MaiboxForwarding.com is a SCAM and a FRAUD.
I’m going to do something here that I advise anyone with a blog who gets screwed by a company to do, and that is call out any company that screws you over so potential customers know to avoid these companies. And countless companies are scams, but I don’t think I’ve ever been screwed so overtly by a company as MailboxForwarding.com. MailboxForwarding.com is a service like Earth Class Mail (which is also a scam, apparently) which will receive your physical mail and scan it so you can read it online, then they’ll shred or forward it to you (supposedly). There are a number of other companies like MyRVMail and VirtualPostMail which appear to be more legitimate, ethical companies, which I now wish I’d gone with.
My interaction with MailboxForwarding.com:
Myself (support tickets only, their phone # is blocked):
June x, 2010: Pay $199 for 12 months prepaid plan.
June x+2, 2010: Submit required Form 1583 to receive mail.
June x+5: No acknowledgement of receipt of Form.
June x+6, 9 am: Contact support, “Hi, have you receive my Form 1583, I sent it in several days ago.”
June x+6, 11 am: “Hello? Anyone there?”
June x+6, 1 pm: “Hello? Anyone there?”
June x+6, 3 pm: “Hello? Anyone there?”
June x+6, 5 pm: “Subject: Refund Request; Hello, I’d like to request a refund. I prepaid for 12 months service and have not used your service in anyway yet. I e-mailed a scanned 1583 form to you several days ago and you’ve shown no acknowledgement of it. I’ve been trying to get in touch with through your support system since this morning without response. This is unacceptable. I want my money back so I can find another service. Thank you.”
Customer Service response 12 hours later:
June x+6, 9:20 pm: “We haven’t gotten to your form yet, we’ll do it tomorrow.” “We cannot offer any refunds on fees already paid.”
Myself:
June x+6, 9:30 pm: “Yes, I would like to cancel my account, I do expect better support interaction. Please refund my 12 month prepaid credit card payment of $199 which I did not receive a single mail item under. Thank you.
> we cannot offer any refunds on fees already paid.
I sure hope you don’t mean that. If you do not refund my payment I will do two things which I assure you will cost you much more in the end. Reading that makes me furious.
I will, and I assure you:
1. File a complaint with the BBB. I’m familiar with the process as I’ve gone through it before.
2. Guess what, I also have a high traffic blog and will be sure to record this. Trust me when I say you don’t want to see “MailboxForwarding.com is a scam” as a top search result for “mailboxforwarding”.
Trust me when I say it’s in both our best interests to refund my money. This is no joke, and I’m very, very unhappy at this point.”
So, we’ll see if the twerps decide to return my 12 month prepayment (I’m not hopeful). In the meantime I’ll leave this review here as I’m sick of getting screwed. Additionally, MailboxForwarding.com is a scam an fraud in my book and absolutely not a company I would trust to have access to any of my mail whatsoever. They deceive potential customers by falsely trying to appear large and professional. My MailboxForwarding.com review: MailboxForwarding.com SUCKS. Stay away. Avoid MailboxForwarding.com. They’re quite content to take $200 and offer absolutely nothing in return. That’s theft and a scam in my book.
http://freedocumentaries.org/teatro.php?filmID=299&lan=en&size=big
So, now’s about the time I need to determine what my main goals for the year are. I actually made one, and only one, New Year’s resolution for 2010, and so far I’ve been keeping it fairly well.. at least I’m doing a bit better two months into the year, and that resolution was to take life a bit easier. In reflection, the past few years of my life were quite transitional and stressful.
2007 was very busy, and also the year I finished college (and started having panic attacks). 2008 was the year I spent writing software for and learning about the family business, and sort of figuring out a lot of personal things like what directions I sort of wanted to go in life. I became pesci-vegetarian (two years ago tomorrow), which was sort of a change. This was also the year I realized I was unabashedly gay and became addicted to the charms of competitive ballet. Nothing is more fabulous than a French Neoclassical. Ha just kidding, I’m not gay. I just wanted to startle family in case they’re quickly skimming this. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, I just prefer to monopolize body hair in a relationship. All in all though, 2008 was a fairly miserable and stressful year for me, not one I have the best memories of.
2009 was defined by work, and materialized into being the absolute hardest I’ve ever worked. I holed up for a lot of the year to develop my programming skills, and endured 8 months of misery with Java virtual machine quirks. So much so, that I told my friends I’d wished I’d done anything but. Hell, I told one friend I wish I thought Java was coffee and had spent all year learning Japanese instead. It’s also (unfortunately) harder to justify self-study than academic study despite the obvious reduced cost and, in my honest opinion, increased effectiveness. My degree, after all, was in economics and philosophy, not computer science, so I’ve been getting into territory I wasn’t *trained* for. Alas, I’m a bit skeptical of “higher education”, so Mark “I never let my schooling interfere with my education” Twain would probably be proud. Ultimately though, 2009 consisted mostly of efforts I’m not sure I’ll ever directly benefit from, although I did get damn lucky on an investment, which perhaps made a bit of indirect luck worth some of the year’s stress.
By the way, Sun (or Oracle? Or whoever owns what/where at this point), you’ve really got to fix some shit, and vastly improve documentation. Also wtf is with JavaSound? I’ve always wanted to say this in meaningful context, well, here I can: “KILL it with FIRE.” Yes, Java maintainers, you must kill the code with fire. Here’s how: print all JavaSound code out, drill 0 gauge holes through the hard drives that held it, and burn the printed code in a ritualistic ceremony. Then let’s all pretend JavaSound never existed and play with large parachutes, while holding hands in hippie-esque circles. I’ll bring the parachutes, and we can burn them too, just because.
Now it’s 2010. I realize I know myself now, what I want, and the avenues I can take to get there. I’ve also reluctantly accepted that my hopes for successful entrepreneurship will take another year, which, *sigh*, means I’ll be asking my family for support for one more year. So, two major immediate goals now: greatly reduce living expenses, and move towards a modern nomadic lifestyle. On the pertinent agenda now is to get rid of as much as I can. This means going through everything I own, and hopefully intelligently organizing it and reducing it to a small volume I can store conveniently. This also means preparing my home for rent, and you know this if you have a home, especially one not recently built, this can be kind of daunting. I still wish to hold on to the place for the long term, I just need to monetize it in the meantime. My first steps towards becoming nomadic have been carefully picking out a flashlight and pocketknife, and getting a Choice Hotels Visa card. I just need a portable laptop and a few other things. With a car, flashlight, pocketknife, and portable laptop, I’ll be a force to be reckoned with. From there, I can begin assembling the death star with my real father who likes to hang out at dockside bars. And, if you can make any sense of the preceding references, you’re my new best friend. Or my father, and I need to learn to play baseball.
So anyway, what I’ll be doing when I get everything in order is the next question. I’ve actually figured out a handful of viable ways to make money on the road, which has taken me two years, and will take another to implement because a: I have limited intelligence and b: internet business models are generally abstract and often guarded. It’s a lot easier to just get a regular job than it is to generate minimum wage off the internet. But, for me, the perks make it worth it, and yes, I’ve been thinking about this for two years, because I knew it was ultimately what I wanted. I’m getting sleepy now will finish when I awake. zzz. aaa. Okay, I’m back again. well sorta. Tuesday’s coming, did you bring your coat? I have a few options for making money online. I know I could build up to $20/day with adsense by the end of the year if I stayed dedicated to a certain website I haven’t launched yet. I’m certain I could get higher than that with paid writers because I’m bad about sticking with one task at a time. Those are “safe” ways to make money while mobile, but honestly not exactly fun. Churning out content mills is about as fun as managing insurance contracts. The most fun, or appealing, way to make money online is to run an infrastructure that generates its own content, either generatively/dynamically or through user input. But these are incredibly difficult to get going. The most surefire way to attract visitors is pure, ordinary, quality content.
The game I created, Space Danger, was designed to be run on an arcade machine. Everything in it is designed likewise. It’s fail-safe on Linux and automatic muting is built-in along with coin acknowledgement. The game can be started directly from a motherboard, and you’ll never know or see the operating system it’s being run off. Just like old arcades, it was designed to feel hardware-integrated. I also pseudo-designed a more sophisticated follow-up game which would feel like an odd remake of Robotron 2084, but never started on it. I had planned to start building arcade machines to house this pair of games, but even though the hardest part is done (the first game), the act of finishing the project into actual machines still feels daunting and without guarantee.
The prospect that seems most appealing to me at this point is, actually, and this again is a bit out there, visualization of audio content. This would involve taking Java2D or OpenGL and pairing it with OpenAL to create custom, mathematical visualizations of sound bites or music (think specially customized WinAmp visualizations). I’m inclined to think performing bands would at least be mildly interested in having visualizations of their music projected during play. This is something I could get going with a few months of dedication. I’ll admit the idea appeals to me. Of course, any visual DJ’ing would have to be done for free at first, but if it generated interest, I don’t see why it couldn’t be lucrative. Before I started college, I wanted to be an electronic musician building songs like Squarepusher, Venetian Snares, or the notorious Aphex. I’m too out of touch to go back into that, though. My ear is no longer trained to keys or chords, scores of meticulous drum patterns are long forgotten, I have hearing damage in one ear, I don’t even know where my bass guitar is, and tweaking synthesizers doesn’t have the appeal it once did. I still wish I put off college at the time to explore this avenue, but I don’t wish to revisit it at this point. Gotta move on. I will admit Reason is badass software if you like this sort of thing.
Main thing is that I need to minimize my living expenses so I can explore these options without as much stress burden. If I learned anything last year, it’s that stress doesn’t yield output, work yields output. Stress is only useful to the point it encourages output. I also haven’t been experiencing panic attacks like I did a couple years ago which freaking suck and are quite counterproductive, and I want to avoid them at all costs. And, I want to move towards a nomadic lifestyle as much as possible. This urge has been heavily compounded by the most miserable winter I’ve ever witnessed in DFW. Yesterday feels like the first time I’ve seen the sun in months. Now I just want to be able to pick up and go wherever if the weather is shit or I just want a change in scenery. So, first priority before I get into exploring mobile money-generation options is to just get prepared. Like a Boy Scout. This means seriously getting organized, getting minimalized, and understanding my mobile tools. From there, I’m hoping I’ll have some mental peace, and consequently the leverage to make my next move. Agility will be key.