RHFtech Help Desk

I helped a client network her Windows 7 and Mac computers a few days ago. She had tried and paid two other firms’ tech support before she called me.

I received the following email a few minutes ago:

I just wanted you to know how much I am enjoying working with my computers now that you have solved the problem of networking them.  Just today I wanted to print a document with some color in it… and it worked perfectly.

I have never been able to use it on my Mac ever since I got my Dell with Windows 7 but you have really done great work on fixing it perfectly.

I am so pleased and and do not want this day to go by without thanking you.  You are the best. [emphasis added]

It is always nice to get message like this.

This is the tale of two troubleshooting issues. One was easy the other was not.

I am usually good at problem solving. But the constant grind is wearing. I have to solve problems for my clients, friends and myself. I do that all day and night long, seemingly 7 days a week. It used to be exhilarating to find solutions. Now it is not. Too many puzzles, too frequently served. Too many applications, on too many operating systems, Mac and Windows, are taking their toll. 

Problem No. 1 – Google Calendar Sync not working

I had set up Google Calendar Sync for a client quite a while ago. We were syncing Outlook 2007 to Google Calendar and to his BlackBerry. Everything worked fine for many months.

My client has had issues with the new BlackBerry Bold. Battery life could be better. It is too large and too different than the BlackBerry Curve he had owned and liked. He has gone through 3 or 4 Bold units in the last few months.

I received an email, after he got the latest Bold, that calendar syncing was broken. I sent him instructions for downloading and configuring Google Calendar Sync on his BlackBerry. But it still did not work.

Ironically, I was fortunate that his two year old Mac Pro suffered a hard drive failure that required me to replace the drive and reinstall/reconfigure the Mac Pro’s OS and software. I couldn’t get his mail applications to log into his Gmail account. I knew his credentials. They would not work. When I mentioned it to him, he said, “Oh, I changed my password.” Problem solved. He had not entered the correct password in Google Calendar Sync.

If I had not had to fix the Mac Pro I might have spent hours trying to find a solution for a problem that the client had inadvertently created. It is not his fault. We all have too many user names, user accounts, passwords, and security questions.

Problem No. 2 – Buffalo Linkstation not connecting

I have a new client, a commercial photography business. They have tens of thousands of photos, and add more every day. They wanted to upgrade their existing storage configuration. They used four Buffalo Linkstation NAS drives attached to an Ethernet switch on their LAN. The drives were almost full. There was no backup.

We agreed on repurposing an old Windows XP computer, adding an attached 4 bay eSATA drive enclosure as a file and backup server for the network. We also agreed on adding offsite drives to mirror the active data drives on the new server.

I replaced the existing router, switch and Ethernet connections for each of the company’s computers with Gigabit capable equipment. The old router had been a Linksys running at 10/100Mbps. The new one was a D-Link.

A problem arose immediately once the new network was in place. One of the four NAS drives did not appear on the network. We tried everything we could think of to recover that fourth NAS box. Of course, it was the most important of the four NAS devices and it was not a simple single drive configuration. It was two, half-terabyte drives ganged together using an internal RAID card to make one TB,

I spent a lot of time trying to coax that NAS drive back onto the network. I tried everything that I could think of. And then a light bulb went off in my head. It occurred to me that the NAS box might have been configured with a static IP rather than the default DHCP. Linksys routers generally use 192.168.1.x for their IP addresses. D-Link uses 192.168.0.x.

I fired up the old Linksys router, connected the NAS box and my ASUS Eee PC netbook. Sure enough the drive was now connected to the old network and functioning correctly. I opened its management console via a browser on the netbook and found that it had been configured for a static IP, 192.168.1.107, which would never work with the D-Link equipment, as configured. I set the NAS device to use DHCP and then reconnected it to the D-Link network. It showed up instantly. Problem solved.

If Buffalo designed their products with a reset button, back to factory defaults, like most routers have, I would have solved this problem with less headache and much faster.

Why do these problems arise? They arise from complexity. There are too many things we all have to know in order to make our equipment and applications work. It is not our fault that we are often at sea trying to coax our stuff to do what it is supposed to do. It is often the fault of the executives, designers and engineers who push out product without working hard enough to make it simple.

One of the more powerful corporate uses of Twitter, perhaps its best corporate use, is to identify where customer support is needed.

I posted a blog entry Another angry Cablevision customer on March 21. My blog posts are automatically tweeted, i.e., posted to my Twitter account.

The next morning I had a new follower on Twitter who direct messaged me asking if my issue had been resolved. He continued to follow me and send me messages as Cablevision worked on resolving the situation. He is a Cablevision employee. Comcast has a similar customer service program using Twitter.

I suspect that Cablevision has a search engine constantly monitoring the Twitter feed stream for keywords, such as Cablevision, Optimum, Optonline, Optimum Voice, etc. They probably have an employee or two who are responsible for reading those tweets and taking appropriate action where deemed necessary.

After Cablevision demonstrated an unusual desire to fix the issues they created, unusual for a multi-billion dollar American corporation, I posted Cablevision redeems itself.

Since then, I had some issues testing Optimum WiFi (a free service available to their customers in much of their cable territory) in downtown Westport, CT and along the Post Road in Westport. Their tech support and dogged follow-up on the issues has been a surprisingly positive experience. I do not know if this is because my account has been flagged to provide this level of support because I blog and I am a tech journalist or it is what Cablevision does today. Either way, I’m liking it.

It is nice being an expert, the go-to guy when technology puzzles people. But that reputation has its downside. My clients and friends often query me for answers to simple questions. They must be ignorant of the power of Google or think that I will save them the time and effort of searching. Of course, they do not think I should charge for answering their queries. It only takes me a moment, perhaps a few minutes, or maybe no more than half-an-hour, well maybe an hour or two to answer them.

Yesterday, while doing a home theater installation, I received an email on my BlackBerry from a friend and client with the subject “can you print a large spreadsheet and get it to reduce to fit 8 1/2 x 11 paper?”

I have used electronic spreadsheets since 1981 and paper versions long before that. Once, I was an expert in using and programming Microsoft Excel. My Excel chops have withered but I still remember how to set up a worksheet to print the way I want.

If you have Excel 2007 you click on the Office button, select Print > Print Preview and then click on the Page Setup control in the Ribbon. If you have Excel 2003 or earlier you click on the menu items File > Page Setup…

The Page Setup dialog appears and one would then select the Scaling options they want on the Page tab.

I am sure he needed to do something in a rush and did not want to spend the time looking for the answer to his question. I did not have the time to shift gears in the middle of the late day installation and walk him through this, especially typing this out on my BlackBerry. I needed to finish the job at hand.

But I try to always promptly respond to these types of questions. I diverted my attention and took the time to respond to his exact question, “can you print a large spreadsheet and get it to reduce to fit 8 1/2 x 11 paper?” My answer was “Yup.”

lastpass was recently recommended to my by Ed Bott as a multiplatform password manager. I like lastpass a lot. It does exactly what I wanted and needed and it is free. They have a product LastPass Premium which adds functionality—BlackBerry app and YubiKey multi-factor authentication—that appeals to me. The price is $12 per year for the service and an additional fee for the YubiKey of between $30-$40, depending upon delivery method. I was all set to buy both when I was confronted with a PayPal page.

In the past when I went to a merchant’s PayPal page there was an option to pay with my credit card and not have to login to PayPal. Not this time. This time I had to login to PayPal to make the transaction. They left me no choice since I had a PayPal account. I tried to use a different email address but that didn’t work because PayPal knew my credit card number. Although I could have used a different card I was not interested.

So I logged in. Now PayPal wanted to debit my checking account and offered no option that I could see to use my credit card.

I refuse to allow PayPal to debit my checking account. They are unregulated and, in my opinion, untrustworthy. I don’t let any business debit my account. I prefer to initiate the transaction to retain control over the account. I prefer to use my credit cards. But this time I could not.

Enough of this aggravation! I cancelled my PayPal account. I wrote lastpass.com an email explaining that PayPal debiting my checking account was unacceptable to me and that I was unlikely to buy their premium product or to recommend it since PayPal had become an impediment.

Robert B. of lastpass responded quite quickly suggesting that I could do what I wanted to do with a link to buy by credit card on the PayPal page. Sorry, Robert, that link was not available to me as long as I had a PayPal account.

Yes, I cancelled my PayPal account after this aggravation. Now I am too frustrated to go forward with the LastPass Premium transaction. This is too hard. I wanted something secure and simple. I wanted it on my terms. I did not get that.

If the rest of the world treated me this way I would feel like royalty.

My post of March 21, 2009, Another angry Cablevision customer, recounts my frustrating and anger inducing experience talking with the billing department about what happened after the technical department fixed a problem with my service.

Yesterday I was called by Cablevision’s Andrea W., a polite, kind lady, who wanted to fix this issue. She listened to my side of the event and was the first person to understand that:

1. I did understand what Cablevision’s “revised” bills were about.
2. From my point of view, Cablevision had surprised me with a very large unannounced set of new bills, forever accelerated what I owed them by two weeks, and that the lack of sympathy and concern on the part of the “robotic” agents in the billing department was off-putting, frustrating and anger inducing. After all, Cablevision had caused the problem and fixed it by screwing up my account.

Additionally, another employee, Jim M., has been following me on Twitter and sending me private posts to see if this situation can be resolved. It is fantastic that a multi-billion dollar company would reach out to resolve my complaint this way.

I am usually an advocate of Cablevision’s services. They usually offer bleeding edge services, top-notch technical support, and reasonable pricing, especially compared to the alternatives. My experience with the billing department made me rethink my unpaid evangelism.

On Tuesday night, at my CTPC presentation on Social Networking for the 21st Century: Facebook and Twitter, one of the members who had moved out of the Cablevision territory related his unhappy experiences with Comcast and AT&T’s Uverse.

My typical reply to people who complain to me about Cablevision is that they could experience really bad service if they had AT&T, Charter, Comcast, or Time Warner instead. Andrea W. knows. She works for Cablevision but lives in a Time Warner location.

I am gratified and impressed that Cablevision respected and responded to my concerns. Sometimes large corporations get it right. This is one of those times.

Cablevision is my cable company. They provide me with three services—cable TV, Internet service and telephony, respectively Optimum IO TV, Optimum Online, and Optimum Voice. I was a happy customer, even a fan of Cablevision. They have top-notch, often bleeding edge technology and good technical support. What’s not for a geek like me to like—their billing department!

All the good will they built up over more than twenty years was extinguished by my encounter with their billing department today.

About a month ago I wanted to set up a web server using the hosting service that is included with my premium high-speed broadband Internet service they call Boost. I tried to access the web hosting to no avail. I spoke with three different technical support people over a two week period who all tried their best to help. Finally, Erik hit upon the idea of fixing the problem by rebuilding the account in their database, which he did and it worked, I think. You see, I started my server project when I had a window of available time. Since it took almost two weeks to fix the problem the window closed and I have not had the opportunity to set up the service.

Today I received two bills from Cablevision. I had paid the most recent bill on March 18, 2009 so this was a surprise. Adding further to my surprise was learning that Erik had precipitated a change in my account number and that Cablevision was now billing me for a stub period on the old account and about 40 days on the new account. They had also changed my billing cycle, moving it up from the end of the month to the middle. In effect, Cablevision was asking me to loan them about $100 for a month or more because of the way they fixed the web hosting problem.

I tried to explain this to five customer service representatives in the billing department. Their consistent response was that the billing was correct and they could do nothing to adjust it. They were indifferent to the fact that Cablevision had neither notified me that this would occur, nor gotten my approval. They did not dispute the events. They just were not going to fix this.

I have been a customer of theirs since 1987. I have always paid my bills on time, usually early. This means nothing. Their billing department acts like a bully and there is little I can do but add my voice to all other angry Cablevision customers.

Yesterday, following a gentle, short 20″ fall to a carpeted floor, my Kindle 2′s display went bonkers. I have included a couple of photos below. I tried resetting the device by holding the power switch in the right-most position for 30 seconds, twice, without affect.  I called Amazon’s customer service. Megan was both apologetic and extremely helpful. She is overnighting a replacement unit and provided me with both an RMA label and a free UPS shipping label to return the defective device. Wow! The new machine should arrive later today.

Until then, here are the two photos of the busted screen, in standby and showing the Kindle’s table of contents. Note the garbled area at the top of the screen. Note the vertical lines. Note the dark cast over the lower 80% of the screen.  

Kindle 2 defective screen in standby mode

Kindle 2 defective screen, device TOC.