New Hampshire Real Estate & Consumer Resources

Archive for September, 2006

I hate to admit it here, but I’ve never been much of a “shop around” guy when it comes to certain things. Sure, when I am looking for a new toy, I do tend to spend a lot of time researching and shopping around for the best price.

However, when it comes to those mandatory things that are not at all exciting or fun to buy, I have always followed the path of least resistance. I’m talking about things like insurance and other things we all seem to need these days.

Dealing with that stuff always seems like a big hassle to me and something I would rather avoid. Hence, I tend to just pick a company nearby or one whose name I recognize and go with that without scouting around for the best deal. That, I am starting to learn, is a mistake. Big surprise, huh? All you serious bargain hunters are laughing at me now.

My home is heated mostly by propane gas. We have the typical big 500-gallon tank in the yard which the delivery truck fills up every few months on our automatic delivery schedule. During the summer, of course, our consumption goes way down, which means we usually get a delivery in May and then not again until October.

Sometime back around April I called our propane company, Eastern Propane, and told them to cancel our automatic delivery. Propane has been following along with gasoline prices for the most part and I didn’t want to be filling my tank with prices so high. I decided to gamble a bit and hope that prices would be lower in the fall when I would have to buy more propane. I knew I had more than enough in the tank to make it through the summer months.

Fortunately, it looks like I made the right move, since gas prices have been coming down recently. About a month ago I figured I better start planning the timing of my propane purchase, so I called e-mailed Eastern Propane and asked them what the current price was. I did not volunteer that I was already a customer. They e-mailed me back the next day to tell me the price was $2.57 a gallon. Frankly I expected it to be lower since it has been staying below gasoline prices for a while, but now seemed to be dropping slower than the gasoline prices.

Up until this time, I always thought the prices of propane would be pretty much the same across all the local suppliers. Sure, maybe a few cents or a nickel difference, but that would be about it, right? Wrong!

I decided to start calling around to see what other local propane suppliers were charging. I learned a couple of things right away. Firstly, there can be very significant differences in price from supplier to supplier. Secondly, they adjust the price they charge based on how much you use. If you use more, you pay less per gallon.

I was surprised to be getting quotes from various companies like $2.39 and another that would lock me in with a price of $2.09 for 6 months after I switched to their service. I also discovered that there were charges that differed from one company to the next for installing the new propane tank. One company wanted about $75 and the other about $40.

I decided to call Eastern Propane on the phone and tell them I was a customer and see if they quoted me a lower price than the one they sent in e-mail. Over the phone they quoted me $2.52 a gallon. Gee, thanks for being so generous, Eastern! I’ve been a customer for 8 years and this is the best they can do for me? At that point, I knew I would be switching to one of the other suppliers.

I happened to be talking to my dad and mentioned to him that I was planning to switch propane companies due to the significant price difference. Being the kind of guy that loves to jump on the Internet and research these kinds of things, my dad started looking around and called me a while later and asked me if I had checked with a local company called Roy Brothers. I had heard of them, but honestly didn’t even know they were a propane supplier. I thought they were just a trucking company or something.

Anyway, I called Roy Brothers and was able to get the best deal of the bunch. They are going to lock me in at $2.09 a gallon until April and install the tank for free. I had found my new propane suppler.

I called Eastern to inquire about any kind of charges they might have for removing the tank or anything like that. Turns out they charge you 60 cents a gallon to remove the gas from the tank if it reads over 5% full. That’s what I wanted to know.

A day or two later I get an unexpected call from the account manager at Eastern because my account had been “red flagged” due to the calls I had been making asking about prices and such. They wanted to be sure everything was OK — or more to the point — wanted to know if I was thinking about switching.

The fellow did not sound too happy when I told him I was switching to another company. Naturally, he tried to persuade me with the usual nonsense about how other companies are lowering their prices temporarily just to beat their price and stuff like that, but I wasn’t buying it. I told them I would call and let them know when they could come pick up their tank.

A while later I got an e-mail from the guy telling me they will match the price and give me a refund on my last delivery. I’m not 100% sure what he meant by the refund, and I did not ask, but I presume they would refund the difference in price between the new price they are offering me and what I paid for my last fill-up.

Here’s what he did not realize. It was too late to start offering me deals. Seeing how much lower some of these other companies were made me feel like I was getting screwed by Eastern. Makes me wonder how much I could have saved over the last few years if I had been with one of the other companies.

Apparently, Eastern Propane is the kind of company that charges the absolute maximum they can charge and still maintain a sufficient customer base to stay in business. At least that’s the way I see it.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I hold grudges over things like this. When I feel like I got screwed, I never forget it, and Eastern Propane is now on my “black list” of companies I will never do business with again.

One of the things the Eastern account rep said in his e-mail was that I have “been a great customer for Eastern and I hate to see you go.” Well, yeah, someone who does not take the time to find out he is getting a lousy deal by staying with the supplier who is charging the highest price in the area is a great customer! Of course they hate to lose a sucker, er, I mean a customer like that!

If Eastern really valued my business they would have been charging a more competitive rate instead of offering me deals only when they find out I am planning to switch suppliers.

I had fully made up my mind to switch by the time I got the e-mail from the account rep and that is exactly what I told him in my reply. The bottom line is simply too little too late, Eastern Propane. Good riddance.

Even if you doubt that shopping around for something boring like propane or heating oil is worthwhile, I urge you to make some calls and check out the competition. You may have an opportunity to save a significant amount of money and not even know it.

Break out the Yellow Pages and start dialing!

If you have read much more if this blog, you’ll know that I was a TracFone customer who was completely dissatisfied with their service.

We were a 3-TracFone family. Originally, we bought one for my son. Seeing how cheap it was compared to our standard cell phone plan with U.S. Cellular, we ditched the U.S. Cellular service and got TracFones for both my wife and myself as well. If you don’t know the rest of that story, just read my other TracFone entries here.

As I mentioned yesterday, my TracFone airtime expired and my TracFone promptly stopped working.

My son’s airtime ran out about a month ago and since he’s back in school and not going back and forth to work for a few months, it was a good time to ditch his TracFone and just get a new one from another company in the spring.

I was a bit more work to convince my wife to dump her TracFone, since as she put it, “I haven’t had any trouble with it.”

Well, that’s because I am the one that programmed the new airtime into all the phones in the house and the only one who had the “pleasure” of calling TracFone customer service to deal with whatever problems we were having with the phones.

When I told her that I was finished dealing with TracFone in any capacity, and that she would have to add her own airtime and take care of all the issues involving her own phone, she softened her position and agreed to a new phone if it was as inexpensive as TracFone.

I was very happy to hear that. We would now be 100% TracFone-free and I would not have to give them another dime. Their lousy service cost them three phones in this household.

So begins the search for new prepaid wireless service for my wife. I am going to wait a while before I get a new one, since I don’t travel as much as she does.

Naturally, I began my search on the internet. Since we live in a rather out-of-the-way location here, we don’t have as much choice when it comes to wireless service. U.S. Cellular pretty much owns all the service in our area, so the provider we select has to play well with their sites. That left out a lot of the most popular wireless companies.

Cingular looked like it might work, but the way their plans are described on their site, did not give me confidence and was a little difficult to understand. One thing good about the TracFone service was that you simply buy your airtime and that was it. You did not face any more charges until your airtime expiration date arrived or you used up all of your airtime before the expiration date and needed to buy more. No surprises with that. You knew what you were spending.

I found the wording on the Cingular site confusing. I won’t go so far as to say “deceptive,” but I will say they could do a hell of a lot better explaining how the plans work.

Here’s basically how they presented the information on their plans. It was a certain dollar amount for a certain period of time. For example, it was $15 for 30 days of airtime. On the same page, a little above that, it said the plan was 25 cents per minute. Huh? Which is it?

Well, finding no clear and detailed explanation of the plan other than that, I have to presume that they are charging you $15 just to have the phone able to function for 30 days. Beyond that, I guess they expect you to pay the 25 cents a minute when you actually do use the phone. That’s not much of a deal, so I decided it was not going to be Cingular.

I decided to dig around a bit more and came across Beyond Wireless that also looks like it will work in my area. I browsed around their site and fortunately, their plan seems like a much better deal. It clearly states the minutes and the airtime expiration date you get with each purchase.

For example, for $5 you get 36 minutes and 15 days. See that, Cingular? That’s no so difficult is it?

The rates also look quite favorable when compared to TracFone. Even a little better I think.

One thing I noticed while reading the FAQ on the Beyond Wireless site is that it is sometimes possible to keep your old phone and move it to their network. Maybe I would not have to retire the TracFone phones at all. It’s a long shot since the TracFones seem like they are highly customized to work with that service.

Since the FAQ said to call to see if your old phone can be used with the Beyond Wireless service, I figured I would give them a call and ask. That’s were things get a bit ugly.

I have been on the phone listening to their “on hold” music now for over an hour. Since I have a headset and don’t have to hold the phone up to my ear and I can also just sit here and do my normal work with the headset on, it is not as much of a hassle a it would be for a lot of other people to be on hold this long.

I must say that I am not impressed with Beyond Wireless so far. Apparently, they are too cheap or greedy (or both) to hire enough customer service people to handle the incoming calls in a reasonable amount of time. Being on hold for over an hour is in now way acceptable customer service by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s amusing to hear the little recorded voices that cut into the music every few minutes to let me know that they “sincerely appreciate my patience and that they look forward to talking with me soon” also “they’ll be right back with me.” Well, after an hour, that’s a bit hard to believe!

If they really cared about talking to me and the many other people that must be on hold as well, they would spend a few more bucks and hire some more people to answer the damn phone. Guess that might cut a bit too far into the massive profits that the top execs of the company are enjoying. Screw customer service. it’s all about the money.

In a normal world, I would simply hang up and cross Beyond Wireless off my list. However, in a world with consistent crappy customer service almost wherever you go, you are left with the choosing the lesser of two evils. The best of the worst, so to speak.

If I eventually get a reasonably competent customer service rep who speaks good English on a phone line that is not full of noise and the voices of 1000 other customer service people in the background, I will have to consider it a “win” compared to TracFone.

What a sad state customer service is in these days. Now if I we do end up with a Beyond Wireless phone and they start sending text message SPAM to it constantly, I might just start shopping for tin cans and a lot of string!

Update: After an hour and 45 minutes on hold with Beyond Wireless, I decided that the situation was beyond reasonable and I hung up. I may try e-mailing them, but with no other choices available that I know if for prepaid wireless in our area, I may have to give them a try anyway.

[tags]prepaid wireless, tracfone, cingular, beyond wireless[/tags]

The airtime minutes on my TracFone expired yesterday. I will not be adding any more airtime. Ever.

I have some plans in store for my TracFone later this week, so if you like watching video of things getting destroyed you may want to come back and check it out.

Let me take this opportunity to summarize why I think TracFone is lousy service and should be avoided like the plague:

I had not talked about this before, but in retrospect, the procedure for adding airtime to a TracFone is a real pain.

If you want to do it without having to talk to one of their customer service reps (an experience that can be compared to a visit to the 7th level of customer service Hell), you can use their web site to purchase airtime. When you have made your purchase you are presented with a series of codes that must be entered in using the buttons on the phone’s keypad.

Each code is probably about 16 or so numbers and you have to enter at least 4 of these codes at least — maybe as many as 6 but it’s been a while so I can’t be remember exactly. Anyway, it’s a lot of tapping on the keypad and it is a pain in the rear if you buy your airtime in small blocks and have to keep adding more every couple of months.

I don’t recommend buying large blocks of TracFone airtime for two reasons. The first of which I talked about in this post a while back, and the second is that if you buy a whole bunch of airtime, like a year’s worth, and come to the same conclusion that I did that TracFone sucks, you will be stuck with it until the airtime expiration date, unless you just want to blow it off and get new phone and let the TracFone airtime be wasted.

TracFone customer service is terrible. Every time I called, the phone connection was terrible with lots of static and other noise on the line. Not to mention it sounds like there are about a thousand other people on the line with you since you can hear all the other customer service reps in the background talking to other unfortunate TracFone customers.

The customer service reps are clueless and are constantly putting you on hold each time you ask them any question that is more difficult than “What’s your name?”

Many of them also have terrible English speaking skills and it is nearly impossible to to communicate with them.

Apparently, they are also trained to apologize every 10 seconds or so. I guess they think that will make everything better, but in my experience, numerous apologies did not seem to help solve the problem I was having. Imagine that!

The thing that finally pushed me over the edge was the text message SPAM TracFone was sending to my phone constantly.

I normally use my phone only when I leave the house. I turn it on and throw it on the seat next to me in the car. The first time I received text message spam from TracFone I wasn’t sure what had happened. I was driving down the road and my phone emitted a rather loud single “beep.”

At first I thought the battery was dying or something else had gone wrong with it. I picked it up, only to find a text message on the screen. Who the heck would be sending me a text message? It soon became clear. It was TracFone text message SPAM. “Get FREE minutes for your phone…” or some other garbage.

I started getting these things about once every other time I turned the damn thing on and it was annoying. If you hate SPAM as much as I do, you’ll know what I mean.

After a few of these text message SPAM messages I decided enough was enough. I e-mailed TracFone and told them I wanted them to stop sending text message promotions to my phone. They promised it would stop. And it did. For a while.

About a month or two later it started up again. It was then I decided that I was done with TracFone and would not purchase any more airtime from those idiots again.

When we first got a TracFone, I thought it was a nifty idea. I liked the idea of adding airtime through their website and not having to call someone. I love doing business on the web and I hate doing business on the phone. If I can avoid talking to some customer service drone and order something on the web or find an answer to a problem on the web, I am very happy to do so.

I had read the bad reviews about TracFone customer service, but I figured I’d never have to actually call their customer service line. I could activate the phone and buy all the airtime right on the web! I’m a pretty tech savvy guy so I figured I could figure out most of what I needed to know on my own.

I was wrong. Problems with TracFone service, I discovered, are not uncommon. Trust me, if you are a TracFone customer, the day will come when you have to dial that customer service number. It’s inevitable and you’ll just have to accept it. And then you will find out just how lousy their service can be.

By the way, I got a bit curious about TracFone a few weeks ago and decided to do a little research. I was wondering about their customer service and why my phone connections were always terrible and why I never, ever spoke to anyone there who was a native English speaker.

Turns out that TracFone is a foreign company (from a U.S. perspective anyway!) and it is headquartered down in South America somewhere. So, if you are one of those “Buy American” types, there is another reason for you to avoid TracFone.

[tags]tracfone, customer service, prepaid wireless[/tags]

I’ll have to give credit to the spammers and other varieties of internet-dwelling lowlife for one thing: They are a damn creative bunch! They have come up with some absolutely ingenious schemes to keep the money coming in.

It used to be that a virus or worm or other nasty bit of software was released primarily for “recreational” purposes. The writer was trying to prove how good a hacker he was or was competing with other hackers to come up with the nastiest creation. I suppose others were just mentally deranged or something.

In recent years, I have been hearing a lot about a change in the motivation behind the creation of what has be come known collectively as malware.

Today, the motivation, as you might suspect, is money, and many accomplished hackers are now plying their trade for a paycheck instead of the fame and admiration of fellow hackers.

Although the primary focus of this post is regarding zombie networks, it is worth mentioning that things like the computer virus, phishing sites and adware are still a big problem that do not appear to be going away any time soon.

A zombie network is a group of computers that are controlled by someone else who has somehow managed to get a program or group of programs installed on computers that do not belong to them.

The person who controls the zombie network has total control over all the zombie computers in that network and can make them do anything his heart desires. Unlike a virus, the zombie programs that are installed are designed to work quietly in the background and never do anything to reveal their presence.

It’s not about causing difficulty for the owner of the computer that has been infected, although that is very likely to happen if the victim’s ISP (Internet Service Provider) figures out that the computer has been recruited as part of a zombie network. It’s about the money.

Laws against spam that have been passed in the last few years have driven the spammers further underground than ever. Many of them send their spam e-mail messages from computers located overseas to avoid trouble with authorities here in the U.S.

Others hire hackers who have their own zombie networks that can be used to send spam. Some zombie networks can consist of hundreds or even thousands of computers, all standing ready to follow whatever instructions the zombie master sends out.

Here’s a fictional story to demonstrate how some innocent internet user may end up with a computer that is part of a zombie network.

Joe Surfer stumbles upon a web site while doing some searching for information on the internet and notices an advertisement for a free screen saver or some other free software that sounds useful.

Joe clicks on the ad and is taken to another web site that is probably going to do one of two things. It may offer the software as a free download so Joe can grab a copy and install it on his PC.

It also might use some known security flaw in Joe’s web browser to go ahead and install the zombie program right then and there and leave poor Joe with no idea he has been infected just by visiting the site.

Whether he is infected when he visits the site or when he installs the software he has downloaded, his PC is now part of a zombie network.

Although Joe has no idea anything is going on, the zombie program connects to an IRC or “Internet Relay Chat” channel and sends a message to the zombie master who is monitoring the chat channel to let him know he has a new recruit in his network.

The zombie master can then communicate with the new zombie PC by sending instructions back to it via the chat channel. The zombie program is configured to start up and inform the zombie master of its availability each and every time the victim turns his PC on.

As mentioned previously, the zombie master can instruct all of the PC’s in his network to do anything he wants them to do. Most often they are used to send spam or to launch “denial of service” attacks on other computers that the zombie master or his employers want to take off the internet for some reason. The Blue Frog story is an excellent example of how this can come about.

Unless you have some type of security software installed on your computer, you may never find out that it is part of a zombie network. Although you may find out the hard way when your ISP discovers the infection and shuts off your internet access.

This actually happened to me once. My wife and kids had discovered the “surf the internet and get paid” stories that were going around a few years back and signed up with some of these sites so they could get paid just for checking out certain sites.

(If you’re thinking about getting involved in anything like this, don’t bother! I have never heard of a single “surf to get paid” deal that was not a scam.)

Anyway, a week or two later our internet service just died one day and did not seem to be coming back. I called our ISP and was informed that a flood of spam was being sent out from one of the computers in my house. I was told to let them know when the malware was removed and they would restore our internet access.

You can imagine how ticked off I was and how fast that particular malware was identified and removed from my wife’s PC! So much for “surfing to get paid.”

Figuring that all of my wife’s surfing would be to well-known, safe sites, I let my guard down and did not have the full compliment of security software installed on her PC. It was a lesson I learned the hard way, although I cannot be sure the malware would have been identified by anti-virus software I was using at the time. It is likely that a properly-configured firewall would have drawn attention to it however.

To this day I am not certain if my wife’s PC had been part of a zombie network or not since the information I was able to dig up about the malware that had been installed was not terribly extensive.

I was glad that I was able to download a free anti-virus program to eliminate it, but I wish I had been able to find out more about exactly what it was.

Unfortunately, the bad guys are developing more sophisticated malware programs that are harder to detect and even using rootkits to further mask the presence of their nasty little programs and keep victims in the dark.

There are things you can do to minimize the likelihood of your PC being infected with malware. There are numerous free anti-virus programs you can download and install. I also highly recommend a firewall program.

A firewall program installed on your PC can alert you to any other programs that are attempting to access the internet in the background. There are free firewall programs you can download. Just do a search for “free antivirus” or “free firewall” on Google and you should find what you need.

Using a firewall program can be a bit intimidating if you are not technically savvy, but it really is worth it to take some time to learn as much as you can and make use of a firewall program.

No solution is 100% effective against malware, but using anti-virus and firewall programs will give you a much better chance of detecting malware that has been installed on your computer without your knowledge.

It also appears that there is a new generation of anti-malware software coming on the scene. I heard about a program called CyberHawk and since it was free, I decided to download it and give it a try.

Although the program looked interesting and appears to have some promise, I don’t think it is quite ready for prime time. After noticing a number of occasions when my PC would slow to a crawl and nearly hang for no apparent reason, I traced the problem to CyberHawk and when I removed the program, the problems went away.

I am going to give it another try once they refine it a little more and you may want to check it out in a little while as well. It looks like it has the makings of a good program but has not had the bugs worked out of it yet.

Make no mistake. There are people out there who want to take control of your computer and do things with it that are not lawful so they can make a profit. Connecting your computer to the internet these days without as much protection as you can get is just plain crazy.

[tags]zombie networks, malware, firewall[/tags]

I had heard the stories more than once. Someone who has an internet-based business sets up a newsletter or a mailing list to stay in touch with customers and potential customers via e-mail.

After signing up and agreeing to receive the newsletter or mailing list messages, some clueless AOL user receives an e-mail message just as they had agreed to, and then they get ticked off and hit AOL’s brilliantly-conceived (NOT) “Report As Spam” button.

At this point it is believed that AOL’s systems start keeping score and tracking how many other AOL users report spam coming from this particular source and if enough spam reports are accumulated, the sender of the e-mail messages may be blocked from sending any e-mail to any AOL user.

With the large number of users on AOL, being blocked from sending mail to any AOL e-mail address could be a serious problem for a business that has customers who use AOL.

Just recently I had done some work on one of my sites and part of that was to upgrade the e-mail process we were using and sign on with one of the major e-mail management companies.

Once I got my subscriber list moved over to the new service I sent out an e-mail to all subscribers to verify that they wanted to remain on our list. This was mandated by the e-mail management service to ensure that we were in compliance with anti-spam laws.

Sure enough, the next morning I find an e-mail message from the service to inform me that one of my subscribers who happens to be on AOL has reported my message as spam.

Keep in mind this is something this particular AOL user signed up for. She deliberately selected the option to be on our subscriber list during the check-out process when she purchased something from our site. By default, the option is turned OFF, so the visitor has to take deliberate action to be included on our mailing list.

This clueless twit signs up as a subscriber and then reports our message as spam when she received it. What is wrong with idiots like that?

And speaking of idiots, the people who run AOL are the biggest idiots of all. To give their users a one-click method to report an e-mail message as spam and then actually trust these users enough (some of the most inexperienced users on the internet, by the way) to basically allow them to ban certain messages from ever reaching anyone on AOL is ridiculous.

Here’s my advice to AOL users: Cancel your AOL account and sign up with a “real” internet service provider.

If you’re unwilling to give up your AOL account, I strongly suggest you consider this: Sign up for a free e-mail account at Yahoo or Hotmail or one of the other free e-mail services and use that address if you sign up for any newsletters or mailing lists. At least then you will know that your subscription probably won’t be cut off suddenly some day with no warning or explanation because some of your fellow AOL users reported the sender of your newsletter as a spammer.

And for heaven’s sake, if you are an AOL user and you sign up for a newsletter or mailing list using your AOL e-mail address, don’t report the sender as spam! You’re potentially hurting someone who is probably playing by the rules and just trying to run an honest business. If they are indeed following the rules, you will receive instructions on how to get off the list in each and every message they send to you. All you have to do is follow those instructions to get off the list.

Of course hitting that handy “Report As Spam” button is easier than clicking the unsubscribe link in an e-mail message, so of course, the users abuse it. Of course they are going to opt for the easiest solution they have available and they just want the messages to stop. How the geniuses at AOL missed seeing the enormous potential for abuse with a tool like this is beyond me.

The user who reported our e-mail message as spam has, of course, been removed from our list. I can only hope that she receives her share of real spam on a regular basis. I know of a few sure-fire ways she can make that happen. Perhaps I should e-mail her and provide her with a few “tips.” She’s probably clueless enough to follow through with them.