Porter Airlines: Great Flying Experience, Crappy Website. Does This Matter?
My message to Porter today sums it up: Your site has sent me 85 flight reminder messages so far about my flight tomorrow, starting at 7am today and continuing approximately one every 2-3 minutes. Please fix this. There are a few other problems with your site: Online checkin required two attempts, with no apparent cause [...]
Rogers Wireless’ website blows
The one good thing about Rogers Wireless’ really shitty customer service is that waiting on hold gives me time to take snapshots of their non-functioning website — the reason that I’m waiting on hold in the first place — and blog about it: I’ve been trying to change my price plan online for 3 days [...]
PM Hell
Every once in a while, I run up against a project manager on a client project who seems to be there just to make my life hell. Usually I just let this roll off me since it’s only a temporary condition — that’s part of why I work as an independent, after all — but [...]
Don’t fuck with my finances
We all know that Intuit (the maker of Quicken) treats its customers like crap, yet there are few alternatives for a Canadian wanting to maintain proper personal financial records, especially when they are multi-currency. I’m sure that Microsoft Money would also do this, but the time spent converting my 10+ years of records just doesn’t [...]
The Great Canadian Rip-off
In case there’s any doubt that we’re being ripped off by retailers here in Canada, I went looking for a hard drive upgrade for my laptop today. On the HP US site, it’s $US237.50: On the HP Canada site, it’s $C318: However, a deposit of $US funds to my bank account earlier today showed that [...]
Screwed 2.0
You know that a Web 2.0 company is likely in trouble when their new and improved monetization scheme is to nuke their free basic accounts without notice, holding their users’ data hostage pending a signup to a paid premium account. That’s exactly what happened today with Eventbrite, an event registration service that I’ve used in [...]
Your dictionary is your friend (especially for the illiterate)
I just had an interesting exchange over on my business blog. I wrote a post that someone from a vendor disagreed with (it was a bit controversial in areas), and he called my statements “vacuous” in a public comment on the post. I emailed privately to him and said that I found “vacuous” to be [...]
Payments with PayPal personal
When I first signed up for a PayPal personal account, I couldn’t receive payments from credit cards (no problem) and it was free to receive payments funded from someone’s bank account. Presumably, PayPal made their money because I was also using their service to buy things online from companies with business accounts (like my wine [...]
The internet Darwin awards
The Darwin awards pay tribute to people who manage to find themselves dead through their own stupidity: a voluntary, yet accidental, culling of the herd. I think that it’s time for the internet Darwin awards, for people who behave so stupidly online that they eventually go up in (virtual) flames. A recent case of this [...]
mesh: a conference by, for and featuring white men
Last year, there was a certain amount of noise about the fact that the mesh organizers managed to find only a tiny number of women speakers — 6 out of 50, or some such ridiculous ratio — and this year is not shaping up to be any better, with exactly zero women keynote speakers. It [...]
