13 steps

Today I discovered the joy of Dell customer support for printers. Never again. No, I will not go through a standard 20 minute questionnaire when your own frikkin’ engineer who was here knows what the problem was but he couldn’t get it registered because no one at Dell was answering the phone.
Apparently their printer support is the worst. My account manager, who I called in a very pissed off mood saying she either takes care of the problem or that’s the last time I buy anything there, tried to reassure me that their server and ‘normal’ support wasn’t that bad. But hey, come on, clean your own shit.
So after escalating the matter I ended up being called by an english speaking lady with an Indian name who didn’t give a shit either but was in charge of printer support, who then told me she’d spend me the parts of what they thought was wrong with the thing, but I didn’t get it fixed with that I’d have to go through the 20 minute questionnaire next time.
Yeah… sure.
No more Dell for me. So… what’s HP business tech support like?

(the dutch post office sucks).
No International Money Orders.
No International Reply Coupons.
At any post office in the Netherlands.
“But sir, we’re so advanced, nobody uses that old crap anymore.” Ehm, yes butthead, the rest of the world does, hence the ‘international’. Seriously, the post office has gone to shit ever since it got privatized.

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How do you find interesting sites in a web where 99.9% is tripe from newbies or spammers.
I recently joined a blogger network. Blogs really are the Geocities of today for anyone familiar with how things worked a dozen years ago. The problem is blogspam, the amount of people that blog for money, who think they can earn a quick buck by copypasta-ing stuff from all over the web and posting it as original ‘content’. Even on BlogCatalog this much is obvious, and the amount of noise drowns out the signal, because who really has the time and energy to look for a gem in a pile of, well… dung. An invite only network sounds nice, just for like minded people who do their thing and enjoy the old spirit of the web. That could be a way to build a stronger signal.

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Meh, I’ve had this thing in draft for months, and I just can’t be bothered to clean it up or finish it, so here it is in its unedited state, things that have annoyed me about Os X thusfar:
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That title popped up in my newsfeed… again… it annoyed me.
I know it’s fashionable at the moment to come up with lists of plugins you need to get good seo, lists of popular topics for blogs, lists of things you ‘must’ do to get people to leave comments, but god it’s boring me to death.
After everything else has been monetized they’re now trying to kill the last bastille of freedom of speech by saying what we should or shouldn’t blog about.

Well… blow me. The only thing I’d recommend you don’t blog about is a list of things you should avoid blogging about. It’s pointless.
I absolutely love reading random blogs, and the way they give you a good idea of who the person behind the writing is. The best way to blog in my opinion is to just do it. Write about whatever pops into your mind, whatever happened to you, or whatever your interests are. It’s your blog, do your thing.

Here’s one for the mac fanboys who are still wondering why Apple is lagging in the businesses.

Last thursday my MacBook croaked with a dead DVD burner after only a month. In addition to that I also had the lovely case discolouration problem. So first I had to call Apple. They registered the call and told me the nearest Apple service centre was 40 miles away and gave me the address.
I drove there the next morning and got told it was the wrong address, they didn’t do tech support, I should have dropped it off at another address. But I could leave it there anyway. Gee thanks Apple.
Today I could pick it up at the other address. Everything was apparently fixed, at least the case was replaced. So happily I drove back to work, turned it on, inserted a disc and heard really bad squeeks and clicks coming from the drive and actually saw the keyboard lift for about 5mm. Lovely. Called Apple again, they told me I better take it back (no shit). Called the place I picked it up from and they said they only took in machines between 1pm and 5, and even funnier, they didn’t do tech support, that was the first address…. riiight. So I called the first address again and now I can take it back there tomorrow. To be continued.

Now here’s what happens when one of my Dell machines throws a fit:
I call Dell. Done. Within 4 hours I’ll have somebody with replacement parts at the door fixing the damn thing.

See the difference? Kind of hard not to. And with this kind of business support there’s no way in hell we’ll ever switch the rest of the company over to Apple and the joys of Os X.

A few… ehm… pointers.

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Well, here goes… I’m posting this here seeing as I doubt this would last 5 minutes if I’d post it at AO.
I finally, formally, quit as admin at Avalanche Online, and for the following reasons:
- conflict in management. Personally I think allowing spammers to stay just so the board appears alive is a perfect way to fuck up the community.
And it has been fucked up. Everyone but a few has long since moved on and the forum is a joke compared to the old days.
- Non-involvement of the admin. Edgar was gone for a year. We’re all busy, and we all found time to moderate the place anyhow. If you don’t care just shut the place. And copying bits and pieces from all over the web now to make up ‘content’ is a joke.
- The whole bandwidth soap and the asking for money. I had full admin access to the site, I’ve seen the bandwidth usage. Even after removing the mp3’s it was claimed the site still did way over 100GB a month. It didn’t, it barely scratched 30, and even at that… I pay $10 a month for this site, and that includes 205GB/month bandwidth. Do the math…
- Dragon627 getting booted. He was still active and was removed as super moderator without even getting a notice, with Edgar claiming he couldn’t get a hold of D. Dragon’s always in our chatroom and nearly always on AIM. More bullshit.
- CommS borrowed Edgar a few hundred so he could get his wife over. That was early 2003, to this day Edgar hasn’t spoken to C about paying him back… and he’s borrowed money from more people…

Thanks to everyone at AO who made it a fun place when I started there 4 years ago, but given said points I think it’s time I finally call it officially quits.

And Edgar, you seriously need to change your attitude towards friends who’ve always been there for you. And contact CommS about the money, you don’t live that far away amigo…