Month: November 2008

These are just great and I found them over here.  Not sure I 100% like the name of the blog, but this article just tickled me.

1. Franklin Ace 1200
   Tagline : 13 good reasons to buy the Ace 1200
   
2. Atari 800
   Tagling : More capabilities than any other personal computer under $1,000
   
3. Compaq
   Tagline : Feature for feature, it’s hard to beat the Compaq Portable
   
4. MicroAce
   Tagline : For just $149.00, you get everything you need to build a personal computer at home…
   
5. Macintosh
   Tagline : Introducing Macintosh. What makes it tick. And talk
   
6. IBM PC
   Tagline : The quality, power, and performance of the IBM Personal Computer are what you’d expect from IBM. The price isn’t
   
7. TRS-80 Color Computer
   Tagline : Radio Shack’s $399 TRS-80 Color Computer – Innovation at it’s very best!
   
8. Amiga
   Tagline : Amiga under $2,000. Anyone else up to $20,000
   
9. TI-99/2
   Tagline : TI’s new basic computer. The one to start with and get smart with
   
10. Hewlett-Packard HP-85
    Tagline : Introducing HP-85. A new world of personal-professional computation
    

How do you measure up on the “geek-ness” scale? How many of these have you done?

1. Install a hard drive in a laptop
2. Perform a clean OS install on a machine with two OSes
3. Swap out the battery on your iPod/iPhone
4. Jailbreak an iPhone
5. Wire your house for Ethernet and Coax cable
6. Use BitTorrent and RSS to automatically download new shows from trackers
7. Use an A/V receiver to its fullest capability (every port is taken)
8. Calibrate an HDTV without the manual
9. Use a DSLR in full manual mode
10. Hack the encryption and mooch your neighbor’s Wi-Fi
11. Solder cleanly enough to get around a circuit board
12. Use your 3G phone as a Wi-Fi access point
13. Shove the guts of a modern game console into a retro game console
14. Design a webpage in HTML by hand that features a picture of your cat
15. Use Photoshop to imperceptibly doctor a photo
16. Abstain from buying extended warranties
17. Know where to buy cheap cables and accessories
18. Fix your parents’ computer over the phone without looking at a computer
19. Enter the Konami code
20. Comment on Gizmodo from your phone
21. Type quickly using T9 texting
22. Program a universal remote
23. Contribute code to the Linux kernel
24. Hide porn from your significant other
25. Avoid DRM on everything
26. Know how to back up your data to networked storage—and actually do it
27. Watch TV shows on the internet for free
28. Edit together digital video ripped from YouTube
29. Play any SNES game on your computer through an emulator
30. Reset expired trial software by messing with the registry
31. Hackintosh your PC
32. Download pre-release movies from Usenet
33. Hack the Wii to play homebrew games
34. Get around web content filters on public computers
35. Get into a Windows computer if you forgot your password
36. Securely erase your data so it can’t be recovered
37. Share a printer between a Mac and a PC on a network
38. Build a fighting robot
39. Write your own Firefox plugins
40. Navigate and reorganize the files on your computer in DOS
41. Get something on the front page of Digg
42. Get through to executive customer service
43. Rip a CD to V0 quality MP3s
44. Rip a DVD to DivX
45. Build your own computer from parts
46. Swap out the hard drive in your DVR for a bigger one
47. Get an NES cartridge working again by blowing in it
48. Calibrate a 7.1 surround-sound system
49. Play downloaded games on a Nintendo DS
50. Talk about things that aren’t tech related

thanks Gizmodo

For those of you who are in the prepress industry, dealing with customers and their myriad of issues is a daily if not hourly occasion. I get phone call after phone call and email after email from CSR’s asking for kindergarten level prepress information. Do they soak in anything from day to day operations or does it all just bounce off? Is it just me?

I love it when a 25 year Customer Service Representative veteran calls me asking “The customer sent in files all set up as RGB, what should I do?” Or here’s a classic… without any prior knowledge or information regarding a situation, a CSR will pull this one “Tom, I have a customer on the line who is unhappy with something we did to their files, can I connect them, click…” And there I am, knee deep in a customer situation I have no information on, lovely! 

Or the another ditty, “Sparky, (my nickname at work) I have a customer who sent all their files with type less then a quarter inch from trim, what do I tell them?”

Seriously?!? 

I don’t make enough money to do your job and mine at the same time. Do you ever get this? “Tom please call this customer and help them solve this issue?” I hate that with a passion. How can a CSR learn anything if they pawn everything off on the tech staff? I always insist that the CSR set up and listen in on the conference call..with high hopes they will learn something…rarely happens that way!!

I also love, love, LOVE IT when CSR’s send strings of emails back and forth to their customer, wasting time and energy, instead of just picking up the phone and making a simple phone call. Where has the service gone in the customer service rep?

Does it seem like we have more customer expositors then customer service people around? I can pay someone $7.50 an hour to open FedEx boxes and shuffle work around. That’s easy. What we need are people who can make decisions and work by themselves. I need good people to block and get things done, not forward emails and put customers on hold so they can ask someone else’s opinion on the matter.

It is just me?

How many of you parents out there watched your kids comb through bags and bags of Halloween candy to find that some people are giving out 3 Musketeers bars?? Ew! I too had to deal with this issue and I’m not happy about it.. I could not believe my eyes. People are still buying that candy bar? …or better yet buying it and “re-gifting” to other people’s kids? Do they have no shame? Was the store all out of perfectly good Snickers, Hershey Bars or Peanut Butter Cups? I’m not sure where you were brought up, but in my home town of Rochester, NY passing out that type of poor candy choice was deemed as cruelty to children and punishable as such. I heard one story of a parent losing their kids to foster care for a whole week cause they purchased this candy for them. Some people find this a bit harsh, not me.

Have you ever eaten one of these candy bars? A 3 Musketeers candy bar is just a chocolate wrapper on marshmallow fluff nastiness, no peanuts, no crunch, no nothing. Parents should never let their kids eat this candy. Never, never never!!

So the next time you are in the Clifford household, you will never find a single 3 Musketeers candy bar… not on my watch!