I recently attempted to buy a couple pairs of jeans from Sears through their Web site, an attempt which failed spectacularly, as did my attempts to get Sears to fix it. Also, it turns out that not only does Sears spam people who order through their Web site, but they keep doing it after they’ve… Read More »
The Perkins School for the Blind used to be on the list of charitable organizations which my wife and I support. At some point I donated to them on-line through their Web site, providing my email address at that time so that they could send a receipt via email. They subsequently used that address to… Read More »
In my ongoing quest to find a brick-and-mortar or Web merchant from which I can easily and conveniently buy Levi’s jeans in my size, I decided to try going right to the source: www.levisstore.com.
A few days ago, I flew off the handle and attacked someone on the jewish-boston mailing list for a comment which was meant in jest and which I incorrectly took seriously. I was helped to see the error of my ways by some very polite people, and this morning I sent this apology to the… Read More »
My loyal readers may recall my previous complaint about HP’s bungled attempt to support the Mac with its C5280 all-in-one printer. Unfortunately, my difficulties with this printer didn’t end there. Below is the letter I recently sent to HP’s CEO about the ongoing saga of my attempt to completely the presumably simple task of purchasing… Read More »
Just sent this letter to Citizens Bank. Not holding my breath for any sort of meaningful response, but what the heck… Dana Drago Vice Chairman, Retail and Business Banking Citizens Bank One Citizens Plaza Providence, RI 02903 Dear Ms. Drago, I am writing to bring to your attention a serious deficiency in Citizens Bank’s Internet… Read More »
A common complaint of users of Windows Mobile devices is “ghost alarms.” One manifestation of this problem is when a periodic alarm scheduled by the clock application keeps triggering even when it has been disabled in the application, such that there appears to be no way to make it stop. Another manifestation is when multiple… Read More »
After AT&T acquired Cingular, they released a software upgrade for the 8525, one of their Windows Mobile devices. In the upgrade, they added an extraordinarily annoying boot-time animation to the phone. When you power on, you see an animated picture of the Cingular “flying bars” and then the AT&T logo. It wouldn’t bo so bad… Read More »
At around 3:21pm US/Eastern on November 4, 2007, a zombie botnet began a dictionary spam attack against one of the domains I host. zombie botnet — a group of PCs that have been broken into by a hacker and turned into “zombies,” i.e., PCs over which the hacker now has control, so that he can… Read More »
Recently, I needed to set up a chroot environment for an ssh user on one of my Linux machines. That is, when this user logged into the machine, I needed it to be trapped inside a chroot “jail”, i.e., a sub-hierarchy within the filesystem, such that it would only have access to the files within… Read More »