Crappy Customer service at MilesKimball.com

I purchased an early Christmas present at the end of September for my wife (yes, I know, I started shopping early).  I ordered it from MilesKimball.com on the 26th of September. 

 

It’s now the 20th of October.

I never received the product.  I figured that it was slow shipping, as it was an inexpensive product (a Santa+Mrs Claus Salt and Pepper Shaker set), and I didn’t pay extra for fast shipping.

But I figured a month was long enough, so I called MilesKimball.com today and the nice lady on the end of the phone said:

“What is your name and Zip Code”

I gave them to her

She verified some information, and then said

“We cancelled that order, we stopped shipping that product.  We won’t charge you for it.”

Wow.  They won’t charge me for a product they didn’t ship to me.  How nice.

Nor did they have the decency to contact me via email or phone to let me know it would NEVER SHIP.

That’s crappy customer service, in my opinion.

MilesKimball.com customers, beware.

Technorati Tags: MilesKimball.com,Customer Service

Fiber to the home versus cable

I recently had FIOS installed at home.  I got the 10 meg down/ 2 meg up package, along with a phone line (haven’t had a home phone for about eight years), and TV service.

The installation was painful.  I was told that the installer would be there between 8am-10am the day it was to be installed.  So I worked from home that day, since I still had my Comcast cable installed.

At 10:30am, the installer finally showed up.

At 5pm, she finally finished.

Six hours.  She installed a ONT box outside my house, then pulled the cable inside my garage and plugged it into the electrical outlet in my garage.  It has a UPS built in, but it only allows phone calls, and only for eight hours.  No internet if the power goes out.

She then pulled coax to where my main computer is, and then coax to where my two TVs are installed.

After that, she came in the house, hooked the TVs up with the DVR that was provided, and configured the TVs so that they worked.

She said “You can plug your computer in, just don’t changed anything yet.”

The router is both a wireless router, and a wired router for four devices.  It works fine, so far.

My wife’s laptop was able to connect to it without incident.

I did have one minor issue, which was that the default IP address scheme is 10.1.1.x, which is the same as my work network.  I had to log into the router and change the scheme to something else, like 192.168.3.x, so that the VPN I use to connect to my office would work OK.

After I did that, everything works well.

I uploaded 200 or so picture this afternoon, much faster than it would have uploaded previously via my Comcast connection.  With Comcast, I would have started the upload before I went to bed and it would have most likely finished before I got up the next morning.

With the FIOS, it took about 2 hours to upload all the pictures.

Other packages are available, such as 20/5 and 50/20.  For more money, of course.

I would recommend it, if you can get FIOS in your neighborhood, you should look into it.

Technorati Tags: FIOS,Comcast,FTTH

The Netbook question – what could be done (IMO)

Many folks recently have been talking about netbooks.  A small, portable, internet capable notebook with a 5”-7” screen, running Linux or Vista, or XP.

I’ve got a better idea.  Possibly easier to implement.

Build a small Netbook, say with a 5”- 7” screen.  Don’t make it a touch device, as that just adds to the complexity.  Make it a 3G capable device, with Edge as a fallback for connectivity.

For an OS, use the Blackberry operating system.  Have a memory slot for use by the Netbook, say 8-16gig.

Enable bluetooth.  Enable the Netbook to be used as a phone.

The GMail client for the Blackberry rocks.  The Gmaps client for the Blackberry is stellar as well.

The only piece of this puzzle that needs GREAT improvement is the browser.

The web browser with my Blackberry Pearl, to put it nicely, sucks eggs.  It’s horrible.  Especially because the Javascript support is non existant or will just plain take the browser/phone down and not work at all.

So, if someone could write a decent browser that was able to utilize Javascript efficiently, in a small 5”-7” screened device, you could use it both as a Netbook and as a phone.

Most of my phone usage (95%-98% actually) is via my bluetooth headset.  So the Netbook wouldn’t even have to leave the desktop. When I’m not using the phone portion (or even if I was, in the case of 3G connectivity), I could be reading/responding to email via GMail. Or browsing the web. I could be use NewgatorGo to read RSS feeds.

Sound plausible?

 

The phone company would be happy, as they would still have a revenue stream from the bandwidth plans and the cellular plans.

RIM, are you listening?  What say you, advocate of the Netbook Kevin Tofel?

Technorati Tags: Netbooks,notebooks,cell phones,Blackberry,IPhone,Kevin Tofel,JKOnTheRun