Beware of PayPal: A cautionary tale

I recently had a very disappointing incident regarding PayPal. I have chosen to use my PayPal account where I was able, because I assumed it would be more secure, as I would not have to give out my credit card information to other people. Mostly, I have used PayPal to purchase software online.

Anyway, two days ago, I checked my e-mail after arriving home from work and found six message from PayPal saying I’d authorized $400 in total sales in six separate transactions with two companies I’d never heard of. Instantly alarmed, I called PayPal’s customer service line. I expected to get immediate assistance and assurance that I was not responsible for these payments as I had not, in fact, authorized them. Instead, I got the feeling the customer service representative I talked with could not have cared less about my problem. Her solution was to give me the phone numbers of the two companies involved so I could call them and see if they’d refund my money! What! If that didn’t work, I could wait 19 days and file disputes for each of the transactions. There must be something else that can be done, I said. Nope. That’s it.

So I got the phone numbers from her, called the two companies who had taken money from me and — here’s a shock! — was not able to actually talk to a living person. The first company, something called Zynga Game Network, automatically directed me to there customer service line, where a robot voice informed me I could not leave a message as the voice mailbox was full. The other company, Spare Change, did allow me the honor of leaving a message, for which I was assured I would receive a response — 48 hours later, nothing. I then went to my PayPal account where I filed a dispute for each of the six transactions, and change my password and security questions.

I was a long way from satisfied, so I called my credit card company, got the fraud division, told my story and received satisfaction. The agent said I would not be responsible for those six transactions, that they would not pay them out. He canceled my card number and is sending me a new card.

So, I guess this is a somewhat happy ending. However, I will never trust PayPal again. You would think they’d have measures in place to guard against this type of theft. I mean, any rational person could see from scanning these transactions that they had to be a ripoff. One was for $150, and each of the other five was for $50.

I’m canceling my PayPal account A.S.A.P.

GrandView

One of my interests is writing and information management software. Perhaps using the term “interest” is misleading, as I am sort of obsessed with these types of applications, and have been since I got my first computer, one of those early Compaq “portables.” Around 1989, I bought a license for an application called GrandView. GrandView was a DOS program that combined outlining, word processing and task management. It had some features that were cutting edge at the time, some of which remain unmatched in modern software.

In this entry to Welcome to Sherwood, I want to explore my favorite features of GrandView, because many people have never had the chance to see GV work. So let’s begin:

On its face, GV is a basic single-pane outliner. That is, you can view all of your information in a single window. (Outlook, for example is generally a three-pane outliner, in which you have your list of folders in the tall, slender left pane, your list of e-mail headers in the upper right pane, and the content of any single e-mail message in the lower right pane.)

Here is a screen shot of a basic outline created in GrandView (I’m running it on VM Fusion on my MacBook — thus the status bar along the bottom of the screen):

Basic Outline in GrandView

Notice that headlines I.A, II.A.1, and II.A.2 have little down-pointing arrows at the end. This indicates that there is a document associated with those headlines. We can view those documents in a dedicated document window:

Dedicated document window in GrandView

Document view is essentially a hoist to view just the text of the document. (Note that the odd cursor blocks in this and other screen shots are relics of using GrandView in emulation mode in Windows XP running on my MacBook.) I always liked this feature of GV, because it is like switching to a dedicated word processor to work on this one section of your outline. But one of the most powerful features of GrandView is the ability to see the text of your document inline with the rest of your outline:

Document text viewed "inline" in the GrandView outline

An important point here is that this text is not a separate headline or node. It is directly associated with a headline and can be viewed inline (as above), in its own window (as in the second screen shot), or collapsed and not visible in the outline (as in the first screen shot) This visual flexibility is a powerful feature for writers, because it allows you to switch from a focussed view of your writing to the big picture. You can work on getting each section of the text right, then make sure the entire work flows smoothly with appropriate transitions. Two-pane outliners (such as MyInfo and Ultra Recall, for example), force you to keep your writing in separate, discrete blocks. To this day, no other application has matched GrandView for providing this combination of powerful outlining tools AND single-pane, inline text.

But GrandView had other impressive features, ones ahead of their time. First of all, it had all the outlining tools you could ask for, including hoisting, collapsing, mark and gather, and others:

GrandView provides a host of outlining tools

It also provided advanced meta-data capability to help you organize your work. Here’s a basic list of tasks:

Task list created in GrandView

But now I want to organize this random list. I’ll start by turning on the Category Display (see the bottom of the screen):

GrandView with Category on

Date and Priority are default categories that automatically attach to each headline. I created the category “Role” in order to separate my tasks into my three roles: Work, Home and MIC (the latter being a nonprofit organization I volunteer with). I can now fill in the due date, priority and role for each of my tasks. But to help me with this, I can have GrandView automatically assign a Role category based on a rule. Here I’ve created a rule to assign any headline with the text “MI” to the Role MIC.

You can have GrandView automatically assign categories

Once I’ve assigned data to all the categories of each headline, I can now quickly filter those categories in the Category View:

GrandView filtering all headlines with Priority category set to High

GrandView showing me all the headlines with the category Role set to MIC

Those of you into the GTD method of managing your day, can instantly see how GV would be an excellent way to manage your daily tasks.

Switching to Calendar View, I can now view tasks based upon the day they are due:

GrandView in Calendar View

And when I want to get an overview of the date, priority and role for all my tasks at the same time, I can turn Columns on. Category data for each headline is then displayed in columns (which I can select) on the right:

GrandView with Column View turned on

It shouldn’t take too much imagination to see that GrandView’s incredible flexibility made it an exceptional tool for all kinds of work. When I was using it daily (up to about 15 years ago), I created an outline I called Mission Control. Here I kept a list of my major projects, daily tasks, and reminders. I created individual outlines for each of the projects, and used GV’s linking ability (common now, but pretty radical for DOS) to create hot links from my Mission Control to the project outlines. Some projects were task/milestone heavy, some were writing heavy. I could manage it all in GrandView.

GrandView was abandoned by Symantec at the dawn of the Windows age, and has yet to be matched. EccoPro by NetManage had outlining with powerful meta-data, but did not have GrandView’s document view nor its powerful outlining controls. And, it too has been abandoned (though it still has a dedicated group of users). Scrivener on Mac has its scrivenings view, which allows you to combine separate documents into one long view and edit them. But Scrivener has a weak outliner, and no customization of meta-data fields. NoteMap was a fairly powerful single-pane outliner, but it didn’t offer document view or meta-data or true inline text — plus it appears that development has ended on this application, as well. OmniOutliner has user-definable meta-data and columns, as well as “inline text” but this latter feature is very weak. You could manage tasks very well in OO, but I don’t think you’d ever try writing anything of any length.

Of course, GrandView had its deficits. It was only developed for about five or six years. It never had the advantage of being a Windows application, and existed before anyone had ever heard of the Internet or e-mail. All I can do is imagine how terrific this application would be if developed today with the same imagination, consideration for the end user, and innovation.

Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize!

Barrack Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Hey, that’s our president!

When announcing the winner of this year’s Peace Prize, Jan Snoglobe, spokesman for the Nobel Committee in Oslo, Norway, said, “Frankly, we’re just so excited that George Bush and Dick Chenney are no longer running the world that we’d have even given the prize to Hillary Clinton if she’d managed to win the election. But Obama might actually deserve it.”

I miss Bob Newhart…

I was just browsing the Boston.com Fall Television preview. 

Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, but this all seems like such crap. My only hope is that there will be a gem somewhere among this crop. But, even if that’s the case, you can be sure it will be cancelled by week three.

Spin offs, remakes, vampires, paranormal activity, cougars and Jay Leno in prime time… four or five nights a week!

Does anything signal NBC’s total surrender to original programming more than The Jay Leno Show?  I was just over at the NBC web site to find out if the show really is on five nights a week in prime time, and I couldn’t find the schedule anywhere. In fact, NBC doesn’t even have a schedule of their programs past a week from now! There’s confidence, huh?

But now I’m thinking maybe this Leno prgram really is kinda smart of the network execs, because instead of having to cancel four or five failed shows, they will only have to cancel one. See, with this one move they reduce their failure rate at the 10 o’clock hour by as much as 400 percent. Shear genius.

This admission is staggering…

Even though most of us liberals supsected this was true, it is still staggering to have Tom Ridge, former head of Homeland Security, reveal that the Bush administration manipulated security alerts for political purposes. See here. 

And shouldn’t this be a front page, nightly news-leading  story? Right. They are too busy giving air-time to lying right wingers who want to derail healthcare reform. Just another fucked up day in America.

A healthy dose of reality in the health care debate

The Republican noise machine is cranking out some major lies as the GOP and their right-wing-nut allies try to turn health care reform into a wedge issue. This is the right’s typical modus operandi whenever the truth is not on their side — which, not surprisingly, is frequently the case.

But it is nice to see that some media outlets are not buying their bullshit this time. For a dose of reality, see these stories:

• Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post writes, “The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage.” Read the whole article.
• NPR aired a story this morning about the Canadian health care system, putting the lie to all the misleading messages from the U.S. health insurance industry and their peons in the Republican party.
• And James Fallows has been writing on his blog about the notoriously wrong, yet influential Betsey McCaughey.

Let’s hope the rest of the corporate media start paying attention and report the truth, rather than GOP talking points.  But don’t hold your breath.

Democratic surrender on health care

Seriously, why do we bother casting votes for Democrats. They just spinelessly throw up their hands and surrender to the Republicans, even when they are in the vast majority!

The Associated Press is reporting that a compromise bill coming from the “bi-partisan” senate committee does NOT include the public insurance option. This matters, because the public option represent much needed competition for the strangle-hold private options. Without the public option, this plan is virtually useless.

Of course, none of this is surprising, as from the start of gaining a majority in the House and Senate, Democrats have been looking for ways to abdicate their responsibilities and run from their promises. The six-person committee which is apparently writing this compromise bill is made up of three Democrats and three Republicans. To this I just have to shout to the Democrats: HEY, ASSHOLES, the country elected you to run the country, not the Republicans!!!

Can you imagine the Republicans ever giving Democrats equal representation over ANY important legislation? They wouldn’t do it when they barely had a majority. They certainly would not do it if they held the kind of majority the Democrats currently have.

This New York Times article lists one Democratic capitulation after another:

• No public option
• No mandated employer insurance
• No tax on the wealthy to help pay for the plan

What is clear is that this committee is really just negotiating the Democratic surrender to the Republicans. What a bunch of gutless losers! Sadly, that’s not even hyperbole.

During the first years of the Clinton presidency, healthcare reform was a major issue. Then, like now, the Democrats controlled the legislature and the White House, and, like now it appears that the Democrats in congress will not support their president on this issue. So, what will happen? Probably just what happened in 1994 — the Democrats will be swept from power. Apparently the brains of today’s Democrats are as shrivelled as their testicles, because they can’t seem to remember that fact.

That’s the way it was

I seldom watch the evening news anymore and was reminded why last week while visiting my parents. We were preparing to eat and had the ABC news on with Charles Gibson. The first third of the broadcast was devoted to the Michael Jackson memorial, THEN followed by a short story on President Obama’s trip to Russia.

Now imagine Walter Cronkite anchoring that broadcast.

It’s not possible, is it? Cronkite and his generation of newsmen had something that’s been missing from TV news for a long time: Integrity.

Now Cronkite has died. His will not just be the obituary of a news icon, but of the news itself. It was dead, of course, long before now, but we’ll see clips of his old broadcasts about the assassination of JFK, of the moon landing, and the Vietnam war. We’ll see all to well why today’s sound-bite and celebrity driven news programs are… well, not Walter Cronkite’s news. And we’ll have to ask ourselves what kind of country prefers gossip to genuine news?

Any tribute I paid to him here would only mimic what everyone else of my generation would say. Cronkite’s was the voice of authority and we trusted him, and we knew we were learning what was important and relevant.

Film review: Public Enemies

Year of release: 2009

Starring: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale

Director: Michael Mann

Viewing: Majestic Theater, Williston

Public Enemies is a thrilling cinema experience, but it falls short of being a great film, mostly due to what is not on the screen. What director Michael Mann does deliver is picture perfect. The acting, the photography, the sets and costumes are all virtually flawless. Johnny Depp looks to be having a blast as Depression-era gangster John Dillinger — public enemy number one. The movie starts with a jail break and then follows Dillinger and the FBI’s efforts to nab him. Everyone knows Dillinger was killed coming out of Chicago’s Biograph Theater, which is just about, though not quite, where the film ends. This isn’t a story so much as it is a timeline, but those two and a half hours are so well done and exciting that I was glued to the screen.

The movie is supposedly based on the book of the same title by Bryan Burrough. However, Burrough’s book is about how America’s first war on crime led to the transformation of the FBI from an insignificant government bureau into a national law enforcement agency. Consequently, the careers of all the famous gangsters from the early 1930s are included, and the focus is on the FBI agents and J. Edgar Hoover.

Mann has chosen to focus his film on the last few exciting months of John Dillinger’s life. As a result, we do not get any character development. We don’t learn much about Dillinger’s past. Nor do we learn much about Dillinger’s FBI nemesis, Melvin Purvis, played by Christian Bale. I’ve read several reviews that slam Bale’s performance, but what he is asked to do, he does well. It is not fair to critique him for not playing the role the way you want it played. Mann is intentionally contrasting the style of the outlaw with that of Hoover’s fledgling Bureau. Dillinger is having the time of his life, while Purvis is portrayed as a warrior monk, a man with no passions outside his work.

The one performance I will criticize is Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard. She plays Dillinger’s girlfriend. It is a mystery to me why Mann chose a French actress who clearly has trouble with American pronunciation. Yes, she is beautiful, but so are any number of American actresses.

Mann knows how to stage a movie gun fight. Watching his earlier films Last of the Mohicans and Heat, I felt as if I were in the middle of the battles. And the same goes for Public Enemies. Apparently, Mann used high definition digital recording for this film, which delivers an edgy surreality to the screen that I found very effective, especially for the gun fights.

If you think you’d enjoy a film filled with blazing Tommy guns, sharp Fedoras, wide lapels, intrepid G-men and daring gangsters, you’ll enjoy Public Enemies. Like me, however, you may find that you want to read Burrough’s book afterward so you can add some depth to these characters.

What? Huh!? This is screwy, even for Palin!

I have a nephew who dropped out of college during his first year of medical school. When I asked him why, he responded, “I need this time to prepare for my career as a neurosurgeon.”

Okay, that’s not true. My nephew is only three. But I am making a point about the screwy talk about Sarah Palin’s decision to resign as governor of Alaska. We have to wait and see what her ambitions are, but it seems really, really hard to believe that even a nut-job like Palin could see quitting her job as improving her qualifications for national office, especially the presidency. I think there is more behind this decision than just that. Maybe it’s that she doesn’t find running the state of Alaska much fun anymore, now that she’s getting friction from both sides of the aisle. Maybe her skin is too thin, and she’s tired of media stories like this. Maybe there is some looming ethics issue about to be uncovered.

Here’s my guess: She wants to run for U.S. Senate in 2010, which she views as a stronger springboard to the White House. In doing so, she will be reversing her previous position that she does not intend to challenge incumbent Lisa Murkowski. But Palin has been more than willing to do an about face on her word when it has fit her political ambitions.

I don’t know which I’d prefer. Palin disappearing back into the hole in the ground called Wasilla, or continuing to venture into the national public spotlight. The first would be a relief, and the second would be a lot of fun to watch.

One thing is sure, we should trust Palin when she says Alaska will be better off without her running the show, and bear that in mind should she make a run for the White House 2012.