I think I’m a magnet for customer service problems. Today, my cellphone got shut off, for no known reason, so I called them to ask why. They said that it was for nonpayment. So I called my bank, which verified that they cashed my check a few weeks ago. I called Omnipoint back, and we conference called in the bank, which verified that they had actually accepted my money via electronic transfer, so there was no way Omnipoint could deny that I had paid. The agent on the phone still wouldn’t accept this as an answer; I had to work up another level of management before I got someone that understood how idiotic they were being, and fixed everything. Total time: one hour, which I should bill them for. Update: they are crediting $50 to my bill, which I guess is worth the hour I spent, but all things equal, I wish I hadn’t had to raise my blood pressure.

Joel Spolsky is rocking with a series of programming and interface essays on his website. A few that I have really enjoyed: Things You Should Never Do, Part I (talking about the inadvisability of throwing away source code and starting from scratch), and Introduction to User Interface Design for Programmers (a treatise on why people form the opinions that they do on computers). And, in addition, a humorous statement he made (and has since changed) showing a slight bias against Linux users has drawn the ire of Cam, possibly one of the most biased anti-Microsoft users on Earth.

Jauteria is back, happy happy joy joy!

Tuvalu has decided to sell rights to their national top-level-domain, .TV, to Idealab for $50 million. Good for them, but again, it’s just a sign that the slow response of the domain name system to the need for new TLDs has reached a pathetic state.

Of course, now that I’ve perused Idealab’s site for the .TV TLD, I think that the whole damn thing is just silly. They are auctioning off the domain names, and the prices are outrageous — most auctions appear to start at anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000 (although I cannot figure out the rhyme or reason to where they decide to start the bidding), and the successive bid intervals are pretty big after a certain point. And these prices are for one year, with the registration costs going up 5% each successive year (and by winning the auction, you’re bound for two years). In order to even participate in an auction, you’ve got to pony up $1,000. As Chuck Taggart would say… feckin’ ridiculous.

How frickin’ funny… eponymous, a company that claims to provide screening of the privacy policies of websites, has what can only be called a horrendous database on which it relies for this screening. Different privacy ratings for websites that share the same privacy policy, out-and-out wrong ratings… oops.

Wow, I should start running again.