If I buy Echo Frames, Echo Buds, and an Echo Loop, and sit in a car equipped with an Echo Auto, will they all misunderstand me the same way?

More seriously, will they all fight over the Bluetooth connection to my phone, rendering their functionality non-deterministic?

Also, is it just me, or does the name “Ring Stick Up Cam” sound like something to wear in case you get mugged?

[Not buying the glasses, by the way, because I hate the way thick plastic frames look on my face. Not buying the earbuds, because I have Ankers, and they’re pretty good. Not buying the ring, because it’s huge. Not buying the smart oven, for the same reason I don’t want a gas range that has WiFi: fire bad. Also not buying the Studio, the Show, or the Glow. The Flex has potential, since it replaces the common hack of mounting a Dot on an outlet, but I won’t buy one unless you offer a trade-in on earlier-generation devices; they still work, so why buy more?]

The two packages I expected today arrived as scheduled. The third, unexpected, quite heavy package contained items I didn’t order, wouldn’t order, and according to your web site, are not associated with my account at all, despite having an Amazon-generated shipping label with my name on it.

All three came from the same fulfillment center in North Las Vegas. Is this an off-by-one error, where you’re printing an extra label that then gets slapped onto the next package in line?

In any case, somebody out there is probably wondering where their Fancy Feast cat food and Body Armor sports drinks are…

Your cat’s an asshole:

Speaking of cats, I haven’t had any hanging out on my porch for quite a while, but walking up to the house Friday night, I heard a series of loud, distressed-sounding meows coming from near my porch. I looked over and found a large, rather attractive kitty walking along the fence. To my surprise, he responded to my kissy noises by coming over to say hello, and I rewarded this behavior with a package of the leftover wet food from when I had regular visitors.

He was healthy, well-groomed, and wore a collar, so it wasn’t too surprising that he let me pet him. He hasn’t come back for skritches or handouts, so I’m guessing he’s a mostly-indoor cat who got away from his wranglers for a little while.

I love that you’re promising next-day delivery on a lot of items, but in your relentless pursuit of shipping optimization, you have failed to take into account the fact that USPS simply lies about when they “delivered” a package.

For instance, Wednesday at 5:53 PM, I placed an order (“free next-day shipping, for sure!”). Tracking shows that you handed it off to my local post office at 4:44 AM Thursday. USPS claims it went out for delivery at 8:44 AM, and was placed in my mailbox at 6:51 PM. My mailbox (of the shared, locking variety at the curb) was completely empty when I got home at 9:15 PM.

This is not the first time this has happened. Sometimes it shows up on my porch very early the next morning, other times as part of the next day’s regular delivery, occasionally delayed even further by a weekend or holiday, and at least once it never turned up at all, despite being marked “delivered”.

Friday night update

By golly, the “delivered Thursday” package somehow found its way into my locked mailbox today! It’s almost like it never made it onto the truck and they checked it off to pad their numbers!

Oh, wait, it’s exactly like that!

“🎶 One of these books is not like the others, one of these books really does belong. Can you tell which book is not like the others, before I finish my song. 🎶”

Clicking on the tile reveals several “Catholic Action Horror” novels, Simak’s Project Pope, Stasheff’s Wizard novels, Neil Boyd’s Bless Me Father novels, pretty much every novel by Andrew M. Greeley (no relation), and books on embroidery, aikido, ninjutsu, play therapy, and a Martha Stewart how-to manual. Oh, and some books on religion, evenly divided between Catholic and non-Christian.

Finally you get one right!

[Unrelated, file under “baffling” the person in India who manually posted three link-stuffed (and I mean “every character is a different link, all to the same site”) spam comments to two recent entries. Pro tip: javascript-based comments don’t get indexed by search engines, so no one saw this except me, and it took one click to make them go away. Looks like it’s a WordPress site, so with luck it will be hijacked by other crooks soon…]

All I want for Christmas is less dynamically-loaded content on your home page. Seriously, if I switch to another tab while it’s loading, half the time I’ll come back and find that Safari has given up and reloaded it. Sometimes it reloads while I’m still scrolling down. Any other page is fine.

If I turn off Javascript, it loads a thousand times faster, but then the “Recommended For You” page is completely blank. Wish lists still work, although you have to dig a bit to find them.

This all seems to have started right before Black Friday. Perhaps dialing back on the poorly-debugged holiday scripting is in order?

Apparently I’ve gone too far poking fun at the results of your recommendation system, because you’ve stopped recommending anything except a few “buy it again” tiles:

• “Buy it again in Business, Industrial, & Scientific Supplies”: Loctite, flush cutters, screw caps, and threaded screw inserts. (aka “crafting supplies”)

• “Buy it again in Office Products”: super-sticky Post-Its, NFC tags, and inkjet business cards. (I go through Post-Its like candy; the cards are for giving the addresses of our hotels in Japan to cab drivers and luggage shippers)

• “Buy it again in Home”: trash bags, Boveda humidifier refills, and a 12-pack of stick-on pen loops. (I only needed 2-3 pen loops, one for each Rocketbook and the third for my old Surface Pro, so it will be a long time before I run out…).

• “Buy it again in Home Improvement”: Loctite, Loctite, stick-on plastic feet, and Philips Hue motion sensors. (seriously, Amazon, how much Loctite do you think I go through in a month?)

• “Buy it again in other categories”: charcoal soap, toothbrush heads, USB3-to-Micro/C/Lightning cable, Gevalia Mocha Latte K-Cups.

That last one is amusing, because I actually have a subscription for the k-cups, but in a different box size, so Amazon knows I like the stuff, but doesn’t realize they’re already sending me 36 of them each month. (4 boxes of 9 is $5.65 cheaper than 6 boxes of 6)

This is my daily “liquid pie” indulgence. I drink it with two Splendas and two Mini-Moos, which is like pouring coffee on cupcake batter, yet still only 100 calories.

If I have any further coffees (instead of drinking Diet Pepsi), they consist of Gevalia or Peet’s medium-roast ground coffees, made in an Aeropress (or the new Aeropress Go travel kit) with three Splendas, a Mini-Moo, and a pinch of sea salt.

(for the AeroNerdly: non-inverted, 2 filters, 2 scoops, 2-ounce pour to wet the grounds for 30 seconds, 2 more ounces and ~40 seconds of stirring, slow press all the way down and scrape the foam into the mug, then milk-n-sugar and add 8 more ounces of water)