Christmas Madness II
So I drove past the house in the picture on my way home. It was already dark. I was blinded by the time I passed the house. Every possible thing that could have lights or be outlined by lights… was.

ick

Christmas Madness
I got this picture on my way into work. I was stuck in front of this house for about 5 minutes because traffic was backed up. I could only imagine just what this place would look like at night. They have a frickin zoo’s worth of animals in front of the house. Also, notice that there are two santas. One right out in front and mini-santa taking a dump in the chimney. I personally don’t get the whole ‘decorate your house to make it visible from space’ thing. Growing up my dad would always put a single candle-light in each window and that was about it.

Where’s all the people?
I went to the post office today to send of presents to some family members and there was almost nobody there at all. I didn’t even have to wait. Very odd for just a few days before Christmas.

Is there such a thing as TOO sucessful?
AdCritic looks like it may be closing their doors. Why? :The short answer: we became so popular so fast that we couldn’t stay afloat!”

Such a shame. I always loved being able to go there and find cool ads.

NetFlix
Evan also mentions NetFlix. This is one of my favorite net companies. I’ve been using them since I got my DVD player, almost two years ago. Their customer service is pretty good. The only problem I’d have with them is related to what Evan likes so much about them. I live in Boston and it takes an extra day or so for dvds to get back to them. I’d love to see an east coast distribution center for movies so that your service level isn’t reduced by living further away from them.

To add to his list of netflix-like place that offer adult fare. A friend of mine recently mentioned XRentDVD. One of these days I may get around to trying it out.

IRS
Evan mentions that the IRS is giving suprisingly good customer service these days. I’ve had some mixed results with them. While the people I’ve talked to have been very helpful while on the phone, their follow through was just not that adequate. Up until recently I’d been dealing with a problem where an old company I’d worked for had misreported my pay by a few thousand dollars and never notified me of this.
So, about 2 years ago I got this notification that I owed money. Lots of it. And I went to go about fixing it. I got revised forms from my ex-company to correct what had happened. And I sent/faxed numerous copies of it over the course of those two years. There is not a record of ANY of them ever being received. One of the issues here was that they told me I wouldn’t hear anything for two or three months. So every time I sent something in I just had to wait. They made it sound like whatever I sent in had to float through a few departments before it would be resolved.
So finally one day I was completely fed up and the person I was talking to at the IRS sent me over to the Tax Advocate. This is the department that handles problems that just aren’t being solved.
About a week later I got a call from a very nice lady who listed to me relate my story for the 10th time or so. She had me call my ex-company and have them fax her the paperwork and that she could handle everything from her desk. Two weeks later I got a letter from her saying it was all fixed.
Now, while this woman was amazing and I’ll be forever grateful to her, I wish I’d been able to talk to someone like her from the start. She was the person who understood best what went on, and was able to action on it immeadiately. I wonder if there isn’t a better way to match up cases with mine with people like this more rapidly.

(Of course, then I had to take care of California too, since they’d gotten the same initial tax information. But that’s another story.)

Up early once again
It is weird waking up when it is pitch black, only to discover that it is only 6:15 or so. I really do hate this part of winter sometimes. It just really throws my whole sense of time off. I never noticed it much before this year.

mp3 madness?
I remember way back in the days of the napster wars, hearing an argument in favor of napster saying that CD sales had gone up since it had been around. I was a little skeptical of this since I knew more then a few people who had boasted to have not bought a CD in over a year since they had been downloading everything they wanted. Now we’re starting to see some backlash from all that. John Robb’s Radio Weblog points to a few articles about this. The one paragraph in particular struck me:

In Germany alone, one survey by market researcher GfK found that blank CD sales jumped 129 percent this year. Purchases of pre-recorded music dropped 2.2 percent in the same period. Indeed, blank CDs now outsell recorded discs in Europe and Canada, according to one label executive.

Now I am sure at least a good sized chunk of these sales are due to blank CDs being so cheap and CD burners now showing up on everyone’s computer. I bet even my parents will start using CDs for backups soon. The thing that disturbs me more about all this is the solutions they are coming up with. I get annoyed with the record industry more all the time, but now they are running scared, which means the consumer gets screwed. Htheir been any other kinds of format changes like this that force users to possibly buy new equipment just to use a technology they’ve been using for a while already. Television isn’t the same because when color came along it didn’t prevent people with b&w TVs from watching TV, they just didn’t experience the same thing.

The other questions in my head are: did we create this situation ourselves? Are the record companies the only ones who are at fault? Could there have been some kind of solution between the recording industry and places like napster that would have solved this better? And how will this all shake out?

Yum!

Last night my friend Bree and I went out to Redbones for dinner. Redbones is this great BBQ place in Davis Square that I don’t get to go to often enough. Ribs are one of my favorite foods. I think it has something to do with that whole primal, ripping the meat from the bone thing. (RAAAR!). The only problem is that the ribs I had last night gave me a bit of a stomach ache. Bah, what is happening to me. I used to be able to eat anything and not be affected by it.

Bree also gave me two CDs she made. One was a collection of Christmas songs (including some of my favorites). The other was a mix of different folk singers that we both like (including one my favorite songs ‘El Dorado’ by Sam Shaber). Thanks Bree!

Stalkers ‘R Us
Nari posted about Coincidence Design. I have to say that I found this kinda neat, but also quite disturbing. It’s almost, but not quite stalking. And it ain’t cheap. It looks like if you want to use their services it’ll cost you around $80,000.

Okay, I may hate being single, but I’m not THAT desperate.