So, you may know the story of the shirt but if you don’t here it is! (3rd person of course because that’s always fun for storytelling)
Zendesk is a cloud company focused on helping you deliver amazing customer service through better communication. Their tool helps companies make happy customers.
With a slight interruption in the webinar schedule due to SXSW (Did you make it to the Small Business Web cloud party?), there are just four more webinars I’m doing in the month of March. After this, I’ll be relocating to San Francisco so get in your live webinar time now! There will be a short webinar break as I settle into my new digs in SF.
I’ll also be doing a guest webinar with Groundwork. They provide network monitoring tools (think Nagios) and you can escalate issues right into Zendesk. That’s on Thursday and I’ll be blogging about it tomorrow so I guess that makes FIVE webinars!
I just updated this video I created last year about Antivir Avira’s free antivirus program that has super annoying nagware asking you buy the paid version. I’ve gone back and updated the original post as well so enjoy! [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6rGE6o44ec[/youtube] Read More…
Windows XPwill be supported until 2012 2014. It’s going to be the business mainstay for the next 5 years irregardless of Vista and Windows 7.
iPhones were built to be jailbroke. This allows you to run additional software that you wouldn’t find at the App store. The Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks Apple lost some marbles and that this is no different then when people modify their cars.
WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world! Major newspapers including the New York Times use it to run their blogs. Wordpress also can run your website
Moo makes awesome business cards. I get lots of compliments on my business cards so I keep reordering from Moo!
Firefox is a web browser for the world and is made by Mozilla. It now makes up over 25% of the browser market as more people get sick and tired of using crappy Internet Explorer.
Timebridge makes meetings happen. It streamlines the process by allowing you to send multiple times to everyone you’re meeting with. They all click on the best times and Timebridge adds the confirmed time to your calendar.
Dell is a great hardware platform if you’re going to stick with Windows. It’s a solid choice for business desktops, servers and home systems. You can net a sweet deal on a refurbished Dell for $300 with a 3 year warranty for your business. I picked up my 23″ Samsung monitor from Dell because they had the best price.
Apple makes great laptops. I have seen these macbooks last for years, find them to be made of high quality parts and most importantly, have excellent power management vs many pc based noteboooks which I won’t name. I will be getting a 13″ Macbook pro in the next few weeks (fingers crossed) and will rejoin the computer world as a cross platform IT person.
Lijit is a custom search plugin for your blog or website. It crawls your site and provides visitors with a Google-like results page. Lijit will also list content from folks on your blogroll. Pretty cool stuff plus @tarable and @micah work there!
Flickr is a social networking site based on images. It has huge Google juice so if you care about SEO for your website, find a way to incorporate Flickr. I have their pro account which allows me to upload a lot of images.
Netflix is a superior alternative to renting movies from your local video store because there are no late fees, you can queue up movies, no shipping charges, a much larger selection and they launched “Watch Instantly” in 2007 so you can watch movies on your computer. I’ve been using Netflix since 2003.
I didn’t mention two companies as I’m waiting for their logo banners but I’ll mention them here:
Zendesk is a web based helpdesk ticketing system which centralizes IT support requests and will save you time and money. It’s scalable so you can be a single consultant or helpdesk with 200+ support folks. I started using it last year, Twitter copied me this year as did MSNBC (probably because I was on The Rachel Maddow Show) and Viddler.
Harvest and is one of THE BEST solutions I’ve used for easy time tracking and invoicing that is cross platform. They support Quickbooks export, you can Tweet your time and they talk to Zendesk so I can bill right from my tickets. Did I mention they recently added the ability to collect payment via Paypal and create reoccurring invoices?
Did you ever want to show someone an error message on your computer or how you fixed something? Techsmith has a suite of amazing tools that make taking screenshots and doing video tutorials easy!
The last 24 hours have been quite trying in the life of Adria. First my rat dies yesterday afternoon, then I get my period, my blog goes down around midnight and then today MyCoopRocks makes an early announcement of the contest winners…and I’m not one of them.
Now, dealing with grief, physical discomfort, frustration and disbelief is usually a process that most folks experience during a long and drawn out situation, not in the middle of the week!
Loss of a Pet
Justice my rat died (He’s the Orange one). I had him for 2 years. I adopted him from the Humane Society of Minneapolis. I still have his little friend Common but Justice was the cute and cuddly one who would sit in my lap for an hour. Rats do something similar to cats when they are happy. It’s called “bruxing”. They sorta grind their teeth around and their eyes will jiggle. That means they are really, really happy. Anyway, Justice used to do that.
Menstrual Wha?
Yeah, cramps! They suck! So much that I made a video on YouTube a few weeks back and women are watching it and leaving comments which I think is awesome as this is one of my efforts to be more transparent by sharing non “techie” stuff about myself. I want to connect with people on things we all deal with, all struggle with. I am not alway the fixer…sometimes I need fixing.
Then, like how the carpenter has a leaky roof, my blog (yes the one your are reading) decides that it is angry and must explode. I tried to coax it along, asking the database to please wait until the weekend, promising I would migrate it to the new server space at Rochenhost but no….It seized up. Now I do take responsibility here that I did an in place upgrade to WordPress WPMU 2.7.1 but I was following Richard’s instructions and his first set about configuring WPMU were really good!
I have been with the same hosting company since 2005. Now, using software is just like dating in many ways…the longer you are “with” the software or hosting provider, the more attached you feel to them. In spite of problems around:
Support (emotional)
Performance (ladies?)
Cost (financial stability)
Communication (Is he hearing you?)
Cost (lower cost for same or better level of performance..see above)
Competition (Is this really the best deal in town?)
most people will stay with their partner hosting company. Well, I realized mine was not paying attention to my needs. I gave them many chances to improve. I even spent more money with them…hoping they’d notice me. I left them nice comments in their tesimonials forum…no change. I even suspected they were cheating on me not giving me actual answers they knew but were just copy/pasting from a knowledgebase. Finally, I began looking around and found someone a hosting company that fits my needs.
Did my hosting company go south? Did our needs/offerings change over time to create the rift? I know I tried to resolve things and am moving on.
Now you may be saying, “Adria, don’t you hate Joomla though? Why would you host with a company that is tuned for Joomla? ”. The answer is that Joomla, WordPress and many Content Management Systems (CMS) have similar requirements for hosting in reference to Apache, PHP, MySQL, hardware and bandwidth.
But it seems the judges had other ideas. I was awaiting Friday May 8th when they would make the announcement on who won but they made it around dinner time Thursday. Seeing the email, my heart skipped a beat! Had I won a macbook! What would the website look like? What would I tell people on Twitter?
Uhm…yah…No need because I didn’t win!
The good thing I take away from this is that I have masted the skill of networking.
I feel comfortable enough in my own skin try something new
The ability to evaluate my skill set and be realistic about it
The insight to consider who I know and think about how I can utilize my network
Tthe courage to ask for help and when receiving it, make the most of it
The motivation to follow through and thank others for their help
Now, just 4 years ago, I was terrified of speaking in front of people. Just 1 year ago, I had no experience in front of a camera. 6 months ago I was not doing my daily lifestream at AskAdria.com and 1 month ago I had never met some guy with a camera on site to shoot footage for a contest.
One of my entrepreneurial heroes is R. H. Macy. He founded the Macy’s Department store but not before he went broke out west selling shovels to miners digging for gold. He also sold real estate in Wisconsin. The first shop he opened up in New York City was not a big, spacious retail store…it was more like the with of fruit stand and he sold ladies gloves and hair pins. From the humble beginning and initial failures, he amassed a fortune and created a memorable landmark/memory/slice of life for many people.
In modern society, it’s seen as shameful to try and fail so most people don’t try at all. Jeff of CodingHorror.com talks about failing often as a measure of success in programming. Who cares how many “sites you launched” if they all required the same skill set from you making you no more than a fast paced gerbil on the Internet superhighway’s assembly line?
Fear of failure is so teriffying to people they spend their whole lives taking safe bets. Many of these same people then grumble when “risk takers” achive amazing things. Point is, everyone should take risks…intelligent risks where the payoff has been evaluated and it’s something you’re interested in.
Perfectionism can drive people to accomplishments and provide the motivation to persevere in the face of discouragement and obstacles. The meticulous attention to detail, necessary for scientific investigation, the commitment which pushes composers to keep working until the music realises the glorious sounds playing in the imagination, and the persistence which keeps great artists at their easels until their creation matches their conception all result from perfectionism”.
In the workplace, perfectionism is often marked by low productivity as individuals lose time and energy on small irrelevant details of larger projects or mundane daily activities. This can lead to depression, alienated colleagues, and a greater risk of accidents.
Five characteristics of perfectionists: procrastination, fear of failure, the all-or-nothing mindset, paralysed perfectionism, and workaholism.
I liked my co-op a lot. I felt invested enough I could come up with 10 reasons why they were awesome. After I made my own video, I realized it wasn’t going to win any awards. I felt I had a strong set of reasons so I set out to find someone who could help me deliver my message in a good format. Even though I didn’t win, I now have a much better understanding, start to finish, of how to get a video recorded and what the production results can look like!
So, this last 24 hours might have sucked but I learned a lot. I’m off to eat my bowl of ice cream now!
At first, I didn’t think to use Twitter when I saw my client’s website wasn’t loading. I saw the DNS problem at 6pm CST on 1/22/2009 but thought it was a blip and would get fixed quickly. Today though when I got a call from my client, I took action. He said not only was his site down but so was his email. Eek!
How To Use Twitter for Technical Support, Outages and Downtime To Keep Your Customers Informed
Company: Network Solutions
Problem: DNS problems are preventing websites around the world from loading
Suggestions: Encourage existing customers to join Twitter and visit blog. Be proactive and Twitter status updates ever 2 hours until resolved. Put social networking icons on website near phone number. Add it to the phone script to raise awareness. Focus on providing information and status updates instead of always trying to upsell hosting products.
Update 1 – 9:35pm CST 1/23/2009 - Shashi has just Tweeted from @netsolcares that the Network Solutions DNS problem is resolved
I contacted Network Solutions at 12 noon CST 1/23/2009. I explained that I had seen problems yesterday with the DNS and validated the problem was occurring again using OpenDNS’ cache check tool. I wanted to know if they had an ETA to resolve this problem. Dave at Network Solutions said no but that he could bump the domain for priority callback. That’s when I knew it was serious.
A bit later @netsolcares posted with a status update to Twitter and I captured it.
I called my client back and told him there was nothing I could do; this was as big as the internet itself. The ironic thing was I had just got the OK from him on Thursday to move his domains from Network Solutions to GoDaddy. I’d already sent him the article how Network Solutions charges outrageous prices for domain names.
He understood that this was out of my hands and that the company in charge of his domain name was the only one who could fix this (aka Network Solutions). We began talking about email alternatives like Google Apps. (update: Problem acknowledged this on the Network Solutions blog).
As I was lifestreaming today around 6pm CST 1/23/2009, someone dropped in this link from CircleID:
Network Solutions Under Large Scale DDoS Attack, Millions of Websites Potentially Unreachable DEVELOPING STORY Network Solutions is having problems with “all” its name servers, according to their tech support and a recent post on North American Network Operators’ Group (NANOG) mailing list indicates that it has been under very large-scale UDP/53 DDoS attack for the last 48 hour period. As a result, domain names hosted with Network Solutions’ Worldnic have been affected.
During the stream (I use ustream.tv), I talked about what people could do, how the support lines will be flooded for the next few days, how DNS takes time (often days) to resolve and in the meantime, how many business owners will be losing clients because of this. I also talked about how to find a hosting company based on your needs for service, response time and speed rather than unlimited space and bandwidth since that is false advertising.
Also, I talked about how there would be angry folks, scared folks, folks ready to take action and people happy to not have domains with Network Solutions. I told viewers I would be moving my client’s domains tomorrow. If you are upset with Network Solutions and want to switch, here are 5 things to look for in a good domain registrar. I also found an interesting timeline on the Wikipedia Page for Network Solutions
1979 – Network Solutions started as a technology consulting company1991- Network Solutions gave out names in .com, .org, .mil, .gov, .edu and .net for free, with free IP address blocks
1992, Network Solutions was the sole bidder on a grant from the National Science Foundation to further develop the domain name registration service for the Internet
1993 – Network Solutions was granted an exclusive contract by the National Science Foundation (NSF)
1995 – National Science Foundation gave Network Solutions authority to charge for domain name registrations
1998 - ICANN is formed to oversee, manage and allocate domains, ip’s and protocols
1999 – Fee for registration had been reduced to wholesale rate of $6 per year to registered resellers
So why the heck are people paying Network Solutions $35 per year per domain? Because they don’t know they can pay closer to $7 for the same domain at GoDaddy.
In the past, it was hard to determine if a problem was local network, caused by a vendor update, due to a problem with the internet connection, hardware or what but now with Twitter, you can hop on and basically input a few keywords and get real time updates from other users of the product or service.
I also twittered a blog post I did with instructions on how to transfer your domain name to GoDaddy for the Do-It-Yourselfer’s out there and made a plug that people could hire me to help them with domain transfers. I know a lot about this topic, I deal with moving domains and managing DNS on a regular basis for my own business and for my clients so I felt I could contribute helpful information on Twitter. It will be interesting to see how my little experiment went.
I want to hear from you!
How did your day with Network Solutions go?
Did your clients call you?
Were you able to explain what was going on?
Did they blame you?
Are you mad at Network Solutions?
Do you plan to keep your domain name with them or leave?
I did get an email this morning from Network Solutions to let me know the domain for my client was now resolving:
The issue you reported to Network Solutions on 1/23/2009 01:26:14 PM and assigned Service Request 1-382739781 has been completed and closed.
Currently your mail domain is resolving normally. However, if you continue to have issues accessing your webmail, please contact Network Solutions technical support and reference this service request number.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and thank you for your patience.
We hope this update has been helpful. However, if you have any additional questions, or feel that the issue has not been completely addressed, please do not hesitate to email our Technical Support Department at technicalsupport@networksolutions.com or call us at 1-866-391-HELP (1-866-391-4357). If calling from outside the U.S. or Canada, please call 570.708.8788
So the other day, I heard a woman saying how she was going to get Netzero so she could have some cheap internet. I realized it wasn’ the place or time to educate her on the incredibly frustrating choice she was about to make.
If you know someone who is considering dialup and they’re standing in front of you, ask them if they took the bus to meet you.
Them “Highspeed is so expensive so I’m going to get Netzero” You “Did you take the city bus here?” Them “No, I didn’t. That would have taken too long” You “Then don’t get dialup because it’s the same story” Them “ahh, I get it!”
The basic problem with dial up is it’s slow. Very slow; extremely slow; turtle slow. It’s not a good deal just like a car with 3 wheels or a lame horse isn’t a bargain. They won’t get you where you’re going until you put a lot of time and money into them.
Financially, the difference between the two services of dialup and highspeed is $10 a month.
But it’s so expensive! Not it’s not. Ask for free installation and you’ll get it. Comcast will give you 6 months at the fixed price of $19.99. After that, you can call and ask them to extend the offer or you can switch to their “special” plan at $28 which still gets you 3mb downstream. This package/pricing varies per state but that’s what I was quoted.
How slow is slow? It’s slow it’s like comparing rollerskating to driving a car. Now if you’re going 1 mile, it’s not so bad but most of us are commuting 5-20 miles to a destination.
Below are the numbers I got when I ran a route from Minneapolis to Downtown St. Paul on my GPS TomTom software I use on my Windows Mobile PDA. A great feature is you can calculate your method of transportation to more than just driving. It also has biking and walking.
Driving – 14 minutes – Franklin to 94 to 10th Street exit
Bicycle – 45 minutes – Franklin to University Ave to Dale to Concordia to Kellogg to 7th Street W
Walking – 3 hours, 1 minute – Franklin to Seabury to East 24th Street to West River Parkway to Marshall Ave to North John Ireland to Kellogg
I also pulled an estimate from Metro Transit taking a city bus on a weekday afternoon
City Busy – 51 minutes – Take bus downtown to catch 94 Express bus to Downtown St. Paul
How does this affect me? Let’s say you were going out on job interviews and your first one of the morning was in St. Paul. From the times above, walking would consume your entire morning. Take your bike or the bus and you still are putting 2 solid hours towards your commute there and back making it hard to schedule more than 2 interviews a day. This is what happens when you surf on dialup. You’re crawling along and waiting for pages to load while your competitors are zipping all over applying for jobs and following up on leads.
3 items that affect your internet speed
Your internet connection speed
Your computer’s condition
Website’s layout and content
Here are the load speeds for MSN.com using the website speed test tool from Weboptimization.com
Connection Rate
Download Time
14.4K
88.53 seconds
28.8K
46.86 seconds
33.6K
40.91 seconds
56K
26.63 seconds
ISDN 128K
11.76 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps
5.77 seconds
Take Away Ideas and Resources
Testing your internet connection speed is easy. Just load up the tool and it will test your upload and download speeds. I also use the one at DSL reports but it has more widgety options and I’m keepin this short.
Internet acceleration is fake. The “technology” behind it involves loading compressed versions of images so pages “appear” to load faster
