Dear Melbourne IT Leadership Group

Posted on 09. Dec, 2011 by Cameron in General

Dear Melbourne IT Leadership Group,

I would like to send my sincere commendations to a member of your hosting support team by the name of “Sank”.

In the last week, I have been screwed around ROYALLY by several of your staff. Sank was the only one who seems to know what he’s doing.

On 30 November, I received an email regarding one of our domain names ‘nelsongoc.com’. The email advised “The following account has been deleted and is no longer accessible.” This is, I might add, a completely useless email. It tells me nothing about the situation. So I rang your support line and spoke to a gent (whose name I unfortunately didn’t write down) who advised me that our domain name was registered through to 2019 and that this email was only regarding our hosting service. I asked if allowing this hosting service to expire would affect our MX records on the domain, as they were pointing to Google Apps. He assured me that letting the hosting expire would not affect our MX records in any way. So we let it expire.

A week later, our email for this domain (which we use to run several businesses I might add) stopped working.

So I rang again last night (8 Dec) and spoke with someone else who told me the same thing as the gent on 30 Nov. I explained that our email had stopped working but he assured me it had nothing to do with the MelbourneIT side of our service.

After scratching my head for another 15 minutes, I rang back AGAIN and this time spoke with a gent called “Niz” who explained that everything I’d told had been incorrect and that I did, in fact, need your hosting service to re-direct our MX records to Google Apps. He offered to set up this service for me – at a cost of $219 p.a.! I asked him if there wasn’t another way to change the MX records – after all, every other domain name registration service we use has this functionality built into the domain service – but he assured me that there was no other option. So I agreed to proceed with setting up the new hosting service. He sent me an email with the new login for the service a few minutes later. However when I tried to login to the DNS section, I was asked for the login a second time but it wouldn’t work.

So I rang your support line for the THIRD time that day and spoke to a young lady who assured me that the DNS login was the same as the Hosting login and worked on her side. She advised me to send an email to the support department with the details of the MX records we needed changed and that they would do it for us. This was about 6pm Brisbane time last night.

This morning, around 9am Brisbane time, I rang Niz again to see if the MX records had been changed. He put me through to Sank.

Sank advised me that what Niz told me about needing the Hosting service was INCORRECT. He said there is a way to change the MX records on the backend of the domain. He then proceeded to walk me through how to set it up. He then put me back through to Niz to cancel the hosting service.

SO……. it took me FOUR calls to your technical support department before I actually got hold of someone who knew what they were talking about.

What kind of operation are you running in there?

The Sad Journey of an iPad2

Posted on 22. Jun, 2011 by Cameron in General

Jason ordered a couple of iPad2s for us several weeks ago which haven’t arrived yet. Here’s the shipping notification we just received from Apple.

• May 26th – Picked up from Shenzhen
• May 27th – Arrived Singapore
• May 29th – Arrived Frankfurt
• June 3rd – Delivered in Good condition, Istanbul
• June 9th – Picked up from Istanbul
• June 18th – Arriived Shenzhen
• June 20th – Arrived Hong Kong
• June 21st – Awaiting departure to Brisbane
• 21 Jun 2011    06:22:35    Hong Kong    Shipment Received At Transit Point.
• 21 Jun 2011    09:11:33    Hong Kong    Shipment In Transit.
• 21 Jun 2011    11:21:48    Hong Kong    Shipment Received At Transit Point.
• 21 Jun 2011    17:03:56    Hong Kong    Shipment In Transit.
• 21 Jun 2011    21:00:00    Hong Kong    Shipment Lost. Recovery Action Underway.

No Illusion Notes 21/06/2011

Posted on 21. Jun, 2011 by Cameron in General

• Could Obama Be Impeached for Waging War in Libya Without Approval of Congress? Glenn Greenwald asks in Democracy Now. Apparently he decided to ignore the views of top White House lawyers when he decided to invade LIbya. My take on this is that while he probably COULD be impeached, he won’t. The elite don’t do that to each other except under EXTREME circumstances. Oh sure, they will huff and puff about blowing his house down, but it’s all political theatre designed to keep the people distracted, sell newspapers and bump up viewership to cable news and news sites. Meanwhile Goldman Sachs will continue to rape the U.S. blind.
• The Liberty Scam – Stephen Metcalf in SLATE has written a terrific and timely article on why libertarianism fails as a political ideology. I have come to the same conclusions over the last ten years. None of us is an island, to paraphrase John Donne. If you live in a country such as Australia, you are taking advantage of the opportunities that our society offers. That doesn’t only include benefits such as public education and healthcare. It also includes people who build roads. People who collect your garbage. The people who grow your food and the people who sell it to you. It’s one big system and, because you are part of it, you are benefiting from it. If you’ve been successful and made a few bucks, you have to ask yourself the question – “Could I have done this if I had to carve my own roads, manage my own healthcare, grow and harvest my own food, dispose of my own garbage, protect yourself against burglary or enemy invaders?” Chances are you owe, in no small part, your success to the fact that many, many other people are doing the things you don’t HAVE to do, which has allowed you to focus on education or hard work. So you didn’t get to where you are all by yourself. That’s a fiction. You owe a large part of your success to the system you live in.

No Illusions Notes 20/06/2011

Posted on 20. Jun, 2011 by Cameron in General

• Iraq hunting $17 billion missing after U.S. invasion - “The missing money was shipped to Iraq from the United States to help with reconstruction after the ouster of Saddam Hussein….. All indications are that the institutions of the United States of America committed financial corruption by stealing the money of the Iraqi people, which was allocated to develop Iraq, (and) that it was about $17 billion,” said the letter sent to the U.N. with a 50-page report.”  That’s what these wars are about, folks – theft. Plain and simple. Theft of money from the U.S. taxpayers and theft of the natural resources of the Iraqi and Afghani people. Everything else they throw at you – Saddam, Bin Laden, the Taliban, etc – is just smoke and mirrors. It’s all about the rich stealing from the poor and the gullible. It’s the oldest trick in the book, a magnificent sleight of hand even Hypnotist Kenny would be proud of.
• Another day another pedophile Catholic priest & cover-up by the Church - remembering, of course, that the key message here isn’t about the pedophiles themselves, it’s about the Catholic Church’s systematic and deliberate cover-up of the crimes to protect their cash. (See my earlier posts on the topic – GDay World 382 – Dr Wayne Chamley on Catholic Sexual Abuse in Australia, G’Day World Video – Peter Kennedy, Rebel Priest, part one, The Irish ”Child Abuse Commission”).
• WSJ has a brain aneurism when it learns the The Dalai Lama is a Marxist – “Earlier this month, the Dalai Lama told a group of Chinese students at the University of Minnesota, “I consider myself a Marxist . . . but not a Leninist.”" The author, philosopher Carlin Romano, then goes on to say “It’s an old, familiar position in Western secular intellectual life: Marxism wasn’t a God that failed, and the Soviet Union and Mao’s China don’t count against it, because Marxism was never tried—Communism perverted it.” That’s actually not the argument at all, Carlin.  The argument is that the Bolshevik’s perverted socialism. Had the Menshevik’s managed to wrest control of the Communist Party, we might have seen a very different 20th century Russia.