Last week I wrote about LA Fitness’s appalling admin and their inability to cancel a gym membership.
After a lot of stress and the threat of legal action, LA Fitness Head Office have finally apologised – to a point.
Despite the fact that we’ve paid them 120, they were willing to refund just £40, because (despite the stupidity of staff at the Epsom branch) we didn’t follow their terms and conditions – despite the fact that the Epsom manager openly admitted that mistakes had been made during the transition from Dragon’s gym to LA Fitness.
So, effectively, LA Fitness have still got the £80 that they claimed we owed them, and caused us a lot of stress with it.
I just hope that ARC Debt Collectors charged them a LOT of money for running crying to them, when they couldn’t even be bothered to send us a personal letter first.
Yes, LA Fitness, you whine on about how we should have sent a recorded delivery cancellation to you. Perhaps you should follow your own ‘advice’ with regards to customer relations.
LA Fitness is one company I hope never to have to deal with again. I suggest you avoid these thieves, too.
Posted in Health, Scams | 102 Comments »
Despite some suggesting that my silence on the issue translates as indifference, I do actually care about the Kathy Sierra web bullying situation. Here’s my response on The Blog Herald.
Posted in Blogging, Internet | 2 Comments »
I’ll admit I occasionally use some of the high profile sites I write for to sound off about something that’s particularly irritating me, though I try to minimise it and hope that it’s in the public interest.
Finally this week I cracked when it comes to igizmodo.com. These sploggers, hiding behind a reasonably professional design (most splogs look like crap) have been ripping content from a whole host of technology blogs and news sites for a long time, and profiting from it. And I’m sick of it.
So I ranted.
Whether anything will come of it, I don’t know, and even if iGizmodo disappear, there are thousands of other sites doing exactly the same thing. It made me feel better, though.
Posted in Blogging | Comments Off
J. Angelo Racoma has written an interesting piece at the Blog Herald asking if you can be sued for tracking your blog’s uptime.
Earlier this month, BlogFlux launched its uptime tracker, which was intended for bloggers to monitor their blog hosts’ uptime. Apparently, hosting company ISPHost.org felt that this was tantamount to an invasion of, or an attack on, their servers. They sent BlogFlux a cease and desist letter.
Sounds ludicrous, but then the ISP in question sounds like a bit of a tin-pot operation. Sure, ISPs have to watch load on their servers, but 144 pings over a 24 hour period really shouldn’t challenge any host, unless they’ve invested 50p in hardware and Net connections.
Posted in Blogging, Internet | Comments Off
I’ve just heard that Linda Jones and Craig McGinty have started a new web site called Freelance Writing Tips.
It includes an interview with Keith Richards by Hunter S Thompson and a debate about whether journalists are getting lazier through using online forums too much.
Linda runs Passionate Media, writes on You’ve Got Your Hands Full, a number of Shiny Media blogs, and has contributed to the Family Relationships blog, so certainly has plenty of experience.
Do take a look and support this new venture.
Posted in Journalism, Media | 1 Comment »
I’ve never used Ruby on Rails, but I know that my generally excellent host TextDrive support it well.
Bruce Tate has written an interesting article: Ruby on Rails case study: ChangingThePresent.org. It’s reasonably technical and project management oriented, but gives some interesting insights into managing a large, socially aware project. Well worth a read for both techies and non-profit developers.
Posted in Charity, Internet, Software | Comments Off
Here’s a word of advice…
If you’re the sort of person who might ever cancel a gym membership (and let’s face it, that’s most people) don’t EVER go to LA Fitness (at least, not the one in Ruxley Lane, Ewell).
Not unless, when you cancel your membership in the way expressly recommended by the (incompetent) manager, you still receive threatening letters from debt collection agencies.
The idiots at LA Fitness Epsom have threatened my wife, without any prior warning, with a debt collection thuggery agency, demanding an £80 payment that was never due.
Added to which, they took at least 2 months’ payment after the original membership was cancelled, before we stemmed the flow of cash by stopping the direct debit from our bank account.
So, don’t EVER join the idiots at LA Fitness. They don’t listen to complaints. They have no system in place. And to be honest, if they can’t handle basic administration, what chance have they dealing with something of the utmost importance: your health?
Thanks for nothing LA Fitness. You’re a bunch of cowboys and you deserve to publicly ridiculed. Hence the post.
Posted in Finance, Health, Scams | Comments Off
Though the apostrophe incident was a tad extreme, it was at least based on the correct principles of English grammar.
One of the new rules to come out in the “Style Guide” is to capitalise the names of seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
If I’d just written that on a blog covered by the new “Style Guide” I’d have been for the gallows. Fortunately, this is my blog.
Nowhere (yet) have I found an authoritative resource that says season names should be capitalised. Nowhere. When I find one, I’ll publish it. I like sticking up for the minority.
The only time I can see that seasons are capitalised is when they form part of a title, like “The Spring 2006 Collection”.
So, for the sake of a little purity (not that my writing is amazing, but I try) I will now be avoiding using the seasons, so that I don’t have to conform to a misplaced rule.
I don’t mind being told when I have made grammatical mistakes when working on someone else’s site, but it would be nice if the dictators used the correct rule book.
Posted in Blogging, language | Comments Off
Jo O’Meara, one of the celebrity contestants cooped up in the Big Brother house earlier this year has hit out at Channel 4 and Endemol’s programme directors, claiming that they made her out to ‘look like some monster’.
“All I wanted to do was relaunch my career and save my home. Instead I was turned into the most hated person in Britain. And for what? Nothing,” she tearfully told the News of the World.
Yes, programme edits can make someone look worse than they are, but the fact is, they can only work with the material they are presented with. If you were made to look like a bully, then that’s because you acted like one.
I’m not sure you’re the most hated person in Britain though. Hopefully people are moving on from it now. Looks like you got your well-paid tabloid interview in just in time, Jo.
Posted in Celebrities | Comments Off
The Biz of Knowledge wants to know who the top 6 most prolfiic bloggers are. Now, I surely know that I’m not one of them, but I find the criteria a little odd all the same.
To even begin to qualify, you need to have 1000 posts on just ONE blog.
This strikes me as odd – the definition of a blogger is not that they have ONE blog only. They may do, but many professional / full-time / ‘prolific’ bloggers have several blogs, each catering to a different niche and/or target audience.
I’ve posted well over 1,000 articles – probably going on for 3,000 articles across the blogosphere – but I don’t think I’ve hit the 1,000 mark on any one blog yet (a couple are close).
Does that mean I’m not prolific? Well, it does by that criteria, though in the last 7 months I’ve posted at least 15 blog posts every weekday, across a number of blogs.
Ahh well.
Posted in Blogging | 1 Comment »
