This is Alpha, the first-born, when he was 2YO.
This is Beta, the second-born, when he was about 2YO.
This is Gamma, the third-born, when he was about 18MO.
Bad Site, Bad
Jul
25
2008
I recently had to deal with the government, and part of that involved completing an application. The application could be via phone, paper form, or online form. I chose online form, as I thought it would be the easiest and fastest. I chose poorly.
Although most of my life is up-to-date, my home entertainment is still in the Neolithic period (I was going to type Stone Age instead of Neolithic period, but I can’t). I have dial-up internet access and broadcast TV – broadcast analog TV, on a cathode ray tube. The broadcast TV part means that the federal government is going to improve things, which means my life gets disrupted. I have to buy a digital-to-analog TV signal converter, otherwise my TV won’t work next year. But the government decided that, since they’re going to make a boatload of money on this deal, they would be nice and subsidize converter boxes for the masses.
So I went to the government site to order two coupons. The site looks nice, but it is a horrible site. I entered my information and clicked the Submit button. What happened? The form cleared my information. Was my information submitted? Do I need to re-enter it? The site had earlier mentioned to remember my confirmation number, but I got no confirmation number. Do I need to wait for a confirmation number? Is my submittal being processed? No feedback whatsoever, so I waited a few minutes (the site had said that the submittal could take a few minutes), tried again, and the same thing happened.
It turns out that the site does not play nicely with browsers other than IE. I was using Firefox, like any good internet user should. The reason I am writing negatively toward the government website dtv2009.gov is not because it just didn’t like Firefox, but that the website people should know that and either fix it (preferred) or warn users that the website is bad and won’t work with their browsers (not preferred, but still better than just not working and not caring why). So I used IE and got my confirmation number. The End.
Then call, and I will answer; Or let me speak, then reply to me.
Job 13:22
This little article thingy was written by Some Guy sometime around 10:40 pm and has been carefully placed in the Technical category.
July 26th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Someone should tell the Association of Social Anthropologists that those Geico commercials aren’t real.
July 26th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
That’s immensely obnoxious for us sensible Mac users, as Microsoft no longer maintains IE for the Mac. I didn’t think there were still web designers who were dumb enough to produce IE-only sites.
August 27th, 2008 at 7:17 am
[…] received our vouchers from the government for the digital-to-analog TV signal converters. So we went to the store last Saturday and bought a […]