Oh boy is the internet pissed at Godaddy this week! Turns out they supported SOPA (which they later changed their mind about). That was reason enough for quite a few folks to start pulling their domains and move them to different registrars. I know I did, but not because they supported SOPA. More like, that’s the straw that broke the camels back.

I’m transferring domains away from GoDaddy as fast as my checkbook will allow. I only have 8 or so left with them, and I hope to have them transferred to Hover by the end of January. This is a process I started earlier this year after Bob Parsons came home from Africa after spending some quality time shooting elephants. But that’s only part of why I’m moving my domains.

Another part is their famously awful user interface. Or the fact that they are the worst WordPress host. Or the fact that when trying to check out when purchasing anything you have to click through 10 different pages offering upgrades, magazine subscriptions and ginsu knives. But, like the other reasons, this is just a part of why I’m transferring away.

If we take a second to look at the graphic at the top of this post. That is a screen shot from my Gmail account. Please note the date stamps on each line. If you want to know why I’m transferring away from GoDaddy, it’s because they are practicing email spammers and there is no way to make it stop that I can find.

Buy a domain? 2 emails. plus the weekly “buy more domains” email. Have a domain? 9 months before it expires they start sending reminder emails to renew. As the date draws closer, the frequency of the emails increases until you are getting 2 per day (per domain). Once the expiration date has passed, they continue to send emails at the rate of not less than 1 per day per domain. And there is no way to make them stop.

Worse part is when you don’t want a domain name any more. I let about 10 go this year that I will never do anything with (or my customers won’t be using). And the damn emails never stop. It’s truly rediculous.

So, if the emails won’t stop, if the UI won’t change and if the check-out process won’t stop pushing ultra high security email and faxing from my rotary phone, then I’m out.

And now you know The rest of the story.

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Is it law that all photographers have to use the same Flash host serving the same Flash template that opens in a full screen Flash window?

August 15, 2011 2:03 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@dbwilldo

db

Just through the course of a day I end up on some photographers website. Invaribly it’s something hosted by photobiz.com or wix, all done in flash with copy-righted background music playing and a crappy looking WordPress blog hanging off the side like dirty dish rag hanging out of the kitchen window. I keep asking why, but never get answers that I find acceptable.

Until I asked Stella the same question. Being the photographer of the house, I thought she would have good insight into the reasoning behind photographers having such horrible websites. Our conversation went a little something like this.

• dbwilldo: why do photographers have such yucky websites?
• Stella:because they are not nerds

Could it really be that easy? A person that has the ability to charge thousands of dollars for their services that they perform with (possibly) tens of thousands of dollars worth of very complicated electronic components just aren’t nerdy enough?

That must be it. I think the problem that we as nerds run into is in our thought patterns. Photographers aren’t nerds. Photographers are creatives, that just so happen to do their creating with digital equipement. A fact, I think, fools the rest of us into thinking that photographers know the same things that we do.

Which they don’t.

They just want a website that displays their portfolio and other information in a pleasing manner, just like everyone else. Sites like photobiz and wix have capitalized on this, targeted photography professionals with words like ‘easy to use’, ‘background music’, ‘elegant’ and ‘comic sans’ to lure them in. So they get stuck.

Makes me wonder. Do they not try to open their websites on their iPhone/Android/Blackberry? Have they not tried to open their site using an iPad or Android tablet? If they have, do they just shrug their shoulders and say “Oh well. I’m not a nerd enough to make something better”?

Or do they see Flash as their security blanket? Thinking that if their photos are wrapped up in flash, they can’t be stolen and used in nefarious ways. Nerds know otherwise, don’t we?

Instead, I prefer to think that we, as nerds, have failed the professional photographers. Failed in that we haven’t shown them the way to nicely display their photos on any device, on any platform and with any browser. We have failed to guide them in best web practices. Failed to help them save money by avoiding services such as these.

As nerds, we owe it to our photography brethren to show them the right way. The way to display their photos in a pleasing way that is easy to use and keep their photos as safe. The way to share their work with iPhone/iPad/Android/Blackberry users. The way to save money by not having to pay the rediculous rates that the other guys charge. We owe them.

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I suppose saying I would replace ADT with the #1 competitor was a good tactic. Never call ADT. Call Protection 1 instead.

May 26, 2011 2:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@dbwilldo

db

A process battle that was started almost 3 weeks still isn’t completed. And that would be a security camera installation at work. Security cameras installed by ADT, since they also handle our alarm system and we were told the 2 work together quite nicely.

It all started with our sales rep and a walk-thru. A walk-thru that included a trip through our 50,000 sq/ft warehouse where we pointed out all 6 doors that we wanted to keep an eye on, hopefully with cameras mounted on the 20′ high ceiling. “Great!” he says. “No Problem!” he says. Check written, order placed, he says about a week to 10 days before the installation. Cool.

Installation day comes. I’m not notified about the date until the installers arrive. Turns out it didn’t matter since the sales rep neglicted to tell the installation department that we had a 50,000 sq/ft warehouse with 20′ ceilings. They would need a lift and cables that were longer than 60′. So, off they went to procure said items, hopefully to return the next day.

Another week passes before they returned. This time with a lift and 200′ cables. This time ready and rarin’ to go!

Except the wrong cameras were ordered. Yes, we would need the interior cameras to work in low light. Not to worry, they ordered replacements and would have them shipped “next day”. Meanwhile, they installed the cameras that were correct and ran all of the wiring.

Turns out, “next day” in the ADT world actually means 3-4 business days, if you are lucky. Also, wiring was not within the realm of expertise of my ADT installers. I have some experience with this and I can tell you that the job my guy did was pretty poor.

To make a long story short, I ended up having to call into ADT corporate support to get some help. However, it wasn’t very helpful. And they record all calls. A fact I know about since there is a very loud BEEP that is played during the call at 20 second intervals. They were able to give me the number for my local office (since I didn’t get it from either my sales rep or installer).

Ideally, I would have a recording from that call. Throughout my office I was hearing gasps and other exclimations as I proceeded to tell the manager at the local ADT office what I thought about his company, his sales staff and his installation department. You might say I was a little riled up. Then everyone was jumping. And apologetic. Seeming sincere, but not really.

Yet here I sit writing to you today with a camera system that is not 100% completely installed. Turns out one of the cameras was installed incorrectly, rendering it useless. And the wiring still pisses me every time I walk into the warehouse. It would appear that nobody at ADT really cares.

ADT is a security company. To me, they should be doing everything that they can to instill a feeling of security and professionalism into their customers. They did not do that for me. Instead, they left me feeling that my company was completely scammed out of a big pile of money with barely anything to show for it.

As I told the manager, if it were up to me I would pull every last piece of ADT gear out of our office and replace it with Protection One. Unfortunately, it’s not up to me (or, luckily, depending on what side of the fence you are on).

If you are in the market for a security system for your home or business, do not call ADT. I have never dealt with any company that was less professional, less competent or less caring than ADT. Scratch that, they do care. Care about taking your money and giving you the least amount of effort and service for it.

Call anyone else. Just don’t call ADT.

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I have it when I'm right, but when I'm right I'm right. One of these days people will learn that I'm more than just a pretty face.

March 15, 2011 2:38 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@dbwilldo

db

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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Maybe it’s just me, but lately I’m noticing a lot of laziness around me. Laziness and, if I’m honest, half-assed work. Details going unnoticed, pieces missing and work not complete.

This might not be making any sense to you, so here are some pretty pictures that might help. Taken from the roof of a very swank hotel in a very swank city in Arizona. Look at the first pic closely and I’ll continue to tell you what I’m on about.

Nice right? Colors match, the fire gives that feeling of warmth and comfort and the flowers help to soften the hard edges. At first glance it looks amazing. Until you notice the details.

The yellow circles show off some very not-blending-in chrome table legs that look like they came from a desk chair about the same time this particular hotel was built. Top left is a cable that is coming from the fire pit, presumably to light it, running someplace. We’ll ignore that one for now since it’s not as glaring as shiny chrome.

I’ve been told not to sweat the details in the past, but I always ignored it. I’m going to tell you why.

The details make a difference.

You see in our example above, if the table cloths were bright red, or if the fireplace wasn’t lit, then seeing the table legs would probably be perfectly a-ok. It would appear, however, that a great deal of work went into the planning and decoration of this particular space for this event. Allowing the table legs, at least to me, while a minor detail, is one that takes this otherwise great looking scene down a notch or 5.

It’s just half-assed.

If you are going to do something half-assed, don’t be half-assed about it. Be consistent. Rip a table cloth, break some glass, forget to sweep. Consistency is key.

If you are going to spend the time, effort and money on making something truly kick ass, then make sure it is, in fact, truly kick ass. Mind the details. Cover those crappy looking table legs. Give the glass a final polish to make sure there aren’t any spots. Sweep the floor.

When the details are missed is usually when it is the most noticeable. Go for perfection or go for half-assed, just don’t do them both at the same time. It makes you look bad.

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I’m having a pretty good week so far if I can be so bold. Nice and busy, but not crazy busy. Just about perfect. Perfect except for 1 thing. It may seem minor to some of you, but it is making me absolutely batshit crazy.

Everyone one of my customers this week have had printer problems. Every one of the printers was an HP. And every one of them took me no less than 2 hours to complete if it would even complete at all.

Whiskey tango foxtrot, over?

Let’s start with the size of the basic driver download for a PC (Windows, all versions, all bits). For most of these downloads the file size was a compressed 205MB or larger. I had 2 of these drivers, uncompressed, that weighed in at 1.5GB. Gigabytes people. For basic drivers.

Next up was the installation. On a brand new and fairly buff Windows 7 machine, one of those drivers took almost 8 minutes to install and required a reboot. The longest of the printer driver installs was 45 minutes. Yes, you read that correctly. Almost 1 hour to install a printer. Sure it was XP. Sure it was a Celeron processor. Sure it only had 1GB of shared RAM. Is that an excuse? When I can install video drivers on that same machine in less than 5 minutes? No, it’s not.

Maybe I’m too old school in my thinking. I remember when a driver was nothing more than a few .inf files, maybe a .dll or two. Fit on a floppy disk and installed in just a few minutes. I guess that is no longer the case. Or, probably more like it, HP is getting lazy and/or Microsoft is making them include a but of crap that isn’t even needed but they think it is.

If you are looking for what the problem with Windows is gang, just look at the printer division of HP. Bloated software that performs poorly and clogs the system with files and features that aren’t needed or required.

I know I am repeating myself, but printers are nothing but a waste of time, energy and money. I went paperless a few years ago on everything that doesn’t require my signature, perhaps you should encourage your users to start doing the same thing.

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Or to the web developers that have never heard of a Mac, a browser other than Internet Explorer and still think Front page is a cool thing to use.

Or to the architects. Wherever you are.

Please take a minute the next time you create something that one of your customers, potential employees or anyone in the general public could possibly interact with and let someone else look at it before you pull the trigger making it live.

Please.

You HR people. I understand there are rules and that you need a ton of information when an applicant applies for a job. I do. How about making the process make sense? How about paying a designer with some idea of user experience planning to design the forms for you? How about a little beta testing to make sure that the forms work?

You that build large corporate websites used for support and to serve customers other important information (verizon.net, I’m looking directly at you). Why not follow the links you create to make sure they go somewhere? Again, beta test that cool new feature of the site to make sure it works before rolling it out to the general public. And, hey? Why not take a few minutes to add a little consistency to your entire web presence?

Finally, you architects. I realize that you don’t always get to see your projects to completion. Still, why not visit a property you designed to make sure ‘it works’ correctly and things are easy to get to and find. Essentially, test the navigation. See how fucked up it is and take that back to your drawing table to make things better. Make sure to account for trees and parking structures if they aren’t already in place.

Through the course of each and every one of my days I’m constantly coming across things that could have be fantastically awesome if only someone would have taken a little bit of extra time and planning to make sure it worked correctly. To make sure the navigation was consistent. To ensure that it looked cool, no matter how it was viewed.

I’m less than a genius. I’m also the first person to admit that I’m not always the smartest person in the room. But I do know how stuff should work. Sometimes I can even do something about the stuff that you made to make it work the way it should.

Anyway, I would really appreciate it and owe you a solid if you could do something to help me out here. Just stop making things that suck.

You rule, as always!

xoxo

db

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Dear Internet,

For you among us that take advantage of services provided by in-house IT staff, friendly neighborhood kid or myself. These are things that, no matter how hard you try, how loud you scream or how long you argue, are not our fault.

1. If you can’t open a web site from your favorites because the page you bookmarked is gone.
2. You lose your data because your hard drive crashed and you did not have a backup
3. Your computer gets a virus and you don’t have anti-virus software
4. [insert component here] stops working
5. Your website, hosted by [insert web host here] goes down
6. Your Windows PC screen turns blue
7. AOL.com is not available so you can’t check your email
8. You dropped your laptop and broke the screen
9. You can’t find your original Windows installation disks
10. You say your computer runs slow with 2 Adobe apps running, 10 other apps running, 2 browser windows with 10+ tabs open in each one
11. Somthing something Facebook
12. You gave your credit card number out to a fake anti-virus

That said, when you do have one of the above listed issues, or anything else wrong with your PC or Mac, don’t be gettin’ all butt-hurt when we tell you how much it is going to cost to fix it. Parts cost money. Windows licenses cost money. MS Office costs money. Please don’t ask us to ‘hook you up’ with a free copy of Windows or Office. We can get in big trouble for that.

And, our time is valuable. If all we did was help people for free, then we would not be able to have nice things like food or electricity or cell phones that you call us on when you can’t print because you didn’t turn the printer on. We aren’t going to charge you for a 30 second phone call, but a hearty thank you is always nice, or even a cup of coffee. Something to acknowledge some appreciation.

Finally, and we’ve discussed this before, don’t question our answers to your questions. You have the problem, you came to us about the problem, we give you a solution for your problem, done. If you don’t like our answer, call someone else. Don’t continue to insult us by pretending you know anything because you “heard about it on the radio” or “saw it on the news last night”.

Of all of the tasks you do, taking care of computers is not one of them. That’s why we exist. We are here to help. Please try to keep that in mind next time you are looking to blame someone because your hard drive crashed.

As always, thank you for your time.

xoxox

Don

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I’m a fan of Twitter. You guys know this already. I mean, I’ve been using it since it was an Odeo product about 5 years ago. You could say that with Twitter, I was a very early adopter.

Most of the time I find it helpful, entertaining and quite informative. The nice folks that I follow usually share quality items that interest me or say funny shit that makes me giggle.

That said, there are times when I absolutely fucking hate Twitter. Hate that burns with the heat of 1,000 suns friends. Hate that would turn the average person green with rage.

Yesterday (and I’m sure today) was one of those times.

You see, for those of you that are living under a rock on one of Saturn’s moons, the new Apple Telephone Device was being delivered yesterday. And all 408 of the people that follow me got one. And all 408 of the people that got one did nothing but fill my Twitter feed with post after post after post about the line, the phone, how great Apple is and how the device has changed their lives.

All day. Nothing but ATP posts.

Here’s the thing. While I’m sure the device is awesome and made from rainbows and pure unicorn fur, when all I have to read on Twitter is nerdgasm after god damned nerdgasm about it gets a little old. I even unfollowed a few people yesterday because of it.

I get your excited. Awesome! I get that you are in puffy pink heart love with the damned thing. Hooray! I get that you want to gay marry Steve Jobs and bare his puffy pink heart love child. I do, really. You are really excited. Good for you.

I, however, don’t care.

So, you can expect more Android news and retweets in my twitter feed. As long as you guys are going to do it to me, I’m just going to do it back.

And enough with the FourSquare. I don’t care where you are or how many others are there with you. If I did care, I would follow you within the FourSquare app (yes, I’m there, search for me). I for realz don’t want that crap in my stream any more.

As always, thank you for your time.

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I’m writing you today because I actually have the time. You see, I thought I had a 9:00AM appointment with one of my best customers. Turns out, I was mistaken and didn’t find out until I actually spoke to the customer 10 minutes prior to my arrival.

She speaks broken English but I have never had difficulty understanding a word she says. She is also a member, which means all of her information lives in a database someplace in Florida, referenced, I’m sure, by her telephone number or email address. Knowing that, why would anyone, in an unpleasant tone from what I understand, ask her to repeat her address so many times that she became frustrated, assumed the appointment did not get made and then call someone else? This is not rocket science.

This particular exchange is made equally frustrating by the fact that it actually cost me money. Sure, only $50, but right now $50 is $50 and I will take all that I can get. This is also made even more frustrating by the fact that she called me first, but I am not allowed to book appointments myself, so I had to direct her to the call center to do that.

Yet another frustration on top of more frustrations I have on a daily basis with this outfit. Why do you think I’m constantly trying to get work off of Twitter and Facebook? I make more money and control the experience, start to finish. If I can control everything, I know if there is a problem when the problem happens and can fix it. Except for one small detail.

There usually aren’t any problems.

If there is one thing that I know better than almost anything else it is how to take care of customers and how to retain those customers and keep them saying “I’ll be back”. It’s what I have been doing since I started working in 1984 and what I will continue to do for the foreseeable future.

Are you ready for that level of service? Let’s get started!.

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