USPS Priority Failed

Update.-- The folks at the Post Office said they only refund Express mail deliveries, and Priority Mail deliveries only have "expectation date of delivery" and not date of promise, so any late deliveries only gets you a shrug as the folks there only say they're not responsible for their own mistakes or failures.

Original Post.--I sent my IRS tax form (refund) via USPS 3-day priority mail and I discovered today is was delivered 7 days later, not 3 days, and it took 4 days to get from San Jose, CA to Fresno, CA. Really. Greyhoud is faster that the USPS from San Jose to Fresno and it takes the scenic route with lots of stops.

Will someone at the US Post Office explain this to me and why I should not get a refund for the failure of the USPS to deliver it when it promised and I paid? Huh?

Click image to enlarge.

Other 10.10.2 Stuff

After updating OS-X Yosemite to 10.10.2, see previous post on this blog about some of what I discovered, much of which still hasn't been fixed or is a new problem - I haven't figured out why Apple would rather spend their time adding new features than fixing old or those they broke - I have discovered a number of menu bar apps don't work right.

This problem includes Evernotes and Twitter along with others which intermittently work and don't work. This appears to be around Apple's new sandbox and other rules restricting apps for access to other apps or OS-X itself, but that's more reading the console log than anything.

That said, it's frustrating with the releases of each version of OS-X, it appears app developers don't fully test their apps for the basic operation of it with the dock and menu bar. All the while there are a number of menu bar apps which continue to work flawlessly.

I'm still finding small things with Apple's app which are annoying, in part because the don't work but mostly because Apple broke something that actually did work. For instance Mail's search for words doesn't always work, and for me rarely works.

They still haven't fixed Bluetooth connection to the iPhone series 5/5c/5s models with some Mac's, which worked under IOS 7 and OS-X 9, so it's clearly a software problem than a hardware one. The iPad connection works 90+% of the time. I put this to their focus to sell the iPhone 6 models to the exclusion of the 5 series models.

Safari can't remember the size of your browser window and always defaults to some preset size. I haven't found a solution, but I've always kept a blank (white) image for the window size I design Web pages to load and then adjust the window to the borders.

Safari's "Show in Collection" for search results doesn't work. Safari still can't handle some Tumblr styles and either only partially loads in increments, spins the rainbow wheel, or stutters when scrolling. Safari used to be, up to Safari 7, the best browser, but now Safari 8 close to the worst.

I'm not sure the reasons whether it's Adobe, Apple or a combination of both, but all Adobe CC apps take 2-3 times longer to open than older CS5, 5.5 or 6 apps, especially Bridge, Photoshop, and other major Adobe apps.

It's become obvious to me OS-X and Apple apps are becoming too complex and embedded with so many bells and whistles and stuff to do, Apple is not fixing old problems, breaking things that worked and introducing new problems. They've lost what people expect, problem-free, flawless, straight-forward software.

Anyway, just some observations to date, which is the fact OS-X is becoming a disappointing operating system and Apple apps are to be avoided if you can. But given the choices of Unix flavors or Microsoft, it's still the lesser of evils, but getting worse with each update.

Commuter Trains

Why not put an energy-absorbing, collapsable, impact rail car in front of the first passenger rail car of every commuter train? It would absorb the initial impact and damage from any collision with anything in the path of the train, and reduce or prevent any pieces from going into the passenger cars. It would the slow the impact of the passenger cars into the front of the train, reducing the forces on the passengers.