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Posts Tagged ‘rants’

waterboard the crusader

We all know the sad story of what happened to Dr. Tiller at the hands of a zealot who views the world in his own perverted view. Now the assailant who I won’t name because he should be forgotten, is threatening more action from behind bars.

In a couple of calls to the AP he has basically stated that if abortion remains legal more violence will occur. Let me repeat that, a known domestic terrorist is threatening more violence, and only he knows the details about that violence.

So using the logic of our former VP doesn’t that mean we should water board him? Waterboarding is wrong but using the logic of the far right, if we only do it to one person its okay right? (No of course it’s not)

06.07.09 read more »

California Dept of Departments

So the state of California is completely boned when it comes to money, which leads me to ask…. are all of these really needed?

Read the rest of this entry »

05.20.09 read more »

Your IT Department is killing us all

60% of companies use IE6 as their default browser

I just finished reading an excellent post over at the webware blog, by Larry Dignan entitled What Browser Wars? The Enterprise Still Loves IE6. In this article he details the corporate worlds long (and continuing) love affair with Internet Explorer 6.

In this article he doesn’t break any new ground but he does reveal some stats that are just amazing. I knew that corporations love IE6, out of the people I am closest with I am the only one without IE6 in my life. However, I did not expect to see that IE6 enjoyed a 60% market share in the corporate world, I expected something between 45 and 50 percent.

The article goes on to ask many questions about how IT departments are killing productivity with browser specific solutions (theres no excuse for those any more, period) and uses the usual anology of giving workers an antiquated piece of technology to deal with current problems.

Where I really enjoyed the article however was where he talked about reasons to switch. All too often these articles pile on about IE6’s myriad amount of problems without detailing why even IE7 or IE8 are better. This article is worth a read because it not only showcases why IE6 is bad but it also provides a great crib sheet you can use for winning over your IT department to your line of thinking regarding IE6.

If you need help killing IE6 there is a number of solutions out there in addition to the article talked about here, these include the website from .net magazine bringdownie6.com, and saveIE6.com, or you can simply do a search to find many more.

05.01.09 read more »

why the passing of proposition 8 was a good thing

no on prop 8If you know me, chances are you will look at the headline of this posting and wonder what happened to me to make me believe that the expression of h8te was a good thing. Well the answer is I have seen the last few days in my state. In the aftermath of something as wrong as proposition 8’s passage I have seen a mass of humanity mobilized in a mixture of fear, disgust and disappointment.

“without struggle there is no progress” ~ Frederick DouglassFriends who have never registered to vote, peers who have never spoken up on anything related to current events or politics, and those with political perspectives the opposite of my own have all spoken up in some manner against enshrining hate in our state’s constitution.

So that is why I believe the passing of this proposition was a good thing, sure I would give anything to have seen the proposition defeated and I honestly weeped at it’s passage, at least something positive has grown out of something so wrong.

We have seen marches in all corners of this state and marches in other states. Young, old, gay, straight, republican and democrat and independent alike have all marched in the days after this election to denounce this proposition’s passage.

In the aftermath of something so wrong, this movement for equality and yes change, has dusted itself off and only grown larger, you see I was complacent, possibly like you were. I looked at the polls and looked inwards at myself and believed the rejection of proposition 8 was only days away. I watched the exit polls showing an Obama victory on election night and assumed to have a huge victory at hand.

That was until just after Obama’s speech and I saw the results start to flow in and reality began to set in. While some exulted in the glow of the election of the first black president, others simply could not, while the nation took one gigantic step forward, my state also took a bigger step back.

Even with this step back though, my hope for the future only grows. I look at the exit polling, and I see hope. I compare the results of proposition 22 in 2000, a similarly themed proposition tossed out by the courts, and the results of proposition 8, and I see the tide slowly turning. Most of all however I look at the youth vote, a segment I still call my own and I see true change. Just over 60% of those under 29 voted against the marriage ban, a number we can only hope to see increase.

Change never comes easy in this country, but change is coming to this state and eventually in this country. In my grandmothers lifetime she has seen a world war, the end of segregation, and the fall of a superpower, and now the first black president, so don’t tell her we can’t change.

There is no legally or morally justifiable reason to not extend the right of marriage to all couples, hate and intolerance has a short life span in this country, it is only a matter of time.

11.08.08 read more »

customer service as a curse word.

UPDATE: A few hours after contacting Verizon I did notice a service improvement and soon thereafter the problem was eliminated.

verizon fiosWhen I first heard about FiOS coming to town, I got excited, when my friend across town got FiOS I got jealous. So it was with an aggressive and sometimes zealous passion that I followed Verizon’s installation online. Eventually a couple months ago the introduction of the technology began, and just recently was completed.

I even was so aggressive we became the first to get FiOS in this area and immediately I was wowed, the color on HD channels appeared more vivid and lifelike than on our previous providers system, and the connection speed was out of this world. Sure we had snags, like missing certain channels and an annoying habit of Verizon capturing our malformed url’s and sending us to a search page to serve us advertising, but it was things we could overlook.

I expected future problems, anything you use everyday will break down at some point, and today it did rather spectacularly and rather than help, Verizon’s tech support only exasperated the problem. The problems, a new channel listing, lack of easy ordering of new channels, seem minor yet annoying but the worst problem out of all three has to be the problems we are now encountering when attempting to connect to any Yahoo property.

Now you might catch yourself saying, so what they intro’d a new channel listing, go print the new one and you’re fine. I attempted to, only to find the listing offered was the old one, hours later the current listing became available but not in an easily printed version. Seeing as they fixed this in a couple hours it was a failure you could live with. The problems with ordering current tv, however are a seperate level of annoyance altogether.

First off if you don’t watch current, I recommend it highly, with that said let me reveal some details. FiOS just added current with the new channel line up, and since we had been missing the channel we immediately wanted to view it. This turned out to not be possible since it turned out we had to order it from Verizon, however they offered two ways to do just this, on the phone or by the web. I chose the web path (naturally), and to spare you some boring details, the online path ended at the same phone number I had first encountered. This was when I started to become angry.

The following day was when I started to question if getting FiOS was a good thing, say what you will about cable internet at least it isn’t blocking access to extremely popular websites like flickr, delicious, and yahoo itself, in fact the entire Yahoo network is inaccessible as of this writing. I checked every connection and computer available to me, I checked with friends and no one had the error, that is until I checked with others who had FiOS, and it turns out all of them had the error.

I didn’t want to brave the torment of a long phone wait time so I trudged into the online FiOS support, and once again to spare you boring details, let’s just say I ended up at the same phone number once again. Apparently at FiOS, customer service is a four letter word.

I figure this problem will be gone shortly however it has opened my eyes, I know very few companies fully support customer service and even fewer take it seriously but Verizon has a lot to learn from companies who have either taken innovative or positive actions in the field. In the past, companies like pownce and apple have left me very pleased with their level of support, so far Verizon has not.

Don’t let my experience turn you off of FiOS, it is in fact a phenomenal service, just right now it’s phenomenally underwhelming.

10.18.08 read more »
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