Thursday, February 28, 2008

Xanga and Comcast ~ Who's problem?

From this page on xanaga.com

4. ALL XANGA EMAIL HAS BEEN BLOCKED BY YOUR ISP

Because of the volume of subscription emails we send, the odds of a subscription email being erroneously reported as spam have gone up dramatically. Sometimes an ISP will take unwarranted action and block ALL xanga.com emails. If you suspect this is the case, let us know and we will contact your ISP.


Ummm... how do I contact them? I suspect the reasons I'm not receiving their subscription email is because of Comcast. But I switched the email address today to Gmail so we'll see.

HP is losing me as a customer - it's bigger then I have time to tell

I'm setting here waiting for a form to go through and I'm twitteling my thumbs so I thought I'd write something. And now it's gone through! :D Maybe I should stop and go back to my work. Anyway, don't buy an all in one HP printer (OfficeJet 6310xi to be exact). Junk! And oh, HP Passport log in takes forever to log you in!

HP is losing me as a customer - it's bigger then I have time to tell.

Need more reasons? Start here.

Monday, February 11, 2008

The language software engineers use...

As you start up larger more complex programs they usually go through a series of steps before you can use it. A couple of these messages while starting are rather comical.
-Almost done...
-Becoming ready...

:D

Monday, February 04, 2008

Microsoft, Adobe and Sony - How they are alienating their customers

I know, I know, this is more of a rant then anything worthwhile reading... but I have to get it off my chest.

I'm really starting to dislike all companies that say they aren't supporting Vista in their last non-Vista certified version.

Microsoft comes out with Vista. We are a pretty decent fan of Microsoft so we buy it with our new systems (instead of XP). But frankly there isn't too much at the small business level that they have improved for us. Actually I can't think of anything (if there is someone tell me)!

So then over the past two weeks as we migrate systems to Vista we slowly start to learn that some of our high dollar software from Adobe and Sony don't operate fully on Vista. Here is the killer though... on our Vista test systems they worked fine so we purchased new systems with the reasoning that they would work fine there too! Not so! What are we expected to do? Buy XP and continue to use that? We don't need to upgrade to Vista, Adobe's CS3 or Sony's Sound Forge 9. All the previous versions do exactly what we want them to do for us!

I've got ideas to fix this... and none of them make any of these companies earn money, more sales or make friendlier customers. I'm really starting to like open source more and more and our companies will really start supporting them in the future. This is just becoming to much nonsense!

There, I feel better... ;) but that doesn't mean I still ant' going to do something about this.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

CrossLoop - The next generation of tech support

I am thrilled at a new service called CrossLoop. It allows me to access and view the computer screen and use mouse and keyboard on someone else' computer with their permission. Now this technology has already been around, but not in the simple form that I have found this to be in. This is great for quick tech support issues and calls that are just too complicated to explain to the user.

The steps are so simple it's not even funny. It seems to work through firewalls and everything. I have only had one time I didn't seem to work and now that I've tried it some more I'm thinking I just should have tried it again with that user and it would have worked.

Tell the person you want to do the tech support with to go to crossloop.com, click on the Free Download link on the left center side of the page about halfway down. It'll ask them to either Run or Save it (for most users tell them to run it, as they don't know everything about temporary files and where to save programs like this). The program will ask you what language, to approve the EULA, a few other simple things and then conveniently launch the program for the user (as long as they leave the check box checked to do so). Have them click the "Share" tab and give you their access code. You enter it in on your end and have them hit 'connect' while you hit connect too. It may raise a red flag on a firewall but just tell them to accept or unblock. You may to have them disconnect and then reconnect again (you doing the same) the first time to get through the firewall.

At that point their screen will come up on your screen and if they are like most users they'll have some very low resolution set and you'll be on some huge monitor with a high resolution. You'll be able then to walk them through what ever they are working on or take over the computer for them and let them see what you are doing. I had one user report when they were trying to view my huge screen that it took quite a while to update. But for me it isn't or hasn't been a problem!

So far this program has been worth so much to me!!! I'm loving it and it's free, quick and simple and gets through the tons of firewalls that we all have to have enabled. The only downside is, it is connecting to a server so potentially who ever runs CrossLoop could see what you are doing on your computer (which usually isn't an issue for me anyway). Otherwise great program!