I've had Kaiser health insurance for about three years now, and I thought I'd share some thoughts for those of you who are deciding amongst health insurance plans... and even those of you on Kaiser looking for a few tips.

I just got an autoreply after submitting a suggestion to a company:

Thank you for your note. We appreciate your helping us test out [...]

This is just an autoreply to let you know we received your email.
We're putting most of our energy into improving [widget], so we can't
promise a personal reply to every question.

That said, user feedback is very important to us, and your comments and ideas will be used to improve [widget].

That's actually not so bad... but it could be better. Here are my thoughts on what makes for a good autoreply:

I swear, don't companies bother actually putting ANY of their stuff through QA? Or even CSF (Common Sense Filters)?

I recently bought something at Best Buy locally (darnit, I needed the item immediately, or I would have amazon.com'd it), and while that immediate experience was generally decent, the followup has been so bad it's laughable.

I just read on Darren's Problogger.net site (via Threadwatch) that Google is testing out a pay-per-call feature in its AdWords program.

I invite you to go grab your cell phone / mobile phone / home phone whatever and program the following numbers into it:

- 1-800-555-8355 ("555 TELL" -- TellMe)
- 1-800-373-3411 ("FREE 411" -- Free411)
- 1-888-392-7563 ("EZ ASK ME" -- AskMeNow - Initial signup on site required)
- 46645 ("GOOGL" - Google SMS beta - Google via Text Messaging)

NOTE: One or more of these numbers may be U.S.-only... sorry :|

For details on each service, read on...

First, let me offer a sincere disclaimer: I've debated whether or not to post this, because I'll get free Web hosting credits when people sign up with the link below.

But I've decided that this deal is simply too amazing not to share, and I just can't feel that guilty for using an affiliate link (when being up-front about it) in this context. I've already set up an account for myself, urged my good friends to get accounts, etc.

Here's the deal:
- 4.8gb of space (increases weekly by 40mb)
- 120gb of monthly bandwidth (increases weekly by 1gb)
- Plus shell access, mySQL, mailing lists, ftp, etc. etc. etc.
- Free 1-year registration of a domain
- Unlimited domain/subdomain hosting

...for $9.24 *TOTAL* for the first year (77 cents a month).
After that, it's $7.95 or $9.95/month (still a fab deal), and perhaps even cheaper by then.

Here's how to sign up:
1) Click here.
2) Click on "Managed Web Hosting."
3) Click on the "signup now" button under "Crazy Domain Insane."
4) Select the 12 month term.
5) Make sure to enter promotion code 777 to receive the special pricing!


* * *

I do welcome your frank thoughts both about this post and about DreamHost. My experience with DH so far has been generally good... a relatively straightforward signup process (with my account active in under 2 minutes), a friendly forum... but on the flip side, my control panel was initially slow, and I find the CP to be a bit unintuitive. Site speed, thankfully, seems pretty fast.

Lastly, I'd like to give a hat tip to the fabulously cool and useful deals site SlickDeals.net, from which I initially learned about this offer.

A few weeks ago, I decided to splurge and book a night at a "four star" hotel via Priceline so I could get a good night's rest before taking a long bus ride to Swing Out New Hampshire.

If this Hilton Hotel in Manhattan is four stars, I'd hate to see what a one star place is like.

Okay, so I got at least the 'bare minimums':
- A clean room
- A decent shower
- A relatively comfortable bed

But beyond that... I fail to see why anyone would pay an arm and a leg to enjoy the "four star'ness" of this hotel.

This entry about a fella's (nasty) experience installing Quicktime made me both chuckle and nod in understanding.

Apple has a reputation of being so easy to use, so consumer friendly, so I gotta ask: what the $&@#! were those folks smoking when they went ahead with this install process? This is about as consumer-hostile as you get. It's annoying and downright rude.

In fairness, Apple's not the only company that should be forced to sit in a corner and repent. Other misbehaving miscreants include AOL and Real; I installed the most recent beta version of AIM only so I could play with the new Plaxo integration (which is actually slick and damn cool [see disclaimer]), but I sure as hell didn't want a stupid Web browser ("AOL Explorer") piggybacked on top, nor did I ask to have AIM sit in my system tray and be present upon every Windows startup. And regarding the Real Player, well... despite being very tempted to install it so I can watch some in-Real-format-only clips on the Web, I've put off sullying my new computer, 'cause I remember what a splatting mess the install was last time.

Jeremy Zawodny recently posted that he's going to be speaking about blogging at the Direct Marketing Association's annual conference, and asked his readers what he should tell those folks.

Many people, understandably, responded that he should basically tell them to drop dead. Given the DMA's, ahem, relationship-challenged practices in the past (e.g., supporting opt-out, rather than opt-in e-mail lists), that's hardly surprising.

With that said, though, I figured it'd be worth it to suggest a few more friendly guidelines for the DMA folks, at least those genuinely interested in communicating decently and effectively with others online. Specifically, here's what I commented on Jeremy's blog:

UPDATE 9/23/05 2:34pm PST:
Looks like I was a bit too quick on the CrankyTrigger this morning. Apparently, Streamload had shifted over to Blogspot, but hadn't updated one of their primary links (1 step off of their home page). Certainly a frustrating but nonetheless innocent oversight. See Streamload's acknowledgment of the issue here in their P.S.

My apologies for jumping to conclusions. I'm keeping the rest of my blog entry intact so I'm not a hypocrite

* * *

I'm a paying member of Streamload -- a multimedia remote storage service -- and I regularly follow their blog in my aggregator.

Recently, they've been heralding their upcoming major service overhaul in their blog... a huge new feature set, new pricing, and so on. Everything was supposed to go live, well, a few days ago.

Well, a day or two ago, they blogged an apology for the delay, citing power outage issues stemming from a storm (no, not one of the hurricanes). I totally understood... these sort of things happen. But then imagine my amazement and annoyance today when, upon checking their blog, I notice that they've wiped out the last month's worth of entries. Poof, gone. Here's the Google cache of what they had written.

A firm message to Streamload and any other companies that may be thinking about, ahem, rewriting history: Don't do it.
1) People like me will catch it and call you on it.
2) This'll create ill-will and suspicions regarding your firm's integrity.

And for goodness sake, if you're nonetheless determined to cover your tracks, at least don't do it half-assedly; roll-back your press releases, too. Sheesh.