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| Tuesday, August 30, 2005 |
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Dept. of Eventual Leverage 
Dept. of Distraction
| | While Cox works at getting the Net restored in our neighborhood (or all of Santa Barbara, or... not sure), I'm sitting in the shade in front of a Starbucks here in Santa Barbara, sucking down a doppio on ice, listening to Dylan's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall on the sound system (surely from a CD Starbucks is selling), while a parade of unusually (though typically for here) good-looking women walk in and out, while I sit here, blissfully invisible as a floor tile. Being an old fart in shorts does have its advantages. |
Think (or better yet, blog) about it
Department of Identity Hell
| | In addition to all the crap my accountant went through when she was here this morning (see item below), we also discovered that I hadn't received my main credit card bill for two months. Well, it turns out it was sent to some other address (with my name) in Texas, and had some (about $1500 worth) of fraudulent purchases, mostly at a Circuit City in Oklahoma. |
| | Sooo. I'm wondering what else is f'd up today. Or around my identities. |
| | Oh, the Net is down. Cox Cable has an outage in our area. I'm getting on here through Bluetooth and Cingular, over my cell phone. Speed: 56Kb down, 9Kb up. Better than nothing. And a lot better than more than a few folks are getting on the Gulf Coast. |
Customer Relationship Mismanagement
| | My accountant has been on the phone, mostly on hold, for 20 minutes (so far) trying to get Quicken to give her the info she needs to restore her copy of QuickBooks after the program disabled itself for want of registration information that is in no obvious place and appears to require talking with a series of customer support personnnel in some other country over a bad phone connection. |
| | Now (half an hour later), a Quicken person is telling her she'll have to wait until tomorrow or later to get help recovering from the worsening of the situation, caused by an apparently incorrect registration number provided by an earlier "service" person. She is not happy. Or getting off the phone. |
| | The current service person just had her re-install the app from a CD. The problem is still there. Nothing opens. It's been 40 minutes. |
| | Okay, apparently there was some problem with different versions of the program: one called NUE and another called Pro. She's trashing both right now, by instruction from the service person. (I'm writing about this because it's soaking up nearly all my/our attention, even though there's plenty else to do in this little office we share one or two days a month.) It's been 45 minutes now. |
| | I just spent 10 minutes on an extension phone, during which we gathered that QuickBooks kept generating copies of files old and new, with extensions .qbmb and .qbmd. The qbmd file was the new one, and it turned out that was current. We were home free. Almost. |
| | At this point the customer service person was required to ask us to express our satisfaction with her performance, and then shunted us to an automated system that asked us two questions about this person's performance, but NOTHING about the hell we went through before we got to a person who could solve our problem. |
| | The whole system is f*d up in so many ways I don't know where to begin, so I won't. I will say it's lame in the extreme for a CRM system to put the whole evaluation burden on one individual, rather than the hold-and-transfer chain that leads to that person. |
| | Total time wasted: one hour and ten minutes. |
Say where
| | We conceive, or frame, the Net in a variety of ways: as a publication (we "write" or "author" things called "pages" using a "hypertext" protocol), as a transport system (we have "content" that we "load" into "packets" or "streams" and "deliver" over a "transport" protocol), as a theater (we "perform" for an "audience" we want to have an "experience"), as real estate (we have "sites" with "locations" that we "design", "architect", "construct" or "build")... and so on (there are more, such as suitor, which Terry Heaton uses here.). We mix some of those metaphors as well. For example, when we talk about "traffic", we mix transport and real estate. |
| | These distinctions become important when we look at what's happening right now on the Gulf Coast, in the wake of Katrina. |
| | People can¹t see TV in New Orleans because there is no power to broadcast or receive. But the stations are broadcasting on the internet, just in case someone can see. |
| | People can¹t get newspapers in New Orleans because there¹s no way to distribute it. But the Times-Picayune put up its entire edition on the internet, at Nola.com, just in case someone can see. |
| | If you want to know what metaphors are being used, prepositions are good give-aways. We go on the Net, for example. Or on the phone. Or on TV. These may be "media", in the transport frame, but they are also places. |
| | When the Times-Picayune had to leave the building, and failed to circulate its print edition on the streets of New Orleans, they went on the Web, much as many residents of New Orleans went up on their roofs. Now the T-P survives as a blog. WDSU-TV survives on the Web, but with some kind of video my laptop can't show (probably Windows Media). |
| | WWL-TV is live on the Web (not sure about the air). Here's the station's blog. WGNO-TV is about the same. Same with WNOL-TV. WVUE-TV has no blog, but does have recent stories running in a frame. WWL/870 radio, the biggest station in town (as well as the whole Southeast, at night), has one AP report and nothing else, other than the (customary for broadcasters) crowded page full of promotional links to itself. |
| | Public TV Station WYES has no sign Katrina ever happened. WLAE has a tiny bit more, though not much. |
Say how
| | Since most IT folks don't blog, but many will have post-Katrina stories to tell, I'm volunteering IT Garage as a place where anybody with a story can tell it. If you don't have an account, create one, and post away. |
Say when
| | Today's edhat reports on time-to-live calls to varioius utilities: |
| | The final ranking in our dial-to-live-person survey were Cox Cable (3 minutes, 14 seconds), Verizon (4 minutes, 31 seconds), and SCE (5 minutes, 30 seconds). And, the Gas Company? Well it was infinity the first time, and 2 minutes and 15 seconds the second time. It was unclear how to award today¹s prize. A hasty meeting of the Edhat board of directors, concerned citizens, and people we didn¹t know determined that the Gas Company was the longest wait based upon their first round figure. For the average time, it was decided that we should take the median time 5 minutes and a half a second. |
Say why
| | For what it's worth, I used rel="nofollow" on those last three links, and just clicked the little "objectionable content" flag on that splog. (Though the pop-out balloon that says Notify Blogger about objectionable content. What does this mean? obscures the little flag on this splog in post views, so I can't flag it.) |
| | Apparently he purchased tools from a company called rssequalizer.com (again no link; no juice) which is a ready made spamming toolkit using RSS to build your sites from other people's content. And he didn't know that it was an issue? He couldn't tell he was a spammer? Sheesh. Give me a break people. I've heard this one before from spammers and its always a line. |
| | Just my .02. I'm sorry but Blog Spam is a huge issue for everyone in our business and this kind of stuff has to stop. Yes I took a very, very harsh tone but we have to do this. Getting harsh on spammers is the only way things are going to get better. And I mean I could have been harsher -- I could have called for razing his home and sowing salt into the ground but I'm a nice guy. I'll settle for razing his domains, his IP addresses and his ad sense account. |
| | The bold-facing in the first paragraph is mine. This is RSS being used for evil. On the one hand, it's flushing the spammers out of the email closet. On the other hand, it's making spammers out of search engine optimizers. |
The tangled Web
| | Mike Warot started a thread here, which I picked up here, and he continues here, with pointers to others who have contributed, so far. In a bonus link, Mike visits the limitations of blogs for threaded discussion. |
discuss
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