Technologically, it would be one thing if there was some confusion or missing data in my customer record, so that something like “first_name” didn’t populate correctly, but you can see that there’s a field for “CURRENT_MONTH_NAME” which isn’t something that is coming from my customer account record with them.

They’re going to say they tested it and something went wrong.  Well, no, they didn’t test it… because no merge program/mechanism puts the field name in the document if the field can’t be found.  It usually just displays/prints nothing, or it will say “field not found”… but no program I’ve ever seen prints the field name instead of the field data as a result of the merge, no matter what.  There’s simply no way this was tested before it went out, because there is no way you get field names displaying.

Regarding the absurd “NEW_CUSTOMER_GRIPE_METRIC” – let’s all learn a lesson here.  Don’t use terms inside your company that would offend people outside the company, namely, your customers.  Remember, it’s you who sucks, so to label me as griping, well, really doesn’t that just say it all?  And for the record, you want to track a new customer satisfaction metric, not a gripe metric.

And did you really send out a plain text, insecure email that put my security question and answer in the body of the email?  Are you freaking kidding me?

I’m trying to figure out if the “joke” of the merge area somehow means the erroneous merging is a joke, but I can’t see it… Dreamhost: still the worst webhosting company ever.

Top of email clipped below:

Well now that you put it that way, I feel better.  I absolutely do deserve the right to comment on their website.  They benefit from my visit to their web page, and on the internet in the 21st century, it is customary, nay mandatory, to allow public responses to the news and opinions that they wish to share with the public.

As absurd as it might seem for me to say I wasn’t blunt enough in my comment, perhaps I should have been more direct.  Although you interpet my comment as “Let ME tell YOU how to run your website”, the more correct meaning was “Have you gentlemen sought the advice of a licensed professional for an evaluation for this apparent disconnection from reality, because the very notion of disabling an enormous portion of your business, and the substantiation put forth are utterly ridiculous.”  Here’s an analogy that I think is pretty spot on, in particular the “icky” part:  It’s like opening a coffee shop and saying that you simply refuse to take out the trash because that job is icky and you don’t want to get your hands dirty, so you will not have any trash receptacles in the coffee shop and people will have to take their trash home with them to throw it away in their own trash can.  When you own an establishment selling food, you have trash cans!  It’s unavoidable!  Comments are an unavoidable part of maintaining of any website worth its weight in salt, and the idea that you’ve discussed them and decided they just make your sunny days blue and thus they should be removed entirely from your website speaks to a disconnection from the world around you that gives the concept of groupthink a whole new dimension of meaning.  Let’s be clear:  that you got to a point where you all agreed to discuss removing comments, you already sank into a groupthink scenario.

Yeah, and although I am clearly over the top in both of these comments, I hope you can try to see that  the enthusiasm I put forth is not actually about putting them down or elevating myself – although I understand some may take it that way – but my enthusiasm spills over from the sincerity of the trust I place in using the publication and recommending it to others.  [Recommending it to others just /yesterday/.]  And I think the publication is absolutely worth the effort to go all out in trying to grab them by the shoulders, give a vigorous shaking, and convince them that what they’re proposing doing is a really, really bad idea.

This post is so silly – is this an early April fool’s joke?  Is there some other 2012 joke I’m unaware of?  Here I am just having read someone the riot act yesterday for a bad quality review… I copied the riot act (comment) onto my blog, and prefaced it with “I think macstories.net is a quality source, try them instead.”…

Your post raises more questions than it answers, but I support more websites/blogs than I write for, so I simply don’t buy this reasoning at all.  From a technical standpoint, there simply is no problem with spam if you use Akismet or TypePad (based on Akismet as I understand it) antispam filters.  I mean literally, there *is* *no* *spam* *problem* as in it completely solves all spam.  I have one client running a message board within his site and TypePad simply eliminates spam as a problem.  You can’t be so technically competent as to be able to make a site this fantastic and yet have no clue that an antispam filter solves spam problems 99.999%.

The whole point of a “blog” was/is for there to be interactivity, and the points you raise above… they’re really shortsighted, guys. I can’t come up with a better word but childish.  ”Low quality comments make my site ugly and, pooh, we don’t want the lesser-thans mucking up our beautiful creation?”  What’s //really// immature is the notion that you can’t be bothered moderating comments at all.  You run a BLOG and even when you take the comments out, it’s still a BLOG, but one that people make a face at and click away from.  For as long as I’ve been familiar with it, WordPress has a “close comments after xx days”.  It stops people from being able to comment after an article is a certain number of days old.  And you can fill in the xx with any number you want.  The number is pre-filled with – wait for it – 14.  I mean THAT is one of your reasoned points, that people post comments too long after the fact?  Are you for real?  On one hand, if you’re making a living with the blog, break down and offer a college student a paid internship to help maintain and moderate community feedback; on the other hand if it’s just a hobby, then stop shoving Dell advertisements down my throat and say “listen we’re doing this for fun.”  But you’re clearly not doing it for fun.

The points you use to substantiate this bizarre move not only communicate an immature group of bloggers but, it’s absurd from a business point of view, because it’s alienating to readers on a variety of levels, and the less time people spend on your site, the less clicking of affiliate links they’ll be doing for you.  Even if they are Dell links.

I just can’t believe that one day I’m praising your work as the go-to blog for tech and the next day you display such a phenomenal and collective cluelessness.

I’m sorry if this particular question offends, but are you all under the age of 25?  It seems like the facebook generation doesn’t understand things with abstract value attached to them.  Take Accounting 101 at any community college.  You’ll learn about “goodwill” as an asset on a balance sheet.  It will do wonders for your business acumen.

Sheesh!

There was a review of a personal diary program, Day One, today on AppStorm, a site I visit from time to time.  It was an awful review lacking the most basic common sense.  This personal diary app stores data in plain text files that anyone can read:

The format is XML, but as you can see, I can view my diary entry 100% in the clear with TextEdit.

This means that anyone sitting down at my computer can open up my dropbox folder and view every single entry – even copy the file and view it on any other computer.  FAIL.

The reviewer didn’t obviously read over previous reviews of the product, and doesn’t address some longstanding concerns with the product.  For a product with a lack of connectivity, why bother?  If you’re going to use it for information you don’t trust to any other device/program, then for gosh sakes, the data has to be encrypted!  And the first commenter on the article says how features have been slow in coming…. that’s an important consideration too!

Really!

The bigger concern is really whether or not Envato properties are trustable – I’m becoming more wary that the sites I have questions about are owned by them.  They run a WordPress theme marketplace, and discussions with people having purchased themes there lean heavily towards not getting the help and support they expected or needed.

A copy of my comment:

I’m going to agree with Cal that the program doesn’t deserve a 10/10. Part of that is that literally the program seems to have some unacceptable shortcomings, like the absence of tagging, categories and um, /encryption/, and part of this is that if you are going to write a credible review for a program like this, you can’t review it exclusively of the desktop client, and the desktop client is very basic. I have 1.0 and there is no help file, no “check for updates”, nothing. This program really isn’t practically used exclusively of the desktop client, so it earns double the deductions for the missing required features of a journaling program.

In reality though, why are you reviewing any app so positively that is so void of any connectivity? Let’s adjust for reality: Developers are a dime a dozen and they come and go. This guy gets a job offer tomorrow and suddenly the app never gets any updates and people are stuck with their 2011 journal entries in this app, or worse yet, in a [RTF/TXT] document. How hard would it be to create an export to a format easily imported by any other program? Do you commonly use programs that have no ability to transfer data to any other program? If you had done your research you would have seen that there was a relatively longstanding complaint about the lack of export ability with this program, and it’s not clear what one gets with version 1.2 because all the developer wrote was “export to a text file” – I’d be looking for you to clarify that for me, the reader.

The fact that the app doesn’t connect to any other program in any other way certainly makes for a good private diary, but just how useful is that in the end if the idea is to put information in this program that one would not put anywhere else? Well, it would be possibly basically useful if it encrypted that presumably private information, but it doesn’t do that at all. I mean for gosh sake, I could password protect a word processing document…. And what format is it in now if it’s not actually encrypted, is it just sitting on text files for anyone to read who sits down to my computer where my dropbox is logged in all the time?

[5 minutes later] Well with 1.0, the results are fantastic! The file itself is stored in plain ol’ XML and viewable to anyone who wants to, with just a text editor. You can view a sample copy of a diary entry on my blog: http://robthecomputerguy.com/app-storm-day-one-review-fail/ ‎

As for iCloud support, I’m also in agreement with Cal on that one because haven’t developers had iCloud docs and access for at least 6 months now? I’m not totally sure that the delay in implementing that feature would be the developer’s or Apple’s fault – because as far as I can tell so far, iCloud is yet another iDisaster, the randomness of problems across every app, device and feature I’ve seen to date has been perplexing and a major downer.

As for features being slow in coming, that’s entirely relevant, and for you to ignore it is unacceptable. Could you not simply sit down and objectively look at whether or not the app met the basic [objective] requirements of a personal diary keeping program? You’re reviewing a product as opposed to the developer, but those considerations are important because on one hand the Developer could indeed be weighed down with Apple’s problems (and that’s relevant to all users, right?), but on the other hand at $12 a pop for the matched set, this Developer should be able to achieve a basic feature set appropriate to the app he’s selling – in particular, encryption, tags and categories are extremely important. Venture funding? Probably not. Some part time coding help? Gosh I’d hope so. The point is – because you clearly missed it – if the developer isn’t reinvesting in the program then it’s a high risk of take the money and run, and although you might disagree, the program is not even feature equipped enough to be rightfully considered beta software yet.

I’m sorry but more than the app, this review is a major and thorough fail.

You know, I’m becoming more wary of the Envato logo when it pops up on sites I didn’t previously realize were Envato owned. The more I look at Envato owned sites with a careful eye, it’s becoming a concern that Envato publications and properties are first and foremost concerned about generating revenue, and carelessly so: generating revenue /from volume/, and quality is just an afterthought. This review is honestly so over the top in giving any endorsement to this app, and it’s made me think AppStorm is simply not trustworthy for tech related information.

-rob the computer guy

Oh yeah, and markdown support?  Really?  Who is THAT appealing to?  If you’re making a simple app to appeal to the novice user, where’d you come up with that as some great feature?  Ugh.

My website is still very much a work in progress, and I’ll be adding a fancier contact form here soon.

In the meantime, drop me a line at rob@robthecomputerguy.com and I’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as I can!

I’m a computer guy with a flair for matching people and teams up with technology that saves them time, money and aggravation.

No, that's not me. But I love the concept.

I went back to school a few years ago to finish my degree and while I was busy taking courses from a wide spectrum of disciplines, I surprised myself in coming back to my love for technology.  In my case, I think I have a whole spectrum of new insights about my work from branching out into a whole array of Anthropology, Sociology and general interest courses.  What I’m really interested in now is the idea of user experience – and I’m interested in matching people up to the right technology – whether that be the right computer or the right options settings in Microsoft Word – and making their experience as helpful as possible.

Now, what do I mean by “as helpful as possible” ?  Well, I think there was a turning point in the last 10 years where we started doing everything on the computer whether or not doing it on the computer saved us any time, effort or money.  I think we often resign ourselves to the burden of doing things on our computer in any given way because trying to learn and implement new ways of working smarter into our daily lives is actually very difficult to do.

Let’s face it – the easiest way to get something done is simply the way we know how to do it.  If there’s more than one way to execute a task, sometimes it’s just nice to have choices.  But in the end, what I find most satisfying is helping someone learn something they didn’t know that they didn’t know.  Like the first time I ever tried the right-click on a mouse – ask me about that some time.