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The other day my wife and I were doing the “don’t forget to pick up X at the store” routine. She then came back with, “if you go, don’t forget Y.”

Just the a little brilliant hack came to me. I quickly opened up TextEdit on the Mac (notepad for you Windows folks) and write down the items we needed and saved it to our shared Dropbox folder.

Over the last few days, my wife opened up the file on her PC and added a few little things to it. Today when I made a trip to the grocery store, I opened up the Dropbox iPhone app, viewed the list, purchased the items and came home.

I cleared out the list, adding two things we forgot, and the next time one of us goes to the store, we have a shared shopping list. It’s simple, but very handy.

Today I received a letter in the mail stating that I could either sign up for Automatic Payments, or Sprint would charge me $4.99 per month extra.

Now under many circumstances, Sprint imposes the Automatic Spending Limits when someone with less than good credit applies for an account. On the other hand, like in my case, I gave a 12 year old a phone with a data plan and text messaging for Christmas. I imposed the spending limit for my own fiscal safety.

I don’t so much mind putting his phone and my cellular modem, which are the only Sprint devices we have as my wife and I both use iPhones, on automatic payment. It’s the manner in which I feel I am being blackmailed to do so. How is “Give me access to take money out of your bank account or I’ll charge you another $5 per month” not blackmail? Do what they want, which I never agreed to, or they will raise my bill.

I wanted to see what the real deal was, so holding the letter in my hand, I signed on to Sprint Chat, and the conversation was so silly, I felt it was worth posting:

Your session ID is 8439091.
Time (Eastern) Details

01/12/2010 06:32:50PMSystem: “Please wait and the next available account specialist will be with you shortly.”

01/12/2010 06:32:56PMSession Started with Agent (Tiffany B)

01/12/2010 06:32:56PMSystem: “If you are chatting today for Technical Support, please call (888) 211-4727.”

01/12/2010 06:32:56PMJason Burns: “Letter about automatic payment fee.”

01/12/2010 06:32:57PMSystem: “Thank you for contacting Sprint. My name is Tiffany B. In order to better assist you; may I please have your first and last name?”

01/12/2010 06:33:04PMJason Burns: “Jason Burns”

01/12/2010 06:33:19PMAgent (Tiffany B): “Hello, Jason! I’ll be more than happy to assist you today. For account security and verification, may I please have the **********-********** digit PIN number on your account?”

01/12/2010 06:33:34PMJason Burns: “um, ****** I think”

01/12/2010 06:33:52PMAgent (Tiffany B): “Thank you for that information and how may I assist you today?”

1/12/2010 06:34:21PMJason Burns: “I received an disturbing letter in the mail today saying that Sprint is basically going to force me to use automatic payments or charge me not to.”

01/12/2010 06:34:36PMJason Burns: “I did not agree to that when I signed terms and conditions and I do not want to sign up for automatic payments.”

01/12/2010 06:35:00PMAgent (Tiffany B): “I will be happy to assist you with the ASL charge today. As of **********/**********/**********, each Sprint account with a spending limit will be charged a monthly Spending Limit program charge of $**********.**********. The fee is per account, not per line and applied automatically each month. This charge is to provide ASL customers with additional benefits and support to help monitor accounts and bills. This change will impact both new and existing Sprint accounts. The $**********.********** fee can be waived with enrollment in our Automatic Bill Pay system in your Sprint.com account. If the recurring automatic payments are removed from the account, the charge will be re-applied. Existing customers have a bill message in December ********** invoices, January ********** invoices and February ********** invoices. Additionally, our customers received a direct mail letter from Customer Finance Services in late December ********** explaining the new charge associated with the Spending Limit Program.

01/12/2010 06:35:23PMJason Burns: “thanks for pasting me the contents of the letter I have in my hand, that was really helpful.”

01/12/2010 06:35:30PMAgent (Tiffany B): “You are very welcome.”

01/12/2010 06:35:35PMJason Burns: “that was sarcastic.”

01/12/2010 06:36:02PMJason Burns: “perhaps I should have mentioned that in my witty retort.”

01/12/2010 06:36:17PMJason Burns: “The point is, don’t I have to agree to that up front? You can’t change the contract after I signed it.”

01/12/2010 06:36:22PMAgent (Tiffany B): “You are able to sign up for automatic payments to waive this fee, or you may choose not to sign up for automatic payments which would cause the $**********.**********/month fee.”

01/12/2010 06:36:25PMJason Burns: “I didn’t agree to a $********** fee if I don’t use automatic payments”

01/12/2010 06:36:32PMJason Burns: “that’s not how that works, that’s blackmail.”

01/12/2010 06:36:42PMAgent (Tiffany B): “This is not blackmail, sir.”

01/12/2010 06:36:53PMJason Burns: “I agreed to all the fees in the contract when I signed it”

01/12/2010 06:37:03PMJason Burns: “that fee was not in the contract, neither was requirement of automatic payments”

01/12/2010 06:37:12PMJason Burns: “I signed no contract agreeing to either.”

01/12/2010 06:37:22PMAgent (Tiffany B): “I do apologize, however there is not a way to waive the fee for ASL customers unless automatic payments are signed up for.”

01/12/2010 06:37:40PMJason Burns: “that’s fine. I’ll just cancel service”

01/12/2010 06:37:43PMJason Burns: “good call on your part.”

01/12/2010 06:37:58PMJason Burns: “You can’t add fees I did not agree to to my bill and force me to accept them”

01/12/2010 06:38:10PMAgent (Tiffany B): “I do apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. At this time, we would be unable to set up cancellation of services by chat. To set up a cancellation in the account, you would need to contact our Account Services department at **********-**********-**********-**********, Monday- Friday: **********:********** AM – **********:********** AM Saturday: **********:********** AM – **********:********** PM Sunday: **********:********** AM – **********:********** PM CST.

01/12/2010 06:38:15PMAgent (Tiffany B): “May I assist you with any other questions today, Jason?”

01/12/2010 06:38:23PMJason Burns: “you didn’t assist me with this one”

01/12/2010 06:38:27PMJason Burns: “thank you (sarcasm)”

01/12/2010 06:38:30PMSession Ended

She was obviously very helpful. My friend told me earlier that Nationwide Insurance is taking the same approach. How is it possibly legal to force a customer in a contract, to pay an additional fee they just made up if they don’t use a service they weren’t required to use yesterday?

The part that kills me is the part of her response that says:

This charge is to provide ASL customers with additional benefits and support to help monitor accounts and bills.

What additional support? I don’t need help, I just don’t want them drafting my bank account. Thoughts?

I am sure that sounds quite counter-intuitive. Today the latest issue of Mix Magazine came in. I was flipping through the pages and it occurred to me that it’s pretty much all advertising, loosely held together by editorial content I could have easily found online for free.

I am really into music production. I subscribe to Mix Magazine, Recording Magazine, Guitar Player Magazine and a few others. The problem lately is not only are the magazines getting thinner and thinner, but the speed at which I am finished with them is doubling faster than they are shrinking.

Basically they are selling more ads in less space to make up for the loss in subscribers. The end result is that I am paying a yearly subscription to them to send me advertising.

I might as well start sending checks to the people that put the stupid grocery circulars in my mailbox.

I don’t know if I will subscribe to another physical magazine. Even the experience of magazines on the Kindle seems to not make sense. I subscribe to a ton of sites that I am interested in via RSS, and every day I scan thousands of articles on Bloglines to find the content I really care about.

American Musical Supply, Musicians 1-2-3 and Musicians Friend regularly send me free catalogs, including new product editorial content. I don’t think I ever see a product in a magazine I didn’t already know about through some other means.

That leaves the publishing industry in a pickle. If the readers can find all of the content somewhere else, and the advertisers have plenty of other channels to get their products to the public, that leaves them with no magazine to sell and no income in which to make money if it did sell. Ouch.

I am not sure what Apple is supposedly trying to do to bail out the publishing industry, but I think just like the record industry that still doesn’t get it in spite of being forced to get it, the publishing industry has evolved.

I am reminded of a book I read by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers. The premise of his argument is that due to the nature of the season beginning dates of Pee-Wee hockey, the system generates a set of players based on purely month of birth, and of those, the most excellent are selected, get more experience and eventually go on to be professionals. The rest get sentenced to mediocracy just because they were born too far away from the cut off date to be able to play.

I think journalism has followed a similar path. Due to the nature of the post graduate education system, a group of would-be journalism students fight for a small amount of positions available. The excellent ones rise to the top and write the articles that you and I read in the newspapers and magazines of today.

The only problem is that now anyone has a platform and all of the other would-be journalists that did not go to college for journalism, but still have the talent and personality to be widely read, can rise to the top outside of the established system.

The process itself not only grows the reputation of the writers, but the platform itself. Today many blogs are considered first class news and narrative platforms. Writers that would have otherwise never made it to major newspapers or magazines are heard, loved and read. Many of them without ever intending to be a writer!

I am not counting myself as one of those, but for a guy who doesn’t intend to be a journalist or columnist, who is in the computer software industry and doesn’t claim to be a writer, I am betting based on historical website statistics that more than a thousand people will view this article. That’s a thousand readers of a story that ran on what Alexa.com says is the 231,113th most popular website on the internet.

Meesa thinks magazines are newspapers are in deep doo doo betcha betcha.

I had to show this, recently an artist contacted me and asked if she could use a photo of mine as the inspiration for a piece of artwork. I was glad to help, and totally jazzed when I saw the result of her amazing work.

The photo in question was taken near the troll bridge in Seattle. I saw this homeless man sleeping in the grass and snuck a quick shot of it.

The resulting artwork dwarfs both the artistic quality and the feeling of the image, it’s just fantastic work.

I don’t even know the artist’s name, but you can follow her on flickr @ http://www.flickr.com/people/jgrabowski/

Enjoy!!

This account is a true story, the names and dates have been left in tact to further shame Verizon.

So once upon a time this not so bright contract sales person comes by my home to try and get me to switch from Comcast to Verizon FIOS. I talk to him for a few minutes, and when I realized that they did not provide any basic cable over the copper, which would render my Microsoft Windows Media Center PC useless for recording the shows I like to watch, I declined.

The plucky sales rep came back a few days later to tell me he had talked with his technical people and found that I can connect it up with S-Video and RCA cables and use an IR emitter to change channels on the box. As it was a workable solution, the channel guide looked much more usable, there was more HD to view and the internet access was faster, I said “sign me up!” This was in November. I was given an install date of December 24th, Christmas eve.

A few days before Christmas I saw some guys walk past my back sliding glass door and I walked out to see what was going on, neither of them spoke English. They smiled and said something I didn’t understand. One walked around front and got what I assume was the foreman and he told me they were just running a temporary fiber cable that it would be buried in a few days.

Two days before the install I got an automated voice call saying my install was scheduled and if I had any problems to call them.

Christmas eve, I woke up to a phone call from my installer, 10 minutes after the scheduled appointment saying it had been cancelled because of the snow. Now I will admit, there was a LOT of snow, so I can let them slide, I was told someone would call me shortly to reschedule an appointment. The only problem is nobody called me, I got this generic email:

We’re sorry that we couldn’t complete your Verizon FiOS Internet and FiOS TV installation on the originally scheduled date below.

• Original Installation Date — 12-24-2008
• FiOS Service Order Number — 0N8018368

We are very excited to get you up and running with Verizon FiOS Internet & FiOS TV and need to speak with you as soon as possible to select a new installation date.

Please call us at 1-888-553-1555

The sooner we’re able to set up a new installation date, the sooner we’ll be able to bring you the nation’s largest fiber-optic network straight to your home! After you’ve scheduled a new installation date, be sure to visit What’s Next to get all the information you need to know about your FiOS installation.

Don’t delay in giving us a call at 1-888-553-1555 so you can start the countdown to Verizon FiOS Internet & FiOS TV. Verizon FiOS is the network of the future delivered today.

Thank you for choosing Verizon!

This message was sent from a notification only email address that cannot accept incoming email messages. Please do not reply to this email.

Now I have been cancelled, and I have to call them back to get a new appointment, I waited till the day after Christmas and called back to find out that I couldn’t get a new appointment until January 9th. I begrudgingly accepted the new date as I had hoped to not have to deal with Comcast prorated bills, etc. But what to do but accept it, right?

Tuesday this week, someone came while I was not home, and buried the fiber cable, while they also buried my driveway in mud. In case you didn’t notice all the rain, it’s been a nightmare keeping it from tracking in the house because I have to wade through it to get in and out of my car.

The 9th came and luckily for us my wife works from home on Fridays, so she would be able to wait, unless it went over 11am, in which case I would come home and cover her hour at the Optometrist and then come back to work.

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