I’ve been a member of DVD-rental service Zip.ca for a few years now, and generally like their service - with a few exceptions, mostly around their deeply skewed ship-ranking system (I have six months worth of data to process and eventually write up into an article) and their horrendously Web site (which usually comes from slow servers). Going to Zip.ca, finding a movie, and adding it to my account should be a fast process, right? Since day one as a Zip.ca customer, I’ve found their servers to be slow - it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to wait 10 to 20 seconds for a search result to come back, then another 10 to 20 seconds for the movie page to be displayed - thank goodness they use an AJAX-type solution for adding movies to the cart so that part of the process was quick. The server slowness was consistent: it didn’t matter if I visited at 9am or 11pm, a week-day or a weekend, from home or from a different country. It was always slow. I did the usual things a geek would do: tracerts, pings, etc. It always came back to the same thing: the Zip.ca servers were sluggish. I stared at this message frequently:

Every couple of months I’d send an email to Zip.ca customer service, complaining about the issue and asking them to invest in a better server infrastructure to make using their site more pleasant. I’d get the usual service drone responses promoting their “continued improvement” but nothing ever changed. I decided to kick things up a notch: I wrote separate letters to Rick Anderson, President & CEO of Zip.ca, and Kelvin Osborn, Director of Product Design. In these letters I detailed my complaints with Zip.ca related to their slow servers, informing them both that after several years of putting up with their poor level of service I was placing my account on hold as my way of protesting their lack of improvements in this specific area. I’m just one of thousands of Zip.ca customers, but my hope was that if I made my voice heard they’d realize that I likely wasn’t the only one unhappy with their Web site speed. I also submitted my complaint to Zip.ca customer service.

Guess what happened? Almost nothing. Kelvin Osborn sent me an email informing me that he agreed the Web site experience wasn’t as good as it could be, and they had resources dedicated to addressing this issue - and that I should see the work go live in “the next couple of weeks”. That was the first week of June. Amazingly (and, yes, this really surprised me), I received no response from Rick Anderson’s office, or from Zip.ca customer service. The few occasions when I’ve gone the extra mile to write a letter to the head of an organization, I’ve always heard back from their office - even if it’s just a letter filled with empty platitudes. The fact that neither the President & CEO, nor the customer service department, replied to my concerns in any way is extremely telling in terms of how Zip.ca perceives their relationship with their customs. Mr. Osborn seems to be the only one of the three that I contacted that felt I was worth responding to.

I was planning on re-upping my service sometime in the fall, because I really do like the service they provide even if I’m not happy with how fast they provide it, but something happened this week that made me re-think that. Check out the email I received this week:

Yes, that’s right, they sent my account password over an unsecured email - a completely idiotic thing to do. The only time a company should send a password over email to a customer is when the customer has forgotten their password and they need it sent over email so they can log into their account and change it. I’m not surprised when Joe Average computer user sends passwords, and even credit card numbers, over email, but for a business to do that is another story. I’d say that Zip.ca should know better, but given my experience with them over the past few months, they just don’t seem to care about what they do to their customers.

I’ve been hearing about OpenID, and it seems like a good idea in theory - so I thought I’d check it out. I head on over to the OpenID site, and I click on the “Get an OpenID” link. I’m taken to a page that says the following:

“Surprise! You may already have one. If you use any of the following services, you already have your own OpenID:”

One of the sites they list is Smugmug (username.smugmug.com), where my username is jasondunn. So my OpenID should be jasondunn, right? Ok, so how do I manage it? I head over to myOpenID, and I click on the “Sign In To Your Account” link, because the main OpenID site told me that if I’m signed up with Smugmug I already have an OpenID. I try logging in with my Smugmug username and password, and that doesn’t work. So I decide to create a new OpenID account from scratch, which I complete successfully using the username jasondunn. So how could I take that username if it was taken first at Smugmug?

None of this makes any sense.

Dear Mozilla Foundation,

On behalf of all the online publishers in the world who are trying to scratch out a living online via banner ads, screw you for promoting AdBlock Plus so heavily and making it so easy for people to block ads, making it harder for me to do what I love for a living.

Sincerely,
Jason Dunn

How long has Amazon been running sponsored links? I was looking at The Wreckers live album, and saw this in the listing:

Clicking on the ‘What is this?” link gives the following text:

SPONSORED LINKS
Sponsored Links are advertisements that Amazon.ca provides for you. We receive Sponsored Links from Google’s AdWords service. When you click on a Sponsored Link, we get revenue. The selection of Sponsored Links that are displayed is based on keywords. For example, if you search for “Bruce Springsteen” or view pages about Bruce Springsteen, the Sponsored Links may point to sites that sell tickets to his concerts or provide information about him. Sponsored Links are always clearly labelled.

Generating additional revenue from Sponsored Links allows us to offer you lower prices–something we are dedicated to doing in every way we can.

Really Amazon? You’re going to drop your prices because you’re making money from Google? You’re not just going to roll the profits into your quarterly earnings to make your shareholders happy? Yeah. That’s what I thought.

[I really do like Amazon though, I order a lot of stuff from them - pretty much every new book, DVD, and CD I buy comes from Amazon.ca...and I'd buy a lot more from them if Amazon Canada offered MP3s, electronics, etc.]

I don’t think I can thank the people at Akismet enough for their amazing comment-spam-blocking technology that they give out to most people for free (sites without ads). Every couple of days I get around 500 spam comments that are completely blocked by Akismet - I’d say no more than three spam comments a week slip through to my moderation queue, meaning that for the most part, Akismet’s system is completely administration-free. That’s truly amazing stuff - thank you Akismet!

One of the most irritating thing that can happen to you as a domain owner is when a spammer decides to use your domain as the reply-to email address. When this happens, if you have your domain email configured as I do to capture email at every address @ the domain.com, you get hundreds of bounce-backs flying at you. The worst part about this? There’s absolutely no way to stop them - the design of email is fundamentally flawed in that it allows anyone to put an email server online and send email without having to authenticate who they are and if they have permission to send email. Worse still, if people flag the spam they received as spam, it hurts my chances of being able to send legitimate email from jasondunn.com. Someone really needs to fix email - it can’t continue like this for another 10 years.

So if you happened to have received a piece of spam from the jasondunn.com domain, I can assure you it wasn’t I that sent it.

Decoder ring: I’m “Customer” and the technicians are from The Planet, the company that hosts my Web sites.

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you…
You have been connected to David G.
David G: Thank you for contacting The Planet Customer ServiceTeam! How may I assist you today? Would you be interested in seeing the weekly promotions that we are having?
Customer: Hi there…
Customer: My site, www.zunethoughts.com, isn’t loading - it seems like a DNS issue
Customer: The other sites on my server are loading fine
David G: Can you verify your username and last 4 of your password please?
Customer: I was wondering if you might have any ideas?
Customer: sure….
Customer: username: **************
Customer: password: ****
David G: Let me transfer you to our Support Team. They will be able to point you in the right direction for a solution. One moment please Thank you for choosing The Planet!
David G has left the session.
Please wait while we find an agent from the Technical Support department to assist you.
You have been connected to Michael W.
Michael W: Hello, how may I assist you?
Customer: Are you able to see what I said earlier in this chat?
Michael W: Yes, one moment please.
Michael W: There was a problem with many of the DNS zones in our name servers. This caused some domain records not to resolve. I ahve republished your zone which should be ready some time after 6AM CST. I do apologize for any issues this may have caused. (more…)

Eight days from now, Ashley and I get on a plane and go to Japan. First we fly into Vancouver, then from there it’s an 11 hour flight to Osaka, Japan. And guess what? The Air Canada plane we’re flying on doesn’t have any power in the seats. AUGH! That drives me nuts - in this era, almost everyone has some sort of electronic device with them, and most of them do not last 11 hours. I ordered one of these today, which hopefully will help. The real solution is for Air Canada to get out of the ’70s and retro-fit their planes with things that airline passengers want. I really hate flying Air Canada - they suck. When I flew back from New York to Calgary, they wanted to charge me $2 to use a pillow. And even on a four (or was it five?) hour flight, they served one drink and didn’t even offer the standard bag of pretzels/chips/whatever.

This Wired article has the details about the changes at eBay - and beyond the changes in fee structure, which seem to be both good and bad depending on how you look at it, the biggest change is that sellers will no longer be able to leave negative or neutral feedback for buyers. This is great news, because vengeful sellers are the bane of eBay because they know even if the buyer leaves negative feedback, the seller will usually have enough volume to bury the negative feedback in a matter of days or weeks. Buyers, on the other hand, tend not to be as high-volume, so negative feedback sticks around in a much more obvious way.

I’ve been on eBay for nine years next month, and in my 281 buying and selling transactions, I’ve had six negative feedback points. Three of those were from sellers whom I had a fairly negative transaction with (like Majeeda Haaq), and when I left neutral feedback to express my dissatisfaction they left negative. The other two negative feedback points were from an eBay seller in New York who bought some software off me and left negative feedback as a way of ensuring I’d give him a refund - which I would have done anyway. I’ve only had one genuine negative feedback point from a buyer, who happened to be in Italy and was angry he had to pay duty/customs import fees - and all because he insisted I put the full retail value of the item on the shipment when I suggested putting a lower value.

So, as a seller on eBay I’m not too happy to hear about the higher fees, but as a buyer, I’m thrilled to hear that unethical sellers won’t be able to leave punitive feedback for buyers. I’m a bit surprised they’re stopping neutral feedback as well, although as someone pointed out to me last year, if a buyer pays within a reasonable time frame, that’s pretty much the end of the buyer’s responsibility.

Oh yeah, and their CEO Meg Whitman is getting the boot, largely because of eBay’s disastrous purchase of Skype (who the hell was advising her that sellers and buyers actually wanted to talk to each other?).

When I wrote about this issue a few days ago, I made sure to go in and check my settings to indicate that the only things Paramount was allowed to email me about were the Iron Man movie and the Marvel Comics newsletter. Here’s what my profile with them looks like today:

So imagine my surprise when, once again, I received another promotional email for the “How She Move” movie. That seals it: Paramount is using my email address to promote other movies to me, without my permission. Guess I need to blackhole that email alias since Paramount doesn’t have the ethics to follow their own rules. I’ll try unsubscribing from everything first - we’ll see if they honour an unsubscribe request or if they keep using my email address.