I was a long time user of the Blockbuster mail order DVD service. For me, in Guernsey, it worked well enough, DVDs arrived promptly and I was pretty happy. Around the same time, I trialled the Lovefilm service (mainly, I think, due to a friend of mine doing one of those “Free iPod” style things, where you get friends to sign up for stuff, and you get a free, erm, iPod). And whilst the service was fine, I was perfectly happy with Blockbuster, so at the end of the trial I cancelled. But ever since, I have been plagued by emails from Lovefilm, begging me to rejoin the service, and chucking all sorts of carrots in my direction as incentive to do it. I never caved and simply deleted them all as they came in.
But I’ve recently been looking for a new mail order service. I’ve got a spangly new LCD tv, an a Blu-Ray capable PS3 and being a bit of videophile, I like real, actual DVDs rather than downloaded ones with people’s heads popping halfway through the important scenes, and Lovefilm does have a far superior selection than Blockbuster. So I figure fine, next time an email from Lovefilm turns up, I’ll go for it.
But, of course, after waiting a couple of weeks, no emails have arrived from Lovefilm, I had no copies of old emails from them, so I thought I’d try my luck.
What follows is a tale of woe and despair, highlights the problems of outsourcing your call / customer care center to non-English-speaking countries, but ultimately, through a little (sarcastic) persistence, has a happy ending. Kind of.
Notice I explicitly say Microsoft software. I don’t necessarily hate Microsoft as a corporation, I’m by no means their biggest fan, but I have no reason to hate them. Indeed, hate is such a strong word that I use it very, very sparingly. But I do hate their software. It’s a boring subject, so I’m not going to bang on about the evils of the Microsoft and laud the wonder that is Apple. It’s a pointless no-win argument - some people like Microsoft, some people like Apple. You choose, and you do what you want.
But here is a good example why I hate Microsoft software, and why I am ever so pleased that I made the switch to Apple.
Oops, sorry. For starters I should be more clear. Cable & Wireless Guernsey are, of course, known as SureCW. Or Sure. I’m not sure. Whatever.
I suppose I should admire their motives, but they cost me money, and, more importantly my time and sanity. About 6 months ago, they announced they were upgrading their ADSL service from 1mb to 2mb. For free. Hurrah! we all thought - free upgrade to the service. But, sadly, there’s no such thing as a free broadband speed increase, and it has, quite frankly, been fraught with problems for me. The main problem is a result of them uprating to ADSL2, which, I’m led to believe is a lot more fussy about quality of service - specifically, noise on the line (SNR) which only gets worse, the further you are from the local exchange. And considering where I live in Guernsey, it’s about as far from the exchange as you can get. So what happened? Very mysteriously, up until the day they upgraded us, everything was working fine. The days and weeks after the upgrade and I had consistent problems, mostly manifest in a complete loss of service. My ADSL wireless router was still up and running, but something, somewhere was clearly not happy. A hard reboot of the router seemed to solve the problem, but the lock ups were seemingly random and, for a perfectionist arse like me, regular reboots were entirely unsatisfactory.
Now, I’m no stranger to a bit of networking - I know my DHCP server from my DNS server - and I tried literally everything I could to resolve things. Cable and Wireless, sorry, Sure, assured us (nice) that no change of hardware was required - if it worked before, it would work after - but the first thing was to check for firmware upgrades for the router. And I found some. But this didn’t solve it. Hours of talking to their “tech support” got us no further - even a change in profile - which allegedly makes the line less susceptible to noise by downrating the speed, did nothing. All the normal things - replacing ADSL filters, unplugging every bit of telephony equipment on the line, did nothing. Of course, there were times when I thought I’d pegged it, I’d announce triumphantly to the other users of the network that it was working and boom! dead.
And so, the only remaining solution? Spend money. I’m now the proud owner of a Netgear D834 wired router and an Airport Extreme. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind spending money on new toys and as I slowly but surely migrate all of my computing toys over to the ways of the Apple, the addition of the Extreme, to go with my two Airport Expresses, is no bad thing. (Really, it isn’t. It makes much sense.) And ultimately, seeing as my problems are now solved (he says, holding his breath, because it’s not unlikely that things will break shortly after submitting this), it seems pretty easy to pinpoint the problems on the DLINK router that I was using previously.
But my point is quite simple - Sure can’t offer a free upgrade and expect users to upgrade their hardware to work with it. It seems a ridiculous thing to be whinging about, it really does, because for someone like me especially, the alleged increase in speed is welcome, but, this has literally cost me no end of time and money in rectifiying it. And what’s more, I’m technically minded and enjoy tinkering with stuff like this to get things working. I know of a handful, which in reality is therefore far more people, who now have simply got in to the routine of restarting their router when things go Pete Tong. ADSL is supposed to be an “always on” service and has been for a good 7-10 years, and in this day and age (God, how old do I sound) restarting your router any more than a few times a year is unacceptable.
I’m told by “people in the know” that a lot of the problems are caused by Sure not investing well enough in decent switching and routing equipment. (And are now, allegedly in the process of sorting things out.) So full marks to Sure in the first instance in wanting to upgrade the service to ADSL2, but zero marks (negative marks if I could) for doing such a piss-poor job in the implementation.
(Don’t even get me started on the pricing.)
I really like WordPress and I’ve been using it for many years from the pre v1 days, I believe. It has certainly grown massively since there, and now boasts the most impressive feature-set of all the online diary platforms. But, as with most software systems, as popularity increases, so does its vulnerability to attacks from unsavoury hacker types. It’s a widely covered phenomenon in the Windows vs Mac debate - Mac OSX is largely more secure because there are far fewer malicious attacks out there - for the simple reason that Windows is a more valuable target since there are many more users of it. (OK, this ignores the fact that the UNIX platform is natively more secure - but there is more to be gained in attacking Windows systems.) The increasing use of WordPress has resulted in an increasing number of security exploits. The WordPress folks are normally quick to close, patch and fix these holes, but I’ve always found the upgrade process, in spite of the infamous 5 step install / upgrade, to be a little arduous - backup existing install, deactivate plugins, download latest source, unzip, upload new source remembering not to overwrite your wp-content folder which contains plugins and themes, perform upgrade, reactivate plugins and cross your fingers. My experience has generally been fine - there has been only a few occasions when it’s gone titsup. But nevertheless, it’s a time-consuming process, especially the having to upload wp-content stuff separately. And there was a point recently, leading up to the 2.5 release, and then shortly after, where there was a spate of releases. When you’re managing 5 separate installs of the WordPress software, it invariably becomes a half-to-full day chore, rather than a quick update.
Well fortunately, there now’s something you can do about it. As of 2.5, all plugins have the ability to check for and update themselves requiring little more than your FTP credentials. And the WordPress automatic update plugin will keep your WordPress install bang up-to-date as well. I’ve tried it on a 2.5 install, as well as a 2.3.3 install, and, moreorless, the experience has been great. The “step by step” upgrade got a bit confused when trying to reactivate some of my plugins, but using the fully automatic mode worked like a dream. The plugin is certainly a bit rough around the edges - the templating and presentation is as disorganised and ungainly as CPanel, not to mention many many typos and grammatical errors, but if you’re not bothered about that, then there is now no reason to not keep your WP fully up-to-date.
Bootnote: I actually started this post about 2 weeks ago, before the automatic upgrade plugin had been released. So fortunately it was saved from being an all-out “WP stop releasing so many updates you bastards” to a “here’s a handy plugin that will keep your WP life more pleasurable.” Hurrah for that.
I recently posted a rather flippant attack (for want of a better word) about Yahoo! Answers. In it, I linked to a chap named Doug who is one of the more prolific answerers. I accused him of taking himself a little too seriously, given his rather staggering point count. Well, bless his li’l cotton socks, within a couple of hours of posting it (must have been a slow work day), he responded with a rather scathing full-scale rebuttal. Now, I’m not one to make random “enemies” for no apparent reason, but the only purpose it serves is to validate my original point.
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Internet trolls might call me an Apple fanboy, but I wouldn’t say I am. I am just one of the happy people who made the switch a couple of years ago, and I am well-pleased that I did. I started with the Mac Mini - which seemed like the cheapest way to find out what the switch would be like - all went well - and so have since bought a Macbook Pro. Which all went great, aside from a snafu over the definition of Apple retail versus Apple store.
Anyway, with the new stock MBP in hand, I started looking at upgrading the RAM, from 2gb to 4gb. After finding the specs, first stop was the Apple store to see their prices. You can imagine I was a little taken aback to see that 4gb (2 sticks of 2gb) was a staggering $600 - I’m well aware that Apple hardware is more expensive than most, but $600 seemed ridiculous. And indeed it is - I picked up 4gb of Kingston (a more than reputable memory manufacturer) for $125 from Amazon. I could also have got Crucial or Samsung, for a similar price. Intrigued, I decided to call the Apple store, just to find out why their RAM was so damn expensive. I mean, $200 I could undrstand, maybe $250, but a full FOUR times more expensive? No way. I didn’t really know what answer to expect, so I just went ahead:
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OMG lOlz, like its totaly teh suxx0r. Ahem. Sorry. How bad is Yahoo! Answers? I found myself on the site a few days ago after a Google search led me there and then ended up answering a few questions. It took me back to my Sitepoint Forums days, where I cut my teeth as a web designer. I spent nearly two years at SPF, where over time I learnt the art of question answering in a community atmosphere. The forums at Sitepoint were a remarkable place, as an oft heavy-handed approach to moderation generally ensured that the quality of answers stayed high. Not to mention that it was frequented by recognised experts in a variety of fields. Over the time, I moved up through the ranks to one of the senior moderators and although I spent far too much time there, and at the detriment of most parts of the rest of my life, it was a good time.
Enter Yahoo! Answers and a (not such a-)shock reminder that, frankly, the web is a dank, musty place, where information is freely available, but there are zero guarantees that the information is accurate or correct in any way, shape or form. (Wikipedia being a shining example.) Y!A is far worse than the Wiki, however.
The theory with Y!A is anyone can ask a question and anyone can answer the question. There is a category for moreorless any question you may want to ask and naturally I gravitated towards the Computers and Internet section.
My gripe is twofold and is directed 1) At the question askers, and 2), at the question answerers.