Canon support: awesome

marketing technology

I don’t have any expectations if it comes to end consumer support. These days I anticipate phone systems that will try very hard to make you give up. Should you reach a person they seem often not to care about your issues, their job or anything for that matter.

When I ran into questions with a recent Canon camera I called them anyway. I have been massively and positively surprised: After 90 seconds I spoke to somebody who cared. He had the camera I had in hand within a minute.
I sent them test pictures, and now they are looking at them. Regardless what the outcome of this investigation will be: I have the feeling that they care about their product and my experience with it.

As I said: I have not expected this. It will probably be a long time before I would consider another manufacturer. Unless there is a killer feature in a competitors product I will always look for a Canon device. I don’t mind paying more for it.
It might very well be that other companies have awesome support too. The risk to run into issues and they don’t is just to high.

So, yes, every support call is the chance to win a customer for life.

How odd that so few companies seem to understand this.

Good Bye Firefox

internet misc

OK – I really am a laggard. Using Firefox in 2014 was not really the best thing to do. But it got me where I needed to be. Other browsers are of course always part of the mix of things to use. Comes with the job.

But with Firefox 29 today they finally pushed me over. As usually it is a minute detail: I like to have around 20 things 1 click away. Firefox used to be able to ONLY display those bookmarks without the favicon.

Since I identify those things by 1 or 2 letters it makes a big difference if I have the favicons visible or not. With Chrome I never found a way to get rid of them. Now with Firefox they just poppped in.

So I might as well use Chrome, and maybe look for a way to get rid of them there. There is no way that I will invest any of that into a browser that it is declining. These days Internet Explorer actually causes less troubles than Firefox.

Turns out there is a solution for Chrome:

Remove Chrome Bookmark Favicons

It is not ideal since it leaves the space AND the site itself looses the favicon as well, but it is never the less better than Firefox.

I doubt I will ever look back …

Internet Security Companies

internet

Between January 2012 and March 2014 more than 160 giga dollars were spent for Internet security. You would think that much of it would care about Encryption. One would further think that some of this money would go into evaluation of the actual code of library mostly in use: OpenSSL. Apparently not enough.

There are between 3 and 10 contributors to OpenSSL, which provide a total of around 50 code commits a month.

If the security Industry would spend only 0.01% of their earnings on these code commits, then each one would have a review budget of 10 kilo dollars.

ping frequency of black boxes

technology

Today’s story on flight MH370 is that pings got picked up by a Chinese ships. Blackboxes seem to emit a signal every second for a couple of weeks.

Maybe it would be better if these devices would send a ping not every even second. Technically it should be easy to give black boxes a fix random
ping frequency. I probably would help that the device you are looking for emits a ping every 1.345 seconds.

And bigger batteries are probably a good idea as well.

network solutions – how to ruin a company

internet

Since I have been on the Internet for a while I unfortunately have domains registered with Network Solutions.

They were the first company that one could register domains with.

They are so bad, it is not even funny.

With having your domains there you can also have DNS service with them. However: Their DNS servers go away. That is really really really bad.
That’s like your car stalling at random times. And doing so repeatedly.

The example with a car is not the right one, since most DNS providers are simply never down. They just work work work. While Network Solutions Servers don’t.

But that is -unfortunately- not the end of what is wrong with them:

Their web interface sucks. Much like with Godaddy its main purpose is to sell you more crap. Not to let you do what you want to do. That is really hard.
Imagine the DMV but having hundreds of beggars, peddlers and the like trying to push something on you while you wait.

Their phone system is just as awful as most phone systems are.

How rotten Networksolutions is I learned today:

I happen to have a .com domain with them that will expire (thank god!) in 2 months. Today I got 2 mails: They thanked more for my order of the corresponding
.info domain. They didn’t want any money for it. But it is ridiculous since I had to cancel this domain that I didn’t want.

What are they thinking???

Domain registration is EXTREMELY lucrative. For a couple of bytes one pays good money.

Network Solutions had more money than god. They had lots clients. Serving them just average could have kept them
in business for a long time.
Instead they tried to make even more money.
And all they accomplish is to royally fuck this up.

Register anywhere you like. Hell, if you don’t mind being exposed to half of the rant-points here, then even use the dreadful Godaddy. But Never Ever use Network Solutions. Really.
You will regret it. They gotten so continuously worse during the 15 years that I tolerated them in my life, I can only envision in horror what they future will bring …

jetset without overplay is dull

internet media technology

Finally followed advice from a good friend and got overplay. Was super easy. Support was stellar. Netflix releasing House of Cards while I am on the wrong contintent?
Who cares …

Nice planet. But parts of it are a bit boring without any access to netflix etc.

printing all pdf’s in a folder in OS X via terminal

OSX

Make a new folder on the desktop, and drag the pdfs you like to print in there.

Open the terminal, type

cd

and a space. Then drag the folder you just created on to the terminal window. OS X will put the path there. So your shell command looks something like this:

cd /Users/yourName/Desktop/FolderYouMadeThatHasThePDFs

hit enter.

Then you can simply print all PDF files in that folder by copy pasting this:

for i  in *pdf ; do echo $i ; lp $i ; done

Wells Fargo session.cgi from Statements & Documents

technology

I tried to download an online statement from the Wells Fargo today. What fun!

While I could do so for one account – on the one I needed I got nothing. I could select the year, or click on “Recent Statements”.

I called Wells Fargo. After ten minutes the first human I was able to talk to told me that I would need to speak to the online department for that.

So I was put on hold for another ten minutes. ( 1 800 956 44 42 would be their direct number). WF hold music cut deep grooves in my auditory system in the mean time.
It is the most obnixous loop one can think of. Amazing how they can literally have humans listen to this junk for years each day and nobody complains.

Once there was a human on the other end he was able to ‘enable online statements’ for the account in question. Not sure why that was not on in the first place.
After signing off and on again I did indeed my past records. Which is awesome.

I friendly declined the second offer from the WF operative if he could sell me any additional services at this point. That’s a bit like trying to sell timeshare junk to people
having a root canal.

All this would not be worth wasting any ink over. It’s just corporate America how it slogs along day after day extracting billions from people trying to get by (and from me too) .

When I clicked on the actual download link all I would find is a file called

session.cgi

Turns out that WF online puts the PDF statement into file with that name.

Renaming to

anything_you_like.pdf

made it accessible. I decided not to spend another 20 minutes in the Wells Fargo phone loop to tell them about this unfortunate bug.

Media consumption in 2014

history internet media technology

4 months after I moved I connected the BluRay player. Turns out it was worth it: “Save the Tiger” is worth watching.

nest blinking red light

technology

I moved five months agao and had not installed the nest yet. When I hooked it up it only showed

a red blinking light

On top of the unit. It turned out that the device needed to get charged via the mini USB adapter in the back. After about 5 minutes, a small dull nest home screen showed up.
After maybe another minute the screen said:

Please attach display
to its base

It turns out that this message tends to be over optimistic: After connecting the device
it fell back into the red-blink slumber.

I gave the device 10 more minutes of USB charge. I used an actual physical charger, not a USB connection from a computer. The ampere that the unit sees can be quiet different.
A drained rechargeable battery certainly appreciates the flow a nice and solid current.
After said 10 minute charge things got better: the thermostat started ‘boot’ while being connected and it was able to operate the heat pump. At this point it still said

low battery

in the Wifi and other connection related screens. Since this did not change for an hour I gave the display another 30 minutes on the USB charger and then was able to set up the network connection as expected.