Sick and Tired of Adobe Reader Updates?

Me too!

Go here and fill out a bug report (since they don’t have a way to leave complaints):

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?event=processform&name;=wishform

Here’s the feedback I’m leaving for them:

Your feedback page doesn’t have a place for complaints, so I’m using the bug report form to do it.
******BUG******
Concise problem statement:
Steps to reproduce bug:
1. Use any computer with Adobe Reader installed.
2. Within a day or two, I’m prompted to confirm yet ANOTHER bloated install and agree to yet ANOTHER Multi page agreement, which I won’t read.
3. click “i do not agree”
4. Uninstall.
5. Install FoxIt PDF reader.
Results: After step 5, become much happier.
Expected results:  I expect to NOT have to install a new version almost every day, and I certainly don’t expect to have to reboot my computer after an update, and I REALLY don’t expect to have to read pages and pages of legal agreements every freaking day!

Look guys, Adobe Reader is a fairly unimportant piece of software in my day to day work and play.  I rarely need to read a PDF and the software has no business trying to make itself so prominent on my desktop, grabbing my attention every day when I only use it once a week, at most… even less now that Google has a web based PDF reader.

Adobe needs to learn its place on my desktop.  It is NOT an important product.  In fact, I’ve uninstalled it from my home PC.  I’m now using FoxIt, which is MUCH LESS intrusive (actually, not intrusive at all).  After I submit this report, I’m going to uninstall it from my 2 work PCs as well.

I’ve had enough of the endless license agreements.  You should have ONE agreement that doesn’t change, unless necessary, then only prompt me for that new one WHEN IT’S CHANGED!  If you were honest, you’d highlight the parts that changed, so I don’t have to copy out the text, save it to a text file, and do a WinMerge file compare between them to see what’s different.  I just don’t have the time to do that EVERY DAY, much less, READ THE ENTIRETY of it EVERY DAY!

When you change your product to:
1. Not update every day.
2. Not have a new license agreement for me to read every day.
3. Become unbloated.
4. Not require a restart for new versions.
5. Learns its place on my desktop as a fairly unimportant and rarely used product and doesn’t speak unless spoken to.

Then, and only then, will I consider installing it again.

Unfortunately, they bug report form only allows 2000 characters (no doubt, the programmer that made the form is using a database that doesn’t allow more than 2000 characters in a field (probably MS SQL Server) and doesn’t know how to record more than 2000 characters at a time).  How many detailed bug reports can fit into 2000 characters really?  But, that’s another issue.  So, I didn’t leave the entire text, only part of it.  I put a link to this entry so they can read the entirety of it.

Anyway, I encourage you all to leave similar feedback to them if you’re also sick and tired of the intrusive, constant updating, and unending license agreements.  If you don’t complain, they’re NOT going to fix it.

Update:  I found this interesting thread on the Adobe forums.  It’s a couple years old, but more relevant today than it was then:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/755439?decorator=print&displayFullThread;=true

Most Awesome, Unintentional Facebook post ever!

You know when your friends on FaceBook click “like” on something, like a song or a personality, FaceBook publishes that as “John Doe likes American Idol”?  Sometimes, the name of the item they’re liking turns the post into what looks like something with a different meaning.  Recently, a friend of mine “liked” the TV show, “Men Of A Certain Age”, so his FB automatic post read,

“John Doe likes Men Of A Certain Age.”

That was classic and I had to comment on it (Thread below, with the names and images of the innocent removed).  What other funny, unintentional posts have you seen on FaceBook?  Leave your comments below.

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Resolved: Windows 7 – “E: is not accessible. Access is denied”

Have you received the error in Windows 7, “E: is not accessible. Access is denied” (where E: is any drive letter)?  I can’t guarantee my solution will solve your problem as there are many causes, but here’s what happened to me and how I solved it:

What happened?

Remember the April 27, 2011 storms across the South East United States?  Well, I was smack dab in the middle of that (had to duck and cover against tornadoes FOUR TIMES that day!)  Anyway, during two of those events, at night, with golf ball sized hail that totaled both of our vehicles, we also had an enormous amount of lightning and lost power.  My APC Back UPS 1500 X lost its ability to store a charge and became an expensive surge protector.  Since then, we’ve had lots of power outages and fluctuations… just this past week, we’ve had several significant storms and 2 tornadoes in the area.  During one of the recent power spikes or drops, my E: drive become corrupted to the point that all disk activity caused my Quad-Core PC with 8GB of RAM to halt for 30 seconds at a time.  Eventually, Windows deactivated the drive and took it offline.  After a couple of reboots, Windows scanned the drive and repaired a lot of the errors, but my drive showed up in Windows Explorer as, well, nothing:

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(Yes, these are all real, physical drives.  I don’t do partitions.)

When I tried to open it, I got the infamous “E: is not accessible. Access is denied” dialog box.  This was bad news… REALLY bad news, because most of my source code was on there and I hadn’t backed it up recently.  Also, all my scanned documents and family photos were on it.  Most of those were backed up, but not the most recent ones.

Here’s how I fixed it:

I right-clicked the drive and chose “Properties” and clicked the “Security” tab to get this dialog box:

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Then I clicked the “Continue” button, which brought up this “Permissions for Local Disk (E:)” dialog box:

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I clicked the “Add…” button and typed in my Windows login ID to add it to the list of groups and users that have access to it.  Then, my user name was added to the list.  I clicked my user name to select it, then checked the check box in the “Allow” column, on the “Full control” line to give my account full control of the drive.  When I clicked OK, Windows started scanning through ALL of the folders on the drive, applying the new security permissions to each folder.  The following dialog box popped up, quickly spinning through all the folders on the drive:

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But, when it got to a folder under “E:Documents and Settings”, which are private folders for other users from an older installation of Windows, it popped up a dialog box similar to the following for each of them:

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I just clicked “Continue” for each one.  I can grant myself access to them letter on an as-needed basis when or if I ever need to get to them.

After about 5 minutes, it was done and I had access to my drive again.  Note that the drive scan process that took place during the reboot created a folder on the root called, “found.001” and placed a bunch of files in it that it had found, but had lost the information of what folders they were in.  Turns out there were 190 files.  188 of them were family photos and 2 movie snippets… all from my cell phone.

T-Mobile “My Faves” is gone, but you can get it back

Have you noticed you’re using up minutes for numbers you’ve already added to your T-Mobile “My Faves” list?  That’s because T-Mobile silently disabled your list in May of 2011.

What is “My Faves”?  It’s a feature where you can add up to 5 phone numbers to each phone on your plan.  Anytime you make a call to or receive a call from any of those numbers, those minutes are NOT used against your bank of allowed prime time minutes.  Verizon has a similar feature called “Friends & Family”.

How do you get it back?  Call 611 from your cell phone and complain.  I was on for 31 minutes.  The guy I spoke to falsely claimed I never had that feature.  I know, for a fact, that I did because I talked to their operators multiple times to help me get it set up.  I also set it up on their web site and remember them telling me, multiple times, that you can make changes once per month.  There’s also a “My Faves” app on my MyTouch 3G Slide phone, and I recall them telling me that changes I make to the app have nothing to do with the actual list.  Anyway, after complaining, he talked to the loyalty department and they added it back.

After they add the service back, it’ll take about 2 hours (or so they say) for it to show up on the web site after you log in.  Here’s the URL:

https://my.t-mobile.com/ManageLandingPage.aspx?unavid=Manage&rp.Logon;=true

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Note the section I have circled.  This is a list of all your phones.  There should be a link by each line that has the “My Faves” feature enabled.  Click that link and you can add up to 5 phone numbers that are always free.  Note that each line can have its own list of 5.

DO NOT add other T-Mobile numbers to this list because calling other T-Mobile #’s is always free!

Did you know you can use this feature to MAKE ALL YOUR CALLS FOR FREE!?!?

Read my article on how to do that here:

Google Voice: Free, unlimited calling on your cell/mobile phone!

Rush Limbaugh’s Tea

Rush Limbaugh just announced a new product: Two If By Tea.  Click the link to get to the web site.  The motto is “From Tea To Shining Tea”.  He’s got 2 flavors.  Regular and Raspberry.  Each available in regular and diet version.  One 12 pack case costs $23.76.  Free shipping.

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Chromium on Google’s Chromebook: Opinion

I got my hands on my first Google Chromebook at CodeStock on Saturday.  I have to say, that I was utterly unimpressed and severely disappointed.  What is a Chromebook?  It’s a severely limited netbook with a severely scaled down version of Linux that runs only ONE program… Google’s Chrome browser.  That’s it.  That’s all it does.

How much does it cost?

As of right now, none are available, but they WILL be in mere days.  Samsung is offering one with a minimum buy-in price of $429.  THAT’S the key, right there… The price.  Why?  Because you have to consider what alternatives you can get for the SAME price (or less).

What can you get for $429 or less?

How about these two netwooks from mwave.com?

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These have more memory, more storage, run a full blown version of Windows 7 (which means you’ve got a legal license for Windows 7 to boot (pun intended)), have more connectors, and guess what?  They can run the Chrome browser (and any others) and do EVERYTHING any Chromebook can…. FOR LESS!!!

And… You can even install the Chromium OS on these netbooks to make a full blown Chromebook yourself… FOR LESS!

So, I’m not necessarily knocking the idea of going completely to the cloud and doing all your work in a browser.  Hey, whatever floats your boat.  I *AM* knocking the idea of blowing your hard earned cash on an intentionally crippled piece of hardware when you could get so much more for less money.

So, what do you get with a Chromebook that you don’t with these easily found alternatives?

A smaller checking account.

Box.Net Releases YOUR E-Mail Address to Spammers!

Box.NET has released addresses from their user database to spammers.  At this point, I don’t know if it was intentional or by accident, nor do I even know if they know about it, but here’s how I know, with nearly 100% certainty that they are responsible, in one way or another, for releasing my E-Mail address to spammers:

Update (6/8/2011):  I received this response from box.net:

Very sorry to hear that this has happened to your account. We never sell or give out email addresses, so trust me when I say that everyone at Box is taking this very seriously. We know that you trust us with your information, so hearing that you’re being spammed makes us feel terrible.

We’re currently investigating what happened and will update our users once we have answers. In the meantime, please feel free to contact me directly at ******** if you have other questions or concerns.

Best,

Mark

That was left to me on this blog.  That makes me feel much better that they are now aware of it and are researching it.  Note that I’ve also received a confirmation from another Box.net user in the comments below.  I look forward to Box.net’s resolution.

Article now continues…

I follow these practices (religiously) when giving out my E-Mail address to vendors such as box.net:

In short, I make a new E-Mail address for EVERY website that needs my e-mail address and NEVER give that address to anyone else, EVER!.  The E-Mail address I registered with Box.net YEARS ago finally started receiving spam as of 6/2/2011.  The one on the 2nd was for replica luxury watches and the other was for, you guessed it, those little blue pills, which was today, 6/3/2011.

Update:  I called box.net at 877-729-4269 and informed them.  They seemed to take it seriously (at least, they didn’t discard it).  I should be expecting some E-Mail from their support manager about the instance.

For the record, to show how my anti-spam practices actually work, I’ve received only about 10 or so spams so far this year (and we’re well into June now).  100% of them are traceable to who was responsible.  3 or 4 were from my cousin’s wife’s PC that has a virus.  2 were from a friend with a virus, and 3 or 4 were from one of my sisters’ PCs, also with a virus, and then these 2 triggered by box.net somehow releasing my address.  In case you’re wondering if I’ve forgotten to check my spam folder… these ARE the full contents of my spam folder.  These anti-spam practices really work and take less effort, overall, than manually filtering through all the spam and marking or deleting it.