I have my iPhone all setup etc (more on that some other time maybe) and just about everything is A-OK except one thing is fucking pissing me off. I’ve had this same issue with the Ipod/iTunes as well. This issue is string trimming…

Currently some contacts in my Contacts List on my iPhone are indented by 1 space. Now, i checked thru these entries on my Mac’s Address Book and none of these entries have a leading space character. None of them. But still, on the iPhone some contacts have this little indent going on. Kinda looks like this:

 Ryan Abcdefg
  Ryan Bcdefg
 Ryan Cdefg
  Sam Blabla

Why the fuck is this happening? I trolled around the web and found someone in the Apple Forums with the same problem. They insist that their Address Book doesn’t have any leading space characters for any of the offending entries. BTW, The forum thread has no proposed solutions.

Now, I stash my contacts in a few places and sync them all up to Plaxo. I’m using Address Book on both my work and home MacBooks, some contacts that are created on my phone and a bunch of others I sync to Plaxo from my Yahoo! account. And somehow, while setting up my iPhone, iTunes asked me if I’d like to import contacts from Yahoo! as well. So, that leaves a few points of fuck up failure here. I’m guessing one of these sync points left/inserted an “invisible” character in either the prefix, first name or last names fields that’s manifesting itself as an “indent”.

I’ve had a similar issue with iTunes and the iPod. I’ve seen multiple entries for the same artist… its always just been the same artist name with trailing whitespace. So “Bad Religion” vs. “Bad Religion ”. Here the solution is easy because your can edit the ID3 tags of multiple songs at once using iTunes. Now, this new iPhone issue of mine is not as easy to fix…

Last night I went thru almost all of my contacts and made sure that their first and last names did not have any leading spaces. After that i synced the iPhone to my machine and nada; the contacts on the iPhone still had the indenting BS going on. Funny enough, the list of contacts on the Mac itself did not have any of the whacky indenting going on - just on the phone.

This leaves me pretty confused. I’ve edited names on the iPhone itself to no avail. The edit screen for a contact shows no leading whitespace… regardless I cleared out a couple contacts’ names and reentered them and even this didn’t fix the issue.

I guess I’ll write a script to plow thru my Address Book database tonight and see if I can find any whacky data.

But, seriously… why doesn’t Apple just trim the fucking strings? Maybe the iPhone bullshit is a bit more complicated (assuming crazy characters are at fault) but the iTune thing is just lame; just trim the fucking string upon saving data.

Bleh, hopefully I’ll have this shit squared away tonight.

I try to like Yahoo! ’cause they’re all happy n shit but sometimes I think “do you really think you’re in competition with Google with shit like this?”

So I just stumbled upon their SiteExplorer and set up a profile for phatduckk.com. I’m running on the assumption that this is pretty much Yahoo’s version of Google’s Webmaster Tools/Sitemaps.

Just like Google you have to authenticate your ownership of the site. I had to create an HTML file called y_key_9cb39696f3bf5be3.html and make sure the contents of that file were e6c5f476b7ce26bb. Alrighty then… I added the file to my web root, checked to see it was working right, clicked “verify now” and then I saw this:

And a message that says:

We will authenticate your site ownership by checking this file within 24 hours.

WTF is wrong with you Yahoo!??? I have to wait up to 24 hours for you to hit a fucking URL & check that the document you download from my server contains a specific string? You slow bastards!!!

Complaining doesn’t us any good… so, since I know you guys use PHP, I decided help out and write the code for you. Enjoy…

All joking aside - If Google does something instantaneously you might wanna aim to accomplish the same sort of task in less than a day if you really wanna compete with ‘em. Honestly, I still have no fucking clue what this tool does considering I’m still not verified. Unless they verify me within the next couple minutes I’ll probably lose interest…

I use Google Analytics to track stuff for this blog and we also have an analytics account for Fuzz. Today I figured I’d login to Fuzz’s account and grant my personal account access to Fuzz’s stats. I figured this would be way better than logging in and out a bunch of times each day… sounds good, right?

So, logged in to analytics and added my personal email in Fuzz’s account dashboard then logged in with my personal info. assuming I’d see both sites listed and I’d have the ability to flip/flop between the two at will. Wrong! The entry for phatduckk.com disappeared and all I saw listed was the info for Fuzz. Did my stats all just go away? WTF!!??!! I logged back in to the Fuzz account, removed my personal email from Fuzz’s account section, logged in to the phatduckk account and my site’s stats came back.

Pretty disappointing huh? Isn’t it a fair assumption that this should have worked? Why the fuck do they let you grant access to a separate Google account if its gonna screw up that accounts original access? Do I really have to have multiple Google accounts?

That pile of shit is by a band called Muscles.

I walked back into the office after a quick trip to get some smokes and this pile of rotten ass was play on the stereo. I haven’t heard anything this bad since Greg tricked me into seeing this vomit inducing filth.