I wanted to make it feel "fun" again - not heavy and dark. Thus, you will now find a new look for the top of the PhuseBox pages. I think this fits better with the tone of the site - and the mood of what is to come.

I also made a couple modifications to the top interface, so let me know if you run into any problems. 

If  you were effected by this small glitch, I apologize. It has been fixed now and will not happen again.

Sorry. Thanks for understanding. 

Set up a new contact on your phone and enter that address into the email field. Then, snap a picture and send it to that contact.  Pretty simple.

You know, as long as the car in front of you does not hit a bird.

Happy Brithday, Ben... even though you killed a bird. 

Ok. So I absolutely love these new ads from Apple... and not just because I am an Apple fan (I am kind of getting sick of the iPod commercials).

I still have note decidd if I am going to fork out $500 for the iPhone when it comes out, but I must say, these commercials make it look pretty slick. 

20 Euros (it is London, afterall) to anyone that can give me five solid reasons why this design for the 2012 Olympics logo is a good idea...

This is about the worst logo design I have ever seen... and the design firm got $800,000.00 for it... almost 1 million - for that... that. A 5-year-old with construction paper would come up with a similar design.

London reports that they wanted something that did not look corporate and spoke to a younger generation... hmmmm... kind of like kids from the 1990's?

I hear they also got MC Hammer as the Olympic spokesperson. 

Seriously... Creative ads are great. And especially in a YouTube world, spending the extra creative effort will have a vast effect on the reach of your "second-life" internet video market.

It pays. 

I will press on with everything else.

Like I said before, there are still several features that I need to "finish out" - mainly a way to edit photo titles and descriptions, friend requests, and the messaging system.  These should be done shortly.

Also, this is just Phase 1 of the new PhuseBox... there is lots more to come. I wanted to go ahead and launch the site with the new look and interface, but watch for more stuff soon.

The new PhuseBox has launched, but there are several things and features that still need work, so you may see some things that are not functioning.

I thought it would be better to go ahead and launch it this way than to keep the site down any longer.

So, there are still a few things that are not working, but everything should be functioning soon. Just hang in there.

I thought, "Awesome... here is a company that finally gets that you do not need to try to push every product you offer all on one page... simple, and easy to use. Very nice." Comcast was looking great to me.

Well, if only Comcast's internal accounts system was overhuled in the same process. It seems to me that all energy was spent rebuilding the site and not enough was put into connecting the site to the account management system.

Instead of making manual payments every month, I decided to register for the automatic bank draft on my Comcast account. Easy enough, right? The no-thinking-automatic-withdraw thing was appealing to me. The thing is that I never got any sort of confirmation. Slightly confused, I just accepted that the payment was going to go through, and probably at the end of the month. So I waited.

Bad decision.

The payment did not go through that month. And I did not make a manual payment. So, even though I registered for the automatic online payment, now I was stuck with my next month's bill being twice as much and, in addition, a nice late fee.

I tend to be understanding in situations like these, so I just thought... ok, fair enough. And the next month, in order to escape from the same thing happening, I decided to make a manual online payment in the amount of almost $300 for two months of service, assuming that this payment would overide the automatic payment. Good, I thought. Next month I will not have to deal with this.

Wrong.

It turns out that Comcat's account system does not automatically flag your account as PAID. I found a nice second payment AUTOMATICALLY drafted at the end of the month.

Total taken by Comcast in one month: $600. ((month 1 + month 2)*2)

Luckily I was able to get Comcast to reverse the automatic payment, but not before it did some damage to my bank account.

Moral of the story: 1. don't trust automatic online payment systems and 2. don't use Comcast

I say number 2 but in reality, they have a monopoly in my area, but that is a whole other blog post. Thus, I will continue to use Comcast, but I will be making manual payments from now on after completely shuting off the automatic draft.

Unfortunately, Comcast does not look too good to me anymore.

Frustrating.