeware like "Find Any File," but not the Mac OS. When I search for a file named "All in Kansas," which I know is on my hard drive somewhere, Mac OS X reports "0 items." Why? I have no idea. Find Any File picks it up with no problem, as you can see in the above screenshot.

I have a feeling the reason this happens has something to do with a hidden setting for Spotlight that involves digging through preference panes or mucking about in the terminal, which is why I'm not bothering with it. (Apple's hilariously outdated support page certainly won't help. Check out those pinstripes!)

Firefox profile manager

So I finally upgraded from Firefox 3 to Firefox 8. I would have upgraded a while ago, I think, but I must be the only person in the world using the Profile Manager to run multiple versions of Firefox (i.e. one with my bookmarks, passwords, links, and plug-ins, and another for my "test" identity for trying out new stuff). I had been able to access the profile manager in version 3 with this completely non-intuitive Terminal command I had to discover by digging around on the Mozilla website:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profilemanager

Yeah, really easy to remember, right? So anyway, when Mozilla brought out Firefox 4, this command no longer worked, and they never (not even to this day) bothered to update the website to explain how to use Profile Manager. Go see for yourself.

I stuck with Version 3 all this time (not using Chrome because I like having bookmarks and pages in a sidebar, thank you very much). Then I discovered on some random Mozilla forum that there's a whole new command to launch the Profile Manager. Here it is:

arch -i386 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -ProfileManager

Happy as I am now to use Firefox 8 with both my old profiles, I have to wonder why Mozilla hasn't bothered updating their own help section after five versions of their software?

Dot_clean

Here's something positive for a change. I use Dropbox to share a handful files among computers, and one thing that's annoyed me is the slew of "dot" files that get somehow get created. You know the ones I'm talking about, the zero K clones of every single file you've ever put in your Dropbox. Well, I just learned a quick little command-line tool that gets rid of them... all of them! Here it is:

dot_clean

In other words, to clean out the "dot" files in my Dropbox, I hit dot_clean ~/Dropbox/. I even set up a "Cron" tab with Cronnix to clean them out every day, but of course it does absolutely nothing for some reason. I have to enter the command manually in Terminal every time I want to clean out my Dropbox.

Sometimes it just feels good to find a solution to a problem, but then again, maybe this problem shouldn't exist to begin with. That's when you type the following command into Terminal and restart:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

I'm still not entirely sure what purpose these "dot" files serve.

10.7 has been out for five whole days! UPGRADE NOW!!

This stupidity has got to stop. Mac OS X "Lion" (10.7) was released FIVE DAYS AGO, and the Evernote people are already telling me that I have to upgrade? What for? I haven't really seen any compelling reason to drop everything and upgrade. From what I've heard, Apple's just screwing with the UI to make the Mac more like an iPhone while removing things like Flash, iSync, and the ability to run PowerPC apps. They've also made this thing a download-only upgrade that requires 10.6, which I never bought. Yeah. I'm skipping this one, too, and I have the feeling that I won't be missing much.

Seriously, this bleeding-edge, constant upgrade fever has got to stop. The idea that I have to keep pouring money into the cesspool of planned obsolescence is ridiculous, and I've decided not to participate. I barely noticed when 10.6 came and went. I'm sure I'll do just fine without 10.7. Consider this a strike on upgrading.

UPDATE: So apparently, the guys who make Evernote are so certain that you and I should be using the latest, crappiest version of the Mac OS X, that they've deleted all previous versions of Evernote from the Internet. Yeah, that sucks. Fortunately, I did some serious digging on their forum and found a version that still works with versions 10.5 and below.

Facebook on Adium

So, I haven't been able to connect to Facebook via my favorite chat program, Adium, for some time. It just asks for my password over and over, even when it's correct. I'd Googled the problem before and found no easy answers. I just thought something on my end was screwed up, or the app was broken and the developers weren't fixing it. I just downloaded a new version today, and the problem still persisted. Then I did some Googling and found a fix.

Guess what? You're not supposed to connect to Facebook using Facebook. You're supposed to use Jabber instead. This is apparently common knowledge. Then why keep the "Facebook" option around when it doesn't work? Probably just to screw with me, I guess.

Details are here.