Worst shipping service? UPS!

UPS is consistently the worst shipping service I have ever used.  Their package guarantees which you pay for are absolutely useless.  Their customer service reps do nothing but give you the runaround when you’re trying to figure out what on earth is going on.  Their IVR phone system is maddening.

So I ordered Christmas gifts on the 16th with 3-day-select shipping.  Today is the 27th and I’m still getting the runaround that my package is affected by the “adverse weather conditions” that ended days ago.  If I can get my honda accord up a 12% 230 foot hill with chains, UPS sure as hell can do what they’re paid to do.

I called the 800 number twice yesterday and, after dealing with their useless IVR, spoke to two separate customer service representatives.  I asked to have the package held and they obliged saying I’d get a call back within an hour.  No phone calls ever received.

You read these package updates and tell me what they mean:

REDMOND,
WA,  US		 12/26/2008 2:07 P.M. THE RECEIVER IS ON A HOLIDAY. DELIVERY WILL BE ATTEMPTED WHEN THE RECEIVER RETURNS
12/26/2008 5:29 A.M. OUT FOR DELIVERY

Call me crazy.  Does that look to you like, oh, I dunno, the package is OUT FOR DELIVERY?

So I call again today and what am I told?  There was no package delivery attempt.  So I ask “How do you know if the business was closed if there is no package delivery attempt.”  He alleges that “the system tells them when the business is closed by virtue of the address.”  Oh, so the system takes from 05:29 in the morning until 14:07 in the afternoon to process whether or not the business is closed.  I’m told it’s on a “holding trailer behind thousands of other packages.”  Then what on earth does “out for delivery mean?”  No reponse to that little gem.

So apparently the holds I placed on the package yesterday and the customer reps telling me I could get it then were complete and total fabrications.  They, of course, keep citing the “adverse weather conditions” (which, in all fairness, are real)  but not for the whole week.  They’re milking that for all they can get.

3 day select package delivery time  13 days; well before “adverse weather.”

I beg you, Thinkgeek, do all of us LNUX holders a favor and stop using UPS.

UPS is complete and total garbage.

Update:  And look at this little gem!  A Sikh with the last name Singh signed for a package… guess what the UPS driver wrote as who had signed?  “Terrorist.”  Wow.  UPS really is complete garbage.  Here’s the image of the tracking information.

The crooked verbal contract of Speakeasy

I live in the Seattle area, much to my chagrin on a “private road”, where there is little in terms of availability of broadband Internet connections.  This is particularly sucky because of the oodles of provider options in the area.  I use static IPs, so I typically have a business plan with whatever provider I use.  For about the past year and a half prior to the most recent six months, I had been using Comcast cable with a business plan.  The speed was great and I never had any problems.  It was a relatively decent price for a /29 (almost) and oodles of bandwidth.  When I moved, I practically begged them to provide service on the road :(

Unfortunately, when I moved, due to the “private road” crap, there is no cable along the length of the road.  So I was forced into DSL, which I’ve never really had a good experience with.  At the time, it was my understanding that Qwest didn’t offer any business class services, so I ended up going with a provider I actually signed up for while heading up the systems side at Avvo; Speakeasy.

I had been happy with the service, despite it being grossly overpriced for crappy DSL at $150/mo.  Originally they had set me up with an 8Mbps/1 line but I consistently had problems with it, and despite apparently trying to sell me the more expensive circuit, the line was too far from the CO to handle it.  So a couple of months into service I downgraded to 6Mbps/768k for $130(!!)/mo.

The house I’m living in currently has a 6mo lease, so when I signed up for service I certainly would never had committed to a year contract.  And, of course, I did no such thing.  The items on my first bill were “monthly DSL” and their outrageous setup fees.  But I had not much choice due to the location and I wasn’t going to pay comcast $200/foot to bring a cable to the house.

So I called up the other day after calling Qwest (which is the carrier for my DSL line under speakeasy anyway) and realizing that they do, in fact, provide business class service for … oh… about half the price.  Yep, they offer the same speed, same subnet for about $85/mo.  So I called up Speakeasy to find out if I had to cancel with written notice or whatever and spoke with Stephen Wille (stephen.wille@hq.speakeasy.net).  He was pleasant and, despite my almost immediate frustration with being told I was under a contract, I explained to him the situation, my 6 MONTH lease and that this can’t be right.  I also dug up all my old correspondence (of which was only some emails) looking for my old order information.  Nothing to be seen about a 1 year contract, let alone the criminal $300 fee for terminating it within the first year.

So he does some checking and apparently the 1 year agreement is a verbal contract.  Ha!  And by using the service, as seen in the tos below, you’re agreeing to whatever they could have possibly told you over the phone.  Which, in my case, didn’t include anything about 1 years worth of service!  Yay!

Well today I got an email which I’m not surprised to see:

Hi Ryan,
I’m afraid the use of our service is taken as a contractual agreement, which I’ve linked to below.
One work around may be to have the next occupant take over the contract, or go with Speakeasy at your new location.

http://www.speakeasy.net/tos/msa.php

Acceptance by you of this Agreement occurs upon the earlier of: (a) Speakeasy’s acceptance of a Service Order signed by you indicating your acceptance of this Agreement; (b) your acceptance of this Agreement electronically during an online order, registration or when installing the Software or the Equipment; (c) your use of the Service; or (d) your retention of the Software or Equipment we provide beyond thirty (30) days following delivery. If you change Service plans, your term and monthly rate may change (depending on the plan you select), but all other provisions of this Agreement will remain in effect unless otherwise noted.

________________________________
Speakeasy<http://www.speakeasy.net/> - helping small businesses succeed
________________________________
Stephen Wille
Business Support Representative
M-F 07:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. PST

Phone 1.800.556.5829
Email support@speakeasy.net
www.speakeasy.net/myspeak<http://www.speakeasy.net/myspeak>
________________________________

Now I’m usually pretty anal about bills and whatnot.  I’m not one to omit reading the fine print.  And I’m not stupid enough to agree to a 1 year contract living in a house with a 6 month lease.

You see, what happened was that Grant Hetherington, the lowly sales guy that I apparently talked to when dialing the 800 number to request service never mentioned a 1 year contract.  I, of course, only know his name in retrospect.  Do you remember the name of the guy you talked to when you signed up for cable, for utilities?  Must be nice for his bottom line to sucker people into crooked setups.  Unfortunately Grant’s email address is doesn’t seem to correlate to any speakeasy pattern that I can guess within a 5 minute timespan.  Although you can view his linked in page here.  I would love to post his email address so everyone can let him know how crappy it is to omit telling someone about a verbal contract they’re agreeing to!

So there you have it.  Notice in the signature, they’re “helping small business succeed” by suckering them into contractual fees.

So, Speakeasy, you’ve alienated one of your customers who previously would have been in a position to spread the word around Seattle that, despite the higher price, the service is good.  No more.

Mukasey ’surprised’ by scope of terrorist threats

That’s the headline on this piece at CNN where Bush-Cheney puppet Attorney General Michael Mukasey reports to “have been taken aback by the scope and variety of potential terrorism threats facing the United States.”

Furthermore:

“I’m surprised by how surprised I am,” said Mukasey, who as a federal judge presided over terrorism-related trials in New York.

“It’s surprising how varied [the threat] is, how many directions it comes from, how geographically spread out it is,” he said.

You have got to be kidding me.  Let me translate this whole piece of “news” trash for you:

Bush administration official thinks it’s “really crazy how scared we should be from threats of terrorists.  For real, it’s really, really bad.  It’s amazing how much we should give in and live in constant fear and continue to abridge our freedom and rights.”

This is nothing short of outright propaganda.  This piece of “news” is indicative of how the Republicans have run this country under Bush-Cheney for the past 8 years.  It is despicable.  Every so often, the news is permeated with pieces like this from alleged jounralist Terry Frieden to “keep being scared and vote Republican.”  There is zero substance here, naturally because - no surprise - it’s “secret”!

I, personally, have had it.  Yes, terrorism exists.  No, I won’t give up my rights and cower at every turn feeding into the Republican fearmongering machine.

5 Years in Iraq? I don’t understand…

I don’t understand what all this hullaboo is recently about the War in Iraq having gone on for 5 years.  The New York Times is running a whole bunch of pieces about having been at war in Iraq for 5 years.  They even have this nifty interactive timeline of events in Iraq from 2002 to 2008.  But I don’t understand any of it…  The war ended on May 1st, 2003.  And I even have proof:

H&R Block TaxCut bogus “password protection”

Unfortunately, I have to resort to using a Windows computer when it comes time to do my taxes. Last year I started using H&R Block TaxCut software for reasons I can’t remember. I think I picked it up at Target for 20 bucks because I knew my taxes were going to start to get hairy. What better than to have some software do most of the grunt work for me.

In most respects, I am completely pleased with the product. And more than likely they’ve lured me into their trap because they conveniently send me a new disk right around tax time, like they did this year for 2007 filing.

So today I had to file an amended return because I figured I could save some cash on the check I was about to write the IRS. While dicking around trying to figure out the terribly unintuitive way to amend a return, I saw an option in the “File” menu for “Password Protection.”

When I have sensitive data on my computer, if it’s seriously sensitive, I usually just use OpenSSL to encrypt it. I feel pretty safe knowing that something is encrypted with a 256-bit AES cipher-block-chained algorithm.

So I chose the password protection, entered one of my stronger passwords and did what I had to do. Later I of course backed up my files over to my linux box and for whatever reason it struck me to check out the contents of the files. Just blobs of data in vim, but then, naturally, run strings on it:

rwoodrum@slard:~$ strings my_taxcut_backup_file
... snip ...
int:ui_prop_start_state_tab_screen=0
int:ui_prop_xira_version=1
string:ui_psswd=MY_SUPERSECRET_PASSWORD
int:formprop_import_source=1
int:formprop_import_source=1
... snip ...
rwoodrum@slard:~$

Wow. I guess I’m kind of surprised that I’m surprised. I actually thought that since this sort of stuff could be pretty sensitive that they would have some kind of real password protection. Nope. The password is easily recovered by use of the 31337 hacker tool /usr/bin/strings.

I don’t understand why a software company would do this sort of crap. This is what you expect from 10 or 15 years ago. Strong encryption is readily available. Hell at least obfuscate the damn thing. (That sentence is NOT meant to condone security through obscurity, which is a deplorable thing to do.)

So, H&R Block. I challenge you. Make your product safe for thousands of individuals’ important tax data. It’s probably nothing short of misleading to end-users who think that their data is safe.

Word to the wise: If you use this software and are worried about your data, protect it via some other means.

Now… time to encrypt those files by hand…

Systems Engineer vs. Systems Administrator

This is something of a hotbutton issue with me at the moment and deserves a blog post.

Call me a systems engineer, call me a systems architect. Don’t call me a system administrator or an “ops guy.” Why? Because they’re totally different. Some might disagree with my position in this similar, somewhat dated discussion on System Engineering vs. System Administration. I patently disagree, however, that they are equal and I patently disagree that the former is “resume inflation.”

I’ve discovered that there are a lot of Software Engineers, SDE’s whatever the hell you want to call them that are seriously arrogant bastards. Ok, maybe they’re not arrogant bastards. Maybe their exposure has simply been to “dumb ops guys” that are perhaps trained to press buttons when something breaks. Maybe they’ve just sat on a throne for such a long time that they can do no wrong. Maybe they have some notion in their head that they can do what everyone else can but no one can do what they can.

What might that “ops guy” do or the guy in your “IT” department do? He might fix your piece of shit Outlook. He might fix your piece of shit @microsoft_product. He might revel in buying a new computer all the while oggling over new flim-flams on the motherboard or some crap like that. He might be super uber and haxxorz and do something in BIOS!!111

Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with doing that stuff. And, yes, years and years ago I did in fact do the same thing. You’d probably be hard-pressed to find anyone with a degree in computer science that hadn’t done that sort of thing. Now? Now I don’t give a crap about that stuff. I don’t give a crap about configuring apache for the 80 gazillionth time. I don’t care about setting up authentication with openldap for the 80 gizillionth time. What I do care about is figuring out real engineering problems. Why? Because that’s what’s challenging. How do I make large scale systems interact? How do I architect something such that it’s scalable? How do I automate those mundane tasks? What software can I write to make it easier?

These are not the same sorts of things as reading your logs for the, yes, 80 gazillionth time to figure out why postfix didn’t send some random mail. Not the same thing as writing your 10 line bash script to find files meeting criteria foo, bar, baz, and bit. Again, is there absolutely anything wrong with those sorts of tasks? No way. Do I ever find myself doing them? Sure. Is it my primary talent? Nope, because my time is spent better elsewhere.

As pointed out in this blog post, some places disallow use of the term “engineer” because it’s tied up in certifying bodies, etc etc. I’m not talking about that sort of thing. And I’m not talking about “resume inflation” equating the garbage guy with a “waste management engineer” or some crap.

Am I the only one that makes this distinction??