I heard you’ve been collecting payments on a private loan or “note.” I would love to give you cash right now so you don’t have to worry about collecting payments anymore.

They varied slightly in word choice, but both were careful to use the quotation marks around the word note. Have phishing attacks using e-mail lost their effectiveness? Are scam artists turning to the old postal mail standby?

One of the postcards listed a web site, a classic “turn key” business site, where hundreds or thousands of users will have their own URI and a standard template, such as www.scams-r-us.com/dirt-bag. I’m sure the parent site takes their cut, too.

Anyway, I loaded the main site (http://www.cash4cashflows.com/) and it looks like every other scam out there. Some dirt bag scrapes web sites or purchases address lists, then he hands them out to everyone who signs up for the site. Of course, everyone who signs up gets the same set of leads, but that’s the best way to make money off a single lead more than once.

Periodically, I will run a speed test, just to gather data points. I’ve consistently seen a sustained downstream rate of 1.6 Mbps. Recently, the service has felt slower—sometimes unbearably so. I ran another test this afternoon:

Download Speed: 1520 kbps (190 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 276 kbps (34.5 KB/sec transfer rate)

Seriously? This is high speed?

Somewhere I’ve seen Cox advertise rates of 3 Mbps, but I don’t have a reference to this handy. Searching Cox’s web site, I’ve found reference to 15 Mbps. I’m receiving one tenth the advertised rate, yet I’m paying 100% of the price.

Gee, thanks Cox. For nothing.

Last week, when Mrs. sirhc and I were visiting Oregon, we took advantage of the absence of a state sales tax and a sale at Costco to buy two Samsung u550 phones. They seemed like a good deal at the time, and we were assured of a very liberal return policy, so we went ahead and bought them.

We soon decided that we didn’t like our new phones very much. The features seemed limited, and I couldn’t get the volume up to a decent volume on either of my Bluetooth headsets. I also decided that I really wanted a PDA this time around, and set my sights on the new Palm Treo 755p. So back to Costco we went, down here in San Diego this time.

The return went smoothly, but the guy working the kiosk at Costco didn’t seem very interested in activating our old phones. Since the kiosk didn’t have the phones we wanted, we didn’t worry too much about this and went over to the Verizon store instead. That’s when things stopped going smoothly.

The kiosk guy didn’t reset our contracts, and there was nothing the customer service guy at the Verizon store could do about it. I had our old phones reactivated and called the original kiosk guy in Oregon. He said everything was fine and fed me a line of, what the real Verizon customer service guy told me was crap. Apparently, the kiosk guys do this all the time, to keep their commission even after a customer backs out of the contract within Verizon’s 30 day trial period. I was about to call Verizon corporate customer service myself and ready to drive back to Costco when the customer service guy said he’d make some calls and bring his manager into it.

In the end, the Verizon store guys got everything straightened out. We got our contracts reset, so we were able to get discounts on my Palm Treo 755p and Mrs. sirhc’s LG enV. So far we’re pretty happy with our new toys.

And that’s the last time I buy a phone from a kiosk.

I think this will be my last non-business flight for a long, long time. Not when it costs most of a paycheck just to fly somewhere for a weekend.

Update (26 Mar 2008, 09:30): I just booked a rental car and a hotel room in Oregon. Total cost, $208.32. $2.68 less than one ticket reschedule from American Airlines.

My day hasn’t been off to a great start. After a bout of insomnia and a near collision on the 405, I arrived at the Los Angeles Airpot Westin to find the parking garage full. There was some parking that we were told was off limits, despite the lack of barrier and hidden signs. I am, instead, parked in a supposedly free garage down the block. Hopefully my car will still be there this afternoon.

As it seems the network connection for the keynote has failed, I’m going to wrap this up and see if I can find any of my fellow KPLUGgers.

On the plus side, things can really only go up from here, right?

False alarm. Seems the keynote is back on. More to come later.

[tags]SCALE[/tags]

Lastly, make absolutely sure you request to reschedule your phone interview half an hour prior to its commencement. This one works especially well when I’ve cut my sleep short and arrived at work early just for your interview.

So we arrive at the vet’s office only to find out that it’s no longer the vet’s office. They have moved, and left a sign on the door with the new location. Of course, the address on the front page of the web site has not been updated.

All Cats Hospital
7040 Avenida Encinas Ste 109
Calsbad [sic], CA 92011

We called the (new) office to let them know we would be late and why. We were told we would have to reschedule.

Sure, I’ll reschedule. For an appointment with a different vet. I refuse to do business or trust someone who can’t even keep something as simple as a web site up to date. Not to mention spell the name of their city correctly.

Many would consider me a Luddite, preferring Mutt as my MUA. of choice. I can imagine the cries of people who use so-called modern mail readers: fancy text formatting! embedded images! annoying layouts! hidden viruses! phishing scams!

What happened to the power and effectiveness of the written word? I suppose many aren’t capable of scribing a well-formed sentence, so they compensate with fonts, colors, and cryptic abbreviations. Still others are attracted to the shininess of the formatting. They can send mail that looks like a web page! Even when all they wanted to do was ask a short question!

This is progress?

Normally, I’m content with killfiling any mail that arrives with a content type of text/html. Unfortunately, there are some people I simply must communicate with for whatever reason (usually it involves money in one way or another). One of the fastest ways to get on my bad side is to send me mail that requires extra effort for me to read. This rant is a result of one of these messages.

I drafted a message of moderate length to discuss some points I thought important. Normally, I would expect any responses inline or, at worst, top posted. No, the response I received was even worse than what I see from users of Eudora’s unintelligible reply style. The responses were added directly to the paragraphs I had written, but styled bold and red for “readability.”

Hello, this is my opinion on the matter. I see, but have you considered this other thing?

As can be expected, this style doesn’t lend itself well to reading in plain text. Of course, I don’t think this style lends itself to any kind of comprehension.

I responded to this message, demonstrating how difficult it was for me to read without jumping through hoops, and expressing my annoyance at being forced to jump through said hoops. I tried to be kind, blaming the bad-habit-inducing tools (Outlook) rather than the writer. So this fellow tries again.

With an attached PDF file.

Seriously? Was he so enthralled by the font styling that he felt compelled to force upon me an attached document in order to render correctly? Maybe e-mail really is dead. Apparently a well-written, plain text message is too much to ask for.

[tags]annoyances, e-mail, people[/tags]