The Major

Blog

  • Letter to Postmaster General John Potter

    I have written the following letter to Postmaster General John Potter as a follow-up to the letter I sent to the Pine Street post office in San Francisco, to which I have not received a response.

    2 December 2005

    Postmaster General John E. Potter
    U.S. Postal Service
    475 L’Enfant Plaza, S.W.
    Washington, D.C. 20260

    Dear Postmaster General Potter:

         First of all, I am writing this letter directly to you because I was unable to find a general mailing address for the USPS on the usps.com website. I find this a bit ironic.
         On November 2, 2005, I sent a letter (included in this mailing) to my local post office, located at 1400 Pine St. San Francisco, CA 94109-9991, concerning a customer service complaint. I have not yet received a response, which only further adds to my evidence of shoddy customer service at this location.
         I understand that the USPS is not motivated by profit, and therefore it may be more difficult to motivate managers to provide good service to the customers. This is the reason I am writing – in the absence of feedback in the form of rising or falling profits, managers have to receive feedback from the customers as far as their performance is concerned.
         I hope you will take action to improve the customer service skills of the employees at this location. I would like to hear back from you or someone at my local post office with details on what actions are being taken to improve customer service.

    Sincerely,
    Stuart Matthews
    2240 Larkin Street
    Apartment 103
    San Francisco, CA 94109

    **** Original letter to SF post office omitted from this post, because it can be found by clicking here. ****

  • Hyphens

    I have many quirks, some bordering on being obsessive-compulsive. One of my quirks is that I am rather anal about hyphen usage (and to a lesser extent, grammar in general). On that note, I admit that I don’t have perfect grammar. But I do have a great desire to learn how to write and speak clearly.

    So it is with deep regret that I annouce that one of my heroes, Ralph Nader, has written an article titled “The Corporate Controlled Media”. Let’s just hope we can blame his webmaster.

    Having said that, I just read the article, and I suggest you do the same. Another great read.

  • Penn Jillette is an Atheist

    I think Penn and I think about atheism a bit differently, but this is still a nice article: There Is No God by Penn Jillette

  • EFF volunteering

    Well I was finally able to hear back from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). I will be volunteering for a few hours today. Hopefully things will go well and I can keep at it.

  • Caring for Your Introvert

    Inside the minds of introverts. A very interesting read.

  • Aftermath of the First Live Mix

    I had my first live mix show tonight, broadcast online on FourMajor Radio. As mentioned in a previous post, I will be doing live shows weekly on Wednesdays from 2200-0000 PST.

    Tonight’s show went OK. I had three listeners (Thanks guys!). Most of the mixes between tracks were either bad or OK, with one “good” mix that I really think I nailed. There were a few hiccups. I had one record skip on me, and had to quickly and messily switch over to the other turntable. On another mix, I got caught rushing back to the beginning of the next track . . . and accidently started the next track at the wrong speed! Oops! Also, the program I was using to rip the stream (streamripper) didn’t work. It said I was capturing the stream, but at the end I was left with a 0 byte file. So, unfortunately there will be no podcast this week. And as I mentioned before, I need to get some more records. I simply run out of good tracks to play in the course of two hours.

    I am really having a great time mixing records. I am looking forward to next week’s broadcast. I really hope you all tune in.

  • Top Websites

    Here is a list of websites that I find to be best for these basic purposes. New tools are constantly coming out that are later and greater than what is currently out, so this is simply a current snapshot.

    weather National Weather Service
    maps/directions Google Maps
    reference Wikipedia
    news Google News
    all-in-one homepage Google Personalized Home
    sports Yahoo Sports

    Do you think I am missing something? I generally give higher points to websites that don’t have moving ads and are easy to use.

  • FourMajor Radio Weekly Shows

    As I showed you all in a previous post, I have obtained some turntables, a mixer, and some records. Well, after a little bit of practice mixing, I am still not all that good, but I think I am getting better.

    I am going to broadcast a live show weekly, starting tonight (2005-11-23) on my Internet radio station FourMajor radio. It will be held every Wednesday night from 2200 – 0000 PST. I will mostly be playing drum & bass and trance, but you might just hear some industrial and rap in there as well. I will broadcast at 160kbps, 128kbps, and 64kbps

    I am also going to be recording all of the shows, and making them available via podcast.

    To listen to the live broadcast you will need a mp3-capable audio player program for your computer and a broadband Internet connection. Please visit FourMajor radio for links to the streams.

    To listen to the podcast, you will need to run a “podcast receiver” such as Juice and add my podcast feed (which I will link to later). You do not need a broadband Internet connection to listen in this way.

    Anyway, I hope at least a couple of you tune in each week. I will be going record shopping soon to expand my collection. As for tonight, I will be running through most of my records to fill the two hours.

  • Yay!

    Ah, life is good!

  • The Search Engine Experiment

    A public experiment discovering which of the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo, or MSN) really offers the best results. By taking the test you also find out which engine you personally prefer (and it’s a blind test, so prejudice won’t effect the outcome).

    read more | digg story

    Evidently I’m a *gasp* Yahoo guy.