Peter's Place

[Updated 25 June 2017 at 7:20 pm EDT with information on driver requirements and safety features] As someone who's been using ride-sharing technology from apps such as  Lyft  and  Uber  for the past few years, I see a lot of misconceptions and misperceptions about them, especially by people who've never used them. Here are my thoughts, based on my real life experiences after having taken hundreds of rides with both services over the past few years. I'm not merely responding to the hype surrounding them based on stories I've read or heard about but my actual experiences. People are afraid of technology and have a tendency demonize anything new and disruptive to the status-quo. We need to get over our fears of change and embrace new technologies and the world we live in, especially when those technologies make our lives easier. Lyft  and  Uber  are companies that have been operating for years and have had time to work most of the kinks out of th...

If you want a great lesson on how to alienate your customers and destroy brand loyalty that has taken years to build up, take a close look here... Y'know this is really a very sad story. Hewlett Packard makes some really great products--that's not the sad part. What's sad is that if you ever are unfortunate enough to find yourself in a position of having to deal with their tech support, consider just junking the equipment and buying something else. Unless, of course, you're dealing with re-installing or upgrading your printer drivers. I don't know what's going on at HP these days but after the last ten or so contacts I've had with their tech support department, I can unfortunately no longer recommend that people purchase their products. And it's a damned shame, too, because they make some of the best printers out there. Case in point: I own an OfficeJet Pro L7580 and an OfficeJet Pro L7680. When I went to upgrade the printer driver for the OJP7580, it w...

OK, I've been trying to do this for the past few weeks but things just haven't been in my favour. I'm hoping that today, they are. Actually, I started this tag a number of weeks ago in my #followfriday and #samesexsunday recommendation posts but I just never had the chance to explain it until now. As most of you know, I use Twitter, that wonderful micro-blogging service that where you send status updates in 140 characters (or less) in response to a very basic question: What are you doing? One of the greatest things about Twitter, and what I find most valuable about it, is the ability to connect with people around the world who you may otherwise never come into contact with. I hold daily conversations with folks from the Netherlands, Australia, Europe, Asia, and the Americas (North and South) that I've met -- solely through Twitter. I've formed great friendships, and met some truly wonderful folk. The way to interact with people on Twitter is by following them, or ...

OK So I've basically had to choose between one of the three FireFox extensions that I've been trying out that integrate the Twitter service into FireFox. I think I've got my top pick; however, there are some issues that I need to take up with them, and some features I'd like to see implemented: The new version of Twitbin (2.0) is much, much better than the previous release and really puts it back into the running as a contender. In fact, the only reason that I started looking for an alternative is because I found Twitbin to be pretty much broken--but that was the old version. So I love love love the RT (that's "Retweet" for you non-Twitterites ... a RT is when you basically twit out someone else's tweet in order to help spread the word to your follows; it's basically a "pay it forward" form of good-will on Twitter) function in Twitbin; I don't know of any other Twitter extension that offers the ability to RT with the click on an ic...

OK, So I'm having a Twiscussion with this self-proclaimed geek from Salt Lake City, UT who developed a really cool social networking app . Seeing that he (and his company) were from Salt Lake City, UT, and knowing how the Mormons provided a massive amount of funding to support California's Proposition 8 I sent him a simple question: Did you (or your corporation) provide any funding to support CA's Prop 8? And thus began our Twiscussion (I'm coining a lot of new words these days ...). I'm glad to say that Jesse has not provided any funds in support of Prop 8; however, in our discussion, he raised a really good, and valid, point: [W]hat studies have been done to show there was money against Prop 8 in SLC? I'd venture to say none that are public. I don't know about the money but I do know that there was a rally opposing Prop 8 in SLC last year. So my fellow blogophiles, since I'm kinda spending the vast majority of my time dealing with personal and fa...

There's apparently a bug in Orkut at the moment where it's not giving you the option to add your picture to your profile. It's hard to find the work-around solution while searching their help section (you actually have to go into the Google Groups for Orkut to find it, and even there it's a bit hidden), so I thought I'd post the instructions for adding a photo to your profile here, to make it easier for people to find. So if you'd like to add your photo (which I think you should have), do the following: Make sure you're using a compatible web browser. FireFox is definitely the recommended choice. Make sure that Javascript is enabled in your web browser (it is in FireFox, by default) Log into Orkut Click on the edit profile link Make sure you're in the "General" tab, and then enter (type or copy&paste) the following line into the location bar of your web browser and then hit ENTER or click the GO button: javascript: showUploadPhoto(); (...