Two days ago I ordered a three-pack of Field Notes Notebooks. (Think of them as the start of a backlash against the seeming ubiquity of Moleskine users everywhere.) I first heard about them from a side reference on Daring Fireball earlier this year. Today I got SPAM from Coudal Partners, the makers of Field Notes, asking me to opt-out if I don’t want any more mail.

You’re receiving this because you signed up at Coudal.com or Jewelboxing and/or you recently bought something from us or one of our brands, like a Pixies or Dead Can Dance CD or a tee-shirt or Field Notes or something else (we’re a small creative firm in Chicago and we do a lot of different things). Whatever the case, thanks for signing up. If you’d like to quit getting these occasional missives, just click “unsubscribe” at the bottom. We’re really very good about that.

I call it SPAM because, despite their comments in the email to the contrary, I didn’t sign up for this email. Instead, Coudal decided (I assume), that since I ordered from them, clearly I must want to get email from them too. What does the Spamhaus Project say about this?

Opt-Out: All bulk email sent to recipients who have not expressly registered permission for their addresses to be placed on the specific mailing list, and which requires recipients to “opt-out” to stop further unsolicited bulk mailings, is by definition Unsolicited Bulk Email, a/k/a “Spam”.

Unconfirmed Opt-In: If an Opt-in request is unconfirmed, then it can not be verifiied. If it can not be verified then the Bulk Email Sender can simply say “You opted-in” which is why almost all spam claims “You opted-in to this list”.

I revisited the Field Notes website looking for where in my order process I got the chance to opt in or opt out, or a blurb that informed me that I’d be added to their mailing list, and found nothing. Not a single checkbox; not even a field for my email in the first place.

Where, exactly, did I sign up for this email?

(Ironically, this is the only email I’ve received from Coudal Partners. No order confirmation, nothing. Only a payment confirmation from PayPal; that’s where they got my email address, by the way.)

This is the height of conceit in many companies, the assumption that I want to receive their marketing screeds, which often have nothing to do with why they may have my email address. In this case, Coudal thought I’d want to know about something called “Layer Tennis“, which, near I can tell, is a bunch of Photoshop jockeys competing in an on-line design contest.

What, exactly, does manipulating images have to do with buying a set of notebooks?

After only a single interaction with Coudal, I’m already doubting my decision. Is this kind of behavior what I should expect? Should I worry that my email address will be sold? (Fortunately I use company-specific email addresses, so I can just change the one I use for PayPal if I need to.)

C’mon Coudal. I trusted you to do the right thing because Gruber usually does, and he uses you for his advertising, along with A List Apart, 37 Signals, and The Morning News, all sites I respect. If you want to email people, create a real confirmed opt-in list. Don’t just assume your customers want your marketing mails, no matter how “infrequent” that mailing is.

Tagged with:
Coudal, Daring Fireball, Spam, Opt-in, Opt-out, UCE, Field Notes, Spamhaus

I recently added Ask MetaFilter to my news reader. It’s a colossal waste of time, but occasionally will have something that educates or amuses.

The latest example is a mom who sticks bad jokes into her five year old’s lunch box every day, and wanted a resource for those jokes. Not only did the “hive mind” come up with some classic gems, e.g.

Q: What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t work?
A: A stick.

Q: Why is the ocean salty?
A: Cause pepper makes the fish sneeze.

they also came up with URLs full of these groaners. I spent several minutes laughing stupidly. From Squigly’s Jokes & Riddles came these:

Q: Imagine you’re stuck in a car that’s falling off the edge of a cliff and you can’t climb out, what do you do?
A: Stop imagining.

and

Q: What did the fish say when it swam into a concrete wall?
A: “Dam.”

and

Q: How do you get out of a room with no doors or windows when you only have a baseball and bat?
A: Throw the ball up. Miss. Strike 1. Throw again. Miss. Strike 2. Again. Miss. Strike 3. You’re out!

and

Q: What did the farmer say when he lost his tractor?
A: “Where’s my tractor?”

and

Q: Why do seagulls fly over seas and not bays?
A: Because then they would be bagels

Alas, my girlfriend didn’t find these amusing. I don’t understand why. Here’s a final one, from Bad Puns, that may explain it:

Two parts of the eye were discussing who told better puns. Their debate raged on, till one said to the other, “You, my friend, are simply the pupil. I am by far the cornea of the two of us.”

Technorati Tags:
Animaniacs, puns, jokes, metafilter

Anyone who tells you owning a house is a pure joy has never owned a house. Yes, yes, the American Dream, pride of ownership, blah blah blah. Bottom line? When you become a home owner, you take on all the problems your landlord used to handle, and then some.

Case in point: my dishwasher is being recalled. The manufacturer (Maytag) says liquid rinse-aid (e.g. Jet Dry, which I use and just refilled two days ago) can leak into the dishwasher’s internal wiring, short circuit, and catch fire.

Maytag Corporation has received 135 reports of dishwasher fires, resulting in product and/or property damage.

Anyone find it ironic that a device that fills with water during its use might catch fire? Yeah, me too.

My model, a Maytag that came with the house and is somewhere between six and ten years old, is within the serial number range, so I called and, after several minutes of Automated Phone Tree Hell, they confirmed I’m covered, and offered either to pay for an in-house repair, or give me $75 toward the purchase of another Maytag, Jenn-Air, Whirlpool or KitchenAid dishwasher.

I took the cash.

While I look for a new dishwasher, I’m not supposed to use this one. Three separate times on their website, Maytag says those with affected units should

• Stop using the product(s).
• Disconnect the electric supply to the product(s) by shutting off the fuse or circuit breaker controlling it.
• Inform all users of the product(s) not to use due to the risk of fire.

Stop using the product and wash my dishes by hand? Are you crazy? I’ll just keep a fire extinguisher handy.

Four injuries have been reported, including three reports of smoke inhalation and one serious hand laceration when operating a fire extinguisher to put out a fire in the dishwasher.

Shit. I need my hands. I can’t hold a perfect chilled martini without them.

Well, I’ve been using it for two years without trouble. What are the odds of it igniting after I read about the recall but not before? Hm?

Does the dishwasher really need to be disconnected if it is working fine?

Yes. Customers that have an affected unit should (etc.)

By the way, this is one reason why you should register your purchases. If the previous home owner hadn’t done so, I may never have heard about this. If you have a Maytag or Jenn-Air dishwasher, take a look at the Maytag recall website to see if your dishwasher is affected.

Well, I’ve been wanting to buy a new dishwasher anyway. Now it’ll be $75 cheaper. Now, if I can just find a good sale….

Technorati Tags:
Maytag, Jenn-Air, product recall

In Superman III , Richard Pryor figured out that he can make himself rich by taking the fractions of pennies left over from rounding down on financial transactions. Corporations for years have added millions of dollars to their bottom-line by raising rates a few pennies per customer (calculate PG&E’s 9.1 million customers getting a one-cent-per-month increase: $1,092,000 a year). And financial institutions use money in your account as loans and investments.

This is the likely explanation for why E*Trade doesn’t let me move pennies out of my brokerage account. I have with E*Trade a brokerage account, a checking account and a home equity line of credit (HELOC). I recently noticed a $4.16 payment due on the HELOC, and $3.04 in the brokerage. I figured I’d use the brokerage to pay off the HELOC, with the difference coming from checking.

Nope.

Oh, it’ll tell you it will work, but will fail at some later point. The error message was classic too:

Transfer failed-insufficient funds
Your request to transfer $3.04 from Brokerage-#### to E*Trade Bank HELOC-#### count not be completed due to insufficient funds in Brokerage-####….

I have exactly $3.04 in there, I’m transferring $3.04, and yet it fails. When I call up their automated system, I’m told I have $3 even in the account! That four cents? Nonexistent as far as their system is concerned.

There appears to be no way to get fraction of dollars out unless I close the account. I could add $0.96 and then pull out the whole dollar, of course. But what a crazy workaround to a non-problem.

Yet another reason E*Trade continues to drive me nuts.

Technorati Tags: E*Trade

Update: Now that Apple’s updated GarageBand, you can make your own iPhone ringtones without any of the hackery below! Don’t have GarageBand? It’s part of iLife ‘08. It also comes for free with any new Mac, like the all-in-one 20″ iMac.

First of all, I didn’t figure this out. I’m simply putting a few pieces together from other people. That said, here’s how I was able to get ringtones on my iPhone from my MacBook, completely free.

Clue Number 1: You can mount your iPhone as a hard drive. I don’t remember where I first learned about this, but MacFuse and iPhoneDisk makes this trivial. This allowed me to mount my iPhone and copy files directly to it.

Clue Number 2: Ringtones are stored in a user-accessible location. One place I learned about this is Erica Sadun’s article on the O’Reilly Network. Erica’s article says to put the music files in /var/root/Library/Ringtones (which, when you mount your iPhone via iPhoneDisk translates to /Volumes/Library/Ringtones); this location didn’t work for me, though.

Clue Number 3: Ringtones need a special file to point to them. I got this from a post on pastebin.com, where the author Keldegar points out that you need a specially-formatted file called a “plist” (short for “property list”, which store preferences and so on). The author also pointed to a different location from what Erica at O’Reilly pointed to; this new location (/Volumes/Media/iTunes_Control/Ringtones) worked for me.

Putting these three clues together, I’m now able to use any audio files iPhone can play as a ringtone! Here’s the step-by-step; it’s more complicated to write it out than to actually do it.

1. Download and install MacFuse. You need at least MacFuse Core 0.4.0.

2. Download and install iPhoneDisk. The latest version as of this writing is iPhoneDisk-20070826.

3. Double-click iPhoneDisk; it shows an icon in the menubar to show it’s running.

4. Connect your iPhone. A hard-drive icon named “Media” should show up in Finder. iTunes will launch and sync if it’s set to automatically do that.

5. In Finder, open the Media drive and then the iTunes_Control folder.

7. Create a new folder inside iTunes_Control named Ringtones.

8. Copy the music you want to use as a ringtone into the Ringtones folder.

Now comes the slightly tricky part. You’ll need a text editor (not a word processor!). I’ll assume you’ll use TextEdit, but you can use BBEdit/TextWranger, TextMate, Coda, etc.

9. In TextEdit, make a new file (File > New) and convert it to plain text (Format > Make Plain Text).

10. Copy and paste the following code. You will need to change it in a couple of places to match your songs (see the next step).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Ringtones</key>
    <dict>
       <key>SongFileName.mp3</key>
        <dict>
            <key>GUID</key>
            <string>1</string>
            <key>Name</key>
            <string>A Song Name</string>
        </dict>
   </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

11. You want to change the following sections to match your songs:

• SongFileName.mp3 is the filename of the song (as saved in Finder).
• A Song Name is the name you want iPhone to display.
• The number 1 can be any number, as long as it’s unique in this file (that is, if you add a second song, that song gets 2, a third song gets 3, etc.)

This file, as is, will give you one song. Here’s an example of a file with two songs:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Ringtones</key>
    <dict>
       <key>SongFileName.mp3></key>
        <dict>
            <key>GUID</key>
            <string>1</string>
            <key>Name</key>
            <string>A Song Name</string>
        </dict>

        <key>AnotherSongFileName.mp3</key>
        <dict>
            <key>GUID</key>
            <string>2</string>
            <key>Name</key>
            <string>Another Song Name</string>
        </dict>

    </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Hopefully it’s clear what to copy and where to paste it. Download this Ringtones.plist file as a starting point. (As an aside, if you’re a Mac developer with the Xcode tools installed, you can use /Developer/Applications/Utilties/Property List Editor to make short work of editing this file.)

12. Save this file as Ringtones.plist to /Volumes/Media/iTunes_Control/iTunes/Ringtones.plist.

Now navigate on your iPhone to Home > Settings > Sounds > Ringtones and you should see your list of ringtones!

Troubleshooting

Things don’t always go perfectly. Here are a few items that might cause some issues (usually your songs don’t show up in the Ringtones list).

The plist file is misnamed, malformed, or not in the right location.

The file is /Volumes/Media/iTunes_Control/iTunes/Ringtones.plist.

Try creating the Ringtones.plist file with only a single song to be sure that works before adding additional songs.

The Ringtones folder is in the wrong location.

I got this working by putting the Ringtones folder inside /Volumes/Media/iTunes_Control; this puts it at the same level as the Artwork, iTunes and Music folders.