Where there's a Will...

Netflix needs social hooks

I just watched "Vietnam's Unseen War: Pictures from the Other Side" on Netflix. It's a National Geographic special that shows photos from and interviews with photographers on the non-American side of the Vietnam War. 

It was moving. I'd like to share a link to this movie with friends who may or may not have Netflix. Such a thing does not exist. Let's go, Netflix!

 

Contextual Ad micro-disaster: Catholic app

A buddy of mine showed me a link to a Catholic confession iPhone app. I visited the page and was shown a contextual ad from Red Bull that was hilariously inappropriate. 

Customer Service: Money Magazine

I just received what has to be the best phone-based customer service I have ever received.

My 3-year subscriptions to both Money & Fortune magazines have lapsed and I've ignored the invoices I've received after the subscription end dates, assuming they were meant to generate new subscriptions. I thought my subscription would just be cancelled once the end date had passed. I happened to see "delinquent payment" on one of the recent invoices for Money magazine, which invoked fear of being sent to collections.

I used their web interface (which needs work, but that's another story) as their notice instructed, but couldn't find anything to deal with "delinquent payments," so I cancelled my subscription, then called the number they provided on the notice. 

I braced for a long period on hold, pouring myself a cup of coffee while I waited. The phone was answered immediately, only seconds after I dialed. I was in mid-pour and my brain had gone to the "hold" zone, where it shuts down in expectation of mind-numbing ads and fuzzy classical music. I explained my situation and the courteous woman on the other end verified my online subscription cancellation for Money magazine was sufficient, then processed my request to also cancel the Fortune magazine subscription.

The call took less than 3 minutes. Wow.

Tasty healthy popcorn (cheap!)

  Liberate yourself from buying microwave popcorn! You can achieve the same effect with a paper lunch sack and popcorn kernels! Disclaimer: You must monitor your microwave! If you start a fire due to inattention it's your own fault!

1. Put 1/3 cup of kernels in a paper lunch sack

2. Fold the top of the sack down about 1/2 an inch from the top. Fold it over again, then fold the corners over at angles (so that the bag won't open when the popcorn expands)

3. Play with your microwave to find the proper cooking time. I set mine to 2:22 then wait for either the popping to slow down or for the popcorn to start smelling burnt-ish.

4. Pour 1/3 the bag into a bowl, drizzle olive oil and very light honey over it, then light salt and pepper. (Repeat twice)

5. Enjoy

Since when was Faxing so expensive?!

  Needed to send 2 faxes today. One is 21 pages (including the cover page) and is going across the state from my 206 area code to the 509 area code. The other is 2 pages (including the cover page) and is going to the 360 area code.
  FedEx/Kinkos pricing for faxes that are not long distance are $1.99 for the first page, $0.99 for each additional page. Translation: $23.77 before tax! What happened to "ten cents per page"?! One of the employees pointed me toward the machines, then pointed out the rate sheet and I only barely refrained from asking him if their corporate team was crazy! I'm not paying that much! I didn't spend any time looking at the extra markup for long distance, since the 'normal' rates were so ridiculous.
  Just in case FedEx/Kinkos is running some crazy maffia markup on fax prices I called Staples to check their rates. $1.25 per page. First page is free. So...over $25 before tax. Yikes!
  I checked out a bunch of online fax services. Most are subscription-based. You pay some monthly fee and you can send some number of pages within the US. The one I went with is RapidFax. I went with them mostly because they had a one page signup and their policy is to not charge if you cancel your account within 30 days. Otherwise it's $8/mo. That's 1/3 the cost of the other places, and I sent my faxes from my chair.
  I will say that I'm surprised I couldn't find a service that would allow me to send "a couple of faxes". I'd much prefer that to a subsciption. I'm also really surprised that the company I was sending faxes to doesn't have something set up to receive digital documents. That's pretty ludicrous in this day and age. Email's free...everyone has it. Why are we gouging people for faxes? Faxes used to be cheaper than they are now and there's absolutely no excuse for that kind of markup when we have such robust data networks!
  If the argument is that it's hard to send digital copies of physical documents...I call shenanigans! I have a USB scanning device that cost all of $80. I scanned in my 20-some pages, added them to a PDF, created a fax cover sheet in Word (and saved it to PDF) and combined those PDF documents together into one document. It did not take long at all and was fairly trivial to do.