Update: after this posting appeared, Mr. Stewart’s office contacted me. They tell me they have now removed my address from their mailing list.
…but he is a spammer. We keep getting cards in the mail from him, despite repeated requests to be removed from his mailing list.
Sen. Barbara Boxer is having email problems:
[title blatently stolen from 37signals.]
Over at Yahoo, it seems some people just don’t know where they are:
Fuzz, on the other hand, has a sense of humour, gently prods its users to fill out their profiles:
I got some junk mail recently advertising the Web 2.0 Expo.
I called O’Reilly. They removed me from their list. I wanted to find out how they got my name.
Customer service put me through to the conference publicist.
The conference publicist put me through to conference marketing.
Conference marketing sent me to CMP database marketing.
CMP’s director of audience development removed me from CMP’s list.
CMP database marketing told me they got my name and address from…Wired.
This absolutely needs to be opt-in, not opt-out.
Bad Wired. No cookie.
On March 23, 2007, I received an email from MoveOn titled “Rep. Pelosi does the right thing on Iraq.” It began like this:
Dear MoveOn member,
We’re one step closer in the fight to end the war. Today the Iraq Accountability Act passed Congress. For the first time, Congress passed a real deadline to end the war—by fall of 2008. Your representative, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi voted right and helped make that happen.This was a very hard vote for members of Congress. But Rep. Pelosi supported Speaker Pelosi in her strategy to wind down this war. Can you write her a quick note to say ‘thanks’ for bringing us one step closer and to keep up the fight until all our troops are home?
Look at the second paragraph: This was a very hard vote for members of Congress. But Rep. Pelosi supported Speaker Pelosi in her strategy to wind down this war.
No, there’s only one Pelosi in Congress. It’s just MoveOn’s software that’s a little overzealous. People in Pelosi’s congressional district should have received a differently-worded letter, or none at all.
My favourite Canadian bank, PC Financial added a brilliantly designed feature to their ATMs:
No more addition mistakes. Enter checks one at a time, and let the ATM do the math. So smart! Why didn’t anyone think of that before?
Wells Fargo does this now, too — they scan the checks and read the amount in automatically. And they no longer require envelopes.
PC Financial’s relatively low-tech solution is something that can work with all existing ATMs, and doesn’t require new hardware or banking laws.
On the other hand, take a look at the work of a clueless Canada Post graphic designer:
Canada post’s ship-in-a-click, part 2
No wonder Canada Post is so slow at delivering things — all their mice are upside down.
This is from my American Express blue online statement. Apparently "24, 25, 26, 25" is descending order. Sigh.
Alsoft is one of my favourite companies. DiskWarrior is the best Mac OS X disk repair utility, hands down. Well, well worth its price.
As soon as I found out DiskWarrior 4 had been released, I immediately ordered the upgrade, without even finishing the article. This was around December 11.
So, what’s broken?
First, Alsoft’s online store does not send out an email confirmation of your order.
Second, upgrade (loyal) customers are being treated like second-class citizens. It’s been five weeks, and the product is all over stores (and was for sale at Macworld Expo), and I still don’t have my copy.
Third, there’s no way to check order status — I had to phone Alsoft to confirm that, yes, I really had ordered, and yes, it should eventually ship. (But they don’t know when.)
AOL’s marketing is so pervasive, it has snuck its way in to their bounce messages:
: host mailin-02.mx.aol.com[205.188.155.89] said: 550 We would love to have gotten this email to reenandsabo@aim.com. But, your recipient never logged onto their free AIM Mail account. Please contact them and let them know that they’re missing out on all the super features offered by AIM Mail. And by the way, they’re also missing out on your email. Thanks. (in reply to RCPT TO command)
So the idiots at Sprint send Joel Splosky an LG Fusic phone to review, thinking he will promote their service.
Phone companies, as Joel points out, have a history of bad decisions:
And it’s 2006, and I almost can’t believe I’m writing this, because way back in 2000 I wrote almost exactly the same thing about WAP, and how cell phone companies keep failing to insert themselves as toll collectors because they’re so darn clueless about how the Internet works, and about the value of many-to-many networks instead of broadcast networks.
Needless to say, the phone sucks, and Power Vision sucks too. Is Power Vision a 3G service? Why do phone companies have to brand everything in some incomprehensible way? mMode? MEdia Net? Vision? Power Vision? Vcast? Stop, my head hurts.
Now, on to the good part:
the LG Fusic user interface could basically serve as an almost complete textbook for a semester-long course in user interface design, teaching students of usability exactly what NOT to do.
And one more:
A little bit more exploring and I discovered that there’s another entirely separate MP3 player on this device. It’s hard to find. You have to go to Tools, then Memory Card, then to the Music folder, and another MP3 player starts up which you can use to listen to your MP3s. For this player, you don’t have to be on the network, so it works in the subway, but—get this—the minute you close the clamshell, the music stops! I am literally not making this up. There are two bad MP3 players on this device, neither one of which remembers where you’re up to, neither one of which can be used on the subway with the phone folded in my pocket, neither one of which has a fast-forward feature.