Category: Rants & Raves

Did Stoney Trail Mazda Scam Me?

I don’t know much about cars. I’m one of those guys that, if something goes wrong with my car, I’ll call the AMA and let someone smarter than me figure it out. The most complicated thing I’ve done on my own cars is replace a headlight. So there’s the context for this story.

On Friday I took my 2003 Mazda Protege 5 to Stoney Trail Mazda in Calgary for an oil change, and after 30 minutes a woman came back to tell me that they were suggesting the following procedures for my car beyond the oil change:

  • Replace air filter ($30)
  • Injector flush ($170)
  • Power steering flush ($90)
  • Replace broken fog light ($270)

I was expecting to walk out spending under $50, and they were suggesting I spend more than 10 times that much! I felt a bit overwhelmed at first, but I started asking questions because it seemed curious that so much needed to happen at once. The broken fog light, she said, wasn’t just a simple blown bulb – the entire assembly needed to be replaced. The car has 61K KM on it, and had never had any of the fluids replaced/flushed beyond the oil and wind shield wiper fluid, but did that mean that both the power steering and injector systems needed to be flushed? I ended up saying yes to the air filter and power steering flush, but said I’d decide later on the injetor flush and fog light.

After she walked away I started searching online for articles related to the topic, and found a good one on injector flushing. I also found a bunch of forum threads where people were discussing the same topic, and the general consensus I found was that unless there’s a suspected problem with the injectors, there’s no need to flush them. It seems that telling customers that their vehicle’s injectors need flushing is an easy money-maker for the auto shop. I’m glad I said no to that. As for the power steering flush, that seems to be more of a mixed bag – some people say it’s good to have it changed every five years or so – which means my car is due – but in general unless you’re having problems with your power steering, the fluids don’t need to be touched. As someone who does computer consulting, it looks like most fluid flushing is right up there with me telling someone the SATA ports on their computer need defragmenting, or their WiFi signal needs cleaning because it’s dirty.

Here’s what ticks me off about this: I took my Mazda back to a Mazda dealership rather than taking it to Mr. Lube or another quick-change shop because I wanted, and expected, by-the-book Mazda maintenance. Meaning that unless Mazda themselves recommended a certain procedure in the owners manual, the Mazda dealership wouldn’t recommend anything different. When I went up to pay for the procedures, I told the woman at the desk I wasn’t sure I’d ever come back to this dealership again for servicing. I wasn’t rude or angry when I said it. She asked me why, and I explained that after some research I didn’t believe that they were giving me sound advice about what really needed to be done on my car. She replied that merely relays what the technicians tell her.

The kicker? When I drove home and pulled into the garage I turned all my lights off and on, including the fog lights, and they all work just fine. I find it hard to believe that Stoney Trail Mazda would be so bold as to tell a customer a light isn’t working if it is, but on the other hand I’m baffled as to why they thought it wasn’t working.

So, any car experts out there care to weigh in on this?

Swoopo: It’s Like eBay Designed by Satan

“Imagine for a second that you set out to come up with an online shopping site that would take advantage of everything we’ve come to know about consumer behavior to separate people from their money in as efficient a way as possible. What would you do? Well, you’d probably try to lure buyers with bargain prices. You’d pit them against one another in an auction. You’d ask them to make snap decisions without taking much time to figure out just how much money they’re spending. On top of that, you’d ask them for only very small amounts of money at any one time, letting payments of a few cents build up to hundreds of dollars. Still trying to figure out how you’d put all that together? You can relax. Someone’s already beaten you to it: the folks at Swoopo. It’s an online auction site that fiendishly plays on every irrational impulse buyers have to draw them into what might be the crack cocaine of online shopping sites.”

That’s a quote from an article on MSN Money, and it’s the best article I’ve seen yet on Swoopo. Despite my earlier success with Swoopo, and a successful cheap acquisition of a 16 GB SD card, like any gambler I rolled the dice and lost: I was bidding on a set of pots and pans, and after using 18 bids I didn’t win, so like a degenerate gambler I bought another bid pack for $27 and blew ALL of them and still lost. The most idiotic part? I kept one bid, decided to bid on something else, and when I checked the pots and pans auction, it had ended – exactly one bid after the person who outbid me. So if I had used that last bid, I might have one – or it might have gone on for another hour. Swoopo is just too problematic – avoid it.

Some Thoughts on Facebook and Twitter

I’m a member of a group called Mobius – it’s an invite-only conference that Microsoft holds once or twice a year, and it focuses on mobility. There’s a private mailing list for Mobius, and it’s always full of interesting discussions. Yesterday there was a discussion about Google Wave and it spilled over into talking about Facebook and Twitter. One of the people mentioned the idea that as long as people use social networking in a professional manner, they’re good things. That triggered something I’ve been pondering for a while now, so I thought I’d share here what I wrote on the list.

“Ah, but there’s the catch! There’s no consensus on how tools like Facebook and Twitter are used – it’s like email, how do you decide the “right” way to use it?

You mention professional purposes, but I’m of the exact opposite viewpoint. Facebook for me was great in the beginning because my friends on there were really my friends. Then Facebook got really popular, and suddenly business aquiantences wanted to be added as “friends”, PR people I deal with wanted to be added as “friends”, and visitors from my sites wanted to be my “friends”. It completely changed the dynamic, and even the meaning of the word “friend” in an online sense. Sites like LinkedIn are social networking for businessses, yet most people seem to prefer to use Facebook for that because it has such momentum.

Then there’s the whole issue of person vs. site. It’s not my place to tell peole how to use technology, but when people on my “friend” list started to import their RSS feeds from their technology sites, I un-friend them. Maybe I’m weird, but if I’m friends with someone on Facebook, or following them on Twitter, I want to see what’s going on with them as a PERSON. If I wanted to know what’s going on with their Web sites, I’d open up my RSS reader. Mixing the two just makes a bit of a mess…

Twitter is a whole different ballgame – but it has the same type of problem when you want to follow a person and instead get a news feed from their site. I created Twitter accounts for each of my sites that I feed an RSS feed to, then I have my own personal Twitter account. Twitter for me is really useful and interesting – I was initially very much against it, having seen a lot of what I’d call “Tweetbuse” (haha!) where people would tweet everything they were doing. “Eating dinner”. “Going to the bathroom” (I kid you not, I saw that once). Thankfully, you can easily unfollow people like that.

One thing I really like about Twitter is how I get connected to opinions from people all over the place – I posted about trying to watch the movie “Day Watch” and only getting through 25 minutes of it, and within a few hours I had four strangers sending me messages telling me that the books were much better, and I should check them out. That’s really valuable to me – and I get a lot of interesting feedback about technology as well.”

OutsourcingRoom.com Stole Customer Data From Elance?

One of the reasons I use unique email aliases for my jasondunn.com email is that it enables me to control and track who’s using my email address, who’s sharing it, etc. Once I start getting spam to a certain alias, I block it. It’s not a perfect system; there are still people who take my “real” personal email address and share it with online services (greeting cards, etc.) and people who have virus/spyware problems on their PCs, so I still get spammed now and then. But I get perhaps 3-5 per day, so it’s easy to manage.

I was surprised then when I received an email from a site called “Oroom” and it was addresses to my unique Elance email address. Here’s what I sent to Elance:

“I use unique email aliases, and for Elance the email address on file is *******. Imagine my surprise when I received an unsolicited email message from Oroom, promoting a new service/site. I didn’t give Elance permission to share or sell my email address to any other companies. Please explain how this happened.”

And here is their response:

Dear Jason,
Thanks for contacting us.
In the last day or so, we’ve learned that OutsourcingRoom.com and its parent company CyberBionic Systematics has illegally obtained and posted information about Elance members and sent out unwanted solicitation emails. We have confirmed that no financial information such as credit cards, tax id numbers, or other financial records were compromised. The stolen data was limited to name, city, state, phone number, and email address.
Elance treats the security and privacy of our community members with the utmost seriousness. We have already mobilized an international team to investigate and respond to this issue and have demanded legally that they cease and desist. We have taken immediate steps to remedy the cause of the security breach, and have secured all areas that were discovered to be vulnerable. We are also in contact with the parent company and are pursuing all avenues available to us to have the data removed and destroyed.
Elance has made demands on OutsourcingRoom.com and its overseas hosting services. We have filed an international criminal complaint. And we are contacting the law enforcement officials in the relevant countries presently.
We continue to take this issue very seriously and will update you when we have more relevant details to share. We extend our sincere apologies for any inconvenience or disruption that this has caused anyone. If you have a specific question, please contact Elance by email at [email protected], and we will attempt to answer with whatever information we have.
Best regards,
Steve
Manager, Customer Relations
Elance

“Dear Jason,

Thanks for contacting us. In the last day or so, we’ve learned that OutsourcingRoom.com and its parent company CyberBionic Systematics has illegally obtained and posted information about Elance members and sent out unwanted solicitation emails. We have confirmed that no financial information such as credit cards, tax id numbers, or other financial records were compromised. The stolen data was limited to name, city, state, phone number, and email address.

Elance treats the security and privacy of our community members with the utmost seriousness. We have already mobilized an international team to investigate and respond to this issue and have demanded legally that they cease and desist. We have taken immediate steps to remedy the cause of the security breach, and have secured all areas that were discovered to be vulnerable. We are also in contact with the parent company and are pursuing all avenues available to us to have the data removed and destroyed.

Elance has made demands on OutsourcingRoom.com and its overseas hosting services. We have filed an international criminal complaint. And we are contacting the law enforcement officials in the relevant countries presently.

We continue to take this issue very seriously and will update you when we have more relevant details to share. We extend our sincere apologies for any inconvenience or disruption that this has caused anyone. If you have a specific question, please contact Elance by email at *******, and we will attempt to answer with whatever information we have.

Best regards,

Steve
Manager, Customer Relations
Elance”

Seems that the outsourcing industry is quite competitive if one company is willing to risk getting caught hacking into another company’s customer database.

My Swoopo Experiment: Yes, This is Gambling

Yesterday morning I was questioning the legitimacy of Swoopo, and after reading up on it some more, my curiosity was so strong I decided to invest a bit of money to see if their system actually worked. So here’s how it played out:

  • I bought a “bidpack” for $27 CAD + tax ($27.30) which gave me 40 bids (that’s 68 cents per bid)
  • I picked a product that I wanted (a 32 GB USB Flash drive), and one that I figured there wouldn’t be a great deal of competition on (such as a laptop)
  • I waited until the last 10 seconds to place my first bid (the price was at 8 cents), and when a bid is placed it adds a few seconds onto the countdown clock
  • I spent about four minutes bidding against a handful of other people, and eventually won – the final price being $9.84 CAD
  • I used up 18 bids on this item, which cost me $12.24 CAD – more than the item itself
  • Shipping on this item is $5.90 CAD
  • So my total cost on this item is $27.98 CAD – almost three times the cost of the final bid price
  • The retail cost of this item if Iwere to purchase it from my favourite computer store (Memory Express) would be $89.24 CAD including tax (not counting the rebate – those are always a bit dodgy)
  • So in the end I’m saving $61.26 CAD on this product. Not bad, right?

…but everyone else who bid on this item threw their money away, and that’s the true “evil genius” in Swoopo. Let’s say there were five other people bidding (and there were at least that many), and that each person bidding dumped, on average, of 10 bids into the process. If they had the same basic cost as I did, each of them spent $6.80 bidding on this and in the end they walked away with nothing. Swoopo in the meantime, made $68.80. Assuming they got a good deal on the purchase of the 32 GB Flash drive, they would have made a bit of money on this transaction.

The real action though is on the hot items like Macbooks, where there are thousands of bids – this article has a great breakdown of the process, but the short version is that on hot items like this, Swoopo is making $13,000+ on a laptop that they paid perhaps $1300 for. You have hundreds, if not thousands of people, throwing money at the process and walking away with nothing.

That’s the real catch with Swoopo – it’s basically gambling, with a group of people throwing money into a pool and only one of them can walk away the winner. You have to go “all in” and be prepared to out-bid, and out-last everyone else in order to win the item. If you don’t committ enough money, you “fold” and give up. One person wins, and everyone else loses. It’s like eBay designed by Satan.

Three New Amazon.com Features I’d Like To See

I really like shopping from Amazon.ca in Canada – and I’d shop even more from them if they had more products. They’re getting better in Canada, adding some electronics, but by and large Amazon.ca is a pale reflection of Amazon.com. At any rate here are two ideas I wish Amazon would implement:

  • Discount Alert: There are some books and movies that I want, but I’m not willing to pay the current price for them. Case in point: The Shield Season 7 is $49.99 right now. I recently purchased seasons two through five for $29.99, which is a great price. I was holding off on buying seasons six and seven until they dropped in price. I was checking on Amazon.ca for something else a few days ago, and decided to look up The Shield again – and wouldn’t you know, season six dropped in price by $20 and was $29.99. Why doesn’t Amazon have a way for me to flag a particular product, then notify me when that product is on sale? If a product I want to pay less for goes on sale for a few days, but I’m not told about it, Amazon is losing out on a sale. Further, if Amazon had 5000 people who flagged an item and were waiting for it to go on sale, they could go back to the manufacturer of that product and say “Hey, we have 5000 people who will probably buy this product if we can get the price down – what can you do for us?” That’s a powerful market waiting to happen.
  • Softcover Alert: There are numerous books that I’m interested in reading, but not so much that I want to pay extra for the hardcover edition. The extra size and weight of hardcover books means I’ll only buy them if it’s a book that I’m really excited about reading (typically something by Terry Brooks). It’s easy to forget the name of a book you want to read, so I’d like to see Amazon.com allow customers to flag a hardcover book and be alerted when it’s available in softcover. This would be an easy way for Amazon to rack up some extra sales. Or they could go even further and allow the pre-order of the softcover book, months before it comes out. This would be much better than what I do now, which is add the book to my wish list with a note saying that I’m waiting for the softcover version. People don’t seem to read the notes, so I end up with a hardcover version…
  • Series Alerts: More often than not, I’ll buy the first book in a series, read it, and forget about the next books in the series until many months later when they finally come out. It’s not that I don’t want to read the next book in the series, it’s that there’s no easy way for me to be notified about the new book in the series. If Amazon.com allowed me to flag a series and get alerted when a new book is released, or even pre-order the next book, it would simply show up at my door when it comes out. Again, easy sales for Amazon.com and a lot of convinience for me as a customer.

YouTube Annotations…Why Didn’t I Think Of This Sooner?

I’m kicking myself for not thinking of this sooner. You’ve seen me complain about having to answer the same questions over and over again in YouTube videos, and it didn’t occur to me until recently that a partial solution to my problem was right in front of me all along: the ability to annotate my videos! YouTube introduced this feature a while back, and it allows the owner of a video to create text overlay comments in the video – essentially adding information to the video after the video has been shot. I think I can cut down on 80% of the repetitive questions I get if I add annotations to my videos explaining that, no, that netbook doesn’t come with an optical drive. 🙂

YouTube Comments…I Just Can’t Take it Anymore

I heard this saying once: “There’s no such thing as a stupid question, just inquisitive idiots.” Keep that in mind as you read this. Since I started doing videos on YouTube for my business Web sites two years ago, I’ve made a real effort to respond to every question I can. If someone asks a question, no matter how basic, I’d answer it. Some days I’ve spent a solid 60 minutes answering questions, typically on a Monday after a weekend of posted questions. As my videos have gotten more views (I’m up to over 1.45 million total views, 97% of those on YouTube) the rate of questions have increased. It’s not uncommon for me to answer 30 a day when I put up a new video, and people seem to really appreciate it – I’ve had many people tell me they’re amazed that I answer questions, since many people who create videos won’t do that.

There’s something I’ve noticed however: YouTube is full of “inquisitive idiots”; people who ask questions without spending even one second trying to find the answer for themselves. For every one question I get from someone who has a legitimate question that requires an answer, which I’m happy to answer, I get 30 from the inquisitive idiots – people who ask questions I’ve already answered in the video. Check out the question below that was posted earlier this week:

stupid-comment1

When I read that message in my Inbox, I swear I felt about a million neurons groan and die inside my brain. The combination of txtspk, poor grammar, and the string of questions, several of which are answered in the video, made me want to do anything BUT answer this comment. To this person’s credit, it looks like they actually went to the HP Web site and did some research – most people opt to ask me questions that they can find the answer to themselves: size, weight, price, specifications, etc. I often have all that information in the sidebar of the video, but most people don’t look at that. Continue reading YouTube Comments…I Just Can’t Take it Anymore

Deleting Those Ipsum Dolors

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Last month when we were in Canmore, we researched a few places that we wanted to go eat at. One of the places we looked up online, but didn’t end up going to, was called The Wood. The above screen shot was taken from their site. Notice anything? Unless The Wood is catering to the uber-elite Latin-reading crowd, what they did was launch their Web site without replacing the Latin placeholder text with real text. Putting in Latin text is an old page layout trick, but you’re never supposed to go to “print” on the Web with it. Talk about not having an eye for detail… 😉

Our New 2009 GMC Acadia

There she is, our new 2009 GMC Acadia. A few people have been asking about what it looks like, partially because the Acadia is only in its third year, so I thought I’d post a pictures of it. We did a huge amount of research before selecting this vehicle, so at some point I’ll do a write-up about that process. Our short list consisted of the Subaru Tribeca, the Mazda CX-9, and the GMC Acadia. We purchased it from Northland Pontiac Buick GMC, and our salesperson – who was excellent to deal with – was Dave Sommerfeld. It was a near-perfect buying experience, one that I’ll write about later. The Acadia was our final selection from the three vehicles, and here she is…

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Ruby red – isn’t she pretty?


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Keiko had to come check out the new car – she’ll be travelling in it of course…

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I never saw myself owning a GMC vehicle, or an SUV for that matter, but here we are…

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We’ll be keeping the Mazda Protege 5 – and selling the Mini Cooper – but I thought it was funny to see how much bigger the Acadia is than the Protege…and the Protege is our “big” car compared to the Mini Cooper.

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We took the mid-level package and did almost every upgrade. This car had every option we wanted on it except for the 110 volt power – the car with that feature was in Saskatchewan, and the dealer there refused to send it our way unless our dealer here would send them a truck…and with the GMC truck factory not churning out any new trucks until August, that wasn’t going to happen. So we ended up getting one from Edmonton that lacked the 110 volt power, but had a trailer tow package (which we didn’t care about very much, but the next owner might).

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We got the all-wheel drive version. Dig the quad-exhaust…I think that looks cool!

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She’s a big beast! I call her the Land Tank. We’re breaking form and not getting a vanity plate.

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The inside is furnished nicely. Not quite as high-end as the twin model from Buick, but who wants wood paneling anyway? Not us. Definitely a technologically advanced vehicle – and pairing the audio system to my smartphone over Bluetooth was shocking easy to do. Yes, something involving Bluetooth that was easy. Who knew such a thing was possible!

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That’s my Zune 120 connected to the auxillary audio input – the only Zune big enough to hold our entire music collection at once. I’m glad it has that input, but I’m very disappointed with GMC for putting it in such a stupid place – having it inside the console, and having the cigarette lighter inside the console to provide power, or better yet a USB port, is the right way to do it. As it stands now, I’m looking for a Zune cigarette power adaptor that will charge the Zune and hold it aloft…I’ve seen one for the iPod like that, but I have to find one for the Zune.