There's Something About Harry

It is Thursday night and I’m writing this article early.  Saturday, I’m flying to Las Vegas for my third Affiliate Summit.  I’m going to be a mentor this year helping at least one person officially and probably 2 other people unofficially navigate Affiliate Summit West for their first time.

Its not even half way through the month of January and frankly things have been a good bit nutty after the holidays.

From a financial perspective I’m racing to make ends meet coming out of the holidays and a short working month of December.  The month of January and February are both looking very good, but cash flow is not timed terribly well right now, so I’m doing everything on the cheap and as conservatively as possible this month.

Delta Maxed out my Amex

I’m also heading to a WordCamp in Boston next weekend, after Affiliate Summit.  I will be sitting in at a couple Genius Bar sessions helping to show people how to design WordPress themes from scratch for the first time.

I was trying to keep my trip cheap, so I went onto Delta.com to book my flight using the last of my frequent flyer miles on Delta ( I used to live in Atlanta and have been trying to get these things used up all year long).  Delta links my profile to my Amex and even when I pay for a flight entirely with skymiles, they secure the order with my Amex.

Well last Friday when I tried to book my order things went completely bonkers on the Delta site and without me pushing any buttons, the site automatically booked and confirmed a flight that I did not select, nor want.

Even worse it charged the order to my Amex with real money not frequent flyer miles and that maxed out my card!

I needed those funds on that card to book my hotel in Boston, so after the order I didn’t have a airline ticket and didn’t have the funds for a hotel! 

I called Delta immediately after and they said they had cancelled my order.  Five days later however, my card had not yet been credited and Delta.com couldn’t process my frequent flyer mile order with a maxed out Amex!

I called them up and they initially told me that I was shit out of luck, no refund.

I re-explained the problem and they relented and offered to give me a refund afterall.  But a day later it still hadn’t gone through.  So this time I called Amex and essentially disputed the charge.  But another day after the dispute and my card is still maxed out.

Its now about 36 hours before I head to Vegas and I have no idea if I’ll be able to get my trip to Boston fixed before I would have left next Friday.

CES Was a Wash This Year too

Every year I always say that I’m not going to go to CES next year.  This year ended up being that year for real.  But my friend Joe Klein and Michael Butler did make it and had a good time.  A new friend here in Charlotte Robert Enriquez (aka NC_SEO on Twitter) also went for the first time himself. 

All in all, I’m kind of glad I missed the show this year, even though I would have preferred to have made that choice and not be forced into it by circumstances.  Anyway it worked out as I have been getting a lot of website design work done for quite a few different customers. (more on that in a future post).

Dancing Last Weekend

Among other things I also had a chance to go out dancing with my wife Becky and some of her teacher friends.  I had a great time as I love to go dancing.  I could do that full time if I weren’t in my thirties. It wasn’t the best club I’ve ever been too, but it got the job done, we had fun and that’s a good thing. 

Broken Laptops and Replacement Cell Phones

My Palm Pre finally died last week and I had a replacement shipped to me by Sprint (I pay for insurance on my Pre).  This was my second Pre to die (I now have my third Palm Pre).  I think its a great phone, but they are not terribly durable.

Once I get back from Affiliate Summit, I’m going to by a spare battery for the phone as well, as the standard battery just doesn’t cut it.

The keyboards on both my laptops flaked out again.  I was able to rebuild my primary laptop keyboard, its less than a year old.  Its a Toshiba and I love the little thing, but it sucks that the keyboard died.

The other laptop is 4 years old and despite spending 3 hours trying I was not able to get the laptop going again.  In both cases, I think the plug for the keyboard on the Toshiba laptop motherboard is a bit defective and it basically causes the keys to seem to stop working. 

So now with my older larger laptop, I will always have to plugin a keyboard via USB to type anything.  I also feel like I am on borrowed time with my newer Toshiba laptop, so I will probably have to get ready to get a new one sometime soon.  I really hoped that I’d get at least 2 years out of this laptop, and am a little miffed that it didn’t even make it a year before becoming unreliable.

Dragon Riders of Pern Series

I’ve recently been listening (re-listening/re-reading) all of Anne Mcaffrey’s Dragon Riders of Pern novels.  I’ve read these more than a half dozen times and just enjoy the story.  This time I’m trying to read them in chronological story order.

I’m also reading Love is the Killer Application by Tim Sanders, which is a good book and I think I’m getting some useful information out of it.

The White Dragon, Harper Hall Series and All the Weyrs of Pern are my favorites.

Meetups and Conferences

I am over due scheduling a WordPress Meetup in Charlotte and will definitely do that no later than tomorrow.  Plus, I am now going to be scheduling the next Charlotte WordCamp picking up this responsibility from Jason Keath the founder of Social Fresh, who also ran the first Charlotte WordCamp.  I’m looking forward to this experience and even more so looking forward to giving people access to some great WordPress resources, information and a people!  I just learned this yesterday so you can be assured that I will have a lot more to talk about on this topic in coming days.

Frozen Lake

The lake is frozen, but I did just receive a new kerosene wick for my heater, so I am looking forward to getting back into my dockoffice, primarily so that I can do some video and audio work.  Outside of my dockoffice I have not found a good location to record video or audio.  Every where I work outside of my office is WAY TOO NOISY! 

So that’s what I have been up to, if you have caught up with me, please drop me a comment with a link or two to your own blog and let me know what you have been up to lately.  I’ve been fairly conversant with folks on Facebook, but haven’t been making the blog rounds as much as I would like, so give me a bread crumb (hyperlink) and let me catch up with you!

I have been a member of Audible.com for almost as long as the service has been running with a 8 month break in service during a billing snafu that resulted in me getting super annoyed and canceling for a while about 6 years ago.

The service used to be great(getting an audio book online when you wanted it), but customer service and ease of browsing navigation for Audible books has always been terrible.

I have always been super annoyed with their subscription plans, mostly because they can not be paused without cancelling your entire account.  From my perspective, there are typically periods of time, when I don’t want the service for 2 –3 months.  This usually happens for two reasons:

1. I’ve read too many books and I need a break from reading for a couple months
2. Audible’s site makes it so difficult to find books I want to read that I give up for a month or two.

Regardless, I have a new complaint about Audible, and this one might drive me away from the service all together.  Its pricing.

They have recently started charging 2 credits (the equivalent of 2 months worth of subscription fees or $30) for the download of many unabridged books.

From my perspective, an abridged book, just isn’t worth reading.  So in making this move, Audible is doubling the price of their books.  Maybe making this even worse, this seems to happen on those books that I can actually find and want to read on Audible, as opposed to the masses of books that seem to clutter their system.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a book worm and read hundreds of books each year, sometimes even a thousand or more.  I’m not super picky, because I can read very fast.  For example, I have read the first 3 books in the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer since Monday.

I had thought about listening to the fourth book, but the price got in the way.

So now, not only can I not find books on Audible, but when I do find them the price is double. 

This might just be the thing that drives me to drop the service entirely.

So I have just ordered 2 more books from Audible.com.  These like many before them are supposed to be ‘Unabridged’ as in the full book and not some chopped up version of the book.

I have just about had it with some of the books that Audible claims are unabridged only to learn that they are completely abridged.  Its like promising your kids a chance to go to the park and play on the swing sets only to learn that the swing sets only have chains on one side of each swing.

I’ve run into this problem on more than one occasion with audible and after 10 years of being a customer with them, it still grates on my nerves when I pick up a book I know is great only to read through it with the best parts cut out of it.

We will see how this one goes . . .