A few months ago a local restaurant had a Groupon which my wife purchased. It was a 5 course dinner for 2 for $20 on weeknights, or $30 for Thursday - Sunday. Within 2 days she received an email from Groupon stating that the restaurant was no longer honoring the deal. Groupon gave us a full credit (not refund, just money we could use towards another deal) Ever since this, my wife has not wanted to go back there.

The irony of this was that we discovered this restaurant through a different deal website, and it quickly became somewhat of a regular for us. Honoring a previous deal made us customers, not honoring a subsequent deal made us no longer customers.

Wish I could find a cheap XBMC or Plex Set Top Box. That's all I really want.

Advertising is actually reverse psychology for me. If I see a lot of commercials for a specific product I stay away from it, knowing that I have to pay more for that product than I should, so that the company can recoup their high advertising budget.

For some reason my Sig is compelling me to reply to your comment...

Interesting. I'm running 6.0.472.41 beta on the latest Ubuntu. It was Flash which was hanging even though the video wasn't selected.

Unfortunately I had to enable this, as trying to access my corporate gmail through Chrome on Linux always caused the flash "intro movie" to crash the browser. Even selecting "No Thanks" still caused it to hang, and then eventually play the video in the background. The only way to check my email this morning was to turn the damn thing on.

She's put in a position where she's acting as a middleman between the advertisers and the hosting company, and losing money in the process. If the Advertisers would just cut out that middleman and deal directly with the hosting company there wouldn't be this problem. But you're right, she's dealing with money, and has to go through the paperwork because she was honest. I just hope Philadelphia gets their $300 filing fee, then sees an overall loss when next year she writes off her hosting, internet connection, computer, and portions of rent, utilities, lunch meetings, travel etc. If she blogs about it it's now business related...

Net Income != Profits. She probably didn't make enough to pay for her hosting. Perhaps we need to go back to the model where people get free hosting in exchange for a 3rd party putting ads on the site. Then Bloggers can blog without having to report the "income" of trying to cover some of their expenses.

I started using using google blog search to create an RSS feed of topics I'm interested. Gradually I started using regex to filter out sites that were clearly just spam sites. Now my regex statement is about 20K in size, and out of 150 results that Google returns, I may have 4 or 5 stories that make it through the filter.

I worked for a small(er) cable company 15 years ago, in their community Television department. We covered city council meetings, parades, had several shows about life in Cleveland etc. It has changed ownerships a few times, and is now Time Warner, and I stopped in not to long ago to see if I still knew anybody who worked there.

The entire community TV department had been replaced by more call center lackeys answering angry phone calls, and what was more interesting was the main reception area where people could pay their bills has the customer service reps behind bulletproof glass, and there was an armed guard sitting in there.

If you are doing such bad job servicing your customers needs that you feel you have to protect your employees from customers so angry they might start shooting up the place, maybe, just maybe, you might want to try and improve your customer service a bit...