James's Weblog

My mom has been receiving a lot of email from Borders. I don’t know why. Anyway, rather than setting email filters, I generally prefer attempting to unsubscribe from newsletters when they’re clearly backed by legitimate commercial entities (they are, after all, accountable and suable if things go wrong). Setting mail filters takes work, and I prefer stopping the email at the source over letting it clog the tubes.

Unfortunately, unsubscribing from Borders’ mailing lists is a challenge. Each email contains an “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom, but the link takes you to Borders’ website and requires you to log in to set your account’s email preferences. My mom says she has no account—and Borders’ website confirms that no account exists for the email address they’re sending email to—and therefore she can’t unsubscribe.

I eventually resorted to contacting their customer support. They said that they’ve removed her address, but we’ll see.

People running mailing lists should make unsubscribing really easy. There should be no hoops. Users shouldn’t have to remember log-in information. The easier it is for people to escape, the more willing they’ll be to try out the service in the first place. Annoying users who already are annoyed with you has no benefit. This doesn’t apply to just mailing lists. Netflix understands this and gets my business. Earthlink doesn’t, and I’ll never do business with them again, and I tell most people I know my Earthlink story so they will never do business with Earthlink either.

Sometime in the past few months the Fremont BART station started requiring people to pay $1 for parking. While the fee itself isn’t so bad, the system seems pretty ill-conceived.

Rather than using a normal paid parking system with parking meters or with entry or exit fees, riders are required to remember their parking space number and to pay at a machine inside the station. The system is so confusing that there are at least three extra employees to guide people through the process: one person in the lot shouting at people to remember their parking space numbers, another person inside the station directing people to the parking validation machines, and a third person to explain to people how to use the machines. And that’s not including any people needed to enforce the parking dues.

The parking machines also introduce a bottleneck since everyone entering the station must wait to use them. No longer can I have a spare ticket handy in my wallet and dash straight from my car to a departing train.

Admittedly the parking lot at the Fremont BART station wasn’t designed for this sort of thing, but I wouldn’t expect retrofitting it to be too costly since the lot has limited entrances and exits, and areas of the lot are designated for buses and for passenger drop-off and pick-up already.

Surely to the dismay of my coworkers, I have been remarkably unproductive at work during the past few weeks. I suspect one factor (or a convenient scapegoat) is that VMware recently started a shuttle service that has a stop near my house. I’ve been taking it to save what I estimate to be about $1500/year on gas, but I think it has significantly fouled up my daily routine:

• I used to wake up at around 10 AM, do about an hour of web surfing and responding to email, head to work between 11 AM and noon, and eventually return home at around 10 PM. Now with the shuttle, I’m forced to wake up earlier, and since I end up rushing out the door, I do my morning web surfing ritual when I arrive to work at 9:30 AM. This means that I actually start working at 10:30 AM, an hour earlier than before, but I have to leave by 7 PM, three hours earlier than before, yielding a net loss of two hours from my normal workday.
• When I drove home, I used to think about problems I was in the middle of working on. Consequently, when I returned home, I was ready to (and often did) continue working remotely. My brain was active, and driving increased right-brain activity which supposedly can give different insights. Now that I spend the commute on a shuttle, I’m sleepy and end up trying to nap or vegetate, and by the time I get home, I’m totally disengaged from whatever I was working on, and I don’t feel like doing anything else.

Of course, some people will say that maybe I was working waaaay too much before, but my claim is that I have to do that to keep up with all my smart coworkers. Sigh.

I received papers from Sony today saying that the USPTO actually approved some ridiculous patent application that my then-coworkers dragged me into filing with them four years ago.

I think it’s just further evidence of how overwhelmed the patent office is, of how ill-equipped they are to evaluate software patents, and of how software patents are usually lame. It’s another example of how large corporations flood the patent office with anything and everything to try to build up their patent portfolios, and not because they think they’re good ideas worth pursuing, but because they want things with which to defend themselves in case someone else sues them for patent infringement. Stupid patent cold wars.

It saddens me to think that my name is associated with that dreck. On the other hand, my name’s all over the dreck that I call my weblog, and as we already know, it’s not an uncommon name anyway.

My claim: a set of 2000 people has a greater than 50% probability of having someone else with my name.

VMware recently hired someone else named “James Lin”. Today I received four separate emails for him. I wonder if he’s receiving any of mine. Maybe he can fix some of my bugs.

And it happens to be on the 7th day of the week too (at least by the American calendar).

All the pregnant women having Cesarean sections today are cheating.

In other unrelated news, the power supply to my ReadyNAS seems to have failed, so most of my data is inaccessible. Grumble.

Several weeks ago, I received two bills from Sprint on the same day. The first was our usual monthly bill, due on May 23rd. The second was addressed to my dad’s estate. It listed no due date. (I have a photocopy of the bill as proof.) It was a bill for the unpaid balance on my dad’s account, a balance I had tried to pay when it was originally due, except Sprint closed the account on the due date, so I wasn’t able to pay it online as I normally do.

I paid both bills last week. Today I received another bill addressed to my dad’s estate with a late fee applied; apparently the previous bill was due on May 14th.

I wonder if I should bother refusing to pay. It’s probably not worth the $3, but the principle riles me.

Update:
For once dealing with Sprint was relatively painless, and they agreed to waive the late fee.

There’s a market on El Camino in Mountain View called “Teh Market”. I haven’t been inside yet, but it sounds like an invitation for a bad Abbott and Costello instant messaging conversation:

abbott2718: teh market has a great deal on beef jerky
costello314: which market?
abbott2718: teh market
costello314: the market?
abbott2718: obviously it’s a market
costello314: what’s the name of the market?
abbott2718: teh market
costello314: that’s what i want to know
abbott2718: what’s what you want to know?
costello314: the name of the market.
abbott2718: teh market.
costello314: why do you keep making typos in the?
abbott2718: in the what?
costello314: in the.
abbott2718: what?
costello314: not what. the.
abbott2718: the what?
costello314: sigh. teh.
abbott2718: right, that market has a great deal on beef jerky

My dad, my mom, and I shared a cellular phone family plan through Sprint. The account was under my dad’s name. Not wanting to pay for service to my dad’s phone anymore, we called Sprint and asked them how to cancel that phone and transfer the account to my name. The Sprint representative told us to fax in the death certificate and to supply a contact number, and then Sprint would call us back to settle everything. Okay.

We did that. A few call-less days later, I called Sprint back and asked them what was going on. The representative said to wait about 3-5 business days for the death certificate to be processed, that Sprint would call us back when it was, and then we could go down to some local Sprint store to settle the account. Okay.

Tonight I discovered that my cell phone stopped working. My mom’s stopped working too.

I called Sprint. Sure enough, they completely closed our account without warning. The first representative said that we’d have to start a new account with a new service agreement. (No thanks, we just finished ours.) He bounced me to a second representative who was much more willing to help, although unfortunately she and her supervisor turned out to be powerless. Apparently once an account is closed, it can’t be reopened. Legal reasons of some sort, they claim, but it sounds so stupid that it might be true. She advised me to call Sprint’s credit department, which was responsible for processing the death certificate and for closing the account in the first place. Unfortunately right now it’s closed, so I have to wait until tomorrow.

Our Sprint bill was due today too. I was putting off paying for it until Sprint contacted me about my dad’s service, and I had intended to pay for it online today, but with our account closed, I’m unable to do so. If I am able to reactivate our account, I wonder if they’ll make me pay a late fee. And if I’m not able to reactivate our account, I wonder if we’ll be able to retain our phone numbers when we jump ship to another carrier.

Update (February 16):
Progress so far:

1. Tuesday night: Talked to customer service representative #1.
2. Bounced to customer service representative #2.
3. Directed to credit compliance department, which is closed for the night.
4. Wednesday morning: Called credit compliance department. Bounced to some accounts department.
5. Bounced to Sprint corporate office.
6. Bounced to customer retention center. Talked to somebody who seemed like he could help.
7. Instructed to make trip down to the local Sprint store to sign things.
8. Sprint store said there’s still something wrong with my account and the guy from step #6 needs to fix it first.
9. Spent Wednesday afternoon and all of Thursday trying to call guy from step #6, leaving messages, and waiting for him to call me back.
10. Friday morning: Guy from step #6 called me back, shortly after I’ve left for work, and no one was home. ARGH.

Update #2 (March 9):

1. Tuesday, February 20: I gave up on waiting for the guy from Sprint to call me, and I emailed the Sprint CEO. He (or likely someone on his staff) responded and told me someone would contact me.
2. Wednesday, February 21: A woman from the executive services department called me. She told me that she’s working on our case and is trying to get our telephone numbers back.
3. Saturday, February 24: Received a bill from Sprint. They’ve got to be kidding.
4. Sunday, February 25: Sprint finally got my telephone number back. They walked me through reactivating my phone. They were having trouble with my mom’s and thought it might take another day or two. They said not to worry about the bill.
5. Monday, February 26: I discovered that I could receive and make telephone calls, but my data service wasn’t working.
6. Tuesday, February 27: Sprint said they have my mom’s number back. They walked me through reactivating her phone. They said it might take a few hours for the phone to become active. They helped me fix my data service problem.
7. Waited several hours. My mom’s phone could make outgoing calls, but incoming calls were greeted with a recording from Verizon about the number being disconnected. The number was originally a Verizon number, so maybe the phone number went back to them when Sprint closed our account? I decided to wait a little longer to see if there was a longer-than-usual delay due to another carrier’s involvement.
8. Thursday, March 1: My mom’s phone still couldn’t receive calls. Called Sprint’s executive services office back to complain. Left messages and waited for them to call me back.
9. Tuesday, March 5: Sprint called me back. They walked me through reactivating her phone again in case I made a mistake the first time. They said that if it still didn’t work that there was probably something wrong with the phone and that they’d call back in a few hours to follow-up.
10. Mom’s phone still wasn’t working. Waited for the follow-up call. Didn’t come.
11. Friday, March 9: Called Sprint back. Actually got through this time without needing to leave a message. Sprint insisted that my mom’s phone must be faulty and that I should bring it in to a store to get it serviced or replaced. They said I might have to pay for a new phone. I gave up and asked for a new number; my mom hasn’t been able to receive calls in a month anyway. The new number worked immediately.

So after all that, we ended up needing to get a new telephone number anyway. Sigh. Cellular phone carriers suck. At least it’s over.

For the Christmas before my dad passed away, I bought him a Bluetooth GPS receiver and the Palm OS version of TomTom Navigator for him to use with his Treo 650. I’ve started using it myself on my Treo during the past few weeks.

Things I don’t like:

• TomTom’s restrictive copy “protection” scheme. Had I realized how draconian it is, I probably would never have bought their software. They require software activation, and the software can be activated at most twice. To show just how ridiculous their policies are, from their “I am having trouble activating a second hand TomTom Navigator” knowledge base article:

  Second hand TomTom Navigator products are likely to have already been activated once or more by the first buyer and the product code may therefore no longer be valid. For this reason we advise our customers not to purchase TomTom Navigator second hand. If you have already purchased a second hand TomTom Navigator product and cannot activate the software, we suggest you return it to the seller.

  In other words, they’re unwilling to help you, and you’re screwed. I’m somewhat tempted to call them to complain that the previous owner was my dad and that they’re a bunch of insensitive jerks.

  I downloaded a crack off the Internet instead.

• Doesn’t automatically switch between day and night colors. The day colors are too bright at night, and the subdued day colors are too hard to see in the sunlight. At least hitting the “C” key quickly and easily switches between the two.

• No verbosity control. The thing is a chatterbox sometimes, saying things such as, “Turn right, then turn left. Left turn ahead. Turn left.” within the span of seconds.

• Some of its directions are misleading. TomTom often gives verbal directions like “turn right, then turn left” even though the left turn is a half mile away. I’d rather it didn’t mention the second turn at all until getting closer to it or if it said, “turn right, then stay in the left lane.”

• Menus are permanently cluttered with buttons that require paid service. I have no intention of ever paying for traffic or weather service, but they’re always listed in the menu choices, and I’m forced to wade through them. Reducing options in a software application that might be used while driving (despite their warnings against it) would be good.

• It uses strange defaults when restarted. When the software starts up and tires to retrieve the current location from the GPS receiver, it initially displays the “Home” location rather than from the last known location. It’s disorienting and weird. And once it does obtain the current location, TomTom Navigator always wastes time attempting to navigate to the last destination, even if you previously cleared the route or even if you already arrived there.

• It doesn’t tell you the name of the street you’re currently on. Admittedly that’s not so important if you’re just blindly following the navigation directions, but it’s something I’d like to know.

• It formats addresses as “Fake Street 123” instead of as “123 Fake Street”. There’s an option in the preferences to put house numbers first, but I can’t tell what it affects.

• You can save addresses to a special “Favorites” list and give them meaningful names. For example, you can save “742 Evergreen Terrace” (er, “Evergreen Terrace 742”) as “The Simpsons’ house”. However, once aliased, you can’t retrieve the actual address. Want to tell someone else where “The Simpsons’ house” is? Too bad.

• Incapable of learning. There’s no way to teach it about roads it’s not aware of, and worse, there’s no way to teach it about permanently blocked roads. Consequently, it will forever get the directions to my house wrong, because I live in a gated community, and TomTom (like most online mapping services) thinks there’s an accessible entrance into it where there isn’t.

• Inconsistent time formats. When showing the amount of time to the next turn, sometimes it says “0:15 hrs” to mean 15 minutes. Sometimes it shows “9.50 min” to mean 9 minutes, 50 seconds. And yes, I told it to use U.S. formats.

• Blinking speed indicator. If you choose to show your current speed, when the software thinks you’re speeding, it displays your speed in blinking red text. This is annoying because the speed limit can be higher than it thinks it is, the blinking red text is annoying and distracting, and because it’s blinking, by the time I look at it, the text is often gone.

• Its “point-of-interest” system is hard to use. If you search for nearby businesses, the list of search results shows you how far away they are but not where they are. Selecting an item from the list automatically navigates to it rather than giving you more information first, and if the selected item turns out not to be the one you wanted, you need to perform the search all over again. Oh, and there is no point-of-interest category for supermarket/market/groceries.

That said, the TomTom Navigator software does look very nice and have a good feature-set, though I wish its features were more easily accessible.