@boston_police is a Good Idea

August 30th, 2009 § 0

I live in a very small town in Connecticut where everyone knows exactly what is going on in town however things can get misreported. This got me thinking as to how things could be better handled in our town and even within the county. A great example can be found with the Boston Police Department. In an effort to spread news of an emergency they turned to the ever popular Twitter to share incidents with the general public and give warnings.

Since moving to Boston in late August I’ve found this service pretty useful although it rarely affects me directly however it certainly has given me a heads up to what’s going on around me. For example, earlier in the week I saw this tweet after I got the alert that the T had struck a car on the BU bridge and knew that traffic was probably going to be even worse and that I should walk down past the incident to pick up the bus or the T to avoid getting delayed and be late to class.

I have a feeling that between the Boston Police feed and the Boston Fire feed any true emergency situation that would affect me directly would be easily conveyed and help keep me and others safe.

Bottom line, Twitter + emergency services = great idea.

HP Customer Support Follow pt. 1

August 20th, 2009 § 0

Well as I mentioned about two weeks ago I  had plans to call HP’s “Executive Care Office.” Turns out that is possibly the greatest idea that any has given me in a very long time. In 7 minutes I had accomplished more than I had in an hour on my first tech support phone call. Within those 7 minutes, the woman I was talking to had decided it’d be best to have my case escalated to a case manager. The woman in customer relations with whom I was speaking then tried to get a case manager on the line with me however she kept having her calls dropped. She finally took my phone number and agreed to call me back if she managed to get another case manager in the next 5-10 minutes. A few minutes after hanging up customer relations called me back and she let me know that she had finally managed to get a case manager on the line.

I was put through to this case manager who just asked me a few basic questions and to confirm my information. She then created a case ID for me and offered me two options. 1.) She ships me the parts in 3-5 and I do it or 2.) HP picks up the bill (they even send you packaging) to mail the computer to them and they replace it for me. Needless to say I went with the lazy method, having them change it out for me. This was by far the most pleasing experience I had with HP and I’m glad that not all their departments are lazy and incompetent (low level tech support). I’ll post again with how this whole ordeal ended for me.

Is Social Media a Fad?

August 15th, 2009 § 0

I’ve always said and thought that social media is here to stay granted I may not like few of the things in it but as someone who consumes vast amounts on information daily via a vast number of sources I know social media and social networking is going nowhere. I feel as though social media is certainly going to play a huge role in the future and I’m even seeing that with the company for which I work. Social media is slowly becoming part of our business model and is slowly driving more traffic and that traffic is converting better and sharing our site at alarm (yet awesome) rates. I came across a video that Mashable had shared and it’s quite impressive and worth the watch.

Some of the numbers presented in this I’ve seen before and it’s done in a form that’s sort of getting old but it’s the numbers that are still the impressive part.

Images Not Appearing in IE Fix

August 12th, 2009 § 4

I’m writing this in hopes to save someone from having the same wild goose chase that I went through attempting to discover why a set of images would not show up in IE. I knew the image was there, I could navigate directly to the image’s location and be returned the little red “X” but not be given a 404 as if I were going to an image that didn’t exist. This seemed strange to me seeing as how I knew that it was a valid .jpg file and I knew that any modern browser should by all means support a jpeg. This sent me on a chase for an answer. I ended up over at designerstalk.com where a few members pointed me in the right direction. It took three tries but none of the previous tries hurt the first, they only improved the page. Finally one member said that he’d experienced a similar issue with jpegs saved in CMYK so back I went to the original images and sure enough all the images that would not display were CMYK images. I setup a batch to re-save and change the color mode to RGB and sure enough my images are all showing up now!

[original thread]

Images Appear Inverted in Safari

August 11th, 2009 § 0

I had a bit of a strange issue when I inadvertently stumbled upon a series of images that I had put online that were inverted in appearance, however this wasn’t perfect either. I went to the server and pulled the folder with the affected images down to my computer and noticed that even in Quick Look I still couldn’t see the image correctly. Going off a (seemingly) unrelated issue I had posted on DesignersTalk.com and will write about tomorrow I tried opening the images in Photoshop and re-saving them, that worked. So I set up a batch and let all the images open and re-save. Now I’m not entirely sure why this was happening however I am able to say that this is certainly a method to try if you ever run into something like this with your images.

This Weeks Tweets

August 9th, 2009 § 0

Powered by Twitter Tools

HP Sucks and Lies

August 9th, 2009 § 0

Well as I previously mentioned I was forced into calling HP for an issue out of my control that was resulting in an NVSTOR error and a cdrom error code showing up in event viewer. I was told by a low level tech that this was a software issue and that I needed to run their recovery program. This was also confirmed by a supervisor of his when I was transfered to him. Out of desperation I obliged and tried it out, it did nothing but waste my time. I’m taking a look around and noticing a few other people with issues and even found an entire website dedicated to HP’s lies (hplies.com) and how to get good support. Later tomorrow I will be calling the HP executive care office at 1-800-756-0608 Op.7 and complaining until I get a competent tech on the phone or an offer to replace the PC, for free. I will certainly post a follow-up from this phone call.

Twitpic Via Email

August 3rd, 2009 § 0

I was thrilled to find out that Twitpic does in fact allow you to now email photos to a unique email address that will then post a picture to your account and of course to Twitter. This finally allows us non-iPhone users to post photos on the go. At least provided your cell provider allows you to send pictures to email addresses without using some crazy website (ie Sprint/Nextel). Either way I tried it out a few days ago and it does in fact work pretty well.

This Weeks Tweets

August 2nd, 2009 § 0

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Review: HP Customer Support

August 1st, 2009 § 1

Today I made a dreaded call to HP customer support for a friend of mine’s PC. After dealing with their surprisingly forgiving voice activated menu system I ended up with a CSR that did in fact have an accent however it wasn’t too bad. The fact that he insisted on refering to me as “Sir Jamison” made it all the better. He did take quite a while to look for possible causes to an error with “NVSTOR32″ and a semaphor timeout error when buring disks. He came back and told me that his research did in fact lead him to find out that nvstor32 is a DLL, however a quick Google search to confirm but most arrows point another way, to it being a .sys file. However I gave him the benifit of the doubt and he insisted on transfering me to his supervisor at the end of the call to let his supervisor know how he did. In speaking to his supervisor he never did ask how the CSR did he basically just confirmed my trouble ticket number and that was it… waste of my time.

So all in all I’m waiting to try their suggestion which was reinstall the OS, which I’m expecting to be a terrible experience since I HAVE to use their recovery partition and their recovery tools. I am however refusing to call back to be stepped through the process.

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »

WordPress Loves AJAX