Google recently announced Google Wave. It has only been released as a developer preview, but it should be open to the public later (as an open-source project) in 2009. Imagine a dozen people editing the same document over the Internet at the same time. No big deal, right? We can do that now. Now imagine [...]
My local "tech support" business is now officially two months old. During this time I’ve learned a great deal and had many experiences, both positive and negative. Terror and Unhappiness Let’s get the bad ones out of the way. The biggest challenge I face is my own fear that I will screw something up, and [...]
Continue reading about The Light and Dark Sides of Customer Service
This is the story of how one simple setting can waste valuable time. I was working on a project that involves some basic PHP and MySQL modifications. In order to do the development work and the testing, I used my local WAMP server installation. I downloaded the files and nailed down the most obvious environmental [...]
OK, well I learned a lot this afternoon. I just finished a bunch of rough cuts on some video we shot for a client’s website. I need to post the video for the client’s review, but didn’t know how to properly configure the exported video for Internet viewing. My first attempt produce files in the [...]
Continue reading about iMovie – Best Settings for Streaming Video
For some reason two of my MySQL databases required repair this week. Both were backing Joomla 1.5 installations – our corporate site (grownbypeople.com) and our old news website (informify.com), which we’ve left running. When browsing to the sites they both produced the same MySQL error #145. And it was the session table that was corrupted [...]
Hopefully this will be the last time I post about the saga of my malfunctioning HP Presario V3000z. Thanks to a compassionate FedEx driver, I was spared the drive to Montrose to pick up my computer (see my last post). He made the arrangements to bring the box to me himself. What a guy! The [...]
As of today, my theoretically repaired notebook is sitting at a FedEx facility in Montrose (an hour away). You may ask, "But Mike, why is it in Montrose, and not delivered to your doorstep?" A fine question – thanks for asking. Despite telling two separate HP customer service reps that my address had changed, HP [...]
HP has diagnosed my motherboard problem, and given me a date for the return of the repaired laptop – November 4. It will be interesting to see if they pull it off. If they do, I will be happy to change the name of these posts to "Update: HP Sucks Sometimes."
I shipped my Presario V3000z back to HP on Friday. FedEx showed that the box was delivered Monday morning. I checked HP’s online status page to see if it reflected their receipt of the box, but as of this morning their status hadn’t changed. So I kicked out another email to HP to verify. They [...]
The return shipping box finally arrived today. I packed the laptop and filled out their form as requested. Tomorrow I’ll see if I can get FedEx to pick it up. The box was 10 days late, but I should point out that this marks the first time an HP promise was actually fulfilled. They told [...]
