I’m sick of getting all this crap from Verizon (my wireless provider) - all these oversize postcards advertising stuff I do not want. I’m sure I’ve opted out before in every way possible, but I tried again.

Sent via their website: Please do not send me any postal solicitations for other verizon services. I do not wish to receive communication or advertisements from Verizon beyond my existing account. Thank you.

Email response, a day later:

Dear Steve Portigal,
Thank you for contacting Verizon Wireless through our website. We appreciate your email and we can assist you.
A request has to be removed from our Do-Not Contact list has been completed.
Please remember, as part of our Worry Free Guarantee if you ever have a problem, it becomes our problem the first time you contact us. Feel free to contact us again through www.VerizonWireless.com if you have any further questions.

“We never stop working for you!”

Oh, geez. I followed up, of course, and did hear back
We apologize sincerely for the last email, as that was incorrect information. You have been removed from our marketing list now, so you should not receive any more solicitation in the future, unless it is specific to the account that you already have.

Welcome to Verizon, where yes is no, removed is added. I’d like to removed from the removal of the Do-Not-Contact negative list in oppositisy, please. Everything I say is backwards. This sentence is not true.

A newly discovered pleasure of coastside living - we went to the boat harbor at Pillar Point yesterday and bought salmon off a boat (we had been before during crab season but the production with killing/cooking/cleaning put us off). They hung it on one of those big ol’ hooks to weigh it. A sea lion surfaced and stared at us from the open slip next to our boat, snorted and dived under slowly as I pointed him out. We took the fish back to a local fish shop that cut and cleaned it for us ($3 for the service, not bad), and then came home and found we had 12 fillets worth of fish. Very nice!

The CoCo or Concert Companion is a handheld device given out (currently) during classical concerts, offering info about the music (in real-time) as well as video and program notes. It’s like Pop-Up Video for reality!

(free reg req’d or try asspants/streetmeat as suggested by BugMeNot)

Pat Benatar is encouraging people to wear hearing aids. Interestingly, the key emphasis for H.E.A.R. (Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers) used to be on hearing protection, but they’ve shifted to remediation…

One of the goals of the Energizer EZ Change It’s Hip to H.E.A.R. program is to educate people about new technologies available to help them manage their hearing health. For example, the Energizer EZ Change is the first hearing aid battery dispenser that eliminates the need to handle the tiny hearing aid batteries and tabs. This makes it much easier to wear a hearing aid because you don’t have the frustration of dropping or losing the batteries, and you can change them anywhere and anytime.
Other innovative technologies that make it Hip to H.E.A.R. include:
Earplugs to prevent hearing damage at concerts or clubs.
Noise canceling headphones that dramatically reduce ambient noise from power mowers, drills, and even city traffic.
In-the-canal digital hearing aids that make it virtually impossible to tell a person is even wearing the device

Check the photos from this week’s trip to Racine and Chicago.

My goodness. I wrote them to complain about the delay in shipping my order (and the out of date status info) - and they have the idiocy and gall to respond with “We have not yet begun processing the order you placed on April 29, 2004 as we have not yet received your complete credit card number.Our records indicate that you used our option to phone your complete card number after entering just the last 5 digits of the card number in the space provided on our online order form.”

Of course, this is completely untrue. So the service is crappy and when you try to get help you get some idiotic inaccurate response.

And even it WERE true - wouldn’t they do something to remind you? I’m not happy. I’m calling - we’ll see what BS that gives me.

Does anyone else think Amazon has become incredibly broken? More often than not, nowadays, when I place an order it becomes incredibly delayed. They sometimes alert me by email that the item I ordered won’t be available for a month from now. One kitchen item I tried to puchase was delayed twice, finally I cancelled, ordered somewhere else online and had it within a few days.

Amazon’s whole thing used to be good customer service (not the case any more I’m finding) and speedy processing. I ordered some stuff three weeks ago and it still hasn’t shipped - even though my account indicates that it should have shipped a week ago. Not to mention that one of the items in this order has already been delayed til June.

Can we trust Amazon for gift giving anymore? They can’t seem to put it together to get stuff out of their warehouse (or however they are doing it) and out to their customers - three weeks? And still not shipped? I’d have been better off ordering from someone else (I hope) or just going to (agh!) an actual store and buying what I wanted.

This art installation is now showing at the SF Camerawork is an exhaustive indexing of scenes from Starsky and Hutch episodes on VCD with such titles as “Every Thug” “Every Sitting in a Car” “Every Eating of Food.”

A site called Sensory Impact blogs the Core article. Interesting that they interpret part of what I write as condescending. Not sure where that comes from!

Fox has picked up American Dad, created by Seth MacFarlane of “Family Guy.”

This Business 2.0 article is for subscribers only, I think, but it describes how Mazda is redesigning their dealerships - one nice feature - a great example of transparency - is the web kiosks they’ve installed so customers can do cost comparisons, read reviews, look up Blue Book values or any other kind of research - in the dealership. Very nice.

from a Racine, WI booster page

Fun FactsOn November 20, 1933, four masked men entered the American Trades Bank on the corner of 5th and Main Streets. One of the four was John Dillinger. During the robbery, they took a Model 1928 Thompson submachine gun from a police officer. The gun, with John Dillinger’s signature on the stock, was recovered later when gang members were captured in Tucson, Arizona. It is on display in the police department lobby at 730 Center Street in Racine.

Yep! Those masked men enter a bank and hilarity ensues! Tune in for more “fun facts”

Recently I found this message on my voice mail. I have NO IDEA why this person called me. And no, I did not call her back.

Hi. My name is Ruth and I’m trying to find out what a …I guess it’s pronounced ‘kayote’ - it’s spelled c h a y o t e s. It’s a green uh some type of fruit or vegetable and it’s from Costa Rica and I was just wondering what it was and uh how you prepare it. I was given one and um I love all different kinds of produce and so I’d like to add it to my list of fruits and vegetables. If you can help me call me back at XXX-XXX-XXXX or XXX-XXXX-XXXX. Thank you..

It’s actually better to hear it, she’s got a bit of a southern accent (the area code is Florida), but still it’s quite funny.”

Interesting meme going around - stupid morons who think that a website about a topic is in fact a means to contact someone famous. Google misuse! In this example many many people ask for Maury Povich’s contact info (and ask for his help, directly) in a blog where some guy relates an experience he had at a Maury taping. But I saw a different example posted yesterday, and a couple of months ago I sent around a page where people were making jokes about the ridiculous titles of Lifetime TV movies that somehow morphed into requests for rebroadcasts of fave flicks. Huh? And even more fun on the same topic here.

From the Simplicity Design Workshop
1. Heed cultural patterns. The iPod, for instance, succeeded not just because of its sleek form, but because, in conjunction with iTunes, it solved so many of the problems of buying and storing music.
2. Be transparent. People like to have a mental model of how things work.
3. Edit. Simplicity hinges as much on cutting nonessential features as on adding helpful ones, the Newton MessagePad and the Palm Pilot being prime examples.
4. Prototype. Push beyond proof-of-technology demos and build prototypes that people can interact with.
(NYTimes story, free reg, or use bugmenot’s suggestion of user: liberalese_ilk; pass: saveme)

It’s nice that Blogger has now enabled commenting on all their blogs, we’ve had ‘em here now for a few days.

Yet no comments have appeared, which of course is embarassing and shameful for your humble host. I mean, aren’t we supposed to be building community? Creating a dialogue? Attracting an audience?

Sigh!

Mmmmm green tea caramel corn

Isn’t it strange that with all the hype and scandal about obesity and with the various food companies scrambling to spin their foods healthy somehow (i.e., the ridiculous KFC is healthy ads that have run in various forms) that so many ads feature definitely overweight dudes revelling in their gluttony? The Ball Park Franks ads running now feature a guy with a pretty serious gut, working on his backyard BBQ, talking in goofily intense tones about meaty, juicy, and….girthy. I guess since no English speaker has ever heard or used the word before, he says “girthy” like 8 times, each time with a silly-but-frighteningly intense growl, drawing it out….Giiiirrthy! he exclaims, with manly satisfaction. Is he talking about the food, or himself? Or what the food does to him? Either way, it’s clearly okay with him. And so it should be with us, no doubt.

Giiirrrrrrrrrrthy!

Doraemon and Gundam studies at University?
Perhaps it would never have happened had the student-age population not dipped. ‘All universities are struggling desperately to attract students,’ notes social critic Kiyoshi Shimano. ‘And so they jump on the bandwagon of whatever is fashionable at the moment. That’s true especially of the lesser-known universities. [Manga courses and the like] are great PR for them.’

Tom and Susan Klebold (Dylan’s parents) have not really spoken to the press about all this. But the lawsuits against them are being settled, and they trust The New York Times, which is the paper they read every day, so they were willing to have a long conversation with David Brooks this week. more: “

full story - Eleven people were found to have been infected with hepatitis E after barbecuing and eating wild boar meat in the woods of Nagasaki Prefecture in March last year

And Google Ads on that page included:

Old World Smoked Meats
Sausage varieties, hotdogs, jerky. Specialty meats, elk, venison.
www.buntingsupnorthmeats.com

Premium Elk Meat
Succulent, tender, protein rich and lean farm raised gourmet elk meat.
www.jamisonfarms.com

Safari Snacks
Big game and exotic snack sticks Great taste, premium quality
www.safarisnacks.com

Alligator Tail Meat
frozen, vac-pac delivered overnight to your door.
www.lintonsseafood.com

Mmmm, tasty!

Technorati: hepatitis, boar, irony, google, google+ads

That short film so many of us have seen on crappy third generation VHS where a guy drives a race car through Paris at high speed is now available on DVD

The recent Core/FreshMeat piece got a quickie mention in a recent Bruce Sterling Viridian Note.
Post-consumer alteration gets re-defined as “designer fanfic.”

This piece from Poynter Online is about journalists asking questions, with some great examples from current events, but the points apply equally well to people who interview for other purposes - say, market research, design research, user research, etc. etc.

Cool! datacloud does a little piece about the recent “The More The Merrier” article on Core/FreshMeat. A neat example in the comments as well…

Disturbing and detailed NYT Magazine piece about the design of the slot-machine user experience.
Still, to maintain a sense of suspense in games that are over the moment they start, to increase what Baerlocher and his fellow game designers call ‘’time on device,'’ I.G.T. spends $120 million each year and employs more than 800 designers, graphic artists, script writers and video engineers to find ways to surround the unromantic chips with a colorful matrix of sounds, chrome, garishly-painted glass and video effects, which include the soothing images of famous people, from Bob Denver (the actor who played Gilligan) to Elizabeth Taylor, many of whom receive hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to lend their identities to the machines. The traditional pull-handle, if it exists at all, is nothing more than a vestigial limb; most players now press a button to start the reels, often virtual, spinning. Many slot machines don’t even pay out coins but issue ‘’credits'’ on a paper receipt to be redeemed at the cashier’s cage. Slot makers have found that their customers don’t miss handling money — coins are heavy and dirty, after all — and stereo speakers can project the simulated yet satisfying ping and clink of cascading cash. ‘’We basically mixed several recordings of quarters falling on a metal tray and then fattened up the sound with the sound of falling dollars,'’ says Bill Hecht, I.G.T.’s top audio engineer, when describing one of the audio files he programs into a machine. “