Dogged Blog

Kong Wobbler takes Scottish Deerhound from top speed to napping

I'd like to buy the inventor of the Kong Wobbler roses and candy.

Seriously, that thing is awesome. Rawley, once he drags his lazy butt out of bed in the morning, is ready to go-go-go. During the work week, he goes out with my friend Courtney Gunter-Durbin from The Whole Pet here in San Francisco, which helps me focus on getting my 12-16 hours of work in each day (yeah, I gotta do something about that schedule, I know), but on the weekends, getting him out to the park and the beach to run off that energy is an inescapable responsibility.

Fortunately, it's often the highlight of my week, too, as it was last weekend when he decided to try to wade through chest-deep mud and cross an inlet of the San Francisco Bay while the tide was out.

But I sadly have to work this weekend, so I needed him to chill out while I finished a few things, after which we'd be able to go to the park.

I put a handful of organic dog treats in the Kong Wobbler I'd bought when he was a puppy, and it kept him busy for nearly an hour. Not only that, when he was done, he curled up for a nap.

Here's a video of him as a puppy, the first time I gave him a Wobbler. The photo above is, of course, Rawley napping.

Amazon, on the other hand, is doing it right

Although Comcast did eventually fix the problem, apologize, and credit me a month's service to make up for the hassle of giving away my phone number one day for no apparent reason, it was only after I Tweeted and blogged about the two hour customer service support chat from hell. What happens to regular customers who don't have hundreds or thousands of Twitter followers, or who don't have "I write for the San Francisco Chronicle" in their Twitter bio?

Still, their Twitter customer service rep, @ComcastMelissa, was truly awesome, and the people to whom she escalated my problem were extremely fast and helpful. Kudos where they're due.

In contrast, I didn't need to go whining on Twitter to get great customer service from Amazon. I ordered something that didn't arrive, went to their online support chat, and prepared to suffer. This is what happened:

You are now connected to Tyler from Amazon.com.

Me:This was being sent with one day delivery and has never arrived -- it's been almost 2 weeks. I would like it to be re-sent to me, and a refund of the one-day delivery charge. Thanks.4:22:42 PM

Tyler:Hello, Christie, I'm sorry to hear that you haven't received your order. This will take a moment as I bring up the order to assist you.4:23:02 PM

Me:Thanks4:23:08 PM

Tyler:Given that it has been so long, I will arrange for a replacement to be sent to you. In addition, I will be refunding your $3.99 shipping charges. As you currently have a Prime membership, I will also be arranging to extend your prime benefits for an additional month as an apology for this missed delivery.4:25:55 PM

Me:Thanks so much!4:26:08 PM

Tyler:I'll be sending an e-mail to you in the next few minutes confirming that the replacement has been created (as well as this Prime extension). Is there anything else I can assist you with today?

Me:Nothing, this was very fast and helpful, thank you!

Tyler:I'm glad to be of assistance, Christie. Thank you for visiting Amazon.com, we hope to see you again soon!4:26:46 PM

Note this took four minutes. And yes, they'll see me again soon.

Yet another reason newspapers are dying, and it's not what you think

I subscribed to the daily paper.

Don't ask me why; I haven't been a subscriber to the dead tree edition of the San Francisco Chronicle in years. I got it at my old house for my mother, who read it faithfully, but I personally never looked at, and canceled the subscription when she passed away in September of last year.

But when I recently moved, I had to fight the impulse to subscribe nearly every day, until finally I gave in and did it.

That's when I realized that this was the very first time in my life I've moved to a new home and not subscribed to the paper as a sort of routine part of moving. Even when I lived in the country and getting the paper was a huge pain in the butt, I at least tried to get it.

But that was all years ago, and my reading habits have completely changed since then. Like, I guess, nearly everyone, I get most of my news from a wide variety of online sources, including a lot of newspaper websites, even including the Chronicle's SFGate.com (for which I'm a columnist). The habit of reading a single paper cover to cover was broken so long ago I can't quite remember when it happened.

I've kind of enjoyed the ritual of going into my front yard every morning to get the paper and let the dogs sniff around, but I think I'm going to be canceling my subscription soon.

Two reasons: One, the paper is pitifully thin. If it weren't for the advertising inserts, it would be thinner than our little monthly neighborhood free shopper. It's really sad.

Two, the delivery has been atrocious. I've only been getting the paper for a couple of weeks, and I've had four days it wasn't delivered. That's 4 out of 14, which if it continues to be that bad means in a given month, I'll get the paper only three weeks out of four. And if you don't report it before 9:30 AM, you can't get it re-delivered, you just have to take a credit.

I realize that "newspapers are dying" is the stupidest and most over-done topic on the entire Interwebz, and I should be embarrassed to be writing about it at all. But until now, I haven't missed the role the newspaper used to play in my life, or the social landscape of America, or even just of San Francisco.

Even now, saying I write for the Chronicle is my single best "ticket" to access to sources for stories. There's a cachet there that hasn't gone away even as the paper dwindles down to minisculosity.

So it's late. It's irrelevant. I know. But just for today, I miss newspapers.

If Comcast cares, they'll read this transcript

This morning a friend texts me she's getting a disconnected message when she calls my landline. I check it, and it makes calls, including long distance calls, just fine. But when I call myself from my cell phone, it tells me the number has been disconnected. Weird.

I call Comcast, my provider, and their phone support says they're having higher than usual call volume (I don't think they know what "usual" means, since I always get that message) and suggests I try their online support.

So I do, for nearly two incredibly aggravating and frustrating hours. Seems Comcast just randomly gave my phone number away to another provider, for no reason anyone has been able to explain to me.

But worse than them doing that was the experience I had trying to find out what happened and fix it. Because while both these agents were perfectly polite, they clearly had no ability to help me, and had what seemed like a lot of difficulty following the chat. I don't know if they had ten other people in chat at the same time or had simply been put out like sacrificial lambs to appease irritated customers without any solid training or being enabled to really help people, but this was ridiculous.

Given that neither of them had the ability to help with this problem, why didn't they just tell me that, apologize, and let me get OFF THE FREAKING COMPUTER?

Comcast, if you really "care," please read this transcript, paying particular attention to the timestamps and the HUGE gaps where your agents were saying nothing, leaving me staring at a screen waiting and getting more and more annoyed, and consider whether or not your current support system is even remotely functional.

And also, you might want to consider why it is that you managed to give my phone number away. Seems like, I don't know, let me try to think of a way to describe it... BAD BUSINESS.

Last, please notice how long it was until someone apologized to me for giving my number away.

Transcript below the jump, and the only edits I made were to redact my personal information (phone number, address, etc.). I didn't even fix my own typos.

A reader's heresy: I hate real books

Amazon reported that their sales of e-books has outstripped that of hardbacks. That's not really surprising, as hard cover books are incredibly expensive and we're in a recession.

But some of my friends have been lamenting this, and I'm not. I won't lament when sales of digital books exceed all "real" books, whatever the cover. Because while I love what's in books, I hate books themselves.

I hate the dust, mites and mold they harbor. I hate having them around the house to collect dust, mites and mold. I hate the smell of old books. I hate the way their spines have to be broken to lie flat, and how many paperbacks never do lie flat even then.

Speaking of which, I hate paperbacks because they're ugly.

So there. I've said it. I don't miss "real" books and embrace my Kindle and the digital era with open arms.

You may feel differently. You may be like Star Trek captain Picard, who would curl up in his spaceship cabin with a "real" book of Shakespeare's sonnets. That's okay, too. But given how frequently people rhapsodize about their love of physical books and turning pages and so on, I thought I'd present the other side.

A Kindle point Amazon appears to be missing

Dear Amazon.com,

Why do you waste so much prime "recommended for you" real estate promoting books for Kindle that are NOT OUT YET? It's not that I don't want to be able to pre-order Kindle books; I do. It's that by making them so prominent, you're missing the whole huge wonderful beauty of buying a book for a Kindle, which is that I can find out about a book and then buy it and read it in around one minute.

You know, "Books in 60 seconds"? Your slogan? Recognize it?

That is all.

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.