13 November 2009
… reply to your customer’s email right away. Even if you don’t have anything to tell them, you should reply. it shows you received their email and that you’re aware of the situation.
I ordered a pair of Dots Gloves. They were too small and there was a thread on the index finger that started to unravel. I only wore these twice and neither time was outdoors. I fired off an email with pictures of the problem asking for a replacement.
I didn’t receive an answer for two business days. At first I replied to the email address that sent me my order confirmation. It looked like a real person’s email address maybe they don’t answer their mail. So after a few days I figured I was wrong about that and used the contact email address from their site. I received a reply no longer than 20 minutes later from the first address that I emailed and never received a response from. That’s a big problem. I’m assuming that a bunch of people see email coming in from the contact address from your site. Once you saw I forwarded my original request to it you realized you had better reply quick or someone was going to be on your ass about it.
That’s really shady and not the first time I have seen someone do that in a company.
The reply I did get back stated there was a bad batch of gloves and my replacement would be shipped out on Monday (that was October 26th) Sweet, I appreciated that bit of info. Almost two weeks later and I have not heard anything nor have I seen any gloves show up at my doorstep. So I fired off another email to the personal account on Thursday the 5th asking for a tracking number. I was confident since we had an email exchange going now that I would receive an answer. Three days later and I have no reply. I forward my email to the contact address from the site again and wouldn’t you know I got a reply about 20 minutes later stating this would be looked in to. This was from a new personal address that had been cc’d in on my previous emails. I received a tracking number shortly after that. I got the tracking number twice. Once from the person who replied to me saying they’d look in to it, and another time from the guy that likes to ignore emails.
One thing was done right here: I got an email regardless of new information. Getting that “Sorry I don’t have any information for you now but I will get back to you” email really made me feel like something was getting done. And if I would have gotten an email like that any time I sent my FIRST emails that would have been even better. I do care if you can tell me something, but if you can’t it looks good if you just acknowledge that I sent you an email.
Now the kicker about all of this. The gloves were shipped a day after I send the first email asking for a tracking number. You know, 10 days after I was told the gloves would be shipped. I can’t say exactly what caused the delay but I assume it was sent the day after I started asking again because someone realized they messed up. Of course a nice little “got lost in the shuffle but they’ve been sent” email would have been nice, and would have avoided me writing this post explaining to people why I think your company (or at least one person in it) is really shady.
10 November 2009 tagged FedEx, rant
After this experience, I’m convinced this is a huge company that just doesn’t know what it’s doing.
I had a package that According to it’s tracking number, arrived to our local FedEx facility on Monday at 7:02am. It was not scheduled to be delivered until Wednesday. I can understand they couldn’t get it to me on Monday since it was late morning but you would figure I would have had it on Tuesday.
So I fire off an email to them asking if I can pick it up. I got a reply with the address of where to go and their hours of operation. Great! So I went to pick up my package a few hours after that.
Well when I got there the woman behind the desk said my package was not available until Wednesday and could pick it up then. I was honestly a little peeved. They have it, I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t at least get it on Tuesday, and the email I for back said nothing remotely close to “you have to wait until Wednesday”
On my way back home I emailed the person back explaining what happened. And that they either they forgot to mention I had to wait until Wednesday or the center that I went to was wrong. I got this reply:
May we suggest for you to call our customer service department at 1.800.463.3339 before heading to the station to ensure that the package is ready for pickup or you may wish to continue monitoring your shipment to obtain updated status by using our online tracking page: http://www.fedex.com/us/Tracking
And that kind of made me angry because it doesn’t show me that person ever knew what was going on with my package and I already know how to track a package. That’s why I contacted them to begin with.
Once I made it home I received a call from FedEx (and it was a blocked number, that’s not cool) Whoever was on the other line sounded like they were in a warehouse. They asked if I wanted to pick up my package tomorrow. I said yes and he said he would hold it for me.
Now I thought that was pretty awesome. I wasted my time going there when my package wasn’t available because of them, so now I can get it a day early from their facility.
Checked the tracking number on Tuesday, “On FedEx vehicle for delivery” You have to be kidding me. This was the day I’m supposed to come over and pick up the package from your facility. Why is it on a truck? I thought maybe their tracking system had it wrong. Maybe it’s waiting at the facility. Well a few hours later and the tracking number was updated. The package was delivered and my dad signed for it.
I am happy that my package was delivered but absolutely no one that I spoke with at FedEx gave me any accurate information.
5 November 2009 tagged bot, ReTweetTweet, twitter
Just launched a new website: retweettweet.com.
You can now create your own bot on Twitter that retweets when certain words are said. This service costs $50 a month. I know that’s a lot but I think it’s worth that much. When you have a bot like this you’ll automatically pick up more followers. All of the bots I run gain followers based on how often I retweet. Plus you can use that account to tweet advertisements or anything you would like really. I wouldn’t recommend doing this with your personal account but you can if you wish.
If you want to learn more about this service go to http://retweettweet.com or get in touch with me.
Once you fill in the form on that site I’ll get ahold of you. Some searches people come up with have too many results and may need to be modified. Once that’s straightened out I’ll add you to my system, give you a link to PayPal, and another to authenticate your new bot with our system.
27 October 2009 tagged domains
My portfolio of domains has grown quite a bot over the last few years. I want to clean house a little and this is a great opportunity for you. Here is a list of domains Im willing to part with and a price it will take to part with them. This is for the domain name only and Ill accept payment through PayPal. Contact me at natefanaro@gmail.com and well work something out.
Domains for $200
hideanything.com
Domains for $150
fastbadger.com
myspacenation.com
Domains for $75
imright.net
myspacebackdoor.net
proxychina.net
proxysuck.com
turtleterror.com
25 October 2009 tagged twitter
I want to bounce this idea around and see what people think about it. For the last 4 months I have been collecting user data from twitter’s spritzer stream. Anything that Twitter’s API returns for user data like name, bio, home page, etc are all stored. A complete list of this data can be found here: http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-users%C2%A0show
All of this is stored in a MySQL database that currently holds over eight million records and takes up about 3.5gigs of space. New users come in all the time via spritzer and users already in the database are updated. I also have an additional script running that updates accounts to make that process go a little quicker.
Currently I am not doing anything with this data. I was thinking I could make a website that follows people based on their bio or name but it’s been done and auto following isn’t something I like to deal with. Then I thought I could make all kinds of strange charts on stuff like what background color is most popular and such but I wasn’t a big fan of that idea either. There are many more ideas, but I’ve been busy with other things.
So, rather than let all of this data go to waste I was thinking I could offer it and the php code that I use to collect data. You can import this in to your current database and do anything you like with it. This data did take some time and effort to get and I am collecting more from Twitter. If I were to make a backup of my MySQL table monthly and each month charge $30 dollars to download a batch would that seem alright? Let me know what you think in the comments. If you need this data now send me $30 via PayPal and I’ll send you what I have. Within 2 days I’ll have a backup ready and I’ll email you a link to download it. Uncompressed it’s 3.1gigs and compressed it’s less than 1GB.
Thanks!
9 October 2009 tagged google, rant
This is going to be a rant post. If you personally know me, well, you’re why I’m writing this.
I have always had the mentality that if someone else can do something they had learn it at some time. If I want to do that thing too I have to learn. If I want to do something that I don’t know how to do already, I figure it out. This is accomplished either via google, trial and error, or just asking around.
Because of that way of troubleshooting life I’ve picked up a few skills all on my own. Programming, car repair, cooking, pc repair, how to hook up dvd players, making “backups” of video games, etc. There are many more things I would like to figure out how to do and I have accepted that I can never stop learning. Unfortunately there’s not enough time to become better at the skills I have and to expand that set of knowledge.
Since a lot of my friends and family members know what I can do they love to ask for help. There are different questions from different groups. Family members would constantly bug me with their computer issues. My friends have been trending upwards with car related issues and pc related problems are still at large.
While I try to be as nice and nonconfrontational as I can be, asking me for help is a huge pain in my ass and really I’m not a fan. If you ask me something that I know the answer to right away, chances are good that I had that issue before and solved it on my own. If I don’t know how to help you I’ll check google or just take a stab at the problem. It’s not rocket science. I never thought of myself to be that bright. Unless you have the mental capacity of a chimp I’m fairly certain you can use google or make an educated guess on what your options are. You’ll even feel good about yourself when you’re all done. It’s what I expect people to try out before asking me. Yes, it is easier for you to check with good ol’ Nate before you check google. But google wasn’t in the middle of eating a Whopper with bacon, sans tomatoes, when you asked it for help. Sorry for the bold there, I do enjoy bacon even if it’s cold. Whoppers aren’t that great cold and unfortunately I know that flavor all too well.
I don’t want to make this much longer. Basically, just try being independent, learn something, take initiative, and grow yourself as a person. Just because other people know something doesn’t mean you can’t do it for yourself too. After you made a good effort to take care of something on your own and still need help, I won’t mind. Just let me finish my Whopper first.
27 September 2009 tagged blogger
Well I finally decided to be a big boy and stop using blogger and move to wordpress. I’m even hosting wordpress myself as much as I really don’t need another thing to maintain around here. I don’t think blogger has had anything updated in the last 3 years or at least it looks like it. So far I’m impressed with wordpress as I knew I would be. I think the hardest part was making certain that all of the links to my old articles worked. That was one reason why I had to host wordpress myself instead of just hosting my blog through them. I ended up making manual entries in .htaccess. It was a bit labor intensive for the 80 old links I had to move however it was quicker that putting some sloppy code together to do it. So enjoy and if you’re trying to take advantage of this site when I forget to check wordpress.org every hour for security patches, don’t hack my shit.
3 September 2009 tagged AT&T, iPhone, MMS, rant
I’m going to first state that I have no idea how MMS really works on the cell phone provider side of everything. The infrastructure, how it really works, and what’s required is all a mystery to me. But there’s one thing that I do know, AT&T has taken too long to bring it to the iPhone and no one is happy about that.
First lets try to figure out how many iPhones are on AT&T’s network. According to Apple they have sold 21.17 million units as of Q2 2009. (Wikipedia) As everything with Apple there’s no telling exactly where those are sold. Either in the US where we’re stuck with AT&T or internationally. Of course the iPhone has only been available outside of the United States for a few months. Keeping that in mind I’m going to make a very, very rough guess that AT&T has at least 15 million iPhones on their network. According to AT&T’s investor information page they have “78.2 million customers” in the United States. Percentage wise, that’s a good hunk of AT&T customers that have an iPhone.
So right now almost 20% of AT&T’s subscriber base does NOT have MMS. That means AT&T doesn’t currently have that kind of strain on their system. Now if the iPhone never came out and if AT&T had the same kind of subscribers as they do now, MMS would be supported for that 20%. So why are iPhone users being penalized?
When the iPhone first came out it did not support MMS at all. This was not a software limitation but more a “Steve Jobs” limitation. It could have supported MMS but Jobs thought (others and myself assume) that email was just as good as MMS without stressing out a wireless carrier. What AT&T has probably done was turned a blind eye to their MMS infrastructure. Less users that can send MMS probably means that they don’t need to support them. But AT&T had to have known that the iPhone could very well support MMS. I’m sure as shit that Apple and AT&T have had some kind of conversation regarding getting MMS setup on an iPhone to be used with their network well before iPhone 3.0 was a twinkle in Mr. Jobs’ nuts.
Sorry, I got off topic a little there. We all know that AT&T failed to deliver MMS “on time” for the end of summer. What is shady about all of this to me is that AT&T is missing that MMS volume because of the iPhone. Current AT&T subscribers switched over to the iPhone at an alarming rate. This no doubt left a gap in the number of people that could use MMS. What happened to that gap? What happened to the infrastructure that was once used by existing customers that could use MMS previously but then couldn’t when they got an iPhone? That gap is the shady part for me, and makes me wonder why we all couldn’t just have MMS when Jobs said “make it so.”
3 September 2009 tagged google, iPhone, rant, search, web
I’m trying to find out if Sony’s MBW-150 watch will work with my iPhone. I won’t bore you with specifics but this is a bluetooth watch that allows you to play, pause, and whatnot your music and notifies you of text messages and calls that are coming in.
So I fire up google as usual and search for MBW-150 iphone. This has turned up a few forum posts regarding this watch and the older ones that I’ve found say that it can’t be done. That’s fine. To me that’s a valid search result.
What I’m having a big problem with are mostly blogs. They’ll review the watch and the review contains no information about iPhone compatibility. Why are these reviews showing up in my search results then? Doing a quick scan of the page you can see that some kind of link containing the word iPhone is on the site’s side bar. This is the same kind of crap that went on a decade ago when the web was still fresh. You would see (and sometimes still do) a ton of small text at the bottom of every page that contained a jumble of words.
I’ll try to show you what I’m talking about here. Open this link http://bit.ly/tiSfB hit control + F and search for iPhone. At least for now there are tons of references to iPhone but none are actually in the content of the article.
We need a search engine that just looks at the meat and potatoes of a site. There are so many SEO tricks and tips that try to game the system just to get their sites at the top of a search result without any regard for the user. If your site is relevant it’ll show up, if it’s not maybe you should work on providing better content not a better rank. I’m not saying all SEO tips are like this but honestly that is one idea of the web that I despise. That’s for another post though.
The solution? If a site provides an RSS feed, scrape that instead. To one up this idea, every page should have one atom feed designated for the content of that page. All of the navigation, bad comments, etc aren’t included. Of course once you start scraping RSS feeds all of the SEO jocks will start telling you to throw your entire site in to your feed. At least for a little while we’ll have a higher signal to noise ratio, and I can figure out if I should drop $200 on a kick ass watch.
16 June 2009 tagged rant, twitter, web
Just a small snippet of a reply I sent out to someone while discussing video taking over text. This mainly in relation to Twitter and other micro-blogging applications as well as communication between people in general.
Twitter became big mostly because of text messaging. It took years for every device and almost every user to have text messaging available to them, then a service that utilized it was possible. Video does not have the option to be ubiquitous like text is. Great, you me and 20% of at&t subscribers are going to have phones that can post their stupid videos to myspace. That is not enough users with devices that have the technology to make a difference right now.