T w e n t y S i d e d

I’m usually pretty good about answering my email, but lately I’m noticing that people are asking me about emails I’ve never seen. Since most people who write probably assume I just didn’t answer, I’m really worried that I’m losing a lot of my email.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird, because it has a built-in spam filter. I get hundreds of spams a day, so manual filtering just isn’t an option. I suspect that the number of spams is so dense and the ratio of spams to real emails is so high that the adaptive filter now thinks that most of the words in the english language are no-no spam words. The spam filter will allow emails from people in my address book, but that just means that my address book is a whitelist. People who email me for the first time have no way to ensure I get the email except to tell me about it elsewhere.

So, if you’ve sent me an email for the first time and I never replied then I apologize. I never saw it.

As I was looking into this, I noticed my spam count is very stable. I took a few random samples from the last month and found I get a steady supply of 383 to 387 spams per day. That’s only a 1% variance from day to day. Strange.

And now as I was doing THAT I realized that I just screwed up my spam filter. I accidently marked all of my spam from the past month as “not spam“, meaning I just taught the adaptive filter that it should allow all of this stuff.

Arg.

Well, I’ll reset the filter. It wasn’t working right anyway, so this isn’t too big a loss. Where is The Broiler when you need him? Oh right… he doesn’t exist.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

A few days ago I mentioned that Netflix had shipped me a disc which had been incorrectly burned, and the label of the disc and the data it contained did not match. We sent it back, and requested another copy. As I feared, this second copy has the same problem.

So the disc label says it is Last Exile: Disc 4, but the data on the Disc is for Last Exile: Disc 3. Netflix has ways for you to let them know that they sent the wrong disc, and ways to let them know that the disc is scratched or broken, but there is no way to tell them about this particular problem. When the movie gets back to Netflix, there is no way to tell them that they should not put the disc back into circulation.

We did the best we could. My wife put sticky notes on the disc and sleeve describing the problem. Will this do any good? I doubt it. I’m sure these things are opened by some poor sod who sits there all day tearing open envelopes and making sure the disc and sleeve match. I’m sure they see lots of stupid stuff all day: people accidently mailing back one of their own movies, people sending back smashed and broken discs, people sending back bootleg copies because they had retained the legitimate copy themselves, and a dozen other things that may go wrong in the process. I’m sure all sorts of people ignore the instructions and try to communicate with Netflix via these envelopes. Maybe some dim blub will include a little hand-written note, “Please send me movie XXXX”, instead of using the web interface. I know how strange things can get when dealing with a large enough group of people.

So what will they make of our sticky notes? I’d hoped that someone might read it and check their inventory, making sure the other copies of Disc 4 were ok. At worst, they would ignore the note and put the disc back into circulation. If they are truly stupid they would send me the same disc back again.

So now they have sent me a replacement for Disc 4, and it’s messed up like the previous one. It’s clear that they have a bad run of these discs. I went to the website to see if I could contact customer service / support / anything and let them know about this problem. It turns out that this cannot be done. No email. No phone number. No way to send any sort of specific message. (You can send text via the “give us feedback form” but I’m sure that info isn’t going to go anywhere useful.) The only real interface is a “report a problem” multiple-choice form, which doesn’t provide any way for me to tell them what is really wrong. There is no way to convey that the disc is bad unless it is scratched. I’m sure if I keep reporting Disc 4 is scratched over and over, they will think I’m the one doing something wrong.

I’ve always praised Netflix, but now I see they have a rather nasty flaw: Their system is incapable of dealing with unexpected problems.

I took a permanant marker and put a tiny little dot on the most recent disc, and I’ll see if I get the same one back. This would be an amusing experiment if I wasn’t deprived of my Last Exile in the meantime.

Sigh.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Ubu Roi has a nice horror story involving an HP Pavillion. I have had my own issues with HP Pavillion in the past.

I hate these machines because of the misery they spread. Their low prices ensnare the less-savvy, and invariably their proprietary bits of hardware, vault-like case configurations, and greedy bloatware all cause frustration and headaches. The hapless user will then call their freind who “knows all about computers”. If you happen to be that person in your circle of friends, then you are going to be dealing with a lot of these machines.

My wife and I have both had to tangle with HP / Compaq machines from time to time, and the experience is always a miserable waste of time. These are machines designed by people from marketing and not engineers. “Sure, we could use an off-the-shelf power supply, but if we use this HP-only version then we can charge people an arm and a leg if it burns out. All we have to do is make sure the power supply costs a little less than a new computer.”

I don’t even know what can be done about this. I know better than to get one of these machines, but I can’t stop everyone else from buying them. I keep waiting for HP to get some comeuppance the way DELL has recently, but so far it isn’t happening. They should have an Edsel-ish reputation by now, yet they keep selling new machines.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.