Matt Ellsworth – SEO Consultant & Internet Marketer

We found this small piece of furniture on BedBathBeyond.com that we thought would go great for a little piece to have in the corner with some wine glasses and something nice on top.

Ordered it about a week ago, and it arrived today. The box was really quite damaged – apparently Bed Bath & Beyond doesn’t ship items with packaging they just throw the item in the truck. Macy’s however has shipped everything in a box even if the item comes in a box – so you have some extra packaging.

After the pictures were taken of the box, we opened it up and started putting it together. The directions are just horrendous. A diagram with no lines showing you what goes were, nor anything about what order to do anything. I’ve put together my fair share of put together furniture and this is by far the worse! The furniture from www.ikea.com/ has awesome directions with neat cartoons.

We found out that one of the drawer fronts was broken – where you have to attach the screw – so we set that aside. Continued putting it together – the back of the drawer has no pre drilled holes – so you are kind of guessing on getting it all lined up.

When it came time to attach the side to the base – the cam locks are made out of such cheap metal that when you turn them (so they lock into the wood) – the cam locks bent instead of going into the wood. These are definitely the cheapest quality cam locks ever – I highly doubt they would have held up even if you could get it together.

So now I have a partially put together Wine Bar Pacifica that I have no clue what to do with, I will never be able to get it back into the box. So I guess I’ll call them tomorrow and see what they want me to do with this hunk of junk that they sold us. The packaging from this by the way was excessive and made with lots of that cheap Styrofoam that gets the little white bits all over your house.

Overall this experience has made me think twice or maybe more before ever ordering any sort of furniture from Bed Bath & Beyond. Frankly the really cheap stuff from Christmas Tree Stores has been of way better quality than this.

Filed under: Off topic by Matt Ellsworth

Filed under: Matt by Matt Ellsworth

Mens warehouse sent me the wrong size tux from what i ordered. I guess their five percent fail rate is correct.

Filed under: Off topic by Matt Ellsworth

Recently contacted Enterprise Rent A Car to get a car for an upcoming trip. I had to call three locations to find one that even had cars in stock – the other two didn’t, but the website said they did. That is something that the first guy said is "above his pay grade".

The third location then explained that if you do not want to use a credit card – and would rather use a debit card, then you have to provide them with your utility bill and pay stub – and have the address match your license. In addition they put a $300 hold on the debit card plus the cost of your rental.

Clearly something has gone horribly wrong in this country when companies are penalizing people and businesses who choose to pay for what they need with cash / debit card instead of making the credit card companies even more money. Requesting that people show a rental car company their utility bill and pay stub is terrible. Shame on Enterprise Rent A Car.

It’s not a matter of not having a credit card, its the point that you should be able to pay with cash, credit or debit without having to give someone a utility bill and a pay stub.

Hopefully other rental car companies are not this rude to their cash paying customers.

Filed under: Matt by Matt Ellsworth

I’ve been helping a friend try to recover a stolen domain name (was at GoDaddy) for the last week. Someone logged into the account, changed the email, and all the information on the account to something in India.

Then they transferred the domain name out of the account to a protected name service at name.com

That was over 3 months ago. GoDaddy never emailed to say "are you sure you want to change all your account info, or email address, or transfer this domain". Instead he was left blind sided by all this. Until the hacker changed his password – then he realized that something was up.

When he did discover that all this had happened – and contacted GoDaddy – they said that there was nothing they could do.

I’m pretty stumped as to how all this happened without GoDaddy so much as notifying the customer that their account information had been stolen. But this certainly doesn’t make me think too highly of GoDaddy.

I am still hopeful that they will be able to recover the domain name.

He spoke with someone who looked into it all and found out that the registrant info was never changed before they transferred the domain. This was likely because of the icann rules that say that you can’t transfer a domain name within 60 days of changing the registrant info.

Filed under: Matt by Matt Ellsworth

Yicrosoft Directory is the contest term for an seo contest sponsored by SEoNoob. We decided to enter our site www.yicrosoft-directory.biz/ just to see what happens with it. So far over night the number of results for this term have gone from 10 to 420 in Google. Should be an interesting contest!
Mobile post sent by mjesales using Utterz.  Replies.

Filed under: Matt by Matt Ellsworth

I just bought a vehicle with GM’s OnStar System installed and it came with a 1 year subscription. I’ve had some privacy concerns in the past about Onstar however, I spend a lot of time in the middle of nowhere – so I thought it would be nice.

I called and setup Onstar on Friday and yesterday they sent me an email with my car information including the mileage, tire pressure, etc about my vehicle. I went to the website to login and it said that it couldn’t find my account number.

So I did what it said – called OnStar Service and Support. I was directed to someone and after a 10 minute phone call it was determined that I could not login to my account because it was too new. The Onstar Rep told me that it can take 3 weeks to get my online account setup.

They said that because OnStar works with a third party vendor for the OnStar website, it can take three weeks for the account to get setup. I have no idea why this is going to take three weeks to create a login unless they are sending the information via smoke signals.

We build websites all the time that have databases that need to be sync’d up and it doesn’t take three weeks like OnStar does. Instead its done either instantly or nightly.

After questioning the OnStar Rep as to why it was going to take three weeks for them to create my account, I got nothing other than the standard response of that is what the third party said it would take.

As to why OnStar can send me an insane amount of information about my car – including my car’s phone number – it can’t create a login for a website in less than three weeks. This is why OnStar went from being really cool to really bad.

Filed under: Off topic by Matt Ellsworth

I never thought i would be happy to swap an audi for a chevy. But i am thrilled about it and wish i did it sooner.

Update 2011:
sure it was nice at first… but the brakes had issues until we put after market ones on (3 different dealers couldn’t figure it out). The emission sensors started to fail around 3 years. The door locks have issues, and the heat doesn’t work when the car is idling (you have to be moving). Overall it’s a pretty poorly built piece of american engineering. It runs like a tank in the snow though.

after seeing all of the issues with onstar and their privacy issues, still makes me question whose running govstar.

Filed under: Matt by Matt Ellsworth

Reading the 4 hour work week
while waiting in the waiting room and im shocked at how much i like it. You should read it.

Filed under: Matt by Matt Ellsworth

clipped from www.suckypoems.com Note: I was just thinking of the song American Pie and the following just came out in the last few minutes. Must be my constant thinking about one day being financially free and kicking back. So bye-bye to the month of July No vacation at my occupation Because I’m one of the new guys I work 100 hours per week and then start to cry Singin’ this is how my social life died This is how my social life died

Filed under: Matt by Matt Ellsworth