Unless they -really- get their act together. Point in case – I have ordered two Roombas plus accessories from iRobot, and my credit card has $1000 in a limbo between August 22nd and August 30th. I have no idea if the card charge will eventually go through, as it’s in what is called an authorized state. The money has not left my account, but the bank is holding the charge out of my balance in case the merchant (in this case Google Checkout) finally captures the payment.

The chain of events has been thus:

1. Ordered the robots on the iRobot store. Clicked the Google Checkout button.
2. Entered my payment information on Google Checkout. I’m using a virtual MasterCard, which you pre-charge with the amount you want to spend. It’s a disposable number, so no worries on it being stolen or miss-used.
3. I receive an email from iRobot saying my order has been received – all seems good.
4. Google Checkout now says that the payment has failed, so I add some more credit to the card, and tell Google to retry.
5. I receive an email from iRobot saying my order has been canceled, with no specific reason given.
6. Google Checkout informs me the payment has now been successful, and that the vendor has received my order. But, the vendor has already received….and canceled it!.

This all took place within two hours. After this, iRobot says my order was canceled, and no charges have been made (they don’t charge until they ship). Google Checkout, however, says the vendor has received the order, and my card WILL be charged. So far, my bank has only told me that the charge is in the authorization state, it has not been captured, and the limit date until an automatic rollback is done is August 30th.

What does all this have to do with PayPal? Basically, that Google Checkout, in its current state, will never beat PayPal. These are my main gripes:

• Google Checkout has no phone support. PayPal does. When there is a problem with my money, I want to talk to someone right now. I don’t want to send an email and wait – even if the reply is quick. Arguing over email is hard to impossible.
• Google Checkout has very feeble fraud protection. Last time I checked, they only used AVS, which is easy to fool if you have the card owner’s billing address. For example, Bibit uses a full-featured scoring system with some 60 different checks, which can be fine-tuned by the merchant. It costs a few cents per transaction, but it’s well worth the hassle.
• Google Checkout has its flows all ass-backwards. Why did they send my order to iRobot before they authorized the payment, only to then send a cancellation which triggered a cancellation on iRobot’s systems? The right way would be to only send iRobot the order after the payment has been authorized. Then, when iRobot ships, the payment can be captured.

There are plenty of comments, right from when Checkout was launched until today, about the system’s shortcomings. Google needs to get their act together, or risk losing merchants and customers.

Having used Thunderbird on my Mac for a couple of years now, I grew accustomed to the Growl notifications it provided (via a plugin) when new email arrived. The time came to switch to an Exchange server, as our email host was getting worse and worse.

I’ve read different reviews on Entourage 2008, but none so bad as to totally put me off at least trying it out. I have to say it’s really good on a few aspects that Thunderbird lacks, but that’s a matter for another post. What really brought me to a spate of AppleScript and some graphics work was the so ugly default popup notifications provided by Entourage, and their position at the bottom of the screen. For a heavy Growl user, totally counter-intuitive. One thing led to another, and I ended up with a script that does the following:

• Generates a Growl notification with the default style for each new email that arrives (or those you want to – more on this later).
• Shows the email subject in the notification title, and below the sender’s name (or email address if the sender has no display name), and the first 80 characters of the email – enough to give you a feel of what’s in it.
• Shows a custom icon for high and highest priority emails, which also have their notifications made sticky.

Without further ado, here are some screenshots:

The default normal-priority notification, in Growl’s Smoke style.

A high priority notification, in AboveTheNight style.

The highest priority of them all – in bright red!

Download eGrowl.zip here, and follow the install instructions found in the Readme.

Enjoy, comments and suggestions welcome!

Today I updated my home Mac Pro to Leopard, and proceeded to download and install the latest Parallels release. I have been a faithful early adopter, buying their very first release when it was buggy and unstable, and have since seen it outgrow many expectations. First surprise was having to “upgrade” to version 3.0, for a total of $49.99. Incidentally, this comes out to just over 31€, but they charge 39€ at the store if you choose this currency – when are US-based companies going to stop abusing European customers? But I digress.

Having made the purchase, I am told that my order “needs review”, and that it should be handled in between 12 and 24 hours. Not sure what this means, but the Internet was invented so that purchases, particularly of downloadable software, could be immediate. Well not quite, but you get my point. With the the option to receive a 15-day trial key via email, I was still a happy camper, until I get this in my inbox:

Dear Parallels user,

Thank you for registering for a 15-day trial download of Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac!  Your trial activation key gives you access to a complete version of Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac and all of its innovative features.

Your trial activation key is listed below:

PRODUCT     : Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac
ACTIVATION KEY    : 1EL1Z-40Z99-F4ZZ1-ZONMV-TCODZ
START DATE    : 2007/12/26
END DATE    : 2008/01/10

Pay attention at the dates, and then tell me if this is not worth sending to The Daily WTF!

So I tried to add funds to an online music store today. Their payments are handled by Chronopay, which provide the most confusing, user-unfriendly payment system known to man.  You are asked for your name and surname, address, and card details (OK all normal up to here), but then…the issuing bank of your card? My bank has variations on the company name, which means I cannot be sure I’m typing the right thing here. After this step, I’m shown my bank’s ‘Verified by VISA’ additional check page, which asks me to enter a PIN that has been SMS’d to my mobile phone (whaaaa?). Entered the PIN which is accepted, and a few seconds later…transaction refused. All in a page using Times New Roman as the font – how ugly can you get? No word on why was the transaction declined, from the myriad of possible fields where data could have been input wrong. Call their service hotline (uhm, their 24/7/365 chat is “offline”, I guess this is a leap year or something), wait for 10 minutes, nobody bothers to take the call. Either they are very busy, or they leave some temp to take the calls at a very slow pace.  In all – it SUCKS! I tried this thing seven times, with various combination of inputs, and they all failed. Just to see if I was going senile, I purchased something else online, and it went through just fine.

One has to wonder, when you read news like this, where Orange France is stating that their 500MB per month data plan, tied to the iPhone, excludes pretty much everything other than email and web browsing. So no VoIP, modem access for your laptop, or even newsgroups (??).

In Spain, Vodafone has been toting 5GB/month plans for some time now, with similar “fair use” policies. What is exactly the point of having such huge data plans, when all you can do is squint at the web on a tiny screen, or read your email – without trying to open attachments which are even harder to read. Granted, the iPhone has represented a leap in usability on these two fields, with fantastic web browsing, and very usable email where attachments can at least be useful. The only problem is the iPhone is one device lacking many functionality other platforms already enjoy, such as VoIP, decent IM, and…newsgroup access. These will come for sure, only because there is a very dedicated community of hackers porting and writing applications for it.

During my first month of iPhone use, when the novelty wants to make you try everything and, for example, browse the web when you don’t really need to, but just because it’s so cool – I went through about 70MB of data. Peanuts, compared to the 1GB plan I had with Vodafone…

Shame they’re a bunch of morons – they told me taking pictures of their restaurant from the street was illegal (!?). If someone came and took a picture of an ad I plastered on my wall…I’d be more happy than anything, it would mean people notice it (even if it was a competitor). Anyway, if you come to Barcelona, check out Fresh&Ready, not for the food, but for the free WiFi.

…you need to pre-emptively register the domain [yourcompanyname]sucks.com – since 1997. This is the case of none other than UPS.

Take a look at the upssucks.com WHOIS information:

United Parcel Service
340 MacArthur Blvd

Mahwah NJ
07430
US

Domain name: upssucks.com

Created on: 1997-12-31
Expires on: 2007-12-30

Maybe it is time to get creative – today I got mighty pissed off at them, because the driver who was supposed to deliver my Jawbone headset today, was “confused” by an address like this:

Street Name 16 my@emailaddress.com

Apparently, the fact that the contact email got wrongly appended to the street address caused major confusion in the brain cells of this driver, who should of course apply for Mensa right now. The rest of the address was just fine, the only thing ‘weird’ was the email address mixed in. Of course, they cannot turn him around, and I have to wait until tomorrow…

I ordered a Jawbone Bluetooth headset on the August 1st. By about the 9th, I should be getting it in my hands. This would not be too bad, were it not that UPS Worldwide Expedited was paid for, at almost $50! Aliph’s site quotes 3-4 business days, but this will be more like 6-7. From now on, I think I’ll request USPS Air, as it costs a fraction, it usually arrives quicker, and has never been held up in customs (I can tell UPS horror stories of packages held for days while some stupid customs inspector felt like having a look at the paperwork…).

It seems Alzheimer has taken over at Technorati, where after an hour or so of seeing “we have a problem, we are working furiously to have it fixed”, posts newer than 13 hours ago seem to have all gone missing. I ran a couple of searches, and they both failed to turn up results I had seen a couple of hours ago. Will the re-index the 55 million blogs all over again?

Starting to think about removing Engadget from my gReader subscriptions. Why? It really really annoys me that all the links in their posts are to…themselves! You read some interesting article, and try clicking some of the links, which take you right to other Engadget posts or sections. I consider this to be selfish, self-centered and simply wrong. When you make a living writing stuff about other’s products and services, the very least you could do is drive some traffic towards them.

A perfect example is this post, where they have 8 links in the text, and all of them go right back to Engadget. Even when they mention Skype they link to their own section on Skype. At the end of the post, there is a short, meaningless ‘Read’ link that takes you to the external article. What does Engadget gain from compulsive self-linking? In my opinion, this policy makes the site look like a link farm.