S1dd - My Other Blog..

Buy.com (scumbags) cancelled my 6 Cell MSI Wind preorder, then raised prices by 50$. So I’m pissed at them and at MSI for lying about the Winds availability and price. Buy.com’s ratings at resellerratings are already so bad that I wonder how they are still in business.

Anyway yesterday I got an auto-notify from Newegg that the EEEPC 1000H was in stock and the same price as the Wind - $549. Plus Newegg is my favorite Electronics e-tailer so I ordered it and it is already shipped!! Oooo!

The disadvantage of the eeePC 1000H is that it is marginally larger and heavier but the advantages are that it has 802.11n, the RAM is upgradable without opening up the whole machine and it has a multitouch trackpad. Otherwise the two are nearly identical. More when I actually get the thing on Monday.

Everyday I get phone calls from “Unknown Name”s with phone numbers that are fake. What good is the Do Not Call registry if people can call you with fake phone numbers and not be held accountable with no means of finding who called? If I pickup, I generally get some sort of automated message and if I get a human once in a while, they refuse to provide a business name or a call back number and hang up if you press them for it. If I don’t pickup, the answering machine picks up and the message left is blank.

The only real company that I used to get phone calls were is random people trying to sell me DISH Network (even though I already had Dish at the time). I could never extract a business name or number from any of these either. Most of them would hang up if I asked about what Dish location they work for, a direct number to call them and if they actually work for Dish (which they claim to do) and a means to verify that they do. These have stopped now. Maybe DISH got a lot of complaints about this?

Jan 18: I rented a car from Fox at Oaklad airport and returned the car on time but they charged me for an extra day due to an error on their part. Calling their national customer service just got me forwarded on to the local Oakland office.

A Vanessa at the Oakland office promised to look into the issue and call back the same day. Ha!! No such luck. So I called back a few days later and this time I was promised a refund to my credit card within a few minutes. No such luck again.

If you ever rented from Fox, I would recommend you check your credit card statement and see if you have been billed correctly. I am going to dispute this charge with my credit card now because it is pointless calling Fox. Supposedly only a manager can give you refunds or investigate matters and a manager is never available nor do they call you back after taking your information.

Update on Jan 28: HSBC (my credit card company) has filed a sales receipt request from Fox and I have provided them with all the information I had. Unfortunately I did not save my copy of the rental agreement. I have also called Oakland again but was placed on endless hold waiting for a manager. I have emailed Fox customer service and left a message for them one more time. If this dispute is not resolved a complaint to the BBB is due.

Upon searching for Fox Rent a Car online, I found lots of people who were cheated far more than I was. Here are links to some complaints:
BBB
RateItAll
RipOff Report

We switched from Dish+DSL to Cable in June because of their irresistible offer - 29.99 for Cable (Digital Basic + HBO + Max) for a whole year and 19.99 for Internet for six months. However since the day we switched we have had nothing but trouble.

On the day of installation, our signal was terrible. It turned out that the wire leading to our house was bad. So they replaced that quickly in a week and voila, everything was clear and we were happy for a day. After which it was all downhill again. We get serious noise on analog channels starting from the 50s. All the digital channels face serious pixellation and sound skipping atleast once a minute. Somebody was supposed to show up yesterday to fix the problem and that never happened. I called them several times after their two hour interval was over and was assured several times that the person is running late and will give me a call with his ETA. No such luck. No person and no call to even inform us or reschedule.

To top all this trouble, as soon as I setup automatic payments the promotion disappeared (?) and my bill went up from 54 including tax to 89.85 including tax and a 25$ credit that they gave me for the trouble, which makes a grand total of 114.85!!!!

I called comcast to fix this and the person had no clue why the bill was what it was. She could not figure any of the charges on the bill and wasted half an hour of mine until I just hung up in frustration (I couldn’t shout while I was at work). I was given bogus stories such as “Sir you got cable in Jun but High speed Internet in August”. What the hell have I been paying for from Jun until August then? I have since sent out an email to customer service and hopefully someone will fix things soon. If not, bye bye Cable.

Update: Comcast had automatically changed the time the tech visited to today without informing me! I got a reply from the email I sent comcast and it told me to chat with Customer Service. It turns out that the person I talked to on the phone had atleast reduced my bill some and the chat person reduced my bill back to what it should be. Now if only their tech can fix our channels. P.S. None of this affects the bill shown on the website and on the website there is no way to tell how much you owe!

Update: As usual, nobody showed up again and after a lot of screaming and complaining, I got another 25$ credit and somebody is scheduled to come in another week from now!!! If you are considering switching to Comcast in Charlottesville, think again. I wish the city would allow some competition for Comcast. When we had Dish, we could get no local channels thanks to trees blocking the view of their satellite.