The fastest rebate processing award goes to ... Tamron USA, Inc

Tamron processed my mail-in rebate in a record breaking time of less than 2 weeks, and left behind a pleasantly surprised, and happy customer!

See, I don't complain all the time ;-)

We need real names please, or at least realistic sounding names!

JavaRanch - Official policy on registered names. What are these people thinking!?

And then there are a bunch of moderators who strictly police the forums to enforce this rule!

According to Dell, the term "Boxing" means...

"...your order is being shipped from our manufacturing facility in Malaysia to our order processing facility in Nashville, TN."

That's what the Dell community forum moderators are saying.

Recommendation for Dell's order status reporting: Less information is sometimes better!

Recently ordered a notebook at dell.com and kept going back to check the order status. They tried to give me plenty of information, but none of that was really useful for me.

At first glance, the order status page looks impressive because it claims to report status at a very fine grained level. For example, you can find out which of the following production stages your order is in:

• Kitting (gathering parts required for the order)
  
• Build
  
• Testing
  
• Boxing (obviously, putting everything in a box!)
  

In my case, the Kitting, Build and Testing phases were completed in less than 1 day after placing the order. But, the order remained in the Boxing phase for 3 days!

Searching Google reveals that this is exactly the case for most other customers.

This makes me conclude, like any average user, that Dell builds fast but is very inefficient in packaging! All because they tried to give out information that is better kept to themselves.

Oh yeah, their Shipping information is no good either. At first, they'll tell you it's been shipped. But, the details will reveal that it is actually travelling from their manufacturing facility to local facility (Why should I care about this?). The shipping method you chose (overnight, 2nd day etc) only applies after it has been shipped again from the local facility.

All they had to tell me was "it's in production" or "it's been shipped, here's the tracking number". That would have conveyed all the information I need as an online customer.

Stupid ideas ultimately get burnt!

Yahoo! News - VeriSign Sued Over Controversial Web Service

When you type in non-existent .com and .net domains into your browser, VeriSign's SiteFinder service hijacks your requests and takes you to an error page hosted on their server. From there, you are encouraged to use VeriSign's search to go wherever you want to go next.

Can't imagine what those high paid executives were thinking when they launched this, but ultimately this is guaranteed to fail. That's what happens when you do stupid things such as alter the DNS design to your own benefit.

How stinking rich are you?

Find out at www.globalrichlist.com how you compare financially to the rest of the world. The result may surprise you!

If you steal it, you buy it!

Innovative notice in a Orlando hotel room.