Getting dugg
May 29, 2006
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Vicious Vonage
May 25, 2006
Just sending this out as a warning to anyone who considers signing up for Vonage. I’ve had the service since August and honestly, it was pretty good. Over the last month or so, however, the quality has been degrading considerably and so I attempted on several occasions to contact customer support.
That didn’t go well. Hold times are frequently in excess of 45 minutes to an hour, and once connected the support representatives are completely clueless with regard to problems with service. They’ll offer to send you to Tier 2 support, which means another half hour or so of holding. Once there, you’re just as likely as anything to be told that the problem lies with your ISP and to try it again later.
On the 24th, I signed up for SoftPhone, Vonage’s PC-based additional line service. The login credentials provided to me were incorrect and as such, I never used the service. I called again and was on hold for 90 minutes before I gave up. I called back this morning to cancel my account.
Cancellation is the worst part of using Vonage. If you cancel within a year of signing up (and believe me, you will) you’re charged a $39.99 disconnection fee. And despite the fact that it never worked, I was stuck with the $9.99 SoftPhone activation fee and $9.99 for the first month of SoftPhone service. Additionally, despite the fact that I’d recently paid for service on my main line ($14.99) and a fax line ($9.99), Vonage doesn’t offer any credits for unused service when an account is cancelled.
Bad product, bad service, bad policies. And with landlines from real phone providers like BellSouth as low as $15 now, there’s really no longer any reason to try it.
Vonage’s service is a costly gamble. I loved it when it worked, but when it goes bad, it goes really bad. If you’re aching to try IP telephony, get hooked up with a provider that doesn’t keep you in a chokehold. If you thought cell companies were bad about managing your account, you’ll be singing their praises once you get a taste of Vonage.
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Ant Farm
May 24, 2006
There is a bug stuck inside my Cinema Display. I never realized that the image of what’s displayed on an LCD is actually projected up onto the top glass surface. The bug can crawl deeper into the picture, looking translucent and barely visible, or right up to the surface where it’s so noticeable that I still fight the urge to swat it off the screen. I have no idea how to get him out, so for now I just have to hope that when he dies, he’ll die off-screen, Leo McGarry-style. Credit to Keegan for giving me the idea to film it.
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Me
May 9, 2006
Apparently I haven’t been posting enough recently for some people, so in the spirit of “use it or lose it,” I’m writing just to recap what I’ve been doing recently in all the time I haven’t spent writing about, I don’t know, tv commercials or whatever.
The business is keeping me very busy, with my main client providing a fertile ground for new design. In the past few weeks, some of what I’ve done is arguably the best work I’ve ever done. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about that, and just hope it keeps getting better.
Working from home is amazing. While I loved working with the people back in the office, waking up at 7:00 and starting work at 7:07 is a great feeling. My family probably wishes that I’d shower more often, but for the most part I think we’re all happy that I’m able to spend more time at home.
I’ve been taking pictures of myself for Moustache May and feeling awestruck at the amount of moustached, talented photographers participating. My peach fuzz and amateur hand are no match for most of them, but it’s a great deal of fun to participate all the same. The concept just works because of how downright cool everyone participating really is.
I bought my mom a Mac mini and have been monopolizing it for now while I patiently wait for Intel-based Power Macs (or Mac Pros, or Pro Macs, or whatever they’ll be called now that we’re stripping the word “Power” out of everything at Apple). I’d never considered a Mac mini before, but I feel like if I had an Intel-native copy of Photoshop, this thing could actually be my primary work machine. I’ve also spent way too much of my free time playing The Sims 2 (yes, I linked to the Mac version; take that) now that I have a system capable of running it. The Intel GMA 950 video chip in the Mac mini sucks for 3D games, yes, but for the kind of thing that keeps me glued to the screen, it does just great (and it plays 1080p QuickTime
, which is something else I’ve never seen before … particularly not on a screen as nice as my Cinema HD Display).
I’m enjoying being in Alabama again and spending time with the family. As much as I swore I’d never come back here when I left for college, the longer I’m back the more I can see myself calling Alabama home for a long time to come. It gets a bad rap, but for the most part it’s got everything and more you could want from a state like, say, Maryland. Without the scary scary scary crime.
So, that’s about it. The past two weeks, in a nutshell. More later, when, or if, I actually do anything.
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Get a Mac
May 2, 2006
Today Apple launched its latest campaign, simply titled Get a Mac. The television ads are genius, incorporating some of the visual style of the “Switch” campaign with much clearer, better defined subjects and goals. The inclusion of genius humorist and Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman really sends it over the top. The new ads are so great, I had to include a mention here rather than in the Etc. list. Check them out.
