Want to cancel your Audible.com membership? You'll have to call them

It all started when I got my wife a gift certificate to audible.com for Christmas.

So I'm not really sure how it happened, but at some point in the last few months, I ended up with a premium audible listener membership, billed at a rate of $23 a month. I suppose it's possible that I did an impulse purchase, but that's neither here nor there in this discussion.

I finally got logged in to the point where I could edit my account details (long story, but basically I had to clear my cookies due to the fact that it kept dumping me right back to the step of "confirming a purchase" I had apparently started - months later). In the account details control panel:

There didn't appear to be any way to cancel my membership.

There didn't appear to be any way to remove my credit card information from my account.

After I pretty much resolved and mentally prepared for the fact this was going to involve a phone call (which to me instantly involves long hold times with bad music, explaining, and convincing, not to mention finding the back door on the website that has the cust. srvc. phone #).

To my surprise, the phone # was easily located on the site, and the phone call went directly to a human. Once I was on with someone, he canceled my membership, refunded my last month's charge, and removed my credit card info from my account. It was a relatively painless experience, actually.

The only way it could have been easier is if I didn't have to call them in the first place.

FAIL: The Snowdrift 2000

I'm sure everyone has thought about trying this at some point, right? Come on, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Fix for X-Lite -> Asterisk DTMF issue

If you use X-Lite with an Asterisk system, as I do, you may notice DTMF codes sometimes don't work after the call has been placed. This results in difficulty when entering pin codes, dialing an extension on another system, etc.

Here's the quick fix inside X-Lite:

Go to menu -> Advanced System Settings -> DTMF Settings

-Change to DTMF Force Send In Band: Yes
-Change to DTMF Tone Length in Samples: 4960

Reconnect the call and try it.

Welcome From FreshUbuntu Podcast

Just wanted to post a shout out to anyone visiting from the FreshUbuntu podcast!

As Harlem mentioned, I have been working on putting together some theme music. The first track I sent over was actually a draft of the title track that will be on my upcoming demo album, called "6 Inches From the Curb". Most of the music on that album will be original jazz and funk, and will feature "solo bass" work (to be clear, solo in the sense that the tracks are predominantly drums and bass guitar, with little or no other instruments). My goal for this demo is to practice my new skills with multitrack production, and to demonstrate my musical concepts to musicians I will collaborate with on future projects (stay tuned!)

The tune was a little rough - I have decided to put together something more reflective of my skills, and more specific to podcast use. Tune into the next FreshUbuntu to hear it!

Rant on G-mail's Supposed "Send Mail As" Feature

Gmail: In development for over
4.109578 years (and counting)

Despite my having sworn off third-party e-mail providers, I broke down and moved my e-mail account to Gmail recently. I was under the impression I could make the transition without anyone noticing that I was even using Gmail. I set up my personal address to forward to my Gmail account, and then set up the Gmail "Send Mail As" feature to send mail from my personal address.

As many users have found out, this is not as seamless as Google makes it out to be. This has been bothering me as well. Gmail doesn't change the sender address, only the reply-to address. Apparently this is because mail coming from a Gmail server (and thus being different from the sender domain) has a tendency to trip spam filters.

I did find this note at the bottom of the Gmail instructions:

" Note: when you're sending with a different 'From:' address, your Gmail address will still be included in your email header's sender field, to help prevent your mail from being marked as spam. Most email clients don't display the sender field, though some versions of Microsoft Outlook may display "From yourusername@gmail.com on behalf of customaddress@mydomain.com."

In practice, contrary to the above note's claim, all of the e-mail clients I have experience with just show the message to be from yourusername@gmail.com . A reply is sent to your custom From: address, but this doesn't really help you much. In fact it's really just more confusing to the end user, as they deal with 2 different e-mail addresses when replying to you. Not to mention it's your Gmail address that gets auto-added to their address

What should Gmail do? They should do as the feature name suggests, change the From: address and let me worry about the spam ramifications of that. I am the true owner of the domain I am trying to send from, and I can create an SPF record which will show Gmail as a valid mail host for messages coming from my address.


Hm... what should I expect from a "Beta" service? Gee, when(ever) Gmail is done it's going to be a good product.

My Godaddy Hosting Cancellation Survey

When I cancelled my Godaddy Virtual Server, they asked me to fill out a cancellation survey. Here's what I wrote:

1. I had my virtual server with godaddy for several years. The whole time, the machine suffered from lag. This was evident as a delay when serving web pages, using Plesk to administer the machine, and severe (at times up to 20 seconds) latency when typing over SSH. I opened a ticket about this and was told it must be my connection. Apparently it wasn't, as the new service I am using doesn't have this problem.

2. SMTP - The godaddy mail relays are constantly DNS blacklisted because many of the servers are being used to send spam. I opened a ticket about this and no one got back to me. Can't really blame them.

3. While Plesk made administration easy, it was extremely slow and prevented me from being able to install other programs or keep the machine up to date with package tools, such as yum.

4. There is no OS upgrade path without having to reprovision the server.

5. I found a better deal - not the least of which is cheaper, faster, better administration tools, and an SLA that doesn't cater to spammers.

The 10 Elements of Music

Bass guitar virtuoso Victor Wooten performed a clinic (view it on www.bassplayer.tv) in which he taught that there are 10 elements of music that you should know how to use. (in no particular order):

1. Notes
2. Rhythm
3. Feel
4. Dynamics
5. Technique
6. Tone
7. Phrasing
8. Listening
9. Articulation
10. Space