Reasons I don’t wear a goatee

  1. Honeybun doesn’t like facial hair on me
  2. I’m starting to get gray hair on my chin
  3. It would make me look too much like Dave Navarro and I don’t want confused fans to ask me for his autograph – again
  4. Two words – “booger trap”
  5. Itch factor

Hootie goes solo

Anyone who knows me could tell you that Hootie and the Blowfish is one of my favorite bands. When I was stationed at Cherry Point, NC back in 92-93, I would drive up to Greenville with a buddy and we’d see them playing in a bar called The Attic. They are a great live band. Oh the memories.

I just saw that three members of the band have solo albums coming out this year (all but the bassist). The most interesting looks to be Darius Rucker’s country album. Should be fun.

Daddy’s girl

Honeybun took Bailey to visit the grandparents in New Mexico this week. Honeybun tells me that last night her mother was giving Bailey a bath. She cried from the moment she was put in the bath until they took her out. During the bath, she kept saying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” I guess she misses me.

But I already own that

I think the top two most successful marketing schemes in the past fifty years are bottled water and ringtones.

Bottled water is amazing. Americans buy about 28 billion bottles of water per year. In doing so, we pay extra money for something we already get out of the tap.

The second is an even bigger scam – ringtones. Cellphone companies have convinced their customers to pay up to $3.00 or more for songs (really small pieces of songs) that they generally already own in their music collection. Wireless providers have so far gotten away with crippling the phone you own by locking down the software so that you can’t load your own song (or piece thereof) onto your own hardware. They do this so you pay more for a ring tone than you do the whole song. Ingenious!

Not for me thank you. But what is a person who wants a customized ringtone to do? Well now that person (um, me) can use Myxertones. Upload your own song, choose which section you want as a ringtone, and they’ll send it to you via text message.

I’ve got my ringtone now. Sweet.

Tivo customer service

Isn’t it disappointing when a great company goes bad?

I have been a Tivo customer for four years. At the end of last year we bought our third Tivo (this one to upgrade our first box). Our nightmare began when we went to activate the third box. When we ordered the box, my wife paid for a lifetime subscription (offered to customers who had previously purchased lifetime subscriptions).

The subscription on our first box was due to expire in February so we waited to activate the new box. Come February, we set up the new box and activated it. Problem was, Tivo charged our credit card a second time for the lifetime membership when we did the activation. Yeah, that sucked. It took a few days but they fixed it.

Now for the second problem. Tivo automatically renewed the monthly subscription on our first box. We called the following day explaining we did not want to renew that box because we were replacing it with the new (third) box. The rep cheerfully told us they would refund that monthly subscription.

After numerous follow up calls asking where our money is, they still have not refunded it. Today, the rep said she sees four pending transactions but for some reason they aren’t going through. At that point she tells my wife that the problem is not their fault because they are doing everything they are supposed to do. She didn’t seem to understand that they did everything except for actually refunding our money.

So once again we are told that they will contact their accounting department to release the request so the refund will be processed and that we should wait up to 14 days. We’ve already waited more than 14 days.

Arrrgh. I hate it when a company I liked becomes so non-responsive. I’ve also discovered this is a sign of a company on the ropes. Looks like we’ve bought our last Tivo box.