rants and raves

i've had so many bad experiences with customer service or my interactions with companies or restaurants and as a result i appreciate good service so much i think it deserves a separate page recognizing the best of the best and the worst of the worst.

raves (sadly, these are few and far between)

• amazon.com: at the top of my raves list. not only is it a great reference, but new books are usu. 30% off, they have free shipping for orders over $25, and they have direct links to used books and music as well. it's also easy to sell stuff on it.
• orbitz: by now everyone probably knows about orbitz. i've tried a couple of other sites to book hotels and flights, but orbitz has a distinct advantage in that they've added a feature where you can look at a grid of departing and arriving days to see what the cheapest days to fly would be. their interface is all around very good, and they have all the things you need, like being able to choose your own seat, input your frequent flyer numbers, and choose what type of meal you want. thumbs up.
• boston related
  • boston restaurants, a vegetarian perspective
  • newbury comics: for new releases i almost always go to newbury comics. they're the cheapest record store in town for new stuff and they're a local chain. good ambience, friendly staff, used music, dvds, and comic books ... plus, their newbury st location is open on mondays to midnight so you can get new releases if you're really obsessed. yeah. they've also improved their online store, which is worth checking out.
  • cd spins (several locations, including newbury st., harvard sq, and gov't center): can almost always find something i want to buy. good stuff.
  • computer-related raves
  • the animal rescue league of boston: where i got my super cute little kitty.
  • $-a-pound: ghetto, but cool ... the garment district is cool for vintage-type stuff as well ...
    
  • manray (central sq): good music, not overly crowded, conveniently located, all around cool place (esp. gay nights on thurs)
  • dok bua (411 harvard ave., boston): hands down my favorite restaurant in boston. thai place on harvard ave (take the C line to coolidge corner and walk up about three blocks, past the little park on the right). the food is simple thai food, but the food is clear and fresh and great quality. not only better than any thai place around, but than the majority of other restaurants around. has a fun, kitschy atmosphere. highly recommended. | boston herald review

• dell.com: near the top on my list of bad service is dell computers. this was surprising, since dell has a reputation for having good computers, so i assumed their service would be comparably good. i was definitely mistaken. my CD burner (a sony CD writer, btw, which you might want to avoid) stopped functioning a little bit more than a year after i had gotten it. after going through the online documentation i eventually got to the point where i had checked everything and ran a set of diagnostics i'd gotten from the website, 3 tests that they called the read, write, and seek tests. my drive had passed the first, but not the other two, and every time that i called or emailed and asked about what that meant, i met w/ a brick wall. the representative either tried to walk me through or point me to a page of the online docs that i'd already read, or informed me that my warranty had expired, which i'd already known and which i wasn't even asking about. the most ridiculous point was when a rep was asking for my service tag and when he was reading it back he said, "now that's b as in boat, c as in charlie, q as cubic ..." when i pointed out that cubic does not begin w/ q he paused as if he hadn't even realized and said, "sir, i'm just following the guide that dell has given me." is dell really so illiterate? frightening thought.
• tremont 647 in boston: andy and i have had so many bad experiences at tremont 647 that it's hard to know where to begin. out of all of the many restaurants i've been to in boston, tremont 647 by far has consistently had the worse, so much so that andy and i have vowed to never set foot in it again. the service is either unfriendly or incompetent or both. the food is mediocre and overpriced. two words: don't go.

computer-related raves

• dvorak: dvorak rocks my world. for those who don't know, it's a way to remap the keys on your keyboard to minimize strain. on most computers it's super simple to switch over and most of the time switching over doesn't require any additional hardware or software. this site includes info on why dvorak is so much more efficient and info on how to switch. i def. think it's worth the little time it takes to get used to the different layout.
  
• fastmail.fm: allow me to take a minute to rave about fastmail.fm ... i really really love this email. some highlights:
  - 5 times the space of hotmail (10 MB compared to hotmail's 2 MB)
  - you can mask your address so it looks like you're sending everything from whatever account you want
  - you can set it so that the webmail and your home mail is perfectly synched. i use pine at home and the webmail at work. works like a charm. super easy to save messages i don't want to read anymore to my computer at home. warning: i only send messages from the web interface. if you want to be able to send messages from another email reader, i think you have to upgrade your account.
  - you can also use it to retrieve your yahoo/hotmail or from any other account you have
  - stylesheets! you can completely change the look w/ one of their stylesheets or make your own.
  
  there are only a couple of downsides to the guest (i.e. free) version:
  - they put a line at the bottom of every email saying something about fastmail but it definitely beats yahoo or hotmail's multi-line sigs
  - no spam filter, but they have this "bounce" feature that deters spammers from spamming you again
  - you have to watch your traffic quota, but that's prob. not a big deal if you don't send loads of email and the first upgrade is only $15.
  - you have to automatically poll for new mail, but there's a free program called fastcheck that's great that you can use that will notify you when you get new mail.
  
  my username is spacedog7 so you should tell them i referred you (or use the link above). try it, you'll like it! :)
  
• opera: the latest release of opera makes it just about as stable as internet explorer on my computer with the exception of audio/video. still, it's great for the majority of my general browsing. it has all the little things that IE and netscape should have added years ago, inc. a great password manager, popup blocker, shortcuts for new blank window and new window that's a copy of the current one, open all bookmarks, and tabbed panes for each window (huge plus). i also love the mouse gestures, which you can use as shortcuts for options like back and refresh. highly recommended.
  
• lunarpages.com: after a really terrible experience with a different service, i'm glad to report that i haven't had any problems with lunarpages. their customer service is really fast, the price is good, and the amount of space they give you is more than your likely to use, and i haven't noticed any downtime in the two years i've been with them. definitely recommended.
  
• mkw audio compression tool: super easy to use tool to convert .wavs to .shns and back. free.
• easy CD-DA extractor: i haven't tried the other features, but for copying CD tracks to your computer this one works extremely well. has a registration fee after a trial period and i tried the CD maker tool on this but it wasn't that great, but i found that it was still worth getting after having tried several other CD extraction programs that didn't work nearly as well.
• winamp 2.91: at download.com. i liked 2.81 which was def. better than winamp 3 ... haven't really tried 2.91 yet. free.
• sneakemail: generates aliases for forwarding on the fly ... useful for reducing spam, theoretically.