Blow Me

I had to buy a new leaf blower last week.  Unfortunately, since my budget is constrained these days, I had to go with cheap, not necessarily frugal, and bought an electric Black and Decker unit.  Having had bad luck with these in the past, I am determined to make sure that, if it does not last through the full two year warranty period, I have everything lined up so that I can get it fixed or replaced.  To that end, I decided I would "register" the warranty.  I know that doing so is generally not required, but I want to make sure that there is absolutely no question if (or more likely when) the need for service arises.

A quick glance at the registration card revealed far more questions than seemed necessary, so I thought I'd take the "easy" way and register online.  Off to BlackandDecker.com I went, only to immediately be met with a demand to "set up an account".  Then I could get email newsletters every week!  I don't want a fucking account or your SPAM, I want to make sure I can get warranty service on this cheap Chinese-made POS when necessary.

Back to the hand-written registration card.  Immediately after my name and address (reasonable information to provide, I think), they want my date of birth.  Then marital status.  Further along, they want the gender and age of everybody in the household, including children (!).  Occupation.  Income.  Own or Rent?  What type of internet access?  Etc.

What the hell, Black and Decker?

No, you can't have all that personal information, you can't have my email address, and no, I don't want you to share my information so that I can "receive important mailings and special offers from a number of companies whose products and services relate directly to the specific interests, hobbies and other information indicated."

And I just love this line "Please check here if, for some reason, you would prefer not to participate in this opportunity."  (emphasis added).  Oh my yes, for some reason, maybe I don't want you to sell my personal information to the highest bidder.  What ever could I be thinking, turning down such an opportunity?

Here's a crazy idea.  Build a product that's sturdy and will last for a decade or more.  Even better, build it in the United States.

Sprint Fail

Remember back a few years ago, when Sprint had those ads with CEO Dan Hesse in noirish settings, talking all sincere and stuff about how dedicated they were and all that crap?  And then he offered up "his" email address.  Now anybody who doesn't know that those emails were routed to a foreign country for useless responses probably also believes in unicorns, but I went ahead and sent Danno a message anyway:

Mr Hesse -

The other day, my trusty HTC EVO 4G stopped working and I had to find a replacement phone quickly.  I've been happy with my Sprint service overall, and have been a customer for over ten years, but in purchasing a replacement phone,  Sprint has done everything to make me reconsider my loyalty

- I had to purchase from a third party to get a reasonable price.  The price I got was $50 less than the best price offered to me on the Sprint website, despite my long tenure, and it was a real price, not a price computed after figuring in so kind of bogus rebate.

- The deal I got from the third party site also included a free accessory kit, something I've never seen offered by Sprint.

- The deal I got from the third party will also credit the (ridiculous and bogus) $36 "activation fee" that you insist on charging.  Do you think customers don't recognize pure profit-taking when they see it?

- Once my purchase had been made and processed by the third party, I received a stupid email from Sprint telling me "As of 10/07/2013, the Everything Data 450 plan was added to your account and the Everything Data 450 plan was removed."  Any programmer worth his salt could have supressed that email.

- And then for some reason, Sprint disconnected my mobile number from Google Voice.  Since my current phone is dead, it was very important for me to have the calls go to Google Voice, so I could at least check the voice mails, and I would also have been able to receive and send text messages as necessary.

Despite my 10+ year relationship with Sprint, I am seriously considering cancelling this contract immediately and going with one of your competitors - and trust me, because you are costing me real money by effectively disconnecting my phone due to the Google Voice fiasco, there would be no chance of you receiving an ETF.

Major failures Dan, from start to finish.

Stupid Sprint is Stupid

I sort of broke my phone the other day, and the best deal I found on getting a replacement was via Costco. WHY?  Why can't Sprint give me the best possible deal, since I've been a customer for ten years???  Topic for another post, I guess.

So anyway, last night I logged in to my Costco account and filled out all the information and so on.

Today I received an email from Sprint, helpfully informing me that:

As of 10/07/2013, the Everything Data 450 plan was added to your account and the Everything Data 450 plan was removed

Boy, that was informative.

. 

Wherefore Art Thou?

Tivo introduced some new boxes today, all named "Roamio".  And in so doing, they continue their apparent campaign to alienate existing customers.

Let's start with the very announcement itself. Sure they put out the press releases and had coverage on all the tech sites, but not a peep in email to a long-term customer.  Barely a mention via their official Twitter account, except for some retweets of other coverage.  Then finally a single post at around 12 noon EDT.  Maybe there was something on Facebook, I stopped following them there because of the nearly negative signal-to-noise ratio.

Along with not giving any heads-up to paying customers, there is, of course, no incentive for existing customers either.  Want a new box?  Full price for everybody.  No trade-in, no service discount, nothing.  It's bad enough that the Series 3 box I have, with "lifetime" "service" hasn't received any significant software update in years.

And then there's the website.  I logged in on tivo.com the other day, and I know I checked the box that said "keep me logged in for 45 days."  But with the new hardware comes a new website, and not only am I not logged in, but that checkbox doesn't even appear.  The new sign on screen has just two fields, email address and password.  Since I've logged into tivo.com dozens of times in the past, I double-clicked in the email field so that Chrome could fill in the box for me.  No dice.  It's a different URL completely.  OK then, I'll just type in the email.  As soon as I type the first letter, an error message appears above the input field --

Invalid: This is not a valid e-mail.

Nice.  That error message stays in place until I get to the "o" in ".com".  Good to see that whoever programmed that completely unnecessary validation routine recognized a TLD other than com.  For a company that's celebrated for the device UI, they sure bolloxed up that bit of user interaction.

I think I'll stick with my ancient TiVo HD and the even ancienter Series 2 DT in my bedroom, at least until all the early problems (and we know there will be problems) get worked out.

Don't even get me started on why only the base model offers an ATSC tuner.  I'm sure there must be some reason, but I'm not interested enough to figure it out at this point.

SWM ISO ...

I got my Gmail address way back when the service first started up.  As such, it's a fairly short name, and didn't require a lot of customization.  As time has passed, I have started getting more and more email that should be going to somebody else, because other people seem to think they own my email.  I've gotten wedding plans, "Mom's" electric bill, contract information of various types, and so on.  I also started getting more and more spam, on an account that initially didn't get any.  With all those various mis-addressed emails coming in, sometimes I'd just ignore them, sometimes I'd reply to the sender stating that they had the wrong person.  There's a woman in Australia who never would believe that I wasn't the person she was trying to reach, and sometimes when I look at my spam folder, I still see jokes that she's forwarded.  A couple weeks ago, I got an email about renting a theater in Vancouver, BC and tried to tell the sender that she had the wrong person.  Her first reply insisted that I had indeed been the one to email her.  I replied again, saying "hey, I was just trying to let you know that you had the wrong person, but if she just wanted to argue, then she should just go ahead and rent the theater to somebody else.  Her reply to that?  "FU".   So yeah, I'm less and less inclined to help people reach the right person.

Anyway ... yesterday I received an email welcoming me to one of the larger online dating services.  It wasn't for me, in case the preceding paragraph didn't make that clear.  That email provided "my" username, password, date of birth and ZIP code.  Good gravy, I'm halfway to stealing somebody's identity and I haven't even used the credentials to log in to the dating site and see what else I can find!

I'm sorely tempted to log in and change field that says "looking for women" to "looking for men".  I am gay after all.  Or perhaps to change the profile text to say "Hey ladies, I'm too stupid to even know my own email address, so you'll probably want to keep looking."

But back to that initial email.  The PASSWORD?  In plain text?  In Two Thousand Freaking Thirteen?  Clearly that means the site in question is not encrypting their records.  Is it time to name and shame them?  Should I actually log in and see what other information is available to me?