Mike’s Blog

Last night I went to an open mic night at The Crown in Stony. (This place is famous for having been in the film Withnail & I.) This is a different type of open mic to the one I’m normally used to at Buckingham and Wolverton where you get a set time to stand up and perform a few numbers and have the benefit of a PA for those of us who have a gentle voice. This one is totally acoustic with everybody sitting around a big table taking it in turns to play a song. It is also acceptable for other players to busk along which is interesting. The evening was a little too folky for me I have to say but amazingly enough, right after I launched into one of my favourite 60’s songs, the others started to play similar tunes!

Would I go back? Yes, it’s different and fun.

Client calls us today:

Client: I need to restart our server.
Us: Why?
C: I’ve just Hoovered it.
U: Why have you Hoovered your server?
C: Because the clean light came on.
U: We’ll get you a new cleaning tape for your tape drive.
C: Do I still need to restart the server?
U: Errr, no.

Phone down and howls of laughter. How the techie kept a straight face during the call is beyond me.

I’m now certain more than ever that Parkglobe are the company to drive Cix conferencing to the wall. Despite many users advising them gently and in some cases very firmly that they need to concentrate on conferencing and in particular the userbase as their main activity, they seem to have spent the majority of their time developing Cix Office. This seems to be a product that virtually nobody apart from Parkglobe themselves have any interest in. I’ve shown it to a few clients and they remain singulary unimpressed.

Meanwhile whilst all this effort has been expended, Ameol (The off line reader for Cix) has limped along with poorly managed software development. The most recent cock up resulting in several users users losing historical data.

The web interface developed in the early days still performs like a dog with three legs and only now, 5 years on is a new version starting development.

Parkglobe have however launched some initiatives to try and turn things around. They are organising a round of meet ups around the country where they pick up the bar and food tab in an attempt to re-energise the userbase. One wag described it as pissing away the marketing budget.

They have introduced an offer for existing users to add an additional 4 accounts. So far from the figures that one Cix users keeps a tally of, this has not been a roaring success. I shall not even begin to describe a disaster the web interface for that was other than to say it was yet another demonstration of just how poor the controls and managment of development are within Parkglobe.

This all seems too little too late. Many offers of free expert advice have been turned away by Parkglobe, users who are experts in their fields have been ignored, anyone who dares to raise a voice against Parkglobe’s managment is now likely to be expelled from the conferences. Its like they have closed their eyes, stuck their fingers in their ears and are quietly humming “la la la”.

I believe they will milk the cash cow that is Cix conferencing until it is a dry hollow sack and walk away from it. It’s something I hope doesn’t happen as I’ve enjoyed my time on Cix and it’s been a great resource of information, help and advice, but unfortunately it looks like the end is in sight and reading http://cixblog.blogspot.com/ suggests I’m not the only one.

This weeks award goes to Netcetera http://www.inetc.net/

This collection of idiots decided to use a DNS blacklist on their mail server and blacklisted my ISPs mail server smtp.nildram.co.uk. Instead of using the DNS blacklist to raise the score or flag an email as potentially spam, these morons just reject the incoming mail. Result was that I can no longer send legitimate mail to some of my customers. When I telephone this ISP (Can’t email postmaster because of dumb DNS blacklist… Doh!) they tell me that they need to get the problem reported by their customer..how is the customer supposed to know that they are losing emails??? Never mind, we’ll recommend our client to change ISP.

I just have to share with you todays classic.

A home user customer brought their PC in with a long list of problems.
He brought along his expert friend who proceeded to educate us on
various PC problems and how to fix them. 99% of the problems were down
to the user and not the machine. However, one problem baffled us and
that was the reported intermittent failure of his modem to dial up. OK
so he only brought the modem in, no power supply, no telephone cable, no
serial cable but no matter, we sold it to him and keep spares so we try
and try and try but cannot reproduce the problem.

Later customer + friend pick up the machine and within 10 minutes of him
getting it home reports the same problem so we send an engineer. The
engineer discovers two telephone cables plugged into the back of the
modem and into the same wall socket. Removing one of the cables restores
normal operation.

The reason he had done this was his “helpful” friend had suggested that
two connections would double his connection speed.

Next time I won’t feed the dog before they visit and I’ll slip a dog
biscuit in the friends pocket.

Later………

The same customer:
Cust: My email is not working
Us: What is your email address
Cust: I don’t know. Give me a clue.
Us: Its got an @ in it….