Auto Show

I got free tickets to the private preview of the Auto Show this year, so I thought I'd check it out. I'm pretty much glad I didn't have to pay for it. For the most part it would be like paying to go to a car lot, except that the salesman don't bug you, and you're not allowed to test drive anything. Maybe the salesman thing had to do with the fact that everyone attending the preview were supposedly in the automotive industry? Oh well. I weep for those that go this weekend and pay full price. In general people were pushy, rude, and anything worth looking at was swamped with people. That means good luck sitting in and checking out anything affordable that didn't lool like crap (the Scion xB... and the new Honda Civic looked nice, and anyone who knows me knows I HATE small cars).
I snapped a few pictures (with my cell phone) of some of the more interesting cars I saw (like the interior of a new Audi A8), a new Dodge Viper, or a couple Aston Martins) which can be viewed here. Overall, there really wasn't that much "wow factor" to the show. That's probably why 62% of people on a cleveland.com poll said they wouldn't be attending.

Safari hunt

This is just an update to my post from yesterday. After wasting well over 35 hours of troubleshooting time with this damn Zebra printer, I finally isolated and solved the issue with it either not printing or partial printing labels. What was it? Their DRIVER! And not just any driver... the latest version of the driver off their own website. After wasting days upon days talking to tech support, sending this thing back to them twice, and using multiple parallel, USB, and serial cables I came to isolate the problem to their own latest and greatest driver.

Great, right? Well, I figured I should tell them about it. Get this... they already knew about it not working with the .NET Framework. Mind you, I emailed like six people in the company and only one bothered to respond. They are well aware of the issue with their newest driver not working with the .NET framework (the old version worked just fine). Funny, it wasn't mentioned ANYWHERE on their website. It also wasn't mentioned in the "known issues" readme file that came with the download. So I guess it's OK for them to know and distribute CRAP drivers and leave it up to end users to play the "is it my cable? my printer? my program?" game.

The sweet and sour

Sweet! I was surfing around on Digg and found this cool site called Meebo. It's basically an instant messenger interface for Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, and MSN but strictly over the web (no software to install, no special ports). You may be saying "so what, some of those services offer their own web version". The difference is any corporate firewall that blocks IM is going to have those web addresses blocked. I've tested Meebo from at least two secured networks and it got by without a hitch.

I'm really sour on Zebra printers. If you need a thermal printer, find something else... ANYTHING else. I've got one of these pieces of crap (TLP 2844-Z) and suffice it to say its super picky and their tech support is worthless. It's been back to the manufacturer twice. They've told me "don't use USB" (then why the hell does it have a USB port?). On four separate machines now (3 XP SP2, 1 2000) the reliability of whether it'll print or not can best be described as erratic. God I hate this thing.