Gotta love customer support

We recently purchased an Ooma (review to follow shortly), and so after transferring our phone number to it I got online with Earthlink to cancel our trueVoice VoIP service. Here's how it went down...

Welcome to Earthlink LiveChat. Your chat session will begin shortly. Feel free to begin typing your question.

Customer Support says: Thank you for contacting EarthLink LiveChat, how may I help you today?

Me: I have swapped phone service to Ooma and need to cancel trueVoice

Customer Support: I am sorry to know that you wish to cancel True Voice service.

So... how am I supposed to respond to that statement? I'm sorry you're sorry to know I wish to cancel? Or, I don't give rip how you feel about it just get on with the canceling? I settled for an awkward silence until the rep started typing again.

Customer Support: Please give me two minutes.

Me: thank you

Customer Support: Thank you for your time.

Whew! Got through that one! So, I think I'm going to have an easy time of it, but no - here comes the hard sale...

Customer Support: True Voice Service has directory assistance service helps find a phone number for the customer through an automated operator. EarthLink Voice allows you to decide whether your phone will be able to make directory assistance calls

Customer Support: Are you sure that you wish to cancel it?

Me: yes

Let's see... I just spent $250 on a device so that I don't have to carry a monthly phone bill anymore and now you expect me to keep spending my hard-earned cash on trueVoice because of Directory Assistance? I don't think so.

After a few minutes I get the cancel confirmation and notification that I just made my last payment and will not get charged again. But, wait a second, I paid Earthlink yesterday for the next month's worth of service. What happens to that money?

Me: Will I be refunded a pro-rated amount for the time I am not using through Dec 14th?

Customer Support: I will check what best could be done. Give me three more minutes.

Customer Support: Thank you for being online.

The "what best could be done"? What "best could be done" better be refunding the pro-rated amount. And, thank goodness, it is.

Customer Support: I will refund $21.62 to your Bank Draft updated on your account.

Me: thank you

Of course, I have very little doubt that had I not asked about it Earthlink would have been more than happy to keep my money for services never rendered.

And, finally after some more rig amoral and I think everything is done I get hit with this:

Customer Support: You are welcome. Is there anything else that I may help you with today?

Me: That will do it. Thank you for your help

Customer Support: You are welcome. I have a good news for you, your account has been selected for a 30 day free trial of PC Fine Tune service and it is a software which will solve the problems you are facing with your computer.

Customer Support: PC Fine Tune fine tunes, protects, and optimizes the computer. It is also called as PC Optimizer. It increases the speed, fixes disk errors, removes unnecessary files. It is EarthLink's 1-click solution that allows customers to easily optimize their system for better performance. PC Fine Tune which will increases the Internet download speed. It improves the performance of the computer. PC Fine Tune will defragment your hard drive, remove cookies and unnecessary files, fix errors in your computer's registry, and even detect early signs of hard drive failure, all in one easy-to-use program!

Customer Support: Right now, we're offering a FREE 30 day trial of PC Fine Tune, which you can continue at a low monthly rate of $4.95 per month with no commitment! Once the 30 days free trial is expired, the billing will start automatically. PC Fine Tune really boosts your computer's speed and performance.

Customer Support: May I go ahead and add PC Fine Tune service to your account?

Me: no

Customer Support: Okay. No problem. If you wish to subscribe PC Fine Tune service in the future, please contact us, we will order it for you.

Evidently upselling services while the customer is canceling other services is good business. I don't think so.

All I can say is, "TrueVoice - you and your monthly payments won't be missed." Next stop? Reducing that cable modem bill by ditching Earthlink altogether.

FM Radio on the iPod Touch?

This kind of thing ticks me off.

Rumor site 9to5Mac reports that Apple is on the cusp of releasing an FM radio application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. And get this: it will be for the current models, not for some new hardware revision. According to the rumor, Apple will awaken the slumbering FM transceiver already dormant within the devices, currently only used to talk to the Nike+ widget.

So, here I have had an iPod Touch 2G for almost a year, and that whole time FM capability has been lying dormant within it. I do everything with my Touch. Yard work, exercise, driving - it's always there. Of course, to do any of that stuff you have to download what you want to listen to first since you won't have any WiFi available. However, if Apple had just activated the hardware that I had already bought, I could have been listening to sports radio without any worries or additional devices.

Here's a good example. I was reseeding the yard this weekend and wanted to listen to the NCSU game. I can still pick up a WiFi signal in my yard, so I thought, "Hey - I'll find a webcast of the radio station (101.5 FM), and listen to the game using my iPod Touch!" Uh, no. They are blocked from streaming the game over the web, even though they are broadcasting it over FM. If you want to listen to Wolfpack games on the web you have to buy a game pack from the website, which at that point I was not inclined to do. And now I find out that all along the solution to this little problem is a tiny chip packed inside my Touch, the capabilities of which I have already purchased and yet Apple thinks I don't need to use.

Thanks, Apple - that's very kind of you. Let me guess, to enable this I will have to pay another $10 dollars to upgrade my Touch, just like I had to buy v3.0 to enable Bluetooth?

I'll take two

And give one to my wife. This is one of the best concepts I've seen in a while.

It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we've all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft's astonishing take on the tablet.

You have the same portability as a netbook, and twice the screen real estate. It's just begging for some e-reader software. And if it was double hinged, two people could work on it at the same time. Or play some cool head-to-head games. If you didn't want to write, one screen could show a soft keyboard for typing with the word processor on the other.

Please make it Microsoft. From reading the comments at Gizmodo, you'll have plenty of takers.

via Wired.

So long TomTom, I hardly knew ya

Like many sad stories, this one has a happy beginning. Once upon a time I bought my wife a new Dell laptop. It just so happened that they were running a sale where you could get a TomTom GPS device for half price with a laptop, so I grabbed one of those as well. My wife was skeptical, but over the following weeks she came to love it. In fact, she became addicted to having maps, points-of-interest, and directions at her fingertips whenever and wherever she needed them.

But then tragedy struck. While driving to a doctor's appointment in Cary, a pothole became the TomTom's undoing. The bounce popped the device out of its holder and it fell to the floor of the CRV.

This was the result.Now, I'm sure you are thinking, "Just call customer service! I'm sure they would replace it. You have only had it a couple of weeks, it was damaged in the course of normal use, and any holder that would fail going over a normal pothole is not the best design in the world anyway." Well, you would be wrong. I did in fact call customer service, and was told that this is 'physical damage' and not covered under warranty. I pointed out that it was being used properly. They said, "It is physical damage, and the screen is not a repairable item."

I replied, "So, you're telling me you won't replace it and my only option is to buy a new one."

Customer Service said, "That is correct. Good bye."

So, good bye it is. Personally, my feeling on the matter is that this is a 'design flaw' not 'physical damage'. But, that argument did not sway TomTom. So, I bought a new GPS unit. And, no, it is not a TomTom. I will not buy their products ever again. And after this experience I would recommend you do not either.

Instead I went with Magellan.This is the Magellan Roadmate 1440 which we will immediately stress test on our trip to Williamsburg this week. It has a nice, robust holder attachment and I think it would take an earthquake to shake it loose.

So, all I can say is, "So long TomTom, I hardly knew ya."

Transferring a tape to a CD

My wife is getting ready for a reunion and needs a tape of praise music that was made when she was in college transferred to CD. So, how do you go about doing that? Here's one answer if you use Windows XP. And, here's some pointers I learned while I was doing it.

• Audacity's a pretty nice little program for free.
• Put some thought into where you select the background noise for the noise cancellation step. In this case, if you select too early the recording hasn't actually started so you won't cancel out any noise. Be sure and pick a dead spot that is being recorded. It's an art getting the noise cancellation right, so play with it a little bit using a small selection.
  
• When it comes time to make tracks, you can select a song and then do a 'Save selection as wav'. This will save copying it into another project. Also, if you hover over the edge of your current selection the cursor will turn into a hand. Using it, you can change the start/end of the selection, and can use it to leapfrog tracks by grabbing the beginning and making it the end of the next track. You will save a lot of time this way.

Simple Outdoor Games

Geekdad at Wired goes unwired with 30 simple outdoor games. Some of them I remember playing, some not so much. But, overall a pretty nice list. Here's some I would add.

• Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, War (guns or swords) and other imaginary games. Or, are we to PC for this now?
• Spotlight. Hide and seek in the dark. The person who is it gets a flashlight to 'tag' people with and send them to jail. You can release everyone from the jail if you can get there without getting spotted.
• Whiffle Ball. Or any similar baseball type game with a bat and ball.

Part of the problem these days is lack of space. If you fit a house on .12 of an acre there isn't a lot of space left for a lot of games. And, newer developments tend not to have a lot of open space since it doesn't make the developer any money. Since I grew up in a more rural setting and now live in a suburban one, I guess I will be learning and teaching my kids those outdoor games that don't need a lot of space.

The Electric Chopper

If the Tesla Roadster is the show car for electric 4 wheelers, then this would have to be the 2 wheeled equivalent.

230 MPG? Really?

Chevrolet is putting out that the Volt will get an EPA rating of 230 MPG. That begs the question - how in the world do you determine something like that? Well, the answers are out there, but they are not easy to find.

Autoblog digs up some facts:

According to a commenter on TTAC.com, the EPA would first drive a PHEV with a full charge until it reaches a charge-sustaining mode, after which it completes a normal cycle of 11 miles. The Volt, therefore, would presumably go 40 miles before activating charge-sustaining mode, and then travel another 11 miles for a total of 51 miles. Thus, GM can claim the Volt will achieve 230 mpg based on 51 miles of driving during which only .22 gallons of fuel would be used. Likewise, if we know the Volt would use .22 gallons of fuel while traveling 11 miles in charge-sustaining mode, we can calculate that it would achieve 50 mpg while traveling with the generator on.

That helps, but it isn't enough. Theoretically, if you drove <40 miles every day, and charged your Volt every night, then you would never use any gas. That kind of makes the whole Miles Per Gallon thing superfluous. However, if you are on a long trip and are going to get 40 miles of battery only travel before the engine kicks in for the rest of the trip then it is not going to be that much different than a regular car. How can you take into account both extremes?

It seems to me that we need to move towards some kind of energy use measurement that would take into account all forms of propulsion be it electrical, hydrogen, gasoline, cold fusion or whatever. We just have to get used to talking in kW per Mile or Miles per kW or something similar. The hybrids are still going to cause problems because of their multiple sources of power, but I'm sure the EPA can work out the details. Then the question becomes whether or not the public can make the switch, and this in a country where we can't even adopt the metric system.

On another note it will be interesting to see what mileage the EPA actually puts on the Volt. Of course, when you consider that Chevy is now owned by the very entity that will be determining the rating, the question is probably moot.

Windows 7 XP Mode RC

Microsoft released the Release Candidate of Windows 7 XP mode today, and as luck would have it I just finished installing it on my laptop. And... it looks a lot like Windows XP, if you can imagine that. My main goal for installing it is to get SAS Enterprise Guide up and running since it doesn't seem to like Windows 7 very much. We'll see if XP Mode is any better. So far, Java seems to run OK, and Flash is working even though it threw up a window saying the install failed. Of course performance takes a hit so I wouldn't expect to play any old XP games on it. Although, I am certainly going to try.

10 things your kids will never experience in a new car

I can identify with all of these.

My dream, my kid's reality?

The AirVenture show in Oshkosh is going on right now, and one of the stars of the show is WhiteKnight Two, the mother ship for the first commercial trip to space. If you have the cash. Making a trip to outer space has always been a dream of mine, and right now it's a race between technology and cost and my age. However, the pieces are being put in place that may make it common place for my kids.

One of those pieces is Virgin Galactic and the combination of WhiteKnight Two and SpaceShip Two. WhiteKnight Two carries SpaceShip Two up to 50,000 ft, where it is released and rockets up on a sub-orbital trajectory. Virgin Galactic does the job of advertising, selling tickets and fronting the money. Whatever - I just wish I could be there. But those tickets are several years worth of salary.

Anyway, I can still dream and if you want to dream along with me these articles should help. First, an interview with the test pilot of WhiteKnightTwo. Next, some shots inside the cockpit. Finally, here's the video of SpaceShipOne, winner the Ansari X Prize.

Mixing Science and Politics

It rarely works - and here's a good example.

This article is unexceptional except that it demonstrates my point. Let's start with the title, "
British crayfish get a 'safe haven' from American invaders and a fungus that eats them from the inside out". Simple enough, but we've already set up the good guys (British Crayfish) and the bad guys (American invaders). Sounds like American Imperialism even reaches down to the lowest of life forms. I'd really like to meet the guy at the CIA who was in charge of the crayfish invasion program.

Anyway, on to the meat of the story. Here are the first two paragraphs.

Looking for crayfish in Britain? Look hard. Almost 95 percent of British crayfish have been wiped out in the last 20 years. Now some of the few remaining crustaceans are going into hiding in a desperate, last-gasp chance to save their species from extinction.

Like so many problems around the world, this one can be placed squarely on the heads of Americans—although in this case, we're talking about American signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus). First introduced to Britain two decades ago as food for trout farms, American crayfish have made their way into the wild. They not only outcompete the local white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes) for food, but they also carry crayfish plague (Aphanomyces astaci), a water mold that is deadly to the British crayfish.

I am left scratching my head why a writer in Scientific American, which you would think would be about, I don't know, science and maybe America is making such grandiose political statements. Look at the bold highlight I added. Is this really necessary for the story? What's worse is that the data does not support the conclusion. In the following sentence we learn that the British introduced the American species of crayfish. They did it to themselves!

I'm sorry, but as a proud American stories like this rub me the wrong way. All he had to do was objectively lay out the facts, and instead he has to ruin the story for many readers by maligning our country. Of course, I imagine there were plenty of readers who read right through that agreeing with every sentiment. But as far as I'm concerned you are better off keeping your science separated from your politics. There is no need to do it, and it will make a good story more enjoyable for everyone.

Crowdsourcing Wii Fit

We got Wii Fit back in April, and I have been using it ever since. If you aren't familiar with it, you get a balance board which senses your weight and how you move, and a game with a bunch of exercises and mini-games designed to help you get in shape. It will chart your progress over time, allow you to set goals, and keep track of your BMI (whether that is a good indicator of your health is another matter). As you start out you only have access to some basic exercises and games, but as you work on it you unlock other games and more advanced levels.

And, that is where the problem lies. Once you have unlocked all the content, the only incentive remaining is (hopefully) watching your BMI drop. Or not. Anyway, after a while doing the same old routines gets boring which is why Nintendo needs to crowd source it.

For example, one of the aerobic exercises is rhythm boxing. There is a basic level and an advanced level. You have a trainer who shows you a series of punches, and then you copy the pattern. But, you do the same set of patterns over and over and over. There are no new ones. They do not vary. You get the same annoying music. Now, imagine if you could create your own boxing routines. You could create your own patterns of punches and then put them together in creative ways. Upload your new routine so that others can download it and use it and voila! Wii Fit is fresh and fun again. You could rate the routines by difficulty and enjoyment so that the best ones rise to the top. And, hopefully, everyone gets fit.

They could do this for step aerobics, jogging, and boxing. It would also be nice if you could string together a series of exercises in the strength and yoga areas so that you don't have to keep jumping out to the main screen each time. People could upload their workout regimens so that others could benefit.

But, the chances of Nintendo doing this are just about nil, so I will just continue dreaming.

The Digital Age Dad

Are you a dad? Can you remember a time when you weren't carrying around a computer in your pocket that has more power than the one in the Apollo Lunar Command Module? Our kids won't. They will not experience life without the internet, without always being connected to their friends, without instant access to the world's knowledge. This shift in information availability is a direct result of the digital revolution, and as dad's we have to be a part of it if we are going to help our kids deal with it. So, here's a blog to help me and to help you.