"Tis The Season

I'd like to take a Time Out from technology and see if I can't raise some money for the Salvation Army. Times are tough many this season, but there are some that are in desperate need. The Salvation Army does a lot of great things in our communities. Please help them help others.

"Tis The Season

I'd like to take a brief Time Out from talking about making money to focus on Giving. I want to help the Salvation Army raise some cash. The programs they sponsor in our local communities are outstanding. Business may be tough for us, but life is a lot tougher for others.

OfficeLive Is Up - Finally

Yesterday I actually got a call from an escalation tech. Of course he called the office and got voice mail. Never mind that I told everyone I talked to to make sure the cell number was primary. Wouldn't have mattered anyway. He was telling me that the escalation folks had determined my problem was complicated enough to be referred to product development. Only they were doing a softeare update (in the middle of the day?) and so it wouldn't go through until the afternoon.

I called my speed dial buddies for an update again at the end of the day. Much to my surprise I was told access had been restored (no mention of the cause of the problem). He also said that everyone had been talking about the Vista/IE lockup problem. Seems the OfficeLive code doesn't play well with Google Analytics. Never mind that it seems to work on pretty much any other site and with every other browser and OS except for Vista and IE. But it was my problem, not theirs. Once I removed the tracking code from all the pages everything seems to work. Supposedly there are work-arounds out there somewhere. Time to start digging.

Total down time: five days

Wednesday Update

I called for my mid-day update. Seems whatever Carrie did last night is now undone. I was unable to log in again. Locked out of everything. I was told the escalation team has been in my file a lot, but no updates.

I still need to find out why most of my entries have three or more instances and how I'm going to resolve that.

OfficeLive - The Saga Continues

Well, I talked to someone today (and she actually admitted that she COULD talk to the escalation team) who tried yet again to reset my password. Ooops. It didn.t work. Again. But it did reset the 24-hour clock. So now I'm locked out for another day. I was basically told "don't touch anything and don't call us, we'll call you.

Later when I want to post to forums and blogs or do anything else that requires my Microsoft Live ID/Passport didn't work. So I hit speed dial and got Carrie. Sweet Christmas! She actaully got me logged in! Best of all, she admitted to me that a person from the escalation department was there and said she was going to march over there and see if he could expedite my case.

I'm afraid it may cost the poor girl her job, but if so she can come to work for me anytime. I think she actually gets it!

I still can't get to my Web site designer, and my site still doen't come up for m ost visitors, but at least now I can look at all my contacts. Almost all of which are now in triplicate. Some are entered five times or more. *sigh* Here's another long process I'll probably have to pay someone to handle.

And we'll see if I can still access my site by down's early light.

Sanity Check

I'm looking for some validation here before I go too far down the path of anger and frustration. Please read the next few paragraphs - just a couple of minutes of your time. Or just the paragraph in red if you're really in a hurry. If you think I'm blowing things out of proportion then shoot me an email, post your thoughts here or just close this page. If you think I'm on target, please email anyone you think can help, whether it's advice or someone working at Microsoft. We can prove the "six degrees of separation" theory again and maybe spare some other sap from the frustration I'm experiencing.

Short story: I've Been working for the last three weeks or so to build a new Web site with Microsoft's OfficeLive. I even wrote a glowing article in the Snohomish County Business Journal about this great product. Come Friday evening all the magic stuff to transfer byteslaves.com to the OfficeLive (OL) servers had been done. The pages were all tested and - except for some content - we were ready to go.

Saturday morning problems showed up on the OL side. I contacted support and a helpful agent found some "behind the scenes" problems. More of this Saturday evening and another call to support and more behind the scenes work. I called it a night with plans to finish Sunday. Logged into the control center but could not access the Web design feature. "Technical difficulties - try later" said the message. Finally I calledthe supportnumber in my soeed dial. The woman I talked to managed to lock my accounbt by entering the wrong login information too many times. Can't fix that. I'm locked out for 24 hours. With no recourse.

I finally convince her to get a supervisor. Rules is rules he says. Try it again tomorroew night. More discussion and he finally agrees to open a troubel ticket. Twenty-four hours go by, I try again, still no joy. I also find I (and my customers) can't access my site using Vista and IE7. Great. Some even complain about XP. Locks up the browser. I call my speed dial buddies again.
I talk to a guy who tells me 1) he can't help, it's in the other department. 2) I can't talk to anyone in that department. 3) He can't give me a status. 4) There's no one that can give me a status. 4) There's no one I can call or write to with complaints about the service. I have to wait 24 hours. Excuse me? This is "support?"

Today, as I write this, I'm talking to my speed dial buddies. Oops. They goofed again. It's going to be ANOTHER 24 hours before I MIGHT have access. And still no status and no one else I can talk to. No estimate on when my visitors might be able to successfully visit my site.

I want to send a message to these folks that it is NOT OK to provide this kind of service to any customer. I know my problem will get resolved one way or another eventually. But if we don't make ourselves heard, who's going to hold big business accountable? They couldn't care less if I close my account. So tell me what you think I should do. Get your friends to weigh in. Help me rattle some cages.

OfficeLive "Support" - Day 2

Now anyone using Vista and Internet Explorer can't access the site. I call and I get a gentleman I'll call Dave (protecting the ignorant). He's the guy who sent me this email last night after I submitted an online ticket saying that I was upset that I couldn't access my page after their support agent entered my credentials incorrectly and locked me out for 24 hours. Here's what Dave had to say.

Unfortunately, as the previous agent stated, because you've failed to sign-in to the account so many times your account has been locked for 24 hours. In some cases we can unblock this type of restricted access; however, this is not the case with this particular issue. The only thing I can recommend at this point is to wait a full 24 hours before signing into your account. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you Sven, especially just before 'launching' your web site.

For your convenience, our support staff is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Please call us at 1-866-591-5483 for immediate support. If you choose to reply via email, please do not change the subject line so that we can directly reference your case.

Oh yeah, when I tried to reply the address line was blank. So tell me how this attitude fosters customer satisfaction and puts forth an air of customer service. As I type this the clocking is click over 24 - the number of hours I was told that must pass. And I still can't log in. I'm worse off than I was before I called yesterday. And the only thing I hear is "I can't help you and there's no one at Microsoft that will." What seems to go unspoken is that it really doesn't seem to matter to anyone there.

I suggested to Dave that perhaps someone should go to customer service training. Here I am writing nice things about them in a major local business journal and they're just blowing me off. Couldn't care less it seems. Hey Dave, if I got a bad burger at McDonald's I bet you theyd give me a new one, and maybe a sundae to go with it. I could surely write to a franchise owner or bigwig at home office. But not so at Microsoft.

Stay tuned. If they make this right I'll post that. But I will also let you know if they don't.

OfficeLive - Not So Hot?

I've been setting up a new site using Microsoft's OfficeLive. Over the last few weeks I've been able to build a site that looks pretty hot. I got everything pretty much ready, then the crapola hit the fan. Suddenly stuff quit working. I couldn't access the Web design portion of the site. Got a message saying there were technical difficulties and to try again later.

I called support several times, and they were very helpful. At first. But they've had to reset my password each time so they could access my account to resolve various problems. Today I went in to finish up the Web site and kept getting an error message saying I couldn't access my Web site due to "technical problems." Finally I called support and they, once again, wanted to change the password. Suddenly we find we're locked out. "Too many incorrect logns" they tell me. Huh? I was logging in just fine to the OfficeLive. I just could not edit my site. The support people tell me I'm locked out for 24 hours. WTF? It was working fine except for that one area. Somehow they screwed the pooch. But they're telling me I can't do anything to my site for 24 hours. No recourse. Some insincere apologies. But they obviously dont give a damn.

This is great reason to stay away from the Big Guys offerings. They look great on the outside, but not so hot hen it comes to delivering service.

Disregard my article about OfficeLive. Shiny on the outside, rotten on the inside. Support is totally unconcered with the end user.

Registry Tools

I was at a neighbor's house a couple of weeks ago, and there were maybe a dozen people sitting on the deck. One person asked me what Windows Registry cleaner I recommended. I was talking to a gentleman from Microsoft at the time, and we both looked at this person and said "none!"

First, if you aren't familiar with the Windows Registry you might want to check out the Wikipedia definition. Basically, the Registry is a hideously complex file that contains all the information that is necessary (and necessary is the key word here) for Windows to talk to all the hardware and software. The following is directly from the Microsoft Support site:

• WARNING: If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

There are a lot of tools out there that claim to be able to root out and remove unused entries and to prevent unauthorized Registry entries. But how do these developers know what's necessary and what's not? I recently had a client who couldn't install the latest Microsoft service pack (SP3) on her XP machine. Seems the Registry optimization tool she was using had locked a couple of critical Registry entries.

In my opinion, Registry tools should all be looked at skeptically. I believe there are some that can dig out entries that no longer have prorams associated with them, but I don't think these entries really impact your computer's performance. What's your take?

Selling Out

I hate to admit it, but I'm finally giving in. I've seen so many sites cave in and start offering ads to their visitors. In my most holier-than-thou voice I have said "We'll never do that!" But now we are. If you visit the Byte Slaves Website, you'll find ads on every page. Shoot, we even have a whole Cyber Mall filled with various ads.

The thing that I hope sets us apart is that we don't get paid for running the ads. We only get paid if you click on the ads and actually buy something. That's called affiliate sales. We won't put up ads for anything we wouldn't buy ourselves. We are affiliates for online retailers like the NationalGeographic store, Top Selling Software at the Apple Store and even Uncover special offers and exclusive savings at Sony Style.

Yes, I did embed links to these various stores, but these are store I have personally purchased products from. Our employee's families and friends buy from these stores. These links offer discounts not available to you if you went to the site yourself.

Now for the ironic part: while I'd love for you to search through our Cyber Mall for deals (and I encourage you to do so), what I'm really trying to do is open your eyes to a whole new revenue stream. Yes, you to can sell products for national businesses with no out-of-pocket costs. Sign up at Websites such as Commission Junction and you can be offering your Website visitors discounts on products and services they want and need. And you get paid when they purchase!

Do you think this is a legitimate way to boost your income. Let me know your thoughts for and against this type of marketing. I'll even include one last link to another product I fully believe in...

Protect Your ID and Your Credit

I was surfing the news while eating some leftover spaghetti and saw this article on MSNBC. It really got my attention. It wasn't long ago that I switched my business account because my bank decided to implement "improved security." This security required that I provide mt debit card number, my PIN, and the validation code from my card. All on an unsecured connection. These are all the things I (and so many others) say NEVER to give out online.

This also brought to mind the article I read about credit card skimming. Seems ne'er-do-wells can use a palm-sized scanner to steal the coded information from your debit or credit card. They then use this information to create a copy of your card that they can use as if they were you. There are even scanners that can be put over the faces of legitimate ATMs or point-of-sale terminals (here's one exasmple).

My thinking? Use a credit card (NOT debit) whenever you know your card will be out of sight or suspect a terminal has been tampered with. You can contest a credit card charge. A debit card takes the money out of your account immediately and it can be a major challenge to get it back.

Is Your Wireless Network Dangerous?

The debate over the potential for our wireless toys to cause health problems in humans has raged since the first cell phones came on the scene a couple of decades ago. Personally I've wondered how it can be healthy to walk around with a source of electro-magnetic radiation clipped to my belt. But I worked in the cellular industry for several tears and the powers that be always siad there was no evidence that cellular emissions posed a health risk (notice the didn't come out and say it was safe, either). But then I'd sit down in front of my computer and my cell phone would start making some goofy noises come out of my speakers. Hmmm.

Now people are starting to ask the same questions about Wi-Fi. I caught this article in an e-newsletter today. It's not out-and-out proof that your wireless Internet will kill you, but it got me thinking. Again.

Look at all the sources of radiation that have appeared and proliferated in the last hundred years or so: AM/FM radio (and then a whole spectrum of radio from short wave to cellular and Wi-Fi), television, microwave and more. Maybe all this stuff just passes harmlessly through our bodies. But then again, when they give you a lead vest and hide behind a wall to X-Ray your teeth, you've got to wonder.

Find out more about different sources of radiation and what the mean to you here.

Loss of Focus

At Byte Slaves we get annoyed by the little problems that bother other computer users, too. Lately for me it's been with my new Toshiba Satellite laptop running Vista Home Premium. It seems it's always losing its focus.

In the computer world, focus means the window in which the cursor is active. Typically that's the one you're working in. But often times the focus will change when an urgent message pops uo. Or, as I'm finding, when a not-so-urgent message pops up. For me it happens mostly when I'm in email. I've got a program that syncs my Outlook calendar with my Google calendar. Every time it runs succesfully it changes the focus.

I'm a touch typist, so I'm not always looking at the screen. I type pretty quickly, too. So when the focus shifts I'm suddenly typing NOTHING. And I hear "ding ding ding" every time I hit a key. That really chaps my hide. Especially when I'm in a hurry.

The bottom line is that I don't care if a program has run successfully. Whether it's my sync program, my email program or my anti virus. These are NOT urgent messages. They certainly should not pop to the front of whatever I'm doing and make me click OK

If you have programs that are doing this, please take a moment to visit the company's support or customer service page and let them know you don't appreciate these little messages. If they get enough feedback maybe they'll make a change.

Outrageous Spyware Story

I copied the following from the Internet Patrol Web site. Seems the folks at Lexmark really want to know about your printing habits. I did a little research and it seems a lot of people have discovered this little bugger. One of our techs ran into an issue with a customer using this printer. Seems he couldn't print at all. Turns out that the customer had a dialup connection. When he wasn't connected to the Internet the printer couldn't "phone home" - no contact with Lexmark's server and the printer won't print. My tech verified this with Lexmark support.

Do you have a Lexmark printer? If so, you could also have Lexmark’s Lx_CATS spyware — which Lexmark euphemistically calls “tracking software” for “reporting printer and cartridge use back to the company for survey purposes” — living on your computer, without your knowledge.

A user calling himself “Commander” has posted to the printer-focused Usenet group, comp.periphs.printers, that:

“Just the other day I purchased a new Lexmark X5250 All-in-one printer. I installed it as per the instructions and monitored the install with Norton as I do with all new software.

On reviewing the install log I noticed a program called Lx_CATS had been placed in the c:program files directory. I investigated and found a data log and an initialisation file called Lx_CATS.ini. Further investigation of this file showed that Lexmark had, without my permission, loaded a Trojan backdoor on to my computer. Furthermore, it is embedded into the system registry, so average users would likely never know it was there and active.”

Commander noticed that the spyware was programmed to surreptitiously report back to a URL, www.lxkcc1.com, every thirty days. lxkcc1.com is registered to Lexmark International, Inc..

When Commander called Lexmark to demand an explanation, the company first denied that they had installed any spyware at all. Ultimately the person with whom he spoke conceded that Lexmark installs “tracking software” on their users’ computers “to report back on printer and cartridge use for survey purposes.” While the Lexmark representative avowed that they did not transmit any personal information, they also admitted that the program does transmit the printer’s serial number, which of course is registered to the user. No personal information my foot!

Rumours of the installation of spyware along with their printer software have swirled around Lexmark for several years, and posts to Usenet complaining of Lexmark spyware date from as early as 2001. Some users complain of their computer trying to connect to the Internet every time they print a document; others worry that the program is reporting not only their cartridge usage, but whether they are using non-Lexmark cartridges, or even refilling their own cartridges, thus possibly setting the stage for a denial of warranty service.

According to “Commander”, the offending files include a program file called lx_CATS, and a related .ini file, lx_CATS.ini, as well as 2 DLL files in the c:program fileslexmark500 folder.

In order to remove Lexmark’s spyware from your system, delete the file (probably in your c:program directory) called “lx_cats.exe”, and also search for and remove a file called “lx_cats.ini” (and, for that matter, any other file including the term “lx_cats”).

My New Favorite Gadget

I've been a fan of Star Trek for a while as you may have guessed by other posts. I can't help but compare so many ordinary things today to what seemed so whizz-bang just a few years ago. Think about it: cell phone "communicator" (I love it when William Shatner opens his cell phone on Boston Legal - it makes the communicator sound), doors that open when you walk up to them and voice activated cars - it's all coming so quickly.

Now the PADD has come to life. This is the coolest the coolest gadgetto date, IMHO. It is the iPhone's cousin the iPod Touch. It's about 8mm thick and fits nicely in the palm of your hand. I fell in love with it when I got it just before Christmas. It's got WiFi capability, an Internet browser that lets you zoom in on Web sites so they can easily be read on it's crystal-clear 3.5" screen. It's got a calendar and address book that you can sync with your PC or Mac. Not only that, it plays music and videos! With the WiFi feature you can even buy tunes straight from your iPod!

But wiat! There's more! Just this month Apple "unlocked" the iPod so you can now add email, real-time stock quotes, Google maps, weather and more. It is now truly as cool as it gets. I can do pretty much anything I would normally do on a laptop without ahaving to worry about where I can plug it in or waiting for it to boot. It fits in my shirt pocket (I got it a rubber case so it doesn't slip out of said pocket), it has all my favorite music and videos on it as well as a hundred or so photos. Way cool.

I've been a PDA user since the first Palm Pilot came out, and I've jumped to the next coolest as fast as it came out. Well, that and the amount of money in my wallet. I've had Palm-powered devices and Windows Mobile devices, but this really takes the prize. It's sleek, it's pretty, it is easy to use. I encourage you to check it out.

People are asking why I didn't just get an iPhone. Well, I've heard the battery life isn't too hot for one thing. My iPod will play music all day and still let me surf the Web. I also happen to like my current wireless carrier (and I've still got a contract). But it does make my once-cool cell phone look a litte clunky.

What's your favorite gadget?