Facebook has broken ads all the time… for example, the following ad is clearly broken:

I took a few minutes to fix it:

Come one, come all to my apartment for a Thanksgiving feast! If you’re a FDRer living in Denver, come on by

[edit] nvmd

I was getting a slow but steady trickle of spam account signups to this blog and one day I looked around and discovered SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam.

It has lots of options but I primarily only use the CAPTCHA on the registration page… and I have not had any spam accounts sign up since!

… just about every author that ever existed, apparently.

One of my friends posted a link to I Write Like and it seemed interesting as I’ve done enough writing of my own to have stuff to check out… but there’s not any consistency in the results. I suppose that this may be the case for most people, but check out the list:

Public posts on this blog:
My webhosting post and “You Are Not Google’s Customer” were like Cory Doctorow… my post on religion (“Nailed!”) was like Mary Shelley… “Sad Little Miss Little Sally Conformity” was like James Fenimore Cooper…

Private journal entries:
Stephen King
H.P. Lovecraft
David Foster Wallace
J.K. Rowling (dream entry)
William Shakespeare

My first two posts @ FDR
Dan Brown
Isaac Asimov

The 3 linked in my bio:
Isaac Asimov (Letter to Joy)
Kurt Vonnegut (Kalap)
David Foster Wallace (Three Years)

I’ve read some of those authors, but certainly not all of them, so I don’t know what bits match and what bits don’t, nor do I really know how it’s trying to match things up. I know it’s just a toy but, well, that game kind of sucked for me.

I am currently in the process of migrating my websites off of Bluehost. I’ve gotten all of the content off and serving elsewhere… the only thing remaining is to get my email serving and then I will be canceling their service. [Edit: this was finished later the same night.]

Why have I decided to switch?

I signed up with Bluehost in April 2008 because I was looking for something inexpensive and reliable, and at the time, Bluehost certainly fit the bill. I saw several positive reviews and thought that it would be a good way to spend my money. I had been hosting my sites off of my home ISP connection and that was proving to be problematic, especially when more then 3 or 4 people were attempting to access it simultaneously.

For most of the first two years, I was actually quite happy with the service. There was little downtime, and I ended up using them for a handful of relatively low-traffic websites as well as an email provider.

I don’t have objective analyses or numbers but over the past 4-6 months, the quality of hosting with Bluehost began to decline. I began to get messages about DNS lookup failures, and more recently, authentication failures for my mail services. I would see errors in the logs about the MySQL server “going away,” and memory errors or execution time limits that seemed to be increasing in frequency.

I chalked it up to “cheap hosting” and kept on keeping on, because, hey, cheap is cheap, and I wasn’t having any major problems nor data corruption, and these were annoyances–though the authentication errors indicated to me that they were having more serious problems.

And then they had a disaster. According to reports from people who were able to get through to customer service at the time, Bluehost’s datacenter in Provo, Utah experienced an emergency shutdown situation due to an imminent transformer failure, affecting 50% of their customers.

However, when services went down at around 8:30pm MDT on September 16, 2010, there was no notice. There was no notice on their main site, on the server status page (which said that all services were up and running with no problems), on their helpdesk page, nor anywhere else obvious. They did not comment on the forum thread that was opened regarding the downtime, and they disabled their live chat with not a word about what was going on.

Actual explanations about what was going on started to appear around 11pm, which was about the time that their help center main page was updated with a notice indicating that services would be restored around 1am Friday (September 17th).

It was also at about this time that somebody at Bluehost started submitting updates via their Twitter account.

While I definitely have sympathy for the techies and customer service reps who got thrown into the shitter, having to deal with this disaster and a large number of very unhappy customers, I have a serious problem with the way Bluehost handled the situation during and after the incident.

You see, I’m a techie myself. I know that, sometimes, everything just plain goes to fucking shit and there is no happy ending despite how hard you work to get things up and running. However, I also know that even if everything is going to shit, you still need to try to please your customers.

My problem with Bluehost isn’t the downtime. Shit happens! My problem with Bluehost is their handling of their customers. As above, there was no mention of the disaster or the downtime anywhere on their site for two and a half hours.

Mull that one over.

In an age where you have smart phones, remote access, VPN, SSH, VOIP, and all kinds of other technologies, Bluehost, a web hosting company, did not update their main page regarding a disaster that affected 50% of their “millions of domains” being hosted by their customers.

That just makes me angry. It tells me that, whatever else is going on, I as a customer am not being considered in their list of priorities. That my confidence in their ability to communicate with me is not important to them.

It probably never has been just good enough to provide a service if you have poor customer service, but it is certainly nowhere near good enough now.

And this is not a subtle or esoteric aspect of customer service… this is Customer Service 101! If I were managing customer service at Bluehost that night, I would have thought, “Total service outage for 50% of our customers and the first two places they will go are the main site and the server status page. We better stick a message up there.”

And it’s not like it would have been particularly embarrassing for them to talk about what was going on, so that makes their silence even more inexplicable.

I posted something on twitter about my displeasure with the situation, and Bluehost responded:

I retweeted: Sigh… #bluehost is STILL down. No formal explanation or apology. Case study in how NOT to do business in the social media age. (https://twitter.com/YuriArtibise/status/24754337216)

They replied: @jamesapyrich We’ve been back up for hours and have made several explanations, such as http://bit.ly/9Lw2cr. Is your site not working? (https://twitter.com/bluehost/status/24821147691)

I replied: @bluehost my complaint is not the downtime. my complaint is the lack of communication for 2.5 hrs from the start of downtime… (https://twitter.com/jamesapyrich/status/24828517137)
@bluehost i have yet to see this point addressed; perhaps i’ve missed it (https://twitter.com/jamesapyrich/status/24828536688)

Their response: @jamesapyrich We definitely should have communicated faster. Primary cause was the timing, those with twitter access had already gone home. (https://twitter.com/bluehost/status/24828732356)

Talk about missing the point.

Their followup has been just as disappointing, frankly… it is almost as if they’re not even aware of the fact that the problem is their lack of customer service.

If I did this in my job–was unavailable at a point where our systems were down, finally appeared 2.5 hours later, and gave no explanation to my absence nor offered some sort of apology–I would either be fired or be treading on very thin ice.

That kind of approach (for lack of a better term) to customer service and communication is a serious liability.

Don’t support this kind of customer service.

[Edit] – if you’re looking to upgrade to a VPS (not for everyone), try linode. They’ve got some nice bundles and if you use that link to become a customer, I get a bonus.

The Bomb in the Brain – an Introduction

For more, visit fdrurl.com/bib

I don’t recall ever hearing this song in its entirety before, just the first couple lines of the chorus… I never, ever knew what it was about.

I found it deeply moving; if it’s not too obvious to point it out, it’s about why children run away. Nearly every single line tears at my heart–not just for my own experience, but for the vast numbers of children that experience this, whether they’ve run away or not:

Lyrics:

Call you up in the middle of the night
Like a firefly without a light
You were there like a blowtorch burning
I was a key that could use a little turning

So tired that I couldn't even sleep
So many secrets I couldn't keep
Promised myself I wouldn't weep
One more promise I couldn't keep

It seems no one can help me now
I'm in too deep there's no way out
This time I have really led myself astray

Runaway train, never going back
Wrong way on a one-way track
Seems like I should be getting somewhere
Somehow I'm neither here nor there

Can you help me remember how to smile?
Make it somehow all seem worthwhile
How on earth did I get so jaded?
Life's mystery seems so faded

I can go where no one else can go
I know what no one else knows
Here I am just a-drownin' in the rain
With a ticket for a runaway train

And everything seems cut and dried
Day and night, earth and sky
Somehow I just don't believe it

Runaway train, never going back
Wrong way on a one-way track
Seems like I should be getting somewhere
Somehow I'm neither here nor there

Bought a ticket for a runaway train
Like a madman laughing at the rain
A little out of touch, a little insane
It's just easier than dealing with the pain

Runaway train, never going back
Wrong way on a one-way track
Seems like I should be getting somewhere
Somehow I'm neither here nor there

Runaway train, never coming back
Runaway train, tearing up the track
Runaway train, burning in my veins
I run away but it always seems the same

Download MP3
49.0M 35:44

An additional note (a bit of a spoiler, perhaps…)

Something else that could have occurred if I had been successful early is I could have projected my “difficult” emotions onto those around me and caused harm to others, which would be an even worse fate…

Download MP3
42.5M 30:57

Well no, not really…

I just dislike the Olive Garden commercials.

They always show canned diversity (but never mixed couples, interestingly enough), and there’s some “joke” after which everybody else laughs Just A Little Too Loud.

And of course, the tagline: “When you’re here, you’re family” just makes me think of the mafia.

Older Posts »