Category Archives: General

People are strange

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We have a lot of customers. A few, whilst emailing us at tech-support can be rude. It’s interesting, visiting their sites, and seeing whether that is just because they’re stressed, under the effects of caffeine, or are just naturally rude.

Take one example… one person just kept ignoring what I said, treating it as if I didn’t know what I was writing about. Turns out, I did, and I fixed the immediate problem (if not the whole one, but that’s something different altogether). He still insists on treating me as if I’m not worth listening to.

Surprise surprise, if I am given the choice (and at the end of the day, when I’m just doing support tickets to stop them needing to be done tomorrow, I often am,) I will delay answering the tickets of those who have been rude. They’ll get done at some point, but I won’t prioritize them; what’s the point? I’d rather help someone who will be grateful! I will go all out in my own time on a problem that interests me, or a customer who is kind. I will go all out if you are rude, but you are stressed and have an excuse. I may force myself to go all out if you pay us a lot of money (but it won’t be on my own time 😉 )

I’ve stayed in the office till 10pm, on a ‘I’m not getting paid right now’ problem, because it interested me, and I liked the people running the website involved. I will gladly spend my free time trying to help them.

If you talk to tech support, be nice! Say thank you, treat us with respect, and you’ll find we’ll be inclined to help you a lot more. Ignore what we say, treat us rudely or as if we don’t know what we’re talking about, and we’ll get dispirited. The last thing you want is dispirited sysadmins. They tend to go home on the dot, and they won’t go out of their way to help you.

If you’re angry, worried, stressed, take a deep breath and a calming moment before speaking to us. We, like anyone else, don’t like people shouting at us for something we can’t help. If your website goes down, because the server it’s on has blown up, and you didn’t pay for a fail-over system, we can’t help you any faster by you shouting at us, and you shouting at us will not make us like you 😉

In the end, just remember, we’re human too! That person you call up because your email is broken has emotions, and they’re likely busy fixing problems, or helping others already. Don’t let the frustration of the problem blow into anger at the people who try to fix it for you 🙂

America – Wake up

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James pointed this out over twitter: http://is.gd/4MV1s

Doesn’t surprise me, it seems that the US has taken the line the ends justify the means for a while, including torture, and the (slightly) indirect causing of torture.

Just one thing, America. You really cannot complain when your troops are tortured. There is a reason everyone accepted the Geneva Conventions, but it looks like the US has decided to ignore them. (Like the UK is ignoring Human Rights in some cases now, and is trying to eat away our privacy.)

The effects of sleep deprivation

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Or what happens when you have to stay up for 22 hours, because a server has suddenly decided it doesn’t like life, and would rather die, as I had to this morning.

Managed to recover it in the end, but this would be the downside of my job 😉

Weak, managed to strain my legs, so both were aching, but oh, did bed feel nice when I got to crawling in!

In my case, sleep deprivation results in:

  1. getting sillier
  2. getting grumpy
  3. trouble accessing memories
  4. eye-hand co-ordination beginning to degrade

I guess, that over time, you can train yourself to deal with these sort of symptoms (though for me, being silly is a bit strange 🙂 )

LPIC exam 101

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Well, it’s arrived again. A little later today, I’ll be taking the Linux Professional Institue’s exam again. With any luck, I’ll pass this time (failed by 10 points last time :() Hopefully, I’ll be able to update this post with good news. Who knows.

I hate exams, especially these, which require rote learning. Rote learning I am rubbish at. Sit me in front of a computer with a task within my abilities, the use of man and google, and fine, I can muddle my way through. But learning all the command flags of rpm? No. Hard. Gastly, indeed. I had hoped I was done with exams when I left school. Seems I was wrong 🙁

Did I mention, I hate exams?

I passed 🙂

In less depressing non-news.. Day 5 of NaBloPoMo, and I’ve yet to falter. Let’s see what happens this weekend, when I get a wonderful couple of nights of disturbed sleep, and short ‘stuff needs fixing!’ deadlines 😉

Reporting Problems

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Have you ever had to talk to tech support? Ask for help, when your computer, your email account, or your internet connection isn’t working?

Ever wondered what’s going through the mind of the person answering? Quite often, it’s this: “I’m not a mind reader!”

Working at a web-host, at least once a week, I get an email that goes “My email isn’t working” or “Please setup a new virtual host for me”. Those questions, whilst they make a lot of sense to the asker, who has the context in mind, make very little to me. What is wrong with the email account? What domain name do I need to add to the server, what server do I need to setup the hosting on? Hence, I’m not a mind reader 🙂

So, if you ever need to report a problem, give us as much detail as possible. What happens when you check your email? Do you get any error messages? Describe the steps you take, so that we can replicate your problem on our machines – fixing it is a lot easier when we can see it happening.

Day 1: NaBloPoMo

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What a strange name for an event. Anyway, yes, this is my second attempt at the interesting experiment, of posting once a day, every day during this month.1 I expect quite a few of these posts will be small, random and useless. Sorry about that, just to warn you!

Anyway, onto more interesting things. Book review 🙂

Completed the “The Business” By Iain Banks the other week. Good book, though not one of his best… Gripping read from about ~60-70% of the way through. Predictable up to that point.
All about a large, democratic company, and the machinations and politics within it, as it looks to buy a small country, to attain a seat on the UN council.

Interesting and enjoyable enough read, but not spectacular by any stretch. I’ll not keep it for my book collection 🙂

Some other thoughts I had whilst talking to someone at church today… Working with the people I do, it’s easy to forget the fear and lack of knowledge a lot people have with computers. For me, they’re simple, far easier to understand than a human by any stretch of the imagination!

If you are ever afraid of a computer, the best thing you can do is to make a backup of all your files onto a USB stick, and then just play with your computer. Don’t be afraid of breaking anything, let your fear go. Just explore all the menus, options and settings, see what happens when you change things around. Right click on everything!

Haymarket Metro Station, Newcastle

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Fore note: Garreth has gone up to Newcastle to study Building Services (foundation) at Northumbria University.
This has to be the most random and unrelated note (i won’t call it a blog, it’s not worthy of that).

Tonight after chowing down on a awesome kofte kebab from Get Stuffed (Newcastle fast food 😉 ) and feeling much better from having some sugar in my veins I was in a chatty mood. Here is the information I gathered!

Guy with guitar, looks like a student, sitting on a chilly step eating a kebab:
Newcastle Student Union hold a Open Mic night every monday!
(Finally some real music!)
There’s a Jazz club that also hosts real music, there’s a guy who hands out leaflets for it during the day near the church.
He’s a fresher.

Builder on St Mary’s street, by the church:
Turns out tonight they are removing the cabins located literally right next to the church. They’ve just completed the new Haymarket Metro station after a 2 year build. Coincidentally, he mentioned off the cuff that they had to use 125ft drilled piles!
Phew! It’s coincidental cos that’s what I was studying today in my Building Construction lecture with Kevin Elliot.

So they drilled 120ft (presumably couldn’t use displacement piles cos it’d disrupt all the buildings nearby, and the underground!), put steel in and poured concrete.

Mr Builder said they had to be really careful with the positioning of the piles or they’d have gone bankrupt – after all the client is not going to be too happy if you drill into the tube you’re building a station for!

It’s strange how you can reinforce your learning with random late night chats with builders! I’d recommend anybody studying built environment courses give it a try 😉

Now about that darn assignment :'(

Btw I have some half decent posts in draft too (Web 3.0, firefox addons), if only I had the motivations to finish them!

Dear web

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Dear web-connected people. A friend asked me recently, do you know of an opensource wiki software that can intergrate with ldap. Any one know of one, or have any ideas? Please comment if you do!