Anyone who designs emails knows that the current landscape of compatibility and rendering from the many different email clients makes the Netscape/IE browser wars of the late 90s look like a sandbox skirmish. Many of us have come to terms with having to continue to use antiquated <font> and <table> based HTML to get a consistent rendering in email, and with the regression of Outlook (now using MS Word for rendering instead of Internet Explorer), that consistency is becoming less and less reliable.

Thankfully, someone has stood up and said enough. An advocacy group has just launched a site to follow in the footsteps of the Web Standards Project, to try to educate designers about best practices and to reign in the multitude of email clients (Outlook, Eudora, Hotmail, Gmail, YahooMail, AOLMail, etc.) to agree to support these common standards and practices.

Best of luck Email Standards Project, you have my support.

I had two cards with points from the ESPNZone, one with one single point, the other with 74 points. I asked the clerk to merge the two cards together. He stated that was impossible. I submit that that is technological impasse is rather convenient for ESPN.

Because, I can not move that one point onto the card with 74 points, there are only two options:

1. It is never used, which means a small profit for ESPN Zone, or
2. I add points to the card to bring it back up to the level where I can play off all the points, which is new profit for ESPN Zone.

I recognize that a great deal of the gift card value for businesses comes from the small change that gets left behind, and if I, the customer, neglect to zero out the card, that is my own doing. But at least the legitimate retailer provides the opportunity to zero out the card. Every major retailer from clothing to bookstores to supermarkets will let you run off the remainder of a gift card and subsidize the remainder with cash or charge. ESPN Zone, on the other hand, does not give the customer any options, it just takes our money. When I asked for a clarifying statement, the clerk at the Washington DC ESPN Zone simple said, “This ain’t the Metro, you can’t trade in your cards here. What you got is what you got.”

I got hosed.

The founding brothers where I work used to have their own weekly call-in show on NPR where they learned the art of answering the caller’s question:

• Keep it brief,
• Answer the question and
• Move on.

Their reasoning was that whatever question a single individual brings to the table is typically relevant only to that person and a handful of others. Therefore, to avoid losing the majority of the group, you address their question, but not expand or pontificate, just answer it to the best of your ability and move on to the next question.

For years, my Delaware Shakespeare Festival had a central phone number, but did not have a central office or operator. So many calls got lost or responded too well too late. It was an unfortunate shortcoming that we could not find a (cost free) means of forwarding that one number to a different or even multiple other phone numbers to actually answer.

A few years late, here is GrandCentral.com. This service does exactly what I was looking for five years ago, it will give me a phone number to give out, and that number will ring any or all of my other phones (home, cell, work, wife’s cell, etc). I can program which numbers to ring and when. I am still kicking the tires on this service, but if it works as well as I anticipate, I think this is the death nail for my home phone, which I pay $35 a month to essentially have a non-cell phone number.

They are only in Beta, but I have a few “Recommend a Friend” opportunities available if you are interested.