Microsoft has absolutely no way to cancel recurring billing of your credit card on xbox.com. None. They tell you they do, multiple times, but then they just provide a link which provides another link, which provides another link until you end up at the place you started. They imply that at some point there will be a way for you to stop the recurring payments from coming off your credit card, but it is a lie. A lie full of malice. A maliceful lie. The only way to stop the recurring payments is to call, so call I did, after spending 15 minutes trying to find the phone number.

I don’t get it though. I like xbox live, and I want to continue using it, but now I am scared of it. No way to cancel is one thing, but to make it so friggin hard and intentionally confusing is just shiesty. I hate doing business with shiesty people. I don’t want to give shiesty people money, because they do stupid shit like make me phone them just to cancel a recurring subscription that I never intended to have in the first place. Shiesty!

I mean, you’ve already won Microsoft. I’ve got so much money invested in games and hardware for the 360, I don’t really have a choice anymore, I pretty much need to pay for a gold membership. I’m just asking some illusion of control here, there’s no need to be a dick about it.

Try as I might, I can not get Google Buzz to recognize ShaunK.blog. It recognized gigglingcorpse pretty much right away. It’s probably because I never update this place. I should change that, since I have a lot of crap I could write here stored in my brain, I have just been lazy.

Lazy and scorned.

There was beer and seven layer dip. What more could be asked of me? A demonstration you say, of this new operating system? Twenty minutes later I have discussed all I can think to discuss about Windows 7. It is Vista with a new taskbar.

I’m not really sure what Microsoft expected from this launch party nonsense. I strongly suspect it was just an excuse to mail out free copies of the new OS. Really, how could a party about an operating system be exciting?

Not that I’m complaining though. I had some people over, we ate some chips and chatted, and I got an operating system for free that I would’ve eventually had to pay for. Hooray!

Why Coast Capital? Well, honestly, because they are across the street from where I work and I realized my insurance had expired. Turns out that they are pretty good though! They cost a little bit($30) more than ICBC, but my comprehensive deductible dropped from $300 to $100 and I got loss of use coverage, which means car rental is covered if my car gets messed up.

I also checked out BCAA, and Canadian Direct. Those guys are both awesome because they let you get quotes online. Canadian Direct actually was the best deal out of all of them by a little bit, but not enough for me to drive uninsured for the day.

So if you are smarter than me and actually renew your car insurance before it expires, you should check out these places to make sure you’re getting the best deal.

Weddings are expensive!

I proposed two weeks ago, and I’m already tired of wedding preparations. What started out as a small wedding with close friends and family has ballooned into an event with 100+ people. I don’t think we know 100+ people to be honest. Organizing food, shelter and transportation for that many people is hard. Even more so when you can count on the majority of those people being drunk. Also the wedding is on an island.

If that wasn’t enough work, we also have decided to have the wedding in Robin’s grandparent’s garden. Unfortunately the garden has been neglected for a few years and will need hundreds of man-hours of work to get it into proper wedding ceremony form. Working in the garden is pretty enjoyable actually, especially after five days a week of sitting in front of a computer. Plus it is hard to spend money when you are working all weekend.

We have the hall booked. Seats ninety-five people, so that has provided a nice upper limit for invitations. We’ve also booked a photographer. She seemed pretty cool, her pictures on her website are nice. Robin is super stoked about having professional photos done. Also two hotels(1, 2) are blocked off for guests to book, since Saltspring fills up pretty fast in the summer. We’re looking at getting some campsites reserved too so that people who don’t wanna spend as much money staying on the island can camp instead.

I think we’re doing pretty good. May 29th is still a long ways away, I’m pretty sure we’ll be ready to go when the time arrives.  I keep feeling like we’re forgetting something though?

Rookie mistake Microsoft. Now a competing platform will have it, and you will regret shunning Canada!

Anyway, as is so often the case, Google has something very smart to say on the matter. Maybe not Google as a whole, but at least two guys who work for Google. Two guys who work for Google and were also two out of the three creators of Subversion. In my opinion that puts them in the pretty smart category.

They talk about a lot of things in the video, but at the start in particular they discuss precisely what I was trying to talk about, but from the opposite angle. They bring up how difficult people find it to share their code. My blog post was about the flip side of the same coin, where people feel the need to ridicule other people’s code. The point is basically the same: you need to drop the ego and think of programming as an iterative team based effort. Really it isn’t even exclusive to software development. Everyone makes stupid mistakes, the people with huge egos are just better at hiding them. I’ve witnessed this first hand in fact, and it rarely improves the performance of the team as a whole. Honestly some of my greatest fuck ups could have been easily avoided if I wasn’t too proud to admit I needed help.

This idea of a “rock star” or “genius” programmer  is out of tune with the reality of software development. I have actually seen the phrase “rock star programmer” used in job postings. I can’t help but wonder if the people who made those job postings understood what they were asking for. You don’t want a developer on your team who disregards everyone’s ideas, who disappears for months hoarding their code away until it is “done” to avoid embarrassment, who looks down their noses at anyone who doesn’t constantly stroke their ego. Even if a self proclaimed rock star programmer is as good as they think they are, they still aren’t going to get very much done all by themselves.

It’s not a crime to be proud of your work, and it is not bad form to offer constructive criticism. It’s a thin line though, and I don’t think many people walk it well, myself included. It is easy to mistake doing things differently for doing things wrong. It’s easy take a simple problem and over complicate it just to demonstrate how impressively you could solve it, assuming it was a problem that ever needed solving. It is painful to see it happen, especially when you realize you’re the one doing it.

This is particularly appealing to me, because this is basically how I listen to music. I tend to listen to music in phases, I will spend a few weeks listening to a certain genre, and then just switch for a few weeks. You can see if you go to my last.fm profile. Last.fm supports this flip flopping pretty well. Being able to do this easily without manually creating playlists is a must have for me now. This is why I switched from Winamp to iTunes in fact, the Genius playlist generator in iTunes is the only way I listen to music unless I have just gotten a new album and want to listen to it at least once start to finish.

I also have a tendency to fall into musical ruts. I will listen to the same seven or eight albums over and over and over again. The albums occasionally shift around, but there have been literally years where the songs in my mp3 player haven’t changed at all. At first I assumed it was because no good new music was coming out. That, as it turns out, was total bullshit. I just didn’t know where to look. Last.fm helps solve that problem. While it is still very easy to fall int a rut with it, constantly starting up the same stations with the same artists and tags, it also makes discovering new music fairly trivial. Basically, if I hear anyone say “I really like <band name here>” I will plug it into last.fm and give their station a listen. I have ended up discovering a lot of new music I really like this way, with almost zero effort.

A side effect of my recent addiction to last.fm is that it has re-kindled my desire for a smartphone. Last.fm is basically the killer smartphone app for me. Whichever smartphone I end up getting, whichever plan I end up choosing, is more or less based around whether I will be able to listen to last.fm whenever I want wherever I want. So hot! Unfortunately the iPhone last.fm app has the pretty severe limitation of not letting you do anything else while you’re streaming. This is of course due to the fact that the iPhone is incapable of running background tasks. That’s a pretty major downside, and it’s not an issue on Android phones.

Anyway, if you like music a lot, and you find yourself having a hard time finding new stuff, I suggest you check it out. Unfortunately last.fm recently started charging Canadians $3USD a month. I broke down and paid it and I haven’t regretted it.

The second you give a gift, with the explicit or implicit expectation of receiving one in kind, you have  really taken something away. You have said “I have spent $x on you, on something you had no control over. I now expect you to do the same, whether you want to or not.”

Now the hapless victim of your “gift” has two choices. Break your unreasonable social contract, or sacrifice their time and money to appease you. Basically they will have paid $x for an item they may or may not have even wanted!

I ripped off the title’s “style” from the episode titles for The Big Bang Theory.

What are the xmice? Basically they are utilities (one command line driven and one with a GUI) that allow you to activate Windows’ ability to let window focus follow the mouse cursor. This lets you do handy things like scroll background windows with your mousewheel, or enter text into them, without bringing them up in front of everything else.

I first started using this style of window focus a long time ago, when it was a feature in TweakUI, the Windows XP UI tweaker power toy. Unfortunately TweakUI doesn’t work for Vista (or Windows 7 I imagine) and so I went looking on the internet for an easy way to allow for the same thing. Apparently one didn’t exist. The only solution was a fairly complex and sketchy registry hack, which I didn’t like.

So I made xmouse to let me do the same thing, using nary more than a simple Windows API call. I now share it with the world in the hopes that other people like me can partake in the glory that is click-free window focus.