While I was driving on Pico near Hoover and came across Best Buy Foods. It’s a grocery store. Hmm. Do the words “cease and desist” mean anything?

Hyundai Equus

According to Autoblog.com, the new 2011 Hyundai Equus will come with a free iPad (16g, WiFi) with the owner’s manual pre-loaded. Apparently, the manual is an app (not just an iBook) and will allow the owner to schedule maintenance on the car and make contact with your dealer.

There will also be video in this app to show the owner how to use the car. Maybe there will be a video showing what will happen to your car if you use the iPad while driving.

Hyundai will update the owners manual app via iTunes so that owners can keep up-to-date on anything new with their car (like recalls). That’s assuming Apple accepts this app to be in the App Catalog.

Manuals are becoming scarce, especially for gadgets, and are going more to online versions. If Hyundai is the future of what’s to come, Apple will have to have a special app section just for interactive manuals. This is good for trees and people who are running out of space for all their manuals. I think I still have my manual for my Atari 2600 somewhere.

The day is coming when printers and the Postal Service are gone.

As everyone that knows me already is aware that the main reason for me not getting the iPhone was the lack of a physical keyboard. And this is why I decided to get the Palm Pre last year.

Since the Palm Pre has many features that the iPhone didn’t have, like cut/paste, multi-tasking, sending pictures via MMS, combined multiple email accounts, flash, no-plug recharge, I felt justified in my decision. Not to mention that they are on AT&T, which nobody seems to like.

Over the last year, the iPhone has been steadily upping the ante and correcting and adding many of the missing features.

On June 24th, the new iPhone 4 will be coming out. It adds multi-tasking, a 5MP camera with flash, HD video recording (with LED light) and editing, front facing camera for video chatting, 326 PPI LED backlit screen, and a few other goodies. They already have voice control, visual voice mail, and of course 200,000 apps online.

Virtually every techie friend that I have has an iPhone already. But I’m not one to break down to peer pressure.  However, it’s getting harder and harder to justify NOT getting an iPhone. Now with the new iPhone 4 with it’s new features, I think I’m going to have to break down and drink the Koolaid.

At this point, the only thing even remotely slowing my decision is AT&T. If the iPhone was on Verizon or even Sprint (since that’s who I’m with now), the iPhone 4 decision would be trivial.

When I’m going out on a fun outing, I have to bring my Palm Pre, my Sony digital camera and my JVC camcorder. It’s ridiculous. With this new iPhone, that’s all I would have to bring.

The straw that broke the screen in half was the fact that Bank of America finally came out with their app for the Palm WebOS today. That’s great news, except WebOS still doesn’t have one for eBay, Paypal, Chase, or any of the other big ones that I would actually be using. How much longer do I have to wait? The HP buyout of Palm was also good news, but who cares if I can multi-task and browse websites on my printer?

That’s it. I’m getting it on day one.

Now the only question is… can I actually get one?

One of the great features of the Palm Pre on Sprint is the turn-by-turn navigation app. The 3D graphics is done pretty well and it’s just as good as any stand-alone navigation device. In case you’ve never seen it in action, here’s what it looks like when it’s working properly.

Screen capture of Sprint Navigation app

But after upgrading the firmware recently, my Sprint Navigation app started giving me this error message shown below.

Account expiration error

Since the error message seemed to indicate that my account had expired, I called the TeleNav number. TeleNav is the company that provides Sprint with the app. The TeleNav call was very short. They told me that they were aware of this problem, because many other Sprint users were calling about this problem, and that the best thing to do was to have Spring 3 way call them with me on the line and they would talk them through the fix.

Armed with this information, I put a call into Sprint’s technical support. There was a lot of confusion and plenty of waiting on hold while the tech support people checked their manuals and on-screen instructions. I told them that TeleNav had told me to have Sprint do a 3 way call to them. However, the Sprint tech told me that they are not allowed to do this. You can see in my OomaVOIP status that the first call was about 1 hour when I gave up.

After trying a few other things myself by doing some Google searches and experimentation, I gave up again and decided to call Sprint back again for a second call. This time I was determined to get them to do the 3 way call to solve my problem. Unfortunately, Sprint does not have a “reference” number type customer service system and each time you call, you basically have to start from scratch. It took me another 42 minutes to the same point as the last call where they told me that they cannot make the 3 way call.

Frustrated, I asked the Sprint tech if it would help if I went to the Sprint store instead of calling. They told me that the store has less access to my account but that they might be able to make the call to TeleNav for me while I was there.

When I arrive at the Sprint store, there is nobody there. When I say nobody, I mean no customers or workers. It was completely empty. I guess Sprint’s not doing so well.

In any case, the tech guy finally came out and tried to help me. Unfortunately, he told me that the Sprint tech support has the access to more information and that he was not allowed to call TeleNav himself. The only thing he was allowed to do was call the Sprint tech support number for me. WTF?!

This situation totally reminds me of how PC hardware and software companies keep telling the user to call the other company.

The only thing I can say is that everyone that I talked to, on the phone and in person, were super friendly and wanted to help me but none of them were allowed to do the one thing I was asking them to do. If the no 3 way calling is really the policy, this needs to be changed. Why can’t the Sprint store tech guy call TeleNav? Very strange.

The bottom line is, my Navigation app still doesn’t work. That was one of the big features that I loved about the move to Sprint because I had to pay monthly on Verizon. But I guess you get what you pay for. Since it’s free on Sprint, there’s no incentive for them to try to fix it for me.

Luckily, Verizon now carries the Palm Pre Plus.  Maybe I’ll be moving back to them again.

Hopefully, you will never need to know how to deposit money for an inmate in Los Angeles county. But if you are one of the unfortunate ones that need this information, read on.

One way you can deposit money is to visit the inmate during normal visiting hours and there will be a way to deposit money there. In the old days, it was called a “wet 40,” because the limit was $40 and they would wash it to remove any drugs before giving the wet money to the inmate.  But that was back in the day when females went to Sybil Brand. These days, the money goes into a computer and the inmate no longer receives the actual cash, but instead has an “account” with the county.

However, there are 2 downsides to depositing money in this way.

First of all, you have to have a valid photo ID. Valid ID means not expired. Also, they may check your ID to see if you have any outstanding warrants. So if you are not squeaky clean, visiting an inmate is not a good idea. Of course, you can go there and just deposit the money without visiting, but Wayside and other prisons can be very far to drive for many people.

The second problem is just the long wait. You have to get there early in the morning and wait to check-in, then wait for the bus, then be taken to the section they’re in, then wait again until the inmate comes out to the talking area. The lines are like at Disneyland except there are no rides at the end. This process pretty much blows your entire Saturday day, or you can take a day off from work during the week.

But I digress.

If you want to avoid all this waiting and risk of being arrested, there’s now a 24 hour method to deposit money.

First, you need the inmates booking number. If you don’t have it, you need his/her full name and date of birth. If you don’t have that, you don’t know them well enough to be depositing money for them.

You can obtain the booking number by going to the LASD inmate information center website at:

http://app4.lasd.org/iic/ajis_search.cfm
Here, enter the name and date of birth to get the inmate number.

If you don’t have access to the Internet, you can call the Inmate Information line at 213-473-6100. You will need the inmates’ complete name, birth date and date of arrest. The operator will provide the inmate’s booking number,  jail housing location, next scheduled court date and the bail amount. But how are you reading this article if you… never mind.

Once you have the booking number, go to the “Inmate Reception Center” (IRC) in Downtown Los Angeles at:

450 Bauchet Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

This place used to be closed at 11pm but now apparently they are open 24 hours a day because I went there at 3am. Not only was it open, there were not one, but 2 cashiers available. The cashier is on the second floor. You can also call the cashier’s office at the IRC at 213-893-5875 if you have any questions. Bring cash.

First, wait behind the “red and white” line, even if there is nobody there. The cashiers there seem to like to follow the rules. Once called to the window, obtain and deposit slip and fill it out with all the required information, including your name. Next, wait behind the line again until called. When called, give the cashier the deposit slip and the cash. They will give you a computer generated receipt.

You are done.

There is one small problem however. The inmate is not notified in any way that the money was deposited. So if you are not in touch with their attorney, or have not visited them, they will not know the money is there unless it was pre-planned. You’d think the inmate could get a twitter or SMS message. Oh, I guess not.

Some other things to remember. Do not talk to other people there, especially at 3am. Do not wake the homeless man sleeping on the bench, even if his cell phone is ringing. Do not solicit anyone, a prostitute or otherwise. Do not argue with the cashier in any way whatsoever, even if what they tell you seems retarded to you.

Lastly, do not use the bathroom there. You can’t really see it in the picture below but it looked like somebody tried to take a shower from the sink and there’s about a centimeter of water everywhere, along with a bunch of jumpsuits the inmates wear while in the holding area. I guess the jumpsuits are free for the taking but I left them there.

Now that you know the trick, depositing money is easy and convenient. Enjoy.

A co-worker was wearing this t-shirt so I asked her what the writing was. She didn’t know what it says but I got the idea from the graphic that it was something about Chikan.

In case you’re not familiar with the word “chikan,” it’s a Japanese version of “frotteurism,” which is the act of groping, or rubbing of a non-consenting person for sexual gratification. More specifically, “chikan” usually refers to this act in public, like on crowded trains, buses and elevators.

If you look at a close-up of the graphic on this t-shirt, you can see that the male on the right is groping the female on the left. They are riding a train because they are both using the type of hand-straps that are available on Japanese trains.

This is one of times when it’s probably a good idea to leave the Spanish translation off of the sign.

It took me a couple of days to figure out that “Pies” is Spanish for feet. If you want to get picky, “pies” is plural, so it should read “feet,” or it should be “foot” and “pie.”

But that’s not really the problem. The problem is I don’t want a food related word anywhere near the word “foot.” I know what a cream-pie is in pron, and I don’t even want to find out what a foot-pie is in pron.  But I wonder if the “special” means you get a happy ending.

There’s probably a book that talks about this at length, but since I don’t read, I decided I’m going to write about it.

Have you ever visited a restaurant on a Friday night and couldn’t get good service?  Forget good service.  You couldn’t get service, period.  Even though they have a ton of waitresses, there’s so many people, they can’t get to everyone.  So, you thought to yourself, “Hey, self.  Let’s come here when it’s not so crowded.”

So, you return to the restaurant on a Monday at 5:30pm.  This time, there’s only 3 other tables with customers, but there’s only one waitress.  Guess what happens.  The waitress seems to disappear after she goes to one table.  When she finally reappears and takes your order, she disappears again, not to be seen for 20 minutes.

What you have experienced is what I call “Customer Service Equilibrium,” or CSE.  Basically, it just means that the quality of service goes to the level required to perform the minimum required work.  Therefore, when the business is super busy, the workers work quickly and hard to just barely maintain some level of customer service.

However, when it’s slow, the few workers slack off because there are less customers.  They no longer rush or work hard because they don’t have to.

I’ve noticed this happening at badly managed restaurants, retail stores, bars, and even strip clubs.  There’s not much the customer can do.  Complaining to the waitress will just make them spit in your food.

But this CSE factor is the difference between a well run business, and one that’s probably going to fail eventually.  I guess it’s like Darwinism for business.

You may recall my older article about having problems with my first HP Pavilion ze5470us desktop from Best Buy, that was DOA and had to be replaced.  So when I upgraded to yet to another HP Pavilion m9450f, you may have wondered if there was something wrong with my brain.

At first, everything was going good. Except for compatibility problems with Vista, the computer hardware was working fast and smoothly…

Until 3 weeks later…

Just about the time I finally had everything installed and moved over from my old hard drive, I turn on my computer and I get a blank screen.  Oh crap.  Not good.

HP has a built in self test program by pressing F9 upon power-up.  This is actually a nice touch.  The screen below shows the result of the testing.  You can click on the picture to see a larger version.

Notice that the hard drive is dead. Also, notice where the diagnostic says, “Suggestion: Backup your important data” WTF? How am I supposed to backup my dead hard drive? It also says to call HP support.  Which I did.

HP support is one of the worst support call centers in the industry.  It took them 55 minutes to tell me that my hard drive was dead and that they would send out a new one to me.  Most of that time, I was on hold waiting for the 2 people on the line to read their script so they can tell me what I already told them.

Of course, I didn’t wait 6 days to get the replacement hard drive.  I went straight to Fry’s to get a 1TB SATA drive so that could start restoring my new computer. What’s really frustrating is that it took me about 3 weeks to finally get everything restored from my old computer and all the programs re-installed.  Now, I have to go through the entire procedure again.  What a pain.

The picture below shows the HP’s guts out.  The cage for the hard drive comes out so that you can install the drive.  It’s not as clean as DELL’s case but it’s not the worst one I’ve seen in my life.  I give it a 6 out of 10.

So I finally did get my replacement hard drive after about 6 days. However, it took about 2 weeks to get the “system restore” DVDs that HP sent out. Luckily, I did create these DVDs myself while the computer was still working so I didn’t have to wait.

After I got the replacement drive, I added that to the system to use as a backup internal drive. I had to go into the BIOS to tell it which drive to boot from, but otherwise, it all works fine.

In conclusion, it’s obvious that I’m as stupid as stupid does.  Even after having problems with my first HP, I still went out and bought yet another HP and paid the price.  To be fair, the hard drive dying is a Seagate problem, but HP gets the blame for putting it in their system.  It would have been a lot less work for me if the new HP was DOA instead of dying after 3 weeks.

So I’ll continue to use my HP and see how many weeks it lasts this time.

Technology and gadgets. I love them. Recently, there was talk of software giant Microsoft buying poor Yahoo.com. Yahoo used to be the number one search engine back in the day. People used to think nobody could out-search Yahoo. How the mighty has fallen. Google has taken over as #1 and it’s not even close these days.

How did Yahoo lose such a large market share? They were #1. They started expanding to mail, games, groups, and chat.  Everything except web search.  They lost their way.  Or another way to put it is, they got lazy.  Lazy, as in slow to react.

This got me to thinking about other similar large market share losses. Speaking of Microsoft, they did the same thing to Digital Research. Digital Research had practically the entire market share of microcomputer operating systems with their CP/M.  But Bill Gates came along and bought an OS from Seattle Computing and with some modifications, sold it to IBM for their brand new microcomputer.

Today, people don’t even know what CP/M is, or was. They’ve never even heard of Digital Research and Gary Kildall. What happened there?  Missed opportunities.  Yes.  But they could have fixed that.  Did they not realize how big IBM’s computer would be in the market place?  Perhaps.  It’s pretty complicated, but I can sum it up this way. They got lazy.

Speaking of Yahoo and Google, what did people do before the Internet?  Today, if I want to buy something, a couple of clicks of my mouse and I can buy anything under the sun online. Before the Internet, people used the Yellow Pages.  Many people are too young to have even used the Yellow Pages.  It’s a big book that has the phone numbers of every business near you. It also had some ads in it too. Sort of like what Google does now, but slower, builkier, and only locally.

How did AT&T/Yellow Pages lose their entire market share?  By the time AT&T realized what the Internet could do, it was too late.  They didn’t even see it coming.  They got lazy.

While we’re on the topic of printed media, does anybody read the classified section in a newspaper anymore? Ahm. Does anybody read a printed newspaper anymore? I don’t. I get all my news online. The classified section used to be the profit center for newspapers. But these days, EBay.com and craigslist.org pretty much destroyed that market.

Why didn’t the newspapers create those websites? Same reason Yellow Pages didn’t create Google.com. They were too busy printing the next day’s newspaper and finding new advertisers.  The daily grind.  Oh, and they got lazy.

During the early days of micro computers, people used Dot matrix printers. These were printers that used print heads that moved across the paper to print by using ink ribbons. Epson, a Japanese company, ruled this market. If you wanted a printer, you bought an Epson.

Then, a instrumentation company called Hewlett-Packard or HP started selling laser printers. These printers were more expensive but made documents that looked like they came from a print shop. It was also fast. Much faster than the dot matrix.  By the time Epson realized what happened, they had lost their entire market share.

What happened to Epson? They were so busy making new dot matrix printers and improving their old models, they didn’t look at new technologies. Basically, they go lazy.

Well, I saved the best for last. During the 80′s, Sony had a product called the Walkman. It was a portable cassette player that would allow the user to play music on the go. You could listen to music while commuting, or jogging, or just hanging out. They sold tons of these things.  It was a great idea.  They owned the market that they had basically created from scratch.

Then a computer company called Apple decided to make a digital music player.  That’s right.  A computer company.  They also created a music store online on the Internet.  Even though Sony owned a record company, they didn’t figure out that Apple stole their entire market share until it was too late.

Now, Sony is scrambling to try to regain their market share.  But they’re busy with Blu-ray players, HDTVs, Playstation 3, Playstation Portable, and tons of other products.  They have so many products, they forgot about their Walkman market.  As a matter of fact, according to PC Magazine, in a list of customer satisfaction, Sony MP3 players rate #7 after Apple, Microsoft, Archos, Samsung, SanDisk, and Iriver. What a joke.

Big Sony. Are they lazy too?  You bet.

The word “lazy” doesn’t mean they weren’t working hard at all these companies.  In fact, these companies were all leaders in their markets.  I’m using the word to mean that they were sleeping on the job. They were so busy with their day to day business of making money, and cranking out new versions of their old products, they failed to see the future.  In some cases, they weren’t even looking.  Slow to react.  Lazy.

Sometimes, you have to stop what you’re doing, look up, come outside the box, and take a fresh look at things. Some people are good at this, and others are not.  Some companies are good at it.  Others, not so much.

This sort of “laziness” can happen to anyone.  Even regarding your daily life.  Personal or professional.  Are you sleep walking in your life?  Are you too busy working and paying your bills to realize you could be rich?  Are you too busy with the rat race to talk to your kids?  Or your wife?  Do you just look at today or do you look into the future?

Are you lazy?