Subject:     Re: Lawsuit
Date:     Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:41:49 -0500
From:     Bill Groome <bgroome1012@gmail.com>
To:     <elliottlawgrp@bellsouth.net>
CC:     <jik@kamens.us>

Hi Tom,
It has been a while. Hope this email finds you well.
There is a blog about myself and my business that categorizes me as a “crook and a liar”. This blog is designed and tagged in such a manner as to follow my business on search engines. The blog is intended to smear myself and damage my business. The blog contains inaccurate information of which I have evidence to the contrary.
Here is the blog: http://blog.kamens.us/2010/03/08/bill-groome-owner-of-madhatter-magic-shop-lies-to-me-about-a-product-and-then-refuses-to-refund-my-money/

I have copied Mr. Kamens on this email so that he is fully aware of my intent. I wish to file a lawsuit against Mr. Kamens for damages.
I will call you this afternoon to discuss this matter, or feel free to call me at your convenience.

Best Regards,
Bill Groome
1-866-333-9450

Mr. Groome, since I know you read my blog, I will offer you my response here.

Executive summary: Snort my taint. (h/t Ken @ PopeHat)

I hope that by now Mr. Elliott has explained to you that you have no grounds whatsoever for any sort of legal action against me, and that such action would be so obviously frivolous that you would most likely end up not only losing, but paying my legal fees and expenses as well.

Have you ever heard of the “Streisand effect“? If not, I suggest you read up on it. Your annoyance now about the fact that my blog posting about you shows up right below your web site in search results pales in comparison to how bad you’ll be made to look all over the Internet if you sue me.

Don’t waste your money paying your lawyer to send me a threatening letter. It didn’t work for the last guy to try that, and it won’t work for you.

Please be advised that since you have threatened legal action against me, I will treat all past and future correspondence from you or anyone representing you as public records and publish them as I see fit.

Let me offer you some advice, which I’m sure you won’t take:

Admit that you gave me inaccurate information about a product. Admit that you should have fully refunded my money because of your error. Admit that you treated me rudely. Admit that you should not have threatened to sue me. Apologize. Promise to try to do better in the future.

If you do these things, then I will post your apology at the top of my blog postings about you, and that will undo some of the damage that you have done to your own reputation by treating me the way you have.

That is the best outcome you can hope for at this point. If your lawyer is any good, he’ll give you the same advice.

I can cope without access to my to-do lists for 12 hours, but what scared me about this outage was the realization that my to-do lists are only in Todoist. If it were to suddenly go away for a more than a day, or if (horror or horrors!) they suddenly went down forever, all my data would be lost. That’s not OK.

Many other people have this same concern and have begged Todoist to provide a mechanism for exporting their data to back it up somewhere. Thus far, the closest they’ve come to this is supporting offline use in their iPhone / iPod / iPad app, which is better than nothing, but not good enough.

So I wrote my own. It’s a Perl script you can download here. Here’s the documentation:

NAME

todoist-fetch.pl – Simple todoist backup / restore script, to reassure you that you won’t lose all of your data if Todoist suddenly goes belly-up.

SYNOPSIS

todoist-fetch.pl [--help] [--manual] [--project=project] [--username=username] [--password=password] –text | –reorder [input-file] | –backup [--nocompleted]

DESCRIPTION

Modes

This script has three modes:

–text Fetch all of the items in a specific project and print them one per line, including the item ID and content for each item.

–reorder Read a list in the format produced by –text and reorder the project so it matches the (presumably reordered) list.

–backup Fetch all of your project and item data (not notes or labels, since I don’t use them, but patches are welcome and print them in JSON format with some text annotations explaining what the various JSON blobs are.

Backup notes

The format of the backup mode output isn’t intended to be particularly user-friendly, or easy to read, or easy to import into another application. If/when you need to do anything real with the data, you’ll probably need to write another script to convert it into something useful. All it’s intended to do is snapshot your data so you’ll have it in an emergency.

Backup mode uses a non-public API call, because the public API doesn’t allow all completed tasks to be fetched except for premium users, and I’m not a premium user. If the folks at todoist change the non-public API, this will break.

OPTIONS

Other options in addition to the mode options described above:

–help Print usage message and exit.

–manual Print entire manual and exit.

–username (or set $TODOIST_USERNAME) Specify Todoist username.

–password (or set $TODOIST_PASSWORD) Specify Todoist password.

–project (or set $TODOIST_PROJECT) Specify Todoist password for –text or –reorder.

–nocompleted Don’t export completed items in backup.

AUTHOR

Jonathan Kamens <jik@kamens.us>. Please feel free to contact me with questions, comments, or suggestions! Also, please consider making a donation at http://blog.kamens.us/support-my-blog/ to support future development of this and other free tools.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2012 Jonathan Kamens. Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 3 or any subsequent version at your discretion. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.

VERSION

$Id: todoist-fetch.pl,v 1.5 2012/01/24 19:34:17 jik Exp $

• They fixed the duct opening which their subcontractor made too small, and replaced the screw in the duct cover that was damaged when I had to unscrew the cover from its frame because the frame was wedged to tightly into the too-small opening.
• They fixed the air leaking from the furnace manifold.
• At their expense, they replaced the whole-house humidifier that was wasting a huge amount of water, with a Humid-a-Mist humidifier that doesn’t.

The fact that they addressed these issues, as well as the manner in which they went about doing so, suggests to me that they really are trying to do right by their customers, or at least what they perceive as doing right by their customers. Having said that, there are some caveats deserving of mention with the repairs listed above:

• The frame of the aforementioned duct cover is still irreparably bent from having been jammed into the too-small opening, but I didn’t really expect them to fix that and didn’t press the issue.
• Surely a huge air leak in the furnace manifold is something they should have noticed and addressed when they were installing the system.
• They programmed the thermostat for the new humidifier incorrectly when they installed it, such that it was humidifying the house in the summer when the furnace wasn’t running (bad both because of the wasted water and because who wants their house humidified in the summer?). They did come back and fix this when I complained, but this is a rookie mistake that shouldn’t have happened.

Furthermore, some of the issues I mentioned in my previous postings still remain, e.g., their inability to process a simple credit-card change for many months, and their offer to replace a toilet handle, a 15-minute job involving a $5 part, for the absurdly high price of $238.

Given all I’ve experienced with them, here’s my take on Winters Plumbing:

1. They try to do quality work, but they don’t always succeed.
2. Their rates are high.
3. If you are an educated consumer and you know how to stand up for yourself, then they will address any issues with their work that you bring to their attention. If, on the other hand, you just leave everything to them and don’t pay attention to what they’re doing, the odds are pretty good that they’ll screw something up.

In a nutshell, Honda Village lied to us when we bought our car, lied to us after the fact, ignored our complaints, sent us (and others) intentionally misleading junk mail and refused to stop when asked, sent us lots of spam and refused to stop when asked, and did mediocre auto-body work for us which took multiple attempts to get right (this last point was Village Collision, another business within the Village Automotive Group umbrella of which Honda Village is a part).

Nevertheless, Honda Village is where we bought our Honda Odyssey minivan, and they are the closest Honda dealership to our house, so when we need service done that is warranty- or recall-related and/or inexpensive and hard enough for them to screw up, we take our van there. Or so I thought.

A number of months ago, I brought our van to Honda Village for some simple service or recall or something; I forget the details. After looking up our van in the computer, the associate informed me that I had to speak to the service department manager about something. I went into the manager’s office, where he informed me that Honda Village would not service my vehicle.

Honda Village has never apologized for any of the things I complained to them about. They have never acknowledged doing anything wrong, unless you consider it an “apology” when they paid me the refund I demanded for the warranty which they convinced me to purchase by outright lying to me about its coverage (fraud!).

Their response to my legitimate complaints was not to acknowledge them and try to improve. No, their response has been to continue on with business as usual and refuse to serve me.

Judge for yourself whether this is a business which deserves your patronage.

P.S. I just realized that I never got around to posting what happened after my last letter to Honda Village’s lawyer. So, for those who are curious… Their lawyer sent back a response asserting that the precedents on which I was relying were out-of-date, and citing a newer precedent which he claimed precluded my filing a Chapter 93a claim against Honda Village. After reviewing that newer precedent, I thought he was probably right, and in any case didn’t have any more time to waste on it, so I dropped it.

My wife and I have used them numerous times for many different services, including routine maintenance (e.g., oil and filter), auto-body work, repairing a broken automatic minivan door, and tire repair and replacement.

In all cases they have been friendly, responsive, and affordable and have delivered high-quality work on time.

Here are two examples of how great they are:

1. We needed a couple of body panels repaired and repainted after someone borrowing our minivan ran it into the side of his garage door (d’oh!). Stadium Auto Body said that all of the damaged panels would have to be replaced and gave us an estimate of $2,400. A-Z repaired the existing panels — no replacement parts needed — for only $860. While they were at it, they detailed the interior of the minivan at no extra charge!

2. Herb Chambers Honda said it would cost $400 to fix one of our automatic minivan doors, which was repeatedly sticking when we tried to open or close it. A-Z did the repair for only $169.

In all of our dealings with A-Z, it has felt like they were being completely honest and up-front with us. Not once have we gotten that unpleasant feeling, so common with car-repair places, that they were trying to jack up the price of a repair or sell us something we didn’t need. In short, these guys are great, and we heartily recommend them!

Dear Gov. Patrick (via Fax), Rep. Honan, Rep. Brownsberger, Mayor Menino, and members of the Boston City Council,

I am writing to you all in incensed opposition to the abhorrent plan currently under discussion to close the MBTA’s budget gap by decimating Massachusetts public transportation.

The T’s budget gap is structural, resulting from the Big Dig debt thrust upon it several years ago, coupled with sales tax revenue that was supposed to increase but flattened instead. Drastic cuts in service won’t actually solve the structural issue, they’ll merely postpone it. They are not the answer.

The idea some people seem to have that public transportation should pay for itself is simply absurd. Public transportation is an essential public service, like roads, bridges, police, fire departments, and schools. Do the Commonwealth’s roads and bridges pay for their own maintenance?

I ride the 501 express bus from my neighborhood in Brighton to and from my job downtown nearly every day. No matter what time of day I commute, the bus is full or nearly full. Eliminating this particular route will cause many T riders to start driving to work instead of taking the bus, increasing pollution, traffic, and road maintenance costs. It will also make Brighton a far less attractive and stable neighborhood and damage property values, since easy access is to downtown is a huge plus for professionals looking for a place to live.

Every one of the more than 100 other routes whose elimination is under discussion serves many people whose lives and communities would be similarly impacted by the elimination of their route. This proposal isn’t an answer; it’s a disaster.

The right way to solve the T’s budget woes is actually quite obvious:

• The Legislature should compare how much the T was projected to receive from the 20% cut of sales tax revenue vs. how much it actually received, and pay off that much of the T’s debt, including any debt servicing interest paid on it over the years, from the state’s general fund or rainy day fund.

• The T should raise its fares to make them comparable to fares charged in other cities and should raise them regularly moving forward to keep up with inflation. Some of the fares charged by the T are absurdly low. For example, I pay $89 per month to ride the 501 bus every day, whereas if I drove to work I’d pay a minimum of $265 for parking, not to mention possibly needing to buy and insure a car, as well as paying for gas and increased maintenance. I suspect the T could easily charge 50% more than it’s charging now for the 501 and other express buses and keep most of their riders. I know I’d pay it.

• Other sources of revenue, such as income or sales taxes or even state highway and bridge tolls, should be used to offset any remaining budget gap on a year-by-year basis. To make this politically feasible, the Legislature needs to change the conversation by first educating itself, and then educating the public through a massive public opinion campaign, about the fact that a good public transportation system actually saves the Commonwealth and its citizens money, creates jobs, reduces traffic, protects the environment, and reduces our country’s dependence on foreign oil.

I love living in Boston. However, the parochial mentality which so often seems to dominate how things are done around here frequently prompts me to wonder if I live in a minor town with pretensions of being a major city. Destroying our public transportation system would reinforce that image in many people’s minds. Please don’t let this happen.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

CC: fareproposal@mbta.com

• Banana Triangle
• Birdbrains
• Dog Eat Doug
• F Minus
• Ink Pen
• Luann
• The Other Coast
• Overboard
• Pluggers
• Rubes
• Scary Gary
• Strange Brew

Enjoy!

P.S. If you find the aggregator useful, please consider making a donation. Thanks!

Speaking as a religious Jew, I can assure you that I do not find it “inclusive” or “welcoming” for you to call the tree you’re lighting today a “holiday tree”.

If it were my choice, there would be no religious symbols of any sort on public property. But since that’s never going to happen, at the very least the symbols that are erected to recognize various people’s religious observances should actually recognize those observances, not water them down and engage in ludicrous newspeak to imply they’re something they’re not.

The only December holiday that involves a tree is Christmas. Please call it what it is and stop pandering to a class of people that don’t actually exist. Nobody who’s offended by Christmas trees on public property is mollified by calling them something different.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

To the editor:

Herman Cain was forced out of the campaign by his immoral acts and lies about them, not by liberal ideologues as Joe Fitzgerald claims. Cain’s plummeting poll numbers came from conservatives who might have actually voted for him.

It’s true that other politicians, on both sides of the aisle, have dallied, gotten caught, and emerged with little damage. The difference is not their politics or their race, but rather their reaction to exposure. It’s obvious that Cain is lying through his teeth, and as usual, the coverup was worse than the crime.

As is befitting in an America which is increasingly post-racial, Cain was judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens