Good Morning Internet

A few years ago, I started buy­ing glasses online and haven’t looked back since. The prices are far cheaper than what I had found in doc­tors’ offices or eye­wear store­fronts, and the qual­ity has been just as high. An excel­lent resource for research and ven­dor reviews is the blog Glassy Eyes, which turned me on to a cou­ple of great online retailers.

This time, I tried some­thing new and went with a com­pany called Warby Parker, which I first heard of from Put This On. Warby Parker’s selec­tion is great and very well-priced at $95. I picked out a pair of frames called Hux­ley, entered my pre­scrip­tion, and checked out.

Within an hour, I got a phone call from Brian at Warby Parker. He believed I might have made a mis­take when enter­ing my pre­scrip­tion because of the huge dif­fer­ence between my right and left eyes (+0.75 sphere and +1.25 cylin­der in the right, +5.00 sphere and +1.50 in the left). He said they rarely see a dis­crep­ancy that large between eyes, which I can believe. I’m special.

No, I assured him, my left eye is actu­ally that much weaker than my right eye, but thanks for point­ing out my short­com­ings. (My exact words were, “Thanks for double-checking!”) I’d never had a com­pany con­firm my pre­scrip­tion before, so I was simul­ta­ne­ously bewil­dered, embar­rassed, and impressed with their swift attention.

Brian emailed me a cou­ple hours later. He said it would cost an addi­tional $30 for the high-index lenses needed. That’s a pretty stan­dard charge, and the new total ($125) was still far lower than what it would be at a glasses shop, so I agreed.

A lit­tle over a week later, I received a voice­mail from Katie at Warby Parker. She apol­o­gized for the delay, but they were finally giv­ing up. My pre­scrip­tion was out of their lab’s range.

How­ever, In order to apol­o­gize for the delay and ulti­mate inabil­ity to ful­fill my order, they sent me the the Hux­leys for free so I can have the lenses made by another com­pany. A cou­ple days later, the frames arrived via Pri­or­ity Mail, and they looked fan­tas­tic. The hinges felt sturdy, the plas­tic durable, and they looked sharp on my big head.

Though they weren’t able to com­plete my order, Warby Parker gave me some of the most per­sonal, atten­tive cus­tomer ser­vice I’ve ever encoun­tered. I always felt like some­one was han­dling my pre­scrip­tion with care and that their pri­mary con­cern was mak­ing me happy. I don’t remem­ber the last time a com­pany made me feel that way. Swoon.

If you’re look­ing for a pair of glasses, I highly rec­om­mend you check them out. Their frames are of excel­lent qual­ity, and you will have peo­ple like Brian and Katie work­ing to make sure your pre­scrip­tion is done right. My only hope is that they can part­ner with a lab capa­ble of ful­fill­ing stronger pre­scrip­tions for those of us with weak eyes.

So, does any­body know a good place that can put lenses into exist­ing frames?

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Update: It appears Apple has resolved the issue. A few hours after writ­ing this post, my mom tried the codes again and they worked. She’s the proud owner of “Broth­ers” by The Black Lips and “Sea of Cow­ards” by The Dead Weather. Still, it would have been nice for her to have them a week ago, as planned.

Last week, I pur­chased two gift codes for albums from the iTunes Store. I slipped them into a card and gave them to my mother as part of her birth­day present. I thought it would be fun for her to type in the codes, down­load the albums instantly, and sync them to her devices.

So you can imag­ine how upset I was when she politely men­tioned to me over the week­end that she had trou­ble redeem­ing the codes. Switch­ing into Mac Geek Son Mode, I hopped onto her com­puter and tried it out. I got the same generic error she did: “The iTunes Store could not process your request. Please try again later.”

My mom had been try­ing “again later” for days, and got the same unhelp­ful error each time. I double-checked my receipt and check card. The trans­ac­tion was processed and Apple took my money, so why wouldn’t the codes work?

On Fri­day, I sent an email to iTunes tech­ni­cal sup­port. Two days later, I got a response from a rep­re­sen­ta­tive who apol­o­gized for the delay (they nor­mally claim a 24-hour turn­around on sup­port requests) and issued me a two-song credit to my account to make up for it. Okay, that’s nice, but it doesn’t address the prob­lem of get­ting music to my mom.

The tech sup­port rep went on:

After research­ing fur­ther, I tried to open it from my end and I received an error as well. I was then informed by my senior super­vi­sor that there is an issue with redeem­ing gift codes and the Apple is cur­rently work­ing toward a res­o­lu­tion for the issue you have reported.

If you do not pre­fer to wait for the issue to be resolved, which I can’t pre­dict when will that be. Please reply to this email and I will cer­tainly refund the gifts back to your credit card. Thank you for your time and I look for­ward to your reply, Gavin.

Gift codes don’t work, sup­port can’t pre­dict when the prob­lem will be resolved, and the best solu­tion Apple can offer is a refund? Isn’t “Gift This Album” sup­posed to be a major fea­ture of the store? It’s unac­cept­able that the top music retailer in the US can’t han­dle a request this simple.

I wrote back, ask­ing if I could get replace­ment codes, or if there was any pos­si­ble way I could get these two albums out of the store and into my mom’s iTunes col­lec­tion. While I await a reply, my lovely mom is waits patiently for these two birth­day presents.

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On the way home from cel­e­brat­ing my mom’s birth­day on Tues­day, we were treated to a gor­geous sun­set, cour­tesy a series of thun­der­storms that moved through the area. As it got dark, this tow­er­ing thun­der­head put on a breath­tak­ing dis­play of cloud-to-cloud light­ning. It reminded me a lit­tle of a human brain, lit up in dif­fer­ent sec­tions as elec­tric­ity coursed through it. It seemed very much alive.

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Over at Daily Sun­rise, I’ve taken a new sun­rise photo every morn­ing since the begin­ning of May. Now that I know how far the sun trav­els along the hori­zon, I picked out the best cam­era angle to cap­ture its move­ment from now until the Win­ter sol­stice in six months.

Yes, I think I’ve turned into the world’s first sun­rise nerd.

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I started two exper­i­ments last week, which I talked about on my last pod­cast episode. The goals are to go a month with­out eat­ing out or watch­ing tele­vi­sion. The ideas seemed sim­ple and I hoped they would save me money and open up hours of time for cre­ativ­ity and productivity.

Over the course of one week­end, I’ve already bro­ken all my rules. This is going to be a lot harder than I thought.

I think I picked the absolute worst pos­si­ble set of 30 days to try these exper­i­ments. Almost imme­di­ately, I added an excep­tion to the “no TV” rule for World Cup games. I still think that’s a valid excep­tion, see­ing how the World Cup comes around once every four years. But that some­how acted as a gate­way to me watch­ing five episodes of Mad Men this week­end, too.

Simul­ta­ne­ously, I failed on the “don’t eat out” front. Like the World Cup, I was lured away from my goal (Ha!) of avoid­ing restau­rants and sav­ing money by Dukem, an amaz­ing Ethiopian restau­rant in Mt. Ver­non. I jus­ti­fied the expense and vio­la­tion of my newly-formed rule with two excuses. First, I was out with friends. Sec­ond, it was Fri­day and the first day of the World Cup. If those weren’t rea­sons to cel­e­brate, I rea­soned, noth­ing was.

The flood­gates opened. It was Hon­fest in my neigh­bor­hood all week­end, and my willpower suc­cumbed to the food ven­dors. Guilty and slightly depressed about fail­ing, but also angry at myself for choos­ing the most incon­ve­nient month for these exper­i­ments, I went home and sunk a few more hours into World Cup view­ing, men­tally re-writing the rules to add an “except on week­ends” clause to my rules.

But this morn­ing, with renewed resolve, I’m tack­ling my goals again. I will bring my lunch with me to work every day. Episodes of Mad Men and the queue of TV shows I have lined up on Net­flix will have to wait. I’m going to cook for myself every night. The take-out menus have been placed out of sight to pre­vent fur­ther lapses.

Sure, I stum­bled hard this first week­end. But for the rest of the 30 days, I’m going to buckle down, focus, and see if I can spend more time cre­at­ing things while wast­ing less money and time.

Except for World Cup games. I’d hate myself for skip­ping those.

Oh, and new episodes of Futu­rama, of course.

I’m screwed.

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So instead here are three four videos.

Update: If, for some rea­son you’ve deprived your­self of the joy that is Futu­rama, I added a fourth recap video that should get you up to speed. Because I love you.

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I have a brand-new open­ing to my show fea­tur­ing America’s Radio Sweet­heart (and Sound of Young Amer­ica host) Jesse Thorn! It makes me sound far more pro­fes­sional than I deserve.

Also dis­cussed in this episode:

• There is a recy­cling bin thief on the loose in Baltimore!
• For the next month, I’ve chal­lenged myself to cook at home and not eat in restau­rants or order take-out.
• Why stop there? For the next month, I’ve cut myself off from tele­vi­sion. Instead, I’ll try to use that time to be more cre­ative? Will it work? Tune in next week to hear how crazy I am!

Enjoy!

Down­load the MP3 here.

Sub­scribe with iTunes or RSS

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Look, Com­cast, we need to talk.

It’s been a wild few years. I invited you into my home at a time when I lived in a small base­ment stu­dio apart­ment and needed Inter­net access. I had been with DSL for a few months, but we both knew I was just set­tling. You promised me more chan­nels than I had ever seen in one place, many in star­tling, breath­tak­ing clar­ity. I ditched Ver­i­zon and signed up with you and your attrac­tive pro­mo­tional rate.

I was so naïve back then.

Let’s face the facts. I tried to love your dig­i­tal cable ser­vice. I pre­tended not to care when the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel dropped out, some­times for days, even when you tried to blame it on me.

Maybe I should have lis­tened to my friends. They tried to warn me about you, but I couldn’t resist the way you streamed Net­flix in HD.

Over the course of our rela­tion­ship, you sent me five faulty cable boxes. Five! Who does that? When­ever some­one came to swap equip­ment, you charged me thirty bucks. It should have only taken me two or three ser­vice appoint­ments to real­ize you had no respect for me.

Also, your embar­rass­ingly out-of-date user inter­face should have been a major red flag.

Oh, remem­ber when I moved to a new apart­ment in a dif­fer­ent neigh­bor­hood? You acted like you didn’t even know me and raised my rates with­out warn­ing. Sure, I tried to call and talk to you about it, but you put me on hold. For over an hour. I believed you when you said my call was impor­tant to you, but now I’m not so sure.

Don’t get me wrong, we had some great times, too! You still have the fastest broad­band in the city. Remem­ber all those movie trailer down­loads? The hours spent play­ing Xbox? The HD movie rentals? They wouldn’t have been the same with­out you. And you have a great crew of peo­ple on Twit­ter cov­er­ing for you.

I’m a dif­fer­ent per­son now. Insanely fast down­stream used to be enough for me, but now I need some­thing more. I need reli­a­bil­ity and con­sis­tency. I need to know my rates won’t change arbi­trar­ily. I need some­one I can count on for Inter­net access with­out always try­ing to turn it into a Triple Play.

I’d ask you to please not call with your “spe­cial offers”, and I’d ask you to not mail me glossy ads of happy-looking peo­ple enjoy­ing your ser­vices. But I know you’ll do those things anyway.

I’m box­ing up your things, and I’ll drop them by your office on my way home from work. Hope­fully, we can end this with civil­ity and with­out mak­ing a scene.

But if you charge me with a “Break-Up Fee”, I’m call­ing the police.

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