Clever Boy

So I was having this geek moment last night; editing my DNS through my iPod Touch. Well, Safari kept crashing at very inopportune times. I was going to leave a message on the blog saying "If you can't access the site, please let me know." Now that would have been real clever.

Reminds me of a great quote I found last week.

Just because no one complains doesn't mean all parachutes are perfect. - Benny Hill

Ambient Intelligence Chapter

I suppose I'm a geek at heart, or at the very least, I acknowledge my inner geek. I was programming BASIC on my Atari home computer shortly after I owned my first bike. I have suffered gadget envy. I lived with MIT students when going to school at BU in Boston. I would have quit my job at Crayola if the MIT Media Lab had an available spot during our visits there.

So perhaps it makes sense that I did draft a chapter for an upcoming book on Ambient Intelligence. My chapter will stick out like a sore thumb among the other chapters drafted by research scientists at innovation centres throughout Ireland. Keep in mind, this is an academic publisher, and my approach was much more paper than essay. If any of this sounds interesting to you, have a read, and let me know what you think.

User-centred Design and Development of Future Smart Systems: Opportunities and Challenges (PDF, 218KB)

AOL now on gMail

I have been working on a service design workshop and have been looking for an exercise that a call centre might use for training. A real moment of truth in any service is when it goes wrong and you look for support. So I figured, why not find out who has one of the best call centres and ask them for an exercise. The AOL Broadband contact centre in Ireland won Best Overall Contact Centre in 2007, along with Best Manager, Best Centre and a slew of other awards. When I went to their contact page, I HAD to chuckle to find their HR team is using a gMail account for email. Priceless.

Eirgone

When I get around to it, I am going to create a site to help those in a similar position avoid Eircom altogether. I know they still technically own my line, but I am paying less and getting more. TalkTalk is now my telephone provider and I get unlimited local and long distance for €30.99/mth, including line rental. I use 13434.ie for calling mobiles and international.

During the transition, Eircom screwed up adding a TalkTime package to my account and I got walloped with a €219 final bill. To their credit (and I use that term with great reservation) I will be refunded €85 in charges, but the error never should have been made in the first place. Good riddance.

My first good experience with TalkTalk, other than a smooth as silk transfer process? I sent an email support inquiry on Friday about my billing credit card and got a personal call back on Saturday afternoon from a customer rep, as well as a written email confirming the call. I wasn't dreaming ...

Air Con

I have yet to meet a single person who likes Eircom. How does a company survive with so much ill-will? They are clearly the most un-user-centred organisation I have ever come across. What was mere distaste and disbelief for me became full-blown hatred this evening.

I still haven't figured out how you can justify charging €24.99 for 150 hours of dial-up, and at the same time offer 1MB broadband for €15. My current bill was €57.01 for dial-up and no discount on local or national calls. That was the charge for recurring service and two calls totaling 18 cent. However, here is their cheapest broadband bundle for €55.99.

• UNLIMITED local and national calls anytime
• LINE rental included
  
• FREE wireless modem
• FREE exclusive online access to setanta sports
• Connection charge €29.99
• FREE 1GB online storage

I need to retain my dial-up connection to use with the satellite and the last hurdle was I couldn't connect to my flat-rate dial-up number. I could only connect to the pay-as-you go number. 1 cent over the weekend to get started was fine, but that went to 5 cent a minute during the weekday.

Now get this ... to talk to dial-up support, you get charged .33/minute. On my THIRD call to support, I was on the line for 22 minutes and my issue was still not resolved. (You still get charged regardless if they solve your issue. Is this legal?!) Support even claimed Eircom didn't sell satellite broadband. (I was trying to understand how the sold a similar product that operates under the same principles.)

Still, the Irish government shortlisted Eircom as one of four companies that may be awarded the contract to roll out the National Broadband Scheme. God help us all.

Ego tripping at the gates of Google

Can anyone honestly say they haven't put their own name into a Google search? I've even set up an automated search that mails me a digest each week of several searches, including my own name.

Best returned search so far ...

Justin Knecht was treated at Bucyrus Community Hospital after a reported hunting accident Tuesday. Knecht told the Crawford County Sheriff's Department he was hunting in Lykens Township when his rifle failed to fire. After reloading, Knecht fired upon an animal and accidentally shot himself in the foot. Knecht drove himself to the hospital for treatment.

Lost and found

Well, the good news is that I've learned a lot about making nice bootable backups of my MACs. The bad news is that I didn't have one in place for my work laptop (which really had the most current data of all my machines). It's not going to happen again and Gabe and Lisa have airtight backups at home now.

Considering the cost of drives these days, you may want to ask your boss or IT department if it is more affordable just to have a Firewire drive on your desk. I suppose there are information theft issues, but I question how any restore process could be as seamless.

Interlink (or Interstink as I've referred to them) lost my laptop from Sligo to Dublin. Apparently the shipping label came off the package??? Anyway, Mactivate has my machine, I'm just waiting to hear what data can be recovered.

Why pay a lot for phone service?

With Vonage, we have been paying $24.99 all-in for our phone service, and calls are now free to most countries in Europe. We set-up a virtual number in Ireland and also were able to keep a number in the US. How cool is that? We also can make calls from our laptop and just ordered a bluetooth headset. To top it all off, keeping Vonage is going to save us money in Ireland where it still costs more than 20c a minute to call a cell phone. We had a chance to get into the Vonage IPO and didn’t. Apparently that was a good thing. Are any of you using Vonage or Skype?