Category Technology

Here’s a fun email I received today!

Dear Christopher Kusek,
At Vonage, we’re committed to providing exceptional phone service at a great value you can rely on. On December 1, 2008, the price of our Residential Basic 500 Minute Plan increased from $14.99 to $17.99¹. The new price will be reflected in your February 2009 bill. We’re proud that we remain one of the most competitive choices among home phone providers.
Don’t forget, with the Vonage Residential Basic 500 Minute Plan, you will continue to receive 25 great features, like Call Waiting, Caller ID, and Voicemail Plus that many phone companies still charge for. International calls are still as low as 1 cent per minute.
As an option, you might consider the Residential Unlimited Plan for only $24.99² a month. For just $7 more you will get:

• Unlimited local and long distance calls in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico
• FREE calls to landline phones in Italy, France, Spain, UK and Ireland
• Peace of mind – never worry about going over your minutes again!

For even more savings and the convenience of one bill each year, you can pay in advance with our Annual Pre-Pay option and save 20% off the standard rate³ or just $19.99 a month.
Click here to access your Online Account and check out these options and more. If you have any questions, you can call 1-VONAGE-HELP and speak to a customer care representative.
At Vonage, we continue to provide you with the best service at the lowest possible price.
Thank you for your business,
Vonage

Here are some of my favorite parts:

¹ Maintaining Vonage service on or after your adjusted bill cycle date confirms your agreement to the rate change.

Uh, WTF? “Watch as we screw you, and you standing by and taking it is your way of agreeing!”

As an option, you might consider the Residential Unlimited Plan for only $24.99² a month. For just $7 more you will get:

Hey, we’re charging you more, so it doesn’t look so Economically bad for you to Pay us even MORE money for the same non-service! Sound good? IT’s only another $7 ! ! !

I stood by and let the fake ‘surcharges’ and other BS slide for the longest time (I’m a far stretch from when I was paying only $16.91 a month, which was a lot considering our non-home phone usage.   And then after ‘bs surcharges’ it went up to ~20 (Which was more than I paid ATT) But now, you’re raising it even more, so after surcharges I’ll be paying roughly ~25 dollars? Yea, sorry.  I don’t think so.

Who knows what type of VoIP service I will switch to in order to maintain a home phone, but I can tell you it won’t be Vonage for much longer.

Hey everyone who participated in this contest, I want to thank you and I appreciate your interest in getting some of the many things I have so you can use any benefit from them!

After tallying the responses when I closed the contest this Friday, and running it through my random ‘winner’ picker, we have a winner! Brian J. Greenberg is indeed our official winner!

Brian’s Blog found here will be the bearer of this, and special thanks to his tweet on twitter from @bjgreenberg.

So, the next contest will be announced on Monday, either for a Zune, a copy of Vista (32bit) or who knows… but that is my plan for kicking it off on Monday (hopefully, if life doesn’t happen!;))

Thanks, and the determination of how long to keep the contest open is derived based upon the number of entries divided by the number of hits/interest, so I look forward to the next one!

Thanks everyone!

Christopher – @cxi

I came across the most amazing website today! Apparently Glaceau.com wants you to WAIT to see their website.  I guess this is in respect to not showing you some kind of error, they’ll let you sit there for what may seem like an infinite amount of time staring at this.

You know, good things to come to those who wait, those who close that damn tab and move on to another site.  Sorry guys, but seriously?! and 00%? Couldn’t code it for 0%?!

And if you do finally get past that initialization point, they treat you with a patronizing tone:

While I love your product, I cannot stand your web attitude.

One of our Twitter Tools wasn’t working (Damn upgrading accidentally!)

If you’re one of those folks who has upgraded Twitter Tools beyond 1.1b1 and want to get it working again, here are the steps I’ve taken (consistently) to get it working.

Deactivate Twitter Tools:

Downgrade Twitter Tools with version 1.1b1 (size:69,478)

Upload twitter-tools.php into the /wp-content/plugins/twitter-tools directory

Drop your Database (wp_ak_twitter) – phpMyAdmin if you can

DROP TABLE `wp_ak_twitter`;

Tweet a bit in the hopes it makes a difference (It won’t :))

And eventually, after an unknown period of time (perhaps tied to API calls) it will start working.

Tweets will then show up on your blog, and when you post entries to your blog, they will tweet on Twitter on your behalf.   Typically, once you’ve done this it should work within 1-2 hrs.

Disclaimer: This is for people who use Twitter Tools and it stops working after upgrading.  I’m not sure why, nor do I really care why, when it fulfills a specific purpose for me :)

Totally hijacked from Dave Bost @ The Mind of a Developer Evangelist

On December 12th, the Microsoft Evangelist team on the West Coast is hosting a (virtual) Windows FireStarter event. This is a great chance for developers to learn “straight from the horses mouth” (so to speak) guidance, best practices and tips&tricks for building applications on top of the Windows platform.

They are holding this FireStarter event *LIVE!* in Redmond, but they are also streaming it live online to the rest of the world.

This would be a great opportunity to secure a conference room for the day, post the agenda around your office, and join us live on December 12th. I’ll see if we can also open up an IRC channel or something to carry the communication online during the sessions.

Be sure to register for online participation or if you can happen to be in Redmond on the 12th, you can participate in-person. Seats are limited!

Agenda: (all times are PST)

8:30 – 8:45, Kick off, Mithun Dhar

8:45 – 9:30, Keynote/Why Vista!, Chris Henley

9:30 – 10:45, The Case of the Unexplained, Mark Russinovich

11:00 – 12:15, Building Differentiated UI Applications Using Composite WPF, Glenn Block, Bob Brumfield & David Hill

1:00 – 2:00, Best Practices for Developing for Windows for Windows Standard User, Crispin Cowan

2:00 – 3:00, Windows Security and Bitlocker, Byron Hynes

3:15 – 4:00, (Windows 7 + Windows Server 2008 R2) Teaser Session, Byron Hynes

4:00 – 5:00, Windows for everyone!

I highly encourage you check this out if any of this applies to you, especially Windows 7, Server 2008, Mark Russinovich, AppDev, Security.. any of it!

Also, be sure to check out Dave’s Blog and the Thirsty Developer, by far one of the most consumable podcasts (which just happens to be about development and architecture!)