Small Time

Unsubscribe. Countrywide is doing the annoying hard sell with their email offers.

And you can smell the desperation. I signed up on their awful, confusing, ugly site to pay my mortgage online, and now they’ve signed me up to get emails offering a refi. Sometimes I get two emails a day from them. I can’t tell you how much I love that.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been unsubscribing from email newsletters that I either don’t read or don’t value. I’m tired of the saleman knockin’ at my door.

It’s been a frustrating process at times, and I’m shocked at how poorly some companies handle it.

Countrywide makes you login to unsubscribe. I hate sites that make you do that. Trying to dig up an old username and password from 2005 so that I can unsubscribe takes lots of time and effort. And it pisses me off.

Amazon made me login to unsubscribe, too. But I go to amazon almost every day, and everything is in my keychain, so there was little effort there.

Food Network also sucked. Make me enter my email myself? I hate you. Make me enter it twice, I hate you squared.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Gap.com actually passed with a B+. They prepopulated my email address, and unsubscribing only took two clicks — once in the email itself and one on the landing page. They would have gotten an A if they had linked “unsubscribe” rather than “clicking here”. It’s easier to scan.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I wish there were such a thing as one-click unsubscribe. Does it exist? It’s so easy to unsubscribe from an RSS feed in Google Reader that a couple clicks to unsubscribe from an email newsletter seems like a Herculean feat.

The Post-Birthday World: walk to your bookstore and get it now. Or your library. Either one is fine.

This book is in no way small. It’s a massive tome. Usually I hate the word tome — I think it sounds pretentious. But TOME is the sound the book makes when you set it down, however carefully. All of the pages kind of hum hollowly.

This is the first time in a LONG time, that I’ve stayed up past one to read, in the dark, with the booklight and only the gas fireplace on.

The Post-Birthday World has me in its teeth. I’d never heard of Lionel Shriver before, but thanks to Entertainment Weekly, I now do.

Who ever she is, she’s got it.

Also — Skitch is fantastic. It’s the fastest way to perezhilton the web. I’m excited. It’s gorgeous.

Lichen & Raindeer Saute

Not eating sugar and flour and starch has made all the difference in my life. Must not become that born-again non-sugar-flour-starch-eater that can’t stop talking about my conversion. How boring and creepy!