08.14.06
Posted in Web, Technology, SocialIssues at 4:48 pm by Danny Dawson
a.k.a How StartLogic.com Consistently Lets Me Down
// This is a transcript of the second part of my conversation with Rob M. after our initial greeting was followed with a browser crash caused by the Liveperson.net Java Applet.
Please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with ‘Rob M.’
Rob M.: Welcome to “Startlogic’s” live chat service. How may I assist you?
Danny: Hi Rob.
Danny: we got cut off.
Rob M.: Please give me the password for email account
Danny: You have my permission to reset it on your end.
Rob M.: No I will need it from your end.
Danny: Sending my password in plain text via http to an unfamiliar URL is not something I’m confident in doing.
Rob M.: Well this chat uses secure URL
Danny: Excuse me..comfortable, not confident
Danny: I don’t know about you but I’m on http, not https
Rob M.: But your connect is directly from your computer within my chat software
Danny: The connection from my computer is insecure because it’s over the http protocol. That said, even if it was over https, the URL I’m looking at is “liveperson.net”, which is not the company I do business with directly. If you are someone authorized to conduct business on behalf of Startlogic, you should have access to a contact at startlogic who can provide you with the necessary information.
Rob M.: Well then you will get a reply for your issue through ticket once the issue is resolved, the ticket is still open
Danny: I’d like to know why I haven’t received a reply yet.
Rob M.: Because the ticket is still open in the support dept.
Danny: And the lack of a receipt acknowledgement email?
Danny: It’s been four days. For an urgent issue, this is unacceptable.
Rob M.: Well the email you got with the ticket id was the acknowledgement email
Danny: That’s an acknowledgement that the server received my email. Not a person.
Danny: Is anyone even looking into the issue?
Rob M.: Yes you will get a reply when the issue is resolved
Danny: When you and I end this chat, you’re going to feel no contractual obligation to look further into this issue. What assurance do I have that I will receive a timely response?
Rob M.: Well the issue is still open in the support dept and it will not be closed unless replied to you.
Danny: That’s not reassuring.
Danny: If your car breaks down and you bring it into the shop, how long do you expect to wait around until they let you know what’s going on and give you a time estimate?
Rob M.: Well this issue is with level 2 techs and once they get it resolved, they will get back to you.
Danny: aha! So it has been assigned to a technician?
Rob M.: Yes a level 2 tech
Danny: does the technician have a name?
Rob M.: No
Danny: if you would like to help debug this issue, you could try sending an email to [email removed]
Rob M.: Sure
Danny: You’ll get a bounce message describing the problem.
Rob M.: May I help you with anything else?
Danny: Did you get the bounce message?
// The next several messages came in very quick succession.
Rob M.: Well it will take some time
Rob M.: May I help you with anything else?
Rob M.: May I help you with anything else?
Rob M.: Please contact us if you face problems.
Rob M.: We’re available 24/7 via chat, email, or phone.
Rob M.: Take care and thank you for choosing StartLogic, Good Bye !
Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.
If you could change something regarding our service and/or products, what would you change?
I would change the entire concept of subcontracted support. Your drones are completely powerless to *actually* help me with my problems, and they either don’t have the ability or they outright refuse to contact someone at the company with whom I’m *actually* doing business in order to resolve an issue when they are unable. I’d suggest you find a different line of work before the market for your services crashes entirely.
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02.10.06
Posted in SocialIssues, Art, Graffiti at 12:00 pm by Danny Dawson
There always seems to be a lack of rational voices within San Francisco’s municipal government whenever it comes time to discuss graffiti. Whether it’s (DPW’s Deputy Director) Mohammed Nuru’s nonsensical comments on the Commonwealth Club’s panel (responding that “the city is not an arbiter of art” when asked how the city decides what is and isn’t graffiti) or Officer Putz (head of the Police Department’s Graffiti Abatement Program) and his snarky comments during an interview with the SF Chron (”This one is by The Snail. I can’t tell you how I know that. It’s a secret.”), it’s really hard to take the city’s “hard line” seriously.
We need more intelligent, socially aware people deciding what they’re going to prosecute our children for (15 felony counts for scratching his nickname into public property). We need folks like Ben Morgan, director of Quality of Life, with his twelve years “working directly with at-risk youth in the juvenile justice system,” who argues for treatment of the social issues underlying the graffiti problem. We need people like John Doffing, founder of Start Soma, a gallery dedicated to showing the work of emerging new artists, who argues for redirecting some of the $22+ million dollars per year the city spends on graffiti “cleanup” and prosecution into more constructive youth outlet programs where at-risk kids can redirect their creative energies into public art projects.
We need you, dear reader.
If you really want to get involved, one of the best ways to do so is by sitting in on one of the city’s Graffiti Advisory Board meetings on the second Thursday of every month. They’re held in City Hall, room 348, at 5:30 – 7:00pm, unless otherwise noted. Meeting agendas are available on the GAB website (linked above).
If you really, really want to get involved, look into applying for one of the vacant seats on the Board. They’re the folks who propose the policies that incarcerate our children and waste our tax dollars. You could help by offering more intelligent, compassionate, and efficient alternatives. The specific positions that lie open right now are as follows:
Vacant seat, new appointment, seat 2, must represent the Youth Court, for an indefinite term.
Vacant seat, succeeding John Omernik, seat 8, resigned, must represent private schools operating in San Francisco, for an indefinite term.
Vacant seat, succeeding Deborah Mansfield, seat 11, resigned, non voting member, must represent neighborhood organization, for an indefinite term.
Applications are available online in pdf format and should be submitted to the Clerk of the Board. If you have any questions, call the Rules Committee Clerk at 415-554-5184 and ask for Dale Johnson.
The Graffiti Advisory Board has the following responsibilities:
- Prepare and submit to the Board of Supervisors and the Mayor a report every six months on graffiti as it affects neighborhoods and the downtown area of San Francisco, which shall include a review and evaluation of the services and programs in place to respond to graffiti, prevention strategies, and recommendations and plans as to a consolidated program of public and private efforts;
- Advise about the coordination of information, activities and goals among existing programs funded by the City and Count and privately sponsored programs;
- Advise about improving the efficiency in the provision of graffiti enforcement, prevention, and clean-up services.
Read the rest of this entry »
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12.02.05
Posted in Dreams, Web, Technology, SocialIssues at 5:15 pm by Danny Dawson
To: Myself
BCC: A whole lot of people
Subject: [Fwd: Fwd: Re: Slow Dance]
Body:
For an expose on this hoax, read here:
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/s/slowdance.htm
If you would like to call Dr. Shields directly and ask him if he had anything to do with this email, please find his contact information available here:
http://www.aecom.yu.edu/dmb/shields.htm
If you don’t feel like clicking that, here’s his office number 718-430-2653, ext 3281.
Forwarding an email without editing it for concision and deleting the list of past recipients exposes the email addresses of past recipients to everyone to whom you send the email, as well as anyone to whom the email may be forwarded in the future.
If you truly insist on passing along a nice story, poem, joke, or some information you feel is important, please keep in mind the following three recommendations:
1. Don’t expose the email addresses of others to other people. Delete unnecessary addresses from the body of the email, and use the BCC field whenever the email that you’re sending doesn’t require people to “Reply-All”. In case anyone is reading this is wondering how I got your email address - someone else you know forgot this step. You can’t find your address below? That’s because I deleted it.
2. If “factual” claims are made in the body of the email you’re sending along, try searching Google for “hoax” along with a couple keywords from the body of the message. For instance: search Google for “Dennis Shields hoax” and you’ll find 51,800 results debunking the content of this email.
3. Keep emails concise. If you just want to pass along a poem or joke, delete everything but the poem or joke. You already read the email when it was sent to you, and you know what parts of it are interesting and what parts aren’t. Delete the garbage out of courtesy to others.
I’m sorry if you feel that I’ve wasted your time with this email. I’m sorry if you were merely an “innocent recipient” on the list and you already follow similar guidelines that you set for yourself, and thus you feel you have no need to have read this.
But at the same time, someone you know doesn’t already have similar “guidelines of email etiquette” that they follow, and remaining quiet about it won’t change the situation. Someone else is taking liberties with your contact information, passing it off to others, likely without your permission.
I, for one, can’t stay quiet about that forever, and I feel it’s inappropriate to complain about what I feel to be “a lack of manners” if I passively let every indiscretion slide. Here’s my attempt to do something about it.
If you agree with me and would like to share these words with other people you know, in order to spread awareness of email etiquette and save a lot of word-weary email users some time in the long run, please do. (I’ll be posting it on my weblog at http://quasistoic.org as well.)
But delete my email address from the body before you hit send.
Thanks,
-Danny Dawson
PostScript - I love you, Mom.
Post-PostScript - Racedrvr: My sincerest apologies to you. I did see the Snopes link you passed along about the email hoax, which I’ll include here for the sake of others:
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/medical/slowdance.asp
On 12/2/05, My Mom wrote:
>
>
> This poem was written by a terminally ill young girl in a New York Hospital .
> It was sent by a medical doctor - Make sure to read what is in the closing statement AFTER THE POEM.
>
> SLOW DANCE
>
> Have you ever watched kids
> On a merry-go-round?
> Or listened to the rain
> Slapping on the ground?
> Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?
> Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?
> You better slow down.
> Don’t dance so fast.
> Time is short.
> The music won’t last.
>
> Do you run through each day
> On the fly?
> When you ask How are you?
> Do you hear the reply?
> When the day is done
> Do you lie in your bed
> With the next hundred chores
> Running through your head?
> You’d better slow down
> Don’t dance so fast.
> Time is short.
> The music won’t last.
>
> Ever told your child,
> We’ll do it tomorrow?
> And in your haste,
> Not see his sorrow?
> Ever lost touch,
> Let a good friendship die
> Cause you never had time
> To call and say,”Hi”
> You’d better slow down.
> Don’t dance so fast.
> Time is short.
> The music won’t last .
> When you run so fast to get somewhere
> You miss half the fun of getting there.
> When you worry and hurry through your day,
> It is like an unopened gift….
> Thrown away.
> Life is not a race.
> Do take it slower
> Hear the music
> Before the song is over.
>
> ——————–
>
> FORWARDED
>
> E-MAILS ARE TRACKED TO OBTAIN THE TOTAL COUNT.
>
> Dear All:
>
> PLEASE pass this mail on to everyone you know -
> even to those you don’t know!
> It is the request of a special girl who
> will soon leave this world due to cancer.
> This young girl has 6 months left to live, and as her dying wish,
> She wanted to send a letter telling everyone to live
> their life to the fullest, since she never will.
> She’ll never make it to prom, graduate from high
> school, or get married and have a family of her own.
> By you sending this to as many people as possible,
> you can give her and her family a little hope,
> because with every name that this is sent to,
> The American Cancer Society
> will donate 3 cents per name to her treatment and recovery plan.
> One guy sent this to 500 people! So I know that we can
> at least send it to 5 or 6 —
> (just think ,it could be you one day).
> It’s not even your money, just your time!
>
> PLEASE PASS ON AS A LAST REQUEST
>
> Dr. Dennis Shields, Professor
> Department of Developmental and Molecular Biology
> 1300 Morris Park Avenue
> Bronx , New York 10461
>
–
Danny Dawson
http://quasistoic.org
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05.09.05
Posted in SocialIssues at 10:38 am by Danny Dawson
Daniel -
Thanks for your order with CD Baby!
Qty Description Price Total
=== =========== ===== =====
1 UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE FEATURING RADIO ACTIVE: r $13.95 $13.95
Sub Total $13.95
Shipping $2.25
Grand Total $16.20
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, May 9th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year’. We’re all
exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
Thank you once again,
Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little CD store with the best new independent music
phone: 1-800-448-6369 email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com
http://www.cdbaby.com
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10.29.04
Posted in SocialIssues at 3:50 pm by Danny Dawson
It’s not just Al-Qaeda that wants to see America burn to the ground. The Bush Administration has done a wonderful job of turning the world against our country. I think when the world starts comparing your nation’s elected officials to Adolf Hitler, it might be time to vote a new administration into office, or prepare to fight World War Three with no one else on your side.
Quicktime Movie (2 min, 40 sec long; 24.8MB filesize):
http://shurl.org/WWIII
In case that website goes down (or if you just want to have a copy on your own computer), I’m seeding a torrent:
http://shurl.org/BarryTorrent
For more information on PNAC, try this article:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1665.htm
More information on the “What Barry Says” video:
http://www.brooklynfilmfestival.org/films/detail.asp?cid=5&fid=353
http://www.lostinspace.com/htm/news/news-simon-robson.shtml
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09.05.04
Posted in Movies, SocialIssues at 1:28 am by Danny Dawson
You want to understand the president? Just eject the tape before the final statements. “We will flow a river forth unto thee.” Watch The Boondock Saints: when Irish Catholics go too far.
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06.06.04
Posted in Travel, SocialIssues at 1:23 am by Danny Dawson
From an email I wrote tonight to Kim:
$14 on a Friday night is ridiculous. So’s $20 on a Saturday night. I’m coming home.
Those numbers refer to tips only. Florida has no minimum wage, so we follow the federal law here. My employer is required to provide me with $2.13 an hour as a “base pay” rate, and if my weekly average pay (including tips) drops below $5.15 an hour (the federal minimum wage, compared with $6.75 in California), my employer must make up the difference. So I should see a small pay check for this week (most of it is taxed — tip jobs [waiter, bartender, etc.] tend to have slightly high rates of taxation). Oh, wait, no, I take that back. Tonight I made a total of $29.585 when you include my hourly wage, and last night I made $23.585. My employer is only required to provide me with extra cash if my total for each of those nights had dipped below $23.175. You gotta love the federal minimum wage Florida.
Were you aware that the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in about 7 years? It was set to $5.15 on September 1, 1997. Assuming a 40-hour work week and 50 work weeks a year, that amounts to a yearly wage of $10,300. In the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area in 2004, $10,300 has the same buying power that $8,886.27 did in 1997 when the minimum wage was set, which seems to mean that workers making the federal minimum wage nowadays can afford about 86.3% of what they could back in 1997. In San Francisco, where the minimum wage was raised to $8.50 an hour this year, workers working the same amount make $17,000 a year, which is equivalent to about $13,764.77 in 1997 dollars. In SF in 1997, minimum wage workers made $10,300 a year (same as in Florida), which shows a quality of living increase for minimum wage workers in SF of 33.6% between 1997 and 2004, compared to the 13.7% decrease of QOL for minimum wage workers in the FLL/MIA area. Note that through all this, the federal Health and Human Services poverty guidelines have been raised 18.0% over that same time period. Sounds like Mi Ami has been fucked and forgotten. Which is one of the reasons I’m moving to California.
Keep in mind that I know nothing of economics. The subject has always mystified me.
Maintaining the same QOL in Emeryville, CA that I do here in Hallandale, FL requires about a 38.6% increase in my income. By my most conservative guesstimates, I made at least 50% more working at Venus in Berkeley (a short bus ride from Emeryville) than I currently do at Tuna’s in North Miami Beach (a bitch of a bus ride from my house in Hallandale, or more often, an inconvenient hitch with one of my coworkers). I say at least, because I’m comparing a very low guesstimate of my average income at Venus with a high guesstimate of my average income at Tuna’s. More likely, I made about 80-100% more, which is what I’d need to maintain the same QOL in the City of SF. However, if I choose to live in SF, I will surely shop around for the nicest cheap apartment I can find and I’ll get some job in the city, where the minimum wage is 25.9% higher than it is in Berkeley.
Again a disclaimer: this is probably all based on some seriously fuzzy math.
Resources:
Minimum Wage Laws by State
Cost-of-Living Calculator over time by Metropolitan Area
Relative Salaries City to City (in current dollars)
History of CA Minimum Wage
HHS Poverty Guidelines over time
Further Reading:
Hope for Florida?
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