An article in the New York Times describes how the US Patent Office is discarding originals of classic patents as they are scanned into digital form. Other folks are dumpster diving to collect and preserve the original documents.

This picture (from a bed-and-breakfast in Santa Cruz) frightens me. I don’t know why.

New spam-attention-grabbing-technique using the ol’ subject line.

I got two messages today, one with the subject line “is everything ok, mrs. burlando” and another with the subject line “is everything ok, mrs. glanzman.” Some sort of prescription drug bypass service.

Tags: email, mrs. burlando, mrs. glanzman, spam, subject line

Did you know that there’s a line of Bob’s Big Boy condiments and sauces? Very cool jar, classic old jar with a nice colorful logo plastered on it. Nothing that good – mostly saw thousand island dressing, tartar sauce, and seafood sauce. I saw them at my local Smart and Final store.

In Ross(DressForLess) there is a section for clothing that is marked by a sign reading “Active Bottoms.”

Word of the day: annuitant

Last night I attended a party to honor my improv instructor, Terry Sand, and part of that whole experience was the opportunity to do some standup. Standup is very different than improv, it’s all about preparation, writing, timing, and the relative proportion of in-the-moment is far less (of course, any good performance of anything needs to be in-the-moment, IMHO, but I digress). I did about 8 minutes, it was really fun, I got a lot of laughs, and I got a good videotape of it to review and look at what worked the way I thought it would, and what worked differently.

I feel great today, having gone through this new experience!

This is a pretty groovy disclaimer (found at the beginning of a piece of spam email I received):

Warning! This message is intended solely for individuals of legal age interested in sex with animals. Please delete it immediately if extreme explicit materials may be offensive for you or in your community or you are younger than 18 years..

Tags: bestiality, disclaimer, email, spam, warning

Status Update

New car battery – car is fine

Three-way calling appears to be working

The tree-trimmers are coming today!

Half.com hasn’t sent me a single confirmation email (that they promise on their confirmation screen) for the 8 items I’ve ordered over the last 24 hours. They also claimed my card was rejected for a $6.00 purchase yesterday, when as far as the credit card company and I can tell, they must have made the request when they were updating their files? I would imagine that credit card companies and the approval infrastructure would be more robust than that, and that merchants would have some retries built into their system, so maybe I just encountered another lying customer support person. I’ve never had this card declined before, and I had several thousand dollars of available credit at the time of the purchase, so who knows. Annoying!

Click the vote!

Well, two days ago my car wouldn’t start. AAA came out very quickly and jump started it. I was on my way to Oakland, so that charged it up okay, and I got back okay. In fact, yesterday I had a similar trip and made it there and back okay as well. I arranged with the local dealership, Menlo Mazda, to drop the car off on my way home, long after hours, and use their key drop. They explained to us where the envelopes are, and so on.

Upon arrival at 10:00 pm, after a long day travelling, we find there is no way to park my car on their site. All their driveways are barricaded with chains. The driveway that would seem to take you right up to their service bays is blocked by two vehicles parked just feet from the sidewalk. I managed to squeeze the little Miata between those cars and their fancy display car up on a stand. Ridiculous. And of course, they were totally out of envelopes, which they were very clear on the phone about “oh, just fill out the envelope.” We grabbed something else out of the car and used that instead.

Turns out that they didn’t notice the car til much later in the day since it wasn’t in their usual parking place (no idea where that was) and the different envelope I used was sized differently and didn’t land where they expect to find it. Nice.

Chapters/Indigo responds. Sorta.

Well, four days later I get this tepid response:

Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 10:29:04 -0500
From: TechSupport@chapters.ca

Dear Steve Portigal,

Thank you for writing.

Apparently there has been some miscommunication regarding the delivery of each of the gift certificates you ordered and I would like to apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.

Our records confirm that each of the four gift certificates were successfully delivered to each of the recipients on the correct requested delivery date – 12/09/01.

The delay occurred in updating our system that marks each of these orders as shipped in your order history which typically takes 24 hours. This in turn affects the “shipping” confirmation email delivery time.

I am sorry for any frustration that this has caused you. Should you require further assistance, please feel free to contact us at any time. Your continued patience in this matter is greatly appreciated.

Thank you for choosing Chapters Indigo Online.
Best regards,
Chapters Indigo Online
Customer Service Team

–Original Message–

On Sunday morning I placed four orders for gift certficates, beginning with order number OR7569244. Gift certificates – all that has to happen is an email is generated to the recipient. No books, no packing, no shipping. Just data!

Nearly 24 hours later, only one of them has been marked “shipped.”

I telephoned your customer support person and she told me that it takes that long to approve the credit card payment. That each order is processed one at a time, and one is not shipped til the previous one is approved.

Please! That is the biggest pack of lies! It does NOT take 24 hours to approve four credit card transactions. Something is terribly jammed up in YOUR system, and frankly is making my gift-giving into a bit of a shambles.

What is wrong? Why has it been 24 hours and only ONE gift certificate has been sent? Please rectify this immediately, and don’t tell me it’s the approval of MY credit card that is taking so long. That’s just not true.

You may have heard that google has unleashed the USENET archives back to 1981. Here’s one of the earliest posts from me that I found. Another is here and one more here.

Groups I was active in during the 1990 to 1993 period include:

alt.folklore.urban
rec.arts.movies
alt.sex
alt.rock-n-roll
alt.tv.muppets
talk.bizarre (though for some reason, those posts aren’t showing up in Google. Although I did win #25 most frequent poster of the week in the USENET stats post, including 76% of those posts to talk.bizarre – so I’ve got “proof” just no evidence)

I found some early (and tame) flame wars, some morally indignant posts by me, many smart-ass posts, quite a few questions about who sang this or acted in that (and my own share of answers), and some real newbi-ism. And, the .signatures from back then – oy! Star Trek references abound…

Tags: archive, data, google, history, usenet

Yesterday I ordered four Hannukah gift certificates for my family members. Two apiece, since indigo.chapters.ca doesn’t offer the denomination I wanted. By gift certificates, this is simply a payment to them, and they issue an email to my recipients, telling them of the code number to claim it, the sender, the amount, etc. In e-commerce terms, this is like the simplest possible transaction, right? No meatspace – no books to be touched, picked, packed, shipped, tracked?

Wrong.

Whatever I did taxed the poor little hamster on a wheel that runs this crappy site. Eight hours later I had received one confirmation email letting me know that my order was shipping to my home address. I had also received a copy of the teaser email they sent to my recipient, letting them know that “something” was coming. The other three orders were just sitting, under “recently ordered” status. Today I called to ask what the hell was going on, and someone with a high school education lectured me that it takes a long time for the credit card transaction to process, and since they do it one at a time, that’s why the other three were still sitting. 24 hours later?

Here’s the emails I got

Within minutes of the order, four different versions of:

Dear Steve Portigal,
Thank you placing your order with chapters.indigo.ca. This automated e-mail confirms that we have received and are processing your order.

Within 7 minutes, I got one of these more detailed order confirmations.

Dear Steve Portigal,

Thank you for shopping with chapters.indigo.ca!

Your order number is #XXXXXXXXX. Please keep it for reference if you�d like to check your Order History online, or if you speak to a customer service representative.

Your chapters.indigo.ca order includes of the following item(s):

1. Gift Certificate

These items will be shipped by Canada Post Xpresspost to :
Steve Portigal
1656 Palm Avenue
Redwood City, California 94061
United States

Four hours later, the teaser email (just for one) was sent, cc’d to me:

Dear Steve’s Relative

It is our pleasure to inform you that Steve Portigal has bought you a gift from chapters.indigo.ca.
Details about your gift will be sent to you via e-mail on December 09, 2001.

We’re sure you will be pleased with your gift when it arrives.

Five hours later, I got a single message confirming the “shipment” of that first gift certificate:

Dear Steve Portigal,

Thank you for shopping with Chapters-Indigo Online.

Please note that the following item(s) of your Chapters-Indigo Online order #XXXXX have been shipped:

1. Gift Certificate

So, they had completely handled one of four gift certificates (they were supposed to all go out and arrive at once, but clearly the ship had sailed on that idea.

Eleven hours later I got the next two order confirmations.

Two hours later, I got the corresponding two teaser messages.

Two hours after that, the fourth order confirmation arrived.

Four hours after that, the fourth teaser message was sent.

Five hours later, the final three “shipment” messages were sent.

All told, that was 33 hours to process four gift certificate orders. And, again, I phoned and was told there was no problem with their system. I sent an email to tech support (acknowledged, but not responded to). And still this happens.

Sheesh

A few years ago they put “three way calling” on all Pac Bell subscriber phones. It was just a pay-per-use thing, but it changed the way flashing/hanging-up worked. You now needed to hang up for 5 full seconds to make it happen, and I read some warning online that modems that redial were probably going to cost $0.95 per call since they would inadvertently trigger. Well! I got on the phone and had the damn thing disconnected.

Flash forward to recently, and hey, now I’m trying to conference call from my phone. Every few weeks I get on the phone to Pac Bell and talk to them about this. “Oh, yes, you already have that service on your line,” they told me in July. Right. I tried a month ago to get it turned back on, and they told me I was all set. Last week I called again, and this time I was put through to a special person who kept me on hold while she did something. Promised me it would be back in a few hours. No dice. Today I received an invoice for the $4.75 they charged for the service. I called in. Amazingly, the woman could see that it hadn’t been processed. I was on hold for 25 minutes while a technician worked on it, she kept coming back to sell my products, or offer to chat with me, or breath awkwardly into the dead air. I was typing and having a grand old time, but every time she’d start to talk I’d get scared because she was kind of slurring her speech, was generally inarticulate, and was enthusiastic. I got a lot of compliments for my patience. I didn’t tell her I was reading blogs at the time. Eventually, they just had me go ahead and hang up, and they called me back once it was set to “flow through” (whatever that means).

Then I had to rank her service on a scale of one to ten. What a crock – as if you will give someone an honest ranking directly…whoever designs these call center is a master of manipulation of data.

It’s two hours later, I don’t think I have the ability to make a three way call. We’ll see tomorrow AM.