Out and About

We had a pleasant evening out the other night, with dinner at Pappadeaux and a movie. For those in the Northern Cincy area who have a hankering for really solid seafood/Cajun cuisine and an interesting atmosphere, I recommend Pappadeaux.

Whoever designed the inside of the place really did a great job--it was like stepping into a converted dock side warehouse in a town that was a cross of Hilton Head and New Orleans. The light was low, but not too low, and the kitchen was cleverly designed to look like a fish market. The patio looked like it would have been a really nice place to eat too, if it hadn't been so hot out. Lots of stonework, brick, and fountains.

We started with crispy alligator with creole sauce and the boudin, both of which were a hit, though the boudin was a little odd to look at. Since it's natural casing sausage stuffed with dirty rice and other things, it's not firm like a regular sausage. Which makes it sort of...floppy. Or flaccid, if you will. Moving on. Despite the look, it turned out to be excellent.

Dinner was a combination of various things that involved softshell crab, which was super delicious. It was a bit of an afterthought, too. You can add one to your meal for an extra $4.95, and it turned out to be my favorite part (not to belittle the rest of the meal). We ended up with just a ton of food, so we had leftovers for lunch the next day.

In which I rave about Joss Whedon:

So I recommend you go immediately to view the first installment of Joss Whedon's latest internet project: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which was released today.

The next two installments will be July 17th and 19th, and I believe it will only be available to be viewed online until the 25th, so act now!

...Hello?

I love my window feeder.

Happy Fourth of July, American pals! I hope there's are lots of fun BBQs and fireworks for everyone. It's a little rainy here, but hopefully it will clear up by tonight.

Mariemont is set to celebrate its second year with "big-time" professional fireworks, so assuming it isn't pushed back to tomorrow, we'll walk over to the park for the carillon concert and "ooo" and "ahh" along with everyone. Or if we're super-lazy, then we'll just sit on the patio and watch them like we did last year.

Big in Japan. And Texas. (and in my house)

Bravo to El Paso, Texas for being cool enough to surprise Tom Waits onstage and present him with a key to the city.

Apparently, during the show, Mr. Waits had just finished pounding away at the piano when a uniformed officer of the El Paso Police department walked onstage to announce the presentation from an El Paso council woman, who came onstage and presented a nicely mounted key to the city to Good Ol' Tom as the crowd roared in applause. Despite the surprise, Mr. Waits kept his characteristic quick wit, thanking the city and saying,

"Apparently this fits every lock in El Paso. If you find me in your living room in my underwear, we have an understanding."

The beauty of loops

The lovely and enigmatic Imogen Heap demonstrates stupid amounts of skill in creating and using loops mid song. The same sort of technique can be seen in Andrew Bird's video below.

I have no idea how she multitasks like she does--knowing where each track is, fading things in and out, recording new loops and making sure everything stays synced... it makes my head spin.

Incidentally, this song is a brilliant expression of how it feels to get together with family over holidays. We love each other, but we drive each other crazy sometimes.

Of Customer Service Nightmares

Actually, if you get NO customer service at all, does that count as a nightmare? It's maybe more like insomnia. Hmm.

Well, the Culprit Company of the Day is Gamefly.

I would first like to say that the idea of Gamefly is great. You make a list of video games you're interested in playing, and then they send you a couple at a time with return paid envelopes and you send back and get the next ones on your list, etc etc. It's basically Netflix for games. Except that Netflix is both competent and reachable. If nothing goes wrong, Gamefly is just fine, but the moment there's a glitch...good luck.

Now is the winter of my discontent:

A couple years ago, we subscribed to Gamefly and were completely satisfied. It didn't even matter that they had a longer turnaround than Netflix. No biggie. We got the games we wanted, and everything was dandy.

It was after a hiatus in our membership that things went sour. I signed up again with an email address I'd created specifically for Gamefly. We have the benefit of being able to create as many subdomains for our email as we want. When I sign up for a site, I use the site's name in the email address I enter, ie: gamefly@myname... etc. that way, if I begin getting spam, I know exactly who sold me. Handy!

Well, shortly after reopening our account with the new address, I suddenly began receiving vast quantities of spam to that address. What does that tell me? My email information is not safe with Gamefly. If my email is not safe, what more of my personal information is not safe?

I know there isn't anything I can do about this but make emails coming to that address bounce. Gamefly would just deny that information was compromised or sold. Whatever. I moved on. Spamfilter, activate!

I was only mildly perterbed about the email thing until recently, when I needed to actually contact customer service about a login error I'm getting. Here's the scoop:

I submitted a query through the "Contact" page on the Gamefly site. I waited. And I waited. Though it said I would receive a reply within 24 hours... a week later, I hadn't heard anything--not even an email saying my question was recieved.

So I looked through the Gamefly site for another way to contact them. What did I find? NADA. "We are an internet company, so we deal with customers through email" the site says. What bullshit. There are only about a million internet companies that also provide phone customer services. There's not a phone number posted anywhere on the website. The only other option is to send an email to customer service, which I did. Again, no confirmation that anything had been received.

Finally, I got frustrated and Googled for a customer service number I knew HAD to exist. What I found was a plethora of people relating their fruitless attempts to get in touch with the company, along with one lone super-secret phone number.

(888) 986-6400, for those interested.

I called it, and got a message from a chipper woman saying that customer service is open for a whopping four hours a day on weekdays (9-1 PT), and that she recommends customers try emailing or "live chat" customer help on the website.

At the time I called, it should have been 9:30 PT, so I have no idea what was up with that.

There was a grain of hope, though--live chat support on the website? I might just get my answer after all! Sadly, my hopes were dashed when I went to the website and found... absolutely no evidence that there is any kind of chat or live supprt at all.

At this point, I was ready to gnaw off my own arm. This elusiveness is usually characteristic of fly-by-night scam companies that take your money and then make it impossible to contact them. If we hadn't actually received games from Gamefly the past, I would have been worried that's what I was dealing with.

Again, I searched the web, and this time, I found that by pressing "5" during the chipper woman's message, I would be rerouted to voicemail. Otherwise they disconnect you at the end of the message. Should you have to do all this spy work and secret handshakes and codes in order to talk to a real person at a company? My inclincation is NO. Not unless it's the "Super-Secret Spy Nonexistant Fun Espionage Club" you're calling. Then it might make sense.

Though I was tempted to leave an expletive laced tirade, I instead left a polite request for a call back (as the message told me to do). A few days later, still nothing.

So here were my attempts thus far to get a response over the past couple weeks:

2 submissions though the Gamefly website
2 emails to the support email address
numberous calls to the secret customer service number
1 voicemail message left at said number

That's a lot of trying to get in touch, don't you think? The happy (?) ending to this story is that I FINALLY got a hold of someone on the phone today, and the issue was fixed in about 2 minutes. That's two weeks it took to fix a two minute issue.

Nice. *golf clap*