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.