Best business practice? Not!

Looking over my credit card statements, I noticed eFax went ahead and renewed my annual plan about a month ago (without, I might add, any email notification that this was going to happen).

Now, frankly, I haven't received any fax of value from anyone for at least the past year, so in an attempt to save a little money (and to prevent such "surprise" charges in the future), I called eFax a few minutes ago to cancel my account and get at least a partial refund of the charge.

To my surprise, I was informed that there would be no proration of the charge and no partial refund of the fee.

Combined with not telling my that my plan was about to renew, I thought this was a pretty shabby policy on the part of eFax, but the fact that I've "paid" for another whole year of service (that consists of having dozens of junk faxes delivered to my inbox) did not stop me from canceling the account immediately.

eFax users, be warned!

Back into the classroom, among other follies...

It occurred to me that I had signed up for (free) courses on udacity.com that had started this past Monday, so after hauling in a chunk of translation income, I went over to see what I could see.

The courses are not mickeymouse, thank goodness, and a single "unit" (corresponding to a week's work) will take a couple of hours to get through. The only part that sort of bugged me was the inability to ask questions in real time, but then there's a whole Internet available to search, so if you know how to ask the questions, you'll get the answers.

A typical unit consists of some number of segments, some of which will pause to ask and allow you to answer a question. Homework is not the way I remember it back in engineering school. As far as background material is concerned, thus far is pretty sparse. This can be interpreted as good news (no $75 textbooks to buy) or not-so-good news (not much else to go on except the video).

My opinion thus far is positive. The price is, naturally, just right. I'm just wondering if I have the "extra" time to take two courses.

We'll see.