Argh – Dovid's Blog

July 4, 2008Dovid Bender 1 Comment

Jimmy Justice is the man

It is pretty much well known that police and other government officials do not always respect the law. If they park in a bus zone who will ticket then ? For this reason many park illegally, make illegal maneuvers etc. The game is now changing. There is a man out there who calls himself Jimmy Justice. He walks around Brooklyn and filming government workers violating all sorts of traffic laws. From illegal U-Turns to parking a bus lane so they can get their coffee. Don’t get me wrong I have the highest respect for New York’s finest however they should if not more than the average citizen should know better. They write the tickets. What kind of message are they showing ? Click here for some of his clips that are on YouTube . Rock on Jimmy and keep doing the great work that you are doung.

July 4, 2008Dovid Bender No Comments

Rant: Tech Support is NOT your personal slave !!!!

I HATE IT when a customer that spends with you $20.00 a month expects you to everything for them. I recently had a client call me and complain about a very serious issue that was affecting a lot of his clients. He demanded that I get it fixed right away. Now I work on giving the best customer service possible but I am limited. If I were to do that for every client I would get no where. Also I will add that what the customer wanted was more of a feature than a severe bug. Just because a system does no preform to the exact liking of a customer does not mean that it is a bug. I recently had a friend relate to me how he had a client whom he set up Asterisk for and put the box up (a very good one I may add) in a data center. The client called him and stated that system was down and demanded that he fix it at once. He explained that he was on vacation and will look at it when he had time. There was no support contract between the two of them and the system was working fine for many months. The customer assumed that if he paid $200.00 for co-location then he was entitled to all the support in the world. In the end the issue was that the customer did not pay his ITSP and his account closed off. This brings me to another issue when your system is down it does NOT mean that mine is. I have another client that calls me from time to time saying “your lines are down”. As always I run a check and most of the time it is his internet that is having issues. I grab a trace, email it to him and show him that it is an issue at his end. Why do people always blame the next one. Check it out on your end and see if there is an issue. I have more to rant about but this will do for now.

May 15, 2008Dovid Bender No Comments

Consumers: Think before you complain

A client of ours just called me all nervous that his Fax2Email was not working and there must be something wrong with his line. I was a bit alarmed because I didn’t remember him signing up for Fax2Email (yes I know what most clients have. We are known for our one on one approach to our clients). He gave me the phone number that he was having issues with and I was not able to find it in our system. Turns out he was using some one else for his faxes and he decided to call me first. Aren’t our clients nice ?

April 6, 2008Dovid Bender No Comments

Another “Great” web site

Today I cam across a web site www.dialaway4free.com. They seem to allow you to make free calls if you listen to advertisements. I don’t know about everyone else but I would rather pay the few cents that it cost to make the call. Why would I want to sit on the phone before every call and listen to an ad ? Even if you will find people that would listen how effective would it be ? Say I listen to a 15 minute ad and then call my aunt Shirley for twenty minutes. I see it as another company that is trying to make it big in telecom “over night”. Would I remember that ad ? Would you listen to ad’s for free phone service ?

March 26, 2008Dovid Bender No Comments

Terrestrial Radio: Time to wake up

EnGadget had an article on a show host who got “bleeped out” for mentioning satellite radio. It seems they realize that there is competition and they are trying to hide it all. Here is a thought “there is a reason why people are moving over” !!! Look in to why people are doing it and offer them what they want. By hiding things you are only showing that you have a lot to loose. Why not give your listeners what they want ???

October 18, 2007Dovid Bender No Comments

Outsourcing Work Over Seas

<RANT>

I have a client who recently found a vulnerability on their server (in the code, I am a gooooood sysadmin). The work was done in a different country. While I do not tell my clients where to go I hate getting phone calls at 4:00 AM that the server is down when it was the coders error (and the server is not down but rather the coders messed up). People have to learn that you get what you pay for. I am not knocking coders in other countries but I have seen my fair share of bad work done over seas. In the words of the great jbot in the #asterisk channel on irc.freenode.net

“<Dovid> ~ygwypf

<jbot> well, ygwypf is You Get What You Pay For. If the sole factor in your decision to purchase a product or service is that it’s cheaper than everything else out there, don’t be surprised if it’s also worse in every other respect than everything else out there.”

Nufffffffff said.

</RANT>