Yes, it’s that time again.  It’s hard to believe that one company could screw things up so badly, but it’s true.  After telling me that I’ve been taken off their opt-out promotional list, once again, I get this email in my inbox.

On Monday of this week, we sent you an e-mail with our exciting new TeraByte Ultra(tm) Web hosting package upgrade that also included 3 free months of Web hosting all for just $49.95. There is nothing you have to do to participate in this upgrade. It is all being done automatically! You will receive notification once you have the new and improved TeraByte Ultra and your account on file is charged the one-time $49.95 upgrade fee. To see all the details about this great new package, please click here. (If the link doesn’t work, please copy and paste http://www.globat.com/learnmore.htm into your browser.)

If, by any chance, you have decided NOT to take advantage of this upgrade offer and the 3 free months of Web hosting, please click on the link below before midnight on October 24, 2007:

https://www.globat.com/optout.php?[actual link redacted]
(If link does not work, please copy entire link into your browser)

Thank you again for being a loyal customer.

Best regards,

Edward Gaa
VP of Sales and Marketing
Globat.com
(877) 245-6228 for US Customers
(323) 874-9000 for International Customers

It’s just amazing how bad this company is run.  Like the last time, I didn’t get any email on “Monday,” about their opt-out offer.  When I first got this email, I clicked on the “learnmore” link and got a 404 error.  Later, they did put that info up.  Once again, it’s more bandwidth and disk space that I don’t need since I use about 3% of my space on this account.  Imagine if I somehow didn’t get this opt-out email and had been charged $49.95 for the upgrade.  What a rip-off this sleazy company is.

If anybody is even thinking about signing up with this company, run away as fast as you can.  Save yourself.  It’s too late for me, I’ve already pre-paid for a year.

My car was in the shop, so I had to take the bus to go pick it up.  While I was riding the bus, I looked around at all the ads on the bus.  My prediction is they will all be LCD displays with ads in the near future.  It might even be video.  The age of “Blade Runner” is coming my friends.  But I digress.

One of the ads I saw on the bus was for flexcar.com.  It said you can rent a car by the hour so I took a lookie see at their website.  First thing I noticed was that the company had been bought by Steve Case’s company in 2005.  Apparently, he’s collecting companies like I used to collect DVDs.  I like keeping track of what Steve’s doing since he was my classmate in High School (along with Barack Obama).  They’ve done well for themselves, but I’m catching up with this little blog.

Anyway, the way flexcar works is you have to join and be a member ($35 per year in Los Angeles), which allows you to rent a car by the hour ($5 per hour).  Unlike regular rent-a-car places, the cars are parked in public places.  There’s a bunch of them at UCLA and USC.  I guess it’s geared mostly to college students.

It’s not a bad idea and I would have used it when I was in college, but I don’t think I need it now that I own a car.  If I could rent a Porshe for $5 per hour to impress a stripper, I might do that, but the cars are mostly hybrids and some SUVs.  Maybe I could impress some eco-minded stripper.

During one of my outing to Little Tokyo, I saw Chris Gore shooting what I assume was a clip for his DVDuesday on Attack of the Show on G4.

Basically, he reviews the new DVDs that come out on Tuesdays with “Buy, Rent or Pass” choices.  From his reviews, I can tell that aside from being a movie fanatic, he is more of a geek than I am, which is pretty hard to do.

Chris is also the founder of filmthreat.com, which started with reviews of mostly small indie movies, but now has gone more mainstream.

Speaking of movies, I saw “The Brave One” with Jodie Foster on Monday with my movie buddy.  Although there was a flashback sex sequence with the dead guy with Jodie, I’m pretty sure the nude scenes were done with a body double.  That’s not to say that Foster doesn’t have a nice body, but she probably doesn’t have to do stuff like that at this point in her career.

My friend liked the movie because she has some anger inside wanting to come out, but I found the movie to be a cheap imitation of “Death Wish”.  Arguably, it could even be considered an imitation of “Taxi Driver,” in which Foster played a teenage prostitute in New York, and De Niro was the vigilante.

In “The Brave One,” Foster plays a radio personality who is a victim of a violent attack which ends in her boyfriend being murdered.  After this attack, she becomes a recluse, then has some type of weird epiphany where she finds pleasure in a Bernie Goetz type vigilante murder spree of New York.  She befriends the detective investigating the murders and even interviews him for her radio show.

At this point, I lost interest in the plot line and was just hoping to see some good gore.  Unfortunately, the gore is not glorified and the plot turns into a rediculous ending.  The only thing missing was an epilog showing the detective taking credit and being a big hero.  If Foster’s character and the detective were lovers, it might almost be able to fly, but I didn’t buy the ending for a second.

As Chris Gore would say, “Pass.”

As you know, I have Time Warner cable and broadband cable for my Internet.  I also use Vonage for my landline phone via the broadband cable.

For the second time this year, my cable Internet connection failed and after trying several times, I was not able to get my connection back.  So, I called Time Warner customer service and they told me that because of the Labor day weekend, Tuesday was the first day they could come out to fix the problem.  Also, the repair person could come any time from 9am to 7pm.  Not very good.

Since I didn’t have a choice, I decided to take the day off on Tuesday so that I can have my cable Internet connection repaired.  The customer support rep told me the repair person would call me about 30 minutes before coming.  I told her that since my phone is VoIP, they would have to call me on my cell phone to contact me.  She noted my cell number and told me they would call that number.

After a second day of being without Internet, I decided I had to try to see what I could do myself.  The last time the repair guy came, he just replaced all cables and it worked.  So I decided to replace one of the short cables.  Sure enough, that’s all it took to get it to work again.  Nice.

Then, the next day, I get an automated computer call on my Vonage voice mail from Time Warner reminding me of my appointment and an option to cancel by calling a toll free number.  I follow the instructions to cancel my appointment.  However, the next day, I get yet another identical reminder call.

First off, they should not be calling me on my Vonage number because I told them that it would not work since my Internet connection wasn’t working and I gave them my cell phone number.  On top of that, their system doesn’t seem to work when I try to cancel.  The second time, I call and go through their multi-level menu system and finally get a live person so that I can confirm the cancelation.

Finally, when I get through, the customer support rep was out of breath for some reason.  Sort of like she ran to her phone or was in a fight.  Weird.  Anyway, I could barely hear her because of all the background noise and other reps talking so loud.  I could literally hear other reps repeating phone numbers and addresses.  This didn’t give me a warm and fuzzy about my private information over there.  When I asked to cancel my appointment, the rep told me that it had already been canceled.  Oh brother.

I love the way these companies love wasting your time for no reason and their robots (both computerized and human) just do what they are told without any regard to personalization.  How uncommon is it for people to have their phone on VoIP, which would not function if their Internet connection is down?  Oh well.  Just venting.  I’m sure nothing will change with their so called customer service.

How would you like free long distance phone calls with no monthly fees?  Well, the newest take on broadband VoIP is ooma, which they say will be available next month.

It’s similar to the other VoIP services like Vonage, but there’s a couple of differences.  The “catch” to the no monthly fee is that you have to buy their hardware and it will set you back a whopping $400.   It’s sort of like the original lifetime Tivo option with no monthly fees.  As you may recall, that went out the window but the people who got that option originally, still have their free service for life.  Hmmm.

The other twist is the box that you get also has a local answering machine like device.  I don’t know if the messages are literally stored on this device or if it’s just some buttons that transmit info to their server to stream the message, but for people who are used to a physical device for their answering machine, this might be better than voice mail.

Currently, I’m paying $14.99 for Vonage for 500 minutes per month.  If my math is correct… carry the 9… that comes out to about 26 months to pay $400, or 2 years.  For the full-price Vonage ($24.99), it would be only 16 months.  That’s less than a year and a half.

When I bought my Tivo, I did the same math and decided to pay the monthly fee instead of the one time $300 lifetime fee.  Now that I’ve had my Tivo for about 3 years, I know I made the wrong decision.

The only other thing that has to be considered is that Ashton Kutcher is listed on their “management team” as their “Creative Director.”  This could be bad.  They might just take your $400 and deliver nothing except an email that tells you that you’ve been “Punk’d.”

Several month ago, I wrote about trying to get Amazon’s Unbox service to work with my Tivo.  In case you missed that, it’s a service where you can rent or purchase DVDs and have the movie or TV show downloaded to your Tivo box so that you can watch it on your regular TV, instead of on your computer (like Netflix).

As I wrote before, I couldn’t get it to work from the Amazon website.  However, Tivo updated their Tivo software to allow you to pick Unbox movies from the Tivo side.  Of course, I had to try it again.  Once of the specials they had was “Breach” for just 99 cents.  Using the easy to use interface, I rented the movie and left for work.  When I returned, the movie had finished downloading.  Nice.

Although the Unbox service requires that you watch the movie within 30 days for regular rentals, and 24 hours (I think) for specials like “Breach.”  In all cases, once you start viewing the movie, you must finish it within 24 hours of starting to watch the movie.  I know some people will have problems with this limitation, but I don’t like to split movies into multiple viewing times so this won’t bother me at all.

As for “Breach,” I can see why it was only 99 cents because the espionage part was a weak wannabe compared to great true stories like “Falcon and the Snowman,” and the young recruit aspect was poorly done, compared to great ones like “Training Day” or “Silence of the Lambs.” But I digress.

The quality of the video was less than normal DVD and there are some artifacts on walls and other areas where there is flat coloring.  This is very similar to video quaility of a DVD that’s been compressed to fit a single layer DVD.  On a regular 480i TV (like I have), the quality is good enough, at least for government work.  But if you have HDTV, the quality would be lacking.  After watching “Breach”, I noticed there was a blinking flag next to it to remind me that it will delete in 24 hours.

Feeling great for getting the Unbox to work, I decided to rent another movie.  I did the exact same procedure as before but when I came home, the movie had not downloaded.  I checked my email and I got a notice from Amazon telling me that there was not enough space on my Tivo.  From past experience, this is code for “we don’t know what’s wrong so you don’t get the download.”

Trying to restart the download from Amazon did not work.  Trying to re-rent the movie from Tivo did not work.  Tivo tells me that I cannot rent that movie.  I guess it’s locked or something.

Damn.  Once again, I’m back to square one.  Or more like square zero.  I wish I could just get this damn thing to work.

Once again, more hell from globat.  This time, I get the following email from out of nowhere:

On Monday of this week, we sent you an e-mail with our new GloVault(tm) product upgrade offer that also included 3 free months of Web hosting and a price-freeze guarantee all for just $49.95. There is nothing you have to do to participate in this upgrade. It is all being done automatically! You will receive notification when you can use the wonderful new features of GloVault and your account on file is charged the one-time $49.95 upgrade fee.

If, by any chance, you have decided NOT to take advantage of this upgrade offer and the 3 free months of Web hosting, please click on the link below before midnight on August 16, 2007:

https://www.globat.com/optout_gv.php[actual link redacted]

(If link does not work, please copy and paste the entire link into your browser)

Thank you again for being a loyal customer.

Best regards,

Lou Rio
Vice President of Operations
Globat.com
(877) 245-6228 for US Customers
(323) 874-9000 for International Customers

This business practice of having an opt-out upgrade is so wrong on so many levels, I don’t even know where to start.  But let me start by saying that I didn’t get an email on Monday, or Sunday, or Tuesday for that matter.  I love the part in the email where it says, “It is being all done automatically!”, with the exclaimation, as if this is a great thing.  What a joke.

Since I didn’t get the supposed email on Monday, I didn’t even know what this GloVault was to see if maybe I really did want it, and that it really was a good deal for me.  Like any normal customer, I looked on their website.  I looked, and looked, and couldn’t find anything.

So, I called their customer support number, which was included in the email from good ole’ Lou.  I pushed “2″ for customer service and waited on hold like usual.  When the guy answered, I simply asked him what this GloVault was.  He said, go to “Products” then click on “Add-on” on their website.  I was already in front of my screen with the globat website open so I followed his instructions and told him it wasn’t there.

The customer service guy tells me that GloVault allows for “very large special files” to be saved and it was too technical for him to explain to me.  He also reminds me that if I had bothered to read my terms of service, I would know that there will be opt-out upgrade offers.  Hmmm. Thanks for reminding me that I’m a stupid dumbass for signing up with globat.

Now, I asked how I could get more information on this wonderful GloVault and he tells me to call the sales department because “they come up with these ideas.”

Okay.  “Please transfer me,” I say to the guy.  “Sorry, but you’ll have to hang up and push 3.” he replies.  Oh great.  They want me to wait on hold again.  Nice customer service.  I literally say to the guy, “Thanks for your help,” in the most sarcastic way that I know how, and hang up the phone.

Now, I call globat again and press “3″ for sales this time. I only have to wait on hold for a short time and get a sales guy.  I ask him what the GloVault is and he tells me that it’s just more disk space for my hosting account.  I tell him that I use less than 1 percent of my space right now, and he tells me that I don’t need it so just decline the offer.

So globat again wastes my valuable time with stupid opt-out upgrade offers that their own customer service reps don’t even know what it is.

It’s absolutely amazing that with so much competition for web hosting, globat continues to treat their customers like trash.  I have to put the fault all the way to the top.  Whoever the CEO is, does not know what the words “customer service” means.  This type of bad service comes down from the top.

I was stupid enough to continue my service for another year a few months ago.  What a mistake that was.  Luckily, this blog is on godaddy.

Update:
After posting this complaint, I had to laugh when I saw the CEO’s blog about customer service:

http://www.benneumann.com/archives/2007/05/customer_servic_1.html

I have to admit, the sales department did pick up the phone pretty quick.  Now, if Ben would just realize that automatic upgrades that you have to opt-out of is not something that people want, he might actually figure out what customer service really is.

After loading up on thousands of MP3s, movies, downloaded pr0n, old VHS conversions, and copies of DVDs, I finally ran out of room on my 160Gig hard drive on my HP Media Center.

Realizing that Microsoft is coming out with their Windows Home Server later this year, which HP and other OEMs will produce hardware for, I wanted to wait a little longer. Unfortunately, the space crunch really got bad and I had to break down and get a NAS (networked attached storage) device right now.

After looking at the Imoga, Maxtor and Buffalo, I decided on the 1TB TeraStation Live from Buffalo because of the built in RAID (0, 1, 5, or 10) feature. It’s more expensive than the other ones but I didn’t want to worry about backing up a 1TB device to a… I don’t know what.  The RAID feature allows for bad drives to be swapped out when a LED warning light comes on.  Nice.

Also, the front panel LCD is a nice touch and shows the status of the device, and even the RPM of the fan.  The lower front literally opens up to reveal the 4 hard drives which can be removed without screw drivers.  They really thought this thing through.

Setup was easy and all I did was plug it into my UPS, connect the Ethernet cable to my router and it was working automatically. Like a network router, you access it’s settings via a browser and you can pretty much set it to do anything you want, including automatic backups.

 You can also connect 2 USB 2.0 devices, including external hard drives or printers. The only catch is, if you connect an external hard drive, it is in read-only mode until you re-format it using the unit.

The TeraStation also comes with a bunch of other features that help with media serving, including interfacing with iTunes and other Buffalo devices for streaming media to your TV, and such.  I’m primarily going to use this devices as a storage and backup device so I haven’t checked those features out yet.

The device comes with a backup software called Memeo, which basically allows you to backup your computer in the background to the NAS (or any other drive).  It’s nice because, unlike some backup software that schedules the job at a particular time each day, this software always watches for files that need to be backed up automatically.

Another side benefit is, when I bring my laptop home from work, and it connects via WiFi to my home network, it automatically saves my work wireslessly to the TeraStation. Now, I don’t have to connect my external USB hard drive to backup the laptop.  Since I was too lazy to backup my laptop most of the time, this feature is worth the price by itself.

Hopefully, I’ll never need the backup features, or the RAID feature but now I feel ready for anything.

Ebay has gone heads up against craigslist.org by opening a U.S. version of their Kijiji free classifieds website. There are very few posts on there so far in the Los Angeles section, and unless they start some type of big marketing campaign, it doesn’t look like they will put any kind of dent on craigslist.

But then, I thought myspace was one of the worst designed website I’ve seen. Look where they are now. Actually, I still think it’s one of the worst designed website I’ve seen.

With the iminent strike looming over it’s head, I remembered a patentable idea I submitted to Ralphs several years ago, which I’m sure they have promptly filed in their round filing cabinet.  In case they are reading this, please implement this idea to make our lives better, instead of causing suffering with strikes.

So here is an open letter to Ralphs:

First, update your website so that Ralphs Club members can login and create a shopping list. There should be a mobile version for iPhone and PDA users. All family members should be able to login using their own username and choose either their own private shopping list, or the global family shopping list. You can add to the shopping list from home, work, school computer, or even your browser enabled cell phone or PDA.

The Ralphs website currently has recipes online. The user should be able to automatically add the ingredients from the recipe to their shopping list, minus items they already have.

When a family member goes to any Ralphs, they will go to a kiosk at the front, swipe their Ralphs Club card and get a printout of their shopping list, with the aisles listed next to each item, sorted by distance from the entrance. This way, a family member can go to any Ralphs, even an unfamiliar one, and be able to find the items quickly.

Also, if another family member has already printed their shopping list elsewhere, but not checked out at the cashier, a warning will show on the shopping list, and on the kiosk screen to let you know that somebody else is also shopping right now and you may need to call them to coordinate your shopping.

And finally, when the shopper is finished, they swipe the Ralphs Card at the cashier and all the items that were purchased will be automatically removed from the shopping list. This way, if a spouse goes to Ralphs later that same evening, they don’t have to worry that somebody else had already bought some of the items from the shopping list because the printout will show only the items that still need to be purchased.

So what’s in it for you, the multi-billion dollar corporation? Well, other than increasing customer satisfaction and thereby retention, you have new ways to track problems in your store. For example, if you find that many people who have a particular item on their shopping list, do not seem to buy it at a particular store, the item’s shelf positioning may have to be checked. If many people seem to have similar items on their shopping list, group these items closer together. The list is endless. So what’s in it for you? Profit.

All of this could be implemented basically all in software except for the kiosk with printer at each store. If implemented correctly, perhaps you would make billions more, then be able to pay your union workers more money, then there would be no strike. Think about it.