Jonathan Zdziarski's Domain

Yesterday I test drove a 2010 Lincoln Navigator equipped with the MS Sync feature advertised to make driving safer and easier by accepting voice commands. First of all – yes, I loathed the Navigator. The quality was about that of the cheap Rolex watches sold on eBay. Among all of the other things I hated about the Navigator’s poor design, its MS Sync feature made me want to get out a flathead screwdriver and forcibly remove the Navigation system, along with the “Powered by Sync” logo stuck on the dashboard. If you are among those few who love pain and actually like Microsoft Windows, Sync may be for you. For the rest of us who are merely forced to tolerate the craptastic wonderland of a Microsoft-based corporate cesspool, I promise you that once you push the Sync button, you’ll find new meaning to the phrase, “Microsoft crashing”, as you struggle to use sync without dying a horrible, fiery death.

In the audio below, it took me a total of three minutes and thoughts of suicide to assign a simple destination using MS Sync. I was forced to take my eyes off the road several times to read numerous lists of possible voice matches for city, street name, and more. Every time you hear, “Please say a line number” in the recording, I’m actually reading through a list instead of watching where I’m driving. After answering nearly a dozen questions, I had to end up touching buttons on the console, and later the navigation system screen to finally set the destination and accept an “agreement” to drive safely and obey all traffic laws. So MS Sync is sort of a voice-button-screen hybrid input, which I’m pretty sure entirely defeats its purpose.

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A nasty windstorm blew through a couple weeks back and decimated the power infrastructure in my town. A large part of the town was out for as much as six days. While most of us New Englanders have generators to take care of the necessities (laptops, WiFi, PS3, etc.), I noticed that many of my fellow generator-powered neighbors were still unreachable via their telephone, and weren’t online. No connection to the outside world, or even down the street, and most importantly – no 911. Come to find, they were all on Comcast.

A few days into the outage, what began as fast busy signals finally began to change into telco messages telling me that these numbers were unable to receive calls. So while Comcast’s network was beginning to light back up, their customers were still dark. By now, it was about four days that I began seeing Comcast trucks finally make it onto the scene (that’s a pretty terrible response time). They were placing what appeared to be battery backup units all over town, about a mile or so apart from each other. I don’t think they were gas powered, but were more likely heavy-duty DC battery units (which work fine on NEBS-rated telco equipment). It took until almost the sixth day for Comcast to bring enough of their repeaters back up to where my neighbors were able to make phone calls. I don’t think their Internet connections came back until even later.

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