Attention fat conservatives: buffets are socialism

No, I don’t mean Warren Buffett, I’m talking about those all-you-can-eat affairs at restaurants. You contribute your money to a pool, and that pool allows the establishment to offer a tremendous quantity and variety of food. You may not be eating the spinach or bean salad, but some of your money is funding those foods for others, and in the meantime you get to load your plate with sausages, cheese steaks, and french…er…”freedom” fries. If you really are against the concept of socialism, you will stop using buffets! Oh, also, make sure you never use services from the police department, fire department, postal service, and ensure that you never fall under the protection of the armed forces. Socialism sucks!

Travelocity – a bad experience

We booked a trip to the Mayan Riviera through Travelocity, first time using this service (we’ve been Expedia customers for some time). We made an error in our booking – set our return date one day too early – but this was prompted by erratic behaviour on the Travelocity website which forced us to rush through our booking.

Getting help from Travelocity was a wretched experience, and we will most certainly not book with them again. I did see many warnings about Travelocity online, but most were dated four or more years ago – I’d thought they’d matured somewhat, but this is apparently not the case.

The full text of the issue is below, in the form of the letter I sent to their support team, but to really appreciate how poor their customer service was, you have to consider a couple of things:

1. We booked our trip at on 28 December, 2011 at 12:45 AM EST.
2. When we recognized our error, we called back at 9:30 AM – in other words, on the same day.
3. However, because Travelocity is based in Texas, they are on central time, so technically the booking was recorded at 11:45 PM on 27 December, and so we fell out of the “same day” changes that would have saved us considerably.
4. The latter point is actually moot – the Travelocity call centre (located in Bangalore, India), chose to leave our fate in the hands of their IT department. By the time they had dealt with it (claiming “user error” – when in fact they misunderstood the nature of the problem) – it was too late to affordably make any changes. January 5th – that’s when their IT department finally got to responding to our issue.

To summarize: if the problem had been dealt with promptly, our fees would have been more manageable, and Travelocity’s offer to waive their change fee would’ve actually been meaningful.

While an email to Scott Quigley, Vice-President of Sales and Customer Care received a reply in which he stated, “I hope that by resolving quickly we can earn back your trust as a customer,” his hope was not to be fulfilled: it didn’t happen quickly (three days for any further action, and that after I prompted with two further emails), and they certainly did not earn back my trust as a customer. Quite the contrary. Travelocity wouldn’t do more than waive their change fees. In other words, all carrier fees, which had inflated because of the extremely slow response time by their customer service department, were to be borne by us entirely.

Here’s the letter I sent to their customer service department 12 days ago:

Hello,

This is the first time we’ve tried Travelocity (in the past we’ve been dedicated to the great service we’ve received from Expedia), but we were excited to see some of the excellent prices you offered, and decided to give your service a try.

We finalized plans for our Cancun trip and began the booking process in the late evening of Wednesday, December 27th. When we had completed our selections, the clock had just passed midnight, and that’s when your website began to misbehave. After carefully constructing our trip, we were told that due to a timeout (or misuse of the back button – which we hadn’t touched), we would have to restart the process from scratch. We did so, and when we clicked the button to commit to the purchase, we encountered the same error. This happened two more times. So, in total, we had entered our info four times, and were rejected each time.

Since we weren’t using the back button at all, we thought we were timing out. On our fifth attempt, we rushed through the entire process and were finally successful in booking everything and paying for our trip. It was about 1:00 a.m. at this point, and we were fatigued and dispirited by the process.

The next morning I found in my inbox confirmation of our trip…with the wrong return date! We had hoped to return on Friday, January 20th, but our return date on the confirmation showed Thursday, January 19th.

I concede that in our rush to complete the booking, we may have entered an incorrect date. But we were rattled and rushed by the mishaviour of your website.

I immediately called your customer support line, and was told somewhat rudely by the attendant that it was impossible to change our trip, and that the cancellation cost would be substantial. When I explained the circumstances surrounding the error, the attendant indicated that she would file a report with Travelocity’s technical department. In other words, it would be up to your IT department to determine whether our problems with your website were legitimate, and whether or not we could change our plan without penalty.

I am the Senior IT Manager at the Canadian Film Centre. Not only am I certain that we did nothing to invoke the timeout/back button error we experienced, but I’m also keenly aware that your IT team will be motivated by pride and possibly skepticism to defend your system and lay the blame on me, the user. Admission of a technical flaw in your system will reflect on their performance and ability – it’s always easier to blame the user, or, in IT parlance, the “wetware.”

In other words, it does not show good faith for you to put the fate of our trip and our relationship with Travelocity at the discretion of your IT department.

I was told on Thursday morning to call back in 48 hours for an update. I have just done so, and was told that there was at this point no resolution, and that I was actually supposed to wait 72 (or more) hours before calling. So I continue to be mistreated and inconvenienced by your staff.

I would be pleased if this matter could be settled properly and quickly. I am prepared to immediately pay the difference in price between the erroneous booking and the correct one ($4244.56, versus $3841.96, for a difference of $402.60).

The trip details are identical, except: 1) extension of the stay at the resort until Friday, January 20th, 2) a change to the reservation on Olympus Tours ground transport to the same date, and 3) seats on the same flight the next day: Westjet flight 2581, depart CUN 3:50 p.m., arrival at YYZ at 8:44 p.m. I have just confirmed on your website that all these changes are currently available and possible – but such may not be the case if we wait another few days for your IT department’s verdict (which I already expect will be negative, for the reasons I’ve explained).

As things stand, I would not book with Travelocity again in future (I’ll go back to Expedia), and I’ll recommend to others that they should also avoid your service.

I would like to hear back as soon as possible from someone with authority to make these changes. I do appreciate any assistance you can provide in this regard.

Thank you,

Brian Panhuyzen

It isn’t hard to conclude that Travelocity will protect its bottom line, even in the face of upsetting and losing customers. Please feel free to post about your own Travelocity experiences.

iTunesMetadata.plist EPUB validation error explained

Problem: you use the epub validation tool at Threepress Consulting, and consistently receive this error:

WARNING: [your epub file name].epub: item (iTunesMetadata.plist) exists in the zip file, but is not declared in the OPF file

Reason: you tested your epub by dropping it into iTunes. That’s all you have to do for this rogue file to be injected into the epub and make it invalid. You don’t even have to sync it to a device. You would expect iTunes to simply copy the file without manipulating the original’s contents, but such is not the case.

Solution: you can unzip the epub (on the Mac, I like the the ePub_UnZip_1.0 and ePub_Zip_1.0.3 Applescripts), delete the iTunesMetadata.plist file, and rezip it, or you can avoid the problem entirely by duplicating your epub file and dropping that into iTunes, leaving the original intact.

Smashwords Kind of Sucks Lately

The buzz used to be that the best place to publish your ebook was Smashwords, as they would rapidly and faithfully push your book to the big retailers such as Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Sony, but it seems that the company has been damaged by its own success, which has made them slow to respond (if you can get support at all) and sloppy in their practices. I originally began publishing Night is a Shadow Cast By the World at Smashwords, expecting to let them distribute it to all the aforementioned channels, but I quickly ran into a few hitches with the epubs that Smashwords’s notorious Meatgrinder produced, such as:

1. inability to set the text on a page labelled “Part One” down slightly from the top of the page; it turns out that the Meatgrinder uses the Calibre engine (if you dissect the resulting epub, you’ll find styles named “Calibre1,” “Calibre2,” etc.) to convert files to various formats, and Calibre by default invokes a TOC entry for and inserts a page break immediately before certain terms, as defined in their Xpath expressions: “chapter|book|section|part|prologue|epilogue”; Calibre allows you to refine these choices; Meatgrinder does not. After a ton of experimentation (17 uploads, conversions, and test downloads from Smashwords) I solved this issue by converting the words “Part One” into a graphic element. See, spammers do have something to teach us.
2. consistent insertion of a blank page in front of every page break when the epub is viewed on an iOS device like an iPhone and iPad. The book has 56 chapters, which means iOS readers would be required to perform 56 superfluous screen swipes to get through the book – unacceptable.

For the second issue I found that I could run the resulting epub through Calibre and have it bump out a new epub – and this one was flawless. (I subsequently donated $10 to the Calibre team – if you’ve ever used this fine program, you should do the same.) Because I could get no traction at all dealing with Smashwords staff (several emails to their support department remain unanswered even today, ten days after I sent them) I decided to forgo Smashwords for iBooks distribution, and deal directly with Apple. It took a week to get my iTunes Connect account approved, and I just uploaded the book this morning and am awaiting approval. I expect this will take at least another week.

I figured while I was at it why not have a go with Kindle Direct Publishing, and that proved to be even easier than Apple. I signed up, uploaded my book, and in under four hours the book was live and on sale at the Kindle Store – astonishing after all the trouble with Smashwords and the long wait time to get iTunes Connect approval. Whatever bad things you might have to say about Amazon (and there are a lot), they aren’t the king of book distribution for nothing.

I decided to keep the book in the running at Smashwords to get into some of the smaller and more difficult markets: Kobo, B&N, and Sony. Today, a week after I submitted the book for Premium Channel approval at Smashwords, I got this response:

Well I’d already done the Ctrl-A method, in fact, I had run the book through the Nuclear Option, with excellent results, and the epub looks spectacular – exactly the  way I want it to look (and I’m a professional typesetter, with over 60 print books under my belt). Is this some uninformed newbie employee, who saw that I used various font sizes for the title page and chapter headings, and is fanatically following some Mark Coker rule-of-law rule in the Smashwords Style Guide? I think so, or at least I hope so. If there’s some Coker edict that will only let you use two font sizes throughout an entire book, I give up on Smashwords. I’ve since resubmitted the book without any changes at all – let’s see how far it gets. In the meantime, I’ve started investigating selling directly through Kobo, for starters, as dealing with Smashwords thus far has proved to be deeply unsatisfying.

Update: On December 27th, I received an email from someone named Raylene:

Thanks for the email. I took a look at your book and everything looks great. I went in and approved your book!

It took awhile, but Smashwords eventually came through. Thanks, Raylene!

And these fools want to govern?

Wood u voat 4 PCs?

In my mailbox today I found this flyer from the Ontario PC party. At the upper right is a quote, attributed to The Trentonian, May 13, 2011: “[Tim Hudak] said a PC government will give families, seniors and small business owners relief on hydro bills and by pulling the plug on mandatory smart meters.” Yes, read it again. And again. Clearly there’s a rogue “and” in there. Fine, The Trentonian needs to hire a proofreader…there are a lot of words in a newspaper. But for the PC party to quote this, verbatim, on a flyer with about 75 words on it, is appalling. These losers want to manage our energy systems, our hospitals, our education system? If you can’t handle the language on a fucking flyer, how are you going to manage a province of thirteen million people?

Oh, but it’s just one little error, Bri. Don’t be so hard on these folks. Okay, wait, there’s more. Sure, they’re quibbles, but look how it ads up. This is one fucking piece of paper, and these dweebs can’t get it right:

• I looked up the article in The Trentonian. It’s from May 12th, not May 13th. Details, details.
• One of the bullet points reads: Remove the ‘Debt Retirement Charge”. That’s right; Tim is saving money by making the first quotation mark a single, while showing his extravagance by closing with a double. (An interesting editorial conundrum: how to present that quote in text? Enclosed in single quotes, I would’ve used doubles; if it ran with doubles, I’d use singles. But one of each? Agh!)
• And how about that zinger in the upper left: “Unplug smart meters, [Tim] Hudak says.” It’s a quote from the Toronto Sun, nothing more than a paraphrase of what Hudak said. There’s no value judgment here, no endorsement by the paper, nothing at all remarkable about it. Just a thing Tim said, and the Sun mentioned. Thanks for showing up, Tim, here’s your prize!

Putting aside an unreasonable expectation that my government be smart enough to write a sentence, all these promises to reduce the cost of electricity are perilous. If you look at this page from the Ministry of Energy, some of the debt that charge is paying accumulated because the Harris PC government kept electricity rates artificially low.  Maybe it’s just me, but if something like electricity is expensive to produce, it should be expensive to consume…it’s the only way to get people to conserve. And isn’t that what Conservatives should be advocating?

Government as racketeer

A racketeer, writes the historian Charles Tilly, is one who “creates a threat and then charges for its reduction.” When governments…create threats and then offer citizens protection from those threats, the state is running a protection racket… Through…conjured threats, the public is treated to a simulation of a real terrorist attack, yet at each post-arrest press conference is reassured that the police were there every step of the way, and that… “there was never any danger.”

from “To Catch a Terrorist,” by Petra Bartosiewicz, Harper’s, August 2011

Self-promotion: the fine line between shameless and lameass

I’m a big fan of The Moth podcast, stories of real-life experiences recorded live and without notes, but self-promotion by the show’s host – which is always nestled among his closing-show commentary, and voiced by an unnamed woman (so we’ll think it is she who is imploring us to buy the book, therefore it’s not self-promotion, right?) played at the end of every single show and without variation – has become a major irritant and motive for me to skip the conclusion. It goes like this – though I’ve blanked the relevant details, to avoid offering my own promotion:

Our podcast host, *** *******, is author of the book **** **: ** ****** ***** ******. Learn more at *************.com.

I tend to listen to the shows in bulk, i.e., five or six in a row, and this sensitizes me somewhat, but I’m sure my listening patterns are not unusual.

What I don’t understand is why the The Moth’s podcast producer Jay Allison lets this go on, show after show. It hurts the podcast’s integrity, making it appear to be a vehicle for the author/host and stealing some of the spotlight from the performers. Not only that, the author should be heedful of promotion fatigue. When I first started listening to the postcasts I thought I might visit the website to find out about the book. Now however I zealously avoid the site for fear that the blip of my visit on his stats might further encourage him.

I drove today…

…and every time I touched the gas, it was like stomping on bunnies. I felt with every acceleration (injection, compression, explosion, exhaust, times six cylinders, times an average of 1500 RPM), with every act of breaking (valuable momentum converted to heat in the break pads), every turn (rubber wearing against asphalt, more momentum lost), even when I was idling (fuel burning, exhaust gases escaping, to no achievement of work), that I was killing our world. This giant, one-and-a-half ton box of metal, plastic, and glass, all of it having to move and turn and stop and move and turn and stop again and again, just to transport my 180 lbs. from one place to another.

This was bad enough, but then – like in horror movies, when the protagonist encounters some utterly hideously entity, only to discover that this is but one of an astonishing multitude (think Ripley in Aliens finding herself among all those eggs in the power station) – I looked around me, on Toronto’s busy streets, and saw dozens, hundreds, thousands of cars and trucks and SUVs and vans, all of them engaged in fullbore destruction of our living environment. And then – oh mercy it actually gets worse – I multiplied this by every single day of the year, year after year after year, increasing each year, and my mind leapt out, spread across the globe, sweeping across North and Central and South America, spreading to Europe and Africa and Asia, taking this single human in this one 1600kg vehicle burning 12 litres of gas every hundred kilometres, rounded the world to Africa and New Zealand, and there it was.

The realization that we, as a species, are fucked. The Earth will survive, but we’re going to make living on it really uncomfortable for ourselves and all our living creatures, and most of us will die off. New life will appear, eventually, once we are gone and our influence ended, and life will flourish here once again. But we won’t be around for it.

Really, there’s no other way this can turn out. Because tell me dear reader, are you going to do anything about this? Are you going to continue to consume and pollute as if we are not an exponentially expanding volume confined in a finite space? Are you going to leave your car at home tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, permanently adopt a method of transport that is much less harmful to our planet?

And if the answer is yes, do you actually mean it – can you confidently state that if you return to this post in six months or three years or ten years you will still be using that new, cleaner mode of transport (or something like it), that is to say, you will have committed yourself to permanently abandoning your daily automobile commute? Pretty unlikely yes? Well let’s just fantasize and say yes, you can and will do this – you have the guts and the will and the character and the strength – then what are the chances that thousands, no, millions of people will take the same action, and to commit to it permanently– what are the chances of that? Really, it’s virtually impossible that you will do it, so what are the chances that millions of others will?

What other conclusion can you possible come to?

Thought so.

We’re fucked.

Have a nice day.

Proof that zed beats zee

My application to the IRS for an EIN. In Canada I would’ve spelled the last three letters of my name as “zed-ee-en.” Because I was speaking to an American operator I had to say, “zee-ee-en,” hence the confusion between “zee” and “vee.” Attention America: there is no letter or number to confuse with “zed.” You’re up to your nose in debt; you can’t be wasting public money to fix avoidable errors like this. Join us and make “zee” into “zed.” It mucks up the postscript to the alphabet song, but consider the savings.

Crybaby conservatives: facts need a “counterweight”

Paging through Toronto Life’s May 2011 edition I came across an interview with this guy named Ezra Levant. It’s a name I felt like I’d seen somewhere before, but I’m not a media junkie due to time constraints, so I knew nothing about him. I was fascinated though, and not in a good way. He complains that the CBC doesn’t include enough conservative “pundits” on their programs. He also said something about advocating for “freedom” and “freedom of speech.” And it occurred to me that this is the conservative attitude: that no matter how ridiculous and unbacked by facts their ideas may be, they should have the right to express themselves as much as those who discuss things that are actually true.

In other words, I have an opinion based on science, e.g., climate change is actually happening. But some rightwing nutbar comes along and says he believes it’s not happening – that’s all it’s got to be, some deepseated belief this guy feels somewhere behind his sternum – and it’s a denial of his right to freedom of speech not to give him equal billing to declaim his viewpoint.

I assume this attitude stems from religion, where your belief in something that doesn’t exist is unquestionable, and to be considered as valid as things that are empirically provable. Levant says, “There is no counterweight in the official consensus media narrative. I think there are plenty of people who are just desperate for the other side of the story…” The thing is, this “counterweight,” the “other side of the story,” is nothing but emotional fiction. People want their unsubstantiated feelings to be legitimized by some talking head on TV. Enter Levant.

He’s given about 300 words in total, and he can’t even manage these without contradicting himself. In describing Sun News’s format, he says they “won’t have the typical set-up, with one Liberal, one Tory and one New Democrat.” But the whole purpose of his rant is to say that CBC doesn’t include the Tory. And yet here he says it’s the “typical set-up.” I guess this guy feels like he’s being consistent…and that should be good enough for any conservative.