Google Checkout is evil.  No, seriously.  Bad newz!

Whenever I see a site where I can buy something with Google Checkout I know it’s going to be easy and I won’t have to enter my billing address and my shipping address and my cc number and one more password for a site that I’ll never go to again.  It’s too easy.  I know PayPal provides about the same service but for some reason I never ran into Paypal very often.

So just now I just spent $15 at some online retailer and it was too easy . . . if I would have had to sign up for some new account and entered all my data I would have thought twice and never spent that $15.  Damn you Google Checkout!

Sheldon

My wife’s like Hyundai Accent is almost 10 years old and it’s falling apart.  Still runs but we have to start looking.

I want three rows of seats AND 50 mpg but that’s not an option we have to settle for one or the other.  So I start looking at the Prius.

Right from the Toyota website the lowest model with an “Available Solar Roof” is $23,000.  I looked all over to find out how much the solar roof would add to the cost of the car but it was nowhere to be found.

So we decide to go to the dealership . . . it was 112 degrees outside but at least we would be in a showroom.  We walk in and a guy greets us at the door.  He asks if he can do anything and we say we want to look at the Prius and head over to the one in the showroom.  The sticker price is $29,xxx and it’s the Prius IV which has leather seats and all these upgrades we didn’t want.  So we ask for the cheaper Prius and one with the solar roof.  The guy tells us that the one on the showroom floor is the cheapest one he’s got and that none of them have the solar roof option.  I tell him I can’t believe that in AZ where in the summer it can be hotter than 150 F in a car that none of the cars he has have the solar roof.  He said that the solar roof doesn’t work if it’s hotter than 104 F.  I try to get more details like if it’s a safety thing or if somehow the fan can’t keep up with the amount of heat in the car but he doesn’t know much about it.  He does know enough (in that we were not going to buy that day) to send us to the used Prius area to look at the cheaper options.  The used area is outside.  We left and will never go back to San Tan Toyota.

I read “The Machine that Changed the World” recently and it was about how lean production is why Japanese companies were doing so well and would continue to erode the market share of Ford, GM, Chrysler. The book “ends” in the 1980’s and after all this time I thought that more of the principles of the book would be true now.  One is how dealers had to be lean too and respond to customer needs and bring customer feedback all the way up the line to the designers of the next model year.  It may be that way in Japan but in the US the dealers for lean producers (even Ford is probably considered lean in the factory now) are just as backwards at the people at any other dealership.  Why does buying a car have to be such a horrible experience?

Sheldon

I don’t have a texting (SMS) plan on my phone . . . it’s $5/month for 200 messages and $20 for unlimited (AT&T) and though it would come in handy sometimes I refuse to pay for something that should be free!  Also I never think to use it because I just use the SMS feature of the Google Chat app from within Gmail.  It’s even more useful now that I have an Android phone and all my contacts from my phone are synced with my contacts in Gmail so I have all my phone numbers right in Gmail and can text when I need to.

Anyway . . .

When the Google Voice app for Android came out I was excited because I could send AND receive text messages from my phone . . . I just had to let people know about my alternate SMS phone number.  That part was easy since I could make phone calls from my cell phone and choose to use Google Voice for that call.  All the app does is call your Google Voice number, press 2 and then the number you want to dial  The effect is that a) the phone call is delayed a few seconds and b) the recipient sees your Google Voice number on caller id.  There are a couple of problems with Google Voice SMS though:

1. When I send a message from the phone it seems to arrive pretty quickly for the recipient but when someone replies there is a *huge* delay . . . more than 5 minutes most times.
2. You can’t text to 5 digit numbers (called “Short Code” I guess) from within Google Voice SMS either online or with the app.    I keep getting the error “Error: this message was not successfully delivered.” That sucks because to set up Twitter you need to send a verification to a 5 digit number and I bought Axe deodorant from Target just to get the 300 MS points and I had to text a code to a 5 digit number and it didn’t work.

There are other issues with Google Voice but overall it’s really cool.  I just can’t wait until I can port an old number from Vonage!

Sheldon