Win Without War Communications Deluge

The Win Without War Coalition is sponsoring an interesting phone-in movement scheduled for February 26 to protest a war on Iraq:

On February 26th, every Senate office will receive a call every minute from a constituent, as they receive a simultaneous flood of faxes and e-mail. Hundreds of thousands of people from across the country will send the collective message: Don't Attack Iraq. Every Senate switchboard will be lit up throughout the day with our message -- a powerful reminder of the breadth and depth of opposition to a war in Iraq. And on that day, "antiwar rooms" in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles will highlight the day's progress for the national media, while local media can visit the "antiwar room" online to monitor this constituent march throughout the day.

Froogle!

New Google BETA toy: Froogle. From the FAQ:

Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.

It seems to have been around since December 2002, but somehow I missed it until now.

Canadian Sent to India in Passport Fiasco with US INS

From Boing Boing:

Zed sez: "An Indian-born Canadian citizen was flying home from India to Toronto, and transferring at O'Hare. INS decided her passport was funny-looking, destroyed it, denied her access to the Canadian consul, and deported her to India via Kuwait with her papers in such disorder she might not have been able to get into India if Kuwaiti and Indian authorities hadn't been so co-operative."

You know, it's a good thing that, when I was living in both Ireland and Canada, none of their customs officials ever voided my passport due to "funkiness" and sent me to Japan or Germany.

Permanent link to Boing Boing post

The Whistles Go Woo Wooo!

Can't get up in the morning? Hook up your ride with whistle tips (WMV video, right click to "Save as" and download to save bandwidth). You should be up cookin' breakfas' o sumpin anyway. Woo wooo!

Joe Wasson has a blog!

Kalashnikov sets sights on superbrand

As seen on Boing Boing. The funny bit about this story, to me, is the following. I've got no problem with being hesitant to do business with US marketing firms, but the ironic logic here is priceless:

Kalashnikov, who began work on the rifle in 1941 after suffering serious wounds while fighting Nazi Germany, said he had received similar offers from US firms but was reluctant to enter a business deal with the Soviet Union's Cold War enemy.

"...I thought if an American company used my name for profit it would have been a betrayal of the motherland," he said.

There be rants here.

I never knew trying to pay your phone bill at a Sprint store was so hard. They can't just take your money and credit it against your account, like you would expect. Even given that you do hand them money when you sign up, and they activate your account on the same system. They can also look up your balance and all your personal account details on this system, but in order to actually pay, you have to use a vaguely ATM style machine that accepts either cash or checks, but not credit cards, ATM debit cards, or check cards. Oh, but if you have a check card with a Visa or MasterCard logo, then you can actually have your payment processed by a staff member at the desk, which is again, the same aforementioned system (and process) you go through when you sign up.

This is after I tried paying via credit card through the web. I figured that by actually walking down to a real Sprint store, I wouldn't have this problem. It's not even a Radio Shack!

The annoying thing about the ATM-like machine is that it uses a touchscreen, which are still lame for this sort of thing, and that it's hopelessly non-customer-service-oriented. I'm sure (well, I hope) that it'll be a win later on when I need to pay, since now I know how to use it, but I still like the idea of having these sorts of machines available primarily when there are no humans in the building. This machine is in the same store. You couldn't get to it late at night, for instance, like you could an actual ATM. You have to use it during business hours. I'm sure the idea here is that it frees up the staff from simple account payment issues, so that they have more time to try to sell potential customers expensive phones and airtime plans, but it amazed me how many times I was told to go back to the machine even after I told several staff members that it wasn't working.

This isn't entirely true, the machine was working fine. I was being petulant somewhat on purpose because, as a customer, once I've tried your recommended option (i.e. "use this automated payment machine") and have noted that "it doesn't work", it should no longer be an issue as to why, you should find some other way to service me. I want to pay you! The lack of a fallback, unless you really become irritating, is pretty damn stupid, and will lead to actual pissed off customers. I'm not going to get into the reasons why I said the machine "didn't work" -- again, it did in fact work, when you provided all the appropriate information and were willing to deal in the formats it accepted. In the end, I did get my bill paid via the machine. What boggled me was the complete abscence of anything resembling anything less than the minimum of customer service for a person who wants to give the company his money.

I don't really blame the employees either. Many of them did help me, although one was less than happy about it. It was near the end of their shift, so I'm sure they weren't in the best possible mood to be dealing with a problem customer. That's fine, I understand. I'd like to believe that the problems I encountered had more to do with the directives Sprint is now giving it's employees, and the "automated" systems they're rolling out. Point is, when I go to the source vendor of a product or service that I pay money for, and that I want to pay more money to in order to receive same service, I expect an easier transaction.

Keeping up with the insane amount of email I receive daily is nigh-impossible, given that I have other things to do. Of course, most of this is self-inflicted, because I'm on a lot of mailing lists by choice. I also have this unshakeable tendency to archive all the mail I get, including list email, although it's almost certainly archived better elsewhere with search tools and threading and what not. I had thought a while back of cutting down the mailing lists I'm on per se, and using GMANE, but that hasn't taken with me.

I'm trying to climb out of this pit a little at a time now (yet again), so you may see me pop up out of the blue on a mailing list or eight. Hopefully, as I've said any number of times, each the last time I did this sort of thing, I'll continue to participate as well, instead of being active in sine waves with amazingly long periods.

I have some essays that are half-finished and ages old that I'll be commenting on shortly, and requesting commentary on, the first on digital rights management. I'll try to get that out this week, at least to this here blog.

Although my day job has near zero to do with anything I was doing for my last three employers, I'm still inexplicably drawn to pontificate about security and languages, so expect more of that. And of course, I mix the personal stuff that's non-technical with the personal stuff that is technical; consider yourself warned.

Recent adventures in coding have seen me fiddling with writing some simple tools (key word: "simple") in C++ (shock! horror!) because I got sick with trying to track down two novelty Perl scripts every time I hopped systems, neither of which was meant to be readable (in fact, they were meant to be as short as possible, and are distinctly unreadable). I've been moaning and groaning about the lack of a decent text editor more lately, though again, this is a recurring pattern with me.

Oh, and I'm trying to post more to this thing. I've said that before. We'll see. One might wonder why I'm trying to post more, if I don't have a lot to say. Let's just call it an "experiment" and go from there.

Nelson has a blog!

Nice relaxing weekend. Did a lot of reading, some writing. Had dinner with Kevin on Friday night in the Inner Sunset, a neighborhood I don't spend enough time in. Went to The Pork Store on both Saturday and Sunday for breakfast: very enjoyable.

So which piece of music is it that I can't stop listening to now? David Holmes's "Hey Lisa", off of _Bow Down to the Exit Sign_. Yes, I'm still also entranced by Nursat Fateh Ali Khan (for the second time).