Archive for the ‘cranky’ Category

Lead411 a scam? - Probably not

Friday, September 26th, 2008

They claim to have a lot of info available if you sign up, but turns out they don’t actually have the info they claimed.  Unsubscribe email address listed in their signup process isn’t even a valid email address.  One can only assume that even if you did manage to get thru to them, they wouldn’t bother doing the job of unsubscribing you any better than they did at putting together a list of contact info.

UPDATE:  As you can see below, the founder of Lead411 has commented with a  certain level of explanation that certianly mollifies my inability-to-unsubscribe-related angst.  I don’t remember the exact info I used to sign-up, to validate his comment about temporary restrictions on “fishy” accounts.  Given that my corporate charter lapsed years ago, I could buy that as being marked “fishy”.

 

UPDATE2:  I had further off-line discussion with Tom, and feel that his explanation for my trial-signup’s limitations was reasonable.  More impressively, he immediately added a proper “abuse@” address to their mail system based on my suggestion.

Totally For Sure It’s Fixed This Time

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Sound Speed Scooters didn’t call me yesterday eve like they said they would.  I took that as a pretty bad sign.

I just got off the phone with the scooter-mechanic, who claims that they think they have the problem solved now, that it was a bad controller / lithium communication channel.  He says they replaced the controller, and drove the scooter thru a full charge yesterday, without any issues.  They are going to do another full run again today, and hopefully have my bike ready tonight.

Because they’re going out of town for the weekend, so if it’s not tonight, it’s next week (he said monday, but they aren’t usually open on mondays, so…?).  Yeah, go take off for a weekend, leave me stuck, again, while we finally get some sunny weather.

schmucks.

Another Day of Waiting

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

The scooter manufacturer’s rep is supposed to be back down at Sound Speed today, since they couldn’t repro the problem for him on tuesday.  I wish I could hold out a hope that I’d have a working scooter by the weekend, but I so doubt that the problem is going to be as easy to fix as they think.

ITunes QA Sucks

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

It must be a pretty small department, without any accountability.  How else can you explain the crapulent nature of the latest iTunes release?  Attempting to select 60 tracks fails silently.  It seems the most you can select at one time is somewhere around 10-20.  And then when you hit delete to remove them, up pops a dialogue box that sometimes has a checkbox for “don’t ask me again”, and sometimes it doesn’t have that checkbox.  It doesn’t really matter, since it still asks you every time.

Not Happy Today

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Sound Speed Scooters is starting to really tick me off.  I spent some serious cash on a new scooter, and when I go to pick it up, it makes it 10 feet and dies.  I have to leave it with them and walk back to work, then leave work again to come pick it up when they fix it.  Today, I’m riding it to the store to pick up a chain to lock it with at work, and it dies again.  This time, I’m way more than 10ft from their shop, and had to get it towed to them.  They assure me that they will take a look at let me know what’s wrong, right away.  I walk back to work, AGAIN.  Their store hours are supposed to be 11am to 6pm, so when I call them at 5pm, and it goes straight to voicemail; I’m pretty pissed.  I drive over, and they tell me they need till at least tuesday to figure out what’s wrong.  ARGH!

Update:  The sales/fixit guy calls today.  He doesn’t have my bike fixed, but he thinks he knows the source of the problem.  Sub-standard fuses “inside the batteries”.  They need a couple of days to decide what to replace them with, and then I will be “good to go”.

<Samuel L Voice>I am trying real hard to believe</SLV>

MADD cowards

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

Is Alicia Neuschwanger a coward, a bigot, the kind of slime you usually find at the bottom of a septic tank? She has plenty of company, wherever slime like her hang out, what with her buddy, Ada County MADD director, Miren Aburusa and her getting national news coverage for their small mindedness. Alicia at least has the excuse that she’s just working at the fair. Miren has no excuse. She works for MADD and is supposed to be trying to raise awareness of the dangers of drunk driving, not hiding them because they aren’t pretty enough. It seems she’s probably more interested in raising money, than awareness. I suspect because you can’t embezzle awareness. If I worked for MADD national, I’d certainly be ordering a very detailed audit of anything ms Aburusa has ever touched. That kind of slime is usually contagious.

Worrisome

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

I finally got around to buying the full box set of Ally McBeal DVD’s, even though it means I’ll have to convert them from PAL to NTSC once they arrive.  As luck would have it, while the box set is out of print in the UK where it comes from, amazon had a couple of american importers with used copies for sale and decent feedback on the sellers, so I ordered one.

Now I notice the same seller has a “new” version of the box set that he’s also selling.  Which seems odd to me, since he didn’t have that copy when I purchased the used one from him, 8 days ago, and it just doesn’t seem like that hot a seller that he’d come up with new “new” stock on.  Given that the other seller I bought from that day both sent acknowledgment emails as well as the product already, while this guy hasn’t given me a peep, I’m starting to think this seems a bit scammy.  sigh.

UW Clinic Doesn’t Make Life Easy

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

So, I’ve got a lump in one of my breasts.  I’ve been to the doctor before, and they’ve squeezed it and given me the brush off before, but recently it started getting larger, and painful, so I went back to my primary care physician.  They decide that maybe since it is growing, they should take a better look, and refer me to the breast cancer group for further study and hopefully treatment.  That’s when the fun began.  Seems of the 5 numbers on the referral sheet they gave me, none of them are correct.  When I finally DO get thru to one of the clinics, I get transferred around until they hang up on me altogether.  It only took an hour on the phone to get yet another pointless appointment with a not-really-a-doctor who’ll just do the exact same thing they did at my PCP’s, who will THEN hopefully send me to someone who can actually do something.

Very frustrating experience so far, and I don’t even think I’m sick.  I can’t imagine how pissed I’d be if I felt in anyways certain that my lump might be cancerous.

boingboing are cowards

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Having now read their “excuse”, I’ve got to say that I will never link to nor read from BoingBoing again.    Their actions have undone any good they ever attempted to do in the realms of open and honest communication, and I will always remember them as a bunch of slimy cowards that got caught trying to lie about being the biggest hypocrites since Fred Phelps.

Well OK, maybe only half a Phelps worth of hypocrisy. 

But still…they are being dishonest about their rationale for this kerfuffle.  They say they wanted to spare ’someone’ embarrassment.  But that’s not the truth.  The truth is contained in their statements about wanting to silence Violet Blue by denying her links.  If they tell everyone they aren’t linking to Violet Blue anymore, that’s just going to encourage people to search for her themselves, and they haven’t cost her any traffic.  It’s obvious they thought they could sneak in her disappearance from their web, and avoid sending any more traffic her way.

 

EPIC FAIL

 

It’s almost like Cory was right, back when he lived by his principles, instead of merely espousing them, that honesty is the best path thru dramatic waters.

don’t buy a kindle

Friday, June 27th, 2008

I used to be a strong evangelist for the kindle, but now I’m an anti-evangelist.  do NOT buy a kindle until Jeff Bezos gets his programmers to stop being lazy, and implement wishlist support.  

I wouldn’t be half as pissed if they’d been honest about the reasons for the limitations, instead of blaming the failure of their programming team on some mystical god-of-just-can’t-happen.  As I said in my last email to them, it’s more than a bit disingenuous to keep using the word “can’t” in your excuses.  The correct word is “won’t”.