Archive for the 'Internet' Category
July 3rd, 2008 by cybrpunk
I signed up for Plurk a while back and have only made a half-hearted effort to interact with it. That is until today. Today I decided to play a little game with Plurk. I noticed that when browsing other people’s friends that it often shows what city and country that each person lives in. So I started clicking on people from other countries and seeing if they were actively using Plurk and if so I would send a friend request.
It’s simple and a bit silly, but I think it would be interesting to see the Twitter-like messages of people from all around the Earth. Sure not all of them will accept me as a friend and many of them don’t write in English but that’s OK. I can make out what some of them are saying in some cases and in other cases it probably doesn’t matter. I don’t think it’s possible to get friends in every single country in the world… but wouldn’t it be cool if you could?
If you are interested in signing up and haven’t yet, you should. http://www.plurk.com
June 17th, 2008 by cybrpunk
Mozilla is releasing Firefox 3 at 10:00am PDT (Pacific) time today (June 17th). Although it will technically be June 18th when the download is available for those of us here in Hong Kong, I don’t mind fudging the numbers if you won’t tell anyone. But the point is that they are attempting to set a World Record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period with this release.
So for those of you interested in being one of the first kids on your block of IPs to get the shiny new Firefox 3, have a click here for more information.
I will be downloading Firefox 3 tomorrow and checking it out. However I’m not staying up till 1:00am to do so. Their record can wait till I get up in the morning.
June 13th, 2008 by cybrpunk
So what did you get your Mother for Mother’s Day? Me? I sent mine some flowers. Which cost almost $200 US dollars. Am I that generous with something that will wilt in a week or so? No. But the other charges on my credit card bill for unknown ’services’ cost almost cost that much. Let me explain.
I made two different orders of roughly $40 for Mother’s Day on ProFlowers.com. You may notice that I didn’t make that a clickable link. For good reason. When we did the checkout, we signed up for a service called EasySaver in order to get $10 or $15 off our next order. Normally we wouldn’t have done that but we were planning on making two orders so it worked out fine. We would just cancel the subscription before we were charged and be done with it.
The second orderlisted that it had free shipping. Bonus! That plus our money off from the first order should make it a good deal. I’m all about good deals so that made me happy. So we get the e-mail from EasySaver (notice how I’m not linking these people either?) and we input the code. It doesn’t work. We tried the code in many different ways and in different browsers and even on another PC. Still no work-y. OK… so that sucks, no money off. But at least we get the free shipping, right?
Well yes and no. When we were checking out that last order it seems that you also get signed up for a site called FreeShipping.com (definitely not linking these bastards). I had no idea what I was signing up for as it seemed like part of the check-out process. The orders shipped and things were fine even though we didn’t get the money off. Oh well.
I checked the credit card statement on-line the day after to see if it posted and saw that EasySaver had already billed us for $1.95 for their service. It seems that they start charging right away unlike what I thought was on the checkout. So now we didn’t get the money off the next order but we also paid more. Well, we figure we just read it wrong and decided to cancel it. Yeah we forgot. Which is exactly what these companies hope will happen.
So I checked the credit card bill on-line last night and realized that I missed the last statement (dammit) so I go back a month to see why we seem to have an awfully high bill considering we rarely use our credit card. That’s when I noticed that we had forgotten to cancel EasySaver and they had charged us an additional $14.95 and probably hoped to do so for ever and ever. OK yeah we screwed up, shame on us. What shocked me though was a mystery charge on the same date from FreeShipping.com for $72 and no explanation or contact number or anything. WTF? I called shenanigans and then called Chase to dispute the probable fraud charge.
The people I talked to at Chase were really nice like they usually are. They gave me an 800 number that showed up in their records that isn’t publicly available for FreeShipping.com. I say it’s not publicly available because it’s not on the credit card statement and the only form of contact on their website is a form you can fill out and hope that they contact you back. No phone number or address or anything else. It also mentions that they are personal information harvesters. Nice.
The guy from Chase politely asked the person who answered the phone for FreeShipping.com about their service and how I got charged for $72. They told him that I signed up voluntarily and had to accept their terms on three occasions during the process. I told them both that I’d never heard of the website and having to accept anything three times would have definitely thrown up a red flag for me. However they did have some information on me that would definitely have been something I would have typed. So I asked the woman on the other end how I could have signed up for this and not realized what was happening. I asked her if this was setup at all to be misleading. That’s when the Chase guy stopped talking.
She told me that all the information is available during the process if you read all the terms and conditions. I asked her if that meant that a person would need to read all the fine print to understand what was going on and she said yes. I asked her some more questions and she admitted that she’s never actually seen the website that we’re talking about. I asked her how she could be expected to answer my questions if she doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. She was not amused. I asked her why I had gotten an e-mail from EasySaver telling me that I had signed up for something but I received nothing from her company. She said that they don’t send out e-mails like that. She mentioned that a reminder e-mail is sent out a day before the trial period ends so you know to cancel if you want to. When I asked her why I didn’t receive a reminder e-mail she told me that they don’t do that. Uh….
I asked her (knowingly) why they needed to be so deceptive in not being open about who they were, what they were doing and what they were planning on doing. I asked her why there is no contact information for this company and not notification that I’ve signed up for something that needs to be cancelled. She apologized and told me that she would refund the pro-rated amount of the yearly membership costs. I asked the Chase credit card guy if that was good enough but got no answer. It seems that he must have dropped off when I started asking pointed questions. Oh well.
I called ProFlowers.com next and talked to a very nice woman on the line. I told her that I had a complaint about their partner offers and wanted to speak to someone about it. She told me that she could help me. So I told her about the charges. I told her about the company admitting that their offer was deceptive. I told her that there is no notification process at any point and that the costs of my orders was almost tripled. She told me that she couldn’t help me after all. However she was very nice and took down all my information and said she’d have a supervisor contact me about this. So far, no e-mails or phone calls. I’m not holding my breath. I didn’t ask for anything from them but I do want them to know that I will not be using ProFlowers.com ever again. Considering we used their service multiple times a year that really won’t be significant to them. However I guarantee that I’m not the only one who’s gotten screwed on this and I’m not the only lost business they will suffer.
I hope for their sake that it was worth it.
June 6th, 2008 by cybrpunk
It’s Friday once again and luckily this particular Friday leads into a long weekend. Pretty much every one of our offices in the Asia-Pacific region is closed on Monday for various reasons. For Hong Kong and Mainland China it’s for the Dragon Boat Races. I haven’t seen them but since we’ve sworn off local festivals here in Hong Kong that means that I never will. And I’m OK with that. Seriously.
Muse has created a new mommy blog for the upcoming hellspawn. The title of this new site is Baby Barie. There’s not much there but she has just started it up so head on over and bookmark. You know you want to. I need to get the latest ultra-sound images from her so I can scan them and post them for your amusement.
On a slightly perpendicular note, Muse’s photography site was recently completed and put back into live status. Go check out ShotSauce for a very small sampling of Muse’s photographical talents.
And since I’m busy plugging my wife (in the internet link sort of way you gutter-monkeys!) I’ll take a moment to plug myself (hehehe) as well. The latest comic of A Little Scary went live yesterday as it always does each Monday and Thursday. People seem to like the zombies in the comics so this one should be a treat for those fans. Sign up for the feed while you’re there so you don’t miss a strip!
May 26th, 2008 by cybrpunk
So I hear it’s a public holiday back home in the States. No such luck here; I had to work today. Although we do get about the same amount of holidays here in Hong Kong but they are at different times and have different names. Exactly the same only completely different.
I don’t remember actually explicitly mentioning it (and I don’t have much else to say today (OMG filler)) but if you use Twitter, you can follow me there via this link: http://twitter.com/cybrpunk Yeah there’s a feed for it over in the sidebar as well but then you won’t get to see the octopus again as he reigns supreme over my Twitter page. He also will not allow me to post all my Twitter posts as a blog post here as a cheater post. He thinks it doesn’t count as a post. I tend to agree.
Since I’ve got nothing much else to say today I’ll just plug A Little Scary once more. I’ve posted Monday’s comic which you should check out. Remember to check back each Monday and Thursday for new comics. Subscribe to the feed while your there too. It’s a lonely feed.
May 20th, 2008 by cybrpunk
I just attended a luncheon regarding the rising opportunities in the online mobile phone markets and it was pretty interesting. I found out the the average youth user in China sends an average of 100 text messages a day. That’s just sending! Considering I’d never sent a text message in my life prior to coming to Hong Kong, that just seems inconceivable to me.
However, the focus of the presentation was about the youth market and how it’s affecting and shaping the mobile web. Basically the premise is that the kids today are deciding and driving the technology and services available on mobile devices and us old folks will just get whatever they decide on. Lucky us. The 2 second attention span generation has come to power.
Supposedly, 50 Cent and young Japanese girls have something in common. They are doing something called Lifecasting. They basically wear their phones around their necks and let it record constantly throughout their day and it auto transmits these images or video to an online accessible site. Personally, I’m not sure how I would feel about this but I guess it would keep Fiddy from doing illegal activities since he’d be broadcasting whatever he’s doing to the world. The japanese girls will probably get flooded with dirty old men though. But maybe that’s what they’re going for.
It sounds like more and more content on mobile devices will be branded as well. Just like you can’t have a college bowl game without some companies name and logo plastered all over it. Just like you can’t play certain video games without seeing billboards in the games advertising everything from soft drinks to cars. Now your mobile content will also be branded. Considering the size of the screens, I hope that you can still see what you were looking for with all those logos.
Of course since this meeting I’ve been thinking about the possibilities of making this site and A Little Scary more mobile friendly. I found this Wordpress Mobile Plugin that looks like it makes your site mobile phone compatible and thought I might give it a try. If anyone out there has any opinions on the matter, please leave them in the comments.
May 1st, 2008 by cybrpunk
If you haven’t already, head over to Yoshi’s place and congratulate him on his becoming a real American citizen. Now he can vote, and be called for jury duty, and be drafted, and pay US taxes no matter where he might move to outside of the USA just because he’s a citizen. But seriously, it’s cool that he got what he wanted.
Muse has another cool panda picture posted over at her her site. You should definitely go take a look at it and the other pictures she has posted.
Of course, it’s Thursday so that means there’s another new comic posted up over at A Little Scary. That marks number lucky 13. If you are enjoying the comic, tell your friends, add the site to your blogroll or better yet post about it and tell everyone how much you like it. It will make you feel good. Seriously.
I got nothing else. It’s my day off of work and this is all I can muster at the moment.
April 25th, 2008 by cybrpunk
If you are a fan of cute animals with funny captions sites like LOLCats, you may want to take a look at this site I found today. The FAIL Blog collects pictures of failures on all different levels. And most of them are pretty damn funny.
Here’s an example (for those of you not trusting enough to just click the link for yourselves):
April 17th, 2008 by cybrpunk
After a week of flaky things happening, the K2 theme I’ve been using for a very long time now finally had to be removed. I’m not sure what’s going on with that but there are some very serious issues with that theme all of the sudden. Which is odd since nothing had changed on my site when the first problems with the comments first started happening.
About a week ago I was notified that my Comments weren’t working at all and the page was hanging. I checked it out and disabled my plugins and all the normal troubleshooting ideas. But the notion that this was even having a problem didn’t make sense because I hadn’t changed anything or installed anything new or even setup any new plugins. It just broke. I disabled the K2 theme and it magically started working again. So I went out and downloaded the newest version and things were good.
Then a couple of days ago, I got a message saying that my Sidebar was broke. Sure enough, the K2 Sidebar no longer worked and it defaulted to the basic Widget config. Which is really odd because it worked in the morning and then stopped in the afternoon. I hadn’t touched the site. So again I downloaded the newest nightly build and it worked again.
Today Muse sends me an e-mail and says that no one is commenting because they can’t. It’s broke again. Yeah, disabling K2 fixed it again, so it stayed disabled this time. So now, I’m using a new theme that I’m not terribly thrilled with but looks decent enough. Try and find the Categories listing or use the Archives. The Categories are hidden on the page and I didn’t even realize where they were for a long time. The Archives page just doesn’t work.
Well, this will just have to do until I can spend some time looking for a decent theme that support Wordpress 2.5 and has AJAX support and a working Live Archives. Sometimes I really hate computers….
April 14th, 2008 by cybrpunk
For those of you that care, Demonoid is back up and running. No I don’t have any invites, sorry. Thanks to the person who gave me one. I won’t link them so no one bothers them either.
Muse has been sick with what seems like a stomach flu for the past two days. I think it’s been long enough since I was sick with that bug that I’m certain I’m not to blame. I’m assuming it was the crowd of 30 or 40 snotty little kids that she was shooting pictures of on Saturday. I’d say “that’ll teach her” but who am I kidding? So I’m working from home today to help out with the dogs and making sure things are OK. Remote access is a wonderful thing.
It’s Thursday Monday (where was I?) so there’s a new comic over at my pet project: A Little Scary. Introducing a new character today so please go have a look. If you are new to the comic, make sure you start from the beginning. There’s not many so it’s a good time to get caught up. I need to work on some resources for later comics. I have a zombie done. Now I just need some brains. Wait… that didn’t come out right.
It’s a few days old, but you should check out Yoshi’s post at Hello! Food where he makes the rest of the world jealous that he can make great gyoza and the rest of us (meaning me) can’t. I know what I’ll be getting for lunch tomorrow at the food court.
Where the hell has Insomnic run off to? He hasn’t posted in two weeks and he’s out of work. I can’t believe h’s looking for a job so hard and often that he can’t post something now and then. Come on, man. Where’s the posts?
