Recently in Internet Category

Update:

I've been making use of the policy below for years, but I had read this past week that it was discontinued on September 1st. This is a major bummer to me, as it was a great deal which I've gotten much money back from. Perhaps that is the reason they stopped doing it. I wrote to Amazon Customer service earlier this morning and inquired if it was the case, and this is the disappointing email I got back:

Hello from Amazon.com.

Thanks for writing to us asking about post-order price policies for items purchased from Amazon.com.

While we don't always beat the best available price on every product, we do offer deep discounts on many thousands of items and cannot offer discounts after your order is complete.

From time to time, prices on some items will change due to special offers from suppliers and manufacturers or our inventory and sales volumes. When we can offer a lower price for new purchases, we will.

You may have been able to take advantage of post-purchase discounts on orders you placed in the past, but that policy was discontinued on September 1, 2008.

I am sorry this may disappoint you.

Major bummer. :(

Original Post from August 24, 2006:

I've been an Amazon.com user for a long time now - my first order with them was placed on June 24, 1997. I could probably figure out how much I've spent with them over the years, but I'd be afraid to. :)

But money is why I'm writing this short article you're reading. Being a long time member of Amazon, I was surprised to find out earlier this year that they have a 30 day price guarantee policy. I don't know what Amazon officially refers to the policy as, because it's not mentioned in their help anywhere (that I could find). However, if you notice that Amazon.com drops their price on something after it's been shipped to you, you can write them and request a refund in the amount of the difference, and they'll do it. It is internal, it's not like they honor a lower price anywhere (say at buy.com), but it works internally. At least that's how I understand it to work, anyway.

It doesn't matter how small the amount is (I've written in for as little as 8 cents), they'll give it to you provided it's within the 30 days (after it ships, I believe). Anyway, what you do is go to Amazon.com help area, and select the "Refunds" option in the "Returns & Replacements" section. From there, select the "Contact Customer Service by E-Mail" option, and then "Refund Inquiry" from the dropdown. From there you are presented with an interactive list of your previous orders, you find the one with the item you want the refund on, and then you are given the option to type in a message. That's where you actually ask for the refund. Make sure and mention the 30 day Amazon price drop policy.

It's a little bit of a hassle with all the clicking to ask for the refund, and you have to keep an eye on your orders for 30 days after they ship, but the way I look at it, if they're going to give me money back, I'm gonna take it - even if it is just eight cents! Make Amazon pay you! :)

I also tried this at Amazon's UK store, and it worked there; I don't know if it works universally at all their stores (amazon.ca, amazon.de, amazon.jp, etc), but it does at these two.

If you're a Gmail (or Google Apps Mail) user, then you've probably seen this lately. A few months back, Google pushed out a newer, "faster" version of Gmail, which by all accouts is faster. It appears (to this non techie programmer), that some of the things are done in javacript locally, then "pushed" (of sorts) to the server. I say this because whenever this error crops up, you can keep doing things locally, but they will never "take effect". Anything you do post error will be ignored by Gmail until you close that browser window/tab and reopen Gmail in another tab or something.

One of the really annoying things about this error is that it never ever EVER goes away. It says to retry in "X" seconds, which it does, and then fails again. In all the times this has happend (and its happened a lot), it has never once recovered. You have to quit and restart. Annoying.

After reading their online help for this error message, I got this:

A conflict with software on your computer, browser cache that needs to be cleared, or a temporary problem on the Gmail server.

I clear my browser cache quite regularly, so it's not that. Additionally this happens across multiple browsers, and has been happening for weeks, so I doubt it's truly JUST a local cache issue. conflict with software? That's nice - care to tell me WHAT software? Blaming it on other software without naming said software is a "shift the blame" tactic. It's a cheap answer for tech support. "Not our problem, something else is interfering, but we don't know what". FAIL.

It's happening on the order of two dozen times a day now, and it's seriously annoying. I went through their help, and nothing helped. I tried right now when I made this blog post to add mail.google.com to my local browser cookie control, and set to allow. Let's see if this makes any difference. I'm tired of dismissing this error. :(

As most who have looked for this info know, the 1-800 phone number for Amazon.com has been around for years and years. It's existence is not listed in the Amazon help area, but if you googled for Amazon 800 number, you could find it.

That number is 1-800-201-7575

I've called that for years, I almost NEVER go through email, because if I have a problem, I want some sort of immediate resolution, I don't want to wait for an email to maybe get responded to in a timely fashion, bounce back with a response, etc, etc.. So I called the 800 number.

Well, I had to do that this morning, got a nice guy on the line, and we spoke about Amazon, ordering, help and all that. Anyway, he told me the phone number above is being phased out, and a better number to call is this one:

1-866-216-1072

He did also tell me that they've added phone as an option in the help area recently. I can verify that this works, as I used it this morning to get a hold of this guy.

If you go to any help page, you will see the following button, you can click on it to get to the contact us area.

When you click that, you'll get an area where you can make a choice as to how to contact Amazon.

Click the tab that says "phone", and you'll get a page that looks like this. (You'll need to click the large image to see what it looks like).

You get to put in a phone number, and it immediately connects both you and an Amazon.com customer service agent. This has the benefit of getting you past all the recordings like "Please press 7, please press 2". It's a "direct line". It actually works pretty well.

But if you want to make a call yourself, they recommend using the 866 number. I had a problem with an order I placed Friday, so I had to call them and deal with it. Found all this new stuff out this morning, which was cool to know.

Are you lost? My RSS feed reader is getting lonely.

I've been using Google Reader for some time now. It's my preferred method of visting sites. In fact, if a site doesn't have a feed for it's content, I probably am not going there. I find it's a lot easier to read information this way. It's also beneficial in that you don't have to wade through piles of garbage website design layouts. The content is shown in a standard format across (almost all) of the feeds you read.

Anyway, if you don't know what RSS and feed readers are, you should. Check out this video entitled "RSS in Plain English". It shows you the basics of what you need to do to get started with feed readers.

w00t! :)

Here's more history on Peanut Butter Jelly Time. And here's a link to the original source flash file. :)

Anyone who knows me knows I get a boatload of email, and of course, insane amounts of spam. The last time I tracked it, I had something like half a million pieces of it myself in a calendar year - so I see a lot of it. Given I do professional work in email, I have to make sure legit email doesn't go to spam, so I notice what the current spam trends are, given I have to look through it all the time.

One that popped up recently a lot was one that went "How to rob banks legally!"

It occurs to me that if you could "rob a bank" legally, it would no longer be "robbing the bank", wouldn't it, as by definition, robbing is an illegal activity.

I get a lot of spam. In 2005, I got just under half a million pieces of it myself at my work email account. So I would like to think I am familiar with it. Each morning I download my 500 or so pieces of the stuff that have built up since the time I left work the night before. Each morning, it all gets routed to the junk mail folder like it always does.

I usually take a quick scan through the folder to see if anything shouldn't be there. I usually sort by subject; that seems to help me weed out things that shouldnt' be there faster. But this morning something occurred to me. Inbetween the spams that start with the letter "Y", and the spams that start with gibberish in the subject, there's no love for the letter "Z".

It appears that I rarely get any spam that starts with the letter "Z". Why is that? Doesn't anyone love "Z"? Come on, "Z" needs some love!

You know with the real flood of email I get (about half a million pieces in 2005 alone), every once in awhile something happens that make me laugh about it. The other day I was looking through my spam, and saw this. It just struck me funny. Spammers use bots to insert names and phrases into their outbound spam, but every once in awhile their systems screw up and you see stuff like this.

It won't make a difference for anything, but seeing this made me laugh at the guy who sent it. If you're going to spam me, at least do it right you twit! :)

Check out the image below. It's a screen dump from my mail client, Pegasus Mail. This is the copy of the program I use at work. I use it at home as well, but this is my office copy only. Specifically, I want you to check out the number of emails in the sent folder. I today reached a target I was wanting to get to for the better part of a year now. Around 6 or 7 months ago, a co worker of mine sent out a message in the interoffice email saying he had 10,000 emails in his outbox. So I thought, I can do that, I certainly write enough of it.

So at that point, I decided to not purge my sent folder, which I used to do from time to time. I don't remember exactly when or how many I had when I made this decision. But today I go and look, and the earliest email in my sent folder now is from Mar 23 2004. If you count the number of days since then till today, it's 467. However, since this is my office email, and I'm not usually at the office on weekends, so the number of days is a bit less. It's actually 327 days if you take out the weekends from that figure.

Dividing 10,000 emails by 327 days tells me that I've written an average of 30.58 emails from my desk per day. That's just an average.

Also keep in mind this is just emails I've written from the office. My sent folder at home has about 3,500 emails in it as well.

P.S. The mail in the "deleted msgs" folder are all inbound msgs I received from this past Friday evening when I went home for the weekend. So yeah, I get a bunch of email. Unfortunately, according to my spam processor, 94.05% of my inbound email is spam.

Here's another one from the "disturbing information about the electronic age" department.. Apparently, if you have about $100, you can pay a website and have them get a log of outbound phone calls from a cel phone.

That's fairly annoying. I'm usually not one to go around waving the "privacy" banner, because I feel that a lot of people whine about their privacy and rights are being violated (when they should just shut up), however, this one is somewhat nasty because the methods used to obtain said records are illegal.

Check out the story about this.

It's getting to the point where we might want to just post everying personal about ourselves on a friggin billboard somewhere.

/me sighs.

I normally don't go for these things, but since I haven't had a blog update in awhile, I thought I'd do this. I picked it up off of Laura Swisher's Blog. Laura was the Co-host of "Unscrewed" from TechTV (later G4/TechTV until G4 killed off all the good shows from TechTV). Anyway..

1. What time did you wake up this morning? 830am, but only after about half an hour of "Get UP!" from the wife.

2. Diamonds or pearls? Pearls. ;)

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema? The Incredibles last November. It's been awhile.

4. What is your favorite TV show? Currently? Star Trek Enterprise. Of all time, probably either Dallas or Doctor Who.

5. What did you have for breakfast? Nothing. Skipped breakfast and went straight to Lunch - footlong Club on Italian Herbs & Cheese bread from Subway.

6. Peach yogurt or granola? Granola

7. What is your favorite cuisine? Italian

8. What foods do you dislike? Tofu, and other "health" foods of that nature. People that eat them look like friggin rails!

9. What is your favorite crisp flavour? Sharp Cheddar Cheese? Not sure I understand this one.

10. What is your favourite CD at the moment? "I Wish We All Could Win" by the Afters

11. What kind of car do you drive? 2004 Dodge Dakota Quad Cab Pickup

12. Favourite sandwich? Anything my wife makes. I suck at making sandwiches, she's much better.

13. What characteristics do you despise? Perceived stupidity.

14. Favourite items of clothing? Baseball cap. Jacket.

15. If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you go? Los Angeles, to visit my friend Shawn Lyon. I've been saying I'll come out there for over 10 years.

16. What colour is your bathroom? Beige

17. Favourite brand of clothing? Don't care.

18. Where would you retire to? Doesn't matter, so long as I have a good internet connetion.

19. Favourite time of the day? 1AM-3AM. I'm usually by myself, and I know the phone won't ring.

20. What was your most memorable birthday? 30th. My then girlfriend now wife, teased me mercilessly about me being "Over the hill". Major tactical error on her part, I can now hold that over her. :)

21. Where were you born? Norfolk, VA

22. Favourite sport to watch? Baseball - is there any other?

23. Who do you least expect to send this back to you? Laura Swisher.

24. What book are you reading now? Books about being a new father.

25. What fabric detergent do you use? No idea. I tried doing the laundy a few times after I first got married, but I botched it so bad, I was banned from doing laundry ever since! That's the secret to getting the spouse to do what you don't want to. Be incompetant! :D

26. Coke or Pepsi? Caffiene Free Diet Coke.

27. Are you a morning person or a night owl? Night Owl. Morning people are annoying.

28. What is your shoe size? 11 1/2

29. Do you have any pets? Yeah, two Tonkinese cats, Zathras & Kira.

30. Any new and exciting news you'd like to share with your friends? I'm going to be a dad in less than 4 weeks, but my friends know that already.

31. What did you want to be when you were little? Several different things, but the most "non traditional" was a professional bowler. This was when I was 4.

32. What are you doing today? Filling out this stupid survey! I also went with my wife for her weekly doctor's office visit for the weekly end of pregnancy checkups.

I'm from Philadelphia, and I know the politics there fairly well. I can't imagine my old town is at the forefront of a move to bring either free/dirt cheap wireless internet to all. Check out this plan - it's quite amazing.

Although since it is government issued, one would have to think it would get screwed up, eh?

This actually was an AP News story, but since Yahoo's news stories disappear after about two weeks, I copied it here.

The Onion is always got a bunch of funny stuff, but this link is particularly funny on what might happen if one's parental units would discover your blog.

Thanks V.

I think this spam I've gotten a few of over the last few weeks is one of the most "out there" (har har) spams I've gotten. Once I finish saving up for the piece of the Brooklyn Bridge, I'll get right on this.