they already made a game about us. wtf the game on psp is only $12 with free shipping. wonder when they plan on sending a check our way for use of the name? wtf = work time fun… who knew?
Author: jr.
thanks for attempting to ruin another year of broadcasts from WMC. i know WMC was a few weeks ago, but hearing her babble the intro to DJ Times Shortlist reminded me how annoying she is. even if she didn’t say her name every other sentence, she would still be easy to identify by her inane chatter. and i’m not the only one who feels this way – a quick search of her name pulls up petitions to get Emily Tan pulled from WMC coverage. unfortunately, i guess it didn’t work this year. she still managed to interrupt mixes every five minutes with some of the worst interviews i’ve ever heard. i found myself begging my stereo to make her please shut up. to no avail. she just kept talking, mentioning her name , dropping other people’s names and acting like she was a dance music trendsetter. sirius, she seriously needs to go.
Oh, don’t you just love the Orwellian schemes dreamed up by politicians to monitor, track and control the masses? Most of which are easily thwarted by true criminals. Case in point, the UK’s £1.2 billion e-Borders scheme (that’s $1.78 billion for our American readers).
Under this new immigration scheme, every person leaving the United Kingdom will be forced to provide detailed personal information like their home and email addresses, phone numbers, passport information, credit card information and detailed travel itineraries. In order travel abroad (by any means – including swimming the English Channel), Britons will have to submit the information a day before departure. Fail to comply? Well then you will be facing a £5,000 fine or possible criminal prosecution for not obeying Big Brother.
Oh wait, it gets better! They plan to hold your information for 10 years. Judging by how well governments (in the US, UK or wherever) keep sensitive networks/information secure, we’ve got nothing to fear about this database being compromised.
As Chris Cuddy points out in an article at Travolution, “…this additional Stalinist hurdle to freedom to travel from the UK is not what ordinary travellers seek when planning a holiday abroad…”
What is worse, with all the money thrown at the misguided scheme, it still has serious holes. Like most things having to do with transportation safety, the effort is more for show than actual safety (the TSA’s 60% failure rate is a good example of all show and no substance). e-Borders is not even online and already problems are surfacing. Have dual passports (something fairly common in the UK)? Darn, they forgot to think about how to handle that. According to the Daily Telegraph, “An airline, under the ‘e-borders’ system, would be denied permission to carry the passenger home. Even if a British passport were presented.”
“But wait!” you say, “that is a minor inconvenience if we are all safer.”
“Not so fast,” I say, “that’s where you are wrong.”
Experts like Frank Gregory, professor of European Security at the University of Southampton, are already warning of holes in the e-Borders system. In his report, he states:
There are two key problems with the e-Borders programme. First, it will not reveal if the person matching the identity documents has created a false identity and, second, ‘watchlist’ scrutiny only works if a suspect person continues to use a ‘flagged’ name.
Unfortunately, the e-Borders ship left port long ago with Big Brother at the helm and Stalin as its navigator. The e-Borders scheme starts this year and will become more and more draconian through March 2014, when it is expected to be fully operational.
Categories
wtf is with WORK?
and now for something on the light side…
The Center for Disease Control has issued a medical alert about a highly contagious, potentially dangerous virus that is transmitted orally, by hand, and even electronically. This virus is called Weekly Overload Recreational Killer (WORK). If you receive WORK from your boss, any of your colleagues or anyone else via any means whatsoever – DO NOT TOUCH IT!!! This virus will wipe out your private life entirely. If you should come into contact with WORK you should immediately leave the premises.
Take two good friends to the nearest liquor store and purchase one or both of the antidotes – Work Isolating Neutralizer Extract (WINE) and Bothersome Employer Elimination Rebooter (BEER). Take the antidote repeatedly until WORK has been completely eliminated from your system.
You should immediately share this medical alert with your friends. If you do not have any friends, you have already been infected and WORK is controlling your life.
The title says it all. Why is Facebook listing fan pages for totally random crap on the discover people you may know page? I don’t know, nor am I a fan of Chris Pan (Marketer), the Pittsburgh Pirates, The Ellen DeGeneres Show or the U.S. Embassy. WTF is with these suggestions? Based on these recommendations I can come up with a pretty humorous version of myself as seen by Facebook. Using the recommendations as your guide, tell me who I am in Facebook’s eyes – add your thoughts to the comments.
WTF people?! I just saw on the news that someone cut off a puppy’s ear and turned it in to an animal shelter in Hollister. “It appears they probably used scissors without any sort of anesthesia or pain medication,” according to Beth Brookhouser, the director of community outreach with SPCA for Monterey County. There is a $1,000 reward for any info about the person who did it. Personally, I think they should take a pair of scissors and remove the ears of the person who did this. For the full story, check out KTVU. I hope a kind person adopts this puppy and treats him well.
I used to champion Sirius Satellite Radio. I loved the programming, the commercial free music, the selection, being able to record songs I like on my Stiletto 2 and killing time channel surfing. I got my first account when I bought a new car that came with a three month free trial. I enjoyed it so I signed up for a year. A little while later I bought another car for commuting. This car, while easy on gas, was light on creature comforts like satellite radio. The hours of listening regular radio were taking their toll – thankfully I was given the Stiletto 2 a few months later as a gift and my commute became bareable.
Don’t get me wrong, I had my gripes – the Stiletto 2 is a bit buggy at times, the audio quality can sound compressed and the ocassional signal loss when you went under an overpass or large tree. But I loved Sirius for what it provided – hours of entertainment for whatever mood I was in.
Then came renewal time. The first time around they auto-renewed and auto charged my credit card without notification and without permission. When I prepaid the first year I specifically stated that I only wanted one year and that I didn’t want automatic billing. I had planned on renewing, but the fact that they ignored my request didn’t sit well. I called their customer service and asked them to make sure this didn’t happen again. They basically told me it was still my fault, but agreed to send me a renewal letter the next time around.
Fast forward a few months to the Sirius/XM merger. I have to admit I was in favor of it. I still liked the liked the service (minus the billing practices). I hoped the merger would keep satellite radio in business. I hoped the combined company would offer even more selection. I was wrong. First thing they did – drop three of my favorite channels and change the programming on another. Aggressive billing was one thing, getting rid of the programming I listened to most effectively killed what I loved. I took the time to write a respectful, but to the point letter about how disappointing their programming changes were. No reply. Not even a canned response. By this point it was obvious to me that they didn’t care too much their customers’ wishes.
I didn’t intend to keep both subscriptions this year and was still debating whether I wanted to drop Sirius all together. I’ve got enough podcasts, mp3 and audio books to fill my need for in car entertainment without satellite radio. If I want news, there is always AM radio. Well… my service just kept going. Then they mailed me a bill. With an “invoice fee”. I ignored it. I don’t want to renew and I sure don’t want to pay an invoice fee. Then another bill with two invoice fees. Then an email threatening “Service Interuption”. Then a few more emails and letters. The gears slowly start turning in my head… wait… wtf? Seriously, did sirius auto-renew me? That was question I posed to the customer service rep who quickly replied that it was standard practice.
-Can you look up the notes on my account? Do you see where it says “Do not auto-bill, do not auto-renew”?
-But sir, we auto renew every account – you need to call and cancel.
-Uh, but it is prepaid and has a defined end date. Money ran out, turn it off.
-That’s not how it works.
-It was when I talked to the rep last year.
-Sorry sir, you still needed to call us.
-Ok, I would like to cancel.
-Please hold while I transfer you.
And so I was placed on hold for 10 minutes (not a ridiculous amount when compared to calling BofA). The woman who answered had a pleasant voice and said she would gladly process my request. Then she offered to renew the account for $50. Hmm. That is less than 1/3 the $160 they were trying to charge me. Let me think for a second. Oh, and you will start the year today and not back date it two months to the renewal date.
I’m a sucker for a deal, what can I say. But it didn’t have to be that way. I would have gladly paid regular price had they just listened to me as a customer. My requests weren’t outrageous. I wasn’t asking for free hardware and free service. Just that they handle my billing properly and take two seconds to address my concerns over the merger. I know they have bigger issues to deal with with all of the doom and gloom surrounding Sirius, but if they forget about their customers they will never survive.
This POS deserves to rot. I’m sure there’s a spot waiting in hell for the people who think he was a helpless victim too.
This morning I went to use my HSBC credit card to pay for some gas and was told to see the attendant. That’s odd I thought, but since I was in a hurry I tried another card and everything worked fine. I didn’t really think much about the incident and figured it was just an issue with the payment terminal… until I got home and found a letter from HSBC. The letter, dated two days earlier, stated:
This is to inform you that we will be sending you a replacement HSBC credit card with a new account number due to a security breach. Although this breach was not caused by us, we are taking this precautionery step to reduce the risk to your Account. Providing our cardmembers with a safe and credit card experience is one of our top priorities.
The letter then goes on to say when I can expect my new card and how to activate it. No explanation of what happened or how my account was compromised. Way to step up and take responsibility HSBC! WTF? You turn off my card and use snail mail to notify me. Somebody, but not you, got hacked and my info was compromised – but you give me no details on how this happened or which company was breached. Was it a partner? Was it someone you contracted with? And how much of my personal information was possibly stolen? Way to be upfront HSBC! Doing the bare minimum required by law to inform me of the situation shows me how truly dedicated you are to making security a “top priority”.
UPDATE:
Turns out that Heartland Payment Systems, a payment processor, was the company that got hacked. Heartland is now being sued for damages by the banks and credit unions impacted by the data breach. The breach has already affected over 500 financial institutions and may be the largest ever disclosed. Banks started replacing cards back in February, but I guess it wasn’t a “top priority” at HSBC until mid-March. More information about the breach is available from Heartland at the appropriately titled 2008 Breach website.
This is something that has really been getting on my nerves lately. You ask someone a question and they don’t answer. This can be face-to-face, over the phone, by email, on facebook or wherever. You ask a question and the other person ignores it or answers with a question. For example, you ask the simple question “What would you like for dinner tonight?” and the response “What would you like for dinner?” Is that an echo I hear?
Every day I deal with sales people trying to sell me this or that and they are the absolute worst about answering direct, clear as crystal questions. For example, a common question might be “How many unique visitors does your site have?” and the typical response “We are the greatest thing since sliced bread and you know, [insert their competitor’s name] isn’t even in our class.” Did I ask about your competitor or sliced bread? A simple “We have 30,000 visitors per month,” would have sufficed. Heaven forbid you ask more than one question over email. You might as well have sent a blank email because the response will have nothing to do with anything relevant.
A perfect example is a salesperson who I had to deal with this week. It was Friday afternoon and they suddenly got it in their head that they had to do a deal in the next two hours. Mind you, this isn’t the first time they’ve pulled this stunt. “You need to sign this contract right now because I’ve got three other people waiting to take this spot if you don’t want it… and oh yeah, it is 10 times more expensive than last year and everyone else is willing to pay full price.” Several things are wrong with this tactic – but I will save that for another post. In the response to their kind offer (they, after all, took the time to email us out of “courtesy” because we already work with them), it clearly stated there are several questions that need answering before we can make a decision. The almost instantaneous response failed to answer a single one and went straight back to “Now or else!”
Well – I wish them luck selling their crap ad space with the oversupply of ad inventory that exists and the crummy economy further depressing prices.