What Were They Thinking?: Meds for Cross-eyed and Possessed Pets

You probably saw these website ads early this year: when the mouse passes over the ad, it turns into a bone or a fly, and the dog or cat’s eyes follow it.  Cute, huh?

At least until you move the cursor to extreme points — such as between the pet’s eyes — and the eye-tracking algorithm break, turning the pet into some hideous beast, either a cross-eyed cat that probably can’t aim to find its litter box, or a possessed pug (ugly enough to start with).

(Maybe the dog is having visions of the future and is about to paint?  Or spray?  Or spray paint?   Where’s Mr. Muggles when we need him?)

Seriously, test your Flash ads before you deploy them.

New blog

Okay, I’ve finally buckled down and done it.  Started a formal blog, using reall blogging software.

I have had two blog-like sites in the past, both manually constructed and maintained.  The first, from 1999-2000, was called “An Opinion About Everything” — so-named because someone in a mailing list flamewar once accused me of having an opinion about everything, as though that were a bad thing.  The second, from 2003-2006, was called “Bouncing Off the Walls” — it was at the site attached to my personal e-mail address, “rubberize”.

This blogging software allows me to backdate posts — perhaps controversial, but less so than with stock options — which I am using to bring in my posts from those other two pseudo-blogs and repost them here, in chronological order, while still being able to post new items as well.  (Some of the original posts themselves got updated at some point, so they are posted under their last update date, with an indication of the original post date as well.)

Despite backdating the entries to put them in the right context, I am not going to rewrite the entries.  What I originally wrote and posted for all the world to see (if they happened to trip over my site) should still be something I’m happy to have people read today.  (I had better be okay with it, since the web never forgets.  Anything I ever posted is archived somewhere.)  There are exceptions to that, though: (1) if I spot a typo or puncutation error or HTML coding gaffe, I will fix it; (2) if I had links to websites and those links are no longer valid, I will fix the links or remove them; and (3) if a removed link means that an entire paragraph no longer has valid content, I will remove the paragraph.

Enjoy, and please add comments where you like.

(Oh yeah, and comments: a few of the original posts had manually inserted comments added to them.  I’ll do something like that here, when I get to those posts.)

Update on July 22, 2007…

I’ve now completed bringing over the posts from “An Opinion About Everything”.  The other blog will take a lot longer to port across.


Update on July 29, 2007…

As I’m starting to move through the old blog post, I see some items that are notes about pages I added to the other website, or “Hey, this is my 100th entry!” posts, which don’t have any content worth preserving. I’ve decided to no bring those across into this blog.

Avoid Pagoo.com

Updated from original post dated October 16, 1999…

Pagoo.com is one of the new companies running an Internet answering machine service.

It’s a great idea.  What happens is that they set up a voicemail box for you.  You then contact your telephone company (or they can do it for you), and set the Busy Call Forwarding to go to that voicemail box.  Then if someone calls while you are online, instead of getting a busy signal for hours at a shot, they get redirected to where you’ve left a message — “Hi, this is Jim.  I’m probably online right now, but leave a message and I’ll get it over the Internet!”  You then get notified of the message they left and can listen to it right there, without dropping your connection, and then act on it or not.

As I said, great idea.  (Unless, of course, you’re not online, but are talking on the phone instead.  Then they leave a message and you don’t get it until the next time you connect.  If you’re online frequently, that won’t be a problem.)

When Pagoo first started, they were a Windows-only product.  (No surprise there, these days.)  But they intended to add a Macintosh version.  I asked to be notified of such, and was invited to take part in the beta program for Mac Pagoo 1.1.

As part of the signup for Pagoo (at the time; details may have changed since then), they will set up the voicemail box for you for a 30-day free trial (after which it is $3.95 per month), and they will spring for the fees for setting up the Busy Call Forwarding switch and your first month’s fee for that service.  (Very cool.  Assuming you stick around, they’ll get that cost back in a couple months.)

This was all fine, until the beta period extended beyond the end of the 30-day free trial.  Presto!  My voicemail greeting was replaced by “This user’s 30-day free trial has expired.”  (No indication that they had got the right phone number, nor why [or that] they had been transferred to what had been a voicemail box.)  As a result, my use of the Pagoo system and participation in the beta program was instantly over (if no one could leave a message, that kind of reduces the feedback I can give, no?).  The fact that some outside modem had called up my phone and locked up my line into always-busy (and scrambled my answering machine, too) while I was away for a four-day weekend only made things worse, as I couldn’t retrieve my own messages, only get that damned message.)

So I tried to contact the company.  I started with my e-mail contact person, Philippe Piernot (vice-president of Product Development at the time), asking for an extension of my “trial period” through the end of the beta program.  (After all, there was nothing for me to buy yet, since the Macintosh version wasn’t publicly available.  I don’t pay to take part in beta programs.  [Mmm, but that OS X public beta is awfully tempting!])   No response from him.  So I go to the company’s web site, looking for customer support information.  I found a FAQ document, but what didn’t I find?  Any telephone number or even an e-mail address for customer support, that's what.   (What great customer support!)  I eventually sent an e-mail to their “Suggestion Box” address, indicating a deadline: in two days, they needed to resolve the matter and contact me (I gave my work number), or I would cancel the service and not be able to recommend it to anyone else.

I ended up giving them three days, and you can tell from this essay what they failed to do.

In conclusion, the idea is great: voicemail for while you are online, which you can retrieve without losing your connection.  Only about $7.00 per month, far less than the cost of a second phone line.  There are apparently several companies offering variations on this idea.  Check one of them out, though, because Pagoo is one to not deal with.

---

Nine days after the deadline elapsed, I got an e-mail from the company, saying “Of course we’ll extend your trial period!”  Too little, too late.  The Busy Call Forwarding had already been shut off, and the software deleted; three-plus weeks of the service being inactive and thus giving people a negative impression of me is three-plus weeks too many.

I’ve requested that the company remove all contact information about me from their files (twice: in my “I’m gone” message and in my response to this one).  Any further contacts by the company are going to be turned over to the Better Business Bureau, and then treated as harassment.  (A year later, no such contacts have come.  I guess the threat did its job.)

(I really, really don’t like service companies who don’t serve.)

In the year since I originally wrote this, search engines have picked up this page, and hardly a week goes by that I don’t get an e-mail from someone thanking me for warning them off from a potentially bad company.  In one case, I got an e-mail from someone else who had had a bad experience with Pagoo, possibly even beating out my own, where they completely screwed up his phone service.

And a year later, there is still no e-mail contact method on their web site for dealing with customer issues and complaints other than “Suggestion Box.”

---

Update for July 19, 2007…

In the process of posting this on the new blog, I thought I would go check out the current state of Pagoo, since I still get one or two notes a year from this piece on the old website.  Pagoo is still around, and sure enough, still with no contact info for the company on the website.   Can’t even tell what country it is based in.

Avoid, avoid, avoid.

E-Mail Petitions

Updated from original post dated September 23, 1999…

You’ve probably received one or more of these in the past.  You know the sort: some social evil is occurring (like the Religious Right trying to crack down on an airline that sponsored a gay event at some point, or Congress about to let the Post Office charge you for sending e-mail, or something like that), so someone starts an “e-mail petition.”  You are then to add your name (and sometimes your city) and then send it to everyone you know via e-mail.

What purpose does this serve, beyond sending lots of e-mail?

The early versions of these didn’t even give any way for the petition to get to the people it ostensibly needed to.  The petition would just somehow magically “appear” on the desk of the president of the airline, perhaps?  More recent versions have had provisions for every 25th or 50th signer to send the petition to some e-mail address, from which they will presumably be distilled and delivered to the right person.

Let’s think about this a moment.  Imagine that you get the petition and are #19 on the list.  You send it to 10 people.  They are all #20, and they send it to 10 people.  That’s 100 as #21, 1000 as #22,… and 1 million people each listed as #25, all of them dutifully mailing a copy of the petition to the requisite e-mail address (and to ten more friends).  I imagine that the receiving e-mail address would get rather swamped quite quickly.  (And indeed, if you’ve ever tried sending such an item in, you probably found that the e-mail address listed was defunct.)

Now imagine someone — even a computer program — trying to process hundreds of thousands of these e-mailed petitions, trying to extract names from which to compile a master list, in order to find out just how many people really did “sign”.  The way e-mailers warp these human-readable messages, with line wraps and “>” quoting and such, heck, a human would need to look at many of the items just to find the names.  Yeah. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of them.  I don’t think so.

Suppose, though, that a list of names was able to be extracted and the duplicates (more than 99% of the names, probably) removed.  What good does a list of names with no addresses attached do?  Anyone could have loaded the petition up with names pulled from a phone book; there is no way to check that any person on the list ever even saw the petition, much less wanted their name attached.  (Or heck, that they even exist!)  No, even if any of these petitions ever do get to a corporation, they are of no use to anyone there, and they will only get tossed out as unsolicited e-mail.

Do you really want to have an effect?  Trying visiting the company’s corporate website, find a contact address (e-mail or regular mail), and write an individual, original letter — even just a two-line note.  This is much more likely to have someone read it, and pay attention to it, than some alleged “petition” to which you can just blindly add your name, send on, and pretend that you have tried to make a difference.

Also consider visiting MoveOn.org.  Started in late 1998 as a reaction to the Clinton impeachment trial, this is a web site intended specifically for the electronic gathering of petitions.  It allows you to enter your name, e-mail address, and zip code, and an optional individual comment, and then a compiled petition with your name included only once (and thus effectively) can be sent to the right people and have an actual effect.