Posted by Tom Moertel
Thu, 31 Aug 2006 17:21:00 GMT
Today I had a problem with my Netflix
subscription that was clearly outside the realm of the online Help
Center. When I tried to find the phone number for Netflix customer
support, however, I could not.
It turns out that Netflix is engaging in the weasel-like behavior of
hiding its phone number from paying customers. The phone number is
omitted from the Contact Us page. Searching for “phone” in the Help
Center turns up the “How do I contact Customer Service?” question, the
answer to which turns out to be, “Most problems can be solved by our
extensive online help system… If you’re still having trouble, email
Customer Service.” In other words, Don’t Call Us.
Forget that. Google and Hacking Netflix
make it easy to find Netflix’s support numbers. To make it easier
for you to find them, here they are:
Netflix customer support
1-800-715-2120
1-888-638-3549
Note to Reed Hastings: Hiding your company’s phone numbers shows a lack of
respect for your paying customers. (So does limiting DVD-rental rates stochastically via a cleverly designed fulfillment-prioritization policy while
using weasel words to pretend that your services are “unlimited.”)
Posted in marketing
Tags netflix, weaselly
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Thu, 06 Jul 2006 03:48:00 GMT
As you may recall from a previous
post,
I set up a CafePress store to
sell LectroTest Robot–branded stuff such as t-shirts, hats, mouse
pads, magnets, and so on. CafePress does a good job of making their
products appear to be of the highest quality, but I am naturally
skeptical about such claims.
In particular, I wondered about their t-shirts.
The results of their heat-transfer printing process – previously the
only option – did not make me happy. Images with transparent
areas revealed the transfer background, which over time yellowed
and made the image seem to float on a sea of urine.
So when I set up The LectroTest
Emporium, I specified the use of
CafePress’s newer “direct-printing” process for t-shirts, hats, and
every other product for which it was offered. Still, I wondered about
the quality.
So I ordered up a LectroTest Robot t-shirt and put it to the test.
Test one: the eyeball and the scanner
When the t-shirt arrived, my initial impression was that it
looked pretty darn good. The Robot came out perfectly, and even the
pointy parts of the LectroTest lightning rendered without problems.
The colors were true, if a little less saturated than I would have
preferred.
Compared to silkscreen, the direct-printing process seems to produce
results that are a bit less saturated and a bit less crisp. It’s like
an airbrush artist rendered the Robot onto a billboard-sized shirt
that was carefully shrunken to normal size.
Next, I threw the t-shirt on a flatbed scanner. The results are
below. The first image is an overall view of the Robot logo. The
second is a 300-dpi close-up of the lettering, where you can see the
air-brush effect.
Test two: the iron
To check for color offsetting, I turned the shirt inside out and
ironed it on a full-steam, cotton setting. Throughout the ironing,
the face of the front-side image was pressed into the white cotton of
the back side of the shirt. Nevertheless, none of the ink migrated.
The pure white remained pure white.
Test three: the washer
For the final test, I washed the shirt on a normal warm/cold cycle
with a small load of other clothes. I then dried the clothing on a
medium cycle. (CafePress recommends washing in cold water and drying on
low, but nobody pampers their t-shirts like that, and so I tested under
more typical conditions.)
When I took the shirt from the dryer, I didn’t see any signs of
shrinkage or fading. To double-check, I ironed the shirt and threw it
back on the flatbed scanner.
Doing a before-and-after comparison of the
scans in the Gimp, I was able to see some
shrinkage and fading (see image below). Top to bottom, the shirt
shrank by about 4.5 percent; left to right, the shirt actually grew
by about 1.8 percent. Minor fading was apparent, especially in the
solid black areas. Neither the shrinkage nor the fading were
concerning, however; both are typical for t-shirts, especially on the
initial washing. The bottom line is that the shirt’s coolness
was untarnished.
Summary
It’s a good t-shirt. It looked cool out of the box and fully captured
the metallic fierceness of the beloved LectroTest Robot. The shirt
handled a hot-steam ironing without any ink offsetting. It shrank and
faded a bit on its initial wash, but neither change detracted
meaningfully from the shirt. In sum, CafePress’s direct-printed
t-shirts seem like the real deal: they look good and stand up to
typical wear and washing.
Posted in reviews, perl, marketing
Tags cafepress, lectrotest, reviews, shirts, t
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Tue, 27 Jun 2006 18:21:00 GMT
I have a bunch of LectroTest news. LectroTest, as you may know, is a specification-based,
automatic testing system for Perl. It may look like Haskell’s QuickCheck, but it tastes like sweet, sweet Perl.
LectroTest 0.3500 was released
This version adds automatic tools for recording and playing back
failures. Using them, you can automatically build regression-testing
suites and incorporate them into your testing plan. All it takes
is one new line of code:
use Test::LectroTest
regressions => "regressions.txt"; # <-- that's it!
See the docs on CPAN for more.
My thanks to Steffen Müller, who suggested the feature and is already
using it in cool stuff such as Number::WithError.
Slides from “Testing Tips with LectroTest” are now online
You can get the slides from my talk to the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers on
2006-06-14 here: Talk / Testing Tips with
LectroTest.
In the talk, I covered some of the newer LectroTest features, such as
regression testing and Test::LectroTest::Compat, which lets you mix
LectroTest with other Perl testing modules.
The LectroTest Emporium opens!
I have very little artistic ability. Nevertheless, alarming numbers
of people seem to love the fiercely metallic mascot I created for
LectroTest.
At the last Perl Mongers meeting, for example, people
actually told me (somewhat sternly) I should put the adorable LectroTest Robot on
t-shirts. I am now delighted to announce that I have taken their
advice:
Introducing: The LectroTest Emporium
Some important points:
- Yes, it’s a CafePress store
- I’m not making any money on these things
- I’m using direct printing, not heat-transfer printing, so
the Robot won’t crack, feel stiff, or suffer from a yellowish
transfer background. (CafePress has a comparison of the methods if you want the full details.)
Some items I have moral reservations about offering:
- LectroTest Robot Teddy Bear -
Who would be so reckless as to allow something as fierce and as powerful
as the LectroTest Robot to come into direct contact with a defenseless, cuddly
teddy bear?
- LectroTest Robot Baby Bib -
Actually, this is a great idea: your infant and the Robot
exist in a symbiotic relationship. When your baby gets food all over the
bib, the Robot will consume it (using a electrochemical process not
entirely dissimilar to our human concept of “digestion”). Thus is the
baby cleaned and the Robot fueled. It’s win-win.
- LectroTest Robot Dog T-Shirt -
I am fairly certain that the immense weight of the Robot would easily
crush any smaller animal. This product strikes me as a very bad idea.
The T-shirts, on the other hand, are the robot’s meow. Check out the
full collection at The LectroTest Emporium.
Posted in perl, fun stuff, testing, marketing, talks
Tags lectrotest, perl, testing
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Thu, 04 May 2006 02:49:00 GMT
Local supermarket chain Giant Eagle has a
brilliant marketing scheme called “fuelperks”: For every 50 dollars
you spend on groceries in their stores, you earn a one-time,
10-cent-per-gallon discount at Giant Eagle’s “GetGo” gas stations.
The discounts accumulate until you use them (or they expire in three
months). If you buy 109 dollars of groceries, for example, you will
earn a 20-cent-per-gallon gas discount. (The remaining 9 dollars will carry over to your next grocery purchase.)
What makes the scheme brilliant is that its psychological effect is
wildly in excess of the discount’s actual value. Many people will
wait in lines to buy gas from GetGo, even though the discount
provides no incentive to do so. Further, as gas prices rise, many
customers perceive the discount to be all the more valuable, even
though it is not.
I thought it would be interesting to
scrutinize the discount and answer
some common questions about it.
How much is the “fuelperks” discount worth?
The discount is typically equivalent to about 3- to 4-percent cash back on your
grocery purchases, depending on the average amount of gas you purchase
per fill-up. For example, my mid-size car has a 14-gallon tank, and I always
buy a full tank’s worth of gas, so for me the discount is about 2.8 percent:
14 gallons × 0.10 dollars/gallon / 50 dollars = 0.028
If you drive a luxury-barge SUV and can manage to buy a full 30 gallons at each fill up, you will earn the theoretical maximum discount of 6 percent.
How do I get the maximum benefit from the discount?
To get the maximum benefit, follow two simple rules:
- buy a full tank of gas whenever you use earned discounts at GetGo
- use your discounts before they expire
Do I lose benefits if I buy gas somewhere else?
No. Even if you buy most of your gas somewhere else, as long as you buy gas from GetGo frequently enough to use your
discounts before they expire, you will get the maximum benefit.
When gas prices increase, do I get more benefits?
No. The value of any discounts you have earned depend on
the quantity of gas you purchase. The price of gas
at the time of purchase has no effect on the discount.
Any other questions?
If you have any questions (or comments), please post a comment.
Posted in pittsburgh, marketing
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Tue, 14 Feb 2006 02:26:00 GMT
Recently I visited Amazon.com and was assaulted by a fat stream of
marketing blurbs. Amazon tried to convince me that I was actually
enjoying an innovative blog written by my favorite authors, each trying
to “connect” with me, but I found the attempt to be shallow and
annoying. To me, it was still a fat stream of marketing
blurbs.
And what do the marketing wizards at Amazon call this blurb stream? Your Plog.
Amazon explains it like this:
Your Plog. Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log
that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog is
different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted
in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the
opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked
the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more
relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog will appear if you are
logged into our web site and is visible only to you.
I explain it like this:
Your Plog. Amazon.com thinks you want your time and attention
delivered to every guy who wrote a book that you somehow indicated
interest in. You don’t. Your favorite authors already have blogs,
and you already subscribe to the ones you care about. As a result,
Your Plog contains nothing but stuff you don’t care about and stuff
you might have cared about, had you not read it five times already
from other sources. It is an annoying waste of your time and
attention, foisted on you by the ravenous marketing weasels at
Amazon.com.
For example, whenever the Pragmatic guys come out with a new book on
Ruby or Rails, I hear about it from Andy Hunt’s blog, Dave Thomas’s
blog, the Riding Rails blog, emails from Andy, ruby-talk postings
from Dave, and now – thanks to “my” Plog – Amazon’s home page.
(In fact, my Plog contains no fewer than three blurbs from the
Pragmatic guys – all stuff I have seen before. I like the Pragmatic
Programmers and think Andy and Dave are good guys, but I don’t see what
they gain by being associated with Amazon’s Plog-based marketing.)
Other takes on the Plog
Here’s what other people are writing about Plogs. From Changing
Way:
When I go to amazon.com these days, I’m shown a “plog.” What
does this ugly term mean? It told that it denotes a weblog
personalized to me. What it turns out to be is a blog by someone I
bought a book from years ago. I’ve nothing against this person or her
book. Neither do I think that her blog is bad. It’s just not of
interest to me, and so doesn’t belong on Amazon’s home page, or on
my “personalized” version of it.
From FactoryCity comes a post entitled Ohmifrog, Amazon, cut it out!
And here’s my gripe: a “plog™” – if that’s really the best you
could come up with – and if it’s supposed to inherit
anything from its “blog” heritage – should be about
original authorship, not about having other people’s content thrown at
you.
Amy Gahran has a more analytical consideration of Plogs in Amazon ‘Plogs’ – What Do You Think?:
I think the idea of plogs may have great potential for
relationship-building, if implemented carefully and with an eye toward
timeliness and relevance. But frankly, this Amazon implementation
feels off-base to me so far…. Well, [an author’s participating in
Plogging] could be terrific or terrible, depending on the content
quality and relevance [of the author’s contributions].
Bingo. That’s why Amazon’s Plog concept will remain more annoying
than useful. Authors do not want Amazon to own what they consider
to be their conversations, and thus the Plog will be used as
little more than a marketing mailing list.
Authors do not want Amazon to own the conversation
It’s the quality of the conversation that counts, and smart authors
will not want their conversations to be confined to Amazon. Instead,
they will set up their own sites where they can have greater freedom
and greater control. That’s where the authors will open themselves to
honest conversation, and that’s where the best stuff will occur.
Amazon’s Plogs will get the scraps – bits of the real conversation
that have been converted into marketing blurbs and pushed down the
Plog channel. In fact, it already seems to be going that way: a lot
of “posts” in my Plog appear to have been recycled from real blogs or
web sites.
Amazon, count me out
Even though my immediate reaction to discovering “my” Plog was mild
disgust, I did try to give it a chance. After having given it a week
to grow on me, I am convinced that I want nothing to do with my Plog.
It wastes my time and attention and gives me little in return.
Did Amazon Plog you yet? If so, what do you think?
Posted in marketing, rants
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