by cameron | Aug 6, 2007 | Uncategorized
Here’s the latest chapter of my saga with 3.
As regular readers may recall, about 8 weeks ago I dropped my 5 month-old DOPOD 838Pro into a 3 store because it had stopped working. They told me they had to send it away to get it repaired and it would be back in three or four weeks.
When I called them four weeks later, they told me it would be ANOTHER 3 weeks.
When I called them three weeks later, they told me it hadn’t even been looked at yet and they couldn’t tell me how long it would be before I had my phone back.
So I asked them to give me a new phone but they couldn’t do that because they didn’t have any DOPOD 838 Pros in stock.
So I asked them to just terminate my account and let me go get a phone from somewhere else. They told me that would cost me a $900 fee.
So i fumed and waited.
Today they called me to tell me my phone was fixed and ready to be picked up at the store. After 8 weeks.
When I went to pick it up from the store, the guy told me it was all fixed. But when I tried to check it, the battery was COMPLETELY dead and I couldn’t even get it to turn on more than 5 seconds.
So I brought it home, charged it up – guess what? They hadn’t fixed a GODDAMN THING. The same problem I had 8 weeks ago – namely that the thing is a brick, won’t make calls – is still the there.
So I called the store back and they told me they now had their own repair center in St Kilda Road and I should take it there. I rocked up at St Kilda Road, only to be told by the girl there that they don’t actually open until September and don’t repair DOPODs anyway.
I told this girl I was furious and explained the story. I then sat there for an hour while she called everyone from the manufacturer to the repair center to “priority support” trying to get me a solution.
After an hour, I had no explanation why they returned me a phone without fixing a damn thing, and they gave me two options:
1) Take the phone MYSELF down to their REAL repair center in Nunawading, lose it for 5 days, and take my chances.
or
2) They had a refurb unit, another DOPOD, not the same model as mine but similar, which they will send me. It will take three days. It doesn’t have a battery. So I need to go online, order a battery, pay for it, then after the battery and phone arrives, I can call 3 “customer support” and they will refund the amount of the battery.
Because I wanted a working phone as soon as possible, I took the last option.
I cannot WAIT to get out of the contract with 3 and I would highly recommend you avoid 3 if you can.
Yes, Hugo, you called it mate.
UPDATE: Looks like I’m not the only person with a gripe against 3. Check out this thread on NotGoodEnough.org.
UPDATE 2: Looks like the NGE people didn’t like my post for some reason, they took it down and deleted my account I think!
by cameron | Aug 5, 2007 | Uncategorized
Back in SL for another Ayn Rand “Atlas Shrugged” discussion. One of the avs here is Lauren Weyland who was interviewed recently on the in-world show “The Late Show with Madelena Rossini”. Check it out for a trip.
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Tom Reynolds has uploaded some photos from MODM 4. This one is of me and the guys from the much-discussed MyLiveSearch. They are coming on the show this week for a yarn.
by cameron | Aug 2, 2007 | Iran, Iraq, Uncategorized
Paul Spoerry has some great visual aids to help us understand the motivations behind the US’s middle east policies. Like this:
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Meanwhile, you have to love the pure frakking BALLS on the Bush administration. Who else could spin the sale of $70 Billion of weapons to the Middle East as “ensuring peace”?!!! Rice sez:
“We are helping to strengthen the defensive capabilities of our partners,” Rice said in a statement. “We plan to initiate discussions with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states on a proposed package of military technologies that will help support their ability to secure peace and stability in the Gulf region.”
Let’s look at the track record of the countries they have sold weapons to over the last 20 years… Iraq. Afghanistan. Iran. Israel. Saudi Arabia. How’s the peace strategy working so far, Condi?
The amount of money that the US itself spends on weapons every year is just insane.
The world spends US$780 billion every year on maintaining its military and buying new weapons —that’s $2.1 billion every day. Dr Oscar Arias estimates that if just 5% ($40 billion) of that annual $780 billion were channeled into anti-poverty programmes over the next decade, the whole world could have basic social services. A further 5% over ten years could provide everybody on the planet with an income above the poverty line. UNICEF estimates that spending just $7 billion a year for the next decade could educate every child on Earth.
(source)
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Laurel Papworth accuses my 2Web colleagues and myself of being sexist because there aren’t any women in our 2Web group!
Hey I, for one, am a HUGE supporter of the meme that we need more women in tech/web. Lots and lots. I’m sick to death of going to tech events and being surrounded by blokes. AFAIK, the 2Web group has never turned down an application for membership from a lady. If there is passive sexism involved here, it’s you girls being too passive about getting involved! Hike up your skirts girls! 🙂
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Telstra put GPS trackers into the cars of their technicians then informed them that if they had a problem with it, “they would face a review of employment.” Classy. According to The Age:
Victoria’s Workplace Rights Advocate Tony Lawrence investigated initial reports of the tracking devices and told The Australian newspaper he had referred what he believed to be a criminal matter to police.
It puts turning off Facebook into perspective.
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The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is back on and TPN’s man on the scene, Ewan Spence, is spending the next month chatting with the performers, audience and promoters! Catch it almost-live on TPN’s EFF show!
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Just for something a little bit different, I’m a guest today on Rod’s Atomic Show. He wanted to talk to me about how the nuclear industry might be able to use new media to change the perception of nuclear with the general public, bypassing the not-always-independent mainstream media. Did anyone else see that show on Frontline last night about the nuclear industry in France and Canada? I saw some of it. Fascinating.
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John Howard and his government never cease to amaze me with how much they have become the white, straight, Christian party. Today Howard announced legislation which will overturn State legislation which allows gay couples to adopt children from overseas. We need a Bill of Rights in this country. Badly.
by cameron | Aug 1, 2007 | Iraq, Uncategorized
From the Washington Post:
… The key to boosting the image and effectiveness of U.S. military operations around the world involves “shaping” both the product and the marketplace, and then establishing a brand identity that places what you are selling in a positive light, said clinical psychologist Todd C. Helmus, the author of “Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation.” The 211-page study, for which the U.S. Joint Forces Command paid the Rand Corp. $400,000, was released this week.
Helmus and his co-authors concluded that the “force” brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies’ competing brands. While not abandoning the more aggressive elements of warfare, the report suggested, a more attractive brand for the Iraqi people might have been “We will help you.” …
Since I know you will want to read the whole study, it is here.
More:
… In an urban insurgency, for example, civilians can help identify enemy infiltrators and otherwise assist U.S. forces. They are less likely to help, the study says, when they become “collateral damage” in U.S. attacks, have their doors broken down or are shot at checkpoints because they do not speak English. …
(via Marc Andreessen)
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Richard Giles is on BoingBoing! Well done mate! With friends in high places, who needs Cam???
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More from the RAND report:
Public opinion polls suggest that much of the anti-Americanism observed in the Muslim world today is attributable to U.S. policies rather than to U.S. culture, values, or people. In a 2004 poll, for example, Zogby International found that residents of most Arab countries had positive opinions about “American services and technology,†“American freedom and democracy,†“American people,†“American education,†“American products,†and the like. But many of those same respondents held negative opinions about U.S. policies toward the Palestinian conflict and Iraq.
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Anil Dash links to a fascinating 1995 doco by Brian Springer called SPIN, about how the media was used for, and itself used, spin during the 1992 US Presidential elections. The most fascinating part for me was about 18 minutes in where they discuss a Demoractic candidate Larry Agran. For some reason Agran, although running third in the early polling, was totally ignored by the media. He was cut out of photos carried in newspapers and refused access to televised debates involving the other candidates. He was eventually imprisoned for interrupting a televised debate demanding he be heard, and was released from jail after the Democratic National Congress had already started. Another example of how you need to have access to media in order to participate in the political process and how the mainstream media interferes with politics when they want to. To suggest they just “report the facts” is a joke and a bad one at that.
by cameron | Jul 31, 2007 | Uncategorized
It’s currently 7.50pm in Australia, 1.50am US PDT. Facebook has been down for the last ten minutes. According to an entry in the Wikipedia profile for Facebook:
IT WAS RECENTLY HACKED BY CHRIS DOHERTY ON TUESDAY 31ST JULY. MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN AFFECTED, ESPECIALLY THOSE IN THE UK. CHRIS DOHERTY PROCLAIMED, “NOW PEOPLE MAY SEE THAT I AM THE TRUE CREATOR!”
by cameron | Jul 31, 2007 | Melbourne, Uncategorized
I’m amused this morning that Duncan wrote up my “Telstra Bans Facebook” in TechCrunch and the rash of comments accusing him of being a Facebook shill. I often tell corporate-types when they ask about why blogging is important that I may only have a few hundred regular readers of my blog but a handful of them are people with real reach – like Duncan. Google “telstra facebook” and see what happens.
Meanwhile, some people like Allen Stern still miss the point. This isn’t about Facebook. This is about businesses feeling the need to block the use of online services because they feel their employees will waste time on them and not get the job done. I know of at least one Melbourne government agency that still blocks instant messenger! Even their online team can’t use it!
Any employee who has enough functioning brain cells to use a PC and the net should have enough to work autonomously towards a set out pre-agreed results. When companies block access to internet services, rather than change their corporate culture, all they are doing is shoring up their command and control environments. This is bad – for profits, for shareholders, for employee satisfaction, for everyone.
I’m going to be talking more about this (and Telstra’s brief banning of Facebook) in my Marketing magazine article.
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Prepping for my Vernor Vinge interview this afternoon by re-reading his classic novella “True Names” which he wrote in 1981 predicting the internet YEARS before Gibson or Stephenson. If you haven’t read it, you should. Here’s a sneak peak but buy yourself a hard copy as well, it’s an incredible piece of work.
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I chatted with a representative from Telstra’s media department today about the Facebook issue. She said that it was a “technical problem” that prevented employees from accessing Facebook last Friday and that the error was resolved later in the day. When I asked for details about the problem, she couldn’t provide any. I asked if it was true that Telstra employees are not allowed to have Instant Messenger at work and she also said she couldn’t confirm that. When I asked what Telstra’s official position is on making Facebook and other internet services available to their employees, she said they don’t ban access to anything but all employees have to abide by their guidelines which means they can only use them as a “business tool” and as part of their job function.
Do you believe the official story?
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