Tom Eppenberger Jr’s blog

This is a rant, so you are warned.

I think it is criminal that any web site or service let you sign-up for an account without making it simple to remove your account should you ever want to stop using the web site or service.

This has bugged me for a really long time, and Box.net is just the latest service to piss me off.

Box.net is an online disk service that I have used on occasion to transfer or store files. With the Windows Live SkyDrive service offering me far more now, I no longer required an account or the 100 MB of disk space that they had been giving me. So, tonight I logged in with the sole purpose of removing my account…

Let me just say that as a user, I should never have to refer to a “Terms of Service” legal document to find out how to remove my account. That is totally ridiculous. As it turns out, I have to email their support and ask for my account to be removed. No problem, but just put it in your FAQ or on the same page where you are trying to get me to sign up for all your “professional” grade services.

Am I asking for too much here? I just don’t want to have to refer to legal documents on a web site to find out how to deal with canceling a service, or removing a user account.

I had never watched this show before (intentionally), but Shelly asked that I put it on tonight when I was flipping through the channels…

We only watched for about 15 minutes, and it was the same contestant the whole time… a woman who had made it through every question (with all the inevitable high drama that goes along with these shows), and had won $300,000. She had to another question to win $500,000 and get the chance to then answer a final $1,000,000 question. The final category was “First-Grade Geography,” and the question was…

“What is the only continent that is also a country?”

Now, I will honestly admit that some of the questions they had asked her up to this point, I either didn’t know the answer to, or got flat out wrong. So, I guess that I am not any smarter than a fifth grader either, but I sat staring at my TV in total disbelief when the woman said that every continent was also a country. Seriously? Come on lady…

Luckily for her, she quit before “officially” answering and got to take home $300,000.

The only reason that I have re-signed up in the MySpace army, is because some friends have decided to only blog there. Since they all have private profiles, and you are unable to see the blog without being signed in, I was not really left with a choice (Yahoo 360 all over again).

After getting my account all setup and verified, I started looking at my friend’s blogs and subscribed to all the RSS feeds and what not. Immediately, I found what I perceive to be a big problem… partial text RSS feeds.

I really hate it when sites offer RSS feeds, but only bother to put the first sentence or two in the feed. This totally eliminates the value in using an RSS reader. If I wanted to have to go to a web site to see what had updated, I surely wouldn’t be trying to read it in an RSS aggregator. Bastards.

A quick Google search turned up a tool from “Make Data Make Sense.” They have a number of MySpace RSS tools, the crown jewel (IMO) being the “MySpace RSS Creator.” Give it the RSS feed for a MySpace blog, and it will pump out a new, full text, RSS feed. Wonderful.

I don’t really ever see myself using MySpace for more than just viewing other folks content (Yahoo 360 all over again), but they do offer other RSS tools for calendars, comments, podcasts, etc. Check it out if you are all up into the MySpace thing.

The DirecTV tech that was scheduled to be here between 8a-12p today never showed up, or bothered to call. When I got home tonight, I dealt with their “award-winning” customer service, only to go through the same 20 questions that I have answered on a near daily basis this week… ”no, it isn’t windy,” “nope, no storms,” ”yes, I have reset my receiver,” “yes, I have tried other receivers.”

After 26 minutes, and being apologized to nearly 26 times, I was told (again) that the issue had been escalated to a supervisor and I would definitely get a call back within 4 hours.

5+ hours later, no phone call. So, I give their “award-winning” technical support another call. I got through to a “technical support supervisor” pretty quickly (and, by supervisor here, I simply mean a less polite person in a different call center with less technical knowlege and probably less authority), and was merely apologized to some more. She was “really, really sorry,” and helped me reschedule another service tech for Monday. Oh, and, as it turns out, the service call from this morning was marked as completed in their system…

So, to show how important my business is, she gave me a $100 credit on my bill. Gee, thanks.

I would gladly keep their damn service if they would just tell me what the hell was wrong, and how they were going to fix it. Don’t just keep apologizing to me over and over again, as if you really care about my problem. The tone in your voice told me that you couldn’t be any more void of real emotion when it comes to helping me. Don’t pretend. I mean, I already know that you are patronizing me, but your poor attitude simply helps me come to the realization sooner. I’d really just prefer that you pretend to help me fix the problem, at least I’d be able to go to sleep tonight…

No… you know what, forget it. Seven years of happy, blissful marriage has been destroyed in just seven days. Congratulations, it’s not just any company that could pull this off.

My DirecTV DVR is out again tonight. The service was fully restored (without me doing anything) by Sunday evening, and seemed to be working fine yesterday. Tonight, back to a big white screen with this error code that nobody at DirecTV seems to know anything about.

Called into tech support and got the same song and dance about some uber-secret covert team of tech gurus in Oregon that were huddled around computers in a dark room trying to sort through the issue…

After finding out that my old SD Tivo device was still active, I decided to plug it back in and veg out with some TV. Nope, no dice. Same error. WTF?!?!? The tech had told me that an older SD receiver should work.

Call back into their tech support a few minutes ago, and am greeted with “Thank you for calling DirecTV, my name is _____. Before I get any info from you, please understand that our systems are updating and I will not be able to do anything specific with your account at this time. So, how can I help you?” Sigh. I explained my problems, frustrations, etc and was reminded that he couldn’t help me before their systems were updating. I asked the obvious question about when I should call back, and it turns out that their systems will be updating until 9:00 AM tomorrow. Holy crap! WTF is that about?

On a related note, I see that Velocity Micro has started shipping their CableCard ready Windows Vista Media Center PCs… off to find Comcast’s phone number…