I got an iPhone on Monday (I know, I fell to the dark side).

A few minutes ago I was sitting at my computer, watching AnyDVD remove the copy protection from The Big Bang Theory so I can put it on my iPhone.  I decided to see if Slashdot had any news.  So what did I do?  I opened Safari on my iPhone.  Sitting at my computer.  Which has a much larger screen.

… what have I done?

… regardless of whether they’re a good deal, their marketing tactics leave much to be desired.

Friday morning at 7:15 am (when I needed as much sleep as possible because I was about to drive 850 miles), my cell phone rang.  It was Komodo, wanting to get me to buy an SSL certificate from them instead of from GoDaddy.

They must have some crawler out there, trawling the web for sites with nearly expired SSL certificates.  When the crawler finds one, it does a WHOIS lookup on the domain, looks up the administrative contact for the domain, and adds that contact to their call list.

Unfortunately, they have two problems:

1. They didn’t verify either my area code (mountain time zone) or my address (pacific time zone) to make sure they wouldn’t be calling so early in the morning.  (The sales guy told me their system is only supposed to give them east coast numbers.)
2. They didn’t try to find out if my number is a cell phone.  It’s illegal to cold-call cell phones; the only reason the call lasted as long as it did is that for a while I wasn’t sure whether Komodo was a subsidiary of GoDaddy or a competitor (they’re the latter).  A cell phone number being publicly available (in my case, in my domains’ WHOIS info) does not make it legal to cold-call the number for marketing purposes.

I’m going to file an FCC complaint; maybe lighting a fire under them will get them to fix their system.

Several months ago my Honda Civic’s “check engine” light started coming on intermittently.  It’d stay on for a few weeks, then it’d turn off for a few days, then it’d turn back on, etc.

Two weeks ago I took it to a Honda dealership for them to fix it.  They checked it and told me “it just wants a software update.”  (How did it know an update was available?)

So they did it, and lo and behold, the light was off.

The following Monday, the light was back on.  It stayed on all last week, until Sunday, when apparently it wasn’t on.  It wasn’t on yesterday either, but I took it in to the dealership anyway.

They looked at it and couldn’t see anything wrong, but they did say some other cars are having the same issue.  He told me “maybe it’s the cold.”

Well that’s just great.  I have a “check engine” light that’s gimped by cold weather.  How am I supposed to know whether my engine is actually breaking, if it’s cold outside?

Wow.  They redeemed themselves.  I really liked this episode.

I don’t want to give anything away – you should watch it yourself, it’s on Hulu for the next few weeks – but let me say that stuff happens.

Now I’m actually excited about the next episode

Mwahahahahaahahahaahahaha.

hahaha.

*cough*

Edit: Some people aren’t seeing the interesting bit: look at the core speed in the bottom left.