More GREAT customer service...

Recently I purchased a new Brother color printer (Model# HL-4040CDN). I've wanted a color duplexing printer for some time now so that I can print some of my marketing collateral, but they've always been too expensive. Well... this one was on sale (brand new) at Office Depot for $225.00 and I just couldn't pass it up: competing models from HP were in the $500 and up range. Every thing went fine with the setup until I went to print booklets using Fineprint, an awesome print utility that I've been using for years and wrote up some time back.

Imagine my surprise when the booklets came out wrong! Fineprint has a great little feature that allows you to easily print two-sided (duplex) documents even if the printer doesn't support it automatically. It runs through a series of tests, gets information from you, and then controls the printing so that you put the pages back in for the second side in just the right way - very nice! With automatic duplexing printers, they figure out how to set the duplex parameters on-the-fly so that everything works out fine.

Not on this Brother, however: no matter what I did, the pages always "flipped" in only one way that worked some of the time and not others (without getting into too much of the gory details, pages can be flipped on the long edge or the short edge, which makes a difference for portrait or landscape mode). I worked with fineprint support (they're great) and Brother support and finally realized that the Brother printer was not accepting dynamic printer commands to change the page flipping parameters: the current driver allowed you to manually change them, but that's certainly not what I expect from a modern printer with automatic duplexing.

When Brother tech support told me that it was working "as designed" and that I'd just have to manually change the settings, that was the last straw. I wrote a letter to the President of Brother USA, explained the situation and pointed out how unacceptable this was.

A few days later, I received a call from an customer service advisor in the President's office and was assigned to a technical advisor. We started working together to describe the situation so that the developers could understand what was going on.

To make a not-so-long story shorter, I now have a new version of the printer driver which properly handles all the automatic duplexing features that I expected from this printer.

Now that's what I call service! Thank you Brother.

GREAT Customer Service... Priceless!

I recently checked in with Timebridge, a relatively new scheduling app that I had previously signed up with and forgotten about. I found that I had two accounts, setup under two different email addresses. I wanted to cancel one account and add that email address as an alternate to the account I was keeping, and -- as usual these days -- there was no way to cancel online: I had to send an email. I used their generic form to request assistance, and resigned myself to the usual delays or complete non-response that I've experienced in the past.

You can imagine my surprise when I got a response within 30 minutes! Not only that, but it was actually an intelligent response, not some canned "We got your email, now sit back and wait..." mumbo-jumbo that you usually get. The fellow (Lior) actually gave me the option of deleting the unwanted account or consolidating it into the one I was keeping. Now that's help! I said 'consolidate' and within another 60 minutes it was done: I had one account with two email addresses.

BTW, Timebridge is a great little scheduling app which (in its free incarnation) let's you contact folks, offer them meeting alternatives, and gives you back information as to who accepted which dates/times. Very helpful for teams that don't work together on a Novell Groupwise or Microsoft Exchange server. The paid versions offer web conferencing and conference calling services.

Highly recommended!

When is "Support" not support?

When it's Canonical support for Ubuntu, that's when. Hard to believe, but it's true.

I've been doing some development using Linux & Ruby on Rails and needed an occasional helping hand with Linux sysadmin duties. Who better than the folks who created the distro that I'm using.

Well... first of all, it took forever to get someone to respond to my email queries as to what would be covered with the support agreement. It took over two weeks to get the answers I wanted (at one point, I had been waiting several days and the sales person finally contacted me and said "We're out all this week so it'll have to be next week" (!) I should have known if they had problems taking my money that they might have problems providing support.

But I really wanted the support so I persisted. Finally, I put together a long email list of applications and services that I would need help with and the sales guy emailed back: "No problem". The list included Apache, Mongrel, and several other apps. I pointed out that I wouldn't need help with the internals of Ruby on Rails, but really wanted sysadmin help (installation, upgrade, initialization... standard stuff like that).

So today I'm authorized and I make my first call: for some reason, I can't get my Mongrel servers to start up at boot time and I want help configuring Apache so that it all works nicely. I get a fellow on the phone pretty quickly (that's good), start to describe my issue and as soon as I say "Apache", he says: "You have desktop support; that's a server issue!". I explain that my requirements have all been documented and approved in detail; he checks his log (the emails are all there - that's good) and informs me that's a mistake and he doesn't support that.

By now I'm pretty sure that this isn't going to work for me, so I try to simplify the whole thing and ask: "OK, how can I just get my Mongrel startup script to run when the system boots?" Rather than answering that he checks his notes a bit, and comes back with the question: "How did you install this? From a separate script or from the Ubuntu standard package?" I start to explain that this was some time ago and I believe I installed from a script, but he interrupts to state: "Did you install this from the Ubuntu package source or not? That's a 'yes' or 'no' question." Things are obviously going downhill at this point, but I still really want the answer to my simple question so I just say "No; not from the Ubuntu script".

Next question from the 'support' tech: "What version of Kubuntu are you on?" I respond: "Kubuntu Hardy". He says: "So I presume you're on Hardy for the LTS (Long Term Support) option?" I start to say: "Well... I'm there because my last ugprade didn't go well and I could use some help upgrading to Jaunty..." but he interrupts again and says: "That's a 'yes' or 'no' question!"

At this point, I'm done and I want a full refund, so I say: "Maybe we'd better escalate this so that I can just cancel this service!" And... you guessed it... he's the only person there and he (of course) can't cancel the service. He can only make a note and tell me to expect a call from London on Monday.

I get the call and they cancel my service with no problems... that's good.

So! How good is Canonical support? That's a 'yes' or 'no' question, folks, and the answer for me is 'no'.

Great little image editor...

I've been using Paint.Net for several months now and don't know how I got along without it (actually, I do know: poorly). It's fast, easy to use, reliable, and it fits my communication style.

What I like to do when communicating with folks is include a portion of a screen shot and highlight the area that I'm discussing. This can be circling a field on a form or shading the area. Some products are too big and bulky for this (read "PhotoShop" or "Gimp", for example, both of which I use) and some don't have the simple drawing tools (read the Microsoft built-in tools or most of the basic image editors available).

Get Paint.Net at www.getpaint.net. I think you'll enjoy it!

When is a trial not a trial?

Today I'm looking for an outliner. You know, a simple application that I can make quick & dirty outlines with, possibly with notes attached to each outline level. I'm willing to buy one if it works for me, so I go on the lookout for a trial so I can take it out for a spin before I plunk down my money.

One of the products I download and start to use is Action Outline. It's a 2-pane outliner (meaning that the outline is on the left and the notes associated with each outline item are on the right. It's got quick & easy commands for inserting, deleting, moving items and very quickly I start to think: "Maybe this is the one?".

And then it happens. I add an outline item and get the message:

"Only 7 sub-items allowed in evaluation mode!"
They have a 30-day evaluation period, but that's not enough for them -- they cripple the product so that you can't really test it. This is similar to other products which don't allow you to print more than a few items or more than one page in evaluation mode, for example.

I have a policy designed to avoid wasting my time/money: if a product is crippleware, I don't test it or use it... it immediately goes into the trashbin. Maybe the developers are afraid that real testing might lead to problems, so all they want to do is whet my appetite and get me to buy the thing on blind faith? NOT.

Note to Product Developers: if you want me to evaluate your product, then make the whole thing available so that I can actually evaluate it.

What was Microsoft think... Oops; wrong question.

Now here is a real catch-22, perpetrated by our good friends, the Microsoft Outlook development team.

As a security move, Microsoft changed Outlook sometime back to not allow recipients of an attached MS Access file (something.mdb) to even see the file, let alone save it or open it. If you get one of these files in Outlook, it's there, taking up space, but it might as well be in Timbuktu for all the good it does you.

So what happens when you try to open that email in another, smarter email reader? All you get is a lone "winmail.dat" file -- that Microsoft proprietary format which they used for "rich format" emails. Completely unusable.

In other words, don't ever use Outlook to email an Access MDB file -- it just doesn't work. Obviously someone wasn't thinking when they made this change... or they just didn't care. Take your pick.

Kodak can't remember numbers...

Just to set the record straight: I really love my Kodak M883 digital camera: it's lightweight, has great optics [sure, I'd like more than 3X zoom, but this is a relatively low-end consumer model], easy-to-use controls, and takes really great pictures.

However, this morning, I stumbled onto the dark side of the Kodak implementation: every time you offload your images from the camera SD memory stick, the camera starts renumbering at 1! Unbelievable... and tech support told me that this applies to most of their current cameras.

What this means is that you can't simply copy the images into the same folder (if, for example, you organize your images by month or by subject for easy retrieval)... that won't work because sooner or later you'll have have two images called "100_0001.jpg", "100-0002.jpg", etc. What a pain... and such a simple thing to have done right in the first place. My older Nikon and Kodak cameras don't have this problem.

Come on, Kodak... you can do better than this.

So here's the simple but irritating work-around. I found out by testing that the camera searches the SD card and finds the highest-numbered image in the image folder (that's "\DCIM\100KM883" for my model; yours will have a different model number but the '\DCIM\" part should be the same) and starts one higher than that. If there are no images in that folder, then it starts at 100_0001.jpg.

To solve this problem, make sure that there is one image left in the image folder that is at least equal to the highest number you have already saved. Easy way to do this is to simply delete all the images except the last one. That way, the camera will start numbering at the next higher number, which is just what you want. Or delete everything from the image folder (like many image managers such as Picasa do after offloading the images), and then copy/create a new file with the last image number that you have used.

If you're a *nix user, cygwin user, or Mac Terminal user, you know that the 'touch' command will do this for you quickly and easily. If you're on Windows, you can download a free version of the touch command and then say "touch :DCIM\100KM883\100_<4-digit number>.jpg" (substituting the correct drive letter and image number) and it will create an empty file and thus cause the camera to number as you would expect it to.