Amazon Is Awesome

I’ve been a fan of Amazon.com for a long time…

• Each December, I do as much of my Christmas shopping there as possible.
  
• For several years, Amazon has been ahead of the curve with cool features like creating your own wish list and providing recommendations for you based on your previous purchases.
• I’ve always been a big fan of Free Super Saver Shipping, and last year, I took advantage of Amazon Student, which provided me with a year of free 2-day shipping.

One of the only problems I’ve ever had with Amazon occurred last week when I tried to get a refund. I had wanted to order ESV Bibles for my High School graduates but I stupidly messed up the order and ended up with three Bibles that I needed to send back.

The mistake was my fault, so when I found out that although I could get a refund I would have to pay the return shipping, it was no problem. Then, a couple days later, I got an email from Amazon customer service saying that I had been credited with 50% partial refunds on each of the Bibles. There was no explanation as to why I was only getting a partial refund, so I was frustrated and sent an email complaining about the situation to customer service. How does Amazon respond?

Within 3 hours (I got the email at 11 PM on a Friday night), I got a response apologizing for the inconvenience and offering me a full refund, including the price of shipping (which I should’ve had to pay since it was my fault in the first place).

When I got the official notice of the refund, it was notated as a “Goodwill Refund,” presumably because rather than arguing with me, they just refunded the whole price in order to foster goodwill with me for the future. It certainly worked.

Well done, Amazon, and Customer Service Representative Afshan Khanam…I will remain a loyal customer for a long time.*

*I have heard of some potentially shady business related to Amazon removing books from peoples’ Kindles, but as a non-Kindle user, I have no experience with this. If people would just read books in the proper, traditional, bound, printed, and papercut-risking way, it wouldn’t be an issue.

Pandora.com

Am I the last person in Western Civilization to find out about Pandora.com?

In case the answer to that question is “no,” Pandora is an internet radio service that allows you to create your own “stations” which play music that you like.

You start by picking a song or artist that you like, and then Pandora chooses similar music. As each song plays, you can either give it a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down”, determining if that specific song and others like it will appear again on your station.

The service is completely free; you just have to register with a username and password in order to save your stations.

I haven’t used it enough to figure out just how good it is at predicting songs that I like, but so far, I’m impressed.

I Sometimes Forget…

…how much faster cable internet is than DSL.

But then I try to download 150MB worth of software updates at work and it takes

all

day.

An Astoundingly Bad Idea

There are a lot of poorly-conceived projects and ideas floating around the World Wide Web, but I was still pretty surprised when I stumbled upon the Sexual Relationship Database, developed by World Health Optimization Management, or W.H.O.M.

What exactly is the Sexual Relationship Database? Well, the title is somewhat self-explanatory, but here’s what W.H.O.M. has to say about its project:

In an effort to better understand society's interconnected nature, this database was created to serve as a repository for information regarding the sexual histories of individuals, across the world and throughout time.

Simply enter a name, and all known sexual partners of this person will appear to the right. However, most individuals have yet to be entered into our database. If you have valid information regarding the sexual past of anyone, at any period of time, please enter it now. Your assistance is vital to the success of this project.

I suppose it is theoretically possible that such a database could be useful. If it was both accurate and comprehensive, it might force a degree of accountability on would-be sexually promiscuous individuals, and I guess it would also alert you if someone you were interested in was such a person.

Of course, the following disclaimer on the website pretty much eliminates any chance of accuracy:

To insure accuracy, anyone may edit sexual histories, provided he or she logs in with a valid email address.

So basically, it’s considerably easier to corrupt this information than even Wikipedia.

As evidence of this, just check out President Clinton’s sexual history. While I fully believe that such a list would be extensive, I also doubt that it would include Osama Bin Laden.

So if you have some free time, head on over to the SRD and enter any pertinent information that you may be privy to. Remember: your assistance is vital to the success of this project.

The Great (Fire)Wall

Being all about censorship as communist governments have generally tended to be, the People’s Republic of China has constructed a massive firewall to restrict certain internet sites that the government doesn’t think its citizens should have access to.

The popularly-named “Great Firewall of China” blocks sites including Wikipedia and the BBC, but through this neat website where you can test your URL on the firewall, I discovered that The Doc File isn’t blocked—I guess I’m just not that controversial.

Before I ran the test, I thought I understood why I wasn’t getting a lot of hits and page views from China’s 1.3 billion inhabitants, but now that I know that my blog isn’t one of the sites being blocked, I’m completely at a loss.

Maybe I should write more posts in Mandarin?