My Archives: June 2003
Saturday, June 21, 2003
I received an e-mail that pointed out something I thought I'd made clear in my article on turboing -- but, it turns out, I didn't make the point nearly as clear as I thought I had. Oops.
Let me say it plain (er, boldface): Don't turbo until you've tried the normal support process.
If you abuse the turbo technique, you may find that it stops working. Perhaps you'll get "blacklisted" at the company in question, and your calls stop going through. Maybe they'll set the "idiot" flag on your account. (I've known at least one company that would annotate their customer-support records with a flag indicating that a caller was known to be abusive and consistently wrong, as a warning to support reps that they should hold their ground.) It could even be that they'll put strong blocking of access to corporate offices in effect.
Here's what a reader had to say: [more]
Posted by Rob @ 12:25 AM ET [Link] [54 Comments]
It's amazing how much effort it takes to bring a house up to shape. Since moving to my late grandmother's house in Connecticut, much of my time has been consumed repairing things. Grandpa built the place in 1954, and there's lots of stuff that's just wrong by today's standards. There's also a good bit of neglect, as one might expect in a house previously owned by an infirm, elderly grandmother. So, as a student of Maslow's hierarchy of needs might expect, I've been busy repairing the physical structure of my home, making sure it's safe.
Another chunk of my time has been consumed looking for work. The job market for UNIX system administrators is terrible. The openings that exist want jacks-of-all-trades, experts in system administration, database administration, Java, various exotic software I don't know... I've even started looking for other fields where I have skills, such as page layout. If you need someone, please drop me a line...
I expect that updates will be sporadic for a while yet. I'll try to make them more often than every few months, though!
Posted by Rob @ 12:00 AM ET [Link]
Friday, June 20, 2003
It seems that my web-hosting provider is actually pretty good at web hosting. Today, my article on turboing was mentioned on Slashdot, a popular technology news site. Such mentions are known for causing meltdowns of web servers due to massive spikes in traffic.
Within are a few thoughts on relevant comments I read in the Slashdot article... [more]
Posted by Rob @ 11:37 PM ET [Link] [224 Comments]
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