I feel like I'm constantly dealing with some corporate octopus that is reaching into my purse with one arm, charging my credit card with another, checking what's in my cart with a third, sending me spam with a fourth, and bitch-slapping me with the last three.

Take Acme, my local grocery store. The lines are always long and only about half of them are for large orders. Of those, maybe one has a bagger working, maybe not.

So what does Acme do? They create self-serve checkouts as a high-tech alternative to their crappy service. So now not only do I get to bag my own groceries, but I get to ring them up, too! And every time I have used this "service" out of desperation, the sappy female computer voice that announces the price of each item and reminds me to swipe my Acme card suddenly changes in to a threatening masculine voice accusing me of theft. This always brings around some spotty-faced teenager to do some magic to get me through the checkout process. (He or she should be ringing up and bagging groceries, IMHO.)

As a result, I am now a customer of Trader Joe's. They actually ring and bag groceries and the lines are never long no matter how many shoppers are in the store. And they're pleasant! They actually look you in the eye when they talk to you instead of glazing over and looking aimlessly at their shoes while mumbling "Have a nice day."

Acme be damned. And on a tip from another blog I tried Trader Joe's frozen pizza. Man... It is really good. Better quality products, lower prices, better service. Let's hope as Trader Joe's reaps the rewards of their superior business model that they don't lose sight of what made them great to begin with: Customer Service.

I slept through most of my vacation, so I suppose the time lapse effect is my own fault. But I still can't believe I have to get up in the morning and go to work.

It should be a slow week since a lot of people are taking time off to extend the holiday. I'm hoping to be able to work on the next skin for my site after work. I think I'll do a year of changing seasons. I have a very wintry theme up now on the site. I've begun working on a spring version.

I really like the way I've done the site this time around. It's very easy to reskin. All I need to do is tweak the classes and I'm done. I'm not supporting v4.* browsers so it makes it much easier that in the past. I'm hiding anything that older browsers would choke on by importing it into my safe style sheet. Nice and neat.

I've got a one-pixel issue in Opera and Firefox that I haven't been able to figure out, yet. But I'm not going to lose too much sleep over one-pixel. But maybe I can figure that out this week as well.

As for now, I'm off to watch the ending of A Knight's Tale on cable. So far it's really poorly written and acted, but the male lead is quite the hottie, so there you have it.

I just read Molly's tips on Blogger.com for promoting a blog. Some of it was just common sense, but some of it involved techniques and services I had never heard of. One such services is Blogsnob. It's a cross-linking deal where you create an add and agree to host ads on your blog in return.

I've gone ahead and implemented this as it's free and seemed like it might have some value. But my concern is that the ads that are now displaying on my site can be about absolutely anything. I don't know exactly how ads are screened or if they are. I'm all for free speech but I'd dislike it if some hate monger put up some ad promoting the next clan meeting, or something.

I'm probably being paranoid. But if you should happen to see anything that you think I would rather NOT have advertised on my blog (pro war propoganda, Bush supporters waving flags, pro-life crap, etc.) give me a yell, would ya? Thanks.

Belated Christmas gift idea for the liberals on your list.
http://www.bushcards.com/

Pete, my ex-husband, contacted me back in the spring out of the blue. I hadn't heard a peep from him for years. He told me that he had a house, a young girl friend, that he was as thin as when he was in the Army, blah, blah, blah. The main point of the call seemed to be to let me know that he was wonderful. I thought he was pretty damned wonderful when I married him, so he had nothing to prove to me. It was strange.

As happy as I was to hear that things were going well for him, I declined a meeting and additional calls. I liked the old Pete better. He was humble and sincere and really funny. He was pretty damned near hard to beat. But I think I'll pass on Pete v2.0.

Anyway, one of the things he wanted to be sure I knew, was that he was a successful fine artist and that he was about to have his first gallery showing! I never would have imagined that in a million years. When we were together, Pete didn't take art very seriously. It was something he liked to play around with and he did some murals for the Army, I remember. But I never thought he would do anything significant with it.

Shows what I know! Check out his site and his online gallery:
http://peteeworld.netfirms.com/index.html

I really like the piece entitled Bird Sky Water. Pete - if you ever stumble across my site and read this, nice job. Now go back in time and be a sweet, humble, honest guy like you used to be. That's an order.

Two recent experiences with big business have left me extremely frustrated -- one with Verizon, and one with HP.

I recently cancelled my LAN line and DSL with Verizon because of their refusal to sell me just the DSL. Technically, this is possible. But Verizon won't do it because they prefer to gouge their customers for the LAN line charges even if they don't need the phone line.

So I cancelled service with Verizon in mid October and now rely solely on my cell phone. I also upgraded from DSL to Comcast Cable broadband. I got digital cable while I was at it. So now I'm saving at least $50 a month and I get better service.

You can imagine my surprise when on this month's credit card statement I saw a $43 charge from Verizon in November and another in December. I was on the phone for over 40 minutes with five different "customer service" reps, each one more clueless than the one that preceded them. I may actually be receiving a credit at some point in the future, but I won't believe it until I see it. It was so frustrating.

Now tonight, I go to download some photos from my HP PhotoSmart 215 camera. (Yes, I know. It's a crap camera. But I got it really cheap with the employee discount and it works okay.) Anyway, my hard drive bit the dust and was recently replaced, so I realized I had to reinstall the software. But the HP software CD that came with the camera wouldn’t load. No problem, I think. I'll just download what I need at HP.com.

No such luck. It seems that HP customer service requires I pay $11.00 for software I already bought! I couldn't believe what I was seeing online, so I called their "Customer Care" line and was connected to some lady in Bangalore, India of course. She was very pleasant and informed me that I could download the software from the Web site. I told her I doubted that was true, as I had just tried to do so wihtout success which is why I was calling in the first place. This seemed to confuse her. Perhaps it was the language barrier. She put me on hold and when she returned she informed me that I was correct and that I must pay $11.00 for them to snail mail me another CD.

HP and Verizon will never see another penny from me. Their customer service could not be worse if they tried. Every time I see an HP or Verizon ad on TV or in print I realize that it is money that should have been spent on creating a better customer experience.

Big business needs to realize that the experience they create for their customers IS their bottom line. One greedy $11 transaction and they can lose a customer for life. That's an $11 gain now, at the expense of a customer's lifetime worth of spending.

Why don't they get it?

My father's sister, Theresa Martin, just paid me a visit recently. She is a Catholic nun -- Sisters of the Holy Cross -- and she usually lives in Mali. But she has been in North America since summer time for training and medical treatment. She's had a few health problems but is feeling better now. She left for Iowa on Sunday to visit her brother -- my Uncle Paul -- and to get cataract surgery.

It was great to get to know her. This was the first time I have been able to really get to know her. She is a huge fan of Ekhart Tolle (author of The Power of Now). I love his teachings, too and had sent her the book a while back. We have a lot in common, my aunt and I.

I know she loves her work in Africa, but I would really be very happy to hear that she decided to relocate to North America. We don't get to see her often enough.

My mom had a couple of dizzy spells. Probably nothing, but she wisely chose to see the doctor since stroke runs in our family. The doctor had her get an MRI. We're still waiting for the results. We have been all week.

Her gut tells her she is fine, and her gut is rarely wrong. So I'm trying not to worry, but the waiting is still difficult.

As a result of the stress and the waiting, I redesigned the site...Again. This is like, the third time in six months. I did this in about nine hours. The site is really content-light and as a result, the majority of the time was spent on the graphics and CSS.

The look is cold, gray winter, which feels appropriate.

Keep Mom in your thoughts. She's the best Mom in the world. I know everyone thinks that, but with my Mom it's true.

Boing Boing: Have a coprophilic Catalan Christmas

Christmas "log flogging." No, not that kind of log flogging. But a crowd-pleaser none the less.

A Painting a Day



Duane Keiser paints a new piece every day and posts it on his blog. Some of his stuff is really good. (Be sure to see Egg 8.) He makes me feel like a complete slacker. I can't manage to do something creative once a week, let alone every day. This guy must have a brush in his hand constantly.

Woot!

If you haven't heard of this site yet, Woot sells one item per day at really good prices. Each day's item becomes available at midnight. When it sells out, it's gone.

Be sure to read their FAQ - it's a riot.

Newegg.com

Recently, my hard drive bit the dust. My buddy Pete recommended newegg.com for hardware so I gave them a shot. I have made two purchases so far --a hard drive and a wireless cable router. Both were competitively priced and arrived quickly. I've found a new store for hardware and peripherals.

I'd recommend them if you are in the market for a gadget for your machine. Oh... And as a reminder: Backup your data, people. I lost a lot of mail that I'll never see again when the HD died.

Buried Lede | The KFS Sweater Project

As promised, this is one of the funnier things sent to me lately. Be sure to click on the links in the descriptions of the sweaters.

It's his facial expressions that really get me.

So everyone else is blogging, why not me? This is probably the motivation for most people's original blog entries, whether they says so or not. But with luck, time and an interesting enough life, sometimes good things come of it.

I imagine I'll babble on about web design and usability from time-to-time. I'll use it as a place to post links to anything I come across that is particularly interesting. I'll try to avoid things you see all over the place, like the Mary on a piece of toast or Jesus in a dental x-ray. And I imagine I'll spend some time talking about my friends and family.

I've been going through my mail tonight and people have been sending me some really odd stuff. I'll have to post again a bit later with links to some of the funnier links I've received. But for now, the laundry takes precedence. It's a glamorous life I lead.