I’m so pissed right now, I pay a total of a couple hundred dollars a month across various ISP accounts, mobile phone accounts and television / broadcast service accounts… Due to where I live, I’m stuck with Verizon DSL, and I have no choice in the matter, so when their service is crap, I get especially frustrated. You can read a bit about what happened when I tried to get cable service installed here.

I thought I’d repost something that I just put up on everyone’s favorite customer service site, Get Satisfaction.

“and the tech support i need anytime” is not available anytime

I have a dry-loop business DSL account. The telephone number associated with that dry loop account does not appear on any of my paper bills.

I call the verizon business tech support number, and am asked to either enter my number, or say “i don’t have one” relying on their voice recognition.

if i call after 5pm, the telephone system instructs me to call back during normal business hours and then disconnects me. i understand sales being closed at 5pm, however tech support being closed is unacceptable.

my connection has been very spotty all day, and now i have to wait until monday to call to speak with their support staff to fix the problem? c’mon. this is supposed to be “business class” service (and support). I pay extra for it, expecting an extra level of support.

View the original post over here.

I remember when the guys from Cuban Council released Moodstats. It was badass and quite ahead of it’s time. A shockwave app that you could use to track your mood from day to day and share that info with friends who used it as well. That was 2001-3. It was a free download but paid app, required installation, and was primarily marketing to the design geek community of that time. For that reason it wasn’t nearly as successful as it could have been.

Moodstats is an application, a personal diary or journal if you will, that allows you to record & rate how your day has been in several categories. Once you’ve entered sufficient data, Moodstats then begins to generate multi-colored graphs & statistics showing you exactly how your moods have been lately.

One of the things I found about my relationship with Moodstats, was it was an unnatural activity for me to document anything outside of work consistently, let alone how I happen to feel each and every day. I never kept a journal as a kid, so though I loved the idea, it was difficult for me to adopt it into my routine. Their site still lists them as having just 1426 users. A total shame.

I’m being sentimental, I know.

Documenting your mood, by proxy

These days we don’t need to manually enter how we feel for the purpose of tracking our mood, anyone who uses Twitter is already doing that, even if they don’t realize it.

The folks over at Summize have built Sentiment, and I just wrote about it being used by Get Satisfaction to pull in commentary from twitter related to companies, products, services, etc. They take 5 different word lists, rate them from great to wretched. Posts that don’t express sentiment are labeled as such and (I’m assuming) ignored.

We use our search engine to find up-to-the-second tweets about this topic, then automatically analyze the attitudes expressed in those tweets.

So I thought I could probably use this to see what the sentiment is for my name, @naterkane… aka my mood. Though it’s very possible for there to be skewed data for a user who receives a large number of @ messages, that isn’t the case for me. What’s my mood been like you ask? According to Summize, it’s “bad”. I can’t really argue with that, and fortunately, there’s always tomorrow to turn my mood around. :-)

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cats fight spam while i sleep, originally uploaded by naterkane.

I woke up this morning to find that one of my cats had not only been reading my email, but also decided to care enough about the comment spam I get that they would start to write back to the notification email.

• Taking a cab home, today was a few hours longer than I planned. #
• I love it when a cabbie doesn’t listen to directions to try to make a buck #
• Just spent 45 minutes stuck on the subway. #
• Time for some pizza from “Two Boots” #

• at home, reinventing my chillax #
• Making a late dinner #
• going to bed, oy i’m tired. #
• Im going to hit the sack #
• proving once and for all that sleeping late *does not rule*… it’s just called oversleeping. #
• Coffee and bagel before I take the train in, #
• Placing nose to grindstone #
• finishing the girlfriend’s taxes so she doesn’t kill me. #
• Buying what I hope will be a delicious sandwich #
• Just found out we didn’t win a particularly large pitch, and i’m relieved. #
• doing multiplatform Q/A of some client work that’s due tomorrow #
• demoing an app to a client #
• Work just keeps rolling in, so i’m going to the deli. #