Make: Terrible UI (in a postal mail bill)

I’m giving a gift subscription to Make magazine to a friend. I already subscribe.

This past Saturday I recieved a subscription confirmation in the mail. It ws addressed to me and thanked me for subscribing. All I needed to do was pay the bill for the magazines to start to arrive. There was NO mention of either “gift” or the name of my friend.

Being utterly confused, I came up with the following three possibilities:

1. It is really a renewal. The mention of “Charter Maker” makes this a possibility since I’ve recieved previous offers on it (but am pretty sure I never sent in any of the reply cards)
2. It is the gift subscription for my friend. While this is what I expected when I opened the letter, there is NO mention of gift or his name.
3. It is a bit of marketing material, making the assumption I want to subscribe and just asking me to pay to get it started. While I hope O’Reilly wouldn’t do this, I’ve seen many offers like it from banks, subscriptions, and mortage companies.

So I called the 800 number (really 866) and asked. While this question was not part of the script (they just wanted to tell me I wouldn’t get a free t-shirt until I payed the bill), it was ultimately confirmed that it was the gift bill. They have now paid to have a real person answer a question that would have been obvious if they had just said “please pay for the gift subscription you requested by reply card.”

I could have avoided the mess if I had just requested and paid for the gift subscription on-line instead of using the reply card through postal mail. But if I remember correctly, the terms on the reply card were better (perhaps I got a free t-shirt ).

UPDATE: to make matters worst, when I went on-line to pay, it needed not just my account number (which appears twice on the bill), but also the zipcode. NOT my zip code (which is on the bill), but my friends zipcode, which is nowhere to be seen. Fortunately, I have it in my address book.

UPDATE 2: I’m giving up paying on-line. It keeps asking me to fill in my e-mail address on the form, but even if I fill it in, it says I haven’t and won’t move on.

What did I mean?

A while ago I wrote something on a scrap of paper, but I don’t rmember the full context.

many to many anonymous pub/sub with data normalization and standardization.

I think it had to do with my summarizing what I wanted a service bus to do and be in as few words as possible.

Windows in the past

There are a number of articles on the history of Microsoft Windows. Windows is turning 20. While I haven’t done Windows development for a long time, I’m used Windows since version 1.0. Honestly, I didn’t use Windows 1.0 very much at all, prefering GEM at the time.

My life with Windows began in earnest with Windows 2.1. Both as a real user and as a developer.

Windows 3.0 was a watershed event, making it something that was truely decent and while I used a Mac in the school labs, my home computer ran Windows, leaving DOS and GEM in the dust.

Reading the 2nd edition of Petzold’s book was even more rewarding than the first. Partly because I learn a lot the second time around and partly because it, as Windows itself, had evolved and matured.

Windows 3.1 refined things, along with some fun play…I mean work… with “multimedia extensions.”

Workgroup for Windows brought networking that worked with Windows to the world. It had issues, but it was easier than trying to get Novell or Banyan VINES working with Windows. In fact, over time it acually made them more workable also.

Windows NT was fun because it was new. Finding 32bit apps in the beginning wasn’t. Where was the Internet when you needed it. Actually, it was right there. Running Cello as a web browser until other options became available. It was also nice to have a decent (by Microsoft standards) command line.

The rest became the story of the masses and Microsoft’s domination.

Welcome.

Hi. This is more of an experiment. I needed a WordPress API key. But I also wanted to see how the service works and how it may differ from the stand alone one.