Category: General

I got an e-mail from LeafWireless the other day because I’d entered a competition of theirs.  Basically it told me that they’re giving a 50% discount on their normal retail price for SD and MiniSD memory cards to people who bought iMate phones in SA from any of their resellers (valid until the end of July 2005).  So if you got your phone in SA (I got mine for free on contract from Nashua Mobile) then you can score… Here’s the prices they sent (they include VAT):

If you’re interested in buying them, their terms and conditions are:
The offer is limited to one SD memory card per handset (IMEI number required).
The offer is valid between the following dates: 01 June 2005 to 31 July 2005.
The handset must have been purchased in South Africa from an authorised i-mate(TM) dealer.

And you can contact anyone in sales on +27 11 326 1844. (The e-mail said you should talk to Melanie, but I spoke to Domanique(?) and Kirsti(?) – not sure how to spell either of their names, but they were both really helpful)

I just read Rory’s blog entitled “Rory vs. the Liars” and I can’t agree more.  The gist of the story is this: He went to fetch his car from the garage after being fixed after someone crashed into him.  The bumper wasn’t put back properly and the garage guy claimed it was how the car was made.  So in true geek form he used is Audiovox SMT5600 (aka iMate SP3) and googled images of the car to show the guy.  But not being satisfied with that he whipped out his laptop, found a WiFi network that was unsecured, “semi-hacked” his way onto the network and gave the garage guy nice big images of the way the car should be.  Needless to say the garage guy gave up and fixed it properly.

My summary is not 1/2 as funny and entertaining as Rory’s post, so go there and read it… and if you don’t subscribe to his feed already, do so!  It’s good! 🙂

[Update: For a slightly less “just-after-the-incident” version of events here’s a copy of an e-mail I sent off… And also to let you know that all things in quotes in the text below are paraphrases, not direct quotes…]
WOW… I’ve just been amazed by differing levels of support for one product.  For just over 2 weeks I’ve been regularly disconnected from my iBurst connection.  Oddly enough it seems to happen when I’m busy processing the stats for my website.  I guess my PC is doing stacks of DNS requests to resolve IP addresses to domain names.

Anyway, I’ve been calling the WBS iBurst support line… My first complaint – They take about 5 minutes to answer and while on hold you get 10 second snippets of cool music with a 5 second “ad” for WBS, then 10 seconds of music again and another 5 second “ad”… They have a total of 4 “ads”.  So after 5 minutes I don’t give a damn about the fact that they’re the network provider for the national lottery, that you can get connected immediately after you’ve signed up, that their SMTP server is smtp.wbs.co.za, and I certainly don’t want to hear one more time that they’re sorry for keeping me on hold.  The hold process almost makes me more frustrated than their poor support.

My second complaint is the lack of technical knowledge that the support guys show.  Their solutions to me are one of the following: “Reboot your PC”, “Disconnect and reconnect your iBurst” and “Your MTU settings are wrong”.  Now since this only started happening about 2 weeks ago and I haven’t changed my MTU settings since I got iBurst 3 months ago I don’t think that’s the problem but they insist that I check each time and their tone with me sounds like they think I’m just being stupid for even suggesting that it might not be the MTU setting.  The other two solutions are just not good enough since up until two weeks ago I’ve been able to be connected for days on end without needing to do either of the two. 

Oh… one time I was asked if I had any spyware software on my PC… so I said “No, I don’t” and the guy said “well then that’s it.  You must go get some spyware software to remove it from your PC”… How silly of me!  Here I’ve been running ANTI-spyware software to remove it! Needless to say I wasn’t impressed with the support guy.

Today I called in and I spoke to Porschia (not sure on the spelling, but that’s how it sounded) for the 3rd time in 2 weeks, this time she told me that “The disconnection problem has been ongoing for a long time and they have minimised it but not solved it completely”.  So I’m just supposed to accept that.  I told her that it only started for me in the past 2 weeks so MAYBE she should pass that info on to some high level support guy because whatever they changed in the last 2 weeks is what’s causing the problem.

At that point I gave up and called FusionReactor (who sold me the iBurst) and WOW what a difference.  If you bought your iBurst connection from them, do yourselves a favour and never call WBS directly again… ever.  Call the FusionReactor guys (I used their 0860 387 466 number)…  I spoke to Craig, who told me that perhaps it was my signal.  I thought “Oh crap, they’re worse than WBS” and told him that my signal strength monitor said I had over 90% signal… He responded by telling me that the iBurst modem uses 3 channels and the signal strength that the modem reports is just the one channel.  So it might see the base station perfectly but not be getting signal on one of the other channels.  He asked for my username and immediatly said – “oh I see you’re definately having problems”.  He was looking at my connection history and could see how often I’ve been disconnected.  He ran through the Anti-spyware check and a few others showing far more understanding of everything.

Eventually I found out that our network guys at work have via a “Windows Policy” (or something like that) disabled the windows firewall, so my PC has been connected directly to the internet via iBurst without firewall for an unknown amount of time.  I have no way to re-enable it because the windows firewall control panel thingy has everything grayed out and a little message at the top telling me that I can’t do anything because my network admins have stopped me from changing settings in it.

So I told Craig that I’d setup another firewall on my PC and I’d see if it fixes it, and he said he’d try find out if there’s anything else that could be wrong and he’d let me know. 

One phone call, great help, excellent attitude, no waiting, no fuss and I feel like my problem has been attended to and I’m happy!

Why can’t WBS do the same? Oh well… at least I’ve learned now – WBS sucks but FusionReactor and iBurst rules.

The movie “One Hour Photo” is one that I have wanted to watch for an age but never have.  After my recent experience at a photolab, I think I’m gonna watch it.

The local Kodak Express near my work is really cool, their prices are way cheaper than any of the places near my home or work.  The only downside is that the lady behind the counter is *VERY* talkative.  That’s not too bad, except that she has an amazing memory and (as I found out today) she looks through your photos in detail.  After I took the first film in there she would greet me by name, and she could remember my phone number the next time I placed an order there.  That was kinda freaky, but ok because she’s like 55 years old and rather small so if she tried anything funny I could defend myself – or at least I could run away faster than I guess she could run after me.

Today I went in to collect my wife’s most recent films (from Zanzibar) she asked “Who’s this amazingly gorgeous guy?” while pointing to a photo.  A bit shocked, I took a look at the photo and said “Stuart”.  She frowned, and said “Yes, I can read it on his name tag but who is he?”. (The photo was of Stuart at a leadership training time so he had a name tag stuck on his shirt).  Aparently their printing machine has problems when it runs out of ink, so you start getting spots on the pictures so she had re-printed a few of the pics.  The picture of Stuart had been reprinted about 6 times, all of which looked quite perfect to me.

I like the fact that she remembers customers (although remembering my phone number is possibly a bit too much), and the fact that she takes the time to check that each and every photo is printed ok, and that she then reprints them until they’re perfect.  What worries me is that she seemed overly excited about learning Stuart’s name.  And what annoys me is that the photos are ALWAYS out of sequential order when I get them from her.

Scarily enough her stalking tendancies don’t bother me half as much as her inability to keep the photo’s in order.  I’m begining to thing that perhaps I have some OCD tendancies myself.  There are a few things I do that could be considerd OCD oddities… but that’s for another post. 🙂

Happy Birthday to me! Happy Birthday to me! Happy Birthday to me! Happy Birthday to me! (sung to the tune of “Happy Birthday”) 😉

So if you’re feeling generous check out my Amazon.com wishlist. I would have put down my Kalahari.net wishlist but their wishlist system sucks – I happily added items to my wishlist only to find out that its “private” so I can’t share it. So I made a new public list and tried to re-add my items to that one but they seem to default to being added to my “private” list (which I can’t delete) and now their site has become as slow as their customer service so I’ve just given up on them.

[Update: I forgot to include some details… like how old I am… I prefer not to think of it as “old” or “aged” although I’m heading quickly towards the big 30.  😉 But as of today I am 28.]