Sprint pretty much gives up on customer service as a whole…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Sprint breaks up with high-maintenance customers
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9739869-7.html

This is tough because while I guess I can understand from a business perspective why you might finally decide that it’s just not economical to serve all of your customers if you’ve got specific ones that require enough work to not be considered profitable anymore, this also just leaves a real sour taste in my mouth because the wireless carriers are always fighting for subscribers as it is, and with the surge that came recently from at&t releasing the iPhone, you’d think the last thing that Sprint would want to do would be to stop collecting money from anyone. How much do they really think that that mediocre offering that they consider “customer service” costs them anyways?!

Just another bad example of a corporation that looks at service as an expense, rather than a given. “It’s really only economical for us to give quality customer service 78% of the time – that’s what we’ve statistically found our threshold to be…”

…

Then again, maybe if I make enough complaint calls, I can get one of those letters for myself and switch to a carrier that actually does care about it’s customers!

Who needs the Kwik-E-Mart???

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Let’s hurl a brick-E-Mart!

Oh man, I’m just about giddy with excitement tonight. Not only was the transformation of 11 7/11 stores into Kwik-E-Marts in promotion of The Simpsons Movie completed recently, but there’s a store over in Orlando!!!

12298 Apopka-Vineland Road
Lake Buena Vista, FL 32830 (Yahoo! maps)

Pictures from Stores Around the Country:
http://simpsonskwikemart.blogspot.com/

http://jimhillmedia.com/blogs/jim_hill/archive/2007/07/03/toon-tuesday-looking-for-a-kwick-konvenient-place-to-shop-then-why-not-stop-by-the-kwik-e-mart-from-the-simpsons.aspx

It’s gonna take every bit of restraint for me to not take a road trip tomorrow for the 4th of July and pick me up a box of Krusty O’s! Clearly we’re going to have to make another trip over to Mickey’s neighborhood before too long… 🙂

also…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I’ve jumped on the bandwagon and decided that I want an iPhone. And I think between the $600 price tag, not using AT&T Wireless, and still being under a contract with Sprint, knowing that I can’t have one makes it even worse! I love that all of the news outlets are now scrambling to make up speed because they’ve spent the last month writing the thing off as nothing but hype, and now it turns out that it actually is just as cool as it has been advertised to us. Every review by worthwhile sources so far have beamed about the iPhone and it just sounds like a really cool tech toy to have.

So here’s the plan, folks – my contract with Sprint will be up next spring and I’ll likely be moving over to Sara’s family plan with Verizon at that point. Apple has until next spring to both lower the price and expand into other cell phone carriers so that I can get one. But if these sweet ads keep coming, it’s gonna be a long wait… 🙁

etc, etc, etc…

Posted on by Scott / 1 Comment

Go!

Weekend = Good
Despite all that presented every reason to have a crappy weekend on Friday, it still managed to turn out ok and I have Sara to thank for that. Being the wedding-crazy slave-driver that she is, a significant chunk of time was spent working on our wedding website because she wants it done about a year and a half ago! Getting close, though, and I’m surprisingly happy with how well it’s turning out, so with any luck it should be done in the next day or two. Link to come when that happens. Aside from that, we spent Saturday evening over at Downtown Disney for dinner (not the best meal I’ve had at Wolfgang Puck Express), mini-golf (Sara whooped my butt – I don’t wanna talk about it!), and a movie (Knocked Up, which was much better than I thought it would be). As they all are, the only caveat was that the weekend as a whole was too short, but a good time was still had by all.

Writing Momentum
Seems to be going somewhat better than usual, as I’m getting a few things done here and there and even started brainstorming an idea for possibly a new fiction story, which intrigues me because I don’t really feel like I’ve written a really good fiction story since, like, the 8th grade! Don’t know where I’m going, if anywhere, with it yet, but it’s still interesting…

To Hell with Our Gym!
Sara and I went down to exercise together last night so she could show me the weights, and not only did they pull out two or three machines because someone else had left them there and they weren’t “covered by the insurance,” but now also the one and only treadmill is “Broked” according to the note left assumedly by whoever brokeded it. So now it’s either going for walks outside, which I’ve actually been doing a lot lately, or using Sara’s recumbent bike for my cardio. As much as we’d like some stuff of our own, gym equipment is too expensive when we’ve got the wedding to save for, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that wherever we move to will have a gym that’s a little better kept up. And just for the record, we’re both very ready for a change from this place…

Car Go … Maybe
My car might not make it much longer, as I’ve been finding it more and more difficult to shift gears as of late. I was really having to force it today, babying it like crazy, and I’m afraid one of these times it’s just not going to go into gear anymore. Need to go see a mechanic in the next day or two to see the damage, but if it’s too high, a replacement car might end up being the more economical option at this point. The thing is 9 years old with 145k miles on it, so what should I expect?

Computers Aren’t My Friend
So I didn’t write about it because life was too crazy, but one night when I went to use the computer last week, instead of getting LiveJournal, I got a message from Road Runner stating that they’d received a complaint citing unsolicited bulk e-mail coming from my IP Address. No threats at this point, just a request to check out the computers on our network to see if there’s any Spyware lurking about, and boy, was there ever! Both my laptop and desktop are pretty much lost causes at this point – the laptop had twenty or thirty different pieces of malware and spyware on it, so I finally broke down and just reformatted the drive for the first time since I bought it back in 2002. I think I’m still installing security updates from Microsoft on it now, but it’s surprisingly quicker and this time I’ll try to keep a little more up on those patches! As for the desktop, it now likes to lose power every time I try to run Spybot Search & Destroy, so it’s next on the reformatting list once the laptop is back up to speed. After these, I’m also throwing linux on a PC in the corner for general web surfing to help cut down on the amount of crap that’s slipping through…

4th of July … Wednesday
I’m off, no plans, and Sara has to work all day. I honestly don’t really care about fireworks all that much because we see them at Disney all the time anyways and we’d be rushing like mad to catch them after Sara gets out, so I’ll probably just sit around the house and try to catch up on writing and video games and whatnot. Fun!

End transmission.

vertical farming

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6752795.stm

This would be awesome, except for the fact that Manhattan real estate would be much too expensive for investors to spend their money on plants and animals… 🙁

Still a very cool idea, though. Love the picture!

Weekend Recap

Posted on by Scott / 3 Comments

It was good. It was busy. But it was good.

This was the first weekend of Sara actually getting weekends off from work, and despite the fact that we spent most of the time catching up on things that had gotten put off, running around for errands and doing chores and whatnot, it was ultimately good to just be able to spend some time together that isn’t 11:30pm after she gets home from work. It’s amazing how even something as mundane as grocery shopping can be better with the one you love.

But aside from housework, chores, and all sorts of other things that nobody really wants to hear about here, we did also make some significant progress with the wedding planning today that we’re both really excited about. Now mind you, things aren’t written in stone or signed with blood yet, but we’re pretty confident that we’ve finally found the location for the whole shindig! It’s a hotel called the Grand Plaza on St. Pete Beach – you may remember my writing about it a few months ago when it stood out on a random walk on the beach. Well, this evening we got the grand tour of the place by the Catering Manager and were pretty much blown away by what we saw. The hotel itself is right on the beach, which means no worrying about how to get guests across a busy Gulf Blvd. for the ceremony on the beach like the last place we were considering. The prices are considerably cheaper, and this is one of the only places we’ve found that actually discounts the food itself and not just the minimums on non-peak days (right now we’re shooting for a Thursday or Friday, with my vote actually towards Thursday). And the room itself, well, although the pictures below aren’t the best and they in no way do the view justice, they still give a pretty good idea of what we’re talking about – this room is ten stories up at the top of the hotel and offers a panoramic view of the Gulf of Mexico through floor-to-ceiling glass windows all around.

The only real caveat is that the room is a bit small – capacity is 100 people – so we’re finding ourselves having to change a few preferences, including switching the meal from a buffet over to a plated meal and being a little more selective on our guest list, but after going over things tonight when we got home, the guest list editing wasn’t nearly as bad as we were expecting and we’ll probably still be able to make some adjustments once we can get an idea of who is actually willing to travel for this. But it’s sooooo worth it for the view – we nearly agreed in the car that we’d cut the guest list down to 20 people if we had to to go with the view … it’s really just incredible and it’ll be another something to remember forever. All in all, it was a great addition to the day and I know I’m feeling a lot better about being able to pay for things next year just by watching the reception bills drop by several grand from one location to another! We’ve still got a long ways to go, but we’re getting there! 🙂

TV Recap

Posted on by Scott / 2 Comments

On the Lot
Apparently I was right in my hypothesizing a few weeks ago, as I’ve still got last week’s episode sitting on the Tivo and I really don’t care if I watch it or not! The show is too showy for its own good (i.e. it hasn’t earned the right to act so flashy and take eight commercial breaks an hour during two episodes a week. Even though I’ve heard that they’ve scaled it back, this one just really missed the mark for me and Project Greenlight was a much better look at independent film making.

Pirate Master
I know, I know – it sounds ridiculous, but I’ve actually taken a bit of a liking to this one, if not just because I think the drama is amusing and the theme is kinda cool. Basically this is a variation of Survivor, also created by Mark Burnett, actually, only now everyone is on a pirate ship and they get their prizes as they go along so they can use the money to buy each other, stir up controversy, and so forth. The last few episodes focused on some early complaints about the system, as “the pirate code” has the Captain automatically take 50% of whatever the crew wins from a challenge and then the rest is divvied up somewhat evenly between the rest. Big surprise – a lot of folks didn’t like that, you know with the thought of getting $2000 while your “Captain” buddy just made $20,000 – there’s a little bit of real life for you! But it’s interesting – I set it to Tivo during the first week just because I thought it would be funny to watch once, but I sat down Thursday night and ended up watching all of them back-to-back. It’s like Survivor, only with the twist that the show needed to keep me watching five or six seasons ago…

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
I’m starting to get bitter about this show because at this point there’s only one episode left to air and I just can’t figure out this – was the show cancelled because the plotline took such a controversial twist, or was this plotline created because the show was getting cancelled anyways and they wanted to go out with a bang? Aaron Sorkin is a genius – I loved Sports Night, even though I absolutely hate sports – and I was really hoping that Studio 60 would stick around for a while because it was smarter comedy and we don’t really have anything else like it today. But these latest episodes have really been dragging hard – not necessarily uninteresting, but just one bad thing after another and after part 3 this week and still nothing has really been resolved, you’re just sort of left thinking, “What next?!” Anyways, the final episode airs on Thursday and I’m really hoping that a miracle happens and the show gets picked up by HBO or Cinemax and is allowed to continue (hey, that’s how Sports Night made it as long as it did), but it isn’t looking good … and that sucks.

Entourage
I like the show, I watch it every week, and for the most part I’m still in good spirits about it as a whole, but I hate the Billy Walsh character for how much of a jerk he is (not like Ari at all – different kind of jerk, mind you) and I hated the last episode because it pretty much centered around him. I also didn’t care much for the style of the episode, shot documentary-style to show “the making of Medellin.” It just didn’t work for me, but at least the show’s getting enough attention from HBO to not have to worry if it will be around next week.

Isn’t it sad when you have to rationalize it like that?