Tech News Vermont

I didn’t change the episode tag at the front of the podcast, I know it says episode 4 then after the music I start into episode 5…. Sorry for the confusion, this is really episode five.

Don’t forget to check out www.vtsda.org.  The Vermont Software Developers Alliance is hosting a lunch and learn on the 17th.

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The WCAX story of a St. Johnsbury resident trying to cancel his Fairpoint service reminds me of my recent cancellation of my Verizon wireless service.

Verizon did answer the phone when I called to cancel my service; all six times that I or my wife had to call with extra information, account numbers, or voice verification that we were in fact canceling our service.  You don’t get direct numbers either, you plow your way through voicemail-menu-purgatory before you talk to a person, whose English is suspiciously bad.

It took two working adults over 2 hours on the phone spread across six separate phone calls to cancel the service.  I basically had to tell the customer service representative that I would report Verizon charges to my bank as fraud before they would take my “request” to terminate service seriously.  It took 5 hours from the first phone call until the customer service person said, “yes Mr Skoda, your service has been terminated.”   I am happy to report I haven’t seen a Verizon bill since canceling the account.  They did do what they said they would.

I’m still on their e-mail list and every time I get an email, I click “take me off your list”  I wonder how long it takes to be taken off their listserv?

I talk about how the iPhone handled being used as a GPS on my road trip.  Some more Fairpoint information about the transition from Verizon.  Good luck to the Green Team, team 885 at the Granite State Regional.  Check out http://www.baesystemsfirst.org/regional/ or http://www.thebluealliance.net/ For a taste of what the Lego League is all about, check out http://maplelegostars.tripod.com/

For the security corner, we talked about the $250k bounty on the table from Microsoft to find, arrest, and convict the author(s) of Downadup.

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The show will be a little late the week. I’m on a road trip and testing my iPhone on the road. So far I’m very impressed with Maps.