This week, another advantage became apparent. I was looking for a book on a technical subject and ordered a Kindle copy of the one that seemed most appropriate based on reading a sample chapter and examining the table of contents. The book arrived immediately and I started reading it. Within minutes I found that what I meant by “How to Create a Frammis Zumwalt” wasn’t what the author meant by “How to Create a Frammis Zumwalt.” I had bought the wrong book.

So I returned to Amazon.com, selected the electronic book, and indicated that I wanted to “return” it for a refund.

Less than a minute later, my refund had been approved and the book disappeared from the Kindle.

That’s the way customer service is supposed to work.

Then I found another book that seemed to be a reasonable choice and ordered it. This is the book that explains exactly how to create a frammis zumwalt and I’m excited about reading it and working through the exercises.

But the book, by Apress, contains a lot of computer code in a fixed-width typeface. The code is fully justified, which means that there are huge rivers of whitespace running through the text. I’ll accept this because this book contains information I need, I can figure out what the authors intended, and I can download the sample code from the publisher’s website. But I wondered if anyone at the publishing house knew about the problem so I wrote to the authors and to the marketing director at Apress.

Less than half a day later, one of the authors wrote to say that he agreed that the formatting was a significant problem and the marketing manager wrote to say that he had asked the QA (quality assurance) team to determine what happened and to see what could be done to update the electronic versions of the book.

That’s the way customer support is supposed to work.

Today I received 4 spams from a company within 2 minutes. The spams wanted me to like them on Facebook. I expressed my displeasure about the spam in messages to Facebook and to the company that spammed me.

Minutes later, I received a call from the company. The caller said that he didn’t know the definition of spam (I explained to him that any unwanted commercial e-mail is spam) and that he had received 3 copies of the same message on his cell phone. He seemed to think that was OK. “Social media” is the future,” he said and I pointed out that it’s the future only if you don’t annoy the people you’re trying to reach. That didn’t seem to register. He also said that he has “no control” over what Facebook sends out even though he has given Facebook permission to send these messages.

“I’m really disappointed by your attitude,” he said “and I’ll have to take this up with the people at [the parent company of the organization I work for].”

That is NOT the way customer support is supposed to work.

Oh … and a message to marketers: If you screw up, just admit it.

Messages from *@*.cmt.com, *@*.comcast.com (sorry if you have a comcast address!), *@*.mtv.com, and *@*.viacommedianetworks.com will all be blocked. Others are added regularly.

I suspect that someone gave Viacom my address but that doesn’t take Viacom off the hook. Any organization that spams me without even bothering to confirm that I’ve signed up for their junk, continues to spam me after I’ve complied with their opt-out procedure, and then spams me from multiple new domains isn’t an organization that I consider to be ethical.

So keep it up, Viacom. I can block domains as fast as you can set them up.

And I hope you rot in hell.

So Saturday and Sunday the alarm wakes me at 5. I could go back to sleep but it also wakes the cats and there is no snooze button on a hungry cat. So I get up and feed them. And check my e-mail. And maybe type a note or two. And work on a couple of projects briefly. Then I go back to bed and end up sleeping until 9 or 10.

When I saw a clock radio that offered one setting for Monday through Friday and a separate setting for Saturday and Sunday, I bought it.

You wouldn’t think that something this simple would make much difference but it does.

Five o’clock now comes and goes on Saturday and Sunday with not a sound from the clock radio. Oh, I still wake up a minute or two before 5 and glance at the clock but nothing wakes the cats. They’re happy to sleep until 6:30 when they weekend alarm sounds and they conclude that it’s breakfast time.

Silly? Absolutely. But it’s one way to keep peace between the humans and the cats (who still lack the ability to read clocks, open bottles, or use the computer’s root password). Someday they’ll figure out the trick, I suppose, but for now it’s working well.

Because I know that buying a new license is always a better deal than allowing Symantec to renew the existing license, I purchased Norton Internet Security 2012 (3-computer license) from NewEgg.

Two days after the software arrived, I received an e-mail notice from Symantec that said my Norton Internet Security 2011 license had been renewed and that my American Express card had been charged $60 and change. A small oversight, I assumed and went to the Symantec website where I found a form to fill out.

A week later, I had heard nothing, so I filled out the form again.

Several days later, when I had still heard nothing, I contacted American Express and disputed the charge. American Express is really good when it comes to problems such as this so I’m sure that it will be sorted out within a few weeks but it’s still more than slightly annoying that Symantec won’t even bother to reply to my request for a refund.

Here’s my recommendation: If you buy Norton Internet Security, and it is probably the best consumer-grade protective suite available, make sure that you buy it in a way that doesn’t allow Symantec to obtain your credit card number because if they have it they will just assume you want the upgrade.

This makes me wonder how many people have 2 or 3 (or more) Symantec licenses for a single computer. Is Symantec crooked or just unorganized?

Some people put it this way: If you’re not growing, you’re dying. Over the New Year’s holiday, I spent some time with Lynda.com.

Photographer Ben Long has a new program on composition. This program fits well with his other programs on lenses, black & white photography, exposure, landscape photography, and several programs on the specifics of Nikon and Canon cameras.
The programs with Ben Long are particularly good because he is comfortable in front of a camera and he has an uncommonly natural-appearing ability to teach. In addition, the photography techniques used by Lynda.com to capture these sessions is both creative and instructive. But I’m particularly impressed by the composition program, more than 5 hours worth of instruction with several useful exercises. Details are here.

Also, I’ve been watching an 11-hour program from 2007 by Kevin Skoglund called “PHP with MySQL Essential Training.” The production techniques aren’t as impressive as those used in the photography series by Ben Long but they’re more than adequate for the subject. See this program’s details here.

Over the past several years I’ve become a fan of Lynda.com and I’ve recommended the resource to several people. Take a look and see if the modest cost would work into your monthly budget.

You may be thinking Norton Internet Security? Really? Yes, really. A decade or more ago I abandoned Norton products because they were bloated and slow. They made the computer slow. But in 2010 the replacement product had become equally bloated and slow. After several months of trying various protective applications and not finding anything I really liked, I tried Norton Internet Security as a last resort.

Symantec had been claiming that it had re-engineered all of its applications and I found that to be true and Norton Internet Security had barely any effect on the computer’s operating characteristics.

The deal I found at Newegg may be available elsewhere but if I find a good deal at Newegg, there’s no reason to look further.

But Viacom seems to think that it’s reasonable for them to send spam to addresses that I would never share with them to promote their products and services.

I have permanently blocked several Viacom-related addresses but just about every day I receive a message from a new Viacom address.

Here’s a message to Viacom: If you expect me to have any respect for your organization, you will stop sending your spam to me when I ask you to. So far I have followed the opt-out links 3 times and I’m still receiving spam from the company. Each time I identify a new address used for spamming I set my anti-spam filters to reject all messages from the domain.

Look, Viacom, if you want to be thought of as a reasonable, honest company, you would stop spamming people who have told you that they don’t want your shit. Sorry if that offends you, but “shit” is what Viacom is sending and they’re sending it to an address that they could have obtained only by using unethical methods.

Viacom, please drop dead.

As I found later, I had created a well-named directory for the files and had placed the directory on drive D, but I didn’t remember that and I spent most of my time looking in directories on my Desktop (where I keep many work-in-progress files), in a “Speaking” directory (where I usually place presentations), and in a “Documentation” directory (where I keep files that are intended to document processes).

That file had taken several hours to create and I didn’t want to do it again. The Windows search function that’s a part of Windows 7 is OK but it didn’t find what I was looking for. Time for Agent Ransack! (This is the free version of Mythicsoft’s File Locator Pro.) If you ever need to find a file on your computer, you need Agent Ransack and you’ll find it here.

I told Agent Ransack to find any files that contained “RemoteSigned” (because I knew that term was in the file) and I set the time range to look at any file created after 1 Jan 2011. After searching for a while, Agent Ransack directed me to a location that was disgustingly easy to find — but I didn’t find it. Agent Ransack did.

The green text at the right appears to be an attempt to show the relative popularity of search terms (more popular terms are larger) but the lack of variable linespacing means that words are piled up on top of each other. Still, they’re more or less readable. (Mostly “less”.)

Now take a look at the description of the clip-art package in black on the left. Can you read it? (Click the image if you’d like to try it full size.)

I thought that the problem was with my browser or that I had disabled something the site needed but the result was the same when I tested the site in Firefox 9, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 9. So now I hope that the website designer did something that effectively destroyed the cascading style sheet and that when I check back in a few days I’ll find a site with readable text.

I wonder: Was the whole name change issue just a sideshow? A distraction? A red herring? So many people, including me, jumped on the silly name that Netflix can say (“respectfully”, of course) that the name was an error.

So we walk away thinking that we’ve won something. But what?

Maybe the marketing person who came up with “Qwikster” was an idiot. Or maybe that person was a genius.