raleighnet.org

There’s a very interesting essay on partical physics over on kuro5hin.

More and more I feel like I want to go back to school. Physics, Statistical Analysis, Language — I don’t understand these things as completely as I’d like. The first time I went through school, I didn’t know yet what I wanted to know. My whole focus was on getting through it to get the paper to get on with my life.

School is wasted on the young.

Mixmatcher is a tool to share your musical ideas and expand your musical tastes.

It seems like a cool idea and it’s certainly well done. Generally I’m not a fan of these let’s get together and build a list of stuff types of community tools. The major problem here is that there’s no way to link to songs so that you can download or play them (thank you music industry for being a bunch of wanker luddites).

Artifact Arcade: Supreme Golf is a great little flash golf game. It simulates a full course. One complaint, it doesn’t seem to keep track of your score for you, so I’m not sure how I did (although it seems I was generally about 2 times par). My 18th hole was a nightmare of water traps - I’m not sure how random the hole generation is.

Ahh Memories…

Some gray Sunday when I have the time to focus on it, I want to take time and go through every one of these links that Peter Merholz assembled on branching and parallel links. For now I’m afraid to click on even one of them as I’m sure I’d get sucked in for the rest of the afternoon.

I’ve never really gotten into any of the multi-user on-line games. But, this story about the development of the upcoming Star Wars Galaxies game is fascinating from a participatory design point of view. I have needed to at least marginally think about community building on-line, and this provides an interesting angle on those types of thoughts.

I’d like to believe that I might enjoy Stephen Wolfram’s new book A New Kind of Science, but something tells me I wouldn’t. I’ll probably buy it anyway when it makes it to paperback.

Thes Traffic numbers for job boards don’t match my experience at all. They don’t make sense to me. Now I feel like I need the actual survey so I can examine their reporting criterea for flaws.

If you ever find yourself in the market for satellite equipment, you may want to avoid Orbitsat. I found the order process to be a nightmare. They asked for information that my mortgage provider didn’t need, and their customer service sucks. I would avoid them. There are much better companies out there that deserve my business far more.

Update 11/1/2002: I was contacted by a representative of Orbitsat who objected to my expressing on this page my opinion of my buying experience with them. They tell me that what I have said here is not true. I’m not sure how expressing my opinion of what happened could be anything but true, but I will emphasize for you that this is just my opinion, and I am merely criticizing them as a United States citizen in accordance with my first amendment right to protest, criticism or parody. You of course are free to draw your own conclusions and make your own decisions.

However, because I want to be fair, and I certainly don’t want to misrepresent the truth, here are the Facts of what happened.

1. I tried to place an order on-line.
2. They wanted me to complete a paper document including my credit card number (which they already had as a result of my order), and fax it.
3. I didn’t know who was at the other end of that fax number.
4. I didn’t feel like that process was as secure as I would like.
5. I wanted to complete the order without doing that, or I wanted them to cancel my order. Either of those choices would have been acceptable to me.
6. Instead of responding with what I believe is the bare minimum of acceptable customer service, they chose to reply to their unsatisfied customer with a letter from their “legal department”.

It is also a fact (as I state below) that when the box broke, they informed me that they don’t support the product after the sale and instructed me to contact Hughes directly.

Now, in my opinion, this is bad customer service. I would even say this customer service sucks. I only do business with people with good customer service, so I will never order anything from this company again. They say that they are doing what DirectTV requires of them. I’m not sure that I believe DirectTV requires them to have their customers fax credit card numbers to blind numbers that may or may not be secure. I don’t believe that DirectTV requires them to respond to customer complaints with letters from their legal department.

This blog in general and this entry in particular does allow for commenting. If there are other facts that Orbitsat would like to share with you so that you can make an informed decision as to whether they deserve your business, then members of that company are free to comment here (provided the comments are relevant and address the issues raised. If it’s just a bunch of spamming, then it is my site, and I do reserve the right to remove those comments).

I suspect that 5 or 6 people have seen this page to date. I know in the past that when big scary legal companies have tried to shut down free expression on personal web sites, they have attracted lots and lots more negative PR than this. Hopefully, Orbitsat will let this drop and work on improving their process rather than working to improve their image so that other consumers will be as uninformed before stumbling into an order with them as I was.

My speech is protected, and my rights are clear in this matter. If I’m forced to defend myself oh what a stink I will raise.

Communication that innitially led to this blog post (they have requested I not post the C&D letter they sent):

From : “Legal Department”
To : Will
Subject : RE: Orbitsat Contact Info
Date : Sat, 4 May 2002 23:29:31 -0400
If you wish to cancel your order log on to
www.orbitsat.com/youraccount.asp you will be charged a 20% restocking
fee. If we do not receive your complete contraqct within 48 hours we
will charge your credit card as per the online agreement a $550 deposit
and ship your order out. The contract is designed to avoid having to
provide Orbit a deposit.

Your call.

FYI: Orbit has been in business for 15 Year and have customer faxing
their contract everyday it’s secure and locked in Vault in our
department after 12 months it is destroyed.

Regards

John H.

—–Original Message—–

From: Sales
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2002 8:24 PM
To: Sales
Subject: Orbitsat Contact Info

************************************************************************
*******
MessageType: Sales Question
Find_Out: Ask
SubjectOther:

Comments:

Invoice #24968
Got a call that said you couldn’t accept the faxed contract from me
since I didn’t put in a credit card number. As I read the contract, it
is with you and not with Direct TV, so I’m unclear about the phone
message from your rep stewart stating that Direct TV won’t accept what I
faxed you. You’re asking for a lot of informaiton that you just don’t
need from me, and that I don’t want to fax to you to complete this
transaction.

If you can’t process the order based on the information you have, then
cancel the order. I don’t want to jump through all these hoops just to
buy something from you.

It seems that I’m alterna-energy boy lately, but what the heck. This stuff is cool. According to the article, some people are forecasting that California will be getting 20% of it’s power from localized fuel cells in the next decade. There’s got to be a way to make money off that somehow.

Besides, it’s not like there’s anything interesting happening in Interface Design/Marketing on the web this week. Unless you care that Don Norman has decided to add a dhtml cursor trail of colored balls to his site and focus on experience design in addition to usability. Everybody in the computer human interface community seems to be impressed at the change in the old usability and simplicity guard, but it just seems a bit inevitable to me. Besides, based on those balls, it Don and I must have very different ideas of what is fun and beautiful on the web.