photo © 2009 Aitor Calero | more info (via: Wylio)

Traditionally complaining is considered a bad thing. Products that you purchase or service you receive often are good things to complain about when you have an issue, even if it is a simple one. The complaining is not only often good for you, but for the company as well. Here are three good reasons you should complain.

1. A food item was sub-standard.

This might often take more time than it is worth, however there often is something in it for you. I recently had to contact Breyers Ice Cream. I purchased a type of ice cream that had nothing to do with butterscotch. However apparently butterscotch was the last thing they had run on the line and someone failed to properly clean the machine.

Why not just eat the ok tasting ice cream and get on with life? Because Breyers had two problems and I had one. Mine was bad ice cream, but Breyers had a customer which was less likely to purchase from them again and a quality control issue. Yet, only I knew about my problem. By calling and complaining, I did them a service, and they sent me a coupon for a new carton of ice cream for my trouble.

Breyers’ quality control team is now able to look into the problem and I am able to get some free ice cream.

Some companies will go beyond just replacing the product for you. We purchased a bag of potatoes and 50-75% of them were bruised internally. Green Giant sent us coupons for two bags to replace it.

2. The product is under warranty.

This might feel like a no-brainer, but most people forget that the item is under warranty. A great example we recently had was a crock pot. The crock received a crack. This was about 2 years after purchase. I called Jarden (who runs CrockPot) and they sent us a new crock right away.

Side note: That crock was the last in their stock and it had a flaw in it, so when I called again about it they sent us a whole new crock pot.

photo © 2009 Piutus | more info (via: Wylio)

Some companies do lifetime warranties. Kingston who makes computer memory and stuff like SD cards guarantees most of their products for life. I had an older 2 GB SD card that was failing. I went to Kingston’s website and did an RMA (costing me a stamp to send it to them). They no longer had that one in stock so they sent me a larger and faster 4GB card. Next time I am looking at SD cards whose am I more likely to purchase?

Most people forget that their stuff might be under warranty. It is always worth asking even if you do not know and it is always worth asking if you do because of reason number three.

3. The product is out of warranty.

This is a slightly different reason to complain. Perhaps the product is just over the one year mark, go ahead and call. Some companies like Lenovo say they have a 12 month warranty, but they actually have a 13 month one in the system.

Other times the product has failed in a way that is big enough that it is worth complaining. Remember than when something has failed it gives you a bad impression of the company. If the company is a good one they will try to help you out.

photo © 2009 Melanie Tata | more info (via: Wylio)

We had an older toaster which recently caught on fire due to a pop tart and failure to pop up. No damage except to the toaster, but I emailed Sunbeam (also owned by Jarden) and they are sending me a new one and request that I send the old one back to them in the box with the label that will be provided. This is a special case where the company needs to find out if they have a larger problem where they might need to issue a recall. It is important to the safety of others that you complain.

4. To find out what companies you do not want to use!

This is a bonus reason to complain especially about small things. If a company handles a small complaint well, it is likely they are also good when you come to them with a bigger one.

So although you want to do it as nicely as possible (remembering that the person on the phone had nothing to do with the problem and might be able to help you) remember to complain. It is your civic duty!

So first off some definitions:

Packets: Networks use packets to transmit information successfully. Think of them as a string of telegrams with notes here and there that inquire to make sure they have all be successfully transmitted. Perhaps a better analogy for you would be frames of a movie.

Nodes: Anything that can receive and/or send information on the network.

Network: A network is a group of nodes (at least 2) that are interconnected and are able to move data from one node to another. Connecting to a network is actually done by first creating a connection from the new node to an already connected node.

The Internet: The Internet is nothing more than the largest network on Earth. The interesting thing about the Internet is that it is not owned all by one person or company. So there are billions of nodes and connecting network lines. So when you connect to the Internet, you are actually just connecting to a node which will pass your packets (data) on to other nodes. The wonder of the Internet is that standards were created to make all the different systems able to communicate.

The Internet and network neutrality.

When you request a webpage (via packets) on the Internet, you are actually passing across pieces of networks that are owned by many different companies. Now the Internet is resilient, and your request could actually go many different ways to get to the node which serves the webpage you requested. The Internet was originally designed to allow military communication even if several nodes were to go offline (via a nuke). Now network neutrality is the idea that each of the companies that own a small piece of the “Internet” treat all data flowing their portion equally. This means that no packet is above another, even if you are doing school work and another packet is just carrying a virus or spam.

Up till now most of the Internet has followed the spirit of network neutrality. There is no law making them do this, it is just good practices. Of course the companies who run the Internet used to just leave the network management to the geeks who believed that this was best. Now however there are those who do not understand the Internet who are trying to get involved. They say that they would be able to charge websites a premium to be faster on their networks, and thus make money that way and decrease the cost of access or build faster networks overall.

Network neutrality is threatened and thus I and others feel that it should be codified into law.

What threat could be so great since the Internet has worked well so far?

Here is a short list, in order of my priorities.

1. Competing Interests. The Internet has grown to where there are large companies who have good reason to prefer one piece of data over another. The examples below show how companies are quickly loosing their incentive to keep the Internet Neutral. Even worse than an ISP like Comcast or AT&T doing this, is the companies that you never hear about doing it. Sprint is not really an ISP, but it owns large portions of the Internet connections.

• Example: Cable companies might not like some people are canceling their expensive TV hookups for the like of Netflix or Hulu. So possible solution is slow them down for their customers unless Netflix pays them some money. I know it sounds like blackmail, but currently it is entirely legal.

• Example: Companies like Verizon and AT&T sell cell phone and telephone service. They might not like it if you started using an online telephone service (VoIP) and they especially might not like it if you didn’t buy cell phone minutes because you are using your cell phone Internet connection to make phone calls cheaper.

1. Censorship. The ACLU is partially worried about this. Once you do not have a neutral network, what is to stop companies from censoring things they do not like. Perhaps AT&T will block blogs that criticize their company, or slowing down Verizon’s webpage. It sounds nice to try to manage the Internet so that file sharing is slower and video streaming is faster, but do to the incentives it would not stop there (Not to mention that who is that company to determine what is important).

   This may not have happened in the United States, but countries like Iran, Turkey, China, Australia, and others block various webpages for often arbitrary and political reasons. Forcing all data to be treated equally is vital to freedom in the world.

2. The Nature of the Internet. The networks that make up the Internet are owned, but the Internet cannot exist without net neutrality. Think about an Internet ecosystem where you have to pay extra if you want to use Google over your service provider’s preferred search engine. Think about email where you have to ask if someone is on the same network as you. These ideas may feel like they would never happen, and they are unlikely, but these things are possible because of net neutrality, not in spite of it.

3. The Dumb Pipe. This is a bit more complex, but think about a telephone call. You make a phone call, and the phone company cannot listen in on you. They cannot even have a computer program do it. And when all the lines are full, it cannot drop some young couple from listening to each other breath if someone else wants to call 911. All the lines are full, then that is that. ISPs and, because I am a bit more extreme, cell service providers should be nothing more than a dumb pipe. Something that makes no choices about importance.

4. Belief in Technology. A lot of people believe that we need non-neutral networks to solve the problem of more and more information flowing across the Internet. They believe that networks connections are filling up exponentially and that building the new ones to handle the load is going to be very expensive. And it is not going to be cheap, but they make their estimates on the belief that the new connections will be only able to hold as much as the old ones. However time and time again technology has been able to drastically increase the amount of data that flows across each line. Originally with telephones you had to have a single wire that ran from point A to B. Now we run hundreds of calls on the same line.

There are other reasons, but these are my top 5. What are your thoughts on Net Neutrality?

To learn more about what you can do to help support Net Neutrality, I suggest visiting Save the Internet.

It is always possible that you have gotten yourself into the position that you have a email mailing list that is just reaching too many people. You started your mailing list to be some sort of exclusive club, and now even your grandmother is on it! So here are ten ideas on ways to decrease the size of your mailing list. If you try any of these feel free to comment on your results!

1. The easiest way is to just delete email addresses. This may however be hard to bring yourself to do. Another way to do it is just “forget” to backup and erase all your files. This may have the unintended consequence of removing other files.
2. Send out a email in error, and then send 3-10 emails apologizing for the one sent in “error”.
3. <li>Send an email in <strong>text format</strong>, however with html<br> coding all over the place.</li>
4. Send ? an email ? and include ? lots of special ??? ?characters? from ? a font ? that no one has, thus showing ? in their place? ??????? ?also shown as a ??
5. Send an email every hour on the hour, telling the time.
6. Create your email in Photoshop, export it, and just send the image.
7. Forward chain messages to your entire mailing list, especially the ones that are false.
8. Send emails from a server with a bad time stamp, making the emails appear to come from 1954 (instead of 1984…)
9. Send an email saying that your mailing list has been hacked, then sell your list to spammers.
10. Send an email bill via paypal to your mailing list charging them for subscribing.

Caution, doing any of these may have unintended side effects, so if you do one, I want to hear about it.