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Customer Service

Friday, November 14th, 2008

I am finding it difficult to get good customer service. I am being extremely liberal in my definition of good. I am just looking for adequate to be considered good.

My domain name problems are all a customer service fiasco. Folks at GISOL were unable to send an e-mail to someone to transfer ladow.net to me.

My current host appears to be incapable of understanding the English language. I ask a billing question and have my password changed on my ftp account. I asked to have a specific file that I named moved to a directory I cannot access. They resurrected a file I deleted and moved that. That file had a different name the one I asked them to move.

Last night I ordered a laptop from Dell. I was told I would receive free 2-day shipping. Now they are trying, in broken English no less, to explain to me that 2-day shipping really means 3-5-day shipping. Huh?

I have an e-mail making things pretty clear: “Either you can deliver this in two days or you can’t. If you can’t, cancel the order. If you can, do so and teach you customer service representative what two means.”

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Re-Organization

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

The recent spate of computer issues is providing an organization opportunity for me.

When I realized getting the blog immediately back online was not going to happen, I shifted into calm mode. I hatched a plan and it looks like it is coming together. I’ve wanted my personal stuff more separated from the family stuff for some time. This fiasco provided an opportunity for that to happen. I successfully changed ladow.net into a domain for the family. I am now in the process of converting another domain into my personal site. I had hopes one time of having batona.net. That didn’t happen. I was going to change my trail name again, but have decided to opt for transparency.

RDOwens seems to be what I am going to be using. I am moving my personal files over to the other account. Once I am convinced the database is going to be usable, I will get the domain name set up.

While all this is going on I am slowly going through the photo archive. It sucks to have to do this again, but it will be done properly this time. In doing so, I am coming across some stuff that I’ve been wanting to find. There are scavenger hunts that I never logged that I knew I had done. So, as I come across these, I am updating the databases with these.

Of course, this is a double-edge sword. Losing ladow.net meant that every scavenger hunt I logged at TC.com now has no photographs with the log. One of the hallmarks of the hunts I post is that photographs are to remain active. Now I have approximately 500 logs with broken links. As more time goes by, the less forgiving the owners are going to be. Understandably.

I am not about to edit those 500 logs. That is too much effort. My account is now associated with broken links. Splendid. All this is the evidence that is leading me to bow out, at least actively, playing the game there.

As of now, I am planning on keeping the scavenger hunt database up-to-date. That will become more difficult because my account will eventually become a non-premium member account. My paid membership is up soon. Presently, I am the UCR leader in Delaware. That will extend the ability to get GPX files for a while. I will eventually lose that status. At that point I will be reliant upon others to help me keep the database current. If it is of benefit to others, I suspect I will receive the assistance I need.

Anyhow, I seem to have adopted a different perspective for the blog since all this happened. It is still a need of mine, but the feedback, attention, notoriety that once helped it seems to be unimportant. The blog, once again, is mine. It’s an odd thing, I understand, but it is significant for me.

The ducks are lining up and I am feeling pretty good about it is all coming together. I see myself taking a backseat in many online communities I once was active in. It’s kind of like the recent trip to Jamaica. I went sans GPS and did not have the camera in hand the entire time. I enjoyed my vacation. True, I don’t have scavenger hunts to log and shutterspots to list. So be it. My personal time was rewarded with my decisions. I am looking forward to similar rewards by spending less time with some of these activities. I do this stuff for me and I am more than happy to chronicle it here. We shall see how it plays out.

Anyhow, happy Veterans Day.

Posted in Bob, Web Site | 1 Comment »

My New Persona

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

The issues with losing ladow.net mean that lots of things change. I use my domain to separate my e-mail. That means every account I have is now linked to a now-dead ladow.net e-mail address. That means I need to make changes to all these accounts. Undoubtedly, I will forget some.

But taking the make lemonade out of lemons approach to things, I am using this occasion as a time to re-shape some things.

I have used Batona as a trail name since early 2006. That coincides closely with when eCache was moved from a GISOL server to the new hosting company. Now that ladow.net is gone, I am going to drop the Batona persona along with some other things.

While I considered what domain name to register, I saw Batona.net was taken. I contemplated reverting to Frolickin.com, but decided against that too. I spent a couple days really working on a good name. It is difficult coming up with something good that is available. Peppery.net was something I thought would be good. Taken. I made up a couple names. Taken.

After some frustration, I came up with a plan. I decided to finally split my activities as I had wanted to for some time. The family stuff would get its own domain. That has been completed. I registered a domain and it has been successfully done. The family stuff will have that to itself. A second account I have was to host my classroom site. Actually, it still does. But it doesn’t work the way I had planned it. Things have changed since I set up my first classroom site in 1995. There just is not time to work on the site during the school day and I do not desire to run it as a teacher site, done after hours. So, I have decided to drop that domain and register RDOwens.net.

Many folks recommend that one posts publicly. Over the years I have adopted transparency with my online life. It is who I am. So once some of the technical stuff is taken care of with my primary account, I will work on moving eCache over to a new domain. If I can get my host to move the files for me, it should be a pretty easy move. I am looking forward to that.

This past week I have begun re-registering at various services as RDOwens. I once loathed doing this kind of thing as I would lose my join dates. I have since re-thought that. I care nary a hoot about join dates these days. Flickr was a thorn in my side. I am unable to re-name anything there. I want to put Batona firmly in the past with Frolickin. I have 6600 photographs posted there. Their policy is such they will not re-name the path for me. After flip-flopping on this for a couple days, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase another Pro account. I lose a couple months this way, but it will keep everything on the same level.

Doing all this has permitted to clean up some stuff. I have new folks to follow on Twitter. I re-connected with FriendFeed. I have found Gmail can be useful. I organized all my bookmarks with delicious. And I am mulling over approaching GPS games from afar.

I have one listed physical cache in the field. I have two scavenger hunts that, unless one figures out how to contact me, will be undoable as it requires getting something from an auto responder that is no longer operational. Everything else is self-working. I would like to find a better resolution to these three listings. It will probably require me to log in as Batona to correct them. I am still working through some other considerations. We shall see how things play out once I am back up and public once again.

Anyhow, things are moving towards getting back to “normality”. I still do not have access to this blog, so I am writing offline until I do.

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Grrr . . .

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

The first thing I did today was check this site. It was down. That was at 12:03 a.m. right when the Phillies game ended. I wasn’t concerned as sometimes the host does maintenance that affects performance for a short period of time. I went to bed.

When I awoke, I checked the site. It was still down. I noticed that in addition, mail stopped. Uh oh!

I e-mailed my host about what was going on and was told the problem has been resolved. DNS was the cause it would take some time to propagate throughout the ‘Net. No biggy. I went to work.

While propagating throughout the ‘Net can take hours or even a day, it usually is much quicker than that. By the end of the work day nothing was working. I had a bad feeling that was soon confirmed.

I called my host and the guy was able to explain that the domain ladow.net had expired. He told me to get in touch with the clearinghouse I use. I loaded the page and attempted to log in. Nothing I used worked. That is not surprising. I hadn’t logged in to this account for two and a half years and any e-mail address I used most certainly was not working. I called them. It didn’t take the guy too long to deliver the death knell. The domain had expired and I don’t own it. Grrr . . .

In my archives are the e-mail exchanges I had with GISOL from early 2006 when I left them. In there I clearly make certain I own the domain. The last issue I had with them was transferring the domain so I could use it with the new hosting company. And if I didn’t own it, then how has ladow.net shown my work since then if it was owned by a different company?

I contacted GISOL to see what was up. They are up to exactly the poor service they had when I left them. I did not stay connected with them long. It wasn’t worth it.

I refuse to let this get to me. I contacted my host and asked about registering another domain. No problem as it is part of my package.

I am now pondering a new domain name. Yes, I lose all the links to Terracaching.com. Yes, I lose all my readers. Yes, I am going to have a big job ahead of me fixing all the broken links. But I was never so enamored with ladow.net nor am I willing to argue with GISOL again. I will just move on. I don’t want to be too hasty in what I select and I need Gert to sign off on the name.

Posted in Web Site | 1 Comment »