I signed up for Vonage in November.  We have Vonage ads on OSNews, so I thought I’d give them a shot.  I signed up for the $25/mo plan.  The problem is, they use recycled numbers, so we got tons of phone calls over the first month or two from people speaking Arabic.   I had to change my number.  They want to charge you $9.99 to change your number.  But we changed ours.

Fast forward a few months, we still get 99% wrong number calls.  We never use the thing.  So when the device stopped working two weeks ago, we finally decided to cancel.

When I called to do that, I found out that Vonage charges $39.99 to cancel your service.  Buried in section 8.7 of their terms of service, you’ll realize that by signing up, you’re actually agreeing to a contract with a cancellation fee.  A big one too: $39.99 for the service, plus, you have to buy the “device” for the full price: returns are not accepted.  So, to cancel today, I have to pay them $170.  Worse than a damn cell phone carrier.

I’m telling everyone I can now: stay away from Vonage. While some may be happy with their service, their terms are intentionally vague (sdee seciton 8.8, “Recovery Fees“), their service “contract” is misleading and intended, I believe, to sucker you into thinking it’s a monthly service, and their customer service laughed at me when, after he told me that it was “kinda hard to find and understand,” I suggested that they should reconsider their terms.

Vonage sucks.

Update: Please see the bottom of this post for the latest.

I am feeling spurned.  I used to follow my local news station, Central Florida News 13, on Twitter.  A few days ago, I realized that I wasn’t seeing their tweets anymore.  Anyone who knows Twitter knows that its performance has been a huge pile of suck lately, so I figured it was one of those Twitter bugs.  I went to their page and it was full of garbage: pages and pages of the same nonsense message.  Had they been hacked? Caught that Twitter worm?I tried to follow them about 5 times, but it wouldn’t let me.  Broken Twitter.  Nothing new.

Today I saw that they had posted a new update because someone re-tweeted it.  So I navigated over to their page and found that they had protected their updates.  I hit the button to  request to follow them, only to be greeted with the following:

What the eff? They blocked me? Why? Why would they block me?

So let me ask: in what case does it make sense for a corporation or business to block a normal user.  I must say, I am pretty upset, upset enough that I am seriously thinking that I won’t be watching channel 13, which I normally watch almost every single day, anymore. If they will single me out as someone who can no longer enjoy their service, why would I be a patron in front of my TV?

This is probably trivial and I should ignore it, but instead, I’m going to blog my new-found hatred for Central Florida News 13 and their Twitter team. Boooooooo!

So, knowing that doing so has lost them a viewer, does that make the world of Twitter a little scarier? Would people stop listening to a band, watching an actor, reading an author, if they expressed a feeling or idea with which the reader didn’t agree? Would companies feel that Twitter is safe ground knowing that tweeting the wrong thing or blocking a user could result in loss of business or audience?

Update, 4/20/09: Turns out it was – unsurprisingly – a Twitter error. I got a DM and a tweet from them, and they followed me. I can’t understand why Twitter can’t seem to get their crap together. You KNOW they aren’t getting as much traffic as Facebook. With $55 million+ in the bank, you’d think they could build the right infrastructure.

All goddamned day I’ve been getting this goddamned whale on Twitter. I’ve also been trying to change the background of my stream, but although it always reports successful (when it doesn’t fail due to capacity problems), it never changes. It either replaces my background with nothing, or it uses the background I had three or four changes ago. God damn it, Twitter, get your goddamned act together!

Facebook loosed their new interface this week.  Thus far, there is nothing “live” about it.  This makes me very sad.

Honestly, if Facebook doesn’t introduce AJAX-y live update goodness to their homepage, I suspect I’ll use Facebook about 11% as much as I used to.

Dr Pepper needs a new web host.  I tried getting through for several hours minutes on Sunday to no avail.  So the offer was extended, and now I get this, crappy availability on a crappy Windows server.  Lame! 

Today is NOT my day when it comes to Apple products.  I bought Mobile Me, the ridciulously overpriced service Apple offers, specificaly for its photo album capabilities, but I cannot activate it.  Although I am logged into iTunes using my AppleID, and I am registered with my iPhone, AppleTV, etc, for me.com, it says there is no such user.   So I figured that I could very quickly get this fixed by calling 1-800-MY-APPLE. 

But Apple offers no phone support for MobileMe.    When you dial and tell the comoputer you want to discuss “Mobile Me”, it says “Our support is now available online at me.com/help.  Thank you.  Goodbye.”  Then it promptly hangs up on you.  Fail. 

My solution? Call and just ram through any menu prompt until I get to an operator and force them to help me.  Apple support is generally pretty decent, but aside from the fact that Mobile Me is priced about 5 times too high, they have the audacity to provide no real manner of support other than the massively un-realtime web.  

Boo, Apple, boo!  You’ve let me down a lot recently.  I hope my new iMac makes me happy, or it may be my last Apple product (for awhile, at least).

I posted an article recently called “Apple’s Jobs Gives iPhone Customers What They Don’t Want” that discussed the upcoming 2.2 firmware and its new features.  iPhone firmware appears to give us Google Maps’ “Street view” and several other “features.”  It does not, however, make available any of the most requested features: MMS, copy & paste, Flash, voice dialing, bluetooth/wifi syncing, A2DP (stero bluetooth), landscape Mail view, video recording, text-message forwarding, or any of the over 1800 issues listed over at pleasefixtheiphone.com.  So what gives? Why is Apple not giving us these things? 

I should start by saying that MMS, or lack thereof, is the one things that bugs the crap out of me on the iPhone.  I’ve detailed before how useless and silly viewmymessage.com is. I can’t believe it’s not even something that can be accessed via a clicked URL.   But I don’t think the iPhone will ever have true MMS.  If Steve Jobs wanted MMS on the iPhone, it would be here by now.  No, they are phasing it out, which is arguably good in the long run, but at the expense of its usefulness today.  I don’t mind paying the extra few pennies each month for MMS.  Even just to receive the messages, but not send them.  But stop making the decision for me. 

I hate to say that the iPhone, a device that literally converted me from a mobile phone carrier to a smart phone carrier, as someone who sold more of these puppies in the last year than most Apple employees, is doing more to turn me off to Apple than anything else.  The iPhone and AppleTV both have let me down.  A lot.  So much so that even though I recently bought a new iMac (the 24″), I considered a nice new PC at a fraction of the cost, as prep for Windows 7, which looks to be really cool.  

Apple’s arrogance and inability to listen to its customers didn’t matter nearly as much when they were a tiny niche company.  But they play in the big leagues now, and I suspect that now that they have serious market share in the laptop and education market, they will find a mass defection in a few years as people start to get wise to their control tactics.  

I find the new iPhone firmware, even before I get my hands on it, a let down.  My iPhone can’t do what phones from 3 years before the iPhone existed does without sweating.   If Apple doesn’t start delivering, I suspect that the odds are very high that by the end of 2010 I’ll be carry an Android powered phone.

It’s been a long time comin’. Apple has engaged in plenty of really lame behaviors lately, and it’s time I sound off on them. Let’s take it section by section, shall we?

I’ll break this down into the following parts: OS X, iPhone, App Store.

OS X

Apple’s operating system, OS X, is still the best OS on the market today. I’ve heard several claims that Apple is proprietary and closed and doesn’t contribute to the open source ecosystem, but here is OS X. It’s built on an open source core, which is good, if nothing else, for auditing code flaws.

OS X is still the most beautiful experience out there, and still gets in my way the least when I’m trying to do work. Webkit still sits as the default browser in the form of step-brother Safari, and Webkit is not only open source, it’s also the available on Windows, super compliant, super fast, and it’s the core of Google’s Chrome browser.

OS X also uses open formats for mail storage, standard XML for most configuration files (yes, some plists are not plain text, but they are trivial to open as well), their backup software produces a browsable volume. Their native office suite produces clean XML file formats. The server system uses Open Directory, RSS, Apache, Ruby on Rails, iCal, WebDAV, Wiki software, Tomcat, L2TP/IPSec, PPTP, and more. SnowLeopard will implement CardDAV and ZFS. In fact, Apple has been pretty decent about using open source technologies. While they haven’t always given back in this form, certainly basing your apps and system around open formats is better than basing it on closed, proprietary systems, no?

I always say: “If you don’t want your open source work used in commercial derivatives, then don’t use a permissive license.” There’s no clause that says you have to give back when using the BSD license.

I used to love my iPhone, because it kept me all up-to-date and synced.  See – on my mac, Address Book and iCal were fully matched up to my calendar.   But then I realized that I really don’t need to sync very often, at first because syncing pre-version 2.1 was painful, but later because it’s just not needed.  MobileMe syncs over the air, but I’m not paying $99/yr for that service, especially not after the well covered problems with it, and the fact that I don’t see myself migrating from Gmail anytime soon. IMAP, however, was handling my work mail.  When iPhone firmware 2.1 came out, I began immediately using ActiveSync, which easily crawls through port 443 (or 80, I think, if you have no cert) on the firewall.  I set it up to handle my email and calendar.  Then I realized, now that my calendar was handled by ActiveSync and Exchange, iTunes wasn’t syncing it anymore.  And by the way, it was seconds behind live data.  And I had to sync my phone even less. 

Fast forward a few weeks and I finally decided to sync my contacts.  I backed up, then wiped my phone contacts and synced them with Exchange.  My contacts all arrived in good shape with their pictures.  But now iTunes doesn’t sync Contacts with my iPhone.  So the backend is now complex, but only on the Apple side.  

On the phone, email, contacts, and calendar are pushed to the phone, often times before they even show up in Outlook itself.   I sync my calendar from Outlook to Google and I pull my Google calendar down to iCal, only when I open iCal, since I’m subscribed via an ical file on Google’s servers.   I set up Address Book to sync with my Exchange server via the OWA interface that Address Book supports by default, but it only syncs every hour, and only when the Mac is running.  So it seemlessly syncs with Windows/Exchange, for free.  But it takes several programs to get to the Mac, and then, only once an hour.   

I sync less and less these days, but if the iPhone included the ability to sync via Bluetooth or wifi – both of which should be fairly trivial to implement – I’d sync much more regularly and trust my Mac to be the master copy.  Instead, due to Apple itself, I rely on Exchange.

All of this makes me wonder if one day in the not too distant future, I’ll be using a phone running Android.  After all, if all of my core data is synced elsewhere anyway, why would I want a phone that has no voice dial, can’t do picture messaging, can’t view flash, can’t do copy and paste, doesn’t allow for any wifi syncing, permits apps seemingly at will with no guidelines, gets more closed every month, has shitty battery life, and drops calls randomly?  Just because it has a pretty apple on it?

Must the judges continue to lick David Archuleta’s balls after every single song this “Aw shucks!” nerd delivers? His silky smooth voice hasn’t found its niche, except perhaps as a second rate Michael Buble/Josh Groban. Archie never met a run he didn’t like, I can’t remember the last time I heard the dude sing a melody. Is he so “cute” and non-sexually threatening that no one dares critique his completely boring adult contemporary ballads lest he not become a marketing machine to pander to 14 year old girls? Yuck.

The reason I think this season stinks is because through the entire season, I have only had one “gave me chills” performance: David Cook’s take on Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello.” Everything else pales in comparison.

Usually, there are songs that make me shut up and songs that can give me pause as I think “this is awesome.” There were several great moments – I loved Carly’s “Crazy On You,” and I really dug Jason Castro’s “Hallelujah.” Many will rally for some of Chikeze’s performance during Beatles week, but for me, I can count the “Wow, cool!” moments on one hand, and the “gave me chills” moments number just one. And while Syesha gets better and Cook solidifies his fan base, tweenage girls everyone should prepare to be let down by AI7 Idol winner David Archuletta’s utterly dismal first album.