Dogged Blog

Evil green alien eye invades my bedroom

A lot of my friends, and even I, joke that I hate change. But I don't. When there's a new technology, I tend to be an early adopter. I love being able to do things I couldn't do before.

What I don't like is change that takes away functionality that I find valuable in the name of giving me something I don't give a shit about -- or, usually, to accomplish some goal related to the service provider or product manufacturer (I'm looking at you, Microsoft) rather than the consumer/user.

Last month it was Facebook, which "improved" itself by taking away our ability to edit or hide applications. I had forty bazillion easter eggs and hugs and quizzes all over my friends page, and there was no way to hide them other than to hide or remove the friend -- or beg them not to use those things. But why should my friends restrict themselves from using an application they enjoyed, just to avoid annoying me? The day before the change, I could hide those things permanently. Now I couldn't. This was Facebook's problem.

Obviously Facebook agreed, because they gave us back that functionality a week or two later. Yay.

Today, it's Comcast, or I guess, all cable providers. The television in my bedroom, which I use once or twice a week to watch an episode of House Hunters or a few minutes of Animal Planet while I fall asleep, stopped working. Although it turned out to be a damaged cable, the tech told me that in June, I'd no longer be able to view anything other than the local broadcast channels without a box on my TV set, due to some new FCC regulations.

The box is free, and so is the service call to install it. But the box is ugly. It's electronic, which means it has lights and cords and it's ugly and it makes a little buzzing sound and as I may have mentioned, it's ugly. I already keep my DVD player in a drawer and only hook it up if I want to watch something, so I hoped I could do that with this, but it's too complicated to hook up and you have to call the cable company to re-set it every time you disconnect it.

It also requires its own remote control, which means I now have three for a television I watch for around two hours a week, if that.

I had what I wanted: My TV set in my bedroom. And it played Animal Planet and HGTV.

Now I have a little always-on green light, ugly cords running all over the place, a hideous little black box staring at me, and a receiver stuck to the front of it with a wire running to the box. I also have a new remote control and functionality that means nothing to me -- wow, I can now watch 20 more channels that I don't want to watch. Yay.

/whineage

Girl meets shoe store

I was walking down Haight Street the other day, and stopped into the John Fluevog shoe store. I've ogled their shoes before on Zappos.com, and even ordered a couple of pairs, only to find them not true to size. (Fortunately Zappos' free no questions asked returns made that no big deal.)

I told the sales guy that, and he and one of his colleagues took me on a tour of their lines, pointing out which ran large, which ran small, and which ran true. They let me try on a few pairs, and then called every Fluevog store in the country to tray to track down one pair of the shoes in the photo in my size -- but no luck.

I sobbed about this on Facebook and someone found me a pair at the Fluevog store in Vancouver -- OMG I love FB -- so this story has a happy ending. I also bought a pair of "Supervog" shoes, so comfortable I'm wearing them to Vegas tomorrow -- Las Vegas, home of the country's worst and most inconvenient airport, which means miles and miles of tromping around.

Fluevog shoes, by the way, are both socially responsible and open source. Yes, really.

And yeah, I know I sound like I'm shilling for either Fluevog shoes or Zappos, but I'm not. I just love them. I hope you're touched.

Amazon Kindle: Ur doin it rong

I'm not, in general, a fan of toys, gadgets, the latest electronic gizmo, and, most of all, "upgrading" my existing electronics. I hate change, yo.

But now and then some toy comes along and I want one so bad it's like a burning ache in my soul. That's how I felt about my beloved iPod. And recently I felt the arrow of desire hit me again when Amazon invented the Kindle.

I'd half-intended to buy one this year, but those plans changed when the economy turned into a messy ooey slippery sliding river of mud pouring down a clear-cut mountain into a churning, obstructed river, threatening every small town and village along its course with flooding, topsoil erosion, and the death of fish, amphibians, and other small creeping, crawling things.

But today when I went to the Amazon homepage to check something for an article I'm writing, I was shocked to see that Kindle is sold out, and there will be no more available for almost three months. Did Scrooge buy Amazon.com? Is the Grinch in charge of production for these guys? Surely they'd have sold a few of these things as gifts, considering how close I came to buying one, and I'm very far from their target customer. It's very unsettling, in a strange, actually quite irrelevant sort of way.

I suppose one day I'll have one, or something very like it. For now, I'm just hoping I manage to make enough money to pay my gas and electric bill this winter. And I'm better off than many people I know... although, to tell you the truth, I'm worse off than many people I know, too. For what it's worth.

So I'm not buying a Kindle. I am buying a lottery ticket. Wish me luck.

Of video and the written word

Dear people who want to tell me stuff,

If you send me to a website on which there is little or nothing but a video clip, the odds are very, very, very, very, very high I will not play it.

Only if you have also written text that tells me what is in it and put it in context as part of your message is there any chance at all I will click "play" on the video.

In fact, you had better just tell me in writing everything you want me to know, because even when you put that video in context, I'm still probably not going to click on it. Your video clip (or podcast, for that matter) needs to be in addition to, not instead of, written words.

This isn't about me approving or disapproving of the fact that apparently you are accepting (or maybe just assuming) that people no longer can or will read. I am not doing this as a form of protest or to send you a message. I'm telling you that if you want me to know what you want to tell me, then write it out.

This concludes my message to people who want to tell me stuff.

That hormone thing, redux

I'm 49 years old, and in the last year, my hormones have turned on me.

I'm not quite sure when it began -- I started having trouble continuing to lose weight and sleeping at night a year and a half ago, but I blamed it on the stress and sleep deprivation of the period around the 2007 pet food recall, when I was working the (very busy) "graveyard shift" for Pet Connection.

Thank you pet food industry for the midnight "dump and run" media releases.

Although my life should have gotten back to normal last fall, I continued to have problems sleeping -- both falling asleep and staying asleep. I still couldn't seem to lose weight, even when exercising and diarying my food. And then in November, I didn't get my period for two and a half months, then when I did, it was short and weird, and then I skipped another. This after a literal  lifetime of menstrual periods I could set a watch by, or, at least, a calendar. I only even had cramps a couple of times a year, and my PMS was usually a single day of weepiness and irritability.

Now I was irritable for weeks on end, and kept finding things popping out of my mouth before I realized I was going to say them. I was easily pissed off, and easily hurt. I still couldn't sleep, I gained ten pounds despite not changing my exercise or food intake -- which after everything I've gone through in the last 5 years to lose weight scared the shit out of me -- and I felt tired and mentally not myself.

And my periods continued to be abnormal. And while they were nothing compared to those suffered by a lot of women, I was experiencing some fairly bad hot flashes, mostly at night -- seemed to be part of why I couldn't sleep. And the combination of hot flashes and sleep disruption probably were behind my feelings of mental dullness, too.

I went to the doctor (we can have the discussion about our fucked up health care system another day), but she was approximately 13 years old and just shrugged and said it was "normal for your age."

Let me explain something to the doctors of the world: Even if going literally in one month from a lifetime of regular and uneventful menstrual periods to nothing BUT abnormal and unpleasant menstrual periods is common, it's not normal. It simply is not. Not to mention that it's unacceptable; I can't and won't live like that for months or years.

More to the point, I started menstruating at 10 years old. My mother, who started menstruating at 12, didn't go into menopause until she was 53. Women typically go into menopause a little later than their mothers, and the earlier you start the later you tend to stop. So 48 years old seemed a little early to me. I also was concerned about how abrupt and severe my symptoms where.

I tried to convince her to check my thyroid, but she brushed the idea aside. Now, I'm going through the "constantly going back in and complaining" routine we have to go through to get doctors to actually look up from their little "medicine by the numbers" laptops and do something for us, and I'm one of the  pushiest people I know so I'm sure in time I'll get the tests I want (and in the meantime, Kaiser is sucking up fifty bucks co-pay every time they see me and did I mention I pay $582 a month for my coverage?), but in the meantime I took matters into my own hands, and started researching herbs and supplements that might address my symptoms.

Before I go on, let me say this: I personally hate testimonials. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data," my experience won't necessarily have any bearing on yours, this could all be a big coincidence, and I still haven't even pried a diagnosis of any kind of out of my doctor. Consider this statement fully caveated.

I'm a firm believer that soy sucks, so I avoided all supplements that contain it, and after a lot of reading, bought myself a product called Estrotone by New Chapter.

I started taking it in the morning, and that night, after two doses, I was sleepy at 10 PM, sound sleep 15 minutes after getting into bed, and I woke up the next day with the birds, full of energy. I laughed and sang and walked the dogs, all before 7 AM. I felt young again.

Two weeks later, I got my period, and it was a little heavy (my rare periods in the last six months had been so scanty I wasn't even sure they WERE periods) but otherwise normal.

Twenty-eight days later I had a second, perfectly normal period.

Twenty-eight days later, I had another.

All through that time, I felt energetic. My brain felt clear and sharp. My sleep patterns were perfect. My moods stablized, although only about 75 percent.

I still haven't lost weight, and I noticed something interesting: My measurements on my body are all unchanged except for my waist. Hips, bust, neck, arms, legs, all the same; my waist is three inches bigger. All that weight is in my midsection, another indication that this is hormonal.

I'm certainly not saying this is the answer to my problem. I'll continue to try to get my doctor to test my thyroid and, you know, help me. But despite my reluctance to add to the glut of supplement testimonials, I guess I just did.

New computer blues

I hate getting new electronics. Hate hate hate. I hate getting a new computer more than anything on earth.

And I'm getting one on Thursday, because I have to. Because my existing computer is running Win 2K and can't see my USB interface anymore and, well... it's time.

And I'm upset and worried and full of dread, because I'm sure I have ten million little programs that I'll never replace, and even though my data is being transferred for me, I know that the forty bazillion auto-fills and stored passwords will mostly vanish, and OH GOD my FTP access info to the seventy bazillion FTP sites on the web I have to access, god... I feel like crying.

This, my darlings, is why I drive a ten year old car and won't get a flat screen TV and even when I'm given a new digital camera I don't use it and only got my first DVD player in November of 2005:  There are types of change I hate, and new electronic stuff is the biggest one of all.

I don't even like to get a new coffee maker.

United Airlines continues to be teh stooopid

So, you might remember my original and then my follow-up rants about United Airlines and how it wanted me to give my credit card billing information to a friend for whom I was buying a plane ticket or they wouldn't let her check in.

She ended up having to cancel her flight, leaving us with a credit with United to use up, so last night we made a reservation. This time we:

• Made a three-way call to United reservations instead of using the website;
• called from my home billing number;
• paid with my United Airlines Mileage Plus Visa card;
• gave them my and her United Mileage Plus numbers

Did the guy who made the reservation tell us that there would be a problem with me paying for the ticket? He did not. No, only after the email came with the confirmation number in it did they tell me, in big red letters, that she'd have to have the credit card at the time of check in.

We were still on the phone with him at the time, so I pointed this out to him and told him he should have warned me of this, and asked what I was supposed to do, since the credit card and my friend live in different cities -- hence the trip,  yo.

Don't worry, he rushed to assure me; in fact, even if she had the credit card in her hand, and all my billing information, they wouldn't allow her to check in. No, I simply had to go to the "nearest airport" and present my card at any United counter prior to her departure and it would be fine.

Now, since I live less than half an hour from San Francisco's airport, this isn't the end of the world. I can only imagine, however, if this had happened when I still lived up in Sonoma County, three hours in each direction from the nearest airport. But I digress.

I complained, firmly but politely, that this was the most ridiculous policy on earth. I was supposed to spend an hour on the road, pay for  parking, and stand in line at one of the nation's busiest airports, just to hand over my credit card to a human being?

It was certainly safer, albeit less convenient, than the earlier policy, now not  available at all, of having to give your billing information to someone, such as your deadbeat drug-addicted teenager that you're flying home after he was released from a Mexican prison, but on the other hand, the bait-and-switch of not letting me know about this minor little detail prior to finalizing the ticket purchase, plus the excuse that this is to protect me from fraud, is too much.

Hello United Airlines, do you think I'm stupid? I'm already protected from fraudulent use of my credit card by what few remaining consumer protection laws still exist. This regulation is to protect you from claims by your customers that they didn't, in fact, purchase a plane ticket for someone else after the fact. It's not like you can repossess a flight that's already been taken.

The thing is, plenty of companies have to deal with purchases that can't be repossessed. I've spent more money on a single meal at an expensive restaurant than this flight cost. I've spent more on shoes, including shoes I've sent to other addresses than mine as gifts. And I've bought many, many plane tickets over the years, including from United, without anything like this. The reality of the world we live in now is that people buy things online and over the phone, and we use credit cards. When your own regular customers can no longer do that, they will also no longer use your company. It's that simple.

There is no other option, he said, to verify my card. It doesn't matter that we have nearly a month before the flight, that I was calling from the billing address and phone number on the credit card, that I was using my United Mileage Plus Visa card, the billing information for which lists that phone number, that both of us had United frequent flyer memberships, nothing.

Because we wanted to use the credit from the canceled ticket, we went ahead with the reservation; I don't even know if we could have canceled it at that point or not. But I'll tell you this: I will never, ever fly on United Airlines again. I suggest you not fly with them, either, because if they have one idiotic customer service policy, they surely have a hundred.

The only silver lining to this whole  saga is that someone told me about gethuman.com, a website that tells you how to bypass pretty much every corporate automated phone system on the planet, and get to a real person. I used it to make this reservation, and thus, my blood pressure started out considerably lower than it normally does.

So, the takeaway message is this: GetHuman.com yes, United Airlines? Never again.

United Airlines, Part 2

So, thanks to those who tried to assure me that United Airlines won't ask my friend for my credit card when she tries to check in -- but they will. When she tries to use the Easy Check In machine (or whatever United calls theirs), it will tell her she needs to see an agent. And that agent will ask for the credit card or the credit card information, including account number, billing address, and security code... depending on who you talk to.

I have no problem with giving this information to this particular friend, but what if I were an employer buying a plane ticket for an employee, or it wasn't such a close friend, or it was my deadbeat kid or something? And don't I have the right to buy a ticket for, well, anyone I want to, without having to give them enough information to use my credit card? It boggles the mind.

Under the jump, my correspondence with United Airlines.

Oh, the American corporation and its mysterious ways

Seriously, how do companies stay in business?

Let's try even to look at a company I love, Amazon.com.

I recently got a new Visa card after some child attempted to purchase $400 worth of games at a gaming website using my account. I forgot all the 34789647 places I had my old number stored, and one of them was my "One-Click" settings on Amazon.com.

So I downloaded the mp3 of Martha Wainwright's new album, and was happily listening to it when Amazon sent me a note saying my purchase was canceled because I'd used an invalid credit card.

Oooops, I thought, and thus began my attempt to pay for my download.

I updated my credit card number. I emailed them using the contact system on the website. I got a couple of polite but non-responsive answers, and finally used their callback system, where a representative told me to enjoy my free download, because they had no mechanism in place to charge me for it. She was very nice, agreed it was something Amazon really needed to fix, and laughed with me at the complete ridiculousness of the situation.

But still, WTF, Amazon? Are you insane?

Now on to a story with less laughter.

I bought a plane ticket for someone else at United.com. I've done this before, at United and elsewhere, for various people and for various reasons, recently and over the years. I'm going to guess I'm not the only person on earth who has purchased plane tickets for other people. Perhaps I'm wrong.

They told me that when she checks in, she must have the credit card used to pay for the ticket.

I was perplexed. I emailed. The email I got in response didn't answer my question, instead addressing a completely different issue. Okay, they accidentally used the wrong form letter, I thought.

I emailed again, asking for the answer to my actual question.

In response, they said I should phone. The whole reason I didn't want to phone is that United puts you into what has to be the stupidest, most endlessly frustrating, totally aggravating automated phone system on earth, and no matter how you try to game it, it's almost impossible to manipulate the little robo-man into putting you through to a human being. But I persevered and eventually, a human came on the line.

I asked her what to do about the situation.

She told me to give my credit card number, expiration date, billing address, and the security number to the person checking in.

I was speechless. "So, why should I do that?"

"To protect you from fraud."

I laughed. "You mean to protect United from fraud, since I'm not liable for fraudulent charges to my credit card."

"Well, ma'am, I've already told you what the reason is. I understand your concern, but you must understand this is to protect you."

"No, what I understand is if I, say, want to buy a plane ticket for my kid, I'd have to give him my credit card information, which I might not want him to have and which is far more risky to me than using my credit card to purchase something online or over the phone from a corporation, something that, by the way, I do all the time without them getting upset that I can't physically show them my card."

She had nothing to say to that because there is nothing to say to that, other than to repeat: How do companies stay in business?

Oh shirt of my dreams

Okay, kind of a drive-by, but I haven't done one of these in a while. Yes, it's time for stuff I like!

Tonight it's a strange catalog company called Soft Surroundings. I can't quite grasp their concept... I guess it's kind of a catalog that sells stuff that's fluffy or cozy or soft or comforting, plus anything else they feel like selling you. Some really nice clothing, a lot of fleece, and sheets and makeup and face cream, don't ask me, I didn't start the company, I just bought this really great shirt.

This shirt fits me so perfectly I want to cry when I put it in. It's the kind of shirt that you want to wear everywhere every day because it's as if it was made for you.

It looks much better on me than it does on the model in the catalog or in this somewhat strangely laid out photo from the website, right.

Regardless of all that? Best. Shirt. Ever.