Glenn Beck’s reaction on his new book being outsold on Amazon on it’s first day

Glenn Beck’s reaction on his new book being outsold on Amazon on it’s first day

“…Our books are ALWAYS #1. And I find it REALLY fascinating, FASCINATING, that if you go to Amazon.com, Broke is number THREE… And then, the #1 book—TODAY at least—is Machine of Death. And it’s collected stories about, you know, people who know how they’re gonna die. Haowww! … This is the left, I think, speaking. This is the left. You want to talk about where we’re headed? We’re headed towards a culture of death. A culture that, um, celebrates the things that have destroyed us.”

—Glenn Beck, upset that some bootstrapping entrepreneurs bumped his book from #1 on its release day. The Glenn Beck Radio Program, October 27, 2010

For those curious, the book that out sold him: Machine of Death:A collection of stories about people who know how they will die

How To: Shorten URL for emailing links

How To: Shorten URL for emailing links

With the rise of Javascript and other web based programing languages, links to certain webpages have grown downright unwieldy. Places like eBay, Amazon, and many online shopping programs are the worst cases. But these portals provide such a vast number of items that any flat file based system from the 90’s would require a team of people to update it 24 hours a day as prices change and stock comes and goes.

Enter a plethora of web sites that “shorten” a given URL and present it in a friendlier format.

Tinyurl is one of the oldest and most popular of such services. They even provide a link that can be dragged to the browser tool bar for on the fly URL shortening services.

For instance: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FHeroes-Season-2-Jack-Coleman%2Fdp%2FB001B7CNZ6%3Fpf%5Frd%5Fp%3D294635701%26pf%5Frd%5Fs%3Dright-5%26pf%5Frd%5Ft%3D101%26pf%5Frd%5Fi%3D507846%26pf%5Frd%5Fm%3DATVPDKIKX0DER%26pf%5Frd%5Fr%3D06WM4R0ZBZMYJDY834NZ&tag=ricktech-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

Becomes: http://tinyurl.com/5gvb4j

Minilink.org does the same thing, and even has a tools page that has a tool bar Javascript link just like Tinyurl. This site has one huge advantage over TinyURL though. Their links include the server name to keep people from inadvertently visiting the seedy parts of the Internet.

Thus the above link becomes: http://lnk.nu/amazon.com/n4m.html

While not every URL needs to be shortened, there are plenty that do. These two tools will certainly help in cases when it is needed. Email, IM’s, forum postings, etc would all benefit.

How to: Contact Amazon.com’s customer service

How to: Contact Amazon.com’s customer service

Just like in physical stores, people sometimes have problems with online stores. Usually the larger companies have pretty good Customer Service. But sometimes you just want to be able to actually talk to someone on the phone to get an issue resolved.

According to Amazoncustomerservice Blog the numbers you need are:

(206) 266-1000 for Local to Seattle US
1-866-216-1072 for US
1-206-266-2992 for International
(877)-586-3230 for Canada
+44.208.636.9200 for UK
0800 279 6620 for UK Free Phone
0011 1 206 266-2992 – Australian (same as international)

He’s also included numbers for Paypal, Ebay, Yahoo!, and Netflix here.