Looking at that “screenshot”, you might wonder what I’m on about. It seems perfectly normal. It might even leave you scratching your head as to why it could ever be a problem.

It’s not just that button: The entire Roku app is awful. Among other things, it now forces your home screen to present Plex-corporate-specific-content, and buries your own libraries in a very irritating menu at the top of the screen.

The library selection menu. Imagine if there were 10 libraries here. I pared it down to the two I use most to cut down on button presses.

From a UX perspective, it’s horribly optimized (or not optimized at all) for quick and easy navigation. The prior version of their Roku app wasn’t perfect, but Plex is clearly aiming for a use case other than consuming one’s own content.

So let’s look at that button again, and compare it to the button on the Plex web interface:

Watch versus Play.

One of those words is the app telling you what to do (watch), while the other is you telling the app what to do (play).

Yep, that’s it. That’s the reason for my annoyance. It emphasizes their philosophy: Plex will now order you around, rather than being ordered around by the user.

You want to watch your own media libraries? Buried. Watch Plex-branded monetized content instead.

Play means “commence presenting the media”. Yet, Plex feels confident enough to redefine it as watch.

However, I often don’t watch visual media. Sometimes I just have it on in the background and I listen. But I’ve always starting it playing by pressing the play button.

Sometimes I leave the room while something is playing, even though I’m no longer watching.

So not only is the button labeling instructive rather than receptive, it’s also just plain wrong in common use cases.

On top of that, it’s unnecessary.

Obviously this is a “play” icon, identifiable even in a logo.

The sideways equilateral triangle pointing to the right is universally understood to mean “play”, across just about all languages and cultures of Earth. Why Plex bothers to label the button is strange, as perhaps their time could be better spent on other areas.

Sure, it doesn’t take a lot of time to label a button, but probably more than you’d think.

Aside from the fact that their codebase needs to contain what are ultimately pointless conditionals to decide whether “watch” or “play” should be shown depending on the type of media, there’s also localization. A simple play icon by itself needs no localization.

But the text accompanying it must be made available in every language supported by the Plex app. Adding text to a universal symbol is just wheel spinning. Moreso when that text actively redefines the meaning of the symbol.

Bizarrely, in a music library, the button isn’t labeled “Listen”. No, it simply says “Play”.

Not only is Plex wrong (IMO) in their button labeling, they’re also inconsistent.

Getting back to iconography, there’s these gems on the left-hand side of the interface. If you’ve never seen them in this context, try and conjure in your mind what they might do in reference to your media library before you scroll any farther:

That top one? I thought it was an eyedropper icon at first, viewing a 2160p 42″ screen from perhaps 3 meters away as I was.

Nope. That’s intended to be a magic wand.

Or rather, I think it’s meant to be a magic wand. It’s a bit oddly proportioned, the top segment isn’t filled in with white as with a stereotypical magic wand, and the spacing of the “magic radiance dots” is too uniform. (Perhaps 4 dots would be better?)

The bottom icon is clearly a grid, which I suppose is at least recognizable. Though, a grid of what? And magic for what?

I polled a few people around the office, showing them an image of the entire screen. No one could correctly identify the purpose of either icon, even in context.

Fortunately, hovering over the icons reveals their purposes:

My question here is: Why persistently label something obvious like the play icon, yet create two extremely vague icons and leave them unlabeled by default?

What’s even more baffling is that the Plex web interface uses a very similar icon to the “Browse” above, yet for a completely different purpose. The grid is used to represent — get this — a grid view. That makes sense.

All design issues aside (and there are more — I’m still on the home screen at this point!) there are major bugs in the Plex Roku app.

For example, twice today the interface froze while I was listening to music. (I use the Roku when working out.) In both instances, it occurred when I was navigating between albums under a couple of different artists. Not selecting anything, mind you. Simply using the arrow buttons on the remote was enough to freeze the UI.

And it was just the UI; Music was still playing, and hitting the remote’s Home button brought me back to the Roku home screen to re-launch the Plex app, indicating that the Roku OS hadn’t seized up. (I was able to reproduce that problem on a completely different type of Roku device, so it’s almost certainly an app bug and not specific to my one device.)

Tonight, when launching the Plex app to get the above screenshots, it greeted me with a black screen. Oh, the volume keys on the remote still worked and the volume indicator popped up on screen. The Roku home button worked. The Plex app did not.

I never had those kind of problems on the old, better Plex app.

In conclusion, my take is this:

Plex initially went in with a very consumer-friendly business model, offering lifetime subscriptions at a reasonable price. This, though great for me and many others, was clearly unsustainable. There’s a certain addressable market for personal media server subscriptions, and they probably addressed all of it.

Now, they want to become some kind of half-assed media company, pulling in revenue from wherever they can, forcing their existing customers deeper and deeper into the Plex content ecosystem. A place none of their users want to be. This is also an unsustainable business model, but meanwhile they’re spending significant money on re-developing all their beloved apps, removing valuable features and rendering others inconvenient.

Why, oh why, do I need 2 different apps on my phone for music and video? Often when listening to music, I’ll play the music video when that’s available and otherwise listen to the MP3/FLAC. It was great when that could be done within the same app. Now, not so good.

I’d move to Jellyfin, but Plex’s web interface is by far the best in the industry. And by “industry”, I don’t just mean that of personal media servers. Plex’s web interface is superior to any video streaming service out there, paid or otherwise*. They had a top design team at one point. Maybe they still do, but that team is being crippled by management. I have no way of knowing.

Jellyfin is (for now) very immature by comparison (though philosophically much, much better).

*Though I wager Plex’s web interface won’t be aces for long. It might even be enshittified by the time you read this. I’d promise to update this post to reflect that, but by the time they kill off this generation of the web interface, I won’t care about this anymore because I’ll be using something else. Probably Jellyfin.)

Of course, I only use Plex for my personal consumption of content which I purchased and ripped from my own hard media.

Another sh*tty power strip

Welp, they’ve done it again. Any by “they”, I mean people that make poor quality electrical devices. Specifically Yellow Jacket, which is a Woods brand, which is a Coleman Cable brand, which is probably somehow owned by either Warren Buffet or the Koch Brothers.

I got this for $16.22 during an Amazon lighting deal, and even though that’s not a terrible price, the poor quality construction and the basic lie about the materials is what really angers me.

Join me as I disassemble and then curse at this poor excuse for a power strip, in my newest installment of first world problems.

Here’s the thing: I don’t need to contact Amazon’s customer service often, but when I do they’ve always been responsive and extremely helpful. So I’m not going to lambaste Amazon in this post, but I do want to tell a story of a horrible customer service experience that’s not just a result of a bad rep but is indicative of a deeper problem.

The Toilet

In an incident that was far less dramatic than you’d hope, my toilet tank cracked and was leaking slowly onto the floor.

Obviously the ideal solution would be a new tank, but I had an Eljer triangle toilet that’s discontinued, and there aren’t a ton of options for a triangular corner toilet.

Needing to have a working crapper, I ran out to Home Depot and bought a relatively cheap standard toilet as a temporary solution. It works fine, but the placement isn’t quite as nice as that of a corner toilet. Hence I went to my favorite online retailer and found an American Standard Cadet 3 Triangle Toilet that looked like it would fit the bill.

Amazon’s product photo of the toilet. Looks like an elongated bowl, right?

It turned out to be the wrong toilet for me. I’m not exactly a small guy at 6’4″ and 220lbs. I constantly have problems at hotels where my .. carriage .. doesn’t fit inside a toilet without .. dipping and/or touching the front. (I’m trying to be polite, which is hard to do when talking about why a toilet doesn’t suit my needs. Not that you really needed to know, but whatever.)

The point is that I hate round bowl toilets because there’s not enough space front-to-back for my taste.

The full name of the toilet on Amazon is American Standard 270BD001.020 Cadet 3 Right Height Round Front Two-Piece Triangle Toilet with 12-Inch Rough-In, White. When I read “round front”, I thought that meant the front was rounded for aesthetic reasons as opposed to another hypothetical model which might have a more squared-off front. I’m no expert on toilet styles. Besides, “round front” sounds different than “round bowl”.

And to be fair it’s also the wrong picture of the toilet on Amazon’s product page. But to be super duper fair to Amazon, it’s probably American Standard’s fault because they have the wrong photo on their website. Check out this side-by-side of the “Round” version versus the “Elongated” version:

It’s rather hard to read, but you can click on the image for the full-size version.

Both of these pictures look the freaking same, and both look like elongated bowls. The point of my telling you all of this is that I don’t think it was 100% my fault that I ordered the wrong thing. But because I felt somewhat foolish at misunderstanding the “round” terminology, when it came to giving a reason for the return I put something like “I no longer need this item”. At any rate, I indicated that the return was my fault and so I was charged around $40 for shipping (which is pretty reasonable for a heavy, bulky, two-package order).

Lord of the Toilets: The Two Packages

I was issued a pre-paid UPS label for return because I’d opted to drop the toilet off at my local UPS Store. Pickup was quite a bit more expensive, even though I thought that it would be way easier.

But there’s the crux of the problem: I was issued one label for two packages. That didn’t seem right to me, so some communication ensued:

July 30

Hi,

I’m trying to return order [order number redacted], and the return was approved and a UPS label issued. However, the item (toilet) is split into 2 packages, so I need two return labels. (Unless I can use the same one twice, but I don’t believe UPS allows that.)

Thanks & regards,

Scott

Amazon replied promptly with the following:

July 30

Hello,

Thanks for contacting us.

I understand that you want to return the item and the item was split in to two packages.

In this case, you can use the same return mailing label twice on the both packages and you can return the item. There is no need to concern. UPS will accept the package.

If you want free UPS pick up to return the item, please let us know using the below link. We’ll create free UPS pick to return the item. So that UPS will pick up the item from your shipping address.

Please visit the following link to provide the information we requested:

http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-mi?c=[redacted]&q=o2r

We look forward to seeing you again.

We’d appreciate your feedback. Please use the links below to tell us about your experience today.

Best regards,
Reshmi [redacted].

The link provided in that last message was some kind of generic feedback form. It’s not valid anymore and so I can’t get a screenshot, but it basically asked for information that was redundant to what Amazon should already have in relation to this return. It had a comments field where I explained that I’d like to change from a drop-off to a pick-up on that order.

Then I waited. And waited. And waited some more. After 10 days with no response, I contacted Amazon customer service again:

August 9, 2016

Hi,

I used the link provided in your email, filled out the form, and requested a UPS pickup. But I haven’t heard anything back yet. This item is pretty bulky, so I’d much prefer a pick-up rather than having to drop it off at a UPS Store. If it’s not going to happen, please let me know before the return window is over.

Thanks & regards,
Scott

Amazon responded to that message right away with the following: (You don’t have to read the whole thing, just look at the bold bits.)

August 9

Hello,

Thank you for taking out time and writing back to us.

To make this right for you, I have arranged a UPS Pick-up for the item “American Standard 270BD001.020 Cadet 3 Right Height Round Front Two-Piece Triangle Toilet with 12-Inch Rough-In, White”.

UPS’s first attempt is typically made the first business day after a request is made, but it can take up to three business days for them to receive the pickup request. UPS will attempt the pickup at the address where the items were shipped. They’ll make three attempts to pick up your return if you aren’t available when they arrive.

When you request a UPS pickup for your return, the UPS driver will bring a pre-addressed, authorized return label. If the package has been opened, please repack it in a way similar to when it arrived.

Don’t worry; packing slips aren’t required to make a return.

UPS does not provide unattended pickup. You can contact UPS to see if they can give you more specific information about the timing of the pickup; their phone number is 1-800-PICK-UPS (1-800-742-5877).

Please reference this tracking number if you call them: [redacted]

We greatly appreciate your patience and understanding.

We look forward to seeing you again soon.

We’d appreciate your feedback. Please use the links below to tell us about your experience today.

Best regards,
Divya K

I was quite grateful that they finally arranged the pick-up, but was still a bit concerned that they were still talking about “a” return label. I figured that wasn’t really my problem (yet). I was a bit bummed that I’d have to be home, but fortunately my UPS driver usually comes between 6PM and 8PM.

But my next message to Amazon 6 days later sorta summarizes what happened in the meantime:

August 15

Hi,

This has turned into quite a problematic return process. I really do appreciate you arranging the UPS pick-up, because this is a bulky item and it saves me the hassle of bringing it to a UPS Store.

However, a couple of things: The instructions from Amazon said that I’d have to be home for the pickup. Unfortunately my UPS driver came at 5PM one day, 2PM the next, didn’t come at all the following day, and came today around 7PM. So it was difficult to coordinate. I contacted UPS on Twitter, and they said that I would NOT have to be home, and that I could leave the packages on my porch for pickup.

Today the UPS driver happened to come when I was just getting home from work, and he told me that he was only issued one return label — but this order came in 2 packages. If you look back in the history of this inquiry, you’ll see that I started off by asking if I could use the same UPS label for both packages. You guys said “yes”. The UPS driver says that cannot be done, and two separate labels with different tracking numbers would have to be issued.

He cancelled the pick-up in the meantime.

I really want to get this returned, so whatever help you can give me would be appreciated. Either I or the UPS driver would need to have 2 return labels issued.

Regards,
Scott

In my irritation, I also took to Facebook. I tagged UPS and Amazon, but they couldn’t be bothered:

But in the end Amazon really came through, offering to let me keep the toilet and the refund! It’s really generous, though I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do with the toilet. Also that’s not the end of the f$(*!ng story.

August 16

Hello Scott,

I am sorry to hear about the problem you had in returning the item “American Standard 270BD001.020 Cadet 3 Right Height Round Front Two-Piece Triangle Toilet with 12-Inch Rough-In, White “.

As you are our valuable customer I request you not to return the item back now as we do not want to cause you more trouble in returning this item to us. You’re welcome to keep donate dispose the item according to your choice.

Also you can see that already a refund is issued to you for this item.

Rest assured that you will not be charged for the same. Please do not sorry about the same.Your issue will be taken care of.

It is our privilege to have you as our valued customer and we want to make sure you are always taken care of.

If there is anything else you need help with, please feel free to contact us at any point of time. We are here 24 hours a day and 7 days a week for your assistance. Here’s a link to our Contact Us page:http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html

Thank you for choosing Amazon. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you again in the near future.

We’d appreciate your feedback. Please use the links below to tell us about your experience today.

Best regards,
aditi

Of course I responded with a very kind thank you note! I felt like that went above and beyond what I expected, and was a ridiculously good example of Amazon’s customer service.

But I don’t think it’ll take much imagination for you to guess what happened next, though it moves our story forward by almost a month:

September 16

Hi,

Again, I really appreciate the sentiment. But I was just re-charged for the purchase.

If you want me to send the toilet back, I’m still OK with that, but please let me know.

Regards,
Scott

The Refunded Refund

That’s right, Amazon unceremoniously pulled $270.74 out of my checking account a month after saying that the matter was settled.

The transactions related to all this nonsense.

Look, I’m not trying get one over on Amazon. I wanted to return the toilet. I really did. It’s been sitting in my living room for over 2 months, having not been pooped in at all.

But they offered to let me keep the it. That was their choice. But notice they kept the $39.04 for the return shipping. I mean, fair enough, because 40 bucks is a cheap price for a toilet. But for a toilet that I don’t want and will probably just donate to Habitat? Meh.

But they’ve now charged me $309.78 for an order that was originally $270.74. (Two $270.74 charges minus just $231.70 in the refund.)

The worst part is that their customer service has responded to my other emails in a matter of hours, yet it’s now been 4 days, and I’m starting to get worried.

I’ll update this saga when there’s some kind of resolution. I’m happy to return the toilet. I’m happy to donate the toilet. Whatever you want, Amazon. Just please let me know so I can put this to rest.

Here’s A Bullet List of Issues for People That Like Lists

• The photo on the Amazon product page was incorrect.
• Amazon only issued one shipping label for a two-package return.
• Amazon never responded to the feedback form that I was superfluously asked to fill out.
• Amazon insists that one shipping label can be duplicated onto many packages. UPS strongly disagrees.
• UPS says that I can leave return packages on my porch for unattended pickup. Amazon strongly disagrees.
• Amazon was quick to promise that I wouldn’t be charged for the toilet, but I was. A month later.
• Amazon still charged me the return fee of $40, even though I never returned it.
• This whole thing started with an order on July 4, and it’s now September 20.

I started off this post by saying that this indicates a deeper problem than just a bad rep or a one-off experience. Amazon really needs to get on the same page as UPS. I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong, but I’m thinking that Amazon is wrong. If they’d issued two labels and let me leave the packages unattended for pick-up, this would have been resolved over a month ago with minimal fuss.

Then again, since I’m dealing in hypothetical “what if” scenarios: If they’d simply shipped the toilet pictured in the listing, I’d probably be pooping in the corner of the room like god intended instead of jammed up against the wall like an animal.

There’s a fundamental accounting problem if their system can bill me an extra $40 in this way. If this was my credit card and not my debit card, I might not have noticed the discrepancy because the transaction volume is higher and it would’ve spanned two statements.

And finally, I don’t think that the feedback form in question actually does anything. To this day I’ve received no acknowledgement of having sent a message, aside from the confirmation page on Amazon.com after I submitted it.

Some of This is My Fault

In fairness to Amazon, I did slow down this process a bit on my own. I didn’t unpack the toilet until a couple of weeks after delivery — I’d been waiting for a spare weekend to install it. In retrospect I should have taken it out to inspect it right away, but I didn’t.

I also took a while to get around to actually trying to bring the thing to the UPS Store. My car isn’t big enough for both packages, so it was going to take me two trips and over an hour. I procrastinated out of laziness, and I was really grateful for their offer of a free pick-up.

(Incidentally, I would have made the cutoff dates for the return despite my delay.)

My UPS guy also came at weird times when I was trying to give him the package. I couldn’t take a full day off of work just to facilitate this return, and though I did leave work early on those days, he came even earlier. It’s not his fault, of course, but it’s just one of those flukes of bad timing. I’ve seen him in my neighborhood after 7 PM quite a few times afterwards.

Also, I take some of the responsibility for ordering the wrong item. However, even though it said “round front”, the picture clearly shows an elongated bowl. It looks nothing like the actual item. American Standard’s site seemed to back up the fact that I was ordering an elongated bowl.

Your Feedback is Important to Us…

…and will be answered in the order received.

Seriously though, if you think I’m being an ass about this, let me know in the comments. And regardless of the long rant, I’m not all that worked up about it. I have confidence that Amazon will come through in the end.

Just for reference, here’s a screenshot of the Amazon listing with the incorrect picture. Looks like I bought at a good time, because it’s now $100 more expensive!

I’m a leftie, but all my life I’ve used right-handed mice in my left hand. I needed to replace my old Microsoft Optical Mouse, and found the DeathAdder Left-Handed Edition. It’s the perfect size and shape for me, but they did the weird thing of switching the left- and right-click buttons.

It’s easy enough in most any operating system to swap the buttons in settings. However — at least with Windows — the buttons are only changed locally. So when connecting to other hosts via Remote Desktop the buttons revert to their hardware configuration. That’s a no-go for me, but I liked the mouse so much that I decided to mod the hardware instead.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to reconfigure the buttons in the DeathAdder. The buttons are on a separate circuit board from the sensor and control circuitry. The boards are connected by a ribbon cable, and it’s just a matter of swapping two conductors on that cable.

Razer Support

I don’t make use of companies’ customer support too often, because I prefer to solve most problems myself. Plus, I’m more often than not completely disappointed by support interactions.

Razer’s support committed one of the cardinal sins as far as I’m concerned: They didn’t actually read my original email, and replied with a cookie-cutter solution (which didn’t solve anything).

Another pet peeve of mine is that they wouldn’t address the issue on Twitter, and instead directed me to their web-based support form on their site. I’m grateful that they responded quickly on Twitter, but the useless support response took over 24 hours.

.@RazerSupport Re the left hand DeathAdder; It's great, but are reversed buttons typical? Sadly changing in sw doesn't translate over RDP :/

— Scott Dot (@SCOTTdotdot) September 1, 2016

Basically what happened was that in my support submission I explained my issue with the buttons and their not working in RDP despite changing the buttons’ purpose via Control Panel, and more importantly asked the very specific question: “Is there a way to change the buttons in hardware?”. (There’s a button on the bottom of the mouse to change profiles, so I was hoping that it had an undocumented or poorly-documented ability to do that.)

The response that support gave was step-by-step instructions on switching the buttons around in the Windows settings. And that’s it.

I wrote back to them, briefly expressing my irritation that they didn’t actually read my original question, and asking again if the buttons could be switched in hardware.

The answer was no.

And that’s why this video exists.

The Background

The Missus and I flew to Florida a couple of days ago, and as usual we took JetBlue. The only eventful part of the flight was a pleasant arrival 30 minutes ahead of schedule. The flight crew had mentioned that the satellite TV was out of commission, and that all in-flight movies would be free for the duration.

I thought that was a good way of handling the issue, and figured that was the end of that.

However, the next day we both received emails from JetBlue stating that we’d been signed up for their Travel Bank, and that a $15 credit had been applied to both of our Banks in exchange for the inconvenience of the malfunctioning TV service! That kind of proactive customer service is fantastic, and one of the main reasons that we fly JetBlue.

Hello SCOTT

Thank you for choosing JetBlue.

The following credit has been applied to your Travel Bank account number: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ^{(Ed. Note: Account # redacted)}

Service Credit: InFlight Entertainment 15.00

We‘re sorry that DIRECTV® service didn’t work during your flight—we know this is one of the many reasons our customers choose to fly with JetBlue. Please accept our sincere apologies and this flight credit for the inconvenience you recently experienced with us.

This credit, which expires 365 days from the date it is issued, is available for use on future travel with JetBlue and is non-transferable.

To book a flight using your Travel Bank credit, visit jetblue.com and choose Travel Bank as your form of payment.

You can check the balance and transactions of your Travel Bank account by clicking here. For more information about Travel Bank and your credits, please visit jetblue.com/help/travelbank. We thank you for your understanding and look forward to a future opportunity to welcome you onboard.

Sincerely,

JetBlue Airways

Plain-Text Passwords

Here’s where the story turns dark, at least from a security perspective: Because this Travel Bank was a new service for both of us, and because JetBlue likewise had to create accounts for us, they sent us a password to get started.

Unlike — oh, I don’t know — every other website in the world, they didn’t send us randomly generated passwords. No.

THEY RE-USED OUR OUR TRUE BLUE ACCOUNT PASSWORDS, AND SENT THEM TO US IN PLAIN TEXT.

Click on this image for the full-size version.

This is a big deal for three reasons, the last of which is maybe a little less than obvious to most:

When emails are transmitted across the internet they are generally not encrypted. This means that your password would be visible to any server or router between JetBlue and your email service. It might be stored, intercepted, or otherwise snooped at any point along the journey.

Perhaps more importantly, anyone that gained access to your email account would know your password. That may seem unlikely (after all, you probably don’t have a crack team of international hackers trailing your every move), but anyone that happened across your phone could see the password.

If that doesn’t sound important, then in my opinion this last point is the worst faux pas of all. Wait, it’s not a faux pas. It’s more an act of pure ignorance and/or negligence: It’s obvious that JetBlue is storing your password in plain text, or at the very least with reversible encryption.

This means that, were hackers to get access to JetBlue’s user account database (unlike you, JetBlue may indeed be targeted by their friendly neighborhood team of international hackers), they could see your password.

And you may store your credit card info in your True Blue account. If so, anyone with access to your account could book flights to your card. Moreover, how secure is your card number if your password isn’t properly secured? That’s the kind of question I shouldn’t have to ask of “New York’s favorite airline”.

And I’m betting that you use that same True Blue password for at least one of your other accounts, perhaps even something critical like your banking or credit card accounts.

Change your Password

The moral of this story is that you should change your password. Not just with JetBlue, but make sure you use a different password for JetBlue than any of your other accounts.

Actually, it’s a best practice to use different passwords for each of your online accounts. Realistically that can be a huge pain in the ass, so even I don’t do it 100% of the time.

The moral of the story for JetBlue: For the love of internet security, use non-reversible encryption to protect our account information! You should never be able to know my password. That principle comes straight out of a community college Web Design 101 course, and you’re an international airline!

What is This Thing?

Hopefully you haven’t heard of Boost Oxygen. Hopefully you haven’t been tempted to plunk down your hard-earned cash on a useless tin can containing 95% pure nonsense.

Did I say “nonsense”? Sorry, I meant that’s it’s full of 95% pure oxygen. According to the manufacturer it’s the “source of life”, so you better go out and buy it now!

The manufacturer also loosely implies benefits to sports performance, general health and wellness, hangover recovery, and altitude sickness. That’s all bullsh*t, of course. Watch the video to find out why.

And Another Thing…

The video discusses two main reasons why this product is unadulterated B.S., but one thing I didn’t mention was the Food and Drug Administration.

You see, supplemental oxygen is used in medicine for all sorts of valid and useful reasons. In fact, it can save the life of someone if they’re ill. But medical oxygen requires a prescription, and Boost Oxygen, LLC is more than happy to point out that they can now sell oxygen in a convenient and practical manner — over the counter.

Yet they fail to mention that oxygen can be used to help you if you’re sick.

If they made a claim like that, then they would be selling a medical product and the FDA would be entirely up their ass about it. Instead, they can only make vague and unsubstantiated claims about the product’s benefits. The FDA exists for a good reason, and although they might be poorly funded and their enforcement powers may have been robustly castrated, they prevent companies like Boost Oxygen, LLC from promising life-saving effects that they can’t deliver. And that avoids killing the suckers that might buy it instead of their prescribed O2.

The bottom line here is this: Do your own research into any “health and wellness” product before you buy it. Hopefully that’s why you’re here, reading this post.

Don’t Forget the Links

I referenced some research papers, reviews, and websites in my video. You can find all of them here, which I’ll try to keep up to date when I get more information.

http://plr.io/1rb

And last of all, please let me know if I’ve made any mistakes or left anything out either in the comments below or on my YouTube video.

Apparently I was so distressed by the non-metal “metal” Defiant power strip from Home Depot that I made a video about it.

If you hate videos but love text, then mosey on over to my previous post about this travesty of a product, and follow my adventures getting pissed off about their HDX Whatever Something Light.

Why Project Fi?

I’ve been a Verizon customer since back when they were called Bell Atlantic back in The Year 2000. Lately their service has been terrible in my area. When I’m lucky enough to get an LTE connection, it’s slow and high-latency.

Project Fi lets my phone choose the best of two providers for my data service: Sprint or T-Mobile. And so far, it’s just plain better.

I go on at some length about it in the video above.

The Intro

In a previous blog post and video I showed off my motion control slider project. I’ve been looking for excuses to use it in particularly “motion-controley” ways, and so I decided to composite a bunch of passes of the camera over my one Nexus 6 to make a wall of Nexus Sixes.

Please check out my new post about the intro!

Yes, FedEx again

I’m waiting on yet another delivery from FedEx, and this time it’s arriving via their SmartPost service.

And so I’m writing yet another tirade about their incomprehensibly incompetent approach to package delivery.

As far as I understand, their “Smart”Post service works like this: The merchant from whom I ordered gives the package to FedEx and pays them. FedEx then brings the package to a post office near to the recipient, and lets the good ol’ USPS handle the “last mile” of delivery.

I fail to understand the point of this service. I mean I get that it saves FedEx the cost of bringing a truck to my house because the mailman is stopping at my house anyway.

How-frukking-ever, it doesn’t actually make anything more efficient. The United States Postal Service already has the infrastructure in place to move my package over the long haul, so why not just let them do all the work?

This more “cost effective” (somehow) service simply introduces a second point of failure. Now instead of just worrying about FedEx screwing up my delivery, I have to worry about both FedEx and the United States Postal Service screwing up my delivery.

Not only that, but it’s far slower to make the delivery this way.

Here’s an example

Do you see that? Eight days in transit with FedEx followed by “one or two additional days” for the USPS leg. That’s only 1200 miles, or a 19 hour drive according to Google.

But guess what: USPS would deliver the same package end-to-end in 4 days, assuming a ship day of Friday! And it would only cost $3.58 (via First-Class Mail Parcel). How much less could FedEx SmartPost possibly cost? I’d gladly have paid a dollar more for a 7 day reduction in delivery time!

And as usual, FedEx can’t even meet the expectations which they themselves set: “Transit Times typically 2 to 7 business days within the contiguous U.S., based on the final destination ZIP code“. What a joke.

And I had to look this up because I’m no expert on Minnesotian geography:

That’s right, it took FedEx roughly 44 hours to move a tiny package 53 miles. That’s an average of 1.2 MPH.

Literally — literally — an old lady with a cart full of groceries could make a faster delivery.

For the love of all that’s holy, get your head out of your ass, FedEx.

Logging into Verizon.com

I log into Verizon’s Small Business portal once a month to pay my bills. Generally speaking, their site is atrocious. It’s clearly the product of committee thinking and their fractured corporate structure.

They recently implemented a redesign of the login portion, and somehow they resurrected good ol’ Frank Kafka and put him on the committee.

I may have buried the lede of this story. So unless you just enjoy reading my rants, skip right to it.

The initial login screen

As with many banking and commerce websites, Verizon has implemented a separate page for your username which precedes the password entry page. This is good security practice and so I have no problem with it in general.

Just for the example here, I’m using the username whoopswrongspelling. What really happened was that I transposed two characters in my username, so it might as well have been whoopswrongspelling. That was my mistake, of course, but it’s a mistake that’s sufficiently common that it shouldn’t cause the website to malfunction.

And so I’m prompted for my password. Perfectly normal so far. I’d realized that I had misspelled my username, so I did what a normal user would do and hit the back button.

I correctly entered my username (again, I’m obviously just using okrightspelling as an example here, though maybe that’s what Tori Spelling uses as her login).

No, that’s not a re-post of the first screenshot.

Even though the first username I’d entered was completely invalid they chose to store that information and ignore the correct username I’d since entered.

The Solution (is Obvious)

Of course, it’s not a completely circular corkscrew of illogic. There is quite obviously a “Sign in as a different User (sic)” link on the password entry page. However, I was never signed in as the user whoopswrongspelling and I can only assume that such a user doesn’t exist.

Despite there being an obvious solution, there are still two separate bugs causing this problem:

They shouldn’t be saving an invalid username in the session (or via cookie and database — whatever). That just doesn’t make sense.

Also, a subsequent login attempt should overwrite the prior login attempt. Once I’d entered okrightspelling and hit “Sign in”, that should have obviated the existing login. That’s both for reasons of privacy and security as well as practicality.

If Only I Could Tell Verizon…

I’m going to post a link to this rant on Verizon’s Facebook page. But otherwise there’s no official channel by which I can report website bugs.

There’s a section on their website to report security vulnerabilities but the issue at hand more represents a frustration and a lack of best practices than a security vulnerability. Actually, this is a security vulnerability.

If you want to talk to Verizon, their customer service infrastructure is where Josef K would feel right at home. Do you have an issue with a POTS line and your FiOS TV? Oh, that’s two different departments, so I’m going to have to transfer you. Or, you’re a business customer, huh? Well, you’ll have to call the business center back between the hours of 9-5 Monday through Friday.

The Security Vulnerability

When logging in on my home computer, I’d checked the box to “Remember My ID“. I assumed that was why my username was being saved, but it turns out that I was wrong.

I just opened a clean private browsing session and did the same test. The results were the same.

That kinda ruins the whole point of improving security via a two-step login process.

This indicates to me that if you were to attempt to login to Verizon’s site on a public or shared computer, the next user would be able to see your username, even if you did not opt to have it saved.

Of course, this only is a problem if you fail to login. But this would effect anyone that forgets their password and for whatever reason doesn’t complete the “forgot password” process. That seems like a rather improbable case, but consider that Verizon has tens (hundreds?) of thousands of small business customers, so even if that only effected 0.1% of users it would effect a lot of people.

Make that: “Millions of Customers”

Their residential customers uses the same login forms. So if they have 10 million customers that can login to their internet portal (which is not an improbable number) and this bug effects only 0.01% of them, that’s still ten thousand customers.

Test it for Yourself

Make up a couple of really improbable usernames, and go to the login page.

But Wait! There’s More!

This is the security bug to end all security bugs (that I’ve found so far).

Try this:

Step 1: Open a fresh, clean, private browsing session and go to Verizon’s small business login page.

Step 2: Enter a username and click the “Sign In” button. I found this bug using my real username, but it also works with a fake one, so enter whatever you want.

Step 3: Wait 10 minutes. That’s right, have some patience and just let your browser sit on this page for about ten minutes. I don’t know that 10 minutes is a magic number, just that I personally don’t have the patience to try decrementing time intervals to find the floor of the time frame.

I’ve entered "secretpassword" in the password box.

Step 4: Now that it’s been 10 minutes, enter your password in the “password” box. Use a fake password, though. Again, when I first found this bug I was using my real user ID and my real password, but a fake one works just the same and is recommended for reasons that will become obvious.

Step 5: Observe that your password is displayed in plain text under the words “Your User ID is”.

I swear that I’m not making it up. These are actual screenshots that I took while going through those exact steps.

Oh man, that’s a doosie.

I can only imagine that Verizon’s servers have some sort of timeout after which they confuse the password field with the username field. But how in the holy heck did the developers even manage that? And how little testing and code review did they do before pushing this code out for use by their millions of customers?

Again, this won’t effect everyone, but I fell upon it by accident when I got a phone call in the middle of the two-step login process. If I was trying to login at say, an airport or a coffee shop (I hear that’s where normal people go to web browse), anyone looking over my shoulder would have seen my password.

But wait! There’s EVEN MORE!

Since I originally posted this rant, this Verizon thing has been nagging at the back of my mind. One burning question, actually: What else is there?

There’s no way that they could have made both a buggy and sloppy login process as well as one that’s secure and trustworthy. I’m no "hacker", so I don’t want to delve too deep into this and risk any kind of legal action, however…

Just a guess that they might use Oracle

That’s what they call SQL injection. You put a piece of SQL in a website’s input box, with the hope (or in this case worry) that it will be executed.

I should note that the SQL query I injected was not destructive and would not reveal customer data to me. I’m not trying to compromise Verizon’s database maliciously, but rather trying to see if it could be compromised.

It produced a username of null.

That doesn’t look like a big deal, right? No secret data was revealed, and there was no catastrophic failure.

Well, as a developer that has written many a login form, let me tell you that it is a big fracking deal.

The word “null” should never be shown to the end user in this sort of context. Never. When a null is spit out by a database or some user interface code and makes it to the user’s screen, that means that something completely unplanned went wrong.

What should have resulted was a nice, polite error on the second login page along the lines of “I’m sorry, but there was an error with your login attempt. Please try again”. Period. End of discussion.

And SQL injection attacks are extremely common. So it’s something for which every web developer (let alone the development team at a multi-billion dollar company) should forsee and for which they should plan.

While this simple emission of “null” from the website is superficially minor, it tells a story: That they didn’t do even basic testing on this login process. It also may mean that my SQL injection did work, but the results of my injected query didn’t percolate up to the user interface.

But something like a DELETE statement doesn’t need to return a result set.

Next, I figured I’d take a peek at the HTTPS traffic going back and forth with Verizon. There was nothing earth shattering, but there is this:

Looks like I probably guessed correctly that they’re using an Oracle DB.

It is bad practice to put the type, let alone version, of your webserver in your response. Why? A few reasons, but chiefly because it tells potential attackers exactly which vulnerabilities to try exploiting first.

Certain versions of certain web and application servers have particular vulnerabilities. Knowing which one they’re targeting is a huge leg up for a malicious “hacker”.

Moreover, because I now know that they’re using Oracle iPlanet and Oracle OpenSSO, I can be reasonably certain that their data is stored in an Oracle database. It only makes sense, right? So now a black hat would also have a solid starting point for any kind of SQL-centric attack.

Do you trust these guys with your personal information yet?

Another crazy thing is that the login form seems to allow for unlimited characters in the user ID field, and there is no pre-processing to truncate the field. It will POST the entire string.

Interestingly, if I threw a ~1,000,000 character string of zeros into the field I was immediately 302 redirected to another login page. (The browser truncated my input to ~27,000 characters during the form submission.)

Again, that should result in a user-friendly error, not a mysterious redirect.

By the Way, Verizon

At least keep your capitalization and punctuation consistent. I don’t grammar-police people on the street, because rules are meant to be broken in casual conversation and in rants on s.co.tt. But you are a multi-billion dollar company writing a very formal website. Details should matter to you.

If it were one tiny mistake out of pages of text, of course I’d forgive you. But in these two simple portions of what should be two simple web pages, you frucked up quite a lot.

• In all the other places that I’ve seen it mentioned, your portal’s branding is “My Business”. Yet you’ve omitted the space between those two words in the sentence “If only all business were as easy as MyBusiness”.
• Speaking of that same sentence, there is no period at the end of it.
• One more thing about that sentence: You’ve consistently used the word “business” in the context of “my [small] business”, meaning a company; A singular noun. Yet here you’re using it first in the plural sense of activities of a business-like nature, then in the sense of “MyBusiness”, the implied form of a singular noun. The point is that it seems out of place here and reads poorly due to too much cleverness and too little utility.
• The phrase “Keep me signed in” ends in a period, but neither “Uncheck if using a public/shared computer” nor “Remember My ID” ends in one.
• To again contrast two of those phrases: The word “My” is capitalized as if part of a title, but the preceding option label did not capitalize “me” nor “signed” in a similar style. It’s just an odd discrepancy seeing as they’re contextually identical.
• The text of the “Forgot User ID” link capitalizes the word “user”. User is neither a proper noun, nor is that phrase part of a title. (I realize that you may be referring to some kind of perceived elevation of the User such that it’s become a proper title, however that doesn’t jibe well with me.)

Sorry to go on, but I have a few simple design points as well:

• Why is “Where do I enter my password” a link? It just opens a tiny popup with two short sentences of explanation. Why not just put the explanation on the page, and not make the user work for it?
• The “Forgot User ID” link is not aligned with the “Sign In” button. It looks like it’s lost in space.
• This is more of a preference than a rule, but generally (which is to say on every other website) temporary field values are in grey or another non-input-entry color. In other words, in the “User ID” text box, the phrase “User ID” should be a lighter or different color to the text of the user ID entered by the actual user.

As for this page:

• I can’t help but notice that the login on the previous page was entitled “MY BUSINESS SIGN IN”, yet here the title is “Sign In to My Business”. It’s just inconsistent is all. I’d be accepting of either, but not both.
• The word “in” should not be capitalized in the title of this page.
• Again, you seem to be suffering under the misconception that I am the Official and Only User and that I have a User ID.
• I see that Password has also been elevated to the position of an Official Title. I feel so important! (This occurs twice on the page).
• There’s a sentence on the right side of the page that bothers me. It ends in the words “your My Business”. I’ll grant that it’s clear and correct that “My Business Account” is the title of this area. (Or is it? Until now you’ve never added the word “account” after the title “My Business”.) Anyway, my point is that “your my” sounds bizarre. A better turn of phrase might have been simply “[..] online security of your account”.
• “Sign In as a different user”. Again, your Capitalization Addiction rears its Ugly Head. (I’m still trying to get over my hyphen-addiction, so I feel for you.)

I only have one design note for this particular area:

• Whereas on the previous page I complained that the default text in the “User ID” box was the same black as a user’s entry, in this page you’ve completely switched styles to a border-less grey box containing a darker grey default text for the “Password” input.

I know that I’m nitpicking. I like to nitpick. But it makes the point that even with giant committees, billions of dollars, and a labyrinthine corporate structure you can still miss the details. It also sends a bad message.

Haphazard and slapped together is not what I want to picture when thinking of my telecommunications carrier.

Update: 2015-04-22

It’s been about a week since I posted the above rant. Today I received an email from Verizon stating that my account may have been compromised and that my password has been changed.

Of course my first thought was that this was a phishing email (I don’t know my own VZ account number offhand to confirm). And by the way before you click on a link in any email, check the bottom of your web browser window to confirm the destination. I did that, and they were in fact linking me to verizon.com.

While it’s completely possible that my account was coincidentally compromised within a week of my rant, I like to think that it just took them a week to catch up with all my crazy login attempts that I made while testing out their login process. Is that the case? I’ll probably never know.

It Keeps Getting Worse

In that email they advise that I can easily and securely reactivate a Primary account online at verizon.com/bizchangepassword. Great! Let’s do that.

The link that they provided in the email redirects to signin.verizon.com. As you can see from the screenshot, that site is down. And just so you don’t think that my internet connection is faulty, I opened up a ping to verizon.com. Unfortunately signin.verizon.com wasn’t responding to a ping, though it did resolve in DNS.

That’s very disheartening. My ISP’s site is down. Meanwhile, my personal rambles on this blog are perfectly accessible. Guy with servers in his basement: 1, multi-billion dollar national corporation: 0.

Just to be clear, Home Depot: Your terrible, terrible light has not been libeled.

The Rejected Review

I know that I tend to be harsh in my criticisms, but this is the most recent review that I tried to post to Home Depot’s site regarding their HDX 150-Watt Incandescent Clamp Light CE-300PDQ:

Very rarely do I wish I could give a product a negative number of stars, but this is one of them.

I know that for under ten bucks I shouldn’t expect an extremely high-quality, durable item. I know that at this price the light could fall apart completely after a bit of use and it wouldn’t be a huge deal.

But what it absolutely shouldn’t do is cause a fire, which is what TWO out of the SIX of these I own was about to do.

Let me explain: I bought six of these in total from 2 different Home Depots in my area for some hobbyist videography lighting. The point is that the faulty units came from different stores on different days, so they might well have been from separate lots.

The first faulty light that I bought developed a problem after about 3 weeks of very light use (no pun intended): The bulb wouldn’t illuminate unless it was wiggled into a very specific position. It wasn’t a problem with the contacts or the bulb — the issue was inside the socket assembly, which is riveted together and inaccessible.

With a bulb in just the “right” position the fixture would work. Except that after about a month of occasional use the bulb would flicker, and along with flickering it would make the sound of an electrical arc. Again, not the bulb’s fault — I swapped out the bulb more than a couple of times and the problem was the same. The contacts looked good, the wire was secure in the base, the switch seemed OK.

The second bad fixture worked for a little while. Then suddenly I went to plug it in and got no light, but really loud arcing quickly followed by smoke. It was doing this regardless of whether the switch was on or off. Needless to say I unplugged it, but being curious I removed the bulb and plugged the fixture back in. I still got the loud arcing.

This is clearly a problem with the units themselves.

These fixtures never left my basement. They were never dropped or abused; In fact, they were probably used for a total of a few hours. I was using 24W CFLs, too — not something that would generate a lot of heat. And those same CFLs worked (and still work) absolutely fine in other fixtures.

That’s why I’d recommend strongly AGAINST buying this product. If I’d have left either of those fixtures unattended or on a timer, I’d probably wouldn’t have time to write this review since I’d be too busy haggling with the insurance company over the price of a new house.

If you already own these, don’t leave them unattended. They may be working fine now, but just wait…

And the guidelines cited by Home Depot when rejecting my review:

• Focus on the product. Yup, I did that.
• Avoid writing about customer service issues – instead, contact us to discuss your concerns. I did not write about customer service issues.
• Do not mention competitors or the specific price you paid. I did mention that it was “under ten bucks”, but that is most certainly not the specific price.
• Do not include any personally identifiable information such as your full name or address. I’m OK here, too. I was tempted to post my social security number, but I refrained because I’ve heard that there’s crime on the internet nowadays.

I’m guessing that they didn’t appreciate my hyperbole at the end. But there’s nothing in their guidelines regarding sardonicism either, so I should be clear on that front.

By the way, let’s take a closer look at the third item in that list.

Why the fug can’t I mention competitors in my review? I assume that they mean competitors of Home Depot, not the product’s manufacturer. However, in this case HDX is a Home Depot brand. They are forbidding me from comparing this item to another item just like it from any other manufacturer.

That’s absolute horse hockey. There’s no way in hell that you can have a fair review section if you forbid comparison to similar items. Some of the most useful negative online reviews are ones that mention an alternate, better choice to satisfy the same need. Not on HomeDepot.com.

And I’m no fool. I understand that they don’t want you saying something like “just buy it at Lowe’s, it’s cheaper there!” Fair enough because even though that information could be valuable to another customer, prices fluctuate constantly. Price comparisons in reviews don’t hold water for very long.

But their guideline is far too broad. It would forbid a perfectly reasonable statement like “Lowe’s sells basically the same socket set under their Kobalt brand, and IMO it’s much better quality.” Ed note: That’s not my opinion, it’s just an example. I’ve never used a Kobalt socket set, but I’m quite happy with the Husky (HD’s brand) sockets that I have. Despite the fact that Husky is a very, very, very stupid brand name.

That’s a very useful bit of consumer advice, and is only fair if the reviewer indeed had experience with both tool sets. Yet I’m sure it would be immediately stricken from Home Depot’s site. Hey, prove me wrong Home Depot.

Not a word of that review is a lie.

If they want to sell an Instant Electrical Fire Kit, then at least put it on the shelves next to the fire extinguishers. My only regret is that I threw out the fixture that was arcing and smoking, because now I’d love to have made a video showing it causing the inevitable fire.

I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to throw in some keywords…

…such as re-iterating that the model number is CE-300PDQ and telling you that the internet number on Home Depot’s site is 100354511 and that the store SKU is 277894. The light (if it didn’t malfunction catastrophically) is great for DIY projects, photography, videography, shop lighting, and temporary lighting. It’s commonly called a clamp light, but sometimes it’s called a work light, clip light, dish light, or wacky monzelfrazen.

Phew, hopefully that will cause this post to show up somewhere reasonably high on the Google results. If they don’t want the review on their site then I’ll gladly let people view it here.

Finally…

It wouldn’t be a rant on s.co.tt if I didn’t mention some problems with their website:

They strip out carriage returns and line feeds.

Even though I took the time to format my review into paragraphs, they turned it into one fat blob of text. That’s a big pet peeve of mine, and a surprising number of sites do it.

They send too many emails.

After I’d submitted my review, their site prompted me to answer other customers’ questions about the product. I was in a giving mood, so I did.

The question was “does this lamp has a regular outlet plugin? (sic)”

They sent a separate “verify your email address” email for each of my 4 answers. That’s on top of a verification email for the review. The verification should be on a per-address basis, because the address doesn’t change.

Their reviews are powered by bazaarvoice.com.

I don’t trust Home Depot with my personal information, especially after their various — how to put it politely? — oopsies with their customer’s data. But who the frack is bazaarvoice.com?

Well, they are a legitimate company, and they must be doing pretty well to have Home Depot as a customer.

However, Home Depot fails to mention that you’re sharing your email address with Bazaarvoice, Inc., at least in any obvious way. The Bazaarvoice service is white labeled, so it fits in somewhat seamlessly with the design of HD’s website. When submitting a review, I could only find Bazaarvoice mentioned once in the terms and conditions.

Just because I became morbidly curious, I quickly looked in their “Privacy Security (sic)” page for any mention of Bazaarvoice. No mention.

However, as soon as I clicked the link on the product page to “Write a Review“, there were tons of HTTP requests to Bazaarvoice’s site.

The review (and your email address) are sent to them as well.

Bazaarvoice was actually the one sending the needlessly repetitious email verification messages.

This is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind when I made Instance Mail. There’s no reason to give these people your real email address. In fact, they ask for lots of demographic information as well, which I assume they aggregate and resell for marketing purposes. (Personally I provide all fake information, but I believe that the fields are optional.)

And that’s about it. (Maybe.)

I suppose that I’m done ranting about Home Depot for today. I’m sure that I’ve got more somewhere deep inside, but I’ll save it for another day.

Yup! This is my style of catharsis, with the usual vain hope that Deluxe Corp. will read it in full.

TL;DR

I’m long-winded. I know that. Here’s a synopsis:

• Deluxe’s Chase-branded website is old, slow, and painful to use.
• The website doesn’t send out emails. No order confirmations, no shipment confirmations. Nothing.
• They also don’t provide any order tracking when logged in via Chase’s site.
• They screwed up my order and I never received it. It’s been a month.
• Their “newer” website’s feedback form is a Kafkaesque nightmare, and they don’t respond to customer inquiries.
• They don’t tell you how many checks you’re getting in an order (“a box”), so you can’t effectively comparison shop.
• I’m pretty sure that their prices are more than double that of their competition (Vistaprint specifically).
• I should mention that Chase themselves, when I complained about the issue, responded to my online inquiry in 10 minutes and provided a refund no questions asked. I’ve always had a great experience with Chase’s customer service.

There’s a lot to back up what I’ve said. Please travel with me back in time to the heyday of the Information Superhighway and take a closer look…

Deluxe Enterprise Operations, Inc.

Their logo says Deluxe Corp, but the footer of their website says Deluxe Enterprise Operations, Inc. I’m not sure what the deal is; Maybe one is a parent of the other.

But you probably know who they are already. They’re the people that make checks, as in good ol’ fashioned bank account checks.

That's right, I went very serious with my design. I even have a 1980s corporate globe logo!

I don’t want to order checks, and I don’t want to use them. Heck, I’d ordered about 100 checks in 2003 and only just used them up! It’s 2014, and let’s be honest, they’re less useful than a newspaper. So before Deluxe goes out of business due to obsolescence let’s see if I can demonstrate why they should go out of business due to incompetence!

From start to finish, my order took over 30 minutes to complete, only about 3 of which was me looking for that globe logo. Otherwise it should have been just a matter of my entering my shipping address and etc.

The Initial Order

First off, I didn’t “choose” Deluxe. They’re the only provider that Chase links to from their website when I’m logged in. I figured I “might as well” use them, because they’re reputable and Chase transferred my bank particulars right to them.

To test it out again, I’ve just clicked on the link from Chase’s website to Deluxe’s. Now we wait… 21 seconds later: The page has loaded!

That’s right, 23 seconds to load a single web page in the year 2014. (Not to be immodest, but I just ran a test on Ookla’s Speedtest and got these stats: DL: 57 Mbps, UL: 29 Mbps, ping: 9ms. So the problem is not on my end.)

And that’s nothing new. In the process of completing my order I went back to Deluxe’s site a few times, and the initial page load took anywhere from 10 to 45 seconds. Subsequent page loads were quick enough, so I’m guessing it has something to do with establishing a new session.

Here’s what greeted me when I first hit their site:

Click for a full-sized image

Where to start with this screenshot?

From a pure style perspective it looks like it was last updated in 1999.

They’re pushing out an unsigned Java application. Sign your application!

Since I use this machine for development, I don’t always update my Java right away. By default, an out of date JRE will not run their unsigned app. (Yes, keeping Java up to date is an absolute best practice. But in the real world, how many people would not be able to use this site because they don’t abide by best practices?)

I had to update Java to use this site. Why is this even in Java, and not HTML5? Oh, right, because it’s 1999. And I couldn’t just make a security exception for it; Java wouldn’t allow me.

This was completely my fault, but nonetheless added to my irritation: At the end of the Java installation I was prompted to do something like “uninstall all outdated versions of Java”. In a hurry and frustrated as I was, I clicked yes. There goes my dev environment. (Yes, I know.)

What were they doing with that Java?

I jumped through all those hoops just to see a tiny thumbnail preview of my checks.

That is actual size.

Are you as wowed as I am? You can really see the exquisite care and detail that will go into my financial instrument. And it’s so realistic. I hope there’s no spacing between my name and the border in the actual printing!

Really, that’s it. Was borking my whole Java environment worth that? (No.)

Let’s go through the steps!

I just want to show you the millennial design of their menu one more time before I get started:

Glorious.

Also note that there’s no wizard-style “get started” button. That flummoxed me more than I would’ve thought, but then I re-oriented myself to Windows 98 thinking and clicked the Design option.

I don’t really want to say 1999 again, but it’s unavoidable. Here’s how you choose your designs on this, the website of JP Morgan Chase’s exclusive check printing partner:

As usual, click for a full-size version.

This doesn’t just look bad. It’s overly time consuming to use as well! You have to click on each of the 18 categories to see anywhere between 3 to 23 checks on each “page”. There’s no “view all” option, no way to filter results, no way to search. No nothing.

Choosing your binding is no big deal. Very straightforward.

When you want to choose your lettering (font), it does get a little hard to understand their design decision:

Actual size. Ugh.

OK. I get it, really I do. That image is 450px wide. When the lowest common denominator monitor of the web browsing public had a resolution of 640×480 you had to keep things tight.

But of course the fonts are so small that they’re barely legible. And they put the sample check images on a rakish 30 degree angle just to make them even less legible. Brilliant!

The part to select a monogram isn’t too bad, but selecting a symbol is another morass of difficult navigation. It’s just like the check design chooser, but this has 17 categories each containing a whole lot of symbols. Again, no filtering, no searching, no “view all”.

Then it’s more of the same if you want to add a message to your checks above the signature line. There are only nine categories, but it looks like there are hundreds of phrases! I didn’t even want a message, but just to get an idea of what they were on about I read through many of them.

There are such gems as these…

• Ask me about my grandchildren
• Proud owner of pocket protector (sic)
• Life is too short to buy green bananas
• BE YOUR OWN HERO
• The Pledge of Allegiance (No, not the full Pledge, just that phrase for some reason.)

…plus many more heartwarming sayings that your 80-year-old grandmother would just love to have on her financial documents!

Inexplicably, coffee is a recurring theme:

• Got Coffee?
• I love Coffee!
• Wake up & smell the coffee
• GIVE ME COFFEE AND NO ONE GETS HURT!

More so than any other theme, the coffee messages have the most aggressive capitalization and punctuation, even to the point of being Grammatically Incorrect.

All of these steps and categories and page reloads wouldn’t have been too big of a deal were it not for the fact that they were plagued with slow-loading pages and server side errors (probably timeouts).

Oh, and I’ve been typing up this post with Deluxe’s site open on another screen. Their session timeout is shorter than Chase’s. I haven’t timed it, but it’s probably about 5 minutes.

First off, who do they think they are that they need a more aggressive timeout than the actual financial institution from which they’re linked.

Secondly, if one of their customers dares to step away to get a cup of, let’s say, coffee, the state of their order is not saved. They’d have to start navigating the menus all over again. This could also happen if, say, they have to spend a few minutes updating Java (ooh, coffee again).

And that’s that… or is it?

Not much else about the design process is remarkable. It ends in a standard early-web form wherein all the input boxes are the same width. Unusually there is only one field for “City, State, Zip” in the alternate shipping address field.

All that remains is to click “Place Order” in the robust menu at the bottom of the final summary.

But wait, there’s one thing that didn’t bother me until after my order was submitted.

I never received a confirmation email.

Weird, right? Well, maybe their email server is just slow. Or maybe it’s that they never collected my email address. That’s right, their site has no email capabilities.

My usual M.O. is to wait until I get a confirmation email before closing my browser and losing my order details. However, since the site had been painfully slow and occasionally timed out with server side errors the night of my order (it seems to be OK now), I closed it immediately out of frustration. Whoops, I guess I was supposed to print my order information.

Maybe I can have it faxed to me?

The delivery…

…that never happened.

Having no ability to email updates to the customer (things like “shipment confirmation” and/or “tracking number”), I waited around for my order. And waited. And waited some more.

OK, to be fair this was low on my list of priorities and I kinda forgot about it. Until I realized that I’d ordered on November 18th, and it was suddenly December 11th.

I went back to Deluxe’s site via the link from Chase’s website to check the status of my order. I figured that even though I hadn’t logged into the Deluxe site they’d have my personal details from Chase.

They did have my information, but there is no way to track your order.

Chase links to ico.deluxe.com, so I decided to go to straight to deluxe.com. I was pleasantly surprised to find a relatively modern website!

When I clicked on the menu item for CHECKS -> PERSONAL I was immediately prompted to enter my bank account details:

As usual, click for the full-sized image.

The “login” form

Let’s look at this from a security perspective for a second.

The very first thing they ask for is your bank account information. If I was unfamiliar with the Deluxe brand, I would find this to be absurdly sketchy at best. It reeks of an overly-bold phishing scheme.

Your account information appears in plain text. Not one of those fields is a “password” type of input box.

Finally, think about this: Your routing number, account number, and zip code are on every check that you send out. Any one to whom you’ve ever written a check could come onto this website and assume your identity. They can view your order history, and ORDER CHECKS IN ANY QUANTITY TO BE CHARGED DIRECTLY TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.

I had to put that last part in all caps. It deserves to be yelled. Again, anyone that has ever handled one of your checks can charge an arbitrary amount of money directly to your bank account, anonymously through the internet using this “reputable” site.

So what about my order?

As I said, you can magically view past orders via this new website. I did exactly that. My order date was 11/18/2014, and the checks were shipped the next day on 11/19/2014. So where were they?

Well, the order details had the answer. I had the checks shipped to my office (so they wouldn’t be sitting outside my house all day). The office has a suite number, but there was no second address line in the details of my order history. The package was probably undeliverable.

That’s my fault, right? I thought so, too. Except that I went back through the ordering process on ico.deluxe.com and my suite number autocompleted in the second address field. It was a form-specific autocomplete, as the other address fields’ autocompletes didn’t contain options for my home (& etc.) addresses that I’ve entered on other sites.

Of course I can’t prove that the mistake was on their end, because they can’t send an order confirmation.

Regardless of that, it’s unbelievable that they didn’t do anything to contact me or assist me when my package was returned to them.

And then there’s the cost

Deluxe charges me $23.19 for a box of checks with no add-ons and no improvements. (Depending upon your bank and your relationship with that bank, you may be quoted a different price.)

They do offer free shipping, but the free shipping takes an astonishing 14 days for delivery and it’s not trackable. Again, 1999 is on the Motorola flip phone, and the call is for you.

The next-best shipping option costs a staggering $13.25 for 4-day delivery! I know for a fact that USPS flat rate priority mail is trackable and will deliver in 2-3 days (Saturday included) for a little over five bucks.

If you want next-day delivery, be prepared to pay as much as the price of the checks over again at $21.50.

How many checks in a box?

Let’s talk value-for-money. For the sake of this article I was trying to compare prices at Vistaprint with Deluxe.

It is impossible to comparison shop. I don’t know if they’re being purposefully cagey, or if this is some kind fraudulent marketing practice, but Deluxe is selling me a box of checks.

Nowhere on their website do they say how many checks are in a box.

In fact, I’m not the only one to wonder about this. There’s at least one question on Yahoo! Answers about it, and another blogger at John’s Tech Journal wrote about the same issue back in 2008!

The worst part of this is that I can’t find a definitive answer, and John writes that even Deluxe’s customer service people were unable to give him a definitive answer! Apparently it’s somewhere between 120 and 150 checks, but I won’t really know until I get my order.

Who runs a business like this?

Vistaprint (which while not perfect is a company with which I’ve never had a significant problem) will sell you 150 checks for $10 with only $4.99 for 8-day delivery. You can upgrade to 5-day delivery for $5 more. So for a mere $19.99 I can get my checks in 5 days from Vistaprint compared to $36.44 for the same product in about the same amount of time from Deluxe.

And I’ve ordered checks from Vistaprint for a different account. Their quality is on-par with that of Deluxe. There was no reason to have ordered from Deluxe in the first place, other than to waste my time complaining about them and feeling like an idiot for overpaying.

Contacting customer service

On ico.deluxe.com there is no online contact method. I was doing all of this after hours, so I was not enthused about calling the 800 number listed on their site:

No, really. That's the entire web page, top to bottom.

Oh, and that number? That’s the number for Chase’s customer service. Maybe they could help me with technical issues on Deluxe’s website. Maybe not. I didn’t want to waste time trying.

Fortunately orderpoint.deluxe.com (the more modern iteration of their e-commerce solution) has an actual “Contact Us” form. Unfortunately, it’s a pile of crap. Here’s how that went:

Click for full-sized image.

There’s a wonderfully obscure error message at the top of that screenshot:

We are sorry. For security purposes, our site does not accept one of the characters you entered. Please remove the characters to continue processing your feedback. (Error message DLX-OPT-0055)

What? Here’s the message I was trying to submit:

Hi,

I’m just writing to inquire about the status of my order. It’s marked shipped as of 11/19/2014, but I have yet to receive it. Is there any kind of tracking information?

Thanks & regards,

Scott

There are no weird characters in there, right? Nothing that shouldn’t appear in a customer service inquiry, surely.

Finally I fudged around with it and managed to send it. I’ll let my next message to customer service speak for itself (yes, I was extremely frustrated to the point of being rude):

This was after I stripped out all the formatting. That's why it's a wall of text.

I put the CRLFs back in for your easy perusal:

Let me start off by saying that your website is horrible.

It took me 30 minutes to order my checks, mostly due to server errors and necessary Java updates on ico.deluxe.com, which by the way I can see hasn’t been updated since -probably- 1998. It also takes about .. 45 seconds -I just counted- to load in the first place.

That aside, I still haven’t received my order. In fact, I just submitted an inquiry. Which is to say I tried to submit it 7 times, each time getting the error ‘For security purposes, our site does not accept one of the characters entered… -Error message DLX-OPT-0055-‘.

Why so many times? BECAUSE THE ERROR MESSAGE DOESN’T MENTION WHAT CHARACTERS ARE UNACCEPTABLE. First I tried removing the single quotes, then the commas, then the dashes, and etc. until all the punctuation was gone.

It was then that I realized it must be the carriage return/line feeds. I’m sorry, but I’ve been a web developer since before you guys had a website -probably-, and I know of no situation where CRLFs are a security risk.

And even if I’m wrong, at the VERY LEAST the error message could mention that. Oh, and every. single. time I resubmit this form I have to re-enter my order number and order date. Not my account number though. Strangely the sensitive information remains.

I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about. Please forward this to your CTO, and tell him I’m available on a consultancy basis. I can actually implement this form in JS and AJAX, two brand new technologies since 1998.

Thank you.

Oh lord, I just submitted this form again and it gave the same error. This time I didn’t use CRLFs. What character is it? I wonder? Hmmm, I’ll have to spend about 10 more minutes on this issue JUST TO COMPLAIN ABOUT THE ISSUE.

Seriously, forward this to your CTO. You just lost a customer over what is trivial nonsense to get right.

OK, I’m submitting this again. It wasn’t the double quotes.

This time I’m taking out the parentheses and replacing them with dashes.

The forward slash? Nope, what next? I’m pretty sure that all these characters were in my last message.

As I said, I was incredibly frustrated. And why they require your routing number and account number in order to complain about their website is beyond me.

Their response

In response to my first message, the one which actually concerned my order that was paid for with my hard-earned money? No response. It’s now been just over a week since I submitted that message, and all I have to show for it is this canned reply to my email address:

Thank you for the comment you provided through our website. One of our customer service agents will respond to your message shortly. This is a courtesy notice: no action is required on your part. Thank you again for your feedback! We appreciate your business.

My rant about their website? It got a response:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting Deluxe.

We value customer feedback, so I have forwarded your comments to the appropriate area. We continually make innovative changes to our Web site to improve its functionality.

We apologize for the inconvenience and will make every attempt to serve you better in the future.

Again, thank you for your comments.

Regards,

Heidi
Your Deluxe Customer Care Representative

Emphasis above is mine. That’s a good joke, Heidi.

I just sent another inquiry about my order. It’s now December 18th, so we’ll see how that goes.

December 21, 2014

Still no response from Deluxe.

It’s been over a month since my order, so I’m giving up.

I contacted Chase via their Secure Message interface on chase.com and described my problem:

Date: 12-21-2014 20:15:55
To: Chase Online
Subject: Account Inquiry

TOPIC:Purchase Inquiry
MERCHANT:Check or supply order
PURCHASE DATE:11/25/2014
PURCHASE AMOUNT:$27.19

Hi,

On 11/18 I ordered checks from Deluxe, which I linked to from the Chase website. The fee for the checks was debited from my account on 11/25 PPD ID: 1410216800 , but I have yet to receive them.

I sent Deluxe an inquiry about my order and haven’t heard anything back in over a week.

I would like to have that fee reversed. I will order my checks from a third party merchant.

Thanks Regards,

Scott

And here’s the response I got back from Chase:

Date: 12-21-2014 20:26:26
From: Chase Online
Subject: Re: Account Inquiry

Dear Scott,

I apologize for any inconvenience you have experienced. I
am more than happy to take a look at your account.

After reviewing your account, we’re giving you a courtesy
refund of $27.19 on December 21, 2014.

Please let us know if there’s any other way we can help
you. We appreciate your business, and thank you for being
our customer. Please e-mail us through the Secure Message
Center while you are logged on to chase.com, or call us at
1-800-935-9935, if you have any questions.

Thank you,

Isabel [Last name]
Internet Service Center

There are two important things about what Isabel wrote: First, she responded in less than 11 minutes. On a Sunday. After business hours. That’s unbelievably good.

Second of all, she gave me a refund no questions asked.

That goes beyond “good” customer service. It’s downright excellent. I don’t have my checks, but I didn’t pay for them either.

I ordered my checks a few minutes later from Vistaprint. And hopefully that puts this whole issue to rest.

December 30, 2014

I got my Vistaprint checks! It only took 6 business days for the checks to be printed and delivered. And that’s with the cheapest shipping option. Not bad at all!

Click for the full-sized image. I redacted personal information, but it was all accurate.

Thanks

Thanks for reading. As I said, this has been cathartic for me, but moreover I’m hoping that this helps customers to avoid frustration from Deluxe in the future, and that it may lead them to update their websites.

Everyone makes mistakes, and nothing in this world is perfect. If I only had one problem — or a couple of minor issues — with Deluxe I wouldn’t have bothered with this laborious review.

So here’s the deal: After months and months of WebEx working flawlessly, the client application started crashing during the meeting setup process. This occurred on all of our users’ workstations.

I knew that between the time it had been working and the time it stopped working I had pushed out no Windows updates and I made no changes to the network (firewalls, IP ranges, NATting, etc.)

I was pretty sure it was a bug in their application, and having no way of fixing that I had the user call WebEx support. After about 30 minutes of no progress and my constantly entering the admin password to re-install WebEx software packages I took over the call.

The first thing I asked the rep: Have you recently pushed out any software updates?

His response: Absolutely not.

I didn’t look at the release notes until later, but it appears that he was lying or ignorant of this fact. Either way that’s a scary prospect, because looking at the notes they made a lot of changes in this release.

I should note that our conversation occurred on October 2, and the release is dated September 12. They must have issued a minor release during that time, as the release notes are for version 1.3.9 and the current version of the software is 1.3.9.0.8.

The rep then went on to insist that we must have made some kind of “network” change that caused the client to stop working.

He took control of the computer, and spent a great amount of time changing browser/internet settings in both Chrome and Windows. He insisted that it was a browser problem, and that the WebEx add-in was crashing or “being blocked”.

I asked: It looks to me like the application is running outside the browser, so why would it be a browser issue?

He insisted that the application was running in the context of the browser and that it was the browser settings causing the trouble. With me entering the admin password when prompted, he proceeded to weaken the security settings of the browsers to near-nothingness.

Even if that had worked, making my workstations less secure is not a viable solution. Nor would it be in any corporate environment.

He disabled our antivirus program and Windows Firewall. All of this was to no avail.

But all this faff over the browsers was completely tangential and pointless because the app would crash at the same point when starting a meeting in the WebEx Productivity Tools. This is done without the use of any browser.

So over an hour of our time was wasted trying to “fix” various web browsers when it was provably not a web browser issue.

Then the rep asked me to log him into the local administrator account. I did, and he was able to create a meeting without the application crashing.

HE THEN INSISTED THAT IT WAS A NETWORK ISSUE.

Not a permission issue, not a profile issue, not a bug in their application, but A NETWORK ISSUE.

At first I thought that he was perhaps confusing “Active Directory” with “the network”, but no. He directed me to a WebEx knowledgebase article about opening various outbound ports on a firewall.

We have never restricted outbound firewall ports, and more importantly if it were a network issue then the application would still crash when logged in as an administrator.

Also, I find it hard to believe that their application would crash due to a lack of connectivity. (And by “crash” I mean full-out “send error report” style crashing.) If it were a network connectivity issue then the app would likely give an appropriate error.

The worst part is that I can guess as to what’s going on:

The app probably has a bug wherein it tries to modify something to which it doesn’t have permission (a registry key, a file, Windows Firewall settings — whatever) in such a way that Windows does not ask the user for appropriate (e.g. admin) credentials, and then the app crashes rather than handling the permission exception properly.

Obviously that’s just my 2c, but it seems likely based on what I observed.

To summarize, here’s what really aggravated me about this encounter:

• The support rep claimed that there were no recent changes to their software, despite there having been a release with significant changes less than 3 weeks prior.
• The support rep insisted that we had made changes to “the network” despite that fact that I told him unequivocally that I had not, and that I’m the only person that would have the ability to do so.
• The support rep’s ultimate diagnosis of the situation was that our network was at fault, despite blindingly obvious evidence to the contrary.

All in all Cisco wasted about 2 hours of my and my user’s time.

Today we gave their support another try. Despite a different rep doing much the same as the first rep there was no progress. Their rep promised to call us back “between 12:00 and 12:30 EST”.

It’s now 13:50 and we’ve received no call back. I’ve also now missed lunch waiting for this phantom call.

The rep said that he leaves work at 14:00 EST, and I’m not very optimistic about getting a call from him in the next 10 minutes.

Update (2014-10-11):

Needless to say, I never did receive that call back.

Another amusing-slash-irritating find on the WebEx site: They apparently did not get the message about all the post-2000-era TLDs.

There’s a big difference between a fake email and an invalid email. I’m assuming that there’s no lumpy.bacca@hoth.guru, but it is plausible.

Yet good ol’ Cisco doesn’t believe in .guru, nor do they believe in a number of other perfectly valid (though stupid) TLDs. I guess that’s fine, because giving them a fake .com email is just as easy as giving them a fake .museum. (Speaking of which, don’t forget to submit a really, really improbable fake email. Poor john.smith@gmail.com must be sick of getting all those notifications!)

It seems like every single FedEx delivery I receive has something wrong with it. I haven’t ranted about this in a few years, so let’s look at this week’s experience.

But first I’d like to say that my local FedEx delivery guy is top notch. He’s friendly, and I’ve seen him loading and unloading his truck outside our building and he doesn’t violently throw packages about.

Check this out…

Click for the full-sized image

So…?

That looks pretty normal. They delivered a package from Texas to New York via ground in 4 days. Pretty good, actually.

Well that’s what the tracking screen looks like now that the package has been delivered.

But while it was in transit I wanted to do something crazy: Track my package.

Tuesday, September 9 (2 AM)

Me: I got a ship notification with the tracking number.

FedEx: This is not a valid tracking number. We have no record of it.

Actually: It was picked up by FedEx about 16 hours prior.

Wednesday, September 10 (Evening)

Me: After checking a few times today, around 56 hours after the package was picked up I finally got some info using my tracking number.

FedEx: “Shipment information sent to FedEx.” No indication that it was picked up nor en route.

Actually: It was already en route to New Jersey from Texas.

Thursday, September 12 (Just after midnight)

Me: Tracking info finally looks normal…ish.

FedEx: Now showing the pickup time and that package went through NJ a few hours ago.

Actually: Makes sense.

Delivery!

Once the package was delivered most of the tracking information was there.

I say most because they still forgot to log one key piece of info: That the package ever left Texas. Check out that image again; It was in tracking limbo from TX to NJ.

I haven’t even opened it up yet, but the box is undamaged. So at least they got that right.

It’s not even consistent

Both of these snippets were pulled from the screenshot at the top of the page.

See that? The data isn’t even consistent within the same tracking report.

On the one hand the “Ship (P/U) date” is listed as 9/11/2014.

On the other hand it was “Picked up” on 9/8/2014, three days prior.

Of course it seems likely that the pickup date was genuinely the 8th, as that would have made sense for a ground shipment. But hey, maybe they lost the package in TX for a while and were forced to air ship it to make up time.

Scott, why are you so mad?

I’m not really. But the one thing FedEx is supposed to be really good at is tracking.

USPS is not good. Often I’ll get a package before their system even updates and recognizes the tracking number (though they have gotten better).

I expect the postal service to be slow and feckless (unfortunately), though I’ve had great luck with their priority mail service. FedEx built their reputation on logistics and tracking.

As for UPS? I’ve found that they tend to under-promise and over-deliver. Often when they say that the transit time for a package is 5 days I’ll get it in 4. They are either on-time or under-time. FedEx I’ve found to be quite the opposite. I’ve also had nearly 100% of my UPS tracking numbers show accurate information immediately following a pickup. (I know because I ship out via UPS with some frequency.)

If this were the first time I’ve seen mis- or under-informed tracking information from FedEx then it wouldn’t be a big deal. But I find their tracking system to be useless often enough that I’ve come to expect it.

In the 1980s computerized logistics and tracking were very impressive even at minimal levels of functionality.

Still using the same technology in 2014 is just embarrassing. (And if they’ve updated their systems and software since then, it’s even more embarrassing that they haven’t gotten it right).

It’s also very frustrating to customers when their package is in a black hole state of limbo for three days.

I mostly have things shipped to my office, which saves me the dreaded door tag at home.  Granted, the door tag isn’t my problem with FedEx, though I would never ever ever ever have them deliver to my house (ever) again.

Home Delivery

“You want that thing crushed, and in two weeks, right?” Out of maybe 8 FedEx home deliveries I’ve had in my life, 2 were crushed so badly that the boxes split open, 3 took more than nine days to arrive, and in one godforsaken incident we received a door tag.  Right before we left for vacation.  And it was a gift.

That’s right.  Since you can’t re-route or re-schedule FedEx Home Deliveries (or at least not at the time of that incident), you are SOL if you get a delivery while out of town or about to leave town.  And since it was a gift, we couldn’t contact the sender to let them know what was going on.

Something else you should know:  FedEx home delivery people take their trucks home at night.  With all of your packages in them.  Your valuable crap is just sitting in their driveways, or on the street.  Maybe in that nice, fancy neighborhood.  Maybe outside a crack den.  The fun of it is, you simply can’t know!  Oh, and also that means you can’t just pick up your item from a FedEx facility, because it’s not there!

Finally, there is a key difference between UPS and FedEx.  UPS delivers in the evening.  FedEx (because they have special residential delivery trucks) delivers all day.  As in, when no one is home because they are working so as to pay for all the crap they buy on the internet.

Commercial Delivery

They’re a bit stronger in this area.  Maybe they’re even the best at this for overnight, super-priority, 6AM, $5000 deliveries.   But for your average internet order, they are just plain crap.  Worse than UPS by far, and worse than USPS Priority Mail by a bit.

You ask: “Surely they can deliver a package at the appointed time, right?”

Yes, they can (sometimes).  But they are really literal about it, to the point of being dickishly passive-aggressive.  Let me show you what I mean:

I wanted to do a tenso for “Package not due for delivery”, but I didn’t care enough.

That’s right.  My package was sitting in the same town as the delivery, but they decided not to deliver it because that would be too soon. There is no such thing as “too soon”, as far as I’m concerned.  I bought some crap online, and I want it now.

By the way, that’s not a ground delivery either.  It’s a premium cost 2 day air delivery.  I’d be lucky if my ground delivery took 5 days from Texas.

Let’s compare this to my last order from UPS:

That’s right.  Less than 18 hours.  Ground.

I know the UPS delivery is from PA and the FedEx delivery is from TX, so it’s a stupid cock-blasting “apples to oranges” comparison.  But know this: I usually get my UPS deliveries from TX in 2 or 3 days.  Never more.

FedEx could take a goddamn week trying to get it here via ground.

I know that they have a computer shoved somewhere up their corporate ass that manages logistics down to the package-ounce and truck-mile.  Guess what?  So does UPS, and they can make a profit without being assholes with your precious deliveries.

One last thing about FedEx Ground:  They don’t always move their packages on the weekends.  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  UPS and USPS?  They don’t give a shit, they’ll move your package around all week long.

In my experience the winner in getting crap to me from the dreaded West Coast:  USPS Priority Mail.  Three days to get to New York.  That’s three days, not three business days.  (The italics indicate the voice of some whiny asshole at FedEx HQ that has an MBA). I actually use USPS Priority Mail as a criterion for bidding on eBay auctions.

I would rather have an item shipped via US Parcel Post than FedEx Ground Home Delivery. If you disagree, please go to Teletubbies.com and tell them what you think.

“An automatic garage door opener makes you feel like you’re working in a futuristic wonderworld”.  – Frank Ormand, Pretzel Magnate

With the purchase of Amanda’s new Volt, I had to get the garage ready for a permanent resident.  She had kept her old Saab in the driveway, so I pretty much had the run of the place until now.  Protection from the elements aside, the garage is just a logical place to stick an electric car whilst it’s charging.

And my father raised me on automatic garage door openers, so I figured installing one would be the right thing to do.

Here’s a before picture of the garage:

Nothing to laugh at, I suppose.  But the stupid door would just sit there unless you went up to it and moved it around manually.  Clearly an unacceptable situation.

But wait.  Did you see the problem in that picture?  I sure didn’t.  Not even after looking at the situation real closely, like in this picture:

As anyone would, I went to my local Home Depot, and purchased their top-of-the-line Chamberlain Whisper-Drive Whateverthehell for $250.  Like an ass, it was after I got home that I started to check clearances around the door.

Do you see that 2×4 running horizontally above the door?  In the picture, you can see that it’s shaved down on one corner.  The joist across from it is likewise shaved down, only on the corner facing the door, so you can’t see it.

Why were they shaved down?  Because that’s the only way the motherfreaking door will actually clear them.  The top of the door travels up in between those joists as it rises, by about 3 inches.

Meaning I couldn’t mount the damn guide track for the opener underneath those beams.

Fortunately after some head scratching — “Should I lower the track and get a low-clearance kit?  Get rid of the overhead storage completely?  Return the opener and let Amanda open her own damn door?” — I came up with a solution:

Use a Sawzall (yes, I have an actual Milwaukee) to cut the ever-living crap out of those joists. It took some temporary bracing and a bit of cursing, but I managed to get a nice channel cut out for the opener, without losing my all-important storage area.

The middle of it is hung from the ceiling, which you can see a bit better here:

The structure is hung by 1×4 maple (yes, I decided to go fancy) which is bolted to 90deg angle brackets, which are then lagged into the ceiling joists.  It’s pretty damn solid, fortunately.

Here’s one more picture from the door’s end of things, just for fun:

Between figuring out a plan, removing (and later re-wiring) the lights, restructuring the overhead storage, installing and configuring the opener, getting power to the opener, and about 4 trips to Home Depot, what should have been a simple project ballooned into a 9-day adventure of anger and confusion.  (OK, so 2 weekends and some evenings in between, and I was calm for most of it).

Fortunately the whole thing works just fine, and I managed to avoid any major blunders along the way (except assuming that this would be a simple project from the get-go, of course).

Oh, and the garage door is probably 50 years old and will fall apart under the stress of constant use, so I’ll probably be replacing that soon.  (Hooray?)

Sorry if you were expecting a how-to, but I hope this gave you some ideas if you’re stuck in a similar situation.  (Plus, I just didn’t think to take pictures during the project).