Colors from the Past

Most folks, when they think about World War I, tend to recall images of black and white battlefields. It’s natural, as old b&w photos and movies are all any of us have seen of WW1.

Until now.

Der Spiegel has published an online article and photo gallery of heretofore unseen color images from the Great War. Fascinating stuff.

Here’s a link to the WW1 article, and another for the WW1 photo gallery.

As fascinating as the WW1 photos are, they are still scenes of sadness and of devastated lives.

In the decade prior to the war, back in 1907, an Italian film-maker had happier thoughts in mind when he created a short film titled Butterflys. The original masters of the film were thought to be long gone, but recently a fairly pristine copy was found.

Set to a new piece of music composed in 2008, Butterflys is an interesting piece for the first 4 minutes or so.

However, the final two minutes are quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. The muted but still rich colors of this hand-tinted film seem to come to life in the beautiful finale. Click on the image below to view the video.

Having a friend who is considering starting an internet-based business, and enticed by an offer from a friend and former colleague (hi Dave!), I signed up for a recent promotion sponsored by Stomper Net.

The company is an apparent leader in the online sales development business (SEO), and their training was offered for just the price of shipping, as long as one agreed to try their new magazine.

The material arrived and after reviewing the magazine I decided to cancel.

That’s where the fun began. I called the number to cancel and couldn’t get through; all circuits busy.

Eventually, I got through, and when I selected the option to cancel I was forced to sit through another sales spiel, touting the articles coming in the next edition of the magazine.

More fun. At the end of the spiel I was told to go to a certain website to cancel. So much for “simply cancel by calling this number.” Yeah, silly me.

So I go to the website. Oh, it’s not ready yet. Tried calling a variety of numbers and got full mailboxes and no humans.

I finally reached Dusty at Stompernet HQ. He had an attitude and told me to use the web site. After I told him it wasn’t working I asked to speak to his supervisor.

After a bit of a wait, he came back and said he would handle the cancellation for me. But first he had to give me a hard time, telling me I shouldn’t be frustrated that it was hard to cancel, as, afterall, I had received the material for free. He didn’t seem to understand the concept that taking an hour to do a 5 minute cancellation isn’t free.

Then, when I asked for his last name and got no answer I told him that I needed it to document my phone call. (I anticipate that I’ll have to have my credit card company handle this based on my experience with Stomper.) I couldn’t believe it when he said, you asked if I had a last name, you didn’t ask me what it was.

So, if after all this, the Stomper product looks like it will help your business, go for it! As for me, I knew better, but was curious and this is the result.

The bottom line is, having a cancellation process that rivals AOL in terms of difficulty is unacceptable and borders on fraud. You’ve been warned.

Postscript: I was promised an email acknowledgement when my subscription was cancelled. Dusty said he would do that as soon as we hung up. I’m still waiting and will update this post if/when I’m notified.

Update: I received my cancellation notice.

From this:

to this:

and this:

These are amazing photos that demonstrate, once again, that human creativity knows no bounds.

You can see more of these wonderful images here:

Rice Paddy Art

Update: As a result of this posting, I was contacted by the Customer Service Director for Dotster. We discussed the issues surrounding my situation and what they might do to help prevent this from happening to others in the future, such as allowing for multiple email contacts to be listed.

While I’m still unhappy that I had to waste a couple of hours on this, at the end of the day my primary domain is working and I’m very satisfied with Dotster’s response to my issues. The fact they were able to refund my entire redemption fee didn’t hurt, but neither did having a great customer service experience.
End Update

After a 10 year relationship, I’m considering breaking up with Dotster. Neither the best nor the worst domain registrar, and neither the most or least expensive, I started with Dotster around 10 years ago, as they were one of the best at the time.

So, why am I thinking of leaving after all of this time? It’s because I lost 2 domains, including one I had owned for 10 years, due their lousy system for processing updates and sending notifications regarding pending renewals. They didn’t auto-renew my domain, even though I have that setting enabled, and all of their renewal emails were flagged as SPAM. Interestingly, the dotster messages were the only false hits in the last 6 weeks; that tells me the problem is on their end.

It cost $99 to get one of the domains back, and the other one just isn’t worth it.

Plus, even after I paid the ransom for my kidnapped domain, I had to make a 20 minute call to tech support, and get a bit huffy with them, before my domain was restored. They kept trying to tell me it would be 24 to 48 hours until my domain was active. Sorry, wrong. Today, a domain is usually active within minutes after being purchased.

To their credit, once I let the customer service rep know I knew what was going on, she escalated and within minutes, my domain was back on the air.

Then, when I called sales to let them know that the $99 would cost them that much and more due to the lost revenues when I move my domains, they transferred me to tech support. That wasn’t so bad, as they were able to refund half of the ransom fees; ICAAN gets the other half.

In terms of my second domain, it’s not worth $99 or even 1/2 of that, so I’ll take my chances on being able to purchase it once it completely expires.

So, bottom line, I have issues with Dotster, but their customer support was pretty good and given the amount of effort to switch registrars, I’ll probably just stay put … and hedge my bets as well; the next domain I purchase will be from another registrar, likely pairnic.com, and we’ll see how it goes with them.

Too busy doing things that aren’t really bloggable, so it’s been pretty quiet around here lately. I have posted a couple of nice fireworks photos on my photo blog, luminosity:

http://www.allthepages.org/luminosity/2008/07/beautiful_fireworks.html

http://www.allthepages.org/luminosity/2008/07/fire_wheel.html

I still squeeze in some time for blog reading (via Google Reader, naturally), and that’s how I found this quick little quiz from my friend Julie-Ann. It fits the bill for a quick, light summertime post:

Erase my answers, enter yours and repost. Use the 1st letter of your name to answer each of the following. They have to be real places, names, things, nothing made up! You can’t use your name for the boy/girl name question.

1. What is your name? Mike

2. 4-letter word: Meta

3. Car: Maybach

4. TV show: Mannix

5. City: Montreal

6. Boy’s name: Mark

7. Girl’s name: Moneka

8. Occupation: Mystic

9. Something you wear: Madras (shirt)

10. Food: Mozzarella

11. Something found in a bathroom: Magazine

12. Reason for being late for work: Moonstruck