from the fedex site on priority overnight:

Next-business-day delivery by 10:30 a.m. to most U.S. addresses; by noon, 4:30 p.m. or 5 p.m. in remote areas; by noon or 1:30p.m. on Saturdays.

and:

Saturday service also available for an additional charge.

well, my phone died this week and verizon is shipping me a new one and i opted to pay the extra $20 for priority overnight, saturday delivery.  here was the status as of 5:01 pm:

notice estimated deliver of 5:00pm.  yeah, it isn't here.  a call to them lets me know that it is likely still on a crate in the phoenix airport.  my options -- not much.  i'm willing to pick it up but they tell me i can't.  so basically i'm going to devconnections next week without a phone -- while i like the fact that nobody will be able to get in touch with me, generally at conferences it is vital to have a phone to communicate with your other staffes.

argh.  well, if you are at devconnections, come to MSUnplugged (Tuesday night, 7pm) and say hello -- we'll be giving out some wicked cool stuff.

hey google, are you accepting terms and conditions on my behalf these days?

when you go to ups.com and enter a tracking number, you must agree to the ups tracking terms and conditions before it will show you the status.  the terms read:

...This is a personal service, thus your right to use the Tracking Systems or Information is non-assignable. ...

so in gmail, when it sees a message that has a UPS tracking number, it contains a link on the right side of the window giving you a direct link to the shipping tracking information without first informing you of these rights.  now, granted you aren't signing your life away, but when you have to "agree" to something before hand, wouldn't you like to know what it is before you agree to it? 

don't get me wrong, i think it is a time-saving feature as well, but i guess i'm just a little curious how i'd feel about google (or others) agreeing to terms on other sites as well on my behalf to provide those services.

my friends over at axosoft have just launched their beta of ontime 2007.  i'll let the video speak for itself, go check it out:

ontime 2007 beta

screenshots from a web app?  are you kidding me?

file under: poor customer service and planning

i'm sure you've all had the infamous 'cable guy' scheduling thrown at you by your actual cable company or another vendor...you know the "between 8am and 12pm" type stuff?  yeah, basically the "we'll get there at some point" mentality.

my dishwasher broke.  we called for a service appointment (still under warranty).  this particular service company only services my area on thursdays...no problem, i can schedule around that.  the appointment time they give me?  between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM.  ouch, that hurts.  that is double-worse.  "we'll get to you at some point, but block out your whole day for us and in the off chance we can't make it, we'll be sure to let you know at about 4:45 PM."

seriously, that bites.  what is even worse is that wednesday evening (night before 'appointment') we get an automated reminder.  yeah, the ones that repeat the appointment details.  seriously hearing the computer repeat 'between 8 am and 5 pm' (with the pauses in between indicating it is pulling the voice bits based on the appointment data being retrieved) seemed like a complete waste of my time and data across the telephony wires...

nothing more, just a rant and a plea to fix the appointment scheduling problem for these companies.  on a side note the guy showed up at 8:30am and was done in < 1 hour so it worked out for me.

so i saw that firefox released v2.  i always have firefox on my machine as i think it is good to check pages i'm working on in multiple browsers (or at least multiple browsers that make up the market share).  i think it wouldn't surprise anyone that i use ie7 primarily (not because i bleed microsoft blue -- i do though -- but i think it is a great browserserves my needs completely), but i had to use firefox when ie7 was released because my online bank put up the big 'you aren't using a supported browser' wallpaper when i tried to use online banking.

anyhow, so i had ie7 (default) and firefox 1.5 installed on my box.  i downloaded and installed firefox 2.  after installing, i launched it and noticed that it had taken over as the default browser.  nope, i didn't get the popup asking me if i wanted it to (both browsers have that popup if they aren't), just made itself default.  not sure if it was a weird config with v1.5 on their first, but i thought it was sneaky.

and while we're at it -- my online bank doesn't (and didn't during beta/RC) have the big wallpaper that firefox wasn't supported even though IT was in beta...how do you respond Wells Fargo???