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.

[Yes, the title of this post is purposefully written that way  based on the name of the movie I was spammed with.]

I use unique email aliases whenever I sign up for something, making it easy for me to turn off an email address if I find it gets abused. Amazingly enough, in all the years I’ve been using this tactic (it’s got to be nearly a decade by now), I’ve only had two clear instances of someone using an email address they shouldn’t be. One was a software development company last year (their President thought it would be ok to take a copy of the customer database to a new company he was launching), and the other is Paramount Pictures. Look at the email address I received this message to:

That’s right, I signed up for information about the forthcoming Iron Man movie (I really hope it lives up to the hype!), and Paramount decided to send me information about “How She Move” without my permission. I’m 99.999% sure that I didn’t opt in for anything other than info about Iron Man, but when I checked their database for my email address, it said I was signed up for something called “Paramount Vantage”. The Paramount sign-up tool for Iron Man information doesn’t have an option for Paramount Vantage, only for “other Paramount movies”, sharing information with “Other Viacom companies”, and the Marvel newsletter. I said yes to the Marvel newsletter, and no to everything else…I think.

I want to be fair to Paramount, so I’ve signed up again with another unique email alias, making sure that no additional options were checked. I’ll wait and see what happens…but it sure ticks me off when companies use email addresses beyond the permission given by the owner of that email address.

I was a bit dubious when my cable ISP, Shaw, released a new service called PowerBoost recently. The claim is that it provides a significant boost of speed for 5 to 20 seconds, but no specifics were given about what speeds should be expected. They’re charging $2.95 a month for this feature, but I received it for free because I’m already paying an extra $10 per month for Shaw’s 10 mbps Extreme package. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and honestly hadn’t noticed any difference (most servers can’t saturate a 10 mbps connection), but today I was downloading a series of files from my own server and noticed an impressive burst of speed: 2.4 MB/s real-world speeds when downloading two files.

The speeds didn’t last longer than a few seconds, which is unfortunate because when you’re downloading big files you need the speed for longer than a few seconds, but it’s nice to see that more speed is possible. Too bad Shaw wants $93/month for their 25 mbps package and it doesn’t offer more upload speed - I’d pay a bit more to get 2 mbps, but they don’t offer that as an option. Then again, compared to the 30 KB/s speeds a friend on the other side of the world is getting, I shouldn’t be complaining at all.

It feels SO good to finally get the re-vamp of Digital Media Thoughts launched, with the name changed to Digital Home Thoughts, a new template, and hooked into our new forums. It took a lot of work from a lot of people (Fabrizio, Jorj, Janak, myself) and was on the heels of a double-server hack, so my life has gone from massively stressful to just a trickle of stress. Up next, migrating Pocket PC Thoughts…

I think the above questions say it all.  I’ve been answering an endless stream of questions on YouTube after posting a bunch of Zune videos, and with some of them, I feel like I’m an AOL forum moderator in 2001 fielding questions from people who are looking for the “Any” key. I don’t know how some of these people even manage to work a Web browser, let alone post a comment on YouTube…

A married couple, friends of mine, are having relationship troubles. You know the old story: she’s on Hotmail, he’s on Gmail, and they can’t see or share their respective calendars. A problem as old as time.

I figured the solution was simple: move her away from Hotmail, to Gmail, and they’d live happily ever after sharing their Gmail calendars. Why Gmail? I think Google’s Web-based email and calendar system is superior to Hotmail, though I confess I’m not as familiar with Microsoft’s offerings as I used to be (I don’t do Web-based email). I created a Gmail account for her, logged into her Hotmail account, and tried to set up a simple forward that would shunt all her Hotmail email into her new Gmail account until everyone started to use her new Gmail address. I didn’t count on huge road-block that seems right out of 1998:

WHAT? Hotmail’s email forwarding will only forward to other Microsoft email accounts? What’s the point then? That’s something I’d expect from the 1998 “We want to rule the world” Microsoft, not the newer “We want to work with the world, as long as we can make money doing it” Microsoft. Having a limitation like this is just a slap in the face to a Hotmail customer - sure, she’s trying to leave Hotmail, but there’s no reason to make the exit an ugly one. If Microsoft offered a real forwarding option, it would leave the door open to coming back. I haven’t thought very highly of Hotmail over the years (mostly because people using the service never seem to get my email), but this really drops the service down a few notches in my eyes.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I find it incredibly hard to believe that what I want to do is really this hard. I’ve done a bit of research and found a few desktop-PC programs that act as email re-directors, but that’s not a good solution. Possibly something Web-based? I thought Hotmail would have an option to function as a POP3 account, so I could use Gmail to pull her email in, but they don’t offer that either. It’s no wonder Gmail is so popular, Hotmail is really unimpressive.

It’s funny what Google AdSense will put up on a site sometimes…