20 Web Sites That Changed The World
// October 22nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology
You know you’ve been doing Internet work way too long when you remember when most of these sites launched. Heck…my first web site was on Geocities!
Archive for Technology
19 People, $52 Million in Benefits
// September 4th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal, Technology
Although I can’t stand the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, it was nice to see them give some props to PennTAP, the organization that I’ve been with for over 5 years. As my co-worker Don said when I started — “this will be the hardest job you’ll ever have, but you’ll love it the most.” He was absolutely right.
Your Financial Data Sold for $65
// August 28th, 2008 // No Comments » // Give Me A Break!, Technology
Well, this definitely doesn’t apply to everyone — but it did affect over a million people in the United Kingdom. A laptop owned by a company that is actually supposed to protect financial data was sold on eBay for $65, but luckily it was sold to an IT person who reported it to the companies whose data was on the hard drive.
I’m not surprised when I hear stories like this — considering that the same thing happened to me at a garage sale a few years ago. I went to a sale here in Mt. Lebanon and saw a Compaq Presario laptop that had a piece of masking tape on the lid with $10 on it. At first I thought it was a goof-up and that she meant to put $100 on it. I walked up to the owner and said “this is really only $10?”. She said “Yup” and of course I said “so..what’s wrong with it?”
She said that nothing was wrong with it and that I could plug it in to confirm that it was OK. I told her that I wanted to and lo and behold, a Windows 2000 login screen came up after I turned it on. I asked her if she could tell me the username/password for the laptop so I could see what programs were on the computer and she told me that she didn’t remember it. She then said that it was her old work laptop and that they gave it to her once she got a new one.
Being the geek that I am, I know/knew that the base install of Windows 2000 has “administrator” as the username and no password for the password and it let me right in. I turned off the laptop, handed the owner her $10, said “Thanks!” and walked out. When I got home, I logged back in and got the surprise of my life.
It turns out that the previous owner of the laptop was a mortgage broker and that neither she nor her previous company wiped the drive before she was given the laptop. A basic search of the computer revealed mortgage applications with all kinds of personal information (names, social security numbers, job information, etc.), emails, documents and pictures. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! Imagine if I was a criminal! I had tons of information to commit identity theft with. She hadn’t deleted a thing!
When I bought the laptop (but before I saw what was on it), I had intended on reselling the laptop after I had wiped the drive anyways — but I definitely needed to make sure to do it now! I pulled out my trusty DBAN CD to make sure that none of the information on the laptop would ever be found again.
And if you think that’s the only time I bought something with data already on it, you’d be wrong. I’ve bought an HP Jornada and multiple Palm PDAs with all of the content intact. Unbelievable!
Let Me Teach You
// August 17th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology
Want to learn how to build a web site? Don’t know how to register a domain name? Confused as to how it all works? Never fear! You can just attend my workshop at St. Vincent College this Tuesday morning.
I’ll be teaching 3 different workshops in the next few months through my partnership with the Small Business Development Center on campus. They are a wonderful group of people that want to help the businesses of Westmoreland and Fayette counties and I’m glad that I’ve had 5 great years (and counting) of friendship and partnership with them.
No More Pandora? WTF?
// August 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology
I read this article after seeing it listed on TechCrunch and it made me sick to think that Pandora might go away as a result of the fees that they have to pay to stream each song that they play via their web site. The part that sucks (and that I didn’t know before I read the article) is that the fees for playing each song vary between terrestrial (the AM/FM that most people don’t even use any more), satellite (those of us with Sirius or XM) and web radio stations (like Pandora).
What the hell is up with that? Why aren’t they all paying the same fees? Why are great web sites like Pandora doomed to failure because of the inequities in the fee structure? I sure as hell hope that there is some way for Pandora to survive. Kudos to Rep. Howard Berman for trying to broker a deal to get the rates reduced.
Customer Service: Garmin
// July 30th, 2008 // No Comments » // Give Me A Break!, Technology
This is the first of (I assume) many postings about customer service experiences that I’ve had. I want to share them with you, the readers of my blog, in the hopes that you are able to learn about the good or bad things that a company has done and either make sure to patronize a company in the future because they did a really nice job or that you stay the heck away from them because of their shoddy customer service.
I received a Garmin nuvi 350 GPS from my parents 1 1/2 years ago for Christmas. They wanted me to have one since they knew that I traveled all over the place for my job (12 counties in southwestern PA). For 18 months, the GPS was working great but then all of a sudden, it stopped working — meaning that it wasn’t able to acquire the GPS satellites and find my location — rendering the unit useless.
I went onto Garmin’s web site to see if I could fix it and learned that I could do a master reset — which actually did fix it the first time. Unfortunately, a few weeks later the same problem occurred and the master reset didn’t do anything to fix it this time — so I called Garmin support and spoke with one of their customer service folks.
I identified myself and explained when I bought the unit and what was wrong. The gentleman told me that in order for it “to be looked at and repaired” it would cost $200. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I told the man, “Um..sir….that’s half the price of the unit NEW”. He said “I understand but that’s our policy.” I told him that that price was unacceptable and that I would rather by a new GPS from another company with that $200. He paused for a second and then stated “Well…the best that I can do for the repair is $100. I sat there and said to myself “Damn….I would’ve had to pay $200 if I hadn’t complained about that price!”
After hearing about the super-quick 50% discount on the repair, I told the customer service rep that I wouldn’t even spend that much for a repair because I still thought it was too high. He paused for a second and said “Let me check out something. I’ll be right back”. He returned to the phone about 2 minutes later and stated that “because it was only 1 1/2 years old”, they would send me a “new” (refurbished) unit free of charge once they had received my old one back.
I received the new unit about 10 days later and it’s been working just fine. I’m happy that Garmin replaced the unit for me, but I’m definitely disappointed that I had to complain heavily about their customer service/support policies in order to get the free replacement that I did.
