Rollout of new Massachusetts unemployment site handled poorly for people with multiple email addresses
Telling people “Your email addresses on the two sites need to match!” without telling them what to do if they don’t is a user-hostile act.
Category Archives: User Experience
Buyer beware: Printronix printers
The printer I got from Printronix was terrible, the company was unable to resolve any of the issues with it, I ended up returning it for a full refund (part of which I was only able to obtain via a credit card dispute), and I discourage anyone who stumbles across this blog posting from doing business with this company. I didn’t think a printer company could annoy me more than HP does nowadays, but Printronix succeeded.
“Human Interest” is terrible
Several years ago I worked for a company which outsourced management of their 401k to Human Interest. It was… not a positive experience. I don’t remember all the details—I’ve worked pretty hard to forget them since they were so unpleasant—but suffice it to say that it was my impression that they weren’t terribly good at… Read More »
I see that Verizon’s customer website and onboarding experience still sucks as bad as it always has
Verizon’s website and their FIOS customer onboarding processes are full of problems and have been for at least a decade. I ran into nearly 30 of them just trying to complete the simple task of signing up for FIOS service. How do they get away with this?
Tampermonkey script: no, Newegg, I don’t freakin’ want to subscribe
Script to prevent Newegg from subscribing me to their spam against my will.
Tampermonkey script to un-Gmail Google Contacts
When you click on a contact’s email address in the Google Contacts web app, instead of opening a new draft in your default email app with the “To” field populated with that email address, which is what it should do, Google Contacts opens a Gmail compose window. I hate this behavior. While I do have… Read More »
Lessons learned from setting up a Linux desktop VM on a Windows 11 Home host
VirtualBox is more functional than Hyper-V Manager but much slower. There are a lot of tricks for getting this right. If you turn off Secure Boot you might permanently lock yourself out of Windows.
Case study: anonymizing email addresses for online accounts
Why you might want to anonymize the email addresses for your online accounts, some techniques for how to do that, and the details of how I did it myself, including stats, stories, and scripts.
Bad healthcare tech of the day: Boston Children’s Hospital patient portal
The user experience for registering for the portal and checking in for appointments is riddled with problems. We deserve better.
Long time Ubuntu user, first time Debian installer
My hot take: Debian is a good desktop operating system for highly technical people who know how to troubleshoot and fix computer problems, but it may not be the best choice for less technical people looking for a desktop operating system to use instead of Windows or macOS.