Looking For “Spine Flu” instead of “Swine Flu”

Consumer Credit Card Warning – Press Release

The major credit card banks and firms including American Express, Discover Card, Visa Card and Mastercard are currently allegedly doing everything they can which in-effect seriously impacts credit card users and of major detriment to the already poor economy and public interest. They are doing things such as sharply lowering credit limits, restricting and closing accounts sometimes arbitrarily, imposing excessive fees and high interest rates. Much of those customer negatives are being done with flimsy, little or no valid reason.

A major impact of those credit-card issues is not only the significant lowering of consumer spending power and access to credit for emergencies but also reductions in FICO credit scores which occur when your credit card balance becomes a higher ratio vs your credit limit. That severely impacts other loans including car loan and home mortgage interest rates which rates can be significantly higher as a highly related side-effect and end-result of how poorly the large credit card issuers are treating many of their credit-card holders.

Still another serious issue is the fact credit-cards routinely permit you to exceed your assigned card credit limit. For example, we have been told by a Wells Fargo bank card employee they allow credit limits to be automatically exceeded by as much as 20%. At first you may think that is actually a nice benefit from your credit card issuer but unfortunately it may sometimes turn-out to be a nightmare.

The reason it’s really a major negative for you is the fact unless you promptly pay the full over-the-limit amount along with your regular payment there are substantial costs involved, i.e. approx $39 over-limit fee, $35 late-charge and you can also expect a huge increase of your card interest rate to say 24.99% or even more with some credit cards.

Remember, all that severe damage to your finances can happen even if you exceed your credit limit by an insignificant amount, perhaps just a few dollars possibly resulting from you not closely monitoring your credit card account balance on a daily or even a real-time basis, as consumers do not do.

Keep in mind as long as you fail to pay the exact over-limit amount and all the high associated costs they continue to be charged each and every month. Very quickly the monthly fees can easily exceed your minimum payment amount by as much as 150% or more from what we have seen, i.e. minimum payment of about $80 but monthly fees and interest charge of roughly $200 per month.

In-effect that means the credit card account will never be paid off and balance will only increase for years into the future unless you come into lots of money one day to pay the credit card off, or you could easily owe hundreds of thousands of dollars on your original low balance credit card over time!

Why Technical Support May Not Understand Issues

Have you ever called an internet-based company for technical support only to have the tech support person be unable to resolve the issue as a result of being unable to personally duplicate the probem you are encountering?

More often than you would think a reason the technical support dept has trouble personally duplicating the problem you are seeing is because they are either not actually using the program on the web like you are or else are using a different operating system, browser or even using a Mac computer instead of the PC compatible you are likely using.

For example, instead of the same program as used by most customers being installed or running on the technicians computer they often use a different setup. Such as an internal, proprietary or server-based setup, which is sometimes working from an admin control panel instead of how you use and run the program.

At other times, the technician may be using a less commonly used internet browser such as Firefox, instead of using the much more popular and much more commonly used Microsoft Internet Explorer Browser. Since the functionality, appearance, setups, screens, compatibility, memory use and potential browser bugs could be diverse the problems you are having may not be experienced by the technical support person you are talking to.

As an example, here is a saved live chat session I had today with the technical support department of a web development program I am using to semi-automatically generate multi-page websites. The company and persons name is not given in the chat log

Me: Hi, whenever I go to a 3rd party web site which has an RSS Feed my IE 7 or IE 8 RSS Feed icon turns orange color to let me know the web site has an RSS feed running on it but with all my sites with you that does not happen?

Technician: Hmm, can you clarify a bit? There is an Orange button? That sounds like RSS syndication. Such as in this example.com website, which has the RSS syndication actve…

Me: Right, exactly like your example, my IE bar has an RSS Icon which is always grayed out even though my sites are using your platform and do in-fact have my RSS Feedburner code installed (which by the way is working well). Why does the RSS icon not turn orange color as it does with 3rd party sites which have RSS activated?

Technician: What version of Internet Explorer are you running?

Me: With both IE7 and IE8 the icon does not turn orange color as it should.

Technician: So for the example site I just showed you, it’s grey?

Me: Right, the IE bar icon (found next to home page button) stays grey with or without RSS running on the site. However, it’s always orange colored icon on 3rd party sites with RSS activated.

Technician: I am not sure why, I would need to look further into the situation, but it may be because the sites are using the platform, and there are some limitations.

Me: OK but look at your own Internet Explore Toolbar which RSS icon is located next to your IE home-page icon (at least there on my screen) to see what I mean.

Technician: I don’t use Internet Explorer. I’m on a Mac, so IE doesn’t work.

Me: You using a Mac is indeed an issue alright. Since the overwhelming majority of the public uses Internet Explorer and most do not have or even heard of Firefox, and is exactly why I only use Internet Explorer. In my opinion anyone in tech supt should also be using IE since that is what the vast majority of the the public is using so by using the same typical setup you can give better client support that way. Sorry if you do not like me saying this but you really should use what most of your customers are using, IMO.

Technician: Most of our team is using a PC platform.

Me: Not sure what that means?

Technician: I don’t do any developing so it is a non-issue for me. I can look further into your situation with our development team. Would you like me to email you an update?

Me: Was not referring to developing as this issue is about surfing the web and looking at the IE Toolbar which most people have installed having absolutely nothing to do with development so I have no idea why you are talking about development but thanks anyway for your time.

Technician: OK, I do like Firefox, you should try it. Thanks for your notification on this issue. Bye for now.

Me: No thanks. Bye.

P.S. After all that discussion and time spent on it the issue was not resolved, in large part because tech support did not see or able to duplicate the same problem on their screen. Isn’t that ridiculous!

You Too Can Request an Audience With The Pope

We were watching the Today Show this morning and heard President Barack Obama had an Audience With The Pope in Rome on his schedule.  

As a result of that news story we would like to announce we successfully launched our new highly targeted web site today AudienceWithThePope.com for folks who would like details on how more ordinary folks may also request an audience-with-the pope at the Vatican in Rome.

Why are Forum & Blog Members Not More Active?

At a domain-name forum it was asked why so many members lurk on the sidelines and are not actively posting. I believe there are several reasons for blog and forum lurkers not posting more…

It goes with the territory even in a good market but a bad market (like we are obviously in today) makes it worse. Most folks simply do not like posting for whatever reason. There is an old adage 90% of the activity is from 10% of the members and that’s true in any business.

The lack of posts at blogs is also poor, i.e. this blog gets 100-200 visitors a day on average but comments and posts by others are not too common, as is also the situation at many other blogs too.

Some website and domain-name forum members may lurk because they feel like they are relatively minor players vs the heavy hitters so why bother to post? They may also think what they have to say is already well known so would not be welcome. 

I have seen that happen personally at a forum board when I asked a question about a subject only to have an Admin chime-in by saying that has already been much discussed here (often via my other posts) so no need to discuss the subject again. What made that incident so ironic is one of the reasons I posted about the issue was to help the forum and bring some activity to it, which forum was very slow and boring at the time. As an interesting side-note I can say that board appears to be even less active with lower public participation today.

Something similar recently happened personally to me at one of the popular forum boards where I was flamed a bit because a veteran member said instead of posting a question about an issue there I should Google for the information instead.

What is so interesting about him saying that is if we all followed his (unwelcome and ridiculous) advice far less issues would be posted and discussed at the forums and blogs (resulting in less blog and forum activity) since the information would have already been researched via a search engine.  How ironic is that anyway.

There is also a less obvious (but nevertheless real issue) of some members being somewhat depressed by reading about all the big sales (some for millions of $) taking place (mostly involving dictionary one-worders the average member do not have the luxury of owning) but they can’t get sales themselves and are also negative due to the ongoing declines in revenue, resulting in portfolios being trimmed a lot, often the result of high carrying costs vs lower income.

First Time More Americans Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice

A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds a 51% majority of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.

Here is a link to the poll and chart

Organized Bulk Voting for Amercan Idol Winner

There is a Kris Allen Fan Club type web site which somehow arranged for Kris Allen fans to do bulk voting for the American Idol winner. Perhaps without this organized mass voting Adam Lambert may have won?

Here is what we found on this website: Go-Here

One member of the fan club had 11 folks at the house and posted they managed to vote for Kris Allen an estimated 33,000 times using a “power texting” text message system!

“This was a long grueling voting night, the last one we’ll ever have to/get to do for Kris. 7- hours was daunting, but in the end at least 450 of the initial 1000 that were on this site voting for 4 hours stuck around til the end. After some sleep, brag about your vote totals here. We’ll tally the votes and let you know how much KAnation did to help bring home the prize for Kris! 105 people who have reported their votes voted a staggering 436,650 times last night. That’s an average of 4,158 votes per person.”

« Previous Page