Marc's Musings Reality from Marc's point of view!

As promised, here is my final entry for my insulation experience with Wilson Insulation. January 12 they arrived as promised (this entry is a little delayed… hey I’ve been busy). They didn’t have an official dam to protect my master bedroom attic hatch access so they constructed one out of some kind of insulation board.

I’m not exactly sure how I’ll be getting into and out of the attic but I presume I’ll figure out the required technique when the time comes.

Overall I have to say I’m satisfied. There were some miscues between the sales and the install folks. These could be related to the time of year, vacations and other seasonal thoughts keeping folks from being as focused as they maybe could be. But they made the effort to ensure that my concerns were addressed and they were prompt and courteous. I would use them again if I had to start all over.

So Wilson Insulation gets a “Thumbs up” from me!

Posted under Retail Experiences

I have been playing with this software for a while now. But I have found no channels for sending them feedback. So today I left the following comment in their blog post regarding their upcoming 2.0 release:

I don’t see any way to find what new features will be released with the newer version.

There does not seem to be any way to send you feedback on the product? I’ve been through the website a couple of times. Am I just missing your feedback arena?

It has excellent potential but major shortcomings:

- Need to be able to shut it up (the same way I can get my ringer to be silent by hitting the volume key) for situations where it starts reading a message and I’m focused on something else. Or if I leave the status announcement on. I’ve had it interrupt conversations in stores announcing that it’s figured out that I’m not driving anymore. This would be fine if I could just shut it up for that one announcement.

- Need to be able to discriminate between messages. I’d like to have the option to ONLY read Level 1 email messages and all texts. If you want to create a separate filter system or allow more granular discrimination, that would be great too. Allowing profiles to control this would make sense.

- Licensing is unclear – It implies that purchase applies only for life of device. Most products you pay one fee for all minor version upgrades regardless of devices. I’m a BES admin and go through devices rather too frequently to have to re-purchase all my software on a per device basis.

- Would be nice if it could parse canonicalized names and just read out the common name for folks on a corporate BES.

- Would be nice if there could be option where it won’t read non words (those with numbers? Those in blacklist?). I receive plenty of important automated notifications and would love to not have to listen to the Lotus Notes generated monitor numbers – they take a while to read out.

I think there is tremendous potential for the product but I also need it to be a bit more friendly to my needs before I invest in it.

Thanks!

Marc

Posted under Tech Stuff

This past Saturday I purchased some software over the Internet (yes, I actually *do* pay for my software..). As part of the transaction I elected to use my VISA card.

Once I had entered the credit card information and clicked “Submit” a curious screen came up purporting to be some kind of confirmation screen. Among other details that it wanted to collect were the last 4 digits of my social security number. Being a reasonably aware netizen I decided that this was too hokey for me and elected to cancel the transaction. I knew that it was *probably* legitimate, but quite frankly I was not feeling too comfortable giving out additional info like that for a simple $30 purchase. I finished the transaction using paypal instead.

Well, fast forward to yesterday (Thursday) and my wife calls me. She was trying to make a purchase for yet more greeting cards and the $5 transaction had been declined by the credit card company. I checked online and my account wouldn’t show up on it’s secured web site so I called Chase (my VISA card brand owner) and found that the decision to cancel out of the transaction had flagged my account 5 days later as a potential fraud risk. I spoke with the fraud rep and they cleared everything up and I was able to use the card to buy gas on the way home an hour or so later.

Checking my online status this morning finds that the account is still missing from the Chase web site. So I called them up and they tell me that the account likely won’t show up for a few more days due to it’s “fraud status”. They ever so kindly offered me a new card that I could use right away (preapproved for a whole $500!) that I could cancel once my other card was up and running. Not sure how they’d get it to me in any kind of relevant time frame.

Anyway, the lessons learned from this:

• If anyone asks for any amount of information regarding your credit card online, just give it to them
• If your card information is stolen online, apparently the thieves have nearly a week to use it
• As fast as the fraud alert is at being set on your account, it’s apparently just as fast at being removed.

This isn’t crippling, just annoying. I use the online credit card information regularly to verify that no weird purchases are being made and to confirm that expected purchases have been made successfully. It’s odd that it takes SO long for a fraud alert to be triggered and then, once that happens, the best tool at my disposal for reviewing and validating purchases is disabled.

Color me not impressed.

Posted under Retail Experiences