I recently had to reload the Mac. Not from anything that went wrong, it was time. It was running much slower than I like and I just had a lot of crap and garbage that I wanted to get rid of. Formatted the drive, reinstalled Snow Leopard, restored my documents and re-downloaded the apps that I needed.
Once it was done, everything was well and good except iTunes. Over the years I have manage to collect some cruft there too. Duplicates and triplicate. Extra songs that I didn’t really want. It was a mess.
You can end up with duplicates files in a few different ways. You can have multiple albums with the same songs on them or you can have multiple copies of the same song. We are going to deal with the last one since that was the main issue that I was having.
A quick search in iTunes will show you your duplicates. But I had over 8,000, so removing them from there was going to be time-consuming. So, a quick search in my music folder was in order, and a rebuilding of my iTunes library.
NOTE Library –> Export Playlist. You will have to do this for each playlist that you want to keep. It also goes without saying that you should already have a backup of your music library. This process involves deleting files and if you delete something that you didn’t want to delete, you can’t come crying to me. BACKUP!
Let’s lean out that iTunes library!
The whole process should take less than an hour and when you are done your iTunes library will be a lean, mean music playing machine!
For those of you that might have visited donburnside.com yesterday, you might have noticed a little something different. Different in as much as a redirect to some website that wasn’t english. Nothing bad as far as I could tell, just not here.
Turns out, this was completely avoidable and has been corrected. You see, I never bothered to stop using the default ‘admin’ user. My password was brute forced and the main index.php file was over written, and my themes index.php file was blanked out. Good thing I had backups.
So, let this be a lesson to you. Don’t use WordPress with the admin username. While I’m a little late to this party, better late than never.
Recently posted at wtf was this snippet.
Recently, a new customer bought $20,000 worth of wine from Vaynerchuk. Many businesses would call and thank that customer. Or send the person some free wine. But Vaynerchuk did something else. He went on Twitter and found out that this customer was a huge Chicago Bears fan. So he sent him a Jersey signed by his favorite Bears player. It is this type of interaction, Vaynerchuk believes, that will thrive in the evolving business landscape.
You can click through to the whole article, but for our purposes today, this is the relevant piece.
This past weekend was spent travelling. From Phoenix to Milwaukee by plane via Southwest Airlines. From Milwaukee to Great Lakes, Illinois by car, via Enterprise Rental Cars. I use both of these services since I think they provide great service and value (and I really like how easy Southwest makes it to fly).
I booked my car about 2 weeks in advance. Got a great rate on a Ford Focus. A little more than $40 for the weekend. When I checked out the car, I also opted for the navigation rental. Sure $11 is a bit spendy, but in saved agrivation and frustration, especially when I drive at night, it was money well spent. Add in the fuel charge (they were about $.20 per gallon cheaper than the street), I was expecting to pay about $120 or so for the entire weekend of car rental.
Imagine my shock when I got my bill at the end of the week for $238. 5 times more than the contracted rate, double what I was expecting. Bonus, I was running late for my flight, so I didn’t have the time to go back to the main desk and bring my concerns to the manager. The problem I had was that I was charged for services that I signed for, but wasn’t told what the charges would be. Primarily for the damage waiver ($22/day) and insurance ($12/day).
Wednesday morning I finally got the chance to address this. Since I was at work, my only option was to use the customer service contact form at the Enterprise website. My thinking was that I would get the process started there, and follow up by phone when I wasn’t contact via email or phone.
Until later Wednesday my phone rang. It was the manager from the MKE location. He pulled up my record, I explained to him my problem and that I new it was entirely my fault since I signed and initialed everything. He said he would do what he could to help me out and did exactly that. Reversing the charges for both the insurance and the damage waiver.
Even after I told him I was at fault. Without making a fuss, without being questions. 5 minutes after getting on the call, the reversal was in progress and he was wishing me a good day. No fuss, no muss.
That, my friends, is how it’s done. And, why I will continue to use Enterprise for my rental car needs. They do it right!
That’s right gang, you can now securely sign in to both Twitter and Facebook, and all I can say is it’s about time!
For you readers that are less nerd than the others, having a secure sign on is important because it helps keep you secure, especially over Wifi. Also for you, you might not be aware that when you access a site over WiFi, almost anyone can watch what you are doing, grab your username and password and be you.
https stops that by encrypting your data so it looks like a stream of rubbish to anyone that views it. I highly recommend taking advantage of these features, and here’s how.
Doing this for both sites will help keep your username and password secure, as well as any updates that you provide, even if you are on an Open WiFi connection.
If you have any questions, comments are open!
More from the easily-fixed-or-avoided-if-you-pay-attention-or-listen files. Typos not withstanding, lets get started.
It’s really not that difficult. And, conversely, I’m actually pretty easy. Easy to please, easy to impress, easy to get along with (for the most part). Also, I’m not one to declare the sky falling often, if at all. I am one that double checks the problems before reporting them a number of ways to make sure that the problem is actually what I’m reporting, not user error.
That means that if I were to report to you that something isn’t working correctly, I would greatly appreciate it if you could listen. I would appreciate it even more if you were to act. That way, a week later when I actually need to use what I reported broken, it wouldn’t be broken and I would be able to do the things that I need to do.
This goes for your users too. After a while you learn to distinguish the ‘sky fallers’ from those that are actually telling you about actual problems. But, and this is a pretty big but, you still can’t ignore the sky fallers. Prioritize them different maybe, but never ignore. It’s the one time that you ignore their problem when there actually is a problem.
Anymore it seems there are way too many issues being ignored for anyone to actually expect to be successful. You can also replace the word ignored with not handled correctly for the same effect.
If you are going to be in business, make sure you take care of your customers. Address their concerns when they happen and report back as soon as possible. Not doing this is yet another reason why your customers are leaving and going to your competition.
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Feel free to use my stuff, just Be sure to let me know.
