KickIdle.com Blog

My internet connection seems to be going in and out more than normal tonight, which means writing a blog entry is a bit of a risky enterprise right now. But oh well, here it goes!

This week has been “downtime” for me, since the next contract hasn’t started yet. I’m really a upstanding kinda guy, but I do have a terrible addiction…

Yes, I’m taking about reading. I’ve read four five full length books since returning from New York City on Sunday. I can’t help myself. I’ve started a sixth & seventh as we speak.

In some ways, the Kindle has been a godsend. For starters, it’s a lot cheaper to read books on the Kindle. That’s a good thing when you plow through multiple books a week! But the biggest downside to the Kindle is that it makes feeding my addiction so much easier! Finish a book? No problem, just hop on over to the Kindle Store and get your next read without having to leave your chair (or bed).

It’s amazing I’ve managed to get anything productive done all week!

But fortunately, I have. Not as much as I hoped, but I’ve covered all the really critical bases – got through my mail, deposited checks, sent in tax paperwork, etc. I do still have a big backlog of photos from the Winchester Photo Meet and our trip to New York City. But with Cindy’s help (reminding me that is), I’ll get through those soon enough.

This week has also been weird for me because I’ve suddenly become a dog owner & home owner (I’m house sitting while my folks are in Panama). In the past, I’ve been here when they’re gone, but it’s only for a day or two and I feel no real compulsion to be productive around the house. But with a whole week here, I’ve suddenly found myself thinking things like “That grass looks like it’s gonna need mowed soon” and “Let’s see if we can find something fun to do with the dog today before the sun goes down”.

Overall, it’s been a great week! Pretty much the only downside has been that Cindy isn’t here to share it with me.

Long distance relationships suck, but I have to admit that with cell phones, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, TokBox and IM things are a lot better than the first long distance relationship I ever had. When I went to college and was dating my high school sweet heart, phone conversations cost $0.21 per minute, US Mail was the only way to write and we probably only talked three or four times per week.

Now, Cindy and I talk multiple times a day via text and cell phone. We can keep up with each other’s day via Twitter and Facebook. There’s hardly a time or place that we can’t reach out to each other and stay in touch, even when I’m much farther away than I was in college. As humans, we don’t tend to notice incremental change, but stopping to ponder how much communication has changed in 15 years really makes my mind boggle.

And that’s a good thing, because decreasing the cost of communication has all kinds of good effects. But the best effect for me is that I get the chance to find and love a girl like Cindy.

or How I learned to stop worrying and love AMEX

Justin Levy talks about the power of a hand written note in a recent blog post and it reminded me that I wanted to give a kudos to American Express for their handling of my recent credit card dispute. I had recently renewed my subscription to the Clear Registered Traveler service that lets you avoid the long lines at the security checks at major airports. Unfortunately for me and about 100,000 other people, two months after I had paid the yearly renewal fee, Clear announced that they were ceasing operations immediately due to their inability to find sufficient credit.

This, of course, is exactly the scenario that economists were afraid would happen on a pandemic scale during the “credit freeze” last year. Regardless of whether you think the actions of the Federal Reserve & Congress helped or hurt the situation, it’s clear now that we avoided the worst case scenario from that credit freeze, but that doesn’t mean every business was going to make it. Apparently, the business I had just paid $176 to was one of the ones that was failing.

There was a lot of talk online about how Clear had screwed people – Clear made it clear (no pun intended) that they wouldn’t be refunding any payments even if the customer had signed up the day before the announcement.

This is why you should always use a credit card for purchases…

I called American Express and disputed the charge on my card, since I had paid for 12 months of service and only received 2 before Clear had shutdown. The AMEX representative immediately put a hold on the charge while the dispute was researched. A few weeks later, I got a call from AMEX letting me know that they had given me a prorated credit for the 10 months of service I hadn’t received. There would be formal letter in the mail, but I appreciated the phone call and was once again pleased at how well AMEX treats their customers.

When I got home from New York and checked my mail, there was indeed the formal letter from AMEX outlining the resolution of the dispute and the credit to my account. There was also this…

That’s right, the AMEX rep sent a hand written thank you note. A note thanking me for the chance to resolve a dispute. This is what sets AMEX apart from any other credit card company I’ve dealt with. Anyone who wants to see what a customer centric business is like should get an AMEX card and start using it!