Saturday, August 16, 2008

Victim of Silverlight, Thanks to NBCOlympics

I missed Phelps' incredible match which he historically tied Spitz's record. I then had to look for the replay online (it could be on the TV some time, but I'm not sure when).

I bumped into the NBC Olympics page but unfortunately the site doesn't support Linux users.


I wondered why, 'til I logged into a Windows machine to view it remotely and found out that the NBC site is using Silverlight, bah. I have heard of Moonlight but I don't think I will invest any time now to find out how to get this video working on my machine. (Separation of concern, hey)

If Microsoft wants to win this RIA game, they gotta make it work on the Linux platform.

- yc

Friday, August 15, 2008

Unprofessional Support-Fu, Let's Talk about It

Check this out. A 22-minute call from an angry customer to the Astro customer service. Most people would say that the customer was being unreasonable and having unbalanced hormones. But I have a different opinion -- that's very bad customer service by Astro.

I am a nasty and very-nice customer, it all depends on the issue am having and how the personnel speaks to me (of course, the same to most people too). I always dial the hotlines whenever I have something to complain or to inquire or I feel that I need to talk a bit with someone on a good afternoon. Always, really. To the extent that my colleagues questioned me a few times if I was simply too free.

At the same time, for the past 2 years, I worked on two support projects, providing technical support to customers around the globe. I was trained and I was also responsible to train new guys to come into this field.

My experiences with TM and Astro were usually bad. And what would I say for this case? Terribly handled. This case could be resolved in 2 to 3 minutes and it was ridiculous to drag it 'til more than 22 minutes 31 seconds.

To handle this emotional customer, Jeeva should:
  1. Apologize for the misunderstanding ("that's your problem, I can't..")
  2. Not question / argue with the customer, there's no rationality at another end dude. Be polite and say "I'm sorry" to calm her down, and bring her back to the point. What do the customers need? Solution.
  3. Not keep quiet to dilly-dally the call.
  4. Escalate! Or maybe not, because it would have been settled if Jeeva had better support-fu.

I always like the Atlassian's core value #3 - "Don't fuck the customer." Seriously don't. If you ever want to do it, do it in the nice way.

- yc, bloody hell.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Can't Delete Recurring Events in Google Calendar

In my Google Calendar, I have a bunch of recurring events from a project calendar that were moved to my default calendar when the calendar was removed, strange. When I tried to delete them by selecting "All Events in the Series", it came back with an unhelpful error message: "An error has occurred. Please try again later."

I followed the suggestion in the mailing list and it managed to solve my problem. Basically,
  1. Export my calendar to an iCal file.
  2. Delete my calendar / all events of it.
  3. Import the iCal into my calendar.
- yc