spugbrap’s blog

I’m having an annoyance right now from some evil marketing company, possible in Maine, or maybe the UK. I don’t really know. They call my grandcentral.com number, and since I’m getting fed up with it, I sent a message to grandcentral support today. Here is that message, which describes the problem I’m having:

I’ve received this call from 5 different numbers over the past 2 weeks. They show up on my grandcentral.com account as coming from the United Kingdom, with a +44 prefix. Here are the numbers:
+44 2074225790
+44 2088082763
+44 2088981403
+44 2088093629
+44 2074413433

When I pick up, the recording is in mid-sentence, and says something like “This is your final notice for an interest rate reduction. Press 1 to speak to a live operator.”

The first couple times, I just hung up.

The second and third times, I tried pressing 1, and got put on hold, but I was on the road and my call got dropped.

The next time, when I pressed 1, I got put on hold for over 6 minutes (all the while planning to place THEM on hold as soon as they picked up), then finally the hold music stopped and the call ended quietly. Nobody ever answered.

The last time, today (2/15/2008) at 1:46pm, I answered quickly, and hit 0 which made the greeting message repeat. It said something like “Hello, this is Heather with Account Services! This is your final notice regarding an interest rate reduction on your credit card! Press 1 to speak to a live operator, or press 2 to stop receiving these notices. Since I’d already shown them that I’m alive by pressing 1 on previous calls, I pressed it again this time. I was on hold for less than a minute, then someone answered, saying “Do you have a balance of $3000 or more on one of your credit cards?” (or something like that). I said “Please hold for the next available operator” and put her on hold. She hung up before I got around to picking back up (I was going to wait at least 2-3 minutes, if possible).

Anyways, I’ve marked all 5 of these numbers as spam on my grandcentral account, and changed my preferences so spam numbers get BLOCKED rather than going to spam voicemail

The problem is, they call from a different phone number each time! I’d like to block ALL numbers that start with +44, or even starting with +4420. I do not expect or care about any legitimate calls coming from numbers that match those prefixes.

So, do I need to just let them keep calling me, and just send them to voicemail, and deal with the fact that they’re going to keep calling me? Or can you block them all somehow?

Every time I get a call where they just hang up, or from a company that’s annoying me, I go to whocalled.us and look up the number/post info about it. Usually the numbers are not listed there, yet, but I’m mentioning this site because if we all report evil spammer companies there, as a community, it will become a more valuable resource over time.

The only reason I ever pressed 1 at all is because I wanted to find out what company was behind this evil automated phone call crap. Since they mentioned credit card interest rate reduction, that narrowed down the possibilities to 2. If I could find out which company was responsible for this, I would cancel my card, and complain publicly about their horrible marketing scheme. At this point, though, after hearing that live operator ask a stupid question, I know that it’s not from any of my credit card companies. It’s just some evil marketing company, and/or scammers. I hope grandcentral is able to help me out with preventing future calls like this!

Ugh! I just wanted to request some replacement health insurance ID cards for my family, this morning, but the web form for that has issues. :(

First of all, they’ve got that annoying “feature” where it automatically tabs to the next field when you finish entering characters in the current field. This is something I’ve seen many times, over the years, particularly for phone number entry. In this form, it’s on all the Date of Birth fields.

For example, to enter the fictitious date ‘12/12/1234′, I only have to type ‘12121234′. After I enter the ‘12′ in the month field, it automatically advances to the day field. After I enter ‘12′ in the day field, it takes me to the year field, and after I enter ‘1234′ in the year field, it takes me to the next form input.

This behavior is mildly amusing, as long as I don’t make a mistake. If I need to go back and fix something, though, I have to fight with it because while I’m trying to backspace or use my left/right arrow keys to move the cursor to the digit I need to fix, the automatic tab “feature” is trying to advance me to the next form field.

Here’s a video showing me trying to correct a mistake in the year field:

Even though I know that the automatic tab “feature” is active, I still find myself trying to use arrow keys to get to the right position in the form field. I also usually press shift-tab to go up to the previous form field, but on this form, the automatic tab advances me out of the field as soon as I get back to it. How annoying!Now, in case you didn’t notice, there’s another problem with those Date of Birth form fields. Here’s a screenshot of the Employee Information section of the Request ID Card form:

In the screenshot, if you look at the Employee Date of Birth fields, you can see where I’ve entered that fictitious date I previously spoke of, ‘12/12/1234′. You’d never know it, from looking at the page, though. It looks like I only entered ‘1/1/123′. I figured it had to be either a font size problem, or a form input size problem. When I did a ‘View Source’ on the page, I saw that it’s the latter:

<td align="left"><font color="#ff0000">* </font>Employee Date of Birth:</td>
<td><input name="EDOB_MM" size=”1″ tabindex=”14″ onKeyUp=”AutomaticTab(this.value,eval(’document.idcard.EDOB_DD’),2)” maxlength=”2″ onFocus=”window.status=’Please enter the month of birth.’;select(this)”> /
<input name=”EDOB_DD” size=”1″ tabindex=”15″ onKeyUp=”AutomaticTab(this.value,eval(’document.idcard.EDOB_YYYY’),2)” maxlength=”2″ onFocus=”window.status=’Please enter the date of birth.’;select(this)”> /
<input name=”EDOB_YYYY” size=”3″ tabindex=”16″ onKeyUp=”AutomaticTab(this.value,eval(’document.idcard.Member_first_name1′),4)” maxlength=”4″ onFocus=”window.status=’Please enter the year of birth.’;select(this)”><input type=”hidden” name=”EDOB” id=”EDOB” value=”"> mm / dd / yyyy</td>

The maxlength attributes are correct, but size attributes, which control how big the viewable text input is on the page, are all too small. Why the hell would someone make a form that hides one character from each date field?

You can also see the javascript calls to the annoying AutomaticTab “feature” in that code, above. Here’s the source for their AutomaticTab function:

function AutomaticTab(CurrentLocation,
    Destination,CurrentFieldLength)
{
var fieldlength;
fieldlength = CurrentLocation.length;
if( fieldlength == CurrentFieldLength)
Destination.focus();
}

Evil. Pure evil. Seriously, I can hit tab my damn self! I don’t need this dumb javascript to help me get from one field to another, especially when I need to use the cursor keys to move left/right within the fields, because not all the digits can be seen on these fields, thanks to the size/maxlength mismatch.

I’d like to think they only screwed up this one set of form fields on this page. Unfortunately, when I tried request cards for 4 family members, I ran into it again:

Yes, 4 more sets of date fields with annoying AutomaticTab calls and size/maxlength mismatches. *sigh*

These things were annoying, but did not stop me from completing the form. However, when I tried to submit it, I got this:

It focused and selected the Employee Date of Birth : Year field, but that looked fine (as far as I could tell, since only 3 digits were visible):

Since I knew the AutomaticTab function would get in the way if I tried to use the cursor keys within the year field, to verify all 4 digits, I disabled it by entering this in my address bar:
javascript:void(AutomaticTab=function(){})

Then, I was able to determine that the year field was fine. It contained ‘1234′, which is what I intended (for the purpose of this blog entry. I entered my real DOB info originally).

So, I looked at the page’s source code again, and found the place where that error message came from. It was in a function called “check_date”. Since I knew my date was valid, I disabled the date validation by putting this in my location bar:
javascript:void(check_date=function(){return true;})

This allowed me to submit the form. This is also a good example of why it’s important to not rely solely on client-side validation (javascript) when writing web applications. Javascript validation code can be viewed, modified, and even disabled. I could have submitted any year value I wanted, since I disabled their javascript date validation function. Hopefully, they have server-side validation as well, but I did not care to find out. I’m not interested in breaking my health insurance provider’s website (they’re pretty good at that, themselves!).

This has been going on for way too long. It definitely started after Google released the new interface for gmail, but it didn’t happen immediately. Now, I’m not blaming Firefox, and I’m not blaming Google. I’m 95% certain that it’s the result of conflicts between one or more of my extensions. I’m always changing up my extensive (hehe) lineup of extensions, and many of those extensions dramatically impact the way the browser works. I love web development extensions, debugging tools, power toys, etc.

Thankfully, I recently read an entry on Mishoo’s blog, which started out describing some [presumably completely unrelated] Firefox performance issues, and ended with a short, positive review of Safari. I decided to give it a try, for curiosity’s sake. I tried Safari when the Windows version was first released, and I remember not being impressed, to say the least. I don’t remember what I didn’t like, but I do remember uninstalling it immediately, so it must have been pretty bad. I don’t use Opera every day, but I do respect it enough to keep it installed and reasonably up-to-date.

Anyways, I tried the newest version of Safari, version 3.0.4, and was pretty impressed. The interface was attractive, simple, and fairly intuitive. Just what one might expect from Apple, I guess. I’m not a big Apple fan; I do not own an iPod or an iPhone, I don’t use iTunes, and have never owned a Mac. But even I know that Apple has a reputation for attractive, simple, and intuitive products.

Using Safari hardly felt different from using Firefox, to me. Almost all I do miss my Firefox extensions, though, and Safari’s Bookmarks menu leaves a lot to be desired. But it is fast, and I almost all the websites I’ve been to have looked and acted just fine. Best of all, it doesn’t crash when I close gmail!

So, where I had been using Firefox for 99% of my personal browsing and Internet Explorer for 1%, I now find myself splitting that 99% pretty equally between Safari and Firefox (and IE for 1%, since some sites just demand it).

One of these days I’ll probably try running Firefox in Safe Mode, and if closing gmail doesn’t crash it, I’ll start disabling one extension after another, until I find the culprit. For now, though, I’m content using Safari part of the time.

A couple years ago, Lacey and I had an argument about the correct wording for referring to upcoming dates.

For example, what does “This Sunday” mean? What about “Next Sunday”?

Lacey ended up winning that argument, for some reason, so ever since then I’ve tried to speak/interpret these phrases carefully, conscientiously trying to use what she taught me back then. As it turns out, she does seem to be right about the general rules for using these future date words. I’ve paid attention every time I’ve heard anyone mention “this {x}” or “next {x}”, ever since that discussion/argument. But it’s definitely a source of ambiguity that bothers me whenever I hear these terms used.

She told me [something like]:

When referring to the next day {x} that will occur, it’s called “this {x}”.

When referrnig to the day {x} after that, it’s called “next {x}”.

So, since today is Sunday, January 20, 2008:

• this Wednesday is January 23, 2008
• next Wednesday is January 30, 2008

*** fast forward to last night ***

We had an upcoming event to write on the calendar on the fridge. Lacey told me “Next Saturday” at 4:30pm. Since it was Saturday, January 19, 2008 when she said that, I first interpreted it (based on what I learned from Lacey way back then) as Saturday, Februrary 2, 2008.

But, she was actually talking about Saturday, January 26, 2008. I called her out on that, because it screamed “inconsistency” at me. After a brief review of what we talked about back then, I still don’t feel 100% certain of the English language rules deal with future dates.

I found a couple similar questions on Yahoo Answers, tonight:

• If someone said: “please send me the material by the end of next week”?
• What date is next Friday?

But none of the answers on those questions linked to any authoritative Enlglish Language sources.

Does anyone know of any websites that might help me straighten this out, once and for all? A web page that even somewhat resembles an official English language rule/guideline/etc. regarding “this/next (day_of_week)” usage would be greatly appreciated. If you know of any, PLEASE leave a Comment, below! Thanks!

I like Mozilla Thunderbird, for the most part, but I hate the way it handles opening attachments.

It asks whether I want to Open with [select box with apps registered to open the file type], *OR* Save to Disk. 99% of the time, I want to do BOTH.

If I choose “Open with”, it puts the file in a temporary directory, and opens that temporary file with whatever app was selected. In this screenshot, that app is MS Word. So, I can go ahead and read the document, if that’s all I intend to do with it. As soon as I close Word, I can’t assume that the file will continue to exist, since it’s in the temporary directory. Anything in the temporary directory should be placed there with the assumption that it could be deleted at any time.

If I choose “Save to Disk”, I get a standard Windows “Save as…” type dialog (unless I specified in the options that I wanted attachments to always save in a particular folder, without asking), and it just saves it to disk.

I usually want to save it to disk, to the place where I want to keep it, AND open it in my preferred application, to read it immediately. Why do I have to choose? Does anyone know of a Thunderbird add-on that lets you both save AND open an attachment?