" I promptly did as required. The next day, I received a response that a replacement jigsaw had been sent via an express courier service. They even gave me the tracking number!
A little intrigued as to how much it would cost to courier the package from Britain to Malaysia, I logged on to the courier website. The answer: ?53 (RM371)! That was almost 10 times the price of the jigsaw. " - Sterling customer service from abroad
Is your help desk and customer service team so good that people write newspaper articles about them? Would stories like this happen if this manufacturer had brushed them off or asked for 6 types of proof? How much was it worth to them that this article was written?
"Growing up a couple hundred miles from the U.S. border in Canada?s smaller province, I?ve always had a sense that we in Canada have a unique vantage point on the United States of America. From here, we can see that America is a large beast, but we are too close to see the whole thing. Sleeping with an elephant, we sometimes say.
I grew up with a feeling that America was the center of the world. There were people in the rest of the world, but that was just the backdrop to America. Maybe someday, the whole world would come to be like America.
More recently in my life, I?ve become aware that while America lumbers on, still the center of it?s own universe, the rest of the world isn?t paying attention anymore. America is becoming irrelevant." from Acts of Volition
Jim posts to a few of the options available in the open source helpdesk space. Interesting. I'd like to find some more statistics or research on what types of helpdesk's use open source vs vendor helpdesk solutions and why. Just the standard "it's free" type reasoning or do they intend to actualy modify the code? If they do intend to do that do they end up doing it? How do they feel about not having support?
"In other words, everyone who has a job anywhere, start keeping tabs on all the work you've done for your employer. When you quit, you should be able to sell back all the work you already did (which you may have thought you already got paid for), and it may be worth even more than the first time they paid you." from Tech Dirt -----
*[This image was lost to time in my blog transition]*Dave Winer has a big rant this evening about how he should be given credit for creating Podcasting. I'm a huge Winer fan and have been reading him for several years, but I believe he's just wrong in this case. He should indeed be given credit for RSS on which this is all based as well as given a footnote for helping once Adam Curry got things rolling but not for the actual invention.
I guess the major problem I have with the rant is this line "The iPodder software was the first software to handle enclosures specially for iPods, but Radio UserLand had support for time-shifted enclosures in its first release in January 2002". Nobody disputes this but that doesn't mean he should get the credit. The fact is that the spark that launched Podcasting IS the fact that Curry hooked it into the Ipod. Yes Dave invented the underlying technology and yes if he HAD written a script to make Radio push media files onto Ipods he would be the inventer but he didn't. I just don't see how he can make this leap. The genius is in the fact that Curry took all these existing technologies and then wrote the code to hook them all together and push them to your Ipod.
Here's another: "Even though Adam gives me credit for the RSS work I did, he didn't actually give me credit for the software, or for the podcasts we did at Harvard in 2003, and my own personal podcast stream starting this summer". Again Dave calls his mp3 audio tracks he created this summer Podcasts and expects to be given credit for them but they wern't Podcasts. They were just mp3's like millions created before them. Sure there was an enclosure element in the RSS feed but there was no software, by Dave's own admission, which could take that mp3 and put it on your Ipod without any human interaction.
I'm not trying to take anything away from Dave's contribution but it's just the way I see it. -----
In response to Jeremy's post mine is always a queue. I would also like to add that I have noticed that most people who use email in queue mode also view mail in the preview window, while those who treat it as a stack tend to click on the mail and view it in full window mode. -----
FILE and LINE are your friends. Not sure why this is but when I first started with PHP I never made much use of these constants, how wrong I was! These babies have saved me hours of painful work since I began adding them to my error handling. They are great for tracking down tricky bugs.
For you new programmers FILE gives the full path name of the file where it's used and LINE of course gives you the exact line your on. You do need to be careful because if you use these in a function they will return the file name of the file the function is declared in and line of declaration as opposed to the file and line where you called the function, which is probably what you really wanted. I often work around this limitation by passing file and line into a generic error handling function. Example:
They just do. It's never just as easy as plug and go. I've had alot of trouble with lodgenet at various Starwood hotels. I was heartened to see Geek News Central let their dollars do the talking. Someone should start a directory of the best internet hotel connections in each city. -----