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Education.com and my bank account #banking #thanksbofa

That feeling when you get your credit/debit card and you finally get your own bank account and can spend your own money on your own things…

…and then you realize you can’t manage your account to save your life and you run out of money before you can say “oops”.

 

That’s me.  And I’m bad at learning, so guess what?  Throughout my having a bank account, I haven’t learned how to keep anything under control.  So I’m having to stare at my $0.30-ish balance almost every week because I can’t Money.

Yay me?…

 

Then there’s education.com.  Oh my FUCKing god, no one over there even has a vision for better education (or so I’m told).  These guys deserve their own post, and if you want me to rat on them please say so.

 

So here’s my experience (and I’m going to end up ratting on them anyway):

 

Someone told me that Education.com is this horrible site that is incredibly lazy and has horrible games.  I was tasked with the task of trying out some of those games.

I found out I need to have a Plan to actually play those games.  So I made a plan, and started a free trial, after which I would need to pay 35 dollars each month to continue using the site.  Remember the 35 dollar part.

 

SO I played a few of their games.  And of course it was Pre-school up through 1st grade, so I played a lot of games with awkward animals and flat graphics.

Then I came across a game called “I Got Your Number”.

It was this game-show type Flash game, where a host (who was a dog), asked you math questions having to do with the hundreds chart (a chart with numbers from one to one hundred, ten numbers per line).  At first I thought the dog had a mustache, but then noticed that it kept flickering out of existence during some frames of the dog’s animations.  Then I realized it actually looked a lot like teeth.  Then I realized it actually was the host’s teeth, and the animators completely screwed up on the layering, and set the teeth to appear outside the dog’s mouth!  It looked awful.

 

So I played a few more games then gave up.  I responded to the challenger saying that it sucked, cancelled the trial and completely forgot about it.

Now pay attention.

 

Fast forward a week or so.  Note that I hadn’t actually heard anything from education.com, except the sad “are you leaving?” email that I got when I told it I was leaving.

 

In fact, here’s part of it:

—

Hello,

Thanks for giving Brainzy [the game] a try. We’re writing to confirm that you’ve successfully canceled your free trial and your credit card will not be charged.

—

Well, they lied, because my bank account got hit by the monthly payment from the Plan that they didn’t actually cancel.  Appearently they didn’t get the memo that when you cancel a plan, you’re not supposed to wait past the first charge to actually get to canceling it!!

 

I had less than a dollar remaining on my bank account.  Brainzy’s plan costs 35 dollars per charge.  Into debt I go!

 

And then even farther into debt I get shoved because the bank has this dumb, dumb, DUMB overdraft fee.

 

An overdraft fee is something banks have because they can’t figure out that keeping money in bank accounts is how professionals survive in the first place.

A week after going into a negative balance, the bank charges you about 20 dollars. To your bank account.  So now it’s even harder to get out of the red, and you’re left screaming at the bank clerk (I didn’t scream at the bank clerk, but I WANTED to).

 

I am lucky, however, as I have BillGuard, and have already started disputing with Education.com over the charge.

I don’t think I explained it very well to them though, as I just said “I forgot to cancel my plan.”, because I hadn’t actually checked because I thought people have decency.

 

Needless to say, I hate everything right now.

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iOS 8 Beta 1 #apple #ios

This might be a thing.  But if Apple comes to me and says “Screw you you can’t talk about this”, then it won’t be a thing.  (And I still have a reason:  No money.  Oh, and Education.com is a dick.)

 

That’s right.  Apple forgot how to Security once again and allowed iOS 8 Beta 1 to be downloaded to literally everyone.

 

I suppose before I get into the real OS I should talk about how these betas are not secured.

 

Every developer beta SHOULD have a UDID check inside the file.  This means when you go to install a beta using iTunes, iTunes verifies with Apple if the device has an approved UDID.  UDID stands for Unique Device IDentifier, and it is used by Apple’s services to find the EXACT device that is using the service.

iOS 7 Beta 1 and iOS 8 Beta 1, for one reason or another, does not have this UDID check.  So when iTunes goes to install the beta, it doesn’t matter what UDID the device has, because the check wasn’t performed.  Now, Apple’s services could have detected that the check wasn’t being done at all, and denied the install, but for some reason it doesn’t.

 

So yes.  I have Beta 1 in my possession.  On my iPad, but not my iPhone.  Even though the 5S would be way better suited for iOS 8 than the iPad 2…betas are almost always terribly unstable, and I need my phone to be working.  I don’t use my iPad very much anyway.

On to the OS itself!

—

 

One of the first things I tried out was the new photo editing features.  And while laggy, they were awesome.  One thing though…for extremely dark photos, both the Light and Color sliders wouldn’t work at all.  I could slide them up and down, but the picture wouldn’t change, and the previews didn’t have any difference between them.  Whether this was due to the iPad 2 camera or the software I don’t know.

 

The photo search function worked well too.  I have no idea why it wasn’t in iOS 7…or 6.  Or 5.  Or any of them.

 

There is still no Weather app on the iPad.  I know it’s only Beta 1…but it really should’ve been in iOS 7.  Just my preference.

 

I’m not quite sure if Spotlight Search should use the internet or not.  If you forget to turn off Airplane mode, then you’ll have a hell of a time trying to figure out why Spotlight isn’t giving you Wikipedia entries (although I did find that it retains previous Wikipedia searches and info, so that’s good).

 

Handoff and Continuity obviously didn’t work because I had only one device running the beta.

 

No Siri though.  Sad Siri is sad for not catering to 1% more of the Apple fanbase.

 

Overall, the experience was incredibly laggy good.  The one thing the iPad was really bad at was splitting the keyboard in two.  For some reason it lagged MASSIVELY when trying to do that.

 

But my reaction to all these lags, omissions and general stupidness is a wholehearted MEH.  It’s the first beta.  It will be broken in some ways.  I don’t care.  Apple is just getting their feet under them with all these new things.  The problems will be fixed.

 

I’m not even supposed to have this anyway. (Unless Apple is cleverly actually opening the betas to everyone!  You must remember, Apple has already opened up the OS X Yosemite betas to the first one million people (I apparently didn’t make the cut)!)

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What are you doing #apple

Bear with me for a moment.

 

System-wide third-party keyboards.

 

Buttons that can launch custom actions from within the sharing section.

 

System-wide third-party keyboards.

 

Beats Music acquisition just for another Steve Jobs.

 

SYSTEM-WIDE THIRD PARTY KEYBOARDS.

 

Are you getting it?  These are not just android features anymore.  Now they will be available for all iOS users.

 

*cue Steve Jobs’s ghost dying and a very loud playback of “Don’t Stop Believing”

When Steve Jobs told Tim Cook not to emulate him, Tim listened.  And instead of stalling and exploding into a pit of slag like the WHOLE WORLD was expecting, Apple continued to innovate and push the envelope.

 

Ever had a problem where you left off on a project on your Mac and had to search for the program, open it, and open your document on your iPhone/iPad?  No more.  Now, the Mac realizes you left off somewhere, and will tell your phone/tablet/phablet, and your phablet tablet phone will prompt you on the lockscreen to open the document that you last had open on the Mac.  It’s called Handoff.  It makes sense.  I want it.

 

I can definitively say that Apple still has that magic touch.

 

—

 

Now for the awkward moves that Apple has pulled.  Namely, the 5C (which I haven’t heard a lick of since that weird dots ad campaign), and the Beats acquisition.

 

The 5C…hmm.  It had color.  It fit in with iOS 7.  It felt fun…but…it just wasn’t right.  People reacted the same way that they did with iOS 7, except this time it wasn’t the colors, it was the plastic.  It might have been called poly-something-or-other, Apple may have said “we had no interest in imitating the typical, fragile plastic phone“, but dude…it’s plastic.  A material usually associated with cheap phones and/or baby’s toys.  Even if God built it…it’s plastic.  People will assume it will break if you so much as drop it on carpet.  It’s PLASTIC.

Also $600 iPhone vs. Free Firmware.  Who wins?  Apple, I’m going to tell you this for your own good: Please Try Again.

 

Steve Jobs would have thought of this…if only Apple had hired another perfectionist who knew what people would want before they did…

 

Oh wait, they have!  Dr. Dre!  Of BEATS.  A MUSIC COMPANY.  NOT RELATED TO ITUNES MUSIC/RADIO.

They also make headphones.  Every single market analyst was stunned.  They hit Ctrl+Alt+Del accidentally on their stock market computers and crashed the stock market (lawl i made a joke).

 

Here’s what I think:  Dr. Dre is a perfectionist, right?  What drives Apple?  Perfectionism.  Awesome build quality, awesome software quality, the Magic Moment, building things people don’t even know they want until they use it!

 

QED.  Apple has just bought a second Steve Jobs.

Apple.  Bought.  Innovation.

Chew on that and tell me how it tastes.  Does it taste like shit?  Does it taste as bad as Apple hiring that iOS jailbreaker a while back?  What?  That tastes like shit too?  I don’t know what you’re talking about.

 

Some people say Apple just wants Jimmy Iovine.  And you know what’s funny?  This post was originally going to ask “Who the fuck is Jimmy Iovine??”  Then I actually checked his Wikipedia article.  You can tell I don’t follow Beats very much.  But the article dosen’t say whether he’s a perfvectionist like Dre.

 

But here’s the thing.  We know that Dre is signing up as an executive.  But we don’t know where Jimmy is going to go.  He was hired, we just don’t know what position he was hired to be in.  Is he going to be CEO, CCO, CBO, design nerd, replace Craig Federigi or Jony (please not Jony)?

 

Time will tell what all this nonsense means.  That or Apple will explode into slag before they finish their new campus.