It Sucks...

Have been getting irritated with a bunch of stuff of late and so thought of just listing them.

1) Windows Vista
This is no surprise bcos there have been sites dedicated exclusively for this and so no surprise that I too felt this way. I had resisted efforts from many to install the Vista OS in my laptop until last week when I had to go in for a new laptop offered to me by the company and it came with Vista. And needless to say, it has been one bad week. Intermittent blank screens, too slow in spite of a 2 GB RAM and the dreaded pop-ups & a bunch of known issues. That is how my Vista experience has been this past one week and no wonder Vista finds its way in this list. And if rumors are to be believed, MS does not have plans to ship the first Vista service pack at least until the end of this year and may be well into next year.

2) Yahoo mail beta
I have been wanting to write about this yahoo mail beta for a while. When the option to try out the beta version of Yahoo came up a while back, I readily accepted it and as expected out of a beta version, there were a bunch of bugs whose number started reducing as weeks went by. But ever since they integrated the chat application into the mail application, I have started disliking it so much. In their effort to ape Google, the UI that Yahoo has come up with for this integrated chat application is pathetic and worse still, it has made the task of browsing through emails a pain.

3) Comcast's new TV guide & on-demand
Upgrades/ newer versions are supposed to give the customer a better user experience and more features. But somehow Comcast seems to think otherwise. The latest version of their on-demand UI was released amidst fanfare (there were promotions on TV about how the new version is so much better than the existing one and all the customers were contacted over phone & informed of the same) and ever since there have been issues galore. This simple issue should tell something: say, if you are watching a channel in the hundreds (173 is ESPNHD), you want to go back to watching MSNBC on channel 47, you won’t get there by simply pressing 4 and 7. I was totally annoyed when I faced this the first time and my tolerance levels shot up when I heard the solution to it. That, I have to press 0, 4 and 7 to get the 47th channel. This is just a small sample. The on-demand application which had few flaws in the earlier version has gone from bad to worse. I am sure folks who have Comcast on-demand at home will vouch for this statement of mine.

And for the final proof that life hasn't been good to me of late, check this out: The summer season is slowly making its way for the Fall season and though that is not something I am very fond of, having enjoyed summer to the hilt and Seattle in summer being one of the best places to be in summer, fall more than makes up for that with football taking center-stage. To me, the fall season is all about 2 things - football and the fantasy football that goes along with it. This year I am playing in 3 different leagues with 3 different set of friends and this past week saw the finalization of the draft order in all 3 of them. And guess what? In all 3 of the drafts, I got the last pick. It was completely unbelievable. I mean, what are the odds of this happening? In 3 completely unrelated drafts, I get the last pick in each one of them and the draft order was arrived in a random manner in each one of them. Truly sucks...