This morning, I found myself chatting with a Comcast support rep. It wasn't a pleasant experience and I'm sure many of you can relate. I find it particularly frustrating to deal with support when I know much more about what's wrong and how to fix it but have no power to. There is a long blog post coming in a couple of weeks about that experience.

Anyway, I came across this blog post about "Tips for Dealing with Poor Customer Service" and agree the tips Michael Shurter suggests. I especially agree with #2-Get your issue escalated and #3-Learn what not to say.

Regarding #2-Get your issue escalated, I've found that it's pretty easy to tech-talk over the 1st level support to get them to transfer you to someone who understands your techno-babble. Something like, "I ran a traceroute and there appears to be a problem with your router, ae-78.ebr2.Chicago1.Level3.net whose IP address is 4.69.134.61. There is a significant jump in response time from that hop of the traceroute and some packets are also being dropped there." At that point, they realize that you probably know what you're talking about and skip all of the standard "did you try rebooting your computer?" stuff. They also realize that they have no idea what you're talking about and that they better send you on to someone who does so that their average call time doesn't go up.

Knowing what not to say comes with experience. Generally, a good rule of thumb is to pretend like you're being audited. Only answer the questions asked, don't volunteer any additional information (unless you're using my method mentioned above to get your issue escalated.)

Like I mentioned, I'll be posting more about my Comcas(suck)tic experience another day. There's something for you to look forward to.

Recently, our beloved '96 Saturn SL1 failed to pass emissions inspection. It turns out that we had two bad sensors, an O2 sensor and the engine coolant temperature sensor. As you can see in the picture, the temperature sensor was in pretty bad shape. Both were easy to replace, it took maybe 30 minutes total. The main problem with the bad temperature sensor was that the car's computer thought the engine temperature was -15 degrees, even when it was 50 degrees outside.

As of late, the engine had started to run more rough and kind of choking on itself.  I thought it was just due to the car getting old.  Little did I know that it was just a $15 part I needed to replace.

I replaced the sensors and went through a few driving cycles and our little Saturn was able to pass emissions. It runs a lot better now too. With my last tank of gas, I got an extra 7 miles to the gallon (now 37 mpg.) I'm kinda excited that it is only about 2,000 miles short of the 200,000 mile mark.

Amazon just announced a price change for bandwidth for outbound traffic from EC2 and S3. The result is up to 26% reduction in costs for all outbound traffic depending on your volume. Here are the new prices which are effective May 1

New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB

You can read full details here.

It's like some people don't want our money. If I ran a dealership, one of my main concerns would be making sure customers are happy (so that they come back and buy more cars from me.) This is not the case at the dealership where we bought our 2006 Chevy Uplander (Riverton Chevy.) My wife has been the one to take our Uplander in for the free oil changes we got with our minivan...er...crossover. Every time she has gone in, I get to hear from her about the condescending tone they take with her and how much they suck. It takes them hours to do an oil change and last I checked it's not fun to entertain two young kids for hours in a waiting room.

Recently, she took it in for some work covered under warranty. There were a few noises in the suspension that really annoyed her. There was also an annoying flicker in all the lights which really annoyed me.

They called her shortly after dropping it off to inform her that they would be able to fix the noises but weren't able to see a problem that would cause the lights to flicker. They said they wouldn't be able to fix it. I called them back and quickly asked if they were incapable of fixing the car. They dodged that question and said they'd see what they could do. I went in to pick it up when the "work" was finished to find that they hadn't done anything about the flicker. The guy said, "Well, if it's a problem, it will get worse and you can bring it in then." I was a bit upset and told him that he was welcome to keep it overnight so he could see what it looks like in the dark. He showed no interest in that. I got the impression that he was long gone from the dealership by the time 5:00 rolled around. What an idiot.

I asked him if there were any TSBs (Technical Service Bulletins) that referred to this issue, he said he was unable to find any. Luckily, I had previously done my own research and found one. I asked him if he could look up a number for me. He looked up the one I found and voila! the TSB states "HEADLIGHTS AND INTERIOR LIGHTS FLICKER." Hmm...looks like a perfect description of the problem to me. What an idiot.

So, it turns out it was a bad voltage regulator on the alternator. They ordered the part and a week later it was fixed. It is so nice to drive around and not have those lights flickering anymore. I find it very disappointing that I had to do the footwork to isolate the problem for someone who is supposedly an expert in their field. What an idiot.

I'm so glad that we're out of those free oil change coupons too (as is my wife.) I'll encourage her to post a comment here with her version of the story since it will be much more entertaining than mine. Since the coupons are gone, I'll be doing the maintenance on our Uplander now (which I really enjoy.)

In short, what do you do with an incompetent service department? Do their work for them and find someone else to help you next time.

I never put much thought into it until now, but while biometrics seem like an easy method of security they lack...um...security. This article is specifically talking about fingerprints.

Get your German interior minister's fingerprint here

I like Bruce Schneier's comment on this:

" This is 1) a good demonstration that a fingerprint is not a secret, and 2) a great political hack. Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister, is a strong supporter of collecting biometric data on everyone as an antiterrorist measure. Because, um, because it sounds like a good idea."

I received this email last week from reactivation@google.com and it almost had me going (until I examined the included link more closely.) That and Thunderbird gave me a nice warning:

the email says:

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Google AdWords Customer,
Please sign in to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login , and update your billing information.
Your account will be reactivated as soon as you update your payment information.
Your ads will show immediately if you decide to pay for clicks via credit or debit card. If you decide to pay by direct debit, we may need to receive your signed debit authorization before your ads start running, depending on your location.
If you choose bank transfer, your ads will show as soon as we receive your first payment.
We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.
Sincerely,
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Google AdWords Team

The email looks surprisingly official and doesn't have any typos or strange wording. The only bad thing is where the link actually took me. As I moused over the link, it pointed to a page on adwords.google.com.djieh3.cn... some server in China. That server has since been taken down, but I'm sure it was a very official looking site where the scammer was saving the login and credit card information given by anyone willing to share it. I can't help but wonder how many people fell for it.

It looks like the easter bunny came a few days late for Amazon.

Yay! They finally offer static IP addresses for Amazon EC2. This is a huge step for anyone wanting to use EC2 to host anything on the internet. They are free of charge if you are using them with a running instance. If they are not associated with a running instance, there is a $0.01/hr charge for them.

This means that you won't have to worry about updating DNS with a new IP address if for some reason your instance shuts down.

They currently have a limit of 5 IP addresses per account, but you can request more if you need them.

They also have a new thing called "Availability Zones." This lets you put your instances (servers) in different locations allowing you some redundancy in case of some sort of failure of a location (like power failure or network problems.)

A couple of months ago, I realized that the battery in my Palm Treo 755p would only last about a day. I had installed a few new programs on it at the time, but didn't think much about it. The strange thing was it would be fine for a few days, then the battery would drain in what seems like a few hours.

Finally, I figured out what it was... I had installed Chatter email because the default email client that came with my Treo wouldn't work with Gmail. Chatter will run in the background and frequently ping your email server checking for new messages.

The fix was easy; in Chatter, go to the Sys menu and select 'Shutdown ChatterEmail' This shuts the program all the way down and so it isn't running in the background. Yay! I have my battery life back!

My good friend Jeremy just opened up his forums so that anybody may now participate.  Previously, you had to buy his ebook to gain access to the forums.  There is so much information in there about affiliate marketing, networks, advertising and SEO that it's definitely worth your time to go check things out.

You can browse the forums without registering, but will need to register (for free) to post messages to the forums.

I've mentioned before about how good ideas in a company don't always come from the top and how Google makes the most of this with their "20 percent time" program (see an example here.) This program allows Google engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren't necessarily in their job descriptions. They can use the time to develop something new or fix something that they have found to be broken.

Paul Allen, CEO of FamilyLink.com has just announced a similar program. He says:

"I am asking every full time employee in the company to spend 10% of their paid time working on their own family history. This includes researching, collaborating, preserving, and sharing. It means using our web sites and other software and web sites as well."

This is further proof that Paul just gets it. He has an amazing vision when it comes to the internet/technology/genealogy.

I'm excited about this because now I have no excuse to not do genealogy. I hope to share my experiences and work on this blog. I've already sent an email out to my family asking for suggestions on where to start. I know I have a lot of "preserving" work to do on the digital side of things, so chances are I'll be working in that area to begin with.