Philip Williamson

I subscribe to a LOT of newsletters. I pretty much sign up for whatever comes around, because I want to see how people are presenting themselves through email. Sometimes I get tired of a certain channel, or I just wholesale cut back on newsletters.

Recently I’ve noticed a couple of services make me log in to unsubscribe from emails. This is for them.

Maybe you think it will keep me from unsubscribing, maybe it’s just the way your “community-management” package works. As the visitor / email recipient / unsubscriber, I don’t remotely care why I’m being horribly inconvenienced:

• After clicking the “unsubscribe” button, I’m taken to a login page.
• The password to the site I never visit doesn’t work. Twice.
• I click the “password help” button, and get a reset link in my email.
• I click it, create a new password, type it in again, and (hopefully) am logged in.
• Sometimes I have to actually log in after creating the password.
• There’s no “unsubscribe” button to be seen.
• I go back to my email and click the “unsubscribe” button on the original email newsletter.
• I’m Unsubscribed! Yay! Sixty-five button presses later.
• I send a snarky support email to the site in question. And write a snarky blog post.

See what happened there? Now I HATE you.

You should make unsubscribing easy and painless, especially if you are a charity that relies on the goodwill of strangers. Don’t make me think you’re a graceless, desperate, selfish clod who is bad at the internet.

Voldemort guy, you’re cut. Frodo and old Bilbo, great work on the other movies, you’re cut.  Galadriel, you’re cut. Call me later. Saruman, you’re cut. Radagast is still out.

Notes! Goblin king, you need to be way scarier. Think “goblin,” not “gungan.” You’re in, but make it worth my time.  Trolls! Good characterization, but we need a ton more suspense. Let’s try it like the book.

Richard Armitage. What are you even doing in this movie? You need to be way older and way gnarlier. You’re Thorin son of Thrain, son of Thror, not Boromir. You gotta be meaner to Bilbo, too.

Bilbo. Complain more. Earn Thorin’s disdain. Don’t be a whiner, but a homely tale or two of your fire and down comforter would go a long way toward showing homesickness and earning the disdain of Dwarf kings. We’ll work out a scene before the mountain pass. Maybe give you new lines for the cave?

Gollum! Great work. More of that.

Thanks everybody! Oh, did I mention we’re doing this in one movie? You’ll all be home in time for Christmas.

I finally figured out (i.e., Googled) how to add images and links into the Tire Pressure Google Doc I maintain… ”Insert>Image” and the formula “=hyperlink(“URL”;”text to display”), respectively.

The only reason I still maintain this document after we (Edison-Gauss and I) released the Tire Pressure app for Android is because of Google’s “protected cells” feature.

Adding the image and links got me on a little cleanup crusade, and I added Triathlon bike tire pressure calculations. Triathlon season is nowhere near, but I had a little time on a mellow Thanksgiving.

Brooks Saddle Sculpture SOLD, a photo by BikeTinker on Flickr.

I sold it to a woman who gave it to her husband as a “Trophy” for successfully finishing the Seattle-To-Portland (STP) bike ride. And… with the last skate deck platforms sold, it looks like my Etsy store is empty!

car-reflection, a photo by BikeTinker on Flickr.

Out of 1000 (300? ah. 594) pictures, this is the one good one.
So far.

I now am Senior Designer (or GUI designer – not sure) for an engineering-driven company making power conditioners for audio equipment. Fantastic people, interesting work, and it fits my job criterion of “working with smart people to make cool stuff.” I guess that’s two criteria – smart people, cool stuff.

My new boss called, to keep me in the loop. The company just merged/absorbed two others (one a bloc of 5 already), so instead of 60 people, the company will be 220. I said “two hundred twenty ONE!” You know, counting me. More cool people, more cool stuff.