Matt Mauldin

• will be out for a while this morning. Upgrading from AT&T DSL to Uverse. Bye bye copper wires. Does fiber optic mean faster tweets? #
• My 7 mo old girl slept 12 hours last night – 1st time ever. Hooray for a well-rested Friday. #
• reviewing competitor websites, and these companies spend major ppc budget on crappy sites. amazing. no testing between keywords either #
• past 2 or 3 windows updates have happened right AFTER a restart, then asked for a restart. Annoying! #
• News said Texas has highest Avg homeowners insurance rates. Why? We’ve got some of the lowest house prices. #
• new post at http://www.mattmauldin.com/ #
• 1 week away from launching a ecommerce re-design. We’re moving away from Yahoo stores. Their admin is really difficult to work with. #

Popularity: 10% [?]

I finally scheduled the switch from DirecTV to AT&T Uverse.  It will happen on Friday, March 6th which can’t come soon enough.  For the past two years I’ve been stuck with DirecTV at the house.  Man, that company sucks!

It started out OK, because they were really interested in getting my business.  But then they started adding on charges for additional boxes in the house.  And they were slow about getting the thing installed.  And once the service guy finally got there, he wanted to install new hardware in my walls because he wanted a “premium” connection or some crap like that.  I told him no, just plug the stupid thing in and hit “On”.

After about 2 hours, we finally got the TVs working and my phone starts ringing.  Every day for a freakin week someone from DirecTV called.

“Welcome!” – got that already from the sales person, the accounting person, and the install guy.

“Thank you for being a customer.” – that too.

“Are you satisfied?” – after 2 days? I guess so.

“What can we do to improve?”  – stop calling?

“I know you are a new customer, but do you want to buy this stuff too?” – no, if I wanted it I would have ordered it 48 hours ago!

Finally, after a week of calls, I get the “are you a happy customer” question again for the five dozenth time and I say “I’ve had a call every day for a week.  Quit it.”  The lady says “Well, you are just part of the DirecTV family now.”  And I respond “Lady, I don’t even talk to my blood relatives this often.  I sure don’t want to talk to you.”

So the call volume really dropped off after that.  But I still get a call once a month asking me to buy Cinemax and HBO.  Why? So I can see the same movie for three weeks at a time and pay you an extra $25 per month? No deal.  Of course, it takes about four “No deals” each phone call before my message hits home.  I really feel sorry for those telemarketers, because they are just trying to hit some quota or something.  Even their responses are read directly off some screen, and they all sound bored out of their mind, so I’m not mean to them.  But crap, quit calling!

Last year some time we had a big thunderstorm and our HD receiver went out.  I don’t know if it was lightening creating an electrical surge, or wind knocking out the power or what, but the HD receiver was a gonner.  So the next day I call direcTV and waste 30 minutes of my life on hold listening to their exciting upgrades for valued customers.   Hey DirecTV, hire some more bored telemarketers to answer my phone call!

Anyways, They want me to pay $300 for a new receiver, so what can I do?  I pay the thing and get it in the mail a few days later.  We’re back up and running.

Things went like that for the past few months, until we get a call last week from AT&T Uverse.  We decided to switch because it’ll consolidate a few utility bills for phone, internet and TV.  And in the long run we’ll be saving $30-40 a month.  Why not.

So today I call DirectTV (who sucks, by the way) to cancel my service.  They tell me that I will have to return all my boxes, which is fine.  But I tell the dude that I bought one of those for $300.  He says I paid that as a “lease agreement”.

What? B.S.  I told him it wasn’t explained to me.  I was told I had to “purchase” a new box.  And that’s what I did.  In fact, you want to know what else is crap?  DirecTV was screwing me from both ends because I paid the $300 lease, and then they charge me each month on my bill for 3 leased receivers.

This is a screenshot from my February bill.  They already charge me for each of the boxes I have in my house, so how can you call the $300 a lease fee when it’s already here and I pay it each month?  Bastards.

Of course, one of the $4.99 charges is credited back.  Of course it is!  They have to provide at least one box because you can’t just plug the satellite right into the TV!  Thanks for nothing.

There’s even a class-action lawsuit against DirecTV about this.

So at the end of my call today the guy said he was sorry I was cancelling and that if I ever wanted to reconnect, just call back.

That aint happening because…

DirecTV, You Suck!

Popularity: 53% [?]

• found a sealed, empty Dr Pepper can. Too bad I can’t get a mouse in there. http://tinyurl.com/55wt44 #
• Digsby is nominated for the About.com 2009 IM Best Awards in “Best Third Party IM” category. Vote here: http://tinyurl.com/byggd3 #
• I worked late on Friday, and still my inbox fills up with work emails since then. Do people take weekends anymore? #

Popularity: 8% [?]

Yesterday during lunch I went to grab the last two Dr Pepper bottles left in the fridge. But instead of two cold Dr Peppers, I get one cold Dr Pepper and one completely sealed yet empty Dr Pepper can.

Here’s a couple of photos:

Dr Pepper Empty

Sealed Top of Empty Dr Pepper

The can is completely empty.  You can’t tell that it’s empty by reading this, but you can see above that the can is sealed, and it’s light enough to balance on the end of a piece of copy paper.

I’m keeping it here on a shelf in my office if you ever have a chance to see it.  That is, I’ll have it here for a while, because this reminded me of a great flick, The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew.

This film has given me a purpose for the empty, sealed can.  I’m saving this can to get a free case of Dr Peppers next time I go to Dublin, TX. (It’s worth the wait because Dublin Dr Pepper is the best. Love that cane sugar.)  The only bad part is that I can’t get a mouse inside the can.

How, you ask?  Here you go:

For all you hoseheads, here’s how to get a two four of Dr Pepper, eh?

I doubt I’ll be getting a two four (a case, to those of us south of The Great White North) of Dr Pepper anytime soon.

Here’s the real bummer: between the wife and I, you can guess who got the full can.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Naymz.com is a business-related social network targeting mainly the same market as LinkedIn.  I was turned on to Naymz after reading an article about their profiles being well optimized to show high in the SERPs.  I am mostly interested to see how soon it will take to see my Naymz profile show up. You can see my profile here:

Is Naymz Spammy?
One user, Ben Poole didn’t find Naymz very helpful.  I wouldn’t either if I had his Spam experience here:
http://benpoole.com/weblog/200801222050
But read carefully past the post and you’ll find some very interesting comments, even from one of Naymz co-founders, Tom Drugan.  Tom responded only 1 day after Ben first posted the problem.  I find that to be very responsive and I certainly wouldn’t expect that from any employee of the big social networks.

One feature Naymz allows is to automatically log into other accounts you own (Yahoo mail, Gmail, LinkedIn, etc) and send an invite to your network of contacts. Volker Weber, http://vowe.net/archives/009346.html, found this very annoying.  So did many of his readers, as noted in comments to this post.
(Notice also that Tom Drugan responded withing a couple of days to Volker’s post also)

Stalkers on Naymz
Naymz has been called A Stalker Enabled Social Network by some because of they provide detailed tracking, including IP address, geographic location, and what time you visited a profile.

Whatever.  Just spend a few minutes on MySpace or Facebook and you can find zip codes, email and IM addresses, hometowns and current towns, and who knows what else.  Sure, you won’t know the exact time of a visit, but you can have a fairly good idea of who is reading your profile.  This isn’t anything new – if someone is serious about tracking you down, your information can be found.

Why will I keep using Naymz?
So Naymz has trouble with spam, provides some questionable tracking practices, and has a much lower adoption than other social sites.  But there is 1 reason that will determine if I continue to use Naymz, and it goes back to the overall goal of “Reputation Management”.

That is, if Naymz can get a SERP listing onto page 1 in Google and Yahoo for my name, then this is well worth it.  That is a whole 10% of the SERP page that I may or may not control without a Naymz profile.

I may not use their premium services, invite my friends, or even spend much time here at all.  But taking up valuable real estate on the SERPs for a page 1 is a benefit that I don’t want to pass up!  Stay tuned and I’ll update in a later post on the results.

Popularity: 41% [?]