spugbrap’s blog

I got an email from DirecTV recently, telling me that prices are going up. They linked to a PDF with new pricing info. It looks like the price of just about every subscription plan/feature they offer is going up by $2-5/month. It was not customized for me, though–it was very generic.

To find out how much my own rates were going to increase, I had to login to my account on directv.com. When I got there, though, I had a very hard time figuring out exactly what my current plan is, and how much I’m currently paying for it.

See, the problem is that I signed up with my bank to receive e-bills from most of my billers, including DirecTV. For some reason, because I usually like to view and pay all of my bills from one central location (my bank’s website), DirecTV will not allow me to view any of my bills–past or present–on directv.com.Here’s what I got when I tried to view a bill (to see which subcription package/rate plan I’ve been on for the past few years):

Our records show you are signed up to view your DIRECTV bill through your financial institution, or another bill paying web site, and not through directv.com. Because the DIRECTV online bill view service allows you to view your bill at only one web site, you are unable to view your bill at directv.com.


To view your bill here instead, you must first discontinue the online bill view you set up at your other bill paying website, by following the instructions they provide. Once de-enrolled from their bill view feature, it may take up to 30 days before you can view your bill statement at directv.com.


In the meantime, you still have access to all other directv.com account functions, including making an immediate, one-time check or credit card payment. Thank you.To ensure the privacy of your personal information, this message will no longer appear once you close the pop-up browser window.

I don’t understand the point of preventing me from viewing my bill from multiple locations. I encountered this same odd behavior with Verizon in the past. Does anybody know why they would do this? I could understand limiting users to having monthly e-bills sent to only one bank. But I think you should always be able to view your account information, including at least the most recent bill, on the company’s site, itself.

To make matters worse, it can take a month or two to get them to start sending e-bills to a bank, and then it can take a month to stop them from sending e-bills to that bank. That huge delay puzzles me, as well. Online customer account management and B2B communication should be instantaneous. 30 days is worse than snail mail! Couldn’t DirecTV print out my bill, send it to my bank via horseback mail carrier, and have someone at my bank type the bill into their system in less than 30 days? Ugh!

Anyways, my rate increase is about 5.5%. Oh well, not like I have much choice. It’s Comcast or DirecTV, here, and I’m happy with my DirecTV DVR that I got before their agreement with Tivo ended. I tried Comcast cable for a while, last year, but I couldn’t deal with the horrible Scientific Atlanta DVR that came with that.

**UPDATE BEFORE POSTING**Okay, I’ve been meaning to blog about this for several weeks, now. I logged into my account at directv.com, a few minutes ago, and I was able to see the name and price of my subscription plan right at the top of the main Account Details page, in a section called “Activity Since Last Bill.”

Click the above link to see the expanded Activity Since Last Bill section from my directv.com Account Details page.

I’m not sure if I just didn’t notice/find this link when I was looking for it, a few weeks ago, or if they’ve since made some changes to their website. I think I’m seeing a lot more DHTML/AJAX going on, so I’m thinking they made some UI improvements recently.

Unfortunately, the “View Bills” link still takes me to that page quoted above, where they tell me that I can’t view my bill on their site since I signed up to be able to receive e-bills on my bank’s site. Hmpf.

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?

I’m a die-hard keyboard user, and always like to know when there’s a keyboard shortcut to accomplish something that might otherwise take a few strategic mouse clicks. The Windows key, while a bane to gamers’ existence, actually provides us with some useful functions.

I’ve known about several Windows key shortcuts for years, but there are a couple that I learned about more recently (sometime in 2007, I think), which I now use on a daily basis. The title of this post refers to these as ‘lesser-known’, but I base that purely on the fact that *I* did not know about them, not on any sort of user experience testing or published statistics.

Windows-D: Show Desktop

Hides all open windows, bringing the Windows desktop to the front. This duplicates the functionality of the ‘Show Desktop’ icon that exists in the Quick Launch toolbar by default, and the ‘Show the Desktop’ option in the context menu that appears when you right-click the taskbar. It does not actually minimize the other windows, and those windows can be re-focused via Alt-Tab or by clicking their taskbar entries.

Windows-L: Lock Computer

This duplicates the functionality of the ‘Lock Computer’ button in the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Windows Security dialog. On Windows XP systems that use Fast User Switching, it takes you back to the screen that lists user accounts.

I make it a habit of hitting Windows-L whenever I’m done using my PC at home, so that when my wife sits down to use it, she can just click her name and login (or resume her existing session). At work, it’s always a good idea to lock your computer, so I hit Windows-L whenever I get up to leave my desk.

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Now, here are a few more well-known (i.e. I’ve known about them for a long time) ones:Windows-M: Minimize AllThis minimizes all open windows. Programs that hide out in the system tray when you minimize them will be sent to the system tray. Everything else will be minimized to the taskbar. This has the same effect of clicking the ‘Minimize’ icon in the top-right corner of all of your open windows.Windows-F: Search for Files and Folders

This pops up the Windows file search feature. This duplicates the functionality of clicking the Start Menu, clicking the ‘Search’ menu option, and clicking the ‘For Files or Folders…’ sub-menu option.

Windows key (by itself): Open the Start Menu

This pops up the Start Menu, just like what happens when you press Ctrl-Esc or click the start menu. I use this all the time.

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Please note that I’ve still never used Windows Vista, so I am unfamiliar with any Windows-key shortcuts which may have been introduced with it. The shortcuts I’ve described, above, are valid in Windows XP Professional (and most of them were usable in previous versions of Windows as well). I did read about a change to the way the Start Menu works, in Vista, with the introduction of a smart search box.

If you know of any useful Windows-key shortcuts that I may have missed, for ANY version of Windows, please leave a reply and let me (and other readers) know!

If you read this blog on the web, you may have noticed that the whole site looks different. I’ve never been too fond of the default Wordpress theme, and didn’t like any of the other Wordpress themes that I’ve seen, enough to use them.

I did always like the theme I had on my old Blogger geek blog, but that theme was not available for Wordpress. The theme is called “Rounders 3″, originally designed by Douglas Bowman.

So, I hacked apart a page from my old geek blog, and did some reading about Wordpress theme development (see links section below), and worked on building a Wordpress theme based my old geek blog’s theme. Today, I decided to go ahead and switch this blog to use that newly-ported theme.

Here are two screenshots, for comparison:

Useful Links:
Theme Development « WordPress Codex
How-To: Create a Wordpress Theme in 5 minutes

Feedback:
What do you think of the new look? Please feel free to leave a reply, below! Also, if you run across any broken links, unreadable fonts, missing images, alignment problems, etc., please let me know. Thanks!

I’m becoming increasingly aware of usability flaws, as time goes by. I’m a professional web application developer, and tend to work on the presentation layer most of the time, so it makes sense that I pay close attention to user interfaces. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on the subject, but it is something I’m very interested in/passionate about.

But, it’s becoming more of a curse, kind of like the way typos jump out and punch me in the nose, whenever I encounter them. Actually, it’s very much like that. When I run across confusing instructions, misleading button labels, dead ends (pages that don’t include any navigation controls to get back to where I need to be), or any other UI elements that don’t make sense to me, I want to fix them!

Unlike typos, though, I feel like I have a better chance of enacting a change by reporting usability flaws, so I’d like to start emailing companies’ customer service/tech support teams about this kind of stuff.

This requires several steps, though:

1. track down the correct people to contact (may or may not be trivial… depends on the site)
2. write up descriptions of the issues, in a way that the recipients will be able to understand (optionally may involve screenshots, URLs, steps to reproduce, etc)
3. suggest potential solutions/improvements (optional)

As this seems like an awful lot of unpaid time/labor, I think I’m going to start by posting some of this stuff here, on this blog, so I will have it handy if/when I’m ready to deal with the companies directly. That way, I can just post a few quick  notes/screenshots immediately, and can deal with some of the details later, if I feel like dealing with it. Unless it’s something I encounter repeatedly, or something that’s really easy to explain, I’m not sure how often I’ll actually follow through. But many companies keep tabs on the blogosphere, so there’s a slight chance they’ll run across it without me having to actually tell them directly. That would be ideal!

An added benefit of posting these things here is that other people (like you!) will be able to comment on them, and perform a bit of sanity checking for me. You can tell me if I’m overreacting, or missing something obvious. Or, you can chime in and say “I’ve run into that, too, and it bugs the heck out of me!” Or maybe it’s a common gripe, and you know of a GreaseMonkey script that addresses the problem. In any case, comments are always welcome!