What the E!

I have been a long time Sprint customer, over 6 years now. I have 4 lines on my account and include data for a couple of the phones. Sprint gets a fair amount of money from each month. They have even included me in there “Premier Sprint Customer” program which is supposed to provide me with something, but it really looks like a program to send me more ads each month.

Well this month I was checking my bill (like I normally have to due to the frequent errors) and I find a charge form “Cylon LLC: Alerts - Info Text 38146 - 02/13” for $9.99 on one of the lines. I dig a little deeper and find out they are basically a text fraud company that sends texts out and when you open them they “subscribe” you to the plan for $9.99 a month. You can check one of the many links related to the company here: Cylon LLC Complaints - Theft thru Cellphone Text Messages.

Well I call Sprint customer service, enter my phone number, the customer service representative asks for my phone number again, my name, and my security question. Then as soon as I saw I have a billing issue and Cylon LLC she intermediately starts to explain how I need to text them back to unsubscribe and how I will get a credit or refund on my bill in the next 2 to 3 billing cycles. It took her more time to confirm my name from the computer system then to respond to my question (probably wasn’t reading off a script on this one).

I ask her to credit my account right now, so my credit card is not charged for the $9.99. This is where the fun starts. As with most things Sprint, the person you are talking to cant actually do anything to help solve your problem. So I ask to speak to someone who can solve my problem or talk to the cancellation department (better know as I can actually solve your problem department). The customer service agent then says “Ok” and I am put on hold for 3 to 4 minutes. Then another person comes online from the cancellation department and asks for my phone number. I ask her if she can reverse charges from Cylon LLC and she says “No”. So I ask to speak to her manager, which turns out is the Sprint Escalation Support line (didnt know that people are managed by a voicemail box, but that could explain some of Sprint’s problems). I will keep things updated to see if I actually get a response.

Why is it so hard to provide reasonable customer service? Sometimes you get lucky and get somebody really good on the line and they do an excellent job, but normally one call leads to 3 or 4 more. I am eligible for an upgrade, but I really wont consider it since I have to pay more than a new customer for my phone (unless I threaten to cancel) and they normally mess up the billing and I lose another 2 to 3 hours on the phone with customer service until I get lucky and get someone that can actually solve my problem! So much for being a “Sprint Premier” customer.

Check out this website DTV Indiana . Info - Indianapolis Overview.

The site is a little rough, but you can see the before and after maps for the DTV transition. It will let you see what will and will not be covered when the transition completes.

Yes, we will have WTTK the CW (my wife’s favorite), but not until August 17th, 2009

At church we are in the process of changing our church website and newsletter system to better communicate with new/prospective attenders and along with regular attenders/members.

As part of this we are likely going to implement a PHPList based weekly email newsletter. As part of the planning process for this upgrade I started exploring templates for use in PHPList. I quickly found a bigger challenge than I expected. Check out the link below and take a look at the chart across different mail clients.

Guide to CSS support in email clients 2008 - Articles & Tips - Campaign Monitor.

The list is crazy look at all the client/operating system combinations. This is my first time down this path, but even testing is challenging. For web based html you have a relatively limited number of mainstream browser/OS combination. Normally, the testing can be isolated to 2 or 3 main browsers and just a couple of operating systems. Even then there are several services that allow you to see how your website renders in a large number of different combination’s; my favorite being Browser Shots.

If you see a service like browershots for email message templates or have suggestions of tools, tips, or services please let me know.

If you have already lost your mind I dont think coffee will help, but according to a recent study drinking more than 5 cups of coffee per day may help prevent dementia. Check out the article here.

It also mentions that “previous studies have shown that coffee drinking may also be linked to a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease.”

For all the coffee drinkers out there (including me) drink up. That is until the next study says coffee is bad for our heart, brain, skin, or maybe just our wallets.

I post content to a couple of different websites and many times people provide the original content in a MS Word document. Nothing wrong with this, but it can be a little bit of a hassle to convert the Word document to html in a clean way.

You can’t paste the document directly into the WSYIWIG editor or you will get really funky formatting and MS Word HTML is what you might call “interestingly dysfunctional”. So normally I hand code the documents in notepad or UltraEdit. This works well, but can be very time consuming.

So after looking at a couple commercial services/software that claim to do the trick, I found this website word2cleanhtml.com. It does exactly what the title implies and does a pretty good job. You simply copy your word document onto the site and hit the convert to clean html button. You may need to clean up a few tags, but generally the code is clean, properly formatted, and ready to go. It can save you a few minutes and help keep your frustration down to a reasonable level!