25 Oct 06 Customer Service; what is it good for?

I just got through with a phone call to Geico customer service regarding my motorcycle policy. My policy was temporarily terminated because it expired before I remembered to renew it.

I normally pay my bills on the internet, including my insurance policy bills. However, the customer service representative informed me that they “have no way” to let me pay for my policy to be renewed online. 97% customer satisfaction indeed. I told her that I wanted her to pass on my complaint about that, and she just repeated her “we have no way…” rubbish.

What is wrong with the world? Since when do companies – particularly service-oriented companies – tell customers “we won’t do that” or “our policy doesn’t allow” or “we don’t have a way” to do whatever? I don’t give a flip. That’s not my problem. I came within a hair’s breadth of just saying “you know, just forget it. I’ll take my business to a business that either has a way or makes a way”.

19 Oct 06 Google on sex and God

I just found this, via reddit: Google Trends: search on sex & God.

Pretty interesting stuff. The long and short of it is that the top 10 countries by search for “god” on google are all western democracies (the top 10 cities were American), and the top ten cities in the world that search for “sex” on google are all Muslim autocracies (or dictatorships). Interesting isn’t it? I think one might have expected to see the American cities in the top 10 list for “sex” because it’s a common perception that our culture is sex-saturated (I tend to agree with that perception and am thusly suprised by these Google Trends results).

The conclusions one might draw from this are completely speculation, but here are some tidbits (some of which came from Vidhyut’s Nuggets:

1. India and the Philippines are on both lists. I think it reasonable to discount India because they are actually the most populous (by a long shot) nation that has unfettered access to the internet. There are probably as many people from India searching for either “sex” or “god” as the total number of people online in the U.S. The Philippines are another story though – they aren’t as highly populated. It’s a muslim country which would lend itself to searching for information about “god”, but why so much “sex”? One might suppose that because the Philippines is one of the most open and representative states that the traditional mores normally imposed by an Islamic state are not as strong or not present. One might also suppose that such openness would allow easy and legal creation and distribution of sexually-oriented materials.

2. Searches for “god” was dominated by western nations, including the United States. You might infer from this that Americans (and other westerners) are more religious than other peoples, but you might infer that simply means that more Americans are soul-searchers or looking for some meaning to their existence where others aren’t. It might be some of both, but one thing to remember is that these trends don’t tell you anything about oppression of free speech which might prevent religous sites from making it through governmental filters, or a simple lack of internet access.

Anyway, all very interesting stuff to ponder.

18 Oct 06 gary-weiss.com: Another Hedge Fund Casualty

gary-weiss.com: Another Hedge Fund Casualty

Gary, I’m not in on all the details of my brother’s business (heck…I’m not even adequately educated in economics), but I do know one thing with certainty – the losses and his shutting down MotherRock were not intentional, and it’s been difficult for him, both financially and personally.

Just FYI.

17 Oct 06 Debate: Scalia vs. Strossen

I’m watching the C-Span video of Justice Scalia debating with ACLU president Nadine Strossen.

I’m no lawyer, but I’m highly interested in politics, and I try to stay widely informed, so this debate is still exciting for me to listen to. I can’t hit everything, but a few things stuck out as I listened.
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16 Oct 06 Quick and simple debug stream for C++

Ever need to set up a quick and simple debug/logging stream for your application without having to deal with large frameworks like log4cpp or *shudder* log4cxx? There’s also libcwd, which seems really neat, but also very large.

I didn’t want to use all that. I just needed a simple way to filter my output using streams without having if(…) blocks scattered all over the place. Here was my solution (I can’t remember if I came up with this on my own, or pawned it from someone else…if nothing else, I at least used the reference documentation for the boost Iostreams library). Read on to see what I did.
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Tags: C++, programming