President Milt Hull opened the April 18 meeting by showing slides of former meetings, taken about ten years ago by Mark Naber, and thanked Mark for doing at least ten years' work. One of the pictures was of Bob Fritz, who died in Folsom Lake about three weeks ago. He got Milt named to the Advisory Committee of American River College, where he still is, and on the Advisory Committee at Cosumnes College. Milt last saw him less than two months ago. He will be missed a lot.
Diana DeMuth, Membership Director: We're doing really well, and it's very rewarding to see people renew their membership, because we really do have a lot of benefits. I encourage you to invite your friends. As publicity coordinator, I also get our news into the different newspapers around town. A lot of people swear by our mentor program. At our last Steering Committee meeting, we reported that our membership went up from the previous month. We think reducing our membership cost helped quite a bit. If you have any e-mail changes, please send them to me.
Future Meetings
Ken Hopkins: Next month Franklin will show us the eBook, which is bigger than a Palm, to let you read books. So you could read Sacra Blue in Acrobat format. The second speaker will be Mark Epley, the CEO of LapLink. At one of his earlier presentations here, he pretended to blow up a computer and set off a smoke detector. When it went off, Milt ran out with a bucket that Mark thought was water, but turned out to be torn-up paper. June is Microsoft's Office XP demo, so we will see it right after it is released. At the same meeting we intend another handheld demonstration. July will bring Ztrace, bringing us laptop-tracking software, which embeds itself on your hard drive and if your laptop is stolen, you just report it and they take it from there. The next time it goes online, they get the phone number and you can call the police or go get your laptop back. Even if they format the drive, it's still there. It's in the partition. We will also have Gene Barlow showing the latest DriveImage. August and September are still open. In October we have an eCommerce presentation.
Milt: If you want to register for the Microsoft Xtreme event on June 2, on their Web site find "Norcal events and Sacramento."
Sacra Blue
Tom Anderson: This month's issue of Sacra Blue is 44 pages. We have an obituary of Bob Fritz and memories of people who knew him. Tony Barcellos was his colleague at American River College, and Mark Naber studied under him. We have a piece by one of PC World's contributing editors, Steve Bass, on protecting your privacy online and how to deal with cookies. We've got excerpts from The New Webmaster's Guide to Front Page, and all our usual game, book and product reviews. The Deals Guy has special deals for members. On the Click Here guide to sites, there's one called Where's George. If you put in the serial numbers of the dollar bills in your pocket it will tell you where they have been before and you can put in ones that haven't been traced before and they will keep track of them as they move around the country. If you're a chocolate freak, there's a Chocolate Registry where you can list your favorite kinds of chocolate that you want to get for gifts. I also found Agentland, which has more than 100 intelligent agents that will do things on the Internet for you—shopping bots and things like that.
Ken: We have finally gotten all the back issues of Sacra Blue on a CD and as soon as it's checked for accuracy I'll have it mastered and you will have a CD that has all past issues and an index.
Milt: People crave chocolate because of a chromium and vernadium deficiency. Iron, too. I got that from a book by a physician.
Rebates
Brian Barch: About a year and a half ago I came here and asked how many were having trouble getting their rebates. There were a lot of hands. I set the subject aside for a while, and stopped going to certain stores.
Recently I started getting teased by the rebates and went into Circuit City and got smarter about proof that I had mailed my rebates. I decided that for anything over $20, I would get from the Post Office a Certificate of Mailing that costs 75 cents. There's no way the people who get your letter know you have done this. It's not like registered or certified mail. I sent my rebates off and updated my rebate tracking database.
I also deposit my rebates and itemize my deposits to have a second check on whether I received my rebate or not. These three Circuit City rebates were all to be mailed on or before January 21, which I did. Lo and behold, I got back a letter saying I hadn't mailed it on time. Now, for me, it would be very easy to get my money back, but that's not good enough any longer. It doesn't hurt the companies any to occasionally pay off a customer. Sure, times are tough, but it seems we are being taken advantage of. So let me quickly run through what you can do to help yourself, and I'll write an article for Sacra Blue with perhaps links to a standard spreadsheet anyone can use.
I'm thinking about some kind of class-action lawsuit. Just to give some news: Iomega is being sued by the United States of America for not giving promised rebates on their Zip, Ditto and Jaz discs in the promised time, and for a lot of other things.
Where to Get Info
Most of this information, by the way, comes from the Federal Trade Commission web site, just search under rebate. Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard settled misleading claims for Pocket PC, so they're under cease-and-desist orders for promising built-in wireless access to the Internet and e-mail anytime and anywhere, because you have to buy a lot of extra stuff to do that.
Another document states: "FCC halts domain name scam." The agency estimates that, at a minimum, 20,000 consumers have been victims. Evidently unsolicited faxes have claimed an identical domain name application by a third party, then say you'd better hurry and re-register this additional thing or you'll miss out. Umax promised rebates on their Astro 1220P and 1220S, and in many instances purchasers received the rebates one to five months late.
Again, there are rules on how businesses must operate. I want to explain in my article what some of these rules are, because we need to start enforcing them. While we are a small group here, statistics prove that if you go to a store and complain, they know you are one of 20 who have a right to complain. So this is tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, that are tied up in scams.
Some Legal Notes
This is not me saying these things, it is the government, so I'm not committing slander. Just so you know a couple of terms: California Civil Code 1770 talks about unfair and deceptive acts and practices, includes advertising goods and services with intent not to supply reasonably expected demand, unless the advertisement disclosed limited availability. And disseminating an unsolicited pre-recorded message by telephone without an unrecorded natural voice first announcing the call. I used to respond to all of those, and give my name as James, just waiting for someone to call me, so I would know where they got my name. Nobody ever called, so the problem is they do these things and don't follow up. They irritate you and don't even try to sell you anything. (Laughter) The way many companies get around the rules is that many are calling from out of state.
Some of the companies will not make good on rebates if you are not in their database. CompUSA will make good for those you have reasonably tried to collect on.
One of the reasons I ran into frustration with a rebate is the company that handles it wants you to punch in this code and that code and the UPC code, and all this other stuff and I always gave up. I could get my $70 back, but my point is that it's no risk to them. And—this is another aside—there are three major credit reporting agencies, one of which is Trans Union. An April 16 release from the Federal Trade Commission says, "Trans Union must stop illegal sales of consumer reports to target marketers."
The bottom line is that Trans Union calls their database of your consumer information and, say you have a credit line of over $10,000, says "This guy has a credit line of over $10,000." There is a cease and desist order, but most of these penalties are a slap on the hand. Very few involve fines. The ones I like are the class action lawsuits, so I'd like to encourage you to keep records. Do the photocopying, get the proof of mailing, and when these things happen, you have some clout.
Are Rebates Worth It?
Audience: I never buy anything with a rebate. If they can't give me a fair price, I don't need it.
Brian: I don't disagree with you. The end result of this I'd like to see is that we put enough pain in the rebate process for these people to stop doing it and sell things for the price they should sell them. Unless they get hurt, they won't put things right. They pay out ten cents on the dollar at most, probably less.
Audience: My suggestion, what I normally do when sending in for a rebate, is to send enclosed all the requested items stapled to the letter. The fact that my letterhead shows I'm an attorney may help, also. (Laughter)
Brian: That's great, too, but I still look at it like I can get my money, but the industry as a whole is playing games that I'm not willing to continue to accept. Thank you. (Applause)
Other Business
Ken: We are doing two events with KVIE, one is this weekend, the Art Auction. We're not taking bids but running the computer, typing in the highest bid number so that it shows up on the scoreboard. The other one is June 2, also on Milt's birthday, a KVIE pledge period. We need 25 volunteers for that.
Milt: We are selling some disks, the APCUG compact discs that are filled with tons of shareware, for $5, and that will save you lots of download time. The latest version of WinZip, ftp, Winsock, everything you can think of.
