beer planet

Mom sent me this picture the other day, taken in Kharkov, Ukraine, my home city.

My question is… wtf? I'm assuming the truck started where the road was - what kind of speeds were involved here? Those trains usually go at speeds around 15-25mph… No word on the injuries.

From time to time my, still curious, mind accumulates a variety of questions and concerns which it has to spill onto the pages of this blog. How random are these? Pretty damn random, and I need to see some answers, quick. Oh, and I’m deliberately not searching Google, as I want to facilitate discussion. What fun would it be if I just looked up all these?

Password Protected Garage Door Remotes

As a paranoid person and a recent homeowner, I started to wonder how safe I actually am in my house. Consider this likely scenario that nobody seems to be concerned with:

I park my car outside for one night and don’t take out my portable garage door remote, the one with a single open/close button. Or, even worse, the remote code is programmed into one of those garage opener buttons built into the car. A car burglar comes along, breaks the window, and trashes my car. Wow, an added bonus – a free entrance into the house!

Needless to say, this is bad already. How many of you lock the door between the house and the garage? What if you forget to do that as well? Is there a spare house key laying around in the garage? You may say “but I’ll hear the garage door open” but does it actually make you feel better? You will be present with an intruder in your house, which will scare the living shit out of you non-governator types.

So here’s my question to you, Internet, is there a garage door remote I can buy that has a programmable keypad, so that a password is needed for the button to work? In fact, it would be almost the same as the one that mounts next to the garage door. And can it not cost $100?

Twitter Security

This part is not about computer security, as you may have thought at first, although I did recently discuss it in the Clickjacking article. I also know that I’m not the first one to bring this issue up but I think it’s worth discussing some more. Consider this scenario:

You’re a cheerful, outgoing snowboarding enthusiast with 3000 twitter (plurk, facebook, or another social network but twitter is the most relevant example) followers. Or maybe you have 3 followers. There’s a 99.9% chance that your profile and updates are public (if you have 3000 followers with a private profile, you must be some sort of a chump. And yes, I did just make the stats up, want fight about it?).

So, on Friday night, you send the following tweet: “Gone snowboarding for the whole weekend. But not before getting piss trashed Friday night at the casino. Wooooo”.

Since anybody can watch your tweets absolutely anonymously and it’s extremely easy to dig up an address knowing very little about a person, what you just said was “If you are a burglar looking for the next opportunity, just drop everything and come on by Friday night. I will be far-far away but my house (located at 123 Main St) will be available for your robbing pleasures. You only have 2 days before anyone is home, so feel free to crash on the couch and eat my food. Don’t forget to feed the cat. Kthx.”

Is this a likely scenario? Not really, unless twitter raises the tweet length to more than 140 characters, but otherwise you see where I’m going with this. Don’t be stupid – avoid advertising exact details of your whereabouts, vacation plans, etc. There are plenty of uses for Twitter without giving up most of your privacy. Ask yourself: would you post a note with your whereabouts on your door every time you leave the house for a while?

How Do Trains And Buses Know Where They Are?

If you live in a relatively large city, you have seen relatively accurate bus and train arrival predictions and, in some cases, almost exact locations of each vehicle. For example, here in San Francisco we have MUNI stations with live maps of trains’ whereabouts and bus stops with bus predictions on small electronic displays.

What is the technology behind it? It cannot be just GPS, because trains go underground where there is no reception. If it’s a combination of externally mounted sensors, are they also placed outside, once the train gets out into the street? Or is it some sort of a 2-way GPS (a conventional GPS device is just a receiver) underground that switches to sensors above ground? I don’t know but I want to.

Train/Bus Drivers And Bathrooms

While I’m on the public transportation subject, here’s what I want to know: if you are a train/bus/trolleybus driver, what do you do if you NEED to go somewhere when you are half way down your route? All of us had such moments at least once, and sometimes you just HAVE TO drop the bomb, sink some submarines, drop the kids off at the pool, release the chocolate hostage, plant some potatoes, give birth to a VB programmer, down the proctoscope, bake some brownies, you know what I mean (if you don’t, you’re a senile muppet, what are you doing on the Internet?).

They can’t just leave the train in the middle of the street, can they? Have you ever seen one run out in the middle of the street? I’m really curious here.

All Of Dilbert

Is there a Dilbert collection somewhere that has every Dilbert comic in an easily browseable manner, ideally with ratings I can sort by? 100 Dilberts per page would be ideal. Ah, looks like the new Dilbert.com finally made it a reality: all Dilbert comics sorted by votes, 49 per page.

Where Can I Buy A Circus Tent?

Who sells them? The ones where elephants and clowns could fit. It could also double as a portable office.

Who Gets To Eat The Most Delicious Burger In Burger Commercials?

And where do I sign up? I’m serious.

● ● ●

Yeah, so that’s pretty much what’s on my mind right now. What’s on yours?

  I’m now convinced that insurance companies exist in this world for the sole purpose of making our lives a living hell any time we need to deal with them. The worse each experience, the less likely we are to file another claim. Of course, we’re also less likely to continue coverage with the same company, but at that point they’d already received our money and, if we accept a notion that most insurance companies have the same evil idea in mind, there’s little one can do to get satisfaction. Except for one thing - spread information about such especially heinous institutions.

Does my story have a happy ending? Maybe, or maybe not, it depends on whether you think the journey was worth it – you be the judge.

So what happened in my case and why am I so furious? Having just recently bought a house, I wanted to have peace of mind for at least some foreseeable future and paid for a year of home insurance that covers such things as kitchen appliances, electrical work, washer/dryer, heater, etc. The only damage was promised to be a reasonable $55 charge per occurrence, with some acceptable exclusions. The sun was shining and birds chirping as I mailed First American Home Buyers Protection Corp (further FAHBP) my check for ~$250.

Everything was going well for about 2 months, we started decorating and cleaning up the house, and life was great. That is until one day when the 23 year old built into the wall microwave decided to stop working completely. Fear not, I thought, I have insurance just for such a joyous occasion. Right? Keep reading.

A quick call to 800-992-3400 and an agent was on the phone. So far so good. She took my claim (I made a mistake of starting it with small dishwasher issue, so until now my case is known as THE DISHWASHER CASE, and I had to explain every time I called that it’s actually THE DISHWASHER AND MICROWAVE CASE and that the dishwasher had been doing fine after the first visit. Apparently, changing the title of a case is an insurmountable impossibility to FAHBP) and promised a contractor would call me for an appointment. At this point I was quite satisfied, not realizing that it was the end of my satisfaction.

The experience of the next month is better described in my BBB complaint below (with a few edits).

Company Information:

First American Home Buyers Protection
P.O. Box 10180
Van Nuys, CA 91410-1980
Website: http://homewarranty.firstam.com/
Phone: (800) 553-6699

Complaint Text

I'd like to preface this by saying that I haven't had such bad experience with a company ever since I dealt with Dell Home.
Every agent of FAHBP I've spoken with regarding my claim is extremely irresponsible.
Day 1. Contractor comes out to see my microwave. This is the only part of the process that worked OK, since he isn't associated with FAHBP. He tells me he needs a spare part for the microwave (built-into-the-shelf unit from 1985). Fine.
Day 8. No word from either the contractor or First American. I call them to find out that the contractor asked to initiate a part search that should be completed within a few days.
Day 14, 15, 16. Still no reply, so I call them myself. The part search has not come back yet (how long can I wait? Days, months? Nobody on the phone can answer that).
Day 17. I talk to yet another customer service rep, Brad, who informs me that the part search had never been initiated correctly, and nothing was happening. That's almost 3 weeks after we started the process. He assures me he is going to take ownership of my case and call me by the end of the day. No call that day, or the next 3.
Day 21. I call to talk to Brad but he's not available all day. Another agent tells me no part search is happening because they don't know the model number of the unit. Don’t have the part number of the unit?? How the ***** does that come up only now?The agent on the phone makes me go to my microwave and dictate her the model number. A call is promised by Brad and/or his manager.
Days 22-26. No call. They never-ever call back. I try Brad a few more times and every time he promises to call back, giving various excuses as to why nothing is happening. Additionally, I am introduced to a new amazing method of solving my problem: apparently FAHBP now found some repair place **** knows where. They are going to send the broken 23 year old part to this place and it will get repaired in an unknown amount of time. After that, they are going to send it back to me.

That's where I am today.

Resolution Sought: Do what you're promising to do on the flashy flyers. Enforce your own guidelines. Make the agents do their jobs and be responsible for cases they own. Make sure I get at least one call back out of the 10 promised. At least once, damnit! My case is not only unresolved, it's not even started after a month.

So, by day 26 I felt incredibly frustrated, pissed off, annoyed, furious, desperate, and helpless. Never in my life did I ever feel in such a way communicating with a company (with the exception of Dell and recently Netshops.com with their hundreds of properties, like ModernFurniture.com – an amazingly irresponsible company).

I had no other option but to follow through with my threat to submit a BBB claim. The BBB website claimed FAHBP had a very high rating of “BBB” (ratings explained here). That was news to me, so as last resort, I wrote up the complaint you’ve just witnessed and sent it in. That was Friday.

Looking back at my experience, I now understand exactly how such big corporations work. The bigger the company, the faster it is going to act on any BBB complaint because it uses a very simple formula: consumers who haven’t done business with it yet are likely to look up BBB (and some other ratings) first. The amount of business the company is going to get is in some way proportional to how good its rating is. Therefore, it is much cheaper to prioritize and take care of the few BBB complaints as soon as possible than lose potential business brought by a lower rating. A corollary of the above is that though smaller companies are probably still likely to act on BBB complaints, they are not going to do it with the same vigor.

On Monday at exactly 10am, I received a phone call from a very upbeat woman. She introduced herself as some sort of a consumer resolution specialist from First American corporate. She had received my BBB complaint and was prepared to:

1. Refund the $55 service call fee for all my troubles.
2. Apologize profusely for how incompetently FAHBP has been handling my case.
3. Offer me a brand new $1600 microwave/oven combination from Sears.com or a cashout of about $1300.

Wow, what a change in attitude. I felt like a cheap whore (apologies to all cheap whores out there), like a kid who couldn’t stand up for himself and had to go complain to daddy. Only after drastic measures did they begin to budge and that made me sick. I took the cashout option because I didn’t like the proposed microwave combination model and closed the case.

Whether or not you will chose to avoid FAHBP because of this article is up to you. Dealing with big corporations is not easy but knowing about BBB can be very powerful in certain cases and you, as a consumer, deserve to have this knowledge. Don’t abuse it but be aware of your options. Additionally, submitting your story to consumerist.com is another great way to go, which is what I’m now going to do retroactively.

Have you had any experience with First American or other insurance companies? Was it good or bad? Feel free to leave a comment.

If you are experiencing a weird feeling in your pants, it's normal.

Today Travis was messing around with a Chinese site blinkx has indexed a short while ago http://www.tudou.com and saw a cryptic error message that started coming up on all pages. The message looked something like this:

各位土豆：
为了给大家提供更好的服务，我们正在搬迁扩建土豆的中心机房。
3月14日凌晨0:00 ~ 夜间24:00，我们的服务暂停24小时。
3月15日凌晨0:00 新机房就搬迁完成了，土豆会准时回家。

Now, neither Travis nor I know the language of Chinese, so what do we do? Go to Google Translate, of course. Here's what Google Translate produced:

That's:

Members potatoes:
In order to provide you with better service, we are expanding the relocation of the central room of potatoes.
March 14 at 0:00 to 24:00 at night, our services will be suspended for 24 hours.
March 15 at 0:00 new room on the relocation is complete, potatoes will be time to go home.

No wonder the servers went down, being powered by potatoes from a central room of potatoes and all. I guess expanding to a larger room of even more potatoes was the only way out.