Chilled Out Bearded Man

Dear RCN,

I am writing to you in the hopes that you will improve yourself.

Your billing system is preposterous. Every month when I check the bill, I worry what new surprises I will find. When my bill increased recently, I tried to figure out where the difference was, but the actual names of the line items had changed. How am I supposed to read my bill every month if the names of the line items are changing?

The question of line item names should really be nonexistent because you offer 3 services that consumers care about:
1) Cable
2) Internet
3) Phone

When I used to get bills from your competitor Time Warner, I had 3 line items:
1) Cable
2) Internet
3) Phone

Do you see how nicely the line items match the services above? That’s how your bill needs to be. We don’t want to see that we are paying for a cable box. We know we have to pay for a box, because there can be no cable without a box. Include the Cable Modem in my price. I can’t have internet without it. The Bundle Discount is meaningless. Show me the bundle as an item and somewhere on your site show me what’s in it. That’s all you need.

In fact, you don’t even need to show me those 3 line items. You should just create packages and have the elements of the package on your website and in your brochures. Then have one line item on the bill.

You are wasting time and money by dealing with all of these line items on your bills. It takes me at least twice as long with one of your customer service people as with Time Warner customer service, because we have to walk through all the line items when I call RCN. When your sales people are trying to sell me a new “package” (bundle, etc) it takes them way too long to figure out and explain the offerings.

Lastly, I would like to bring up my price increase. The increase this year was almost $40 in two months. It was an increase on multiple products, but you have to be kidding me if you think I am going to just accept a $40 increase on a $157 bill. That is a 25% increase.

The short of it is that I will most likely be leaving your service, because your customer support did not seem to understand my situation. In fact they asked if I wanted to remove some of my services. (I may be mistaken, but I believe that will cost me $5 based on many articles I have read. I forgot to ask.) No, I don’t want to remove my services. I want the services, I just want your company to have some sanity about their annual price increases. A 25% increase is unacceptable.

This is by far the worst increase I have seen, but billing failures seem to be a regular event at your company, probably due to the inanely complex billing system. I deal with some sort of RCN billing error one to two times per year. That is one to two times more than it should be.
Make some packages and let me choose one. Show me 1-3 line items on my bill. Then I will stay with your company. I am done playing this ridiculous pricing game. I deserve better as a consumer of a company of your size and stature.

Best Regards,

The Chilled Out Bearded Man

P.S. In case you are wondering, I left Time Warner because I moved to a location that did not offer Time Warner. But, there are other choices and I believe Time Warner may be available to me now.

First Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett… Now this.

http://consumerist.com/5303716/billy-mays-likely-died-of-heart-disease

I wrote about him recently, but I meant no harm. If you believe in curses, I’m sorry.

http://www.chilledoutbeardedman.com/2009/02/02/retarded-oxy-clean-guy/

Sad to see a bearded man go, even though I didn’t see eye to eye with him.

T-Mobile’s new myTouch Google Android Phone presale will begin on July 8.

http://www.t-mobilemytouch.com/

No hard keyboard, but Android now has a touchscreen keyboard since the Cupcake upgrade. The size looks great.

Wolfram Alpha has Add-ons for their search. The add-ons come in many different flavors, from a FireFox addon to a Windows start bar search to an iGoogle gadget. An iGoogle Gadget? Aren’t Wolfram and Google enemies?

Its pretty cool that there seems to be comfortable interaction between Google and Wolfram Alpha.

This is probably a smart move considering that they could potentially end up in the same niche market in the future. Friendly competition is just so much more pleasant than all out rivalry. We could also see Wolfram get bought out by Google if the product proves its worth and Mr. Wolfram finds himself in need of a gadzillion dollars (unlikely considering that he has many other successful products on the market including the famous Mathematica).

Then the big question becomes, how does Wolfram Alpha monetize this type of search? Why would you want to click through to a website for info on a product when all you are looking for is the answer to a question? In Google you are looking for websites and ads are just another website that happens to be paid for. Perhaps Google/Doubleclick with their advertising genius will be able to help Mr. Wolfram find the answer to this advertising conundrum.

Or maybe Mr Wolfram should just install his addon and ask Wolfram Alpha:

How can Wolfram Alpha make money off of Wolfram Alpha?

Because regardless of how amazing a product is, if it can’t make money its survival comes into question.

Dowload the addons here:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/downloads.html

(I’m sure Mr Wolfram already thought of all of this. I hear he’s really smart.)

I’m going to try something new for myself and for you. A daily quick summary of what I learned and/or accomplished today.

- Left joins are different than inner joins in that with a left join a comparison predicate (in the where statement) and the same predicate as a join predicate (in the join “on” statement) do not necessarily give the same result as would be the case in an inner join.

- Wrote a song about breaking up again with someone I broke up with over a month ago and have not gone out with since.

- Roman Polanski is a pretty awesome guy with a very complicated life. I have pity for him and I don’t think he was a horrible rapist. I learned this from the Documentary about Roman Polanski on HBO:

http://www.hbo.com/docs/docuseries/romanpolanski/

- Some programmers are incapable of organizing their logic. It makes people around that person work twice as hard and be 5 times as stressed out.

No more Vista! For everyone who has heard about Vista, but did not want to install it on their machines (ie most people), Windows 7 will be released on Oct 22, 2009.

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/06/02/the-date-for-general-availability-ga-of-windows-7-is.aspx

Apparently the Tmobile G1 Android update I got earlier (http://www.chilledoutbeardedman.com/2009/06/01/g1-firmware-upgrade-to-slick/) is the infamous long awaited Cupcake update.

Some more feature updates that I’ve noticed on my G1 phone:

The camera can now shoot video.

The browser zooming has a button to return to the standard zoom.

The browser zoom box magnifier is better.

An onscreen keyboard with autocomplete that you load by tapping on a text field.
The camera loads up a little faster than before and has two onscreen buttons. In the top left corner is a small thumbnail of the last photo or video you shot. And in the top right corner is a button that you can use for taking photos.

Still missing zoom on the camera (though technically you don’t need it cause you can crop it later and its a high enough quality photo that cropping is feasible).

If you don’t have the updates, yet, those are some of the things you can look forward to getting in the near future.

As far as when your phone will be updated with G1 Cupcake update… I received the phone the day it came out and I received this update at about 8am PST. Two of my friends who have the G1 have not yet received the update. The first friend got the Tmobile G1 in mid-November 2008 and the second purchased it in Febraury 2009.

After I wrote all of that I discovered a full list of the new Android features here:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-1.5-highlights.html

The firmware upgrade today on the new G1 seems to have taken the phone from cool to slick. It still does not feel as smooth as the iPhone, but lots of things are better.

The desktop widgets have nicer smooth shiny gray borders.

The screen seems to come out of standby faster than before.

When programs/apps load, they fade in and out more smoothly and quickly.

The buttons on the built-in gmail app are much prettier and not clunky like the old ones.

Also, there are now checkboxes on the gmail list of emails, so that you can apply an action (such as archive) to multiple emails. This is familiar from the traditional gmail.

And there just seems to be nice font, border and background improvements throughout.

One issue that I encountered was that on the first restart after the firmware update, all of the icons on the desktop were missing. This resolved itself when I restarted, again.

What else did people notice?