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December 29, 2004 I'm turning on Spam Assassin for my personal email here at stumble. My host, Dreamhost, supposedly has it set aggressively by default. Might take me a few days to get the white list setup and fine tuned. So if you send a message that doesn't get an immediate response, don't take it personally. Just working through the kinks.
07:23 AM
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December 27, 2004 Did you know that if you send someone a gift from an Amazon wish list, you won’t get tracking information? I learned the hard way when my parent’s gifts didn’t arrive by the promised pre-Christmas delivery date. Despite the fact that I ponied up for UPS 2-day air. Amazon customer service claims this refusal to share tracking info is a privacy issue. It's a policy their customer service agents quoted repeatedly even after I explained the situation and provided my parent's address to prove that I already know the information they're attempting to protect. Do they care? No, they have a policy. Well I've got a policy, too. I refuse to give money to unresponsive organizations. So I'm starting my own Amazon.com boycott. I instructed my parents to refuse delivery of the Amazon items and I've reordered them from Best Buy. I've cancelled the unshipped order I had placed (the next Harry Potter book) with Amazon last week. I deleted all the items from my wish list, all the entries in my address book, all my credit cards, all the email subscriptions. Basically, everything I could find under the my account tab. I'm also putting you on notice. If it comes from Amazon, I don't want it. No books. No CDs. And certainly no gift certificates. I can forgive a lot of things but systematic bad customer service isn't one of them. UPDATE: Shari found the Amazon.com customer service number which they hide really well. For future reference, it's 800-201-7575.
10:53 AM
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December 26, 2004 The Asia tsunami has unnerved me a bit. Earthquakes are one thing. I've developed a fatalistic acceptance of the inevitable. Not sure anyone can live in San Francisco without such an attitude. But I've never considered tsunami except in the most abstract terms. I reassured myself a bit by jumping in the car and checking the elevation, 230 ft according to the GPS 3D fix, and distance to the ocean, 3 miles. Still. What would happen if 30-foot waves headed our way? How much warning would we have? Would we even want any? All of which is probably just a bit too self centered given that more than 13,000 souls just died in this calamity.
09:39 PM
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December 20, 2004 Hey! You. Yes, you on the other side of the monitor. What are you doing for the next two and a half hours? Oh shut up, it doesn't matter. Turn off the computer and go see A Very Long Engagement. Yes now. Go. You can thank me later. And you will, trust me.
10:25 PM
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NY Times wrap up department. Free Tivos. Who knew? Sprint wants to sell you music streams that you listen to on your cell phone. Right. I can't understand the person talking on the other end 25% of the time and you want me to pay $5.99 a month for low-fi music. Where do I sign? And just as I thought, almost no one puts a big bow on shiny new cars Christmas morning. Damn advertising types always twisting reality.
11:52 AM
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December 17, 2004 You know what I hate? Quotes in email signatures. I mean, what is this 1997? Like I care about bad poetry or inspirational tidbits. They're the electronic equivalent of gold crown store merchandise. Come on people, it's time to stop them. Or maybe we could turn it on it's ear with a series of seemingly sincere but perversely sarcastic quotes, like "When the world gives you lemons, maybe it's time to just give in and off yourself."
10:23 PM
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December 12, 2004 I'm a little tipsy, a little stoned and my husband is watching two lesbians cavort on a leopard skin bean bag while he folds laundry. I believe it's time to go upstairs.
08:39 PM
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December 10, 2004 Seventeen years ago tonight I walked into Uncle Charlie's on Greenwich Avenue in New York just to have one drink and see who was around. If ever there was a case of being in the right place at the right time. Thanks my love.
09:49 PM
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December 09, 2004 Today’s Wall Street Journal’s front page exposes the shocking fact that millions of corporate computer users have to write down passwords in order to function. (No link because wsj.com requires a password. Yes, I relish the irony.) Could this really be a surprise to anyone but the boneheads who populate the upper level of corporate IT departments? The types who rationalize a policy decision based on how it looks in PowerPoint presentations to management committees and auditors rather than actual human behavior and desires. A personal example if you will. I have to access a certain client's graphics library approximately every two months. It's stored conveniently on a website so we don't have to worry about outdated CDs or god forbid physical artwork. Except the site is protected in such a way that I must use a PC running Win XP and IE, but not the latest SP2 releases of either, a bizarre user name incorporating the odd \ character and a 10 digit password that includes alpha, numeric and special characters, which must be changed every three months. So in a typical year, I'll log onto the site six times to get content and four times to change the password. All this to get at logos and product shots that anyone with web access can lift off the company's very high-traffic public site. How can that possibly make any sense? So how do I manage? I write both the user name and password down a stickie note tacked to the divider near my desk. Further, I readily share this information with my staff, both permanent and freelance, because getting an account setup with that bizarre user name in the first place requires completing a couple of forms (sign in blue ink, not black please) and waiting a week to 10 days. If you stop and think about it, every computer user who writes down a password is silently rebelling against these wrongheaded policies. And we shouldn't feel chagrined as the WSJ reporter infers. If anything, it's something to be celebrated. Doing
10:14 PM
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December 06, 2004 Is it possible to be too organized? I ask because of my husband. He normally gets home before I do so he picks up the mail. And he immediately sorts it. Junk goes in the recycle bin, not even crossing our threshold. His stuff disappears into his bag. My stuff gets put into the little wire basket on the desk upstairs. Easy enough, right? Until I don't get home until after 9 several evenings in a row. (Not that uncommon these days.) See by that time, he's already sleeping on the couch (TV on naturally and the cat curled up on his chest but that's a story for another time) so he forgets to alert me if something arrived that needs attention. I'm clueless until I find it later, usually weeks later when I'm looking for something else in the box. Like tonight. As I rifled through the envelopes looking for my latest bank statement, I discovered an unopened letter for our neighbor the University of San Francisco. Seems they wanted us to know about their new master plan and had invited all the folks in the immediate vicinity to come by one evening and quiz the architect on what's about to go down. Nice, right? Except this soiree was on November 9. Right. Hence my original question. |