Vonage raises “fees” to protect me from identity theft

Why impose fees on corporations? Consumers just get stuck with the bill anyway. Vonage emailed me a notice today.

The Regulatory Recovery Fee will become the Regulatory and Compliance Fee, which covers our regulatory-related and legal compliance expenses. For example, this fee pays for charges associated with benefits like procedures to ensure customer privacy, identity theft protection measures and phone number porting.

If it was your cost, I wouldn’t have to pay it.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Q: How does Auto Scaling decide which Amazon EC2 instance in the Auto Scaling Group to terminate when the scaling condition is met?
Auto Scaling will randomly pick and terminate any Amazon EC2 instance from your Auto Scaling Group if the scaling condition is met.

Really? Random? You couldn’t pick the one that was the closest to the 1 hour cutoff and remove it? So, the one I just launched, that I’ve used for 5 minutes, but paid for my full hour, can get randomly deleted before the one I’ve used for 57 minutes?

That seems like it needs a re-write to add some intelligence.

Health Insurance in the United States is broken.

Health insurance companies need to be reigned in.

The fact that they can FORCE doctors into specific diagnoses is unbelievably stupid. If a patient needs an exam, you pay for the EXAM not the results. You do not dictate that you won’t cover the cost if the doctor gives you a response you don’t want to hear.

If enough people realized that the insurance they pay for doesn’t cover them properly, they would stop paying those providers. Once the companies lose their income stream from upset customers, they either die or change.

News flash: caffeine addictive. Also, Sun rises and sets.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, recognized the condition as a disorder five years ago after reviewing decades of studies. They concluded the higher the caffeine intake, the more likely a patient was to suffer from severe withdrawal symptoms when denied the ingredient.

So, it was discovered 5 years ago that caffeine had withdrawal symptoms? Really? No one thought to ask the millions of people who get headaches when they don’t get their daily intake?

I knew it was an issue when I quit drinking soda after high-school and had crazy headaches for weeks.

Thanks CNN

Netflix vs Blockbuster with Blu-ray discs

So, I was originally a Blockbuster online subscriber when they had a very nice setup, something like $20 for 3 movies out with unlimited exchanges in store, and 2 coupons for free rentals in store that could be used for games as well. Blockbuster decided that they were providing a too good of a deal, and raised the price, removed the coupons and generally did a bunch of stuff that made me want out.

I looked into netflix, which was just starting to offer free online streaming, and since I have a 360, it seemed like it might be a good deal. I signed up, $12.99 a month with $1 for blu-ray access. While I’m not sure I like the idea of a premium for blu-ray, I decided to deal with it.

Cut to yesterday. It seems that netflix decided that providing blu-ray movies is worth charging those users more money. My current plan will jump to $16.99/mo, 2 movies out at a time, unlimited mail exchanges per month.

Blockbuster’s 2 a month unlimited mail exchange plan is $16.99/mo, no blu-ray premium (you get them by default) AND here’s the bonus: 3 in-store exchanges per month.

Netflix, unless something changes very quickly, you’ve lost me as a customer, since you’re not providing the same value for my money.

AIG Bonuses, what to do? Job or bonus. Pick one.

Job or bonus. Pick one. There are plenty of people out there that would kill to have a job, let alone a bonus. There are hundreds of people every day being given a choice: Job or paycut. And I’ll give you one guess which one they’re picking.

For each person in AIG getting a bonus, publish their name, and the amount of the bonus in the NYTimes. While this wouldn’t fly with a private company, it would seem that I own 80% of that company now. I feel that I should know who we’re paying millions of dollars to return the biggest loss in US history…

Roundy’s – Pick n’ Save just doesn’t get it…

I shop at Pick n’ Save and I bring along my own bags. I bought them at Sam’s club. They are very large, and generally my whole weekly trip fits in two bags. I usually get a credit of $0.05 per bag. It is was a nice bonus.

I was informed by a cashier last weekend that the credit will ONLY go to people using bags SOLD by Pick n’ Save with their logo on them. I can be “green” and be rewarded but only if I choose to use your bags? You don’t get it. I don’t do it for the nickle. I’m guessing most people aren’t doing it for the nickle either, but to say “You’re not worth supporting in your effort because you didn’t FUND our efforts ahead of time” is just dumb.

I figured maybe the cashier was wrong, so I emailed Roundy’s corporate. Here’s the response. (My emphasis)

Mr. Or Ms. Geiger,

Thank you for taking the time to contact Roundy’s with your inquiry regarding the Bag Recycling Credit.

Customers will receive a .05 Cent incentive to have their groceries packed in Roundy’s Reusable Bags. The bag refund only applies to Roundy’s Reusable Bags, not other retailers nor plastic bags, paper bags or cardboard totes.

If a Customer chooses to double their Roundy’s Reusable bags they will receive a single refund for each doubled bag. All stores will participate in the bag refund program.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Again, thank you for contacting Roundy’s. We appreciate your patronage.

Sandra Price
Customer Service Specialist
ROUNDY’S SUPERMARKETS, INC.
Ref# 471802

Just sad.

iLife Support

I find it kind of funny that Apple has a OS update that includes iLife Support.

Apple screws up the Mac Pro “refresh”

I was ready to buy one, that is until Apple screwed it up. Who in their right mind would pay $3000 for a NEW computer with a video card that’s two generations old.

You don’t go buy a BWM if only audio option is an 8-track.

How to kill a job in progress

I’m building a web application the analyze large data sets. The simplified process is: upload a data set, split it into multiple chunks, process the chunks and then zip the results together.

While you can kill a job in progress right now, all it’s really doing is removing it from the database. The queue is still clogged full of tasks that need to complete for a job that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m referring to this as a push model, since I’ve pushed all the tasks onto the queue and the workers consume them as fast as they can. The problem lies in the fact that to remove the job messages from the queue, you need to kill the queue. (Using beanstalkd right now) This is fine if you have a single job on the queue, and you can ssh into the server, but it’s still a pain.

After some thought, I’m going to try to impliment a pull model. Each worker will announce it’s available to the head node when it starts up. The head node will note it’s existence in a ‘workers’ table, with the status of available. When a job gets submitted, the head node looks to see if any workers are available. If so, it drops the message onto the worker queue. It doesn’t matter if the worker that was available gets the job, just that there was one available. When the worker pulls the task off the queue, it sends a message back to the head queue saying that it’s now busy. The process continues once we have a series of tasks backing up on the head node, where the head will see if we have available workers, and if so, drop a task onto the worker queue.

What we gain from this is the ability to kill the job, and all associated tasks on the head node before they’re put into the worker queue. The tasks that are in process will still complete since we can’t go in and stop them, but that’s ok. Once they’ve all finished, we clean up the working files, and remove the job and other valid jobs can continue on without any issues.

Another gain is the ability to pause jobs, or better assign priorities. We don’t want a job that’s 95% done to be trumped by a higher priority job, since the system would think it’s stuck.