Tag Archives: dummies

Introducing “The Book”

If you’ve ever helped anyone with a computer you’ll love this! This is can also be referred to as “The Medieval Helpdesk“.

This is in Norwegian, so you can probably turn the volume down, but it’s subtitled. I just watched this with a bunch of technology directors and we were all laughing out loud.

Why I hate 1 and 1 web hosting!

I love 1 and 1 web hosting, I really do. Great features, great price, all sorts of configuration options and cheap domains ($5.99 a year). They’ve got decent reports and now they’ll automatically mail me stats. Some of their web interface stuff is a little slow (it’s too fancy) but it’s got lots of options so I can live with it.

What I hate is their lack of customer communication:

  • They need a blog just to keep us up to date of the cool stuff they are working on.
  • They need a status page to let you know what problems are up.
  • They need their staff to know what problems they are having (it shouldn’t take 3 calls over 3 days to find out they are migrating some servers).
  • The need to let us know when they have problems or in advance when they plan to migrate servers.
  • If thousands of pages are generating 404 errors take a minute and alter to the 404 page and mention to the viewers (my readers) that it’s a temporary problem.
  • Even the utility companies can automate a hold message to say there are problems and they are working on it.
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    What is a Network?

    So my Mom asks me what her network is, I tell her the name of it but she wants to know what it is. We talked for a bit but she’s not liking any of my (wonderful) analogies. Plus the fact that she’s wireless now means I can’t just say it’s the wire…

    The closest on a home scale I could come up with was her phone network. She’s got the phone wires just like the computer wires and a cordless phone in the house. It’s not weird that she doesn’t understand the computer network, it’s weird that she thinks she understands the phone network…

    It’s funny the questions people ask when they use technology that they never asked before (I don’t mean just my Mom, I’m picking on millions of people here). There are just so many computer similarities with phones, cable tv, and plumbing but people just never seem wonder about it; but when they get a computer they want an answer. I’m thinking that when she’s over my house next she’ll see all the other wireless networks (in my neighborhood) in her list and that’ll help (at least the why of why it has a name). I was sure to leave out the fact that her phone now goes over the cable with the internet and the television channels. Continue reading