A Day in Paradise

Another for my “note to self category” for when we need a sign for our Web Monday group.

Talked to June -  very nice (561) 697 2380. Just does signs and none-electronic work.

This is easy to do in *nix

find . -type d -name ‘.svn’ -exec rm -rf {} \;

Windows it is a bit more difficult, unless you do what this guy did and create a .reg file with the following content

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\DeleteSVN]
@="Delete SVN Folders"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\DeleteSVN\command]
@="cmd.exe /c \"TITLE Removing SVN Folders in %1 && COLOR 9A && FOR /r \"%1\" %%f IN (.svn) DO RD /s /q \"%%f\" \""

Good stuff

The reason why I couldn’t do a svn export, is that I cancelled a add / commit half way through both, so the repo was basically screwed.

I shouldn’t blame Fonality, it was really a power surge that caused the UPS to fail which caused Fonality to reboot.

When Fonality came back up it decided to resend all the voicemail emails out (on an average of 30 emails for each of our 30 users), this clogged our upstream. Our email server didn’t appreciate getting a flood of emails containing large .wav files so it slowed down.

This happened first thing in the morning, everyone was checking their emails which were slowly filling with .wav files. This clogged our downstream. Thunderbird IMAP also doesn’t like being disturbed while syncing, so frustrated people trying to access other mail were interrupting thunderbird which exacerbated the problem.

This is where you have to holler out “EVERYONE CLOSE YOUR EMAIL CLIENTS! AND DELETE YOUR INCOMING VOICEMAIL FROM YOUR WEBMAIL!!”

Once everyone stopped freaking out and gave the network a few minutes to settle down, things sorted themselves out.

One of the most amusing Wynton Marsalis performances ever!

Steven Colbert also continually impresses us with his musical acumen. The really good part starts around 5:25

A blogger just sent this termination email that they got from Creative Weblogging.

As you may have seen the global economy is going for a bad year and it hits marketing expenses first many advertisers that have been spending tens of thousands of dollars here at Creative Weblogging are just not spending at all anymore.

We also recently switched to no-follow, which greatly improved our traffic numbers but also decreased our ability to monetize traffic.

So were forced to change contract structure again and have removed many paying contracts in the English network. We will have a joint sessions here tomorrow that will evaluate German blogs more intensively.

If you blog for an English blog and you still have your contract it is very likely it will stay. Same is true for German blogs once tomorrows evaluation is done.

We sincerely regret taking these steps but the good times are over and we all need to make our houses ready for the upcoming storm. Things may like VERY different in 36 months so please check back with us from time to time how current hiring goes.

This article on forbes.com suggests that people are tightening their belts by moving from traditional internet advertising (like the above) and moving to google & other search advertising.

The same article goes on to talk about Wikia and how they are also suffering.

While the downturn chokes spending for Google’s major competitors, it may also cut off funding for potential foes in their embryo stages. One potential upstart competitor, Wikia Search, may already be feeling the crunch: Its parent company, Wikia, announced this week that it will lay off 10% of staff. More generally, the credit crisis has made IPOs all but impossible for small start-ups and has chilled venture capitalists’ enthusiasm for young potential Google-killers.

There is a lot of things wrong with the article (I can’t remember the last start-up IPO) and any “search engine” that fails because because they can’t find advertisers in the first year, deserves to fail.

It takes a lot to get me angry, but today AT&T/Bellsouth has pushed me over the edge.

I don’t want to be that insane guy who rants about how a big company intentionally lies to them, and has customer representatives who have no idea what they are doing and give you a different story every time you call them, but after 6 months of bullshit there is nothing else I can do but rant and pay a $1200+ bill to avoid getting a credit hit.

The story starts when we decide to move over from our 8 line BellSouth Small Business phone package to a VoIP solution. We have a 36 month contract which has 8 phone lines and 1 DSL line on it. We know that the contract is coming to an end and, to avoid downtime and cancellation fees, we synchronized our accounts so that we have plenty of time between the installation of our T1 and the termination of the contract. We talked to BellSouth support with these concerns and were assured that we could terminate the contract on the date we needed and not have downtime or cancellation fees.

The T1 was up and running, and on the day of the switch the phones transitioned perfectly, but we had 2 days of our DSL downtime – which is a clusterfuck which I don’t have the time or energy to describe today.

After getting our DSL back we thought we were in good shape – until we got hit with a bill for termination of our 36 month contract.

Call #1: When I get the bill I call and speak to a representative that says that that is a mistake on the bill and they will reissue the bill.

Next month we get the same bill with a late fee.

Call #2: I call and they acknowledge that it is a late fee and state that it was because we terminated the contract, but don’t have any information. I explain that we already discussed this with BellSouth support and we scheduled this move to avoid the contract termination fee. They have no more information.

Call #3: They say that we terminated the bill 3 days after the contract renewed itself. I explained how that was the day we arranged for it to be terminated and we had gotten assurance that we would be prorated for those 3 days without having to renew a 36 month contract. (We were prorated for those 3 days, but we still got hit.)

Another bill comes.

Call #4: I call and explain all of the above, and ask for the account to get escalated to someone who can help me figure out the contract payment issue. They said they would send it to dispute department and get back to me on the status.

This is where I say that we have been loyal customers for a long time, we always pay our bills on time, and we have always been the ones contacting BellSouth as to how we can resolve this issue.

BellSouth got a response from the dispute department, but never contacted us like they promised. Instead it went to collections.

We were surprised to get a collections letter as we were still waiting for BellSouth to call us with the resolution to this issue. We immediately called the collections agency, and explained all of the above and they explained that the issue was no longer in the hands of Bellsouth and it was up to them to resolve it. They said that if we pay the first half of the payment right away they would take care of the resolution (this tactic seems pretty common). I told them I would contact BellSouth and get back to them.

Call #5: I talked to BellSouth and they said that the reason I got the charge was because I terminated the account less than 60 days before the renewal date. They said that I was informed of this on my bill 90 days before the bill would renew. I let them know that my bill was paid online and unless there was an abnormal charge, automatically paid. I also told them that this was exactly opposite of what they told me a month before about having been 3 days late. They told me they could escalate it again but it would take 7 days.

As I hang up the phone. The phone rings again. It’s another person from the collection agency asking about the payment, I tell them that we are working on resolving this, and even if I wanted to pay I can’t because our book-keeper has already left for the night. I ask about the option to pay 50% and have them resolve it with BellSouth and he says I can pay 50% now and 50% next month – Exactly the opposite of what the first guy said.

At this point it’s 6pm and I call Stella and explain that I’ll be late because I’m wrapping stuff up.

The phone rings again. This is another person from the collection agency, who rudely explains to me that unless I pay THAT NIGHT they will report us to the credit agency. I explain again that I can’t turn into a check even if I wanted to pay.  I send a couple emails and decide that while there are other options for dealing with  at&t’s debt collectors at this point we can’t risk the credit hit and I call the agency to arrange the payment.

After all of this I feel that after being a loyal customer and paying them for their service for years, I was intentionally mislead and put into a position where I was forced to pay a fee which was intended to punish people who broke a contract which we took a lot of time and effort to make sure we didn’t break.

BellSouth had MANY opportunities during the process to inform me about the fact that if I waited to terminate the account I would break the contract. I specifically asked WELL BEFORE the 60 days what I had to do to avoid this, and was NEVER informed about the 60 day buffer. Even after we received the first bill we were not told specifically how we broke our contract. If after we got the first bill (Call #1) they would have said  “You didn’t notice the 60 day termination fine print on the contract, now you’re FUCKED” we would have been pissed off, but would have been able to deal with it.

Now we have to deal with paying the bill, the stress of having a collections agency call ever 5 minutes (literally) and the time dealing with this crap.

It’s simply unbelievable.

Earning season is in full swing and with a couple days before MSFT is scheduled to report earnings, Steve Ballmer lets out that Microsoft will not be creating products which are “much more successful than Vista.”

I am not a huge fan of Vista, but I was one of quite a few people I know who skipped XP all together. Moving straight from Windows 2000 to Windows Vista (disclaimer, I used XP on a laptop – this strengthened my resolve not to use XP on my development machine).

Paul McDougal rants on the failures of Vista, and cites other well sourced articles (also written by him) about states which think Vista sucks so hard, that they are going to use XP until Microsoft pushes out the glorious Windows 7.

Ballmer may have been providing cushioning for an inevitable poor earning report, or may just be reflecting the fact that Microsoft has fundamentally changed the way they create operating systems, and will never again release as big a platform as Windows Vista.

I’ll agree with Paul that Windows 7 will not be as big a platform change as a conceptual change. Windows 7 and the rumored Windows Stratos will focus on the “Cloud” much more than the specific hardware.

Everything is pointing to Microsoft moving away from making their money as a Hardware OS platform and moving towards an internet services model, building a cloud computing platform which will surpass hardware and OS platform.

I am watching this PDC more closely than ever, and my money says that MSFT will do just fine.

This letter has been bouncing around the finance industry for the last few days, but due to the fact that most of my readers are in tech, I figured I’d repost it for their benefit.

Andrew Lahde is a relative newcomer to the scene, his US Residential Real Estate Hedge funds started in 2006 and made news when then called the housing market correctly and provided their investors with a 870% return for 2007.

Last week Andrew Lahde bowed out of the Industry with the following letter where he discusses, finance, regulation, quality of life, and marijuana.

The rest of the letter after the jump.

(more…)

Welcome to the newly refreshed Wormus.com/aaron! As regular readers know, the frequency of my blogging varies depending on my work load. When things slow down at work, things pick up on the blog and vice versa.

Over the last year things have been slowly speeding up everywhere, leaving absolutely no time for me to focus on blogging and building my internet empire. My lack of time has brought me to the point where I have considered shutting down the blog completely.

Along with not blogging, I am not keeping up with some of my good friends blogs which has turned me into a bit of a stranger.

This changes now… I’m BACK baby (kinda)

;extension=php_pdo_pgsql.dll
extension=php_pdo_sqlite.dll
;extension=php_perl.dll

http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/downloads/list

a list of other Free OCR apps

http://groundstate.ca/ocr

Windows live writer rocks