Normally when I go for my run, it is late morning, early afternoon, way after the beach has been cleaned up. Yesterday was quite interesting as I saw the trash truck and city crews cleaning up the tons of trash on the beach. It was truly a disgusting site. Granted some people did put stuff in the trash cans, but the park at Crown Point had trash all over it. Can’t people clean up after themselves? It’s a shame our tax dollars have to be used to clean up after slobs.
What part of "no dogs" don’t people understand?
Yesterday I did a 15 mile run on my usual course and started about 8 am (amazing I got out of bed that early). I saw a number of dogs when I started the run and I thought they were violating the no dogs regulation; I later found the sign and it said that after 9 am they were violating the regulation. Even after 9 am, there were a number of dogs there. To top it off, some dogs were off leash which is never permitted. Dogs on the path are just another obstacle I have to avoid. If the regulations were enforced, maybe people would stop bringing their dogs.
I love dogs, but there is a time and a place for them.
$25 to control my air conditioning?
My local electric company, SDGE wants to pay me $25 per year to put a control on my central air conditioning unit that would allow them to turn it off in case of extreme demand. I haven’t used the A/C in the almost 2 years I’ve lived in my house, so this would sound like a great deal. However, what happens if this year I really, really want to spend the insane amount of money to cool my house and it happens to be on the same day there is an extreme energy shortage? I won’t be able to do it. Some of you may be thinking that it would be selfish for me to want to turn on my A/C when there is an energy problem, but I’m entitled to use it once in awhile as I conserve as much as I can all the time. When we first moved in, we have ceiling fans placed throughout the house so we wouldn’t have to turn on the A/C and we have a programmable thermostat so that we only heat the house for a few hours a day when it is cold. While I don’t want to use my air conditioning, I don’t want anyone else to be able to say when I can’t use it. If that makes me a bad person, so be it.
Free email addresses used for business
For years, I’ve had my own domain (next week makes 8 years), so I’ve always had a personalized email address. I fully understand that not everyone is as lucky as me and can’t handle their own email. When I first setup the domain, only Network Solutions existed and you had to get someone to host your website and domain. Since the introduction of different registrars for domain names, domain names are not only cheaper, but in order to win your business companies provide services such as email forwarding. The company I use, GoDaddy charges less than $9 per year for a domain and includes email forwarding. What is email forwarding? Well, it allows people to send email to joe@example.com and have it goto a yahoo.com, gmail.com or whatever email address to make it look more professional. Furthermore, many of the free email providers let you set your return address to be joe@example.com instead of joe123@yahoo.com. So what am I getting at? I’ve dealt with lots of people that use free email addresses (I have no problem with them and even have a few of my own that I rarely use), but to me, it seems that if for $9 a year you can get an email address that doesn’t look free, wouldn’t you do it? Of course this is my opinion and I’m sure some people have valid reasons for using free email addresses for business.
Airlines keep cutting costs much to my dismay
For vacation, my wife and I went to Hawaii (the Big Island of Hawaii) and, of course, took a plane there. Due to when we travelled and booked the flight, our tickets were not cheap, in fact, they were the most expensive tickets I’ve ever purchased. While the cost kind of stung, it was the corners that the airlines are cutting that annoy me. We packed a pretty big bag as I travel with a lot of junk and we never thought about its weight until a few hours before we left when I checked American Airline’s website and found that the weight limit decreased from 70 pounds to 50 pounds per piece of checked luggage. For $25, you could have a 51-75 pound bag or for $50, a 67-100 pound bag. We moved some stuff to another bag and when we got to the airport, it weighed in at 49.5 pounds! On the way back, we got by at exactly 50 pounds. This change in weight limits can’t have anything to do with fuel costs and must be associated with greed, in my opinion. We are each allowed 2 checked bags at 50 pounds each and 1 carry-on at 30 pounds. So, we could have packed 260 pounds of stuff (now that’s a lot of stuff). Instead, we went with 1 checked bag at 50 pounds and 1 carry on at < 30 pounds. If we had stuffed our checked bag, we would have paid extra, but if we took another bag, we could have had an extra 50 pounds of stuff to bring. Does the extra $25 cover worker’s compensation insurance for those lifting the bags? I did see a suitcase with a built in scale on a website recently; must be to avoid the extra fees.
My complaints don’t stop there. On a 5 hour trip from Los Angeles to Kona, Hawaii, they offer to serve us a snack for $5 each. Didn’t I already pay enough for the ticket that they could throw in the snack? I already knew about this before we left, so we picked up sandwiches custom made to what we wanted; granted we paid about $4.50 each for them, but we had fresh sandwiches with whatever we wanted on them.
On the way back, I used frequent flyer miles to upgrade us to first class as it was an overnight flight and I wanted to be comfortable. There we were offered (at no charge) soup and some other things. However, who eats soup at 11 pm? Maybe I should have had it just to get my money’s worth.
I understand that airlines have to make money, but can’t they cut expenses in other ways instead of nickel and diming its customers? I really like flying Southwest because it is an airline that I expect nothing (peanuts and a drink) and am delivered exactly that. Their staff seems always to be friendly (the American staff was also friendly on this trip). In addition, the other passengers seem to have the same feeling on Southwest which makes for a pleasant flight when everyone is happy. Southwest has also managed to make money; granted they do fly different, more profitable routes, than other carriers and bought gas futures awhile ago, but maybe the bigger players can take a few hints.
Product Reviews – is there any value?
Product reviews have been commonplace in magazines, newspapers, on TV, etc. With the increased popularity of the Internet, everyone seems to write reviews on varying topics from products to movies. I’ve even written a review. With all these reviews out there, is there any value to them? That’s, of course, a matter of opinion. Each reviewer has a bias, knows certain facts, has likes and dislikes, and maybe even an axe or two to grind. When I buy things, I typically read a lot of reviews that are all across the board; someone may not like a company because an employee was mean to them, or they could have had a bad experience with a piece of software (one that may only have happened on their machine), or on the other side, the reviewer may have met the author of a piece of software personally and felt a connection.
Years ago (about 10), one of my products was put head to head against a competing product. Both products were decent and the reviewer indicated the strengths and weaknesses of both. In the end, the reviewer said that they were evenly matched; however, the reviewer said this because a feature that my product had, the other product lacked, but the company that made the competing product promised it in a future update. This update never materialized and the reviewer, in my opinion, did a disservice to his readers by reviewing a promise and not what a customer could actually purchase and use. I’m still a bit bitter about this and makes me think even more about reviews I read. Reviews give me an idea of what other people think, but that really doesn’t help me. I need to form my own opinions of a product.
Movie reviews are extremely common and I sometimes glance at them before seeing a movie. My wife and I like the same types of movies, usually action/mystery or comedy (she has a wider range of movie likes than me that includes romance), so we see action movies more than any other type of movie (we don’t watch movies all that often). Before we went to see Firewall, I had looked at the reviews. It got pretty mediocre reviews at best. We both enjoyed the movie. It might not have all the things that Ebert and Roeper think make a great movie, but to us, it was worth the time and money to see the movie (TIP: Costco sells movie tickets for AMC Theatres; 2 for $15 which saves up to $2.50 per ticket).
In another case, I’ve seen reviews of products where the reviewer gave it bad marks because it didn’t do exactly what he wanted it to do; the product never said it would do it, but that didn’t matter.
Product reviews, from software to video cameras, to books to movies won’t be going away anytime soon, but I’d hope that people form their own opinions and don’t just make a buy/watch decision based on what someone else believes.
Free checking
I see that Washington Mutual is offering Free Checking. This is interesting because they’ve been offering it for years; when I moved back to San Diego in 1999, I went to Washington Mutual to get their free checking, but closed my account within days because it wasn’t completely free. I had to pay for checks, something that wasn’t disclosed to me. That annoyed me and so I opened a new account at Bank of America, a bank I’ve been dealing with for years (Oregon and California branches weren’t really linked at the time, so I had to close my Oregon account and open a California account). So now, it looks like Washington Mutual is offering free checks. How nice of them to finally make correct their misleading advertising.
Who designs receipts?
Yesterday, I went to RoadRunner Sports to pick up some stuff for running (in case you haven’t guessed, I’m in training for a marathon; my first marathon to prove to myself that I can do it). I had a coupon for $10 and after checking out, I walked outside, looked at the receipt and scratched my head. Normally receipts have several columns including description, quantity, unit price and extended price. In my experience they also take discounts off at the end. Not here. They had description, quantity and unit price. So if you add up the price column, it will only be correct if you bought one of each item, which I didn’t. To confuse matters, my $10 discount wasn’t taken off at the end, it was taken off the first item. My first item was PowerBar Gel stuff with a price listed as -$2.10. I had to go back in and get this explained to me. What the computer did is take the total cost of the item (3 @ $1.23) and then subtract off $10 and divide by quantity to give -$2.10 each.
That’s just not logical; I guess most people don’t look at their receipts as close as I do or this would be a bigger issue for them having to waste time explaining it to customers.
Hassle free coin counting
I’ve seen those Coinstar machines at the grocery store and always thought it is ridiculous to pay 8.9% of what’s counted for convenience. Recently I saw an ad or heard an ad indicating that there was a no-fee way to get your coins counted by the machine. I checked the website this morning and found that if you get a gift certificate to Amazon.com or some other places, there is no-fee. I figured that we regularly buy stuff from Amazon, so it just made it more convenient for me to get rid of the pile of change we had on our counter in a plastic counter. Turns out we had $92.46 of change! Now what should I get from Amazon?
Usability of ATMs
Bank of America has had the a very ugly user interface for its ATMs for years. It is text based and while usable, it just isn’t pretty. Several years back they changed it into a snazzy graphical interface and then for some reason, pulled it from the ATMs. I actually went into the bank and complained. I wasn’t the only one that complained. However, one thing that has bugged me for years is that after you put in your card, you had to select between English or Spanish. Don’t you think they could store the 1 bit of information in the system what I selected last time? While they still don’t remember the preference, they now don’t make you choose on a separate screen; instead after you enter your PIN you press the English confirmation or the Spanish confirmation button.
Would a prettier user interface help? I don’t know, but I thought the pictures were neat. Maybe they reverted in order to comply with the ADA act (the ATM do have a headset jack for visually impaired people).