06-IV-2010.

El blogue:

Boat tour? Nah, it's complicated.

For once, I wanted to have a boat tour of the area. Living all these years on the coast, I never got around to doing it, but seeing as it's such a lovely day, I got an itch for a boat ride. Just an hour or two of a ride through the inlets, make a few dozen photographs and just be on the water.

For that, I need to know three things: where, when and how much. The Gugao gives me the first choice of RudeeRocket, which blasts immediately with some bass music in a video which shows, well, a speedboat with a bunch of people on it. Since it's a regular media Flash applet, I turned the music off immediately. Trying to find the answers to my three questions, I clicked on several things on the page, but it kept returning me to the homepage. The Flash applet would immediately forget that I turned off the sound, and would start blasting again. Which may be acceptable for a general tourist agency website, but is definitely something my customers would use against me if I put it on their websites. It's just not done.

The only other links on the site that may do something:

Login? Huh? Do I need a membership to just ride on your boat? Become a card carrying member for one ride? Don't be ridiculous.

I googled out a few more bits about this outfit; they seem to have several tours available, but none of them show up on their website. At some place, one of the aggregate websites says some of their tours run only in the summer - Memorial to Labor, and there's a sunset tour as well.

None of that shows up on their website. There's only an address and a phone. I may call, but I won't. Not that I'm deaf, but my hearing on the phone is well below perfect, specially if it's a Southern kind of guy who swallows a lot of consonants, and an American kind of salesman who starts throwing buzzwords at me, so that after two sentences I can't follow what he's saying. Tried before, and it never gets any simpler than ordering at Mac (which I tried once, 11 years ago, and I just couldn't find my way around it, there were so many options that I nearly lost my appetite). So I definitely will not call; they usually assume you know the vocabulary of their job just as well as they do, which I don't feel like learning.

How hard can it be? Can't you guys have a few sentences on your website, saying "this tour has this and that, goes there and there, every hour, at nn bucks per person, between May 20th and September 3rd"? Three or four sentences like that wouldn't kill you. I was ready to spend $100 on this, but you lost me.

Every time I try to get to any of the local services or amenities, it goes like this. I develop some enthusiasm, start surfing the local sites, and it turns out to be too complicated, too much of internal lingo to learn (even product names), too many limitations on availability (things exist few times a week, or in only two places, each 20m from here, or in only two of our 11 shops etc) and you never say the fucking price up front.

So I'll repeat what I said a dozen times on this blogue - I hate advertising when it's pushed on me, but, guys, when I want something and am ready to fork some cash for it, please make it easy to get, don't make me call your pro seller who will try to fast talk me into something I'll regret; don't insert any small print; tell me the total price up front and don't ever ask a dime over it. Then you'll get cash from me. Simple as that.

OK... I take most of this back. I had my NoScript turned on and didn't see the menu. However, even so there are a few things really annoying - like having five links to different tour all pointing to the same page, where you have to select again. Other than that, the prices are listed, not to steep either, but alas, too early. They don't operate before Memorial day.

Still, what I said above applies to most of the stuff I tried to get. The other item for today was a new battery for my PSP 1000 - there's so much to learn about one simple battery.

Ender on the job.

He counts on the chance that one of the shops may need a boss soon... and as he knows the ropes from both sides of the barricade (as a customer of many years, and not the first time behind the counter), this is an exact fit. His first workday was on sunday, and it was „you've always been one of ours, we just didn't know how you looked until now“. And he's dealing again, just now he bought a Porsche, vintage eighty something, for 700$ because the owner thought the machine was fully dead. He paid, touched something under the hood, turned the key and drove away :). The former owner ate his balls, of course, but that's the tuition paid.

Truth be told, he drove it just around the corner, where his pal waited with a hauler, so he loaded it up and just transported it away. He could have driven it all the way, but didn't want to risk discovering that the loose cable, or whatever it was, was not the only malfunction.

Go arrived. We hit the airport at the exact time, down to the minute, weren't even charged for parking. Now the kitchen bacchanalia begin, we just acquired a proper ham. She did find a dalmatian pršut over there, translates into 70$/kg, while this ham cost 35$ and weighs at least 4kg. We drink a lot of water :).

During the day we're out in t-shirts, and in a couple of weeks we'd switch to shorts. In the evening the jacket is still needed, but buttoning up is no more.

At work, just finished testing some signature capturing add-on. Told Daniel that „they have an app which may work by itself, but the API, i..e the door that's open to programmers to use their engine inside other apps is clunky. As for Belfast, they may use it on the side; I don't know about that. I just couldn't make it work as a component in Feds.“

For the part of work involving George, I've refreshed my knowledge and learned a bunch of stuff about jQuery and weird ways of css manipulation... and relearned most of the .js... this will repeat. JavaScript is my dejavu amnesia, „I have a feeling I forgot this before“. Learned the beauty of Firebug, the js debuger for Firefox. How did the coders ever get anyhing done in javascript without this kind of tool?

The pines are shedding their pollen. Everything is sprayed yellow, and then a light drizzle comes and all the cars look like this. It was much worse back in those apartments, with the car parked under the pines. Here, it's about 100m to the Deer Park street (which we always called Beer Dark).

Dad asked about Lena's yoga classes - does she get paid, and does she pay when she attends? Well, the deal is tit for tat, aka nothing for nothing. She's not paid for classes she teaches, but then also not charged when she picks a session to attend, which she still does if she thinks they'll try something interesting.

Mentions: blogue, Daniel Berton, Ender Aquila (Ender), Feds, George Whiteley, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gugao, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), in serbian

28-IV-2024 - 5-VII-2026