Randy’s random musings

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve always liked Google. A lot of folks claim that they only excel in web search, but there are dozens of other services they offer that I really appreciate: GMail, Calendar, Google Earth, and especially Picasa! It’s a simple, tidy photo manager that brings together all the images on your computer, and makes it easy to make adjustments to them, send them in an email, put them on the web, and order prints. When they added RAW support, I was even more excited–finally one program that can manage all my photos!

Unfortunately, we purchased a Rebel XTi recently, and discovered that not only does Picasa have a bug dealing with RAW images from the XTi, but the flaw has existed for many, many months, and there has been no word from Google whether they’ll even fix it, let alone a timeline! As a work-around, try grabbing Adobe’s DNG Converter and converting to DNG prior to importing in Picasa.

So who gets the honor of being the first post in my Rants & Raves? None other than the prominent Paypal, who has a near monopoly in the online auction payment business. They’re actually owned by eBay, who also holds a de-facto monopoly in online auctions.

The dispute at hand is over a $2.45 charge for a shipping label purchased online with Paypal’s shipping software. They offer a convenient method of purchasing and printing postage for items sold at auction. They’re integrated with eBay, so a buyer who pays with Paypal enters his shipping address, and it is carried forward to the Paypal transaction.

My buyer happened to have a 2nd address line in his shipping address, which is apparently a possibility never imagined by the developers of Paypal’s crappy online postage-label software. It silently dropped the 2nd address line, and happily printed out the postage label with the rest of the address. Mind you, this is one transaction among many, part of a mass postage purchase. Trusting Paypal’s capability of converting the shipping address from the one in the transaction details to the one the printed out on the postage label, I never compared the two addresses. I shipped the item out, and a week later, it came back “undeliverable as addressed”.

I quickly found the root of the problem, and my attempt to converse with Paypal’s customer support is where the story gets interesting. I’ve gone back and forth with their “Customer Care” folks five times so far, with absolutely no resolution in sight. In fact, each and every response I’ve had from them was either a request for more information, or a form letter reply disavowing any responsibility for the problem. None of these form letters applies to my particular problem, but I guess they’re trained to just find the closest match? Unbelievable… Folks, never pay for anything with your bank account–use a credit card so you have some form of recourse other than trying to communicate with the form-letter email monkeys at Paypal.

Check back later to see an actual back-and-forth conversation.

This morning, I got a telephone call from a nice German woman who works for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, AKA NATO. She referred to an application I submitted about 2 months ago for a job as a NATO civilian. Apparently, the recruitment office liked what they saw, because I was being invited to Germany for a written examination, followed by an interview!

I submitted the application without really planning ahead at all, so now it’s contingency planning time…

Our little boy, Benjamin, was born today, and weighed in at a hefty 9 lbs, 12 oz! Both he & mommy are doing quite well, but will spend a few short days in the hospital to recuperate.

Click here or the photo below to see more pictures!

Everyone else seems to have a blog, and now that I have a decent webhost, AKA Dreamhost, why not take the plunge? Besides, I need a very public place to air out my frustration with poor customer service, and other bad experiences with other companies, who shall, for the moment, remain nameless.

Oh, yeah – big props go to WordPress. They’ve managed to put together an incredible little piece of software, for the unbeatable price of: FREE!