Instead, they’ve (finally) added a nice note to their email which says, “If you have already renewed these products or are working with your reseller, please disregard this notice or click here to ensure you don’t receive future notifications.” Stupid to make me do this, but sure…I click on it. It opens a new email (not a website) addressed to symantec@customermining.com (let the spam bots have it, what do I care?) pre-filled with something like this (I’ve x’d out the fields they filled in for privacy):

Subject: My Symantec Support Contracts Are Already Renewed

My Symantec Support Contracts have already been renewed. By sending this email, I will ensure that I will not receive future renewal notifications for the products listed in my renewal agreement number indicated below. I understand that if I have other Symantec products with support contracts up for renewal, I may receive renewal notifications for those products in the future.

NAME/COMPANY NAME
Agreement#: xxxxxx and Customer #: xxxxx
Original Order #: xxxxxx
Ref #: xxxxxxx
Support Exp Date: xxxxxx
Source Code: xxxxx

Why on earth do they make me go through this when they should already know I renewed!? I even got a call from Symantec right around the expiration date about this exact same thing, and I told the person that we had just renewed already–just like the email, a phone call that they should never have made. And yet it’s still in their email system!

Yeah, I know, it’s just a few emails. But it’s annoying, and I’ve been through it twice now! You’re a big company, Symantec. Please get your act together. Small things count. </rant>

Austin, in his comment, links to an article in Scholoarpedia on Synesthesia which I begin to read and find rather interesting. However, as I get down to the “Top down and contextual effects” portion of the article, I notice that there’s a sentence with a typo in it, specifically “The second experiment (6) used an ambiguous grapheme (‘A’ or ‘H’) embedded either in between ‘T’ and ‘E’ (as in ‘THE’) or between ‘C’ and ‘A’ (‘CAT’).” If you notice, at the end there, the ambiguous grapheme as an ‘A’ really is between ‘C’ and ‘T’, not between ‘C’ and ‘A’ as the sentence states (this makes more sense looking at the image provided in the article to illustrate).

Now, I was feeling generous and figured, hey, why not mention this to someone at the site so they can fix it? Actually, my first thought, being linked into the middle of the article, was “I already have a Wikipedia account, I’ll just fix this for them real quick.” Of course, they use the same MediaWiki software and default theme (hence the confusion, especially when linked to an anchor within an article), but Scholarpedia is not actually Wikipedia, as I quickly infer (and I haven’t had a scientific paper with a model named after me published with over 250 hits in Google–yet, if ever–so I can’t create an account). No problem, I’m sure there’s a contact form around. Nope. I can’t find one, anywhere on the site. Well, I just noticed the only email address I’ve run across on the site, suggestions @ scholarpedia.org, hidden away on the detailed requirements for authors page. No useful information on the About page, or the Help page. Oh wait, on the Instructions for authors page, it does have a random other email address, for a specific person. But they seem pretty much of the opinion that if you aren’t a famous scientist, you have no need to contact them about anything. Ironically, their Copyright page even says to “Contact Scholarpedia for copyright details.” Without mentioning a way to do so.

Oh well, maybe I’ll grab those two random email addresses I found and send them a quick note. If I get around to it; they can certainly find it here if they bother to look. I guess sometimes it takes is someone who graduated high school after being homeschooled to find the errors the super-genius scientists miss… ;-)

Thus ends this rant. Thanks, I feel better now. School 100% complete for the semester as of a very short time ago, so I’m quite happy to work the hot-air typing muscles for a few before getting to bed later than I should, again (but the exam got completed and submitted!).

This doesn’t always happen; I have been included on this via phone announcement before, and I think they even remembered to tell me personally once. Actually, that may have been for a group lunch, not for a go-home-early party. At least they have remembered before… :-)

Why is it that newspapers, when they design their websites, seem to forget that they are making the site available to a worldwide audience? I see it all the time: read Google News, or a blog entry, or some other source with a link to a newspaper story. Click. The newspaper has the name of the paper, often with the city name, plastered in about fifty places, and that’s just “above the fold”! But do they bother to put the state or any other identifying information somewhere? Not usually on the same page, or the home page. If you hunt around, sometimes you’ll find a Contact page or something that might list even a full [gasp] mailing address! Is it too much to ask that you list the full city and state where the paper is located somewhere on every page of the site? Or even just the homepage?

The latest example, and the one that set off this rant, is this story here, in the Holland Sentinal. One of my new favorite humor blogs, The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, mentioned that the blog was covered in that article in the Holland Sentinel. I clicked through and the article says,

This sign is one of the many signs guilty of what Holland native Bethany Keeley calls “unnecessary” quotation marks.

So yes, it says blogger Bethany is a “Holland native.” So what. I’ve been to Holland twice, and it’s pretty long flight from here, and if that’s where she and the paper are from, there would be a lot more Dutch mixed in on her posts! (And as a side note, “Holland” is actually just a part of the Netherlands, but it is used informally to refer to all of the Netherlands by outsiders. You can read about it on Wikipedia, but having been there, I’ll vouch for the article’s accuracy on that point :-)  But Wikipedia also disambiguates Holland, and shows that there are at least seventeen states with cities having the name “Holland” in them just in the United States! Yeah, that makes it perfectly obvious where the “Holland Sentinel” newspaper is based. Well, it does once you visit their Contact page. Oh well.

Anyway. The article itself is good, and mentions that the blog was covered recently in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, which is pretty hefty exposure for a humor blog! I’m certainly enjoying it. The blog is great,  and so is the article about it, it’s the newspaper’s website I have an issue with! Identify yourself fully, you geographically-oriented entities with cyber-presences!

End rant. If you made it this far…sorry :-)

Shortest. Post. Ever. (For me. :-)

Poor Man’s Google Reader Search appears to have a solution that lets you search a public label or an individual feed, but that’s not what I was looking for.

Google Reader Gears Search has a way to search Google Reader using the Google Gears offline post database if you are set up to use Reader offline with Gears, but again this requires a browser add-in. The creator of this option actually talked to Chris Wetherell, the Google Reader creator, about why there was no search, but he doesn’t articulate the answer with any level of detail.

Google Groups has a thread about Google Reader search, which basically asks the same question I do, but provides no answers. Martin Porcheron comments back in May that Google Reader has updated their CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to include hints of search capabilities, but those haven’t yet materialized. This seems to be the most promising reference that Google is indeed working to make this happen.

The most promising current solution that I’ve found came via a Lifehacker entry about a Google Operating System post: How to Add Search to Google Reader. It requires using Google Co-op and Greasemonkey (there’s another browser add-on to install still!), but it is probably the one I’m going to try for now. You also must export your feeds list and re-import it at the Co-Op site every time you update your subscriptions. Why is it so hard for Google to integrate their own two services, anyway?! I suppose I’ll have to live with the workaround for now, but I still think it’s strange for a company so focused on search to eschew it in such a widely used product. And there’s even an updated Greasemonkey script that will display your search results right within Google Reader. So you (and I) can fake it ’til they make it!

There’s a 15% non-profit discount, and the licensing cost is not prohibitive. It also does threaded email tracking very well, and includes a knowledge base and forum that are simple and make sense from the user and administration experiences. And it includes RSS feeds of several useful areas, along with very good reporting that has flexible filtering and drill-down features.

My main problem is…no asset tracking or inventory management are included. I agree that Ian Landsman, the HelpSpot creator, has some good points when I asked about this on his forums. And the response time (to my question along with the others listed, as well as to my trial setup request) shows me that support is excellent, which makes high quality, fast support a two-for-two find recently if you include MozyPro.

I will try Ian’s suggestion of using an asset tag with a custom field to at least track which systems are being referred to in a ticket, which could work. This could work well in conjunction with Spiceworks (also see posts here and here), which has a good (not perfect) inventory interface but a newly created helpdesk that’s not as poweful as HelpSpot.

I haven’t tried all the helpdesk options out by far. ManageEngine ServiceDesk is the one Jason and team is using at Granger Community Church now. I’ve installed the free version, and I’m impressed with the very large number of features. However, it’s a bit more complex than I’d like, especially given that I may have some non-IT department help with entering tickets soon. Like Ian said, in fact, it tries to do everything. And it’s more expensive than HelpSpot for the configuration we need (initially and recurring). Does anyone want to write (or find) an inventory/asset application that has an interface that’s simple like HelpSpot and integrates with the same? I can’t put my finger on what is keeping me from liking Spiceworks as much as I want to. The speed, perhaps? The unresolved errors in some cases? Probably a combination, plus there are some interface items that just feel “clunky” to me, as nice as it is.

So I’m narrowing down the helpdesk search, and still on the lookout for the inventory side. I’m not convinced in any particular direction yet, but I’m finding more and more acceptable choices. At least it’s progress.

Well, it’s probably a good time to get to bed. And get around to enjoying the start of a long weekend. And conclude what has now turned into a rant, or a ramble. Thanks for your indulgence. Comments welcome.

The emails appear to have stopped on Friday, although if they continue I can easily block them at one of several points (such as our spam filter).  I’ve sent an email to our staff explaining the details in case anyone was confused about the sender of the emails.  But there is no easy way for me to track down who actually sent the emails, since technically, Google did.  I could contact them about the abuse, and will if there is more of it.  But it is very annoying to have an email system that’s so open to abuse and spoofing and takes time out of my day to deal with such petty junk pulled as a prank.  And we have no idea whether this was sent to any church members or anyone outside of the staff, and if it was…will they know enough to realize it’s a spoofed piece of junk?  I know there are email verification and authentication schemes out there, some good, some bad, and none universal.  There are big problems with most, and the likelihood of authenticated emails becoming a global practice anytime soon is not something I’m holding my breath for, but an IT guy can dream, can’t he?

Thanks for letting me vent, as much as my strong feelings have been held back above to prevent publishing anything I’ll later regret :-)

One thing I’d like to see is the physical tracking to go along with the network tracking. What network port (assuming managed switches that the software knows about and can talk to) is connected to what wall outlet (obviously this match has to be input manually)? What are the MAC addresses (and from that, the rest of the inventory information) of the attached device(s), or is the port even active? What physical office is a machine associated with, at least primarily? (Laptops may roam, but most laptop users have an office they’re usually in.) What user?

Tony also brings up searching and historical information. Searching is the key here I think; if I want to know (to use Tony’s example) how much memory Bob Jones has on his machine, I want to locate this information without having to first find Bob’s machine, look it up, and then find the specs. I want to search for “‘Bob Jones’ RAM” and have the system know that obviously I’m talking about his machine, not the person. That’s an easy context, but add enough “easy” things and maybe some harder ones, and the software becomes a lot more user-friendly.

Same goes for the historical information, being able to track a machine from one office to another, from one user to another, or even tracking when RAM was added to a particular system would be helpful! Or when Windows was reinstalled. or other software added or removed. Or how about a history of what network ports a machine has been plugged into?

When we get new equipment, how about a New Equipment Wizard that lets us add basic info (office assignment, user assignment, MAC address, serial number, date of purchase, name of person who initially configured it, maybe more) and then, once it’s on the network (assuming it’s a network device, I’d like this for printers and other equipment that IT uses but may not be on the network) the software would see its MAC address, notice we’d already added it, and tie in scan results with the manually entered data. Having this pre-deployment wizard would help make sure a routine was followed of recording all of this information rather than having it tracked down later, if ever.

I see a lot of good things in Spiceworks, and that’s just because that’s what I’m playing with now. I’ve seen some other good information out there as well. There are plenty of features above that I haven’t seen in any of the limited number of software choices I’ve seen. And the ones that have more than others, don’t seem to integrate everything or make it as easy to use as I’d like. Because ease of use and cost are the two biggest factors. Spiceworks is free, supported by Google ads. That’s okay with me, the ads are unobtrusive and with my current budget (or any budget, really), free is as good as it gets :-) Regardless of the cost, I just want the kitchen sink (as described above) to come with it.

I don’t know who Moduslink is, but Microsoft made an extremely poor choice of partners to work with for this project. Their website has to refresh after each form field selection. After typing in my two model numbers, COA (Certificate of Authenticity) numbers, dates of purchase, etc. for my other office two days ago, putting in shipping and billing addresses, and the credit card information (for the almost $12 shipping charges), rather than a confirmation page I receive an error saying, “An unrecoverable error has occurred, please try again later.” This wasn’t a one-time event, either, I re-typed all the pages in the multi-step process again, just to receive the same message. How about a descriptive error message if you must display one? They keep adding insult to injury here, and it’s taken at least 15 minutes of my time if not more, including gathering all the needed information together. But it gets worse.

I email their customer service after trying to find a phone number for five minutes, unsuccessfully. I explain in detail the steps I took, as above, with the error message. I even thank them in advance for their help. Their reply that evening, which I receive the next day: “Thank you for your interest in the Upgrade Redemption Program. We are unable to process the credit card used for your order. Please contact us at (800) 817-5602 or (801) 431-1504 to resolve the issue.” Finally! A phone number! I call the toll-free one (do they think I’m going to pay long distance given the option?) and try the menu option that sounds like what I’m trying to do (redeem the Vista Upgrade or some such). After a long-winded message that basically consisted of them saying “visit our website to do this” over and over ad nauseam, they politely told me I could have the message repeated (“press 0”), or they’d helpfully hang up. I try again. Different menu option, same result. Quite a waste of time, no human still. Third time I try yet a different option, which has another long-winded message but finally says, “if you need further help, press 8,” at which point I proceeded to hurt my finger pressing eight so hard and fast (not really, but I thought that would sound good).

After an impressively short time on hold, I was able to speak with a woman without an Indian accent. But still located in some other foreign country with English as a second language. After telling her my problem (twice), she wanted me to give her the information so she could try it. Whatever. She proceeded to ask me for the information for each form field, and I could picture her typing it into the same website because it was in the same order and everything. Only it took about 20 minutes for me to spell out Every. Single. Word. I know my last name’s a bit tough, but how many stinking times do I (and she) have to spell “Indianapolis” phonetically only for her to discover that she’d typed ID instead of IN in the state field to cause the error?

Result? Same as mine. I was so shocked I had a heart attack. Or maybe that was from having to sit still through this phone call rather than being up and about getting some exercise to keep my heart strong. (Ha! If you believe I would have been exercising if I hadn’t had to be on the phone, you don’t know me too well! I sit at the computer, too!) After recovering from my “shock” I heard her saying something about writing down my information to submit manually, and that someone would call me for my billing information (credit card number) later. I left my cell phone rather than office phone for this purpose, and was finally done with that ridiculous phone call. But have a heard back from anyone yet? Nope. If I do get a call back, I might end up with a real heart attack from the surprise. But I’ve done my part, and they’d better send me the upgrade at some point, because I submitted my rebate before the March 31st deadline. The only problem might be contacting them to make sure they keep up their end of the bargain.

Fortunately, I did the two Lakeview rebate submissions today, and besides the user interface on the submission site still better fit for website purgatory than human use, it did give me a confirmation page and ask me to mail or fax my receipts to confirm the upgrade, which I have no problem with. At least writing this rant has helped a bit, emotionally if not in substance. And I’m not in a hurry for the upgrades, I just want them to save money when we eventually go to Vista, which is not for a while!