We all know the stories about how vacationing smartphone users became the victim of high roaming charges, resulting in monthly bills sometimes exceeding €1000. To put an end to this, the EU has come up with a rule stating that carriers can no longer charge more than €50 per month for roaming, and are obliged to warn the user before reaching this limit. That all sounds nice and consumer friendly, but I recently tested this, and received an “interesting” monthly bill from T-Mobile.
Tag: opinion
Open Letter to Tim Cook
Dear Tim,
I am certainly not the first, nor the last to congratulate you with your new position at Apple. I’m sure there will be many great things to come for Apple and it’s customers.
Apple has become the doctor that doesn’t fix the pain, but cures the illness and improves our daily digital lives. Please make sure Apple keeps it’s focus, perseverance and good taste in the endless search for true quality.
Tell Steve and Jony I said hi, and keep up the good work. If there’s anything I can help you with, you know how to reach me 😉
Cheers,
Rolf
Linked-In not really Opt-in?
Recently there was some kerfuffle about LinkedIn silently changing privacy settings. In fact, they didn’t do that “silently”, nor was it “recent”. Remember that large chunk of text nobody reads with the “Agree” button you clicked on? Those were the new terms, and deeply buried in them was this privacy settings stuff. LinkedIn’s Eric Heath blogged about that, bringing it as “more control over your LinkedIn information”. Sadly, the default setting for this new “control” is “rather open”. But you can change that.
Why phone companies will fail
I recently had a very unpleasant experience with my mobile phone. Actually, it wasn’t so much my mobile phone itself, as it was the sharing of my private mobile phone number between colleagues. Seemingly harmless, but with great consequences.
One of my colleagues, in his innocence and with nothing but good intentions, shared my phone number with another colleague. As I was sitting in the hospital, the second colleague called me with questions about estimates I made for a project, which at that time intensely frustrated me.
Although I had the whole weekend to cool down, I was still pretty pissed the following monday. Some unpleasant conversations followed. I think everything is solved now but I can only hope somebody actually deletes my number when he says he does. Which got me to think about the old fashioned and spectacularly broken addressing model phone companies are still using.
Why Growth is a bad thing. Bad.
Quite often I am amazed at people’s ability to miss what looks obvious to me. Not only the small things like cleaning up when you spill coffee over the floor, or washing your hands when you get off the toilet, but also bigger things. Like the silly “solutions” to the world’s pollution problem for example.
Looking to solve our pollution problem by changing people’s behavior is one of the things which to me is obvious to fail. Although some behavior may speed up pollution, in the end we all pollute, wether we like it or not.
At the risk of writing a very unpopular blogpost, I’d like to share some thoughts on the ongoing and ever increasing pollution problem. In my eyes, there are 2 real causes of pollution, and ultimately these causes are even self-repairing although you may not like how that works out for you.
The Car Buying Story
Stephen needs a new car. Being dilligent and a car lover, he takes the time to write down all criteria for a great car. When he finishes the list, he notices that the only car matching all his criteria is a Ferrari. Well, he always loved a Ferrari so that makes sense. To make things more realistic he adds another criteria, called “price”, and starts looking for alternatives.
Kilometerheffing? GPS-data NEE!
Ik weet niet welke lobbyist menner Eurlings heeft verteld dat dit een briljant plan is, maar ik weet donders goed waarom onze regering kilometerheffing wil invoeren. Weer een kraantje toegevoegd aan het vat dat “werkende Nederlander” heet, en als bonus nog wat privacy gevoelige GPS gegevens om in rond te neuzen ook. Mocht je de rest van deze post niet willen lezen, reageer dan wel even op de volgende sites, want Eurlings heeft gezegd dat kilometerheffing “bij gebrek aan draagvlak” (welk draagvlak?) niet doorgaat:
- http://www.redonzeprivacy.nl/
- http://www.kilometerheffingnoway.nl/
- http://www.kilometerheffing-nee.nl/
- http://petities.nl/petitie/kilometerheffing-is-verkeerd
- http://www.kilometer-heffing.eu/
- http://www.anwbledenpeiling.nl/ <– Eurlings gaat deze uitslag gebruiken! (als je de vragen gezien hebt zie je waarom :-/ )
T(w)inkering
Now that the twitter hype is cooling down, and companies tart to realize that it is, in fact, just CB radio in a new asynchronous form, only the “true tweeps” still hang around. And now, it’s time to t(w)inker with it.
Design Gripes
Dear Akio Morita,
Lately I have some small issues with a lot of design decisions being made by the company you founded a while ago. If you look at my irritations seperately they’re just small gripes of a grumpy old customer. But the increasing number of design mistakes have me worried about your user acceptance testing and quality assurance processes. Given the sheer size of your company, and the fact that the very same people who are sabotaging your overall product quality can silently delete my complaint, I thought I’d share it with you here, on my very private blog. Nobody else will read this. Honest.
LED’s in your livingroom?
In some countries, there is some talk on banishing the classic (incandescant) lightbulb. I think this whole discussion is needless. The only reason why it exists, is that the fluorescent bulbs are often of mediocre quality, and certain people are here to enforce their bad tastes upon us “for a greater purpose”.
Don’t get me wrong, I really like trees and birds around my house, and I would be more than happy to install energy-efficient appliances in my home, even if they cost me slightly more. But especially if I’m paying more, I expect to get a certain level of quality.
Because of the inefficiency of incandescent bulbs, and the number of bulbs in my household, I decided to look around for energy efficient solutions. Particulary LED lighting caught my interest, because it is not only energy efficient, it’s also dimmable with normal (cheap) floor dimmers. They even stay cold enough so that children touching them do not burn their fingers.