Two separate customer service issues today… both drove me a little nuts.
Rant #1: Endless voice prompts. Called PayPal in regards to a transaction. After entering my account info, I get dumped into the voice prompting system — “you can say, ‘payments,’ ‘account issues,’ or ‘refunds.’”
Aha… I’ve been in this trap before, and I know to [...]

Last night after hours I get a message from a client: “Hey, my domain name is expiring tomorrow. Can you take care of that for me? Thanks.”
Umm, thanks indeed. Thanks for missing the half-dozen or so messages that you’ve already received in the past month telling you that your domain is expiring soon. Thanks [...]

I’m in WYSIWYG hell… and I’m not alone. (For those who don’t know, What You See Is What You Get — the acronym is pronounced whizzy-wig — is a term for any visual HTML editor such as the ones in Web-based email editors, blogs or content management systems. It’s supposed to let you do basic [...]

Thirty-six seconds. That’s how long it took to crack my password a few years ago.
Years back, the IT guys at a company where I worked called me to ask if they could use my account passwords to run a test. They wanted to try to hack an account on the system, to test their security [...]

Okay, we all know that junk email is a problem. But today, within the space of about 15 minutes, three things happened, and they illustrate a problem…

A Facebook friend has apparently picked up Koobface, the Facebook virus whose least-troublesome symptom is spamming all your friends with posts (which link to the virus file — therein [...]

I’ve had a few projects recently where an existing site need a lot of help in a lot of areas: poorly organized, ineffective design, hardware or programming problems, inconsistent integration of various services, etc.
Problem is, design is visual, and clients get that. So they know they want a new design. The other things are harder [...]

From the Incompatible Marketing Rules department: a) generate buyer excitement and b) tell the truth.
Case in point: a few weeks ago, I signed up for a MagicJack free trial. On their (very aggressive) web site, it listed that the free trial was about to end — in fact, I noted that I had arrived on [...]

Earlier this morning, my Web sites went black. No Web site, no email, no back-end access. Turns out, my hosting provider claims I violated their terms of service. Rather than contacting me to resolve the issue, they yanked the account without warning. All my sites disappeared in one fell swoop.
What did I do to deserve [...]

I’ve long been amused by the marketing of country top-level domains for other purposes — recently, I saw an ad for domains using the .me extension (Actual ad slogan: “It’s all about .me”). Pretty funny, if you know what’s really going on.
Turns out, it’s not about me. It’s about Montenegro.
Here’s the deal: In the history [...]

I’ve got Olympic spirit, yes I do. But when I wanted to watch some online video a few days ago, the NBC Olympics Web site told me I needed to install Silverlight (a Flash-like multimedia player from Microsoft).
Weird, thinks I, ’cause I’m pretty sure I’ve already got Silverlight installed. But I clicked the link anyway [...]