So, John McCain and a bunch of Presidential hopefuls have set up MySpace pages in order to connect with the oh-so-cool younger voters. It seems that one of McCain’s staffers decided to use a nice-looking template for his page. Said staffer made a little whoopsie though - they linked back to the template designer’s images. For those not familiar with web design etiquette, this is generally considered to be in poor taste - you’re stealing another guy’s bandwidth.

Hilarity ensues.

McCain loves the hot girl-on-girl action, apparently.

Don’t hotlink images.

Class dismissed.

Sometimes, it’s ok to say “Yeah, we suck” - as evidenced by an apparently disgruntled employee following up to my post a couple months back about the poor customer service I got when attempting to get a warranty replacment of my Magellan GPS unit.


New comment on your post #158 "Magellan GPS - Poor Customer Service"
Author : Magellan (IP: 12.x.xx.xxx , irouter.thalesnavigation.com)
E-mail : magellan@lackofsupport.com
Comment:
Well, need we say more. I agree that we need improvement, but it won't happen. In fact, everyone is being outsourced to india, which is a fact. Go with a garmin. They are hardeer units to use and you may get beter service, but don't know for sure.


The good news is, they admit they have a problem. The bad news is, if my little insider “friend” is accurate, their management is too short-sighted (ie, placing savings from farming out customer support) to do what it takes to fix things.

You should NEVER have to jump through hoops to get warranty service on an item. If you register it online, you shouldn’t need to dig around for an old receipt, or trek over to CostCo and have them locate the transaction in question. I don’t need to bring in a sales receipt when I get my car serviced at the dealer. I can go to any dealer in the country, and if I’m within the warranty time/mileage, it gets fixed. Period.

Magellan’s not alone on this one. Apparently, Nikon makes you jump through hoops to get warranty service done on their cameras too. Fortunately, I did my homework on this one, and I’ve got it all neatly filed away if God forbid something happens to my camera gear.

I’ve been having a rather frustrating experience with Magellan GPS (Thales Navigation) as of late. Last Christmas, Marcie got me one of their SporTrak Color hand-held GPS units. I played around with it a little bit over the winter, took it on a couple of flights with me, etc, but I never really dug into the advanced features the unit is supposed to have in addition to GPS functionality (electronic 3-axis compass, temperature/barometric pressure logging, etc).

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Read the rest of this entry »

Nice to see someone in the media business actually gets it as far as making media available for public consumption. Too bad they’re on the wrong side of the pond. My favorite bit is at the end of the article:

In 2003, when the BBC switched off the encryption on its satellite feeds, allowing anyone who bought a receiver (including the French and Belgians) to watch free satellite TV, the studios went nuts, saying that they would lose licensing revenue from continental Europe.

Hollywood swore it would boycott the BBC: No movies for you!

The BBC stood fast — after all, anyone with a camera can be a filmmaker, but to be the BBC, you need 29,000 employees and 78 years of history — and when the studios’ fiscal year wrapped up, they came, hats in hand, to the BBC, asking if they couldn’t please have some of the money they were accustomed to for satellite licensing.

Meanwhile, over here in the good old USA, I have to resort to hacking my TiVo in order to copy movies off to DVD and edit out the commercials. Why? TiVo kowtowed to the entertainment industry, and stores all of the shows it records encrypted. Fortunately, said encryption was trivial to bypass, and thanks to my StarzHD subscription, I have a nice selection of near-DVD quality recordings.

Then, I bought the new Dave Matthews Band CD, “Stand Up”. It’s one of those non-”Red Book” compliant audio CDs that contains extra crap for copy protection. Again, trivial. I bypassed it by holding down the Shift key while insterting the CD into my computer. I’d like to think it’s the schlubs over at RCA/BMG that are the tools behind this, and not DMB, but a relatively taping-friendly band like DMB that’s popular enough they might as well have a printing press spitting out $100 bills in Dave’s basement ought to be able to “Stand Up” to their label.

It’s not like I’m seeding BitTorrents of the album - all I want to to make high-quality AAC files to feed to my iPod. Stop treating me like a criminal.

If you run your own blog, you’ve probably had to deal with comment spam. Even here on my own lightly-visited site (500 MB/month typical transfers), I’m getting 5-10 per day. Seriously, who are these people fooling? You’re putting ads up for absolute crap on the sites of people who are least likely to visit your site and buy counterfeit Viagra (V!@g.a.r.a), play texas hold-em, or buy the Paris Hilton video. Heck, I’ve even made fun of the spammers publicly for trying to do dumb things. Too bad credit card companies don’t provide a list of fake credit card numbers you can use on spammers that will process through the credit card system, but they don’t get their money. I’d love to screw a few of them out of a few grand. Merry Christmas!

Fortunately, WordPress does have a pretty good system for moderating comments. If you put a link in the comment, it automatically goes to moderation. Then, if it has a banned word, IP address, etc., it gets automatically /dev/null’d.

From the folks at US News:

It was the lead item on the government’s daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. “Stand down,” came the order from embarrassed national security types.

Nice to know the folks in Washington are on the ball.

This just in…
A 24-year old amateur golfer from Lowville, NY was thought to be a serious threat to Tiger Woods’ dominance of golf after shooting an unbelievable 74-under par at a tournament at Pebble Beach. The golf world breathed a sigh of relief when they discoverd it was just Ben Johnson on his PlayStation with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004.

Stumbled across an interesting article in the NY Times today on airfare rules, and how people are bending them in order to save money by doing things like using only half of a round-trip ticket.

What gets me is the tortured logic the airlines use to justify some of their rules. Here’s a quote from the article:

The ticketing rules, adopted in the 1980’s, are primarily intended to prevent business travelers from buying cheaper leisure fares, and how often they are enforced is a matter of some debate. Tim Wagner, a spokesman for American Airlines, said the carrier could detect back-to-back or hidden-city ticketing more easily than it could someone’s buying a round-trip ticket to fly one way. “It’s almost impossible for us to know why someone didn’t use the second half of a ticket,” Mr. Wagner said.

Nevertheless, he defended the airline’s throwaway ticketing rule. “If somebody books a round-trip ticket and never intends to fly that second portion, that’s lost revenue for us,” he said.

Huh? You’ve already got my money for the trip. If you’re selling round-trip tickets and not making money on them, you’ve got deeper issues a good finance wizard should look into.

Here’s my dumb airfares story. Back in 2002, I was planning to go home for my birthday from Chicago to St. Louis. Normally, I’d drive this. A couple days before, I got word I needed to be at a plant trial on Monday morning in Lowville. So, I start looking for fares from St. Louis to Syracuse, returning to Chicago. Best I can do is around $900. Coincidentally, to get to Syracuse from St. Louis, you end up having to go through Chicago anyhow, so my ticket was for STL-ORD-SYR (Sunday) SYR-ORD (Tuesday). Then, I decide to see how cheap it would be to fly home, making my routing ORD-STL (Friday), STL-ORD-SYR (Sunday), SYR-ORD (Tuesday). The fare?

$600. Go figure. I save the company $300 by taking one extra flight. Too bad I didn’t get to pocket the savings…happy birthday to me!

In another related article, they quote a guy as saying “we had markets where we had 70 and 80 different fares filed for a given city pair.” Why? The low-cost carriers are the only ones making any decent money, and they usually only have 4 or 5 fares for any given flight.

Here’s my favorite bit:

As Warren E. Buffett has often pointed out, if one tabulates all of the airline industry’s finances since the day the Wright Brothers bounced into the air at Kitty Hawk in 1903, one will discover that, cumulatively, there has not been a single penny of profit.

Coming to you from Wired’s Furthermore… section:

Rutgers University has turned its attention to a new area of health concern: The Simpsons. A team of researchers analyzed 63 episodes of the hit cartoon show for health-related messages and was alarmed by the study’s findings. “Fats, sweets and alcohol, particularly beer, doughnuts and salty/fatty snacks, accounted for 52 percent of all foods eaten in this program,” said their report. The study indicated that 40 percent of The Simpsons’ health messages run counter to those promoted by health professionals. Fans argue the satirical show portrays the doughnut-devouring characters as balding, drunken losers, but lead researcher Carol Byrd-Bredbenner is not amused. “We should be able to weave some good health messages into The Simpsons … Perhaps we could have more pasta and less doughnuts.”

Your tuition dollars at work, kids. The day Homer Simpson eats a bowl of pasta willingly is the day the show jumps the shark.

Mmm…donuts…

Nice to know my hometown has such a great national reputation.

Ok, this just struck me as funny…over on the right hand side of this page, you can see a section that says “Recent Google queries that led here” - I have a little hack which recognizes when you come to see me via Google, and tells what you searched for.

Someone got here via searching for “picture of Ben Johnson who is a Canadian sprinter”. I come in as the number 2 result by virtue of saying:

Maybe you’re wondering to yourself, “Who is this Ben Johnson guy?” Well … I am not related to the notorious Canadian sprinter …

Maybe Google needs to figure how how to parse natural language queries. Or, the person searching should have used Google’s image search tool.

This one’s straight out of the “only in New York City” and “government intelligence” departments. Read it here:

Osama “Fin” Laden is a threat to national security (link from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Nice to see my tax dollars are well spent, as usual.

Of course, frequent readers of my site probably know how much I “love” the TSA in certain airports. This guy manges to make the Syracuse folks actually appear competent! Idiots and authority are really a dangerous mix. Seriously, if you think a small fish poses any kind of threat to aviation security, you have no business working in aviation security. You shouldn’t even be working as a mall rent-a-cop. I’d be hesitant if you were the one asking me if I wanted to Super-Size my lunch.

At least the story had a happy ending - the fish was smuggled through security and survived its trip. Three cheers for people who fight the system…