blueDonkey.org

Those who follow my Twitter feed might have seen that we received a snarky letter from our HOA here at Bayport in Alameda this week complaining about our front lawn. The complaint itself was not specific (it said something along the lines of the lawn needing “weeding, edging, mowing and/or fertilizing”).

Now, my opinion of HOAs in general is pretty low (and of the particular management company used here, Vierra Moore, even lower), since most of what I have seen from them has been silly time wasting nonsense. At our expense since our monthly dues pay for these time wasters. To highlight just how much nonsense Vierra Moore believes in, one of last year’s “straw polls” for potential new rules they could impose on residents included whether home owners should be allowed to fly flags, and if so what sizes and types of flag. Pathetic people. Learn how to live and let live. Let’s take away all the rules that are not ensuring safety and deal with it.

But, complaints about lawn condition have a much larger implication. By requiring that lawns be kept ‘green’ they are essentially requiring a massive, and unacceptable, waste of water. And the houses here in Bayport do not include grey water systems (a shame in newly built homes). Currently water is a precious resource here in northern California, with a serious drought entering its third year now. Why are we wasting it watering grass?

Unusually for me, I honestly think there needs to be a change in the law to prevent HOAs from requiring their members to run irrigation at all. If grass can’t survive naturally in the climate, then it is simply the wrong thing to plant. That said, even when it is burnt badly in hot summers, it usually comes back unaided when the rain returns in the winter months (as the many un-irrigated hillsides in the bay area demonstrate every year). Of course, it doesn’t look green all summer, but really people, is having a green lawn more important than having water to drink? Perhaps this year we can make brown the new green.

I do think it is time that cities and/or states stepped in here to prevent these pathetic, bullying organisations from being able to require their “members” to waste precious resources. So, I am going to be sending this post to a number of places, including local and state politicians, to see if anything can be done to knock some common sense into these HOA management company bullies.

Update: iNewz 2.7 is now available on the iTunes App Store (as are iNewz Tech 2.7 and iNewz Green 2.7).

Busy weekend this weekend. I finally got the update for iNewz (and iNewz Tech) that I’ve been working on for a while now submitted to Apple for review.

What’s new?
Well, the most visible differences are the switch to the black top bar (somehow it looks a little more sophisticated to me), and moving the thumbnail images from the left to the right in the headlines view. “Huh?” you ask. Well, the other big difference is that when there is no image for an article, it no longer displays the placeholder iNewz icon. And with the images on the left that made for a ragged left edge which was hard on the eyes.

So, images are on the right, when available, and they’re scaled to keep their aspect ratio and feature rounded corners now (yes, I’ve been having some fun with the CG section of the SDK!).

Another big change: Maintenant, iNewz inclus les actualités français. Nouvelles de langue française vient de France et au Canada.

iNewz Tech
The technology variant of iNewz picks up the same UI changes of course, and a few extra sources, including KRAPPS and MacWorld.

One Last Thing
A new iNewz variant was also added to the family with this update: iNewz Green. For all your environmentally sound, eco-friendly green news in the palm of your hand.

Well, it took a little while, but eventually Christina from Comcast’s national customer care center called me, and left me a number to call her back on. After a little phone tag, we eventually connected and she was able to see the payment that went to the transitional account as well as the ones to the new Comcast account. Something that none of the other people I’d spoken to at Comcast had been able to achieve (all claiming that I’d need to talk to the other group to get the problem resolved!).

Long story short, in a matter of minutes she managed to apply the old payment to the new account, and also credited me one month’s service to account for the increased price.

So, if you ever need to contact Comcast to get something resolved, skip the regular customer service and go straight to the national center. It is staffed by people who care, know how to fix things and have the authority to fix them too! Their email address is We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com, or you can get them on Twitter too via @ComcastCares.

Hopefully somebody in Comcast’s upper management is going to take a look at the way the APT transition was handled and make sure that this kind of debacle can never happen again. The cost in terms of support calls and truck rolls could easily have been avoided (and in the current climate, avoiding unnecessary costs should be high on the agenda).