There is no way to report a delivery failure on your web site. Your so-called help page, Find a missing package that shows as delivered basically says “look around, maybe it will turn up”, and “wait 36 hours, just in case”.

What it does not say is what to do after 36 hours.

I had three packages scheduled for delivery on Sunday. Two of them were oversized, and were brought to my front door, at precisely the time recorded on the USPS tracking page. The third, purportedly delivered at the same time into the locked mailbox across the street, wasn’t there.

The USPS web site has a form for reporting missing packages, but it only promises that they’ll respond to the ticket in a few days. And, sure enough, all I got was a voicemail saying “hey, our driver scanned it as delivered into your mailbox, so if you don’t see it, tell Amazon it was lost”. He left a callback number, but didn’t answer, and his voicemail is full. No surprise there.

Going back to the Amazon help page, it turns out that if you scroll down from the useless help message and redundant video, there’s a ‘Contact Us’ button that opens a chat session with someone in India. He didn’t seem surprised to learn that USPS lost a package, refunded it, and threw in an extra $5 for the inconvenience.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it ended up in someone else’s mailbox, but because people do things like go to work, I can’t just go door-to-door asking about it and expect results. Nothing expensive or time-critical, just Yet Another Reason I wish Amazon didn’t use USPS.

Please stop putting things in the “New Releases” recommendation list three months before they’re released. This has been showing up on my lists for weeks, and not only does the Kindle edition not come out until September, the paperback edition doesn’t come out until December.

No idea how this ties into “Cycling”. Unless she’s a personal trainer.

Also, what have I purchased that made you think a “Cycling” category would be a good set of recommendations?

Then again…

I use Amazon’s RedHat-based Linux distribution to run this site in their cloud, with Nginx as the main web server, and Lighttpd for CGI-ish things that are reverse-proxied by Nginx.

Amazon’s been pretty good at maintaining the RPMs, to the point that I don’t worry much about running “yum update” and rebooting at frequent intervals, although I do update my test instance before the real one.

So it was not pleasant to go through a typical update, surf to my site, and find the Lighttpd default page instead of my blog. Whoever packaged up the latest release had it overwrite /etc/rc.d/init.d/lighttpd, blowing away my configuration and replacing it with the default one. And it started up before Nginx, so it claimed the ports.

(and before you ask, I would have put my customizations in /etc/sysconfig/lighttpd if the script had been written in a way that allowed those particular changes; the workaround is going to be to copy it to a new name and disable the original)

Fortunately I keep all configs under source control, so I simply reverted that file and restarted everything, but it’s still annoying.

Unrelated, tomorrow there’ll be a double feature: terrible parody song lyrics with matching cheesecake!

Should I point out that I can buy three singles for less than the price of the two-pack?

Unlike last time, you at least did the math to make sure I know the 6-pack’s a ripoff…

[this late-night blog post brought to you by a blown transformer that took out power to my neighborhood for three hours tonight…]

There’s one thing you could add to your web site that would vastly increase my shopping satisfaction: a checkbox to exclude randomly-named Chinese knockoff products with obviously phony 5-star reviews.

Here are the “brands” of the top-rated (“4 Stars & Up”, with Prime!) handheld vacuum cleaners. In order:

1. KITHELP
2. MOOSOO
3. HOKEKI
4. Onshowy
5. Holife
6. Homasy
7. WELIKERA
8. Kimitech
9. Kimitech
10. GOOVI
11. Dibea
12. NOVETE
13. Cofuture
14. PHYSEN
15. MECO
16. ONSON
17. VacLife
18. LOZAYI
19. Hikeren
20. Dibea
21. Holife
22. NOVETE
23. AUELEK
24. Aiskki
25. Kimitech
26. zswell
27. EMHFLYFN
28. TopWolf
29. Bissell
30. Shark
31. Shark
32. (16”x13” Emoticon Drawstring Backpack 12-Pack)
33. Janker
34. Silipower
35. VacLife
36. DataVac
37. NOVETE
38. Shark
39. Nayamo
40. FUJIWAY

Seriously, the first actual recognizable brand you might find in a store other than Walmart was #29! Sure, they’re pretty much all made in the same three Chinese factories with different labels and quality-control standards, but I can’t even pronounce “EMHFLYFN”, much less get support or service from them.

To add insult to injury, take a good look at “Amazon’s Choice” box for the actual most-popular, best-selling product in this category:

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest they used the wrong picture for this product listing: