business

An awesome time-saving database forwarded to me by a friend:

The IVR Cheat Sheet: This “QuickBase” from Intuit has instructions for how to cut through to a real person when you call a company and get an IVR system — Interactive (or Integrated) Voice Response. You know, the computer system that tries to solve your problem using stacked menu systems so they don’t have to pay a real person to talk to you? Even though you know what you want can’t be solved by the machine and you have to talk to a human? This site will tell you what you need to do to get the human on the phone.

The Intuit IVR Cheat Sheet.

Last night I went to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

Its a good thing Laura took me out for pizza & beer afterwards to cool me off.

I have serious issues with the style of Michael Moore’s “documentaries” (yes, I’ve also seen Bowling for Columbine) . For one, I don’t think they even come close to qualifying as documentaries. They’re more like two-hour long Michael Moore opinion columns.

Here’s his modus operandi:

1. Present a few well known “facts” (many of which have not even been proven true), things that have been highlighted in the major news media for weeks or months or years
2. Make some very tenuous connections between his “facts”, using mainly rumor or conjecture
3. Before the viewers have the chance to come to their own conclusions about what they’ve just seen, bombard them with hyper-emotional imagery in an attempt to make them automatically come to the same conclusions Moore has come to himself.

And that’s how he continues for the duration of the movie. Even worse, he has this coddling tone that makes it sound like he’s talking to a child. If you’re trying to make a documentary meant for self-thinking, intelligent adults, you don’t talk down to them like they were infants.

So suffice to say I didn’t buy into his ruse. The imagery he used was very powerful. He showed a lot of film that many people would feel shouldn’t be shown, including a lot of bloody pictures of civilian casualties and even the Fallujah killings of the civilian security contractors. Personally I feel that in another context they shouldn’t have been shown. But Moore’s goal was to be controversial and edgy, and he succeeded.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Latency.

Why, if I want to mail a letter to someone, do I have to mail it five days in advance, and I’m not even guaranteed it will get there?

I mailed my graduation tickets home about a month ago. “USPS Priority Mail”. Said it “should” be there in 2 days. It took them 4 days to deliver a one-ounce package to a city an hour away.

Seriously, get working on this.

If the USPS upgraded “First Class” mail to 2-day, guaranteed on-time delivery, I’d pay $1/ea for letter-rate stamps. Then have like “Second Class” or “Standard” mail be the regular “get-there-in-4-to-7-days-if-it-gets-there-at-all” service.

RIAA is coming after nine UofM students in their witch hunt for file swappers:

Following numerous lawsuits against Internet users suspected of file-sharing, the record industry will soon subpoena the University for the names of students allegedly sharing music illegally. In January, the Recording Industry Association of America filed suit against 532 individuals nationwide, many of them college students. The suits, called “John Doe” lawsuits, are against users identified only by their Internet protocol addresses. RIAA is subpoenaing the University for the names of the students under its network.

Its a good year to not live in the dorms. I’d be so screwed.

So I did a simple Google search and discovered a number of other people complaining about similar problems.

Of significant interest is this thread. Thats a Google cached version of this link, which has since been deleted. Obviously AT&T doesn’t seem to like to admit that people are having problems with this “upgrade”.

Gizmodo also has a posting about the matter. Most notibly is this statement:

As part of the new 850MHz GSM upgrade that is going on in many of their markets, AT&T has decided to proactively send out the T226 in markets where it feels the new phone will provide a “better experience” than the T68.

So in reality, the upgrade was AT&T’s decision, not Sony’s.

I’ve found a just a few other bloggers complaining about AT&T’s practices. It seems that AT&T continued to sell incompatable 1900mhz phones while rolling out their 850mhz network, and are just now cleaning up their mess.

And people wonder why AT&T was hemoraging customers and had to merge with Cingular.

Update: If you want to read the rest of that AT&T forum thread, this Google search should allow you to get to the cache of all the messages. Update: I found another thread on their listserve. It sounds like some people have been getting upgraded to T616’s on an individual basis. Why has their phone support not been notified about this?