To Cable TV or Not to Cable TV

Last week I called Comcast and requested that they downgrade my cable television service from the Digital Classic package to broadcast channels only. This is a rather fun conversation to have with the Comcast folks. Their procedure seems to require that they escalate the call at least twice to give a couple of supervisors a chance to talk the caller out of this decision. Despite their efforts, I prevailed and the service has been downgraded. This downgrade will save us about $50/mo.

Gone are the satellite channels and the on-demand service. What remains are just the channels that I would be able to receive with an antenna, if I had a desire to put one on my house. The trick now will be to adjust my viewing habits to the remaining service.

My first trial was making it through the first round of the baseball playoffs. This year the games were broadcast on TBS only, which is not part of the service package that I currently have access to. I had to rely on the radio and the pitch by pitch updates on my phone to follow the progress of the Red Sox. For the next round of the playoffs, I will likely be seeking out a neighborhood bar.

For my other TV viewing needs, I have been looking towards Hulu.com. Hulu has a large quantity of television series available on-demand. Thus far I have worked my way through the first few episodes of 'Fringe' and have caught up on a couple of episodes of 'Bones' that I missed.

The interesting thing here is that you cannot just flip through channels. After choosing a program, you have to wait a minute for it to start and then enjoy the program. Hulu does have ads, but I cannot say that I mind watching four 30-second spots over the course of a 45 minute show when I would have to endure 15 minutes of ads if I was watching it on TV.

My ultimate goal here is to actually start reading a bit more and maybe visit the town library from time to time, but I have to say that it is nice to be able to look to the internet to help wean me from my tv habit.

Apathy & Support

Recently I found myself thinking about the 'Apathy' Demotivator.

There is a software that I use to convert video so that it is podcast friendly. The software had an update available for download. To get the update I had to login to the product's support site via a login form (choose product from drop down list, enter email address and registration code from my purchase email).

I typed my information into the form, but could not get logged in. I tried copying this info from the original email the company sent with my purchase. No change. I still could not get in.

I sent an email to their support group that told them them the nature of my problem. I explained what I chose from their drop-down list of products and what I had tried, including both copying & pasting and typing my info into their form and that neither had worked. And what did I get for my efforts? A canned response telling me to "try copying & pasting the information".

Now if their support rep had actually read my email, he/she would not have responded this way. It is possible that canned response emails solve a portion of a company's support requests, but I just cannot agree with this being their first course of action for support. It just leaves me feeling that my questions and concerns are not important to the company.

I did ultimately get this issue resolved after a few days, but I have to say that I actually liked their product a bit more before I had to deal with their support group. I may be overreacting here, but this is my human interaction with their company and I expected a bit more. I am left feeling less likely to recommend their product.

Email Pet Peeve

A decent portion of the email that I receive is definitely spam, but there are some fringe candidates in my Inbox as well. Often these borderline emails are sent from folks that are legitimately trying to market something to me. As there are email marketing companies out there that are actually concerned about the quantity of spam-flagged emails that are sent from their clients, I always look for an opt-out option before reaching for the spam button.

If I make a web purchase, I sometimes opt-in for future emails. When I receive too much email, I go back and opt-out...easy enough. Occasionally a company decides that I am going to be interested in receiving email from one of their partners and subscribes me to that company's emails. I am not a fan of this, but if there is an opportunity to click an "unsubscribe" link I am not too upset by it.

What I really do not like is when a company shares my email address with a partner that does not give me the option of opting-out. Often they want to force me to create an account on their website so that I can opt-out of receiving future emails. This always leaves me wondering why in the world they would think that I would want create an account when I am already less than please with them for contacting me to begin with?

Paperless Billing

I was recently paying some bills and realized that I had not received a current invoice for my phone service. I logged into the company's website and found (much to my surprise) that the account had been switched over to "paperless billing". As I do not recall anyone ever asking me to opt-in to this service, I chose to switch it back to paper.

While it does go against my desire to be an early adopter of all things technology, I have to say that I am kind of partial to receiving paper bills. There are a few reasons for this is:

• I am used to being able to open a drawer and find previous invoices instead of having dig around online and try to locate.
• The vendor's website navigation perpetually changes from site tweaks and redesigns.
  
• Most sites only keep a couple of months of history and going further back than that is challenging to say the least.
  
• The paper copies always seem to contain more detail about charges.

As I look at the growing mound of paper recycling that I need to shred before sending out to the transfer station, I see that I will soon have to change my opinion on this. I will (hopefully) get over this longing for paper and come to accept that the green option here is to embrace the paperless billing.

Remembering Toll Free Phone Numbers

I recently upgraded to a Motorola Q Smartphone and ran into an interesting problem. I was trying to call a company who's toll free number was spelled out in the form of a word (to allegedly help me remember it). As it turned out, the knowing the word did not help.

When it comes to phones in my house: we have no land-line, my wife has a Blackberry, and I have this Moto Q. When I tried to dial the "easy to remember" number, I found that I did not have access to a phone that actually had the traditional letters on each digit of the phone's keypad. The number keys on both the Blackberry and the Moto Q are working double duty as part of the QWERTY keyboard on the devices.

To resolve the problem I had to find a site with the letter to phone key pads.

I felt this issue was worth noting as it just never would have occurred to me that it would be a problem to begin with.

Print-Ready Cheat Sheets

Here is a great HTML Cheat Sheet post on SixRevisions.com; It features a total of 23 different printable sheets of coding samples for web developers.

Frankly I have to say that I am posting this just to bookmark it for my own uses in the future.

Netflix Profiles

My wife and I have been Netflix customers for about a half dozen years. We have used the four movie at a time plan. With Profiles, this gives us two movies each and our own separate queues. This works well because our DVD tastes differ. Sometimes one of us will be working through many disks to catch up on a TV series, while the other just wants to watch a movie. Profiles have allowed for this.

About a week and a haf ago the folks at Netflix sent out an email saying: "We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008." And apparently this was being done to, "improve the Netflix website".

My immediate reaction upon reading this email was to call Netflix at about 11:00 at night (seems they are there 24 hours a day) and cancel our membership, while pointing to the email as the cause for the decision. It seems that others had the same reaction and Netflix has changed their mind.

Yesterday Netflix sent out an email saying, "You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles. Thank you for all the calls and emails telling us how important Profiles are. We are sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. We hope the next time you hear from us we will delight, and not disappoint, you."

Looks like I can join Netflix again and continue with my plans to purchase the Netflix Player by Roku and then happily begin streaming content from the Netflix website to my TV. Of course I do feel a little sad at this point, now having realizing that my product loyalty is only one bad policy decision away from non-existent.

Paypal Virtual Debit Cards

I have to say that I like the concept of the PayPal Plugin. (While in Beta, this was formerly called the PayPal Virtual Debit Card.) This tool allows you to create a one-time or a one-site Debit Card for shopping on-line. The one-site feature is particularly nice because it allows for recurring charges, but still protects from fraud as the charges can come from only one website.

While playing with the beta version of this a few months back, I found that there was no ability to recall the virtual card numbers that had been created. I used a PayPal virtual card order software from a website. When I went to check on the status of my order, the site asked for the last four-digits of my credit card and I could not give it to them without contacting PayPal customer service. Thankfully, PayPal has fixed this in the public release of the PayPal Plugin.

One feature that I feel is still missing from the Paypal Plugin is the ability to apply a limit. While it is nice to be able to shop without exposing my really credit card info, it is a bit tough that I cannot also establish a limit on the charges that can be applied to the virtual card that I have created. This might be the downside of PayPal having a vested interest in the amount that is charged to the card. This "vested interest" being that credit cards fees are charged as a percentage of the sale.

As a whole, I find that the PayPal Plugin is a useful tool. I will be interested to see what they do to improve upon it in the coming months.