(hint: Carnet == 10 tickets)

TMobile Prepaid System Broken -- Customer Support System Blocked

Dear T-Mobile,

I just purchased a $100 t-mobile refill card at a drugstore in Manhattan.

To process the refill, I:

• Entered the number on the my.t-mobile.com website: It said the refill # was invalid.

• Called to refill: It told me to call the number on the back of the purchased FastCard refill card.

• Called number on the back of the purchased FastCard refill card: It asks me to enter my phone number, It tells me my phone number is invalid.

I repeated all of the above steps twice to make sure I was not entering the incorrect refill number or phone number.

It seems from this post (http://support.t-mobile.com/thread/12828) that others are suffering from this lately as well.

Seems like a rather serious technical error.

Erik

Why is the above text tabbed out and in courier font? Because it's a post that I wrote and wanted to post on t-mobile's support forum.

Unfortunately, there seems to be yet another glaring technical bug in their support forum site, which prevents me from writing a new post. I wrote out the above and on clicking "Post", I get a "The connection was reset" error.

I won't waste bytes explaining that there are no humans you can talk to on their support phone lines.

Pretty disappointed with T-Mobile today. Clearly prepaid customers are not high on their customer service priority list.

Adding a Web Address to Google Sites

New Google facelift has made a curious move with the page for adding a custom domain to your google sites page:

Once the sites page is created, you select the "Web Address" link on the sidebar, which brings you here, where you can type in a new address:




Which is great, but once you enter the domain, how do you add it?
Google Help to the rescue:


(Note My hand-drawn circle around the add button)

Only problem is.... in the new layout, that button is not there.

So, I figured this must be a css error. I tried changing the font size. I tried reloading the page. I tried loading in chrome instead of FF. I even jumped into FireBug to try to find it, no beans.

Where is she hiding?

...stare for a few more minutes.....




Wow. There's some UI for ya.

Send In Background Error

I noticed a funny behavior in my Gmail for the last week or two and finally this morning tracked it down.

In the middle of a session, I was seeing the terrible "Oops...the system encountered a problem (#707)" message pop up, along with the exponential backoff for the retry:



Unfortunately, it doesn't snap itself back, and clicking "Retry Now" doesn't work either.

The only way to deal with this situation is to close the tab. A further clue is that on closing the tab, Gmail warns us that we should leave yet... it's trying to do something.




Turns out this has something to do with the "Send in Background" labs feature.



I can consistently reproduce the error by:

1. Open Gmail with "Send In Background" enabled
2. Open any message in my inbox
3. Type a reply
4. Hit tab-enter to send
5. Immediately hit "y" to archive
6. Error
   

Turning the "Send In Background" feature off and walking through those steps again produces no error.

Clicking Elements in IE with Selenium

Short, rough post, just to add another node on the net explaining this horrible bug.

• You are using Selenium.


• You wrote a beautiful test, and it works great in FF with the FirefoxDriver.


• You adapted the test to run with InternetExplorerDriver.


• You run it and it doesn't click.

You will google around, and most suggestions will tell you to call:
sendKeys("\n");
on the element.

That might work for you. It might not.

It didn't work for me.

What did work was going to the View menu and then to the Zoom menu, and there changing the zoom value from 125% to 100%.

Terrible bug. Hopefully this can help save a few hours of humankind.

Thank you Brian Elstner for figuring this out, and for taking the time to post it here.

Advertising Fail

Hello Louisiana Economic Development !

The opportunity that I see is to remove the "break;" and replace it with a "return;" or something, so that this method actually does what you want it to.

Trouble with GMail Superstars

Ever since the June 1 rollout of the labs feature Superstars to all gmail users, the superstars in one of my accounts suddenly stopped working.

I've had trouble with Superstars before, so I thought maybe I should just wait it out a bit. It's been a full week now and they're still not working, so I did a little investigation. I found at least one other pour soul who lost his Superstars, so I'm not alone.

As I said above, I originally thought the problem was related to one of my accounts. Just to be sure, I tried loading the account in a different browser -- FF4 instead of Chrome. Boom! Stars working again. Must be an issue with Chrome.

I poked around a little bit in the page with the Chrome developers tools (and with firebug on the same account in FF4) and tracked down the specific css rule that should be displaying my fancy stars:



When I load that image by itself in a Chrome window, it loads just fine:



...and yet, in my inbox/label views and in the settings tab, the image is not loading.



Anyone else out there seeing this problem?


Update 6/8:


Just realized that the little Google Buzz Icon is not showing up either.

FF (all fine):



Chrome (missing buzz and star):