aubreyturner.org

What the heck happened to winter?  It’s been in the 80’s and I’m still having to mow the lawn.  I normally don’t like cold weather, but at least it slows the grass down…

It appears that my fears of being stuck with extra candy were unfounded.  I was mobbed by a variety of ghouls and other creatures, leaving me with one Tootsie roll (which by the way is some kind of vanilla variety that I hadn’t seen before; overall it wasn’t too bad…).

The best ones were the little kids, although some of the youngest ones seemed kind of overwhelmed by the whole thing.  On the other hand, I was a little put off by a couple of the older ones.  I think a rule of thumb for trick-or-treating should be that if you’re taller than the average adult then you probably shouldn’t be trick-or treating.

Now that I’ve moved into a new house and have a new phone number I feel a little bit like roadkill being eyed by a flock of vultures.  I’ve entered my new number in both the Texas and national do-not-call lists, but being government-run entities they move slowly.  It’ll be early next year before either list takes effect on the new number.  In the meantime I’m getting 3 to 5 telemarketing calls per day and I’ve been forced to resort to caller-id screening.

I have noticed a few changes from the old telemarketing pitches that I used to get at the old number, though.  They seem to be a lot more aggressive now, with one even leaving a message that was a bald-faced lie (claiming they were responding to my request for “vacation and resort information” or some such nonsense).  I think part of it is that they market more aggressively to homeowners than they do to non-homeowners, thinking that we have more money.  Perhaps I used to, but I’m a homeowner now. 

Anyway, I may start answering them, just to have the satisfaction of telling them that I never do business with telemarketers, and they’ve just put their business on my permanent shit-list.  Especially those pushy bastards at Hawk Security, who have been very persistent about calling at least once a day.

One of the companies that makes CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is updating their product.  One of the changes is for a good reason:

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company discussed the new applications, which are shipping with Epiphany version 6.5, on Monday. One new software program is Epiphany Telesales, which is designed to help companies comply with the new do-not-call telephone regulations that went into effect earlier this month. The program also incorporates tools intended to help telemarketers create targeted calling lists and works with high-volume automated dialer systems, Epiphany said.  (Emphasis mine)

However, at the same time, they’re going to make things even more annoying when you call in for customer service.

A new version of Epiphany’s call-center systems includes programs designed to increase the sales savvy of call-center agents. When someone calls for customer service at a company, the software can prompt call-center staff to encourage the callers to purchase additional products, Epiphany said. The software also allows agents to book new orders and keep track of sales leads.

I’d heard that some companies were planning to increase the number of sales pitches when you called in for service to compensate for the do-not-call list.  I’d just hoped that they would come to their senses and not actually do it. 

When a customer is calling for service is most likely the worst time to try to market to them, given that the reason for the call is usually because the customer is having some kind of problem.  I know that I’m usually a bit more irritated than when I started the call by the time I’ve navigated the VRU maze to get to a live human (and now those even more annoying voice recognition systems—I absolutely positively hate and loathe these bastard demon-spawn abominations).  Do you really want to be marketing to someone who is calling because of a problem and is irritated about the horrible phone systems and long hold times they’ve just endured?

Since most of these damn VRU systems these days demand your account number or some other identifying information, they should add a flag to the customer’s account that says not to market to this person.  The “curmudgeon flag” would indicate to the calltaker that trying to market crap to this person will only irritate them further.  Of course, this only works if the company has fully integrated callcenters, where the data for the call is passed along with the call to all of the calltakers.  If a company is as disorganized as TXU Gas when it comes to their call centers, it would never work.  Their system makes you speak to it to determine who you are, then loses your information when you finally get to a point where you can say “agent” to speak to a live person, who asks you the same information all over again.

I mentioned Gator a few days ago in relation to their lawsuits against companies that referred to their product as spyware.  I guess their strategy wasn’t as helpful as they’d hoped, because they’ve now decided to change their name.  They will now be called Claria Communications.  That certainly sounds much nicer and more cuddly than Gator.  However, it still doesn’t change the foul nature of their product. 

As someone pointed out in this thread on Slashdot:

Crap by and[sic] another name still sticks to the bottom of your shoe and smells bad…

The guy from TXU gas finally showed up at around 5:00pm on Tuesday.  It didn’t take him long to turn the gas on and relight the pilot lights for me.  While he was doing that we talked about what had happened (he said he’s had lots of problems with my subdivision in the past because of the similar street names) and he told me something interesting.  In the past TXU would leave a tag on the door of a house before turning off the gas.  This was because in some cases the new owners didn’t know they needed to contact the gas company (I thought this odd, but he said that sometimes new homeowners didn’t know they had gas furnaces or water heaters).  However TXU changed their policy and no longer gives any warning before disconnecting service.  He wasn’t sure why they changed, but he said he didn’t like it because it wasn’t a very customer service oriented policy and it made the field reps like him look bad.  I could certainly understand his concern, since he’s the public “face” of the company and has to deal directly with people who have had their service disconnected.  I reserved my ire for the incompetent person on the phone who entered my service address wrong, even though I had pointed out the difference in addresses and asked her to make sure she had the right one (she even managed to get it right as far as the bill was concerned).

I think one of the things that made me so angry about the whole incident was that having one’s service disconnected feels like a hostile act has been initiated against you.  Usually, having the gas cut off happens because of non-payment, so you feel like you’re getting the deadbeat treatment.  Which is infuriating because you paid the bill on time (which is further infuriating because they managed to get the address right for that).  And on the subject of the bill, I worry that they will not credit my payment correctly and they’ll think I didn’t pay the bill.  This is because they had to change my account number when correcting the service address (I don’t understand why this is necessary, but they claim that it is).  They claim that a notice will be sent to the billing department to transfer my payment from the previous account to the new one.  Given my dealings with them up to this point, though, I don’t trust them to get it right.  I just hope they at least send me a past-due notice before cutting the gas off again…

My shower this morning was unexpectedly cold as I got the last of the hot water.  Thinking that something had gone wrong with the water heater I went to check and discovered that I had no gas.  I just called TXU Gas to discover that while they had the right billing address (i.e. the bill got to me), they had the wrong service address.  Since they don’t think anyone is actually living at my correct address, they cut off the gas yesterday.  The confusion comes from the fact that there are two streets with the same name, one of which is a “Court” and the other is a “Street” (and the Court and Street are connected).

I’m on the phone with them now (so far it’s taken about 10 minutes for them to pass me around and figure out that I’m really right about the address).  If they can’t get out here today and start the gas back up I’m going to be very, very unhappy.  I do not look forward to another cold shower tomorrow.  I guess I’m just lucky that it wasn’t so cold that I needed heat this morning.

Update:  They’re supposed to be sending someone over today, although they didn’t specify a time.  In the meantime I’m working from home (it’s a good thing I finished setting up my office last night; talk about timing…).

There’s something lurking in my kitchen.  It’s infesting the lower part of the pantry.  It taunts me like the heart under the floorboard in Poe’s story.

This is a dangerous time of year for a recovering carb junky.  Last year I avoided the problem by going out on Halloween so I didn’t have to deal with trick-or-treaters or candy.  But now that I have the house I thought it best to have candy on hand so I can appease any little heathens that might come by.  I can only hope that there will be enough of them to get rid of all the candy, or I’m going to be in trouble.  This year Halloween is on a Friday, so I won’t be able to take the leftovers into work the next day. 

Anyway, as of Saturday morning I’d lost 94 pounds on the Atkins plan, so I’m going to do my best to stay away from the candy.  However, the Whoppers may yet be my undoing.

I told myself the other day that I’d wrap up the painting in the living room on Saturday.  I’d done most of the walls and a little over half the trim.  I estimated that it would take about 7 hours or so to finish.  I got started a little after noon and realized that I’d need more paint around 3:00pm.  I finally wrapped up a little after 3:00am (2:00am after adjusting the clocks), and spent Sunday regretting it.  I still have a few little areas where I need to touch up (like where I replaced the thermostat after painting the walls), but I’ll deal with those when I do the dining room and kitchen (probably in a few weeks).  I’m hoping that those areas won’t take as long, since there’s a lot less trim to deal with.

Gator is a piece of software that a lot of freeware applications bundle with their product to offset the cost of development and distribution.  It runs on the user’s PC and gathers information about the user’s surfing habits, reporting this data back to Gator’s central servers.  Gator then uses this information to target ads to the user.  Many users are unaware that this software is being installed when they install things like Kazaa or similar peer-to-peer programs.  Because of its reporting capabilities, it has deservedly earned the distinction of being known as “spyware.”  However, because of the (again, deserved) negative connotations associated with that term, Gator doesn’t like being referred to by it.  They prefer to be called “adware”.

The distinction between such “adware,” which can report back to its creator with information about the computer user’s surfing habits, so as to allow for supposedly more effective ad serving, and “spyware,” which similarly monitors surfing habits and serves up ads, is sometimes a hazy one, and lies at the heart of Gator’s libel suit.

Gator maintains that its software differs from spyware in that people are clearly notified before they download it, and in that they do so in exchange for a service, like the peer-to-peer software. 

Spyware, the company maintains, is surreptitiously installed and gives the unwitting computer user no benefit.

But critics of adware companies question how clearly such downloads are marked—PC users may suddenly be deluged with pop-ups and have no idea where they’re coming from—and protest that companies like Gator are collecting information without sufficiently accounting for what they do with it.

They now intend to go after anyone who refers to their product as spyware.  Their protestation that it isn’t spyware because it isn’t installed “surreptitiously” doesn’t work with me.  Frankly, they’re full of crap and I’m going to continue to refer to them as spyware because I consider any software that reports on anything you do as spyware.  These semantic games won’t convince me that their product isn’t spyware.

Further, most installations of Gator are hidden behind a wall of legalese or snuck in through a pop-up on a website (sometimes even with the logic reversed so that when the user hits “Cancel” Gator is installed).  If the use of Gator is fully spelled out such that even the most naive user understands it (i.e. it’s up front, in large print, and in plain English) and if Gator would tell people exactly what data they collect and what they’re doing with it, perhaps I wouldn’t have a problem with them.  As it is, I am very careful to avoid any chance that Gator will get installed on my systems and I avoid any software that bundles it.

And in case Gator’s legal eagles are trolling the internet to find stuff like this, don’t forget about that pesky little thing called the First Amendment.  I honestly believe that your product is SPYWARE, and by the common sense definition of the term, it most definitely is (i.e. what the average person perceives it to be).  As such, I feel that I have an absolute right to say so and will continue to do so.  You may be able to shut down some websites through your legal intimidation tactics, but that doesn’t change the reality of the situation.  Anything that reports on usage habits will be considered SPYWARE by the common user, even if they derive a benefit from it.  If the user thinks the benefit is great enough, then they’ll consent to use it.  I don’t have a problem with people making such free-marked decisions, provided they’re fully informed.  I do have a problem with people who use the legal system as a club to try to do stupid things like change the common sense definitions of words.

Of course, if the Gator lawyers keep doing stupid things like this, people will just come up with more “interesting” terms for it.  Some of the commentors on the Slashdot thread were using terms like “suckware,” “crapware,” and “malware.”  I somehow doubt that this is what Gator intended…

Link via Slashdot.