Jane Talks Tech!

I'm so impressed by this version of Wordpress that I hardly know what more can be done to top it. I don't understand any of the code and while I'm certain there are a list of bugs waiting to be corrected, I'm happy with the product from the consumer's point of view (especially for a blog that does not have a large readership). Wordpress has a fantastic and large community of users who gladly contribute plugins and one of those plugins that currently serves me very well is the Broken Link Checker plugin. It scours your posts and pages for links that do not lead to working pages anymore i.e. give 404 errors.As you can see in the picture, it displays exactly what link is broken and gives you the option to fix it right there.

It is on my must-have list of plugins for any blog I start. With that said, information overload has a high potential of occurring with this plugin on sites that have lots of posts. Read More »

Wow. The internet is indeed the great equalizer. Yesterday, I penned a post about shady business practices. In that post, I levelled my ire at AWS Convergence Technologies, makers of the WeatherBug software. I had purchased a subscription to WeatherBug Plus and I almost instantly had buyers' remorse. To make matters worse, activating the Plus part of the software was taking longer than advertised. The last straw was the deafening silence on AWS's part in responding to my pleas to look into my activation issues. Then, I decided to obtain a refund and got no word. For the gory details, check the other post out. The purpose of this post is to talk about what I learned from this experience (from the consumer's standpoint) and highlight what went wrong.

What happened: In the end, I was able to get an amicable resolution to the matter of my refund. This didn't happen instantly. My first email to AWS was about the activation issues I was having and no response was received. My fraud radar went up and I followed that email up with one requesting a refund. When I received no answer, I instantly began researching online for any history of weird behavior with WeatherBug. To their credit, I didn't find anyone who had been given the run-around like I felt I was being given. In fact, this should have told me that, maybe, just maybe they were under-staffed or something. However, I have had a few close calls with online purchases and I take my finances rather seriously. After some more email-fu and a couple of calls, I sent a email missive laden with phrases like "good faith effort" and "legal system". :)

Seeing results: When my best effort at sounding serious didn't raise any responses, I blogged about the problem on Jane Talks Tech!. My intent in blogging about it was to see if I would get anyone online to sympathize with me or even give me a hint as to what the deal with AWS could be. Well, in less than 24 hrs after sending the strongly-worded email and publishing my post about the saga, I was contacted via my blog by a representative from AWS. According to the representative at AWS I spoke with, they were 'backed up'. I can understand that and I probably over-reacted a little bit in thinking the worst of them. Nevertheless,  you should know that AWS Convergence Technologies does have humans in charge  who care (:)) and they are actively monitoring the intarwebs which is why I believe this case finally got resolved. Ultimately, some lessons for consumers and sellers alike are: Read More »

Ever since I purchased an HP dv9700t CTO notebook PC, I've had to reformat this computer over 3 times now. The reason is simple: I like to try out new things on the computer and that more often than not, include alpha, beta and even gamma software. I'd like to say that I've learned and reformatting my PC (as a last solution) is a thing of the past. Alas! I cannot guarantee that. So, here's what I've learned from owning a computer that I deliberately introduce chaos into:...

Wow. Remember that Camtasia contest that I won? Well, there was another winner to that contest (Mr. Evan Brammer) and now, he's won the granddaddy of contests: BostonPocketPC's HP magic giveaway!!! What a lucky man! He's also putting to very good use and he might have even won the same contest over at Liz-Henry's blog because he's just lucky like that! Here's to channeling some of Mr. Brammer's luck and wishing for a nice gift too!...