Mail changes shouldn't but may result in communication turbulence 2009

I'm changing domain servers and mail hosts soon moving away from some current frustrations causing me to miss email messages. In theory, all communication should switch over without problems, but you know how it goes.

You can still reach me as my nom du web @gmail.com or through my work contact info over at my business site (fortunately so far unaffected) DinahSanders.com

My apologies for any inconvenience!

On the bright side, I'm racking up frequent flier miles like crazy 2008

Sorry for the quiet spell around here. Work has been intensely busy for both Joe & I which leads us to more business trips, more dining out instead of cooking at home, more passively watching videos and less attention to creative projects.

This is not to say nothing has been happening on that front; we've launched Bibulo.us, our cocktail website, and I've been Flickring, Twittering, and Plurking. Thank goodness for microblogging as a way to stay in touch with everyone!

When things get busy, just pick & choose and don't feel you have to do everything.

Sound familiar? Well, Discardia does start next Friday. ;)

What are you going to let go of worrying about?

Many issues to choose from 2008

I like this post from Jinx of I am only one... so much that I'm reproducing the whole thing here:

In tackling the problems facing our world right now, there's plenty of work to go around, and the efforts are not harmed by some specialization.  If I am talking about gender issues and you are focussed on racial bias --- or if I am talking about education and you are talking about environment --- we are not enemies.  There are enough of us to work on many fronts at once; there are enough fronts to keep all of us busy.  We can cooperate; we can each work on the issue that most stirs our energy at the moment; we can still understand that we are allies in making things better.

If we begin to fight each other over which is the single most important problem, we are wasting energy that could be used to address various problems.  We are also helping those who don't want to acknowledge the problems and don't want to see them solved.

Two very common arguments that serve the purpose of not solving problems are these:

(1)  If the person trying to address the issue is a member of the community (or nation) where the problem exists, the line is "How can you be so disloyal as to attack and criticize your own people."  If the person trying to help is not from the same community/nation, the line is "You are an outsider, you don't belong here, what business is it of yours, why don't you go work on what's wrong in your own home."

(2)  Regardless of whether the problem-solvers are local or not, the line is "How can you even talk about [this problem] when you haven't said anything about [some other problem]." 

Variations of these two arguments show up repeatedly.  They are virtually always distractions from the attempt to solve the problem, though often those who use them aren't consciously aware of that intention.   A good answer may be to describe the solution we're trying to achieve and ask, "Can you agree that it would be better if we achieved this change?  if it would be better, why fight over who helps to make it better?  why say that some other unrelated problem has to be solved before we can work on this one?"

(The original is here if you want to comment).

 

Note for springtime movers 2007

Be very sure if you are moving in early April and have not gotten your act together sooner that you do not put your W-2 and other tax filing materials "in one of these boxes somewhere".

Hindsight is 20/20.

Warning: TypePad now case sensitive for login names 2006

I really hope this will revert because I think it is a bad change, but TypePad now requires you to enter your user name in a case sensitive way.

This meant that all the tabs in my browser which were set up with posts in draft form, list views, etc., today switched over to logging me in not to the account I've had since TypePad was in beta (or was it alpha?), but to some test account with none of my hard work in it; metagrrrl instead of MetaGrrrl.

It still knew that it was me - "Welcome, Dinah!" - but it said I had no weblogs. Since I have more than a wee bit of content accumulated, that was unnerving to say the least.

Unfortunately, the "Create your first weblog" page that was displaying for anything I clicked around to didn't have a logout button to allow me to get out of metagrrrl and into MetaGrrrl.

Finally by chopping off the end of URLs randomly I was able to get to a page that did have a logout. That was a relief since I need to write tomorrow's Discardian post tonight.

This change makes absolutely no sense to me and was particularly annoying because there was no warning and I don't see the value in having both a MetaGrrrl and a metagrrrl as separate users on a system. That sounds like a recipe for help desk confusion and user annoyance to me. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think that a database table got a setting switched wrong and that this didn't receive the business oversight it should have had.

Anyhow, long story short, I'm back in, but cranky. Also I either have allergies or a head cold.

There's a lot of grrr in the grrrl tonight.

Lessons Were Learned 2006

By TypePad:
- If you're asking your users to change the format of something (e.g. from A Record to CNAME addressing), make certain that you know if the continued presence of the old method will prevent the new method from working.
- If it will, be very sure to tell your users to delete the old method as well as telling them to add the new one.
- If you send out alerts requiring your users to take a technical action, users will reply to those emails. Answer those replies. Route them to new support tickets if need be.

By TextDrive:
- If you change support URLs (and systems), make sure that you disable not only the ability to open new calls but also the ability to reopen calls in the old system. (This has now been done, I see).
- Also make sure that any replies to messages in the old system are forwarded to the new system or are being watched by someone.
- Also, black text on the old system's home page with a link to the new system is probably insufficient. Large red letters are more effective. Automatic redirects are better still. (And that last has indeed now been done as well).

By me:
- Vendors make mistakes sometimes or provide incomplete information. Doublecheck the details.
- Even if you don't quite know what they are or how they work, now you know that an A Record trumps CNAME addressing.

Abstracted lesson:
- All kinds of crappy stuff can happen to not only the path to your data, but to the data itself. Do backups. Now. Today. Really. No shit. Now.

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Update July 13, 2009: other lessons FINALLY learned.

How to annoy your current customers by making them jump through a hoop 2005

If you, like me, were an early adopter of PacBell DSL and rode the bumpy ride for years, put up with service which was once atrocious and is now, under SBC, tolerable to good, and you now pay something on the order of $49.95 a month for your connection, you too might have seen advertising promoting the service for much less for new customers. Which hardly seems fair since they never offered it to an existing customer like me at a new rate.

Turns out all you have to do is call and say "Hey there SBC PacBell, I pay $49.95 and that's waaay more than you charge new customers. Please start charging me $19.95 a month since that's the going rate."

And they'll just do it. I mean, great, suddenly I'm saving $360 for the next twelve months, but jeez, why should I have to call them?

They could have said "Hey, existing customers, we're about to change our pricing. It'll be $24.95  but for you and your friends, we'll offer it at $19.95. Your bill will change next month and you can tell your friends just to mention the 'SBC is on the cluetrain' promotion and they'll get the special price too!" and I would have been really happy and said nice things about them and recommended them to friends.

Instead I'm pissed at them because who knows how long ago I could have gotten this price. I'm sitting here thinking "Gee. That's a really great sushi dinner or a pair of hightops or a bottle of single malt or the donation to the Carter Center I've been wanting to do every month or two. SBC PacBell, you've been ripping me off! Jerks!"

*sigh* Can we have open source internet and phone service soon please, universe?

Still working on that "Silicon Valley" concept 2005

I got a postcard from my graduate school alma mater, San Jose State University, asking me to call and confirm my listing in their alumni directory. I called, but when I asked to just be listed with my online information and no physical address or phone number, I was told they can't do that and my only choice would be not to be listed.

Come on, guys, it's 2005. Get a clue. If the directory is really for alumni to stay in touch, this should be an option. If, as I now strongly suspect, it's an opportunity to sell a bunch of addresses to advertisers, quit trying to pretend you're serving a community.

Good thing my former classmates know how to Google.

Wikiverse is not an accurate mirror of Wikipedia 2005

Wikiverse which claims to be "an up-to-date high speed static mirror of Wikipedia, a worldwide community of volunteers building an open-content encyclopedia", but it has clearly not been updated in the last six months. I am aware of a specific example of a quote from this site presented in an article there so out of context as to imply my opinion is the exact opposite (and failing to link to the original context so a reader could reach an appropriate conclusion). That quote was called to my attention last August and I corrected it in Wikipedia, but the change has not populated over to Wikiverse.

Frankly, a bad mirror is worse than no mirror. If they aren't going to keep it up to date, the owners of the domain should take it down and ask Google to remove it from the their index.