Rebate Ridiculousness

I bought a hard drive a while ago from a brick and mortar store.  A while later, I got an email from the company telling me that they were now offering mail in rebates for the drive, and that I would be getting one.  Here's that email.

Dear Jeremy,
We're happy to announce that we're trying to make an effort to increase business, and to do so by offering mail in rebates to our customers.  We see that you recently purchased a hard drive from us, and this qualifies for a rebate.  Please be patient as we process these, but recipients should be receiving checks in the next four to six weeks.

Regards,
Sam Peterson

Well hot dog, right?  Just had to buy the thing, and I'm going to be getting some money back.  I waited for the check to come, but it never did.  After eight weeks, I emailed the company.

Dear Mr. Peterson,
I was thrilled to hear about the rebate offer you announced some time ago.  In the email, you stated that I should expect the check in four to six weeks, however, it has been eight and I've seen no signs of it.  I just wanted to make sure there were no errors in my information, or if I just need to wait longer.

Thanks,
Jeremy

The next day I heard back from the company.  I was a little taken aback by what they had to tell me.

Dear Jeremy,
Hi Jeremy, thanks for your email.  I'm glad to hear that you were happy to hear about our program to help increase business.  Rest assured that we have all of your information correct, and that you don't need to worry about waiting any longer.  While you were the one to purchase the hard drive, we have sent your rebate money to a Mr. Christopher Johnson.  He contacted us requesting that we send a check to him. I hope this clears up any confusion. 

Regards,
Sam Peterson

That just made me even more confused.  They had everything correct, but they sent my check to someone else?  That doesn't make much sense at all.  I decided to go ahead and email back trying to dig a little deeper to see if I could find out why my money went to some other guy.

Dear Mr. Peterson
Thank you for your attempts to explain where my check went.  I must admit, though, that I'm even more confused now than before.  Why exactly did my rebate check get sent to someone I've never even heard of?  Was there a mistake?  If it was my rebate money, should it not have come to me?  I appreciate any further clarification.

Thanks,
Jeremy

The following day he responded.  This time, though, his response made even less sense than before.  I don't know what's going on.

Dear Jeremy,
Don't worry, there was no mistake at all.  While you were the one to purchase the hard drive, we decided to send your money to someone else.  Mr. Johnson never actually bought anything from us, but since he asked us to send him money, we used yours.  We believe that since you had the money to purchase the hard drive in the first place, that you probably don't need any more.  We do appreciate all of the money that you do give us, though. We look forward to you giving us more in the future, as we won't likely be getting any from Mr. Johnson.

Regards,
Sam Peterson

So let me see if I understand how this works.  I give them my money, then they just give my money to someone else?  I'd rather that they just kept it for themselves and used it to make improvements.  I fail to see how exactly this is a rebate program.  Don't rebates usually entail you giving them money, then they give it back?  Not, you give them money, then they give it to someone else.  Am I completely off base here?  If they really don't need the money, they should give it back to whomever gave it to them.  If they do need the money, don't give any of it back.  Use it to improve the company.  Let me know what you think.

Cop Gives Kids Porn...Sorta

I came across this story via Doc Searls' blog.  Some school cop at a middle school in Florida set up a MySpace page as a way to better communicate with the kids.  The page was done with the support of the school and police.  Apparently, one of the people on his friends list had a link to an adult web site.  Now, I know what you're thinking, and the city's police are thinking the exact same thing: Investigate the cop for providing porn to minors.  Duh, it's so obvious that this guy was up to no good.  I mean, as was pointed out, kids could get to the porn from his page in just three click. My goodness, that's practically a direct link to the porn.  Personally, I'm a little worried for myself.  After all, I have linked to Google before, and we all know you can get to porn from there in just two clicks.  Coming from my site, that puts you at the same three clicks.  If some kid visits my site, I'm doomed.   About the only good part of this story is that they're not blaming MySpace for it too.

Asteroid Flies Past Earth, Birds Try to Get Laid

So there's an asteroid flying past earth pretty closely, which has scientists all giddy.  That makes sense, I suppose since this stuff doesn't happen too often (apparently the next one doesn't come for another 20 years).  What I find so amusing, though, is that while the heading warns of this big rock coming close by earth, the picture is a lark that's trying to woo a mate.  Talk about random pairings.

Better Wording of My Point

I'd never heard of Judi Sohn before today, but I really like what she has to say about the Scoble/Plaxo thing.  She wrote four days ago what I wrote last night, only she did a better job.  I didn't read much about this before so I missed her post.  Being out of the loop for so long drives me nuts.  Check out what she has to say, though, because it's right in line with my thoughts.

Glad We Have Our Priorities Straight

I was reading over an article on the New York Times online about the results of the New Hampshire caucus, and some of the things that it talks about are truly amazing. 

First, let's look at why a candidate thinks you should vote for them, and why they think they are the best candidate.  Here is a bit that address why Mrs. Clinton thinks you should vote for her. (emphasis mine)

Mr. Obama, who trailed in most state and national polls until his surprisingly broad victory in the Iowa caucuses last week, was seen by New Hampshire Democrats and independents as the Democratic candidate most likely to defeat the Republican nominee in November, a marked turnaround from earlier surveys. Mrs. Clinton has cited her strength and electability against Republicans as the strongest argument for her candidacy.

Ah, so that's why we need to vote for Hillary: she can win in a vote against the Republicans.  See, I was under the impression that maybe we should vote for her because we agree with her views on Iraq, or healthcare or something.  I didn't realize that we were supposed to be voting for who had the best chance at winning instead of who we want to see elected.  Maybe this is a problem that is only on the Democrat side, though.  Maybe those Republican voters won't be so bad.  Let's take a look. (emphasis mine)

As they had in Iowa, Democrats cited a desire for change in making their votes. Republicans said leadership and personal qualities were more important to them than positions on the issues.

Oh, well that's refreshing to see.  The Republicans aren't all concerned with who might win the election, they just look at what type of person the candidate is.  I don't really know if that's all that much better or not.  Apparently, for Republicans, they don't really care whether or not the candidate agrees with them on economic policy, or tax reform.  No, they just want to make sure that he's a good Christian that loves his family.

So, really, are either of these things all that bad?  Shouldn't we be interested in electing someone that has a chance at winning so we don't just hand the race over to the other guy?  Shouldn't we also be interested in making sure that the person is a decent human being so that we can assume they won't think genocide is a good idea?  Yes, to both of these.  However, to make them your primary focus is a horrible idea.  The concept of looking at non-issues when determining who deserves your vote is why we're in the current situation.  And no, that's not directly solely at Bush, I mean politics in general.  By taking away the issues (and I really should clarify that I mean all issues, not just the issues that get mentioned on CNN), we reduce the race to a contest of not who would do a better job, but who we like more.  We're not voting for homecoming queen here, we're voting for the person that will be the figurehead of our country.  You shouldn't hire someone that knows nothing about tax law to do your taxes just because he's a good guy, and you shouldn't hire someone to be your president just because they have better poll numbers. 

This is exactly why we shouldn't leave it up to the idiots to pick a president.

Who Owns Your Email Address?

For the last month or so, I've been pretty out of the loop in terms of news, both online and off.  I normally read a few hundred articles a day, but during this time I read maybe a dozen total.  The holidays just kept me pretty busy, and I didn't have much time to read my feeds.  That being said, I'm a little late to the party on this particular piece of info.  Robert Scoble decided to test out a utility from Plaxo that would basically screen scrape information from his Facebook friends list and put it in a Plaxo database.  If you're familiar with the Facebook ToS, you already know what happened next.  That's right, Scoble got his account taken away.  After raising a big fuss online for a few days, he eventually got his account back.  I was completely unaware of any of this until today.  Had I found out earlier, I probably wouldn't have waited so long to unfriend him on Facebook.  I try to limit myself to not friending the "celebrity" type people on there, but I did have him, Leo Laporte, and Amber MacArthur.  Now I just have the latter two.  I had contemplated removing him earlier, but decided against it, as it was fun to see his updates.  After this, though, he's off my list. 

That isn't really what I'm writing about, though, as who I have on my friends list doesn't really matter.  What I find interesting is the debate about owning your social graph, and an open system that you can move that information around freely.  I am a bit split on this.  First, I agree that if I want to use a certain system for all of my contact management, I should be able to conveniently get that data from one thing to another.  However, is that data really mine to do that with?  Do I own my friends' contact info?  If they upload their information into Facebook, that doesn't suddenly make it my information.  Their information is still their information.  Does that mean that I should somehow be restricted on how I store this?  No, not at all.  But don't confuse the fact that you can find my email with the notion that you own that piece of data.  On that note, you aren't restricted on where you can keep my info once you have it, but I still have a choice of where I put it.  Keeping my email in your Outlook address book and keeping my email in your Plaxo account are two very different things.  One is only an address book, the other is significantly more.  If I wanted my information in the Plaxo network, I would have put it there myself.  The same can be said for the concept of social networks.  I am a member of Facebook, and I put all my information in there with the intention of it only appearing in Facebook.  I don't want my information in some other social network.  If you want to use some new startup network as your social network of choice, go right ahead, just don't expect me to join you.  Furthermore, don't stick my information there either.  I want to put my information in a network and have it stay there.  Sure, there's nothing stopping you from writing all my info down and then re-typing it into so other system, but I'm working on the assumption that you will be reasonable enough to not go sticking it in every social network out there.

Remember the fiasco that was Quechup?  A new network came along, asked you to upload your friends' contact info, and them spammed them like crazy.  That's a bit how Plaxo used to be.  Once they had your info, it was spam central.  I would really rather not risk having this happen all the time.  I know that we should be embracing the freedom of data portability, but let's not forget that not all of us want our data to be portable.  Just because we put it in Facebook doesn't mean we want it outside of Facebook.  And like I said, I know that it can be done manually, but that manual effort is exactly enough to keep most people from bothering.  If it's so easy to do manually, why do people want portability?  I'm uploading info with the assumption that it'll stay where I put it. 

I don't think that I'm being too unreasonable here, but if you disagree, please let me know.  Dare seems to agree with me, so I know I'm not completely nuts.

Sony Misunderstands the Term Online

A short while ago Sony announced that they would begin selling DRM-free music available for downloading.  This seemed like a great thing, as it signified the last label dropping DRM.  However, Sony has now given some specifics on how this new offering will work.  Apparently, you will go to a physical store, purchase a physical piece of plastic, and then go home and use that to acquire DRM-free music.  This, of course, is wonderful because it's so different from the current method of getting DRM-free tracks from Sony.  You see, right now, in order to achieve that you have to go to a physical store, purchase a physical piece of plastic, and then go home and use that to acquire DRM-free music.  I'm so glad to see that Sony has really picked up on what consumers want and are now providing it. 

Honestly, given that this is Sony, I'm not too surprised by their complete inability to understand the point of downloadable DRM-free music. If I want to quickly grab a song, I want to hop online, download it, and be done.  I don't want to go somewhere, and buy a little card that will let me go back home and download my music.  I admit that I haven't looked into it to see, but I'm willing to bet that Sony has some sort of proprietary downloader that they will force you to use in order to download their music.  I also wouldn't be surprised if that downloader did all sorts of nefarious things to your machine, this is Sony, after all.  This is one of those situations where I'm not sure if Sony offered this in some genuine attempt to appease customers, or if they created a system destined to fail so they can claim they made an effort, as Duncan suggests.  Since Sony has repeatedly demonstrated their inability to give customers what they want, and their superb ability to screw their customers, either situation is pretty likely.

Three Day Weekends, I Hardly Knew Thee

In the beginning of 2007, my company went through some changes, and determined that they needed to reevaluate the vacation policy.  Instead of being able to carryover five weeks from year to year, they would change it to one.  This meant that if you did not want to lose your vacation, you should start looking at ways to use it.  I rarely actually take vacation, so I had quite a bit saved up.  I managed to use some throughout the year, but not quite enough.  In September, I was faced with a whole lot of time left to take, and not many opportunities to take it.  Unfortunately, while taking off a month would have been nice, there is no logistical way that would work.  Instead, I decided that I would take off every Friday, and then a couple weeks around Thanksgiving and Christmas.  So for Oct-Dec I never worked more than four days a week.  The four day workweek, however, was not what I found to be so beneficial.  The extra day on the weekend was where I got my joy.  Instead of having one day to get things done, and one day to be lazy, I had two days of productivity and one day of relaxing.  I was able to get so much more accomplished, but still maintain a relaxing weekend.  Sadly, those times have come to an end.  I now have used my large backlog of vacation hours, and have to return to working on my Fridays.  It's not even the work that bugs me, it's not being able to get more done over the weekend, while still getting the same amount of rest.  I really need to work out some way of getting a three day weekend every week.  I was just getting used to it.

Can You Hear Me Now?

First off, let me get the happy new year out of the way. Happy new year! There we go. The holidays have been jam packed for me, and even though I've not been at work much, I've been pretty busy just running around, or with company over. For the few days that I had neither of those going on, I just sat around and rested. The break was not nearly long enough, but it was certainly a lot of fun. I hope that everyone else had a safe, and fun Christmas and New Year.

As for the topic of my post, I'm fairly certain that people are going deaf. Not only are they becoming hard of hearing, but it is their own doing that is causing it. A lot of people that I know have a hard time hearing things that are softer. They always seem to not hear the same things that I can. I don't think that I necessarily have better hearing that I should, but that they have worse. The primary cause of this, is often what they are having to turn up: music and television. They spend a lifetime of listening to loud music, and blaring TV sets, and as they get older they just turn them up even more, perpetuating it.

One of the biggest problems I have with bars is the noise. They are usually quite loud, and I have no desire to sit there and have my ears assaulted. If I'm out at a bar, I'm going to want to talk without having to shout. Most of the places I go have a fairly low level of noise, usually. There are people talking and rustling around, but they don't blast music, or turn the TVs up past a sane level. Last night, however, that was not the case. One of my usual places, a place I visit pretty much weekly, was overrun with crazy OU and WV fans. Instead of being able to watch my Mavericks and Stars in peace, I was subject to a barrage of cheering and a speaker system blasting the TV broadcast loud enough that I'm sure the apartments down the street could hear it clearly. Of course, I'm sure that the only reason they needed to achieve such a volume was to compensate for their loss of hearing. Had these fans grown up appreciating sound in moderation, there would be no need to turn the dumb thing up so loud.

I know what you are thinking at this point: "Jeremy, if you're just going to complain about this, why don't you just not go to the bars in the first place?" That's simple, I have a good time going out with friends. Also, I just like to complain. Really, though, do yourself and your hearing a favor. Turn the volume down a bit, and start enjoying your tunes and your shows at a more reasonable level.

This post was brought to you by the crotchety old-man Jeremy.