KnoBlog

I took my car in for an oil change and tire rotation today, the "recommended service" according to the car's trip computer.  The place I went to, Hogan & Sons in Falls Church, sent me an email coupon for a $15.95 oil change because I had been there before and signed up for their email list.  I went in at 2:00PM, there was hardly anyone there, they said they could get it done by 3:00PM.

First surprise: Honda recommends 5W20 oil, but their $15.95 oil change only includes 5W30 oil.  Where does it say that on the coupon?  They don't.  They said the recommended oil is $7 more.  Not a big deal, but I told them that for the price they want to charge, I can go to Jiffy Lube down the street with a $5 coupon and have it done in half the time.  Ok, they said, they would throw in the tire rotation.  Total estimate: $28 and change after fees and taxes.

I had my son with me, so we took a walk.  At 2:55, they call me and said that the transmission fluid needs changing, and according to the manufacturer's recommended 30K mile service, the cabin air filter needs changing as well.  Second surprise: they quote me a total of over $400 for all of the services.  That's the oil change, (free) tire rotation, motor air filter, cabin air filter, and transmission fluid.

Now let's break it down: $71 and change for the motor air filter ($40 for the filter and $31 labor), $100 and change for the cabin air filter ($33 for the filter and $67 for labor, "the glove box needs to be removed", they said), and $159 for the transmission fluid change, not including the taxes and fluid disposal fee.  I said forget it, just do the oil change and tire rotation.

They didn't call when the car was done, but we got back to the shop at 3:15 and it was done.  Ok, great.  I paid, put my son in the car, then drove the few minutes to the Advance Auto and picked up both air filters for $33.  After getting home, the motor air filter took just a few minutes to swap out.  I had to do a little Internet research to figure out how to pop out the glove box, but once I found the information, it took me just 10 minutes to swap out the filter.

So let's do the math.  What do they charge for labor at the service shop these days, $40/hr?  If I did both air filter swaps in 15 minutes total, (and I hardly know anything about cars) that should be $10 in labor costs.  Besides the fact that the filters were overpriced by 100%, there is no way they should be charging nearly an hour labor for the car air filter, and nearly two hours for the cabin air filter.  That's just ridiculous, since they should have the experience and tools to do the job even faster than I could.

I guess it pays to be not only an informed consumer, but also be a little handy, because I saved $140 today.  I can't feel ripped off since I avoided paying for the overpriced service, but I can't help but think of all the people who do pay for these services because they don't know how to turn a few screws or how to do the research to do a simple filter replacement.

Now the transmission fluid I'm probably not going to do myself, at least not in the middle of winter.  But now I'm going to shop around.

Apparently the same LED traffic signals that are more efficient and generate less heat can create a potential deadly problem in areas that get a lot of snow.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-led-traffic-lights-29-dec29,0,3473513.story

Ok, come on Verizon.  You have a great network, and everyone knows it.  You are coming out with a great new phone, the Motorola Droid, and it's getting generally positive reviews all around.  Then you go ahead and pull this crap.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/181590/verizon_droid_tethering_will_cost_you.html

"Verizon seems to be doing everything it can to make the Droid as
unappealing as possible by nickel and diming customers so that actually
using it is not cost-effective."

That certainly sums it up.  Would I actually use 5GB/month?  Doubt it.  But Verizon, this is simply not customer-friendly.  You just lost a heap of goodwill that you have been building up with the release of the new phone and the generally positive press and reviews.  Whereas I was seriously considering upgrading to Droid in the very near future, this article certainly made me think twice.

I just read that in May, WinZip introduced a .zipx format that produces smaller files than .zip.  In this day of terabyte hard drives and high-speed internet, unless the savings is on the order of 50%, I wonder if anyone cares.  Once a standard is established, compatibility is more important, which is why most people still use .doc format for sharing word processing files instead of .docx that was introduced by Microsoft more than two years ago.

If I just bought a 2GB MicroSD memory card for $5.99 at retail, why do cell phones still only come with 128MB of flash?  Phone manufacturers are charging hundreds of dollars for these phones, but making us buy extra storage card for storing music, podcasts, etc.  Apple got it right with the iPhone as far as offering 4GB and 8GB (and now 16GB versions).  These days flash is so cheap that there is just no excuse for other manufacturers not to build at least a couple GB right into the phones.

A few weeks ago I got an oil change at a local Hogan & Sons service station.  They were having a promotion that if you sign up for their email list, you get a $10 oil change.  So I signed up.

They emailed me their $10 coupon a couple days later, but the deadline to redeem it is 60 days from the date of the email.  Now since everyone has been taught to go 3 months or 3000 miles between oil changes (and in our case it's usually longer since we work at home and don't rack up the miles) this seems to be a deliberate attempt to either force you to get the oil change a month sooner than you want, or just a completely disingenuous offer because most people just won't use it.  I think such an offer erodes the goodwill that the company was hoping to build through the promotion, and I wish they would have given it a bit more thought before slapping such a silly deadline on it.

Will I go back to Hogan & Sons?  Most likely, since their discounted oil changes (with coupon) are still $10 cheaper than the Jiffy Lube.  But a simple change to their marketing could have also served to build goodwill, and that could have more than made up for any difference in revenue through additional services sold and/or additional referrals that I might have sent to them.

It seems we have been too generous with our software update policy.  For a long time we would let people continue using our software with their license as long as the internal "release date" in the software was within a year of their purchase date.  We were also very slack on updating the internal release date, allowing lots of free maintenance releases, and therefore depriving ourselves of much-needed revenue.

Since we lost a big client last summer, times have been tough, and we need the upgrade revenue from our old customers.  Normally, when a quote service changed their web site, we would continue updating the quote service parameters so the old software would still work.  This week, after Yahoo changed their web site yet again, I thought it was time to try a different approach, especially with customers who have not paid anything for several years: as gently as I could, I am asking customers to upgrade to the latest release.  In other words, it's time to pay up.

As much as I would like to continue supporting our old customers indefinitely, we just can't afford it any more.  I'm a customer too, of other companies, and I hate being on the upgrade treadmill as much as anyone, but there are just some products that are too important to me to be without, and I'm hoping that applies for our customers as well.  I want to support customers who support us, and we don't charge so much for our software that customers can't afford to pay a little every year.

A few days ago I got an email from a friend of mine, a flying buddy from my radio control hobby/addiction, who said that his credit card had been compromised and several mysterious charges have shown up. He also referred me to a thread on WattFlyer, which is one of the discussion forums for electric flight, but not as popular as RC Groups, which is where I usually hang out.  The people in the thread on WattFlyer had narrowed it down to a particular hobby supplier, FMA Direct, which sells some very popular RC battery chargers, batteries, and accessories among other things. I checked RC Groups and decided that since there has not been any discussion of this, perhaps people were not aware, so I made a couple of posts to the forums there, one in the batteries and chargers forum and one in the vendor discussion forum.  I just warned people to read the thread on WattFlyer and check their credit card statements for suspicious activity.

What I didn't realize is what a storm of activity my posts would set off: in the last two days my threads have had more than 150 posts, mostly from people similarly affected, and 3000 views.  Also, except for a couple people who contacted them directly, FMA was not aware of the extent of the problem, so these threads also served to generate a response from the company.

Now as is typical in such situations, sometimes the blame falls on the wrong shoulders.  This incident has led some people to say that they will not purchase from FMA again, or until they are assured that the leak is plugged, but those people don't understand that a credit card number, especially from an online purchase, travels through many different places before the card actually gets charged.  The vendors, the web hosts, the credit card interface, the credit card clearinghouse, and finally the credit card company.  There are many possible places where the breach could have occurred, and right now there is not enough information to pinpoint the leak and fix it.

I'm sure this will have some effect on FMA's sales in the short term, but hopefully people will realize that it's likely not FMA's fault and continue to buy their chargers and batteries.  The important thing is that FMA and their web hosts take all possible steps to prevent this from happening in the future, which it seems like they are in the process of doing.  This is the most important thing to instill confidence in their repeat customers.

I've had an Amazon.com Visa card for a number of years now.  I was recently invited to "upgrade" my card to one that gives more reward points for certain shopping categories.  They also said that I would not have to change my account number, which is convenient since I have some automated billing going to that card.   I said, great, sign me up!

So today I got my card, except it wasn't my card.  The bank screwed up; they sent the right letter to the right person with the wrong card attached.  Of course this means that someone else probably got my card!  These days, you just never know, so I immediately called customer service and was connected to the security department.  After verifying my information they said the only thing they could do was to close my current account and open a new one with the new card number, and transfer everything over.  Great.  Of course since this is my most-used card, now I have to use another card while I wait for the new card to arrive, and I can't transfer the automatic payments that get made on this card until I have my new card.  Plus, since I haven't been receiving paper statements for a year, now I can't even access my online statements from the old account and have to have customer service send me copies of those.  What a pain in the ass!  I have a feeling that I will be making several more calls to customer service as well to have them fix this problem.  All because they sent me the wrong card.

Ok, this whole "purchasing green credits" to offset your carbon emissions is getting ridiculous.  Now even REI is getting into the act, saying that they purchase "Green Tags" to offset all aspects of their customers trips taken with REI.

Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly support "green projects" such as wind, wave, and solar power generation, I even own stock in one of the top solar cell producers in the world, but this whole practice of purchasing "green credits" is nothing more than trying to make ourselves feel good about our pollution.

Let's face it, there is really no shortage of investment in green companies these days.  Venture capitalists have long been investing in these projects, and believe me they put a lot more money into it that we ever could.

If you want to support solar, wind, and other green energy projects, then let's call that what it is and send them a donation, just remember it's probably not tax-deductible.   But if you actually want to reduce your carbon footprint, then take steps to reduce your carbon footprint.  Drive more fuel-efficient cars (or bike/walk to work), change to more efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs, add insulation to your house so you're not using so much electricity/oil/natural gas to heat it.  That's going to be a lot more effective than supporting companies who take a little off the top (don't forget "management fees") and spread the rest around.

Here's another tale in my adventures with contractors.  This time we needed an old outdoor hot tub removed, and the privacy fence that was next to it.  It never worked since we bought the house and would have been too expensive to fix.  I got some estimates from the "big" junk removal companies, then went with a small local guy who posted on craigslist.  I like dealing with small businesses in cases like this since I am one.

I got a very good price from them for the removal, and a guy (not the owner of the company with whom I spoke the previous day) showed up the very next morning to start the job.  He got the fence cut down in a half hour then got to work on the hot tub.  Once he got it drained he was able to use a lever to put it on its side. At this point it tipped over and fell on our Carrier AC unit that we just got installed a year ago, putting a dent in it and causing some of the paint to flake off, leaving the metal exposed.

The owner showed up with another guy about 10 minutes later and was very apologetic about the accident.  Fortunately it didn't seem to affect anything mechanically, so I was willing to live with the small dent as long as the paint got touched up in a timely manner so the metal wouldn't rust.  Since this was already the end of the week, I was promised this would happen early the following week.  He also offered to take away the small pile of rotten wood we had sitting in the back for free.

Unfortunately I did not hear anything back and called the owner on Thursday or Friday.  He was surprised to hear that nothing had happened because he told his painter to come over and take care of it. Over the course of the next week we played phone tag and I got promises on two or three occasions that someone would be over in just a few
hours, but no one showed up.  Then my phone calls stopped being returned (I was actually restraining myself and calling only once a day until yesterday, when I called twice).

I got pretty pissed off last night (after two weeks of no follow-up, mind you) and did a Google search for the company, then posted comments in three places that allowed comments or reviews.  I posted as factual an account as I could given the limited space.  I figured they might actually see it.

Ok, granted I could have gone to Home Depot, spent $5 on a can of Rustoleum, and had this thing touched up in a half hour, but at this point it was really the principle of the thing.  I just hate being jerked around.

This morning I got an email from the owners wife (who does their Internet marketing) and a bit later a phone call from the owner saying that he will be here in an hour.  True to his word, he was here,touched up the metal with some Rustoleum, and took away the rotten wood as promised.  Plus he gave me a coupon for a free haulaway of a fridge or couch.

So what have we learned from this experience?  First, I think that we both learned that no matter how big and strong the employee looks, it's probably not a good idea to let him move anything as big as a hot tub by himself.  Waiting 10 minutes for the owner and other guy to show up would have avoided the whole accident in the first place.  Second, I learned that it's not a good idea tomake full payment on a job if there is still work to be done.  That was my mistake, and I should have held back at least a portion of the payment until the touch up was done.  Third, I think we were reminded that expectation management is so vitally important to customer relations.  If you say that you are going to show up at a given time, then show up or at least follow up with a phone call to say why you are not showing up.  Otherwise you are wasting my time and trying my patience.

I can see now how the old marketing adage of "a happy customer tells one person, an unhappy customer tells ten" can certainly be true.

So many people trust their firewall software, but what if the firewall software is preventing your other software from running properly?

Case in point: some older versions of Norton Personal Firewall will allow our software to access the Internet on a customer's machine after the user answers "yes" to the allow/deny dialog that pops up, but if our software is upgraded on that very same machine, Norton will not allow our software to access the Internet and does not even pop up the allow/deny dialog again.  The customer things that our software has stopped working, when it's Norton blocking the connection.

Case in point: some firewalls will deny our software access to our own web sites (but allow access to more popular sites such as microsoft.com) without popping up any kind of dialog alerting customers to that fact, so again our software appears to be broken.

These kinds of problems just cause headaches for customers and waste our time trying to track them down and figure out workarounds.  The process is especially difficult for customers who may not be as experienced with computers.  Customers mistakenly think that they have to disable their firewall software in order to get our software to work on their machines, when it is only necessary to learn how to use it properly.  We can only hope that the firewall software vendors make it easier for their customers to diagnose these kinds of problems (by providing proper feedback) and to fix them (by making the interface easier to understand).

We visited Niagara Falls, Canada recently, and an interesting thing happened.  Since this was the first time we had traveled out of the country with our boy, we had not even considered bringing any kind of identification with us to prove that he was ours.  The customs agent on the Canadian side asked about a birth certificate or any kind of identification, and after a little scrutiny let us through with a reminder to bring it next time.  At that point I was thinking... ok, how are we going to get back into the US?

Apparently getting into the US is not a problem, as the customs agent on the US side on didn't even ask about the child, and I think we were all a bit surprised by that.  So what does that imply exactly?  If I leave without a child and I come back with one, as long as he isn't screaming that's ok?

I guess we didn't look suspicious enough.  But that does bring up an interesting point, and this is something I obviously don't know since I'm not in the business: what kind of training do the border agents get in identifying suspicious characters?  A few years ago one of our relatives was temporarily detained coming back into the US from Canada, possibly because he has dark skin, a mustache, and speaks with an accent.  I don't know if they are racially profiling, but the guy is Russian, not Middle Eastern.

How much of what border security does is just for show?  Sure, they swipe your passport and look on their screens, but unless the computer tells them to detain you, are they really experienced enough to recognize a real threat?

Very interesting article in Newsweek.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/151758

More silliness from PHP.  This comes from my business partner, Yermo.

<?php

$retval = "eventdone";

if ( $retval != true )
   print "retval is not true\n";
else
  print "retval is true";

?>

PHP 5.2.5 under RedHat Linux yields "retval is not true".
PHP 5.2.4 under Kubuntu Hardy Heron yields "retval is true".