Thursday, March 15, 2007

Sock it to me

I love fees.

I received my phone bill today (first one at my new address). I was struck by the array of fees, taxes, and surcharges levied on something as simple as a phone bill. Discounting the extortionary $46.00 connection fee (which consisted of flipping a switch somewhere, since this is not a new building), my bill consisted of $24.24 in charges for basic phone service with caller ID and $1.12 in long-distance charges (including $1.03 for the slightly reduced long distance charges), and 18.30 in fees, taxes, and surcharges. In other words, the "extras" added up to 40% of my total bill. This is why people stop using the phone and switch to e-mail to communicate. Cell phones are just as bad, which is one of the reasons why I refuse to use them.

posted at 01:56 PM | permalink | Comments (2)

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Gotta love it...

When you go to the Yahoo NCAA tournament coverage, select a video, watch the HP ad, and THEN get a message telling you that you can't watch video on your system. Can't watch the video, but have no problem watching the ads. Hmmmm.

I'm not going to bother going to their help page to figure out why it's broken; I'll simply go elsewhere to get what I want. Yahoo blows it yet again. They eviscerated their TV listings about three months ago, turning it from a useful, convenient module on my homepage into something so totally worthless and counterintuitive that I deleted the module and bookmarked TVGuide.com. More lost revenue, as they are getting fewer pageviews from me as a consequence.

Can anyone recommend a good start page? Yahoo used to have the best portal in the business, but they seem to have a need to fix it until it's broken, and I'd like to have some options when it's no longer worth it. Google's start page is not ready for prime time, and the one that is provided by my ISP is not much better.

posted at 04:51 PM | permalink | Comments (1)