Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I’ve had a bajillion domains registered at GoDaddy for years, not because I particularly liked them, but more because it was easy. After my friend Dave died, I inherited all his domain names, and they were all on GoDaddy, so for ease I just transferred them to my account there.

But given their recent support of SOPA, plus their half-hearted retraction of same when they realized their posturing was not winning them any friends, was pretty disgusting. They backed down, but they won’t actively denounce SOPA. And they should.

So I started the process today to move all 46(!) of my domains to another registrar. (I inherited a LOT of domains from Dave!) But you can’t transfer a domain if it’s set to expire in the next seven days, so I had to renew six of them through GoDaddy before I could move them off. Here’s what happens when you renew domains on GoDaddy:

Click any of these for full size versions.

The first upsell. Notice all the disclaimer marks at the bottom.

The second upsell. This is just the part above the fold; about one third of all the “Special Offers” I had to scroll through before finding the “No Thanks” link.

LOLWUT??? I tried to renew ONE domain – faerytrail.com – for $8.99, and it tacked on 32 extra domains for a total of $293.44. Neato! All six domain names I tried to renew had at least one extra one tacked on that I didn’t want. This is, at the very least, highly immoral.

Last, but not least, the final upsell, after I winnowed out the chaff and bought the renewals for the six domains I wanted.

So, there you have it. Why GoDaddy sucks – and it’s not just because of SOPA.

Most Kindle books are wonderful, and I adore my Kindle. But I’ve recently run across a book that was scanned in and not checked for formatting or scanning errors, and it annoys me. It’s a novel called The Land of Laughs I ran across in the comments of a Boing Boing story.

So here’s the note I sent to Amazon about it:

Comments:Dear Amazon -”

I just wan- tecl you to know that the Kinclle version of #8230;The Land of Laughs -” a Novel is riclclled with stray characters, scanning issues, and other prob- lems that eat away at the enjoyment of reacling a good book.#8230;

This mess- age might be a little over the top…” but it’s representa- tive of the types of errors founcl in the text.#8230;

I got a response back a couple of hours later saying they have asked for it to be corrected and would let me know when a new version is available. Cool!

Walgreens failed today, spectacularly.

First, I logged on to my web account to cancel an auto refill. I got this:

Right. That doesn’t work, does it? So I emailed customer service to let them know. Logged back into my account to see if there was another way to cancel my refill and found, to my horror, that some other woman’s prescriptions were displayed in my account along with my own! WTF! So I know what medical conditions she has. I was absolutely horrified. Was she seeing my stuff? I called Walgreens and they promised to look into it. Uh huh.

A little while later, I actually went into my local Walgreens to pick up greeting cards to send the kids at camp. The pharmacist was shouting into the drive-through phone, top of his lungs, “OKAY, THIS IS A NEW PRESCRIPTION FOR CONCERTA! HAVE YOU TAKEN THIS BEFORE? THIS IS FOR ADDH (sic), DID YOU KNOW THAT, ABOUT THE ADDH?” WTF!

And lastly, I had sent an email to customer service this morning about the auto refill issue. I got an answer back at 1 AM. Thanking me for my product suggestion. WTF!

After three years of the original iPhone, we upgraded to the iPhone 4. My take? It’s lovely – quick, responsive, solid-feeling, and a pleasure to work with.

Do I have the signal strength issue? Yes, I do. And it’s more than cosmetic; a 3G speed test is 10 kbps down/1 kbps up/27414 ms ping when I lay a finger across the little black stripe on the lower left corner. When I remove my finger, it’s 1409/1265/293.

For now, I don’t notice the issue because I have a case on it. I had been considering moving to screen protectors though. I think that’s off the table for the moment.

Is it worth it? Well, with the new phones, we switched from T-Mobile to AT&T. And there’s been a noticeable difference there so far: less dead spots, like the one that was in my office; the ability to use data on Mopac; heck, the existence of 3G. And it’s just so darned much faster than our 2G iPhones. Plus, I took video the other day that just blew away the video quality from my Canon camera. So yes, worth it.

I have now spent 8 hours of my life trying to get Dragon Age to work under either Crossover or Parallels (both of which have been reported on the interwebz as being successful by someone or another) to no avail. My Windows partition is only 20 gigs, which is the minimum amount of bloody free space required to run the bloody game, so to run it under Boot Camp I’d need to use an external hard drive. I’m having twitchy flashbacks of trying to install The 11th Hour. I might need therapy.

Jason Eyer, the man behind the phone calls

How many times have you gotten a phone call in the last week telling you that your car warranty is about to expire or that your credit card interest rate could be lower? I got three calls on Friday alone. This is one of the fine, upstanding individuals behind the calls. Note the scruffy face, the greasy hair, the all-around look of lizard-like complacency.

For more info on the scam, this Ask Metafilter thread has a lot of good links to follow. The people are crooks that don’t give a damn about the national do-not-call database and they prey on the old, sick, and weak. Karma’s a bitch.

Publishing companies: it’s all very well and good that you’re targeting certain readerships for upcoming thrillers. But when you throw the title of a book (or novella, or short story) out there that’s got a major twist at the end, and say “If you’re a fan of X book, you’ll like this one!” and then tie it to reviews that talk about the major twist at the end… well, could you have possibly given away the major huge thrilling twist at the end of your soon-to-be-released thriller?

Just a thought.

In possibly-related news, many of us have turned into gibbering, twitching masses trying to figure out where the crazy tapes lead. If you’re coming to this blog because you’ve received a mysterious tape recorder that wants you to play it, won’t you please leave a comment here saying what your story was about, what number was on the tape, and what it was wrapped in?

And if you’re intrigued, please do join us for conversation on Unfiction and check out Rowan’s guide which is a great way to catch up with what’s happened so far.

What I sent to Which Wich, assuming it got through their flash-based submission system.

Please, please, PLEASE design a website that’s not entirely flash-based! I want to be able to place an order over the phone and know what options I can choose, but all the possible condiments – spreads, vegetables, etc. – as well as kids menu choices are hidden in the background and impossible to read. Not only that, but the flash-based location finder scrolls past so fast that I can’t figure out which location is nearest to my house. Can’t I just enter in a zip code and have it tell me what locations are in my town? This is not a user-friendly site! We have two kids and need places that help us save time, not frustrate us. Unfortunately, Which Wich is not it. I’ve been wanting to try your sandwiches due to the good reviews I’ve been reading about them, but until I can figure out how to get them via take-out, sorry – ain’t gonna happen.

Update: Wow, that was quick! I got a response – albeit not addressing the icky flash interface, but at least I know where to get a menu if I can deal with the twitchy scroll on the location list:

Hi Dee,

Thank you for your comments through the Which Wich website.

Which Wich is constantly updating their website, so we appreciate the feedback. Our to-go and catering menus, including the condiments, are under each location as a pdf on our website.

If you email us the specific location you are looking for we can also email your the pfd of the menu.

Best WICHes!