A friend of mine (thanks Bruce!) pointed me at a totally cool personal file sharing service called Dropbox. In a nutshell, Dropbox smartly and automatically synchronizes a hierarchy of folders among any number of Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs and iPhones. All of the synchronized changes are automatically backed up on Dropbox’s servers, and you… Read More »
Last November, I posted on my blog a copy of a letter which I faxed to Congressman Robert Wexler, in which I chastised him for giving my email address (which I gave him when I made a donation to his campaign, so that he could send me a receipt) to another politician’s campaign and demanded… Read More »
(Simulblogged at universalhub.com.) The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a convoluted(*) unemployment insurance system, under which employers are required to make various quarterly and annual filings and quarterly payments involving at least two different state agencies. This system is administered by the Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA), who decided to replace their old, paper-based system with… Read More »
I am an email pack-rat. I have saved just about every email message I’ve sent or received at work or at home in the past twenty years (excluding messages sent to public mailing lists). That’s a lot of email, over 400,000 messages. I don’t just do this for the heck of it. I look for… Read More »
Around twenty years ago when I was at MIT, I spent far more hours than I care to contemplate combating anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist and anti-Israel propaganda on Usenet. This was back before the Web took off, and Usenet was the happening place for bigots, racists and nutjobs of all sort to spread their filth and lies. … Read More »
I file my email in different IMAP folders, grouped by topic rather than the “received messages in one folder, sent in another” model imposed nowadays by most mail clients. It’s easy to keep the messages I receive organized by topic — when I’m done handling a message, I simply move it into the appropriate folder.… Read More »
I’ve been using Vonage for telephone service for a couple of months, and I’m quite happy with it. Their feature set is quite competitive, and I’m paying them significantly less than I’d be paying Verizon, Comcast or RCN for equivalent service. (Shameless plug: if you’d like to give Vonage a try, send me email and… Read More »
Today, I received a commercial email message from Sears Home Services, a.k.a., Sears Holdings Corporation. They got my email address when I made a service appointment through their Web site, which I subsequently canceled when it became clear that they were going to charge me more than a local repair man. The email message contained… Read More »
I just sent the following email message to Mark G. Ackermann, the President and CEO of Lighthouse International: Dear Mr. Ackermann, I am taking the unusual step of writing to you because my efforts to get this issue resolved “through channels” for over two years have failed. In a nutshell, I have asked Lighthouse International… Read More »
In response to my recent letter to Comcast, I received a call from a friendly woman named Nancy in Comcast’s New England executive customer care office. The call went pretty much how I expected. She had read my letter and understood what I was upset about, but she let me vent at her about the… Read More »