Almost all my players were in losing battles last week, and I had an exceptionally low-scoring game. In fact, I thought for sure my team was going to lose; before Monday night’s Pittsburgh-Baltimore game, I was down by 29 points, and while Big Ben has had a spectacular season thus far, 29 points for a quarterback is asking a lot. But he had a monster game—which, sadly, I missed due to working late—coming up with 5 TD passes and 38 total fantasy points, putting me over the top by a mere 9 points. It was a good thing—no offense to you Eagles fans out there—that Philadelphia (whose D my opponent had) got spanked by Dallas last week, because otherwise I would never have won my fantasy game.

This week is probably going to be tough on me, because I’ll be doing without three key players: Joey Galloway, Wes Welker, and the Patriots’ D. I’ve only got two receivers in play this week, but fortunately they’re Ocho Cinco and Bobby Engram. Less fortunately, my opponent has a fantastic team, including Tony Romo, TO, TJ Houshmandzadeh (who in my personal opinion has been more of a force for Cincinnati than has Ocho Cinco this year; he certainly seems to be getting all the TD catches, and therefore all the fantasy points), and Jeremy Shockey. My opponent is favored by a relatively small margin of 11 points, but this could get ugly.

The reason I’m writing about this earlier than usual, by the way, is that I won’t be able to watch much of the early or late games tomorrow, as I am going to see Da Bears play in Oakland tomorrow! Woo!

did you know? I didn’t. Let me tell you a little story, grasshopper:

So following my distressing realization about the DRM activations, I set out to do something about it. I started by looking around on Adobe’s website for information on who to contact, and I came across the site for the Digital Editions team, to whom I sent an email requesting assistance with my predicament. Note that this was after normal business hours on a Friday, and I realized that I was emailing the development team, who were almost certainly home enjoying their weekends, but I was hoping that they had their customer liaisons monitoring their email regularly.

I did get a response back, with gratifying quickness—which I mention because of its almost shocking contrast with what was to follow—saying that this matter had to be dealt with by Customer Service, as there was no way to deactivate activations from the activation site itself (something I’d already discovered the hard way). The respondent, one Mr. Wright, asked me to contact him if I got no response back from the Customer Service team.

I proceeded to open up a customer service case requesting a deactivation, and responded back to Mr. Wright telling him I’d done so. He replied, again relatively quickly, and reiterated that I should let him know if I got no response back from Customer Service.

By the time Saturday evening rolled around, I still hadn’t gotten a response back from Customer Service (which claimed that responses to online requests were made within 24 hours of their receipt), so I decided to call the Customer Service line.

I was connected to—big surprise here—India, and mayhem ensued. Note that I have nothing against call centers being located in India; the agents are usually very courteous, and I usually get a little bonus courtesy when they discover (upon hearing my name) that I’m Indian too. No, what I objected to here was the astounding incompetence of every person I talked to. Oh yeah! There was more than one.

The first person barely waited for me to finish speaking before transferring me to Technical Support. When I talked to them, they said that Adobe offered no technical support for Adobe Reader, that Customer Support was in fact the right department to contact, and transferred me right back. The second
person I talked to, I tried to explain my plight in more detail, but he clearly didn’t give a rat’s ass what I was saying, latched on to the word “activation” in my story, and transferred me to the Activations department (i.e. the department that’s in charge of authorizing users so that they can use their copies of Photoshop and whatnot), which, if he’d given me a second to get a word in edgewise, I could have told him wasn’t the right place, but did he listen? Nooo. When I got connected with Activations, they told me that, well, they couldn’t handle my problem, and that Customer Service was who I should talk to.

By this time I was getting plenty frustrated, and was like, “But I’ve already talked to two customer service people, and they keep transferring me away!” The Activations person was all, “I’d love to help you, but Customer Service is the department that handles that issue, so I’ll have to transfer you back.”

So lo and behold, I got transferred back to Customer Service, but this time, I was taking no chances. I took the agent through the whole scenario, explaining the concept of the encrypted ebook, and then describing my problem. He finally got the idea, and asked me my identifying information so he could look up my account and delete my now useless activations. I gave it to him, but he said he couldn’t find my account. I gave him my email address, my first name, my last name, everything, and he still couldn’t find me. I was logged into the public-facing activation site, for pity’s sake, and was reading him the profile information I saw there, but he still couldn’t find me. I said, “Look. I’m logged in right now on the activations site. I’m reading you the information I see there. I have to be in the database.” For twenty minutes, he couldn’t find me, and he kept saying “it’s still the same,” like I was the crazy one, and was making all this up just to make his life difficult. Finally he decided to log out and back in to his customer service application, and then I came up. So after this hour-long circus, I finally got all my erroneous activations removed, and was able to reauthorize a valid computer and access my ebooks again.

Needless to say, I was pretty peeved about the whole experience, and decided to let Adobe know about it. First, I wrote back to Mr. Wright the following:

I finally got through to them on the phone (still no response online) and was able to deactivate my existing activations.

A few words here on my experience, which you may want to pass on to your supervisor/manager. First, I had to call customer service three times, the first two of which resulted in transfers to the wrong people and then transfers _back_ to customer service before I got to someone who could help me. Even then it took over 20 minutes to do such a simple thing because he couldn’t find a record of me, even though I was logged into the DRM activation site and was feeding him the profile information that I saw there.

Secondly, I think the fact that I have to call someone to deactivate computers on my profile is, in a word, stupid. If you are logged in and properly authenticated on the activation site, it makes no sense for there to be another step to deactivating machines on your profile. It’s incredibly inconvenient and punishes people who bother to legally purchase content. The key to promoting legitimate use of electronic content is to make it easier for the consumer, not harder. If I have to go through this circus every time I want to authorize a new computer, I’m going to be turned off the product as a whole. As it is, I’m considering never purchasing an Adobe ebook again.

Not to take my frustration out on you, but I think that whoever runs your team needs to hear it. Thanks for your help.

My frustration temporarily exercised, I put the incident out of my mind. Sunday went past without much incident, and on Monday morning, I finally got a response back to my still-open online customer service request on Adobe’s site. It was a long winded message to the effect that the online customer service department only works during normal business hours on weekdays (a fact which is not mentioned anywhere on Adobe’s site that I could see), and then proceeding to tell me that I should talk to—wait for it—Technical Support. I replied back saying that I had already found out, in fact, that Technical Support is not the right department to talk to, and then giving them an earful about my phone experience over the weekend. What did I get in response? Little better than a form letter. Which made me grind my teeth down to stumps.

The only high point here was that Mr. Wright responded back to my rant thusly:

Thanks for the feedback. I know it is a, um, less than optimal system. We are working hard on replacing the underlying system and revamping the support. We inherited the system and it takes time to do these things. I thank you very much for your patience.

As for getting the info to the person running the team, you succeeded…

This is what I don’t get. The customer support people, whose sole purpose is to keep me happy, or barring that, help me out, were indifferent, incompetent, and thoroughly useless. The Digital Editions team lead, on the other hand, who had little or no personal investment in helping me out, and on his own time, cared enough to respond and make me feel—the only person at this company who has, mind—that they actually valued their customers and were working to make things better for them. Thinking about this experience, I’m reminded of this recent Steve Crescenzo post on employee engagement.

So while my Adobe experience has been almost uniformly poor, Mr. Wright has given me hope that at least one person at Adobe cares about customers. Somebody give that guy a promotion.

But wait…there’s more! I found out shortly after the DRM debacle that Adobe has no plans to support Creative Suite software prior to version CS3 on Leopard, and that not until January of next year at least. My copy of CS2 that I paid $800—eight hundred dollars—to upgrade to? Useless. Here’s what kills me. Adobe hasn’t written a decent piece of software in 10 years. The only reason I use Photoshop is just that there isn’t anything else. Adobe has a virtual monopoly on the Mac graphics market, and it shows in this clunky, unfriendly, ridiculously expensive piece of software. It sucks, but they can get away with it because there’s no one to challenge them.

Until now. Earlier this week, an announcement was made revealing Naked Light, a new Leopard-only image editor that is, if its promotional hype is to be believed, completely non-destructive and handles color spaces and varying resolutions seamlessly and transparently. The software goes on public beta today, in a matter of hours. Will it live up to the hype? Who knows? But it’s certainly promising, and at the very least gives me hope that I will eventually find an image editor for Leopard that is a feasible alternative to Photoshop. Hallelujah!

If you read Daring Fireball, you may have read Gruber’s recent post on monospaced screen fonts, specifically Panic Sans, the font bundled with Coda, Panic’s popular web site IDE. Now, I use the Best Text Editor Ever^TM, TextMate, so I’m not looking to purchase Coda, meaning I don’t have access to Panic Sans.

It turns out, though, that Panic Sans is a repackaged version of DejaVu Sans Mono, itself a modified version of Bitstream Vera Sans. I’m now using DejaVu Sans Mono 12pt (love those lowercase Ls!) as my main TextMate, TextWrangler, MarsEdit and Mail plain-text font (replacing Monaco 11pt), though I’m sticking with non-anti-aliased Monaco 10pt for my Terminal font; I like my terminal windows translucent, and anti-aliasing text on those translucent backgrounds just makes it look fuzzy and hard-to-read.

Those interested in another good monospaced font may want to check out Inconsolata. I’m also a big fan of Lucida Console. I am not a fan, however, of Courier or Courier New; I guess I just don’t like monospaced serif fonts for non-design purposes.

Indianapolis had the best chance of stopping the Patriots. Their defense played astoundingly well today, and ultimately what lost this game for them was the offense’s less than stellar—though by no means disappointing—performance.

How about those Patriots, though? Sloppy play overall, but they pulled it out in the end. Randy Moss of the magic hands and Tom Brady the quick draw artist saved this game, Moss almost single-handedly. Quite literally, in the case of one of those receptions.

I don’t think anyone in the rest of their schedule, except perhaps the Steelers, has the ability to stop them, so the next best game we have to look forward to is the AFC championship game between these two teams.

Vinatieri missing a field goal? The Pats going 3-and-out? What a game.

You know, I thought New England was going to dominate the Colts’ pride in this game, but so far, though it’s early yet, Indy is looking better on both defense and offense than New England. So exciting!

manhandled out there. I’m really rooting for the Chargers here, not only because of LT (who’s had a terrible performance with just 33 rush yards today), but because anything that weakens another NFC North team is fine by me.

On another note, nice job by Philip Rivers on this drive!

I cleaned up in week 8: 112-99, and am favored by 30 points in this week’s matchup, though if Drew Brees, my opponent’s QB, keeps playing like he’s been playing the last couple of weeks, I might have a match on my hands.

But enough about that. I don’t know how anybody can think of anything but what is sure to be the best game of the season so far: this afternoon’s mammoth Colts-Patriots meeting. Fireworks in Indianapolis today. Woo!

In other news, I have to say I am liking the nfl.com Fantasy site redesign. Simple changes, but with dramatic effect; the site is clean and easier to use. Awesome!

Have I mentioned before how much I hate Adobe products? Oh. Yes. I have. And with the same post title, too.

This time the problem has to do with Adobe Reader, and specifically its DRM functionality for ebooks. In order to be able to read an ebook, you need to authorize your local copy of Adobe Reader or Adobe Digital Editions (the software you use to read/manage ebooks post version 8 of Reader) with their central database. And of course, you only get a limited number of activations.

Now, this is all fine and dandy, but the problem occurs, for example, when you reinstall the OS on your computer. You have to reactivate the reader in order to be able to read your ebooks, but each activation you run gets logged as a different activation, even when you’re doing it from the same computer. So in no time you’ve racked up your maximum number of activations, and you’re out of luck.

You’d think solving this would be as simple as removing these bogus or no-longer-useful activations from your activation profile, right? Not so fast, bub. Get this: there is no way to deactivate an installation of Reader except from within the software itself, and if you forget to deactivate the software before you reformat and reinstall, don’t even bother praying, because even God can’t help you.

My activation profile contains 6 activations, 1 from a computer I sold, and 4—count ‘em, 4—from a computer I just installed Leopard on. That’s 5 useless activations that I can’t get rid of. And those ebooks I just spent $15 on? Unusable. Not to mention the several-hundred-dollars’ worth of ebooks I’d already bought.

This piece of garbage is almost as annoying as Adobe’s website, which is so poorly designed that it took me a half an hour to even find out that I was SOL. God, I hate these people. Words cannot describe it. Flames…heaving…aaarrrrrgggghh.