A Personal Blog
Archive for April, 2006
A Break
Apr 25th
I’m taking tomorrow and Thursday off. These’ll actually be my first days off in over a month. I don’t actually remember the last real “day off” (defined as anything less than 3-4 hours of work) I had. It might have been since February, really. Sad. Pathetic. I need to find more balance.
So, I’m totally unplugging the next 2 days. No cell. No email. No IM. Well, probably some Xbox Live, but besides that NOTHING ;-)
BlogExplosion.com Sold!
Apr 24th
Good times! As per the post by Jeff and Thomas, the sale is official!
Here’s a bit from their communication to the community:
We are pleased to announce that BlogExplosion has been sold to Stephen Sartain and a group of private investors this weekend. We had competitive bids all through last week and finally was decided on Saturday afternoon.
Stephen has bought two sites from us previously with great results and has extensive experience running sites like BlogExplosion. Our final closing price was in the six figures and well beyond our minimum bid of $100,000. We also want to extend a huge thanks to Jeremy Wright for doing an amazing job brokering the sale of BlogExplosion for us.
Yep. My first six figure sale. Thanks to the team that helped out, specifically Ingrid Diaz for the incredible help putting together a kickass buyer’s package PDF in under 24 hours. I’m really, really happy for the team. Of course you always want to see a client get more, more, more, but this is a really good deal with someone the entire team is happy with.
All around, a great little project. I know I said this last time, but I have no plans on making brokering sales a full-time or even regular activity. As with The Blog Herald’s sale, it was mainly helping out folk who weren’t getting the kind of offer they deserved. And, while I’m sure that’s actually the norm, I do have my own little company to run (along with Shai, Duncan and Darren) and will be staying away from much of this kind of stuff for at least the next few months.
Unless someone wants me to give me a million dollars to sell a site ;-)
Which Team Applications Are Right For You?
Apr 24th
The first in my series of articles for InformIT on “new breeds” of applications is now live. It’s all about the new breed of team apps, and figuring out which ones work best for you. Specifically, the article covers technologies like Central Desktop, Basecamp, CalendarHub, Remember the Milk, etc.
It was an interesting article to write, and hopefully it’ll be helpful to groups (like ours) that are either in different physical locations or who simply want simple tools to solve simple problems.
Best Comment Ever!
Apr 14th
I’ll admit, I often get some odd comments. Most of them I approve. Some I don’t, because they’re attackful or don’t contribute to the conversation. This one was so classic that while I didn’t approve it, I wanted to save it for posterity’s sake as the single best comment I have ever received. Enjoy!
bloggers r lamers. go get a life. nobody wants to read ur damn daily routine.. screw u jeremy!!! y did u steal my gf away/??? did i rape ur sista???? i didnt touch her!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it was alvin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Air Canada's Wonky Support
Apr 12th
Ever just have one of those experiences? Forgive the vent, but I’ve just got to. I had to buy 2 tickets online today, one for myself and one for my mother in law. Had to do it via aircanada.com, since they’ve got a seat sale on that they aren’t passing on to their industry partners like Expedia.ca.
Well, it’s now been about 2 hours of trying to spend my money with them. I got my ticket booked, but no luck on the second ticket. Here’s the process I had to go through to get my ticket booked:
1. Input all info 2. Input payment info 3. Click buy 4. Get routed back to payment info screen 5. Call support 6. Have to go into my profile and add my credit card manually 7. Go back through 1-3 8. Get routed back to payment info screen 9. Support gets me to manually enter my CC 10. Presto, it works!
So, I had to enter my credit card 3 times. And even though on step 7 the card I entered (and bought with) was the one I’d entered in step 6 (which was actually a 5 step process, but anyways), it still didn’t work. Craziness. But, I was okay. It was only about 20 minutes. Not ideal, but not stupid. Just vaguely annoying.
Then I had to purchase my mother in law’s ticket. I was prepped, though, so I went through the entire process (replete with error 4613′s) as instructed in about 10 minutes. Except that this time I got past the buy stage, had to enter my Visa Verified info AND THEN get pushed back to the main payment page.
So I call support. And do the whole thing over again. It’s now been 45 minutes trying to purchase this ticket. But no go. They’re going to transfer me to sales. Reason I didn’t call sales in the first place? Because you have to pay a 20-40$ surcharge for calling them when you could have used the website. I ask if, since I TRIED to use the website this fee will be waived. Apparently not.
Now, I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t have written about this until this point. Mistakes happen, no biggie. I mean, I’m annoyed but I understand.
However, so that they can diagnose the problem, the support tech asks for some “basic information”. The basic information. Some of it’s basic. Some of it, like my credit card number, so they can store it in plain text in the support ticket.
It’s at that point that I lost it. She can’t file the ticket without my credit card number.
Now I don’t mind giving companies my CC if I have a reasonable expectation of privacy on it. Y’know, encryption, auditing, that kind of thing. But for Air Canada to need my details on a SUPPORT ticket?
Bleh. Yeah, so maybe some of the AC employees who read Ensight can explain this.
Oh, finally got through to sales. He says they waive the fee when it’s coming from a support call. Cool. Took all of 5 minutes to book it. Nice guy too.
Anyways, I’m not really pissed. I’m just a little… awed that a company like AirCanada would require / allow this to happen. Seems like abuse just waiting to happen to me.
