Verizon opened pre-orders up last week, May 20, for the LG Ally. I had just ordered a Droid Eris as Ashley’s Mother’s day present, and when I found out about the pre-order opening, I called in and cancelled the order for the Eris… or so I thought.
The next day, I received the Eris. Immediately returned it via FedEx. I called and found out that it would only take 24 hours to process the return, and that I would then be able to pre-order the Ally. Awesome, only two days behind the pre-order.
Not the case… Standard protocol is 72 hours on returns; to confirm package contents, restock, and reconcile the ESN on the device. Then 24 hours after that, your money is returned. So, I was able to pre-order the Ally the day it was suppose to be shipped. Phone was still in pre-order status on VerizonWireless.com, and was not showing any delays. Sweet; it should ship May 21.
Again, nope… now there is a device shortage. I had to call VZW to find this out. They didn’t bother to communicate with all of the people who pre-ordered, that they were out of stock, and will be until at least May 27.
I complained quite after finding this out, mainly due to the fact that the last three orders that I’ve placed with them have had problems. I can’t be the only one having issues with them not being able to get things right. They offered me 100 minutes, as compensation… I turned it down because we don’t even use all of the minutes in our current monthly plan. So much for customer satisfaction.
I hope that anyone else having issues with them is letting them hear about it. If not, then [you/they] should… might get lucky and get a CS rep who cares or has a lower threshold for customer irritation and wants to find a manager who will give you compensation. You’ll never get anything from that company unless you ask. : )
I told my buddy Ben many months ago I would get him setup with a simple way to create torrents for his podcast, The Feeling of Trance. He’s been doing everything manually [BitTornado] for a few years. Not a lot of work, but he’s got a lot going on, so anything that would automate the process would help. Additionally, he’s been relying on himself (obviously) and the community to seed the torrents. It can be somewhat unreliable, and for some impractical, so an alternate solution would be nice, yeah? Until recently, I hadn’t had time to sit down and try to understand how the metadata in a .torrent file is generated. Last night, and this morning, I got my chance.
I am going to start an experiment… I want to first create a simple web interface for creating the .torrent file. The initial idea was all based around web seeding, but ultimately, a web host WILL NOT be required; it’s just a bonus… I’m big on web seeds because they’re constant. You don’t have to worry about the seeder not being online, unless your host goes down, which won’t be for long IF they [noticeably] go down.
Ben is going to be the test subject, to see if it will work, and how reliable it is. I don’t want to give all my ideas away right now, but from what I’ve seen so far, it looks like it could be a big step for BT fans, and tracker sites.
More on this project to come.
Preface: I wrote this post immediately after publishing “Tortoise; How to “SVN UPDATE” using Windows batch files”. Coincidently, Tortoise was queued up in Winamp, and began playing immediately after clicking the “Publish” button. In summation, this post was born. 
Tortoise is an interesting breed… they several different genres they play… probably because they’re all friends that specialize in different types of music; one dude is an American jazz guy, and rock guitarist, another is an engineer and drummer who also plays a whole slue of other instruments, another is a dedicated bassist. Just a crazy combo in my opinion… but it works.
Aside from me [kidding, somewhat] I’m going to give credit to the Showtime’s television show, Weeds, for bringing their music to the masses. At the end of one of the season 5 episodes, they had a song that I thought was by someone else. After researching for a while, I found it to be Tortoise, not my buddy Dan. I immediately when out and obtained my very own copy of their latest album, Beacons of Ancestorship.
Oh, what was the song that turned me on to them? Glad you asked…
sample_-_tortoise_-_northern_something.mp3
This is, of course, a sample of the song… 29 seconds of my crude, do-it-in-60-seconds-or-less-audio-slicing. If you like it, hit them up on iTunes or another legitimate music store.
