Paul Roub : blahg

So, yeah, the move is in progress. Slowly, as these things tend to go.

So far, I've driven the van up to Champaign, filled with guitars and stuff; painted the kids' rooms and so forth; actually worked a few days; and flown back to oversee the movers. Got a tow hitch put on my car, rented and filled a trailer with must-have-before-the-truck-arrives things, and had a yard sale. The amp is still available, by the way.

The packers came on Friday. The truck was supposed to come by today to start loading, and finish tomorrow (Monday). But today we run into the snags that have put me in my current less-than-sparkling mood. ('cause I'm usually an absolute treasure to be around)

First we find that the packers missed a ton of stuff; some was just forgotten, others (like most of the garage) were sort of moved around and tidied, but not packed in any way that the truck crew can make use of. So that sets things back a bit tomorrow...

But not as much as the impedance mismatch between the size of the moving truck (a full semi, moving our house and another in one load) and the size/layout of the neighborhood's entrance. No one from the movers had noticed this before.

So in the a.m., I'll give the driver a lift to U-Haul, whence he'll rent a "shuttle" truck to haul stuff from our house to the nearest viable semi parking spot. My Wednesday night arrival in Champaign is sounding a bit optimistic.

Normally, I'd just drive later/longer to make up the time, but this time it's me and the dog. Who has a bladder infection. And is thus somewhat incontinent. So frequent stops, and not too long a day in the car.

Meanwhile, Christy and the girls flew up today. And AirTran lost one of their bags. So much for me trying to take over the stressful part so she can just settle in. But the girls love the new house. And someday, someday, we'll sell the old one.

Posted by Paul Roub at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I tried to sign up with Frappr yesterday, with less-than-successful results. So off goes the bug report, to wit:

Trying to sign up, I get an "invalid email" error -- using paul@roub.net , the account I'm using right now. What gives?

Now keep in mind, they're not trying to mail me anything. Just trying to register with my email address as my login ID, per their requirements. Weird.

Later that day, I was able to register anyway.

And this morning they replied to my initial report:

roub.net is not currently compatible with Frappr. We're looking into this as we've gotten a couple notices of this for non-common email addresses.

So my... email address isn't... compatible with... your registration form? OK.

Obviously, the first response that comes to mind is "Bullshit." Which is accurate, but not terribly useful. Instead, I went with:

Ummm. A couple of things.

(a) I was later able to sign up, using that email. Getting email updates and everything.

(b) How could an email address not be "compatible with Frappr"? Seems kind of insane.

So we'll see how that goes. It's a cute service, maybe even useful, but can we at least strive for support responses that make sense?

Update:

Somehow or other, Frappr and Privoxy aren't getting along. Checking the proxy logs, I must have used a different (non-proxied) browser when I successfully signed up. Just tested another address -- with Privoxy, failure. Without, all signed up. So there we go.

Posted by Paul Roub at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Having given up on ever getting audible.com to care about their site's usability problems (especially the javascript links which render tabbed browsing unusable), I had considered writing a Firefox extension to fix the links. Maintaining one extension is enough to fill what spare time I have, however.

Enter Greasemonkey: a killer extension which allows you to assign "user scripts" -- Javascript snippets which perform some sort of fixup once a page is loaded -- to certain sites.

Bingo.

So, if you like Audible, but hate the useless interface:

1. Bookmark this page. You'll need to come back after restarting Firefox.
2. Install Greasemonkey here.
3. Restart Firefox (told you).
4. Load the Audible fix user script.
5. From the Tools menu, select Install User Script.
6. Click OK on the ensuing dialog.
7. Load up an audible.com page.

Everything look the same? Good. Hover over a link, however. Look at the status line. Instead of, say, javascript:linkThis('/store/product.jsp','&productID=BK_TIME_000350'), you should see an actual http:... or https:... link. You can open it as usual, in a new tab, in a new window -- all the normal things you can do with a link.

Except save it across sessions or pass it to a friend to help sell an audio book. Audible will have to fix that particular brain-fart themselves.

Update: the script now creates bookmarkable links, as well. Details...

Posted by Paul Roub at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's fun when your complaints strike a chord. Vented to This is Broken about bad on-hold behaviors at most customer service numbers; and now there it is on the site.

The music starts playing. Kenny G. Luckily, your mind quickly tunes that out, much like my nose used to when I worked on a garbage truck. You get on with your work... 30 seconds pass, and there's silence followed by a voice...

Posted by Paul Roub at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Only fair to note that I did not hear from the Applebot robo-mailer today.

Rather, an actual human being from Apple called me.

We determined that, although all of the im3's labelled "iPod Photo Compatible" are supposedly just that, it's clearly not the case here.

Since he can't guarantee that a replacement would fit; and since Altec Lansing only guarantees compatibility, at the moment, for units purchased directly from them; a return seemed best.

About 90 seconds later he had emailed me a FedEx return label, and a full refund awaits when they receive the speakers.

Can't ask for too much more than that, really. Oh, and... and this is shocking, when you're used to dealing with, say, Sprint customer service... he apologized, specifically, for the previous lack of clueful responses.

Yay Apple.

Like I didn't already want a G5.

Posted by Paul Roub at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Again with the not looking good.

Apple comes back with a slight variation on yesterday's form letter:

We apologize again for the inconvenience you have experienced.

If you discover what you believe is a product defect for any third-party product, please contact the manufacturer directly for information regarding the manufacturer's warranty. You may obtain their contact information at: http://www.alteclansing.com/

Please note that products sold through this web site that do not bear the Apple brand name are serviced and supported exclusively by their manufacturers in accordance with terms and conditions packaged with the products. Apple's Limited Warranty does not apply to products that are not Apple-branded, even if packaged or sold with Apple products.

And I reply, and the clock starts again...

Two for two. I guess nobody actually reads the emails, then? Just an auto-responder sending out slightly-varied form letters.

It's not a warranty issue. Nothing's broken. Altec sending me a brand-new version of the exact same thing, in perfect working order, would solve nothing.

You're selling a product as iPod Photo compatible, when it's *not*. I am wondering whether you (Apple), the *seller*, would know if there is another version of this product which *you* could swap out with *your* customer. Or should I just ask for a refund, which, again would *not* be from Altec Lansing, as they have not sold me anything.

What can I do to get this escalated to a point where people actually read the message?

Posted by Paul Roub at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, this doesn't look good. First response to the iPod Photo vs im3 cries for help.

From apple:

Products sold through this web site that do not bear the Apple brand name are serviced and supported exclusively by their manufacturers in accordance with terms and conditions packaged with the products. Apple's Limited Warranty does not apply to products that are not Apple-branded, even if packaged or sold with Apple products.

If you discover what you believe is a product defect or a missing accessory for any third-party product, please contact the manufacturer directly for information regarding the manufacturer's warranty.

To which I've replied:

So even though *you* are selling this as iPod Photo-compatible, and it is *not* compatible, Apple won't do anything about this? Or is this just a form letter?

A sign that someone actually *read* the problem description would be very helpful. I don't think it's defective or broken; I don't think an accessory is missing. I think that the product does not work with my iPod as *Apple* claims it does on your web site.

Is there a Scoble of Apple somewhere? The I-give-a-shit-how-we-treat-customers guy, who can point the way towards others who feel the same?

Posted by Paul Roub at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My wife got an iPod Photo for Christmas. OK, technically we both got it, but it's not the most shareable device, and I already have an iRiver. But anyway.

For her birthday, I wanted to get her some external speakers, preferable something dockable. The inMotion im3 seemed a good bet. Look at it there, linked from the iPod Photo Accessories page. Look at that description - "supports iPod models with Dock Connector". Look at the nice "Compatible with iPod Photo" sticker on the box.

Yeah, well.

Yesterday was the actual birthday. We open it up, and guess what? Doesn't fit. The iPod Photo is a bit too wide, apparently. Sure, it works with the included patch cable and line-in jack, but so do my iRiver and my daughter's CD player. Seems reasonable to expect "compatible with..." to mean a bit more.

So let's see whose tech support can handle this (a) best (b) fastest or (c) at all.

Altec Lansing (which makes the im3) is not the current front-runner. Emailed them yesterday, no response so far. Just trying to find out if (as implied on their site) there's a newer version that would suit our needs. Tried to call them, but the recording explained that support hours on Sunday were between something like 9am and 5pm EST. This was at 11am EST. No option to leave a message. Click.

So today I emailed Apple, since they're the ones who sold me the damn thing.

We'll see what happens.

I'd love to get this to work -- the speakers really are small, portable and surprisingly full-sounding. But we can't dock / charge / use the remote / etc. No fun, and kind of expensive for a simple pair of powered speakers.

Posted by Paul Roub at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Paul Roub at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Paul Roub at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, apparently part of the way overstock.com saves you money is through recycling. Of UPS tracking numbers, unfortunately. Placed an access point / 802.11a card (no typo, long story) order with them, but the order tracking shows it shipping last week, arriving last July. And also the previous October. In various parts of the country.

Anyway, I emailed overstock, basically wanting to know:

1. Did the order ship?
2. When did the order ship?
3. Is that really the right tracking number?

That's all. No venom, no particular agitation at all. I'm not in a huge hurry on this anyway.

The response this morning is perhaps the best example I've yet seen of pay-no-attention, form-letter point-n-grunt customer service.

Remember now, I wasn't complaining. Don't want to return anything. Have nothing to return. Just pointing out / asking about an apparent glitch in the system.

Oh, and the "XXXXXXXX" stuff is not me redacting the order info. It's actually what "Jacob" sent. Quick tip -- perhaps if you take the time to fill in the form letter blanks, you might notice that it's the wrong form letter.

Behold:

Dear Paul,

I have received your e-mail and I am truly sorry that you have had problems with your XXXXXXX. Unfortunately, as was previously state to you, we cannot accept the return on this item because we are outside the terms of our return policy.

We do not mean for our return policy to offend you in anyway. Our policy is established so we can accept returns under reasonable circumstances and exceptions. After this much time has passed, there is no way for us to establish that the defect you are reporting was directly a result of the product itself. I can understand how you would expect your purchase to last well beyond this time, and we try to respect this expectation by establishing warranties or extended return plans on many of our items. Unfortunately, in reviewing the circumstances of your problem, I did not find any indication that this product has failed to stand the test of time for many of our other customers who ordered the same item.

The nature of our business demands that we must have items returned within a minimal time frame so that we are able to send the item back to our manufacturer or vendor. This will allow us to continue to offer great deals on name brand products. My records indicate that our supplier would not honor our return of this item.

I understand this experience with us has been unsatisfactory. I encourage you to not prevent yourself from taking advantage of the outstanding deals we have to offer. I have added a $10 coupon to your account to encourage you to allow us another opportunity to demonstrate we truly have customer satisfaction as our number one goal.

Our XXXXXXXX Department is only one of several great departments on our site. If you feel you cannot trust shopping from our [XXXXXXX], perhaps you will find you can still save money on housewares, gift ideas, or even electronics. I hope you will use your coupon to take advantage of our great savings throughout the site.

Please let me know if I can be of further assistance on any other issue.

Sincerely,

Jacob

Overstock.com

My reply was perhaps a bit more pointed than my initial letter. We'll see what happens.

Posted by Paul Roub at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hey! They actually replied to the last email!

From: support@register.com
To: paul@roub.net
Re: SafeRenew billing failure

We would like to apologize the inconvenience caused to you
due to the SafeRenewal(TM)Service. 

We understand that you domain name has been successfully 
transferred from Register.com and the current registrar of
your domain name is R91-LROR.

We have successfully deactivated the domain name from our
databases and henceforth we assure you that you will not
be receiving any emails regarding this domain name from 
our behalf.

So good, eventually, for them. Of course, the emails weren't my real concern -- more that, had they had updated credit card information from me, I'd now be attempting to get some unwarranted charges reversed.

Take what you can get. At least they're not domain-squatting weasels

Posted by Paul Roub at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Note: this is unedited, stream-of-consciousness babble, containing profanity, a bunch of possibly-incorrect assertions, and a clear Emacs-over-vi bias. I'm frustrated, I need to vent, and that's life. My friend Mark asked for the gory details of my server problems, and it felt so good to spew about them that I thought I'd do so really publicly.

Where to begin?

Background:

I host paulroub.com and openmikes.org at jumpline.net. Various aliased domains are also involved:

        roub.net = paulroub.com
        paulraub.com = paulroub.com     
            (nobody ever spells my name right, so I give up)

        openmikes.info = openmikes.org
        openmics.org = openmikes.org
        openmics.info = openmikes.org

Notice, in particular, that my main email address (paul@roub.net) lives in a n aliased domain. Big deal, right? Ha-ha.

This was all hosted on a couple of RedHat Linux servers, in a typical virtual-domain setup -- my files all lived under /home/paulroub, etc. I had local procmail support, emacs, gcc and other needed tools were there, pretty thorough Perl setup. Life was good.

The Upgrade:

About a week ago, I get a notice that in a couple of days they'll be doing this big server upgrade, moving to Sphera virtual private servers, among other things. OK, that shouldn't be too bad -- having the appearance of my own machine, a bit more control perhaps. They've always been good w/support before, so I figure any problems will be solved quickly, and they must've tested the shit out of all this, right?

Then came Thursday morning.

Thursday would've sucked anyway -- I'd been up until 4 working, slamming things together for a customer demo my boss was doing. This had taken forever because my two Windows machines at home are running 98 or ME, and crash ALL THE TIME when running Delphi. XP and a second hard drive have since been ordered for the main box, soon it will dual-boot (games and Digi 001 still need the toy OS). And yes, I do prefer to use Linux and OpenBSD at home, but my working life revolves around Windows development.

Plus the cable (and hence cable modem) had gone out, so I had to send the program files via phone line. Yee-hah.

So I wake up to check for mail from my boss, and everything has gone to hell.

All my mail account passwords had changed. OK, check the support web site, turns out they've helpfully reset them all to my login password.

Get the passwords fixed, re-download all mail (expected that, new server) -- hey, how come it's all two weeks old? Hmm.

Check database-related pages on both sites. Expect stuff to fail. It does -- new database passwords, etc. I'll just SSH in to openmikes.org and start fixing things.

Oh fuck, no SSH. Turns out that "standard plan" accounts no longer have that. Great.

Edit the appropriate include files via FTP. Still not working. Hey, where'd my /include and /data directories go? Gone. Cool. Restore from my backups.

Much better. Hey, where are my recently-added listings? And page fixes made in the last two weeks? Hmm.

Grab my own backups (done nightly from a Linux box at home), build a Perl CGI script to restore the latest data (since I can't SSH in and use MySQL directly).

Better. Start uploading web page backups to both sites, things are improving.

Hey, how come certain pages still don't work? All Perl pages -- the PHP stuff is fine. Well, let's SSH into paulroub.com (Plus Plan, still have that don't-call-it-a-"feature"-it's-a-basic-goddamn-necessity) and test the scripts locally.

"Can't find module DBI". Hmm. When was the last time you saw a Perl installation without DBI? Must be misplaced.

Let's do a "locate". Not installed, fuck.
Try "find". Hey, no DBI.
Shit, download source, build it locally. No fucking C compiler!
Hey, this is RedHat, let's grab an RPM and install that. No rpm commands installed!
Gaaaahhhh!

OK, let's walk away from that. I'm on 3 hours sleep, and I'm too fucking tired.

Make sure mail is getting through. It's not! Cool! No bounces, though. Huh. Definitely nothing in the mail spool file, nor any activity in the sendmail logs. Are my MX records fucked up?

Uh-oh - what's this?

        [c:]nslookup
        > server ns.jumpline2000.net
        Default Server:  ns.jumpline2000.net
        Address:  66.84.5.1

        > roub.net
        Server:  ns.jumpline2000.net
        Address:  66.84.5.1

        Name:    roub.net
        Address:  209.239.55.116

        > paulroub.com
        Server:  ns.jumpline2000.net
        Address:  66.84.5.1

        Name:    paulroub.com
        Address:  66.84.14.39

Neat! roub.net, where people mail me, and paulroub.com, where I pick it up, are now different! As in, roub.net still goes to the old server. Can I still get there? Why yes I can -- that's where my mail is. Fun. So for the moment I tell Outlook Express and Evolution to check both servers.

Start firing off support requests -- what's wrong with aliases? what the fuck happened to SSH? why are you using two-week-old backups? why are they incomplete, anyway? where is Perl DBI? how 'bout RPM or a C compiler, you fucks?

That was the situation for a couple of days -- dribbles of support responses (they're a bit overwhelmed) -- DBI isn't supported (for no stated reason), but you can still use the old mysql.pm module -- except it isn't there either. Sorry about the old backups, we've restored again from newer ones. Sorry for thereby blowing off all your fixes from the last couple of days.

Nice email-to-all from the Jumpline's Director of Operations -- sorry for the "unforeseen problems". Yeah, who could foresee that old, incomplete backups; missing libraries; out-of-date aliases; etc. could ever cause trouble,

Then, Saturday, the old IP address went completely dead. Fine, except roub.net still points there. Sunday, they say aliases will be fixed "within 48 hours". Yeah, 'cause that kind of thing can't possibly be automated. Maybe the Perl modules they'd need to do it are missing.

Meanwhile, who knows what is happening to my mail?

I give up, buy a year of DNS from Dotster, and point roub.net at the new address. Then I get to go edit all sorts of sendmail configs on the new box so it won't just reject the mail as "relayed".

As of this morning, the new DNS seems to be getting out to the world, and hopefully things will be better.

Still no apparent intention of fixing the DBI problem (question -- what's the use of offering a database if the web's most-popular scripting language can't use it?); they have "grandfathered" us old Standard Plan guys, however, so I have SSH access back to openmikes.org.

So most of openmikes.org works, except the part where you search near a city -- that relies on some Perl DB code. I may be able to rewrite it in PHP, but I don't know if those particular modules are available.

Bunches of things are broken on paulroub.com, 'cause it's mostly Perl scripted. Comments pages, gig listings. Nothing important since I don't have any gigs right now.

Oh, and as of today they still haven't updated DNS for the aliases. Wanna bet they break my hand-tweaked sendmail config when they do?

p.s. Oh, and no fucking emacs, either. pico and vi.

p.p.s. vi!!! gaaaaaahhhh!

Posted by Paul Roub at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)