Getting really tired of all of this phone terror by marketers

The number of calls centre calls that I have been getting have been becoming more and more lately. Everyone wants my time and money. The more of these calls I get, the more aggressive I become towards those people and that also gets me to really force those calls short. The fact that they use a long and slow script does not help matters.

Due to the number of calls coming in (which includes my own after hours business), my daytime work employer asked me to switch off my phone or make it silent because the calls are too disruptive. All of these repeat disruptions are not helping my stress levels and these greedy companies are helping towards my low patience for these calls. Lack of money and stress related to that does not help either.

Basically it comes down to the fact that many businesses need to change their way of marketing and making their account signup method more transparent since it is easy to get onto some product subscription of some company, but it is a nightmare to get out due to customer service details usually not published.

Windows 10 issues with rollback and resulting issues

Recently I had the opportunity to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Initially the new Operating System worked fine, but there were a few smaller problems as expected.

A couple of days after e installation, I suffered from what is known on the Microsoft Community Forums as the "Fatal Start Menu Bug". This also cased several Windows 10 apps to not work either or really slow while everything else was still fast. Several buttons on the taskbar were also affected and just as useless. Search did not respond either. Rebooting or the solutions provided on the forums did not help at all. The problem has been already existing in January 2015 on the technical preview.

Fortunately I had the habit of letting everything that I install to dump shortcuts on the desktop and then send them into a folder to avoid clutter on the desktop. At least I had access to most installed applications this way.

Restoring back to Windows 7 sort of worked. I was asked to activate Windows again and one or two smaller issues were not quite as I left them. There were also some file system errors and the Windows 10 file system check only takes 4 minutes.

About two days after returning to Windows 7, I booted up the machine just to find network and Bluetooth not working at all. The network status just showed "Identifying..." even after disable and enable. The troubleshooter was useless, Windows updates was not an option. Ethernet and Wifi did not work at all.

Windows Repair was attempted multiple times and when that failed, I tried to install Windows 7 in order to overwrite the files to patch up what the file system issues might have destroyed. The installer refused to install, so I decided to wipe all partitions on the first drive and start from scratch, just to find that the installer could not install to a fresh primary partition. I am suspecting that this is because the second drive of four is also bootable. This means the installer is rather stupid and the same installer is used for Windows 10.

Since I needed Internet, I installed Ubuntu Linux which had Internet already on the Live DVD before even installing. The other idea was to at least try and sort out the partition table this way. A day later, I tried again to install Window 7 with the same problem. After that I installed Linux Mint which worked fine as well.

Two days ago, I got hold of a Windows 10 ISO to try and get past the Windows 7 installation problem. Since I have an original Windows 7 DVD set, I was expecting to use my Windows 7 code since I did qualify originally to do the original upgrade in the first place.

The Windows 10 ISO never even got me as far as the partition list due to some super generic error message about some media drivers that are required, but no information about what. For Windows 7 I had to install motherboard, Ethernet and USB 3 drivers afterwards. A friend of mine with a new motherboard had the issue that his drive chipset is not supported and he could not upgrade to Windows 10. The Windows 10 installer could not even tell me what the real issue is.

My theory about the Windows 10 release is as follows:
The Operating System was released in August to the public to have enough users for the Christmas sales to keep business partners and shareholders happy. The product at the time of writing this is still very unpolished and buggy.

Update:
It turned out that the Windows 7 installation to install to the HDD required unplugging various USB devices. Why this caused such problems makes no sense. Windows 10 still did not want to install from the DVD and the message about some media thing was rather cryptic. Why I could then install Windows 10 from the upgrade provided on the desktop is a mystery to me.

How convenience is killing society

As per human nature and also the most common denominator in mathematics, nobody wants to do more work than required. This can be seen as efficiency and also becomes convenience.

The convenience factor is meant to simplify things and hopefully also get a more likely action from people since they would not do things that are tedious or a little bit too much effort. The problem with this is that once a new level of convenience becomes the norm that people want more convenience.

This new level of convenience in reality introduces relying on others due to delegating everything and also introduces lazyness which in turn also causes more people becoming obese and even more lazy. What does not help is a lot of these people then complain about everything and that things are not quick enough for them or not cheap enough. etc. They later on even start complaining when they get something for free.

To make matters worse, this reliance on others also causes the following problem with websites, product packaging, books and other things: reading is becoming too much work (even little bits) and pictures are needed for everything. This is one of the reasons why we have these horrible trends with software where there are these super large tiles that do very little instead of simplicity and yet complex functionality and letting users actually do useful things. Basically everything gets dumbed down more and more.

All of the above comes down to too much reliance on getting anything done and people do not actually want to think for themselves anymore where in the end the basic things need to be repeatedly explained in the same conversation. This gets rather frustrating for individual and businesses if people want something, but they could not be bothered to make an effort like giving specific enough information to be helped for example.

Imagine how this goes with adults who expect to have everything done for them If they have children, their children probably end up like that as well or worse. The term "spoiled brats" comes to mind.

Basically my message is simple: Think for yourself and make an effort to improve your own life instead of expecting that others can do it for you.

Google Analytics enhanced ecommerce tracking nightmares

This post is a rant since I am not finding the information that I am looking for.

For many years I have been using Google Analytics and it was wonderful. Now with the Universal Analytics I am having severe problems with ecommerce and enhanced ecommerce (ec) not showing anything in the reports. This same thing happened on two different projects.

Going three or four times through the documentation for normal Universal Analytics did not seem to help. Everything was exactly as per documentation, the data got posted, but the report shows zero. Forums turned out to be useless and the same with all those wonderful articles that tell you about everything, but not the real way to actually implement. My patience on the matter is now very low since I have been fighting for days with this.

Using Google Tag Manager brought up the same thing where there is plenty about dataLayer, but nothing really on what actually links it up with tags, rules and macros in regards to names, uppercase/lowercase spelling etc.

I am seriously getting the impression that everyone either knows how to do it or not at all and the documentation assumes things since the examples are never complete even when marked as complete. How about just posting an actually example that actually works? I do not want to see posts like "it is so easy" and similar nonsense. Not all of us deal on a daily basis with this stuff and do not have the time to go through hundreds of pages of documentation about very few lines of code, but no clear answer about why the reports keep on showing zero. It does not help that the clients are pushing for data and other things also need urgent attention.