Sheep Guarding Llama 2

Failure of OfficeMax Customer Service

2007-06-13T21:07:00.000-04:00

Original Post: OfficeMax on Sheep Guarding Llama

I got home last night and the cleaning begin in ernest. However, before I could really get down to cleaning I had to call back to OfficeMax because after having opened a customer service case last night and having been told that they would get back to me - they didn’t get back to me. The issue is that we ordered a desk eleven days ago that was to be delivered in one to three business days. We placed the order on Sunday so shipping could happen the very next day. We waited and no desk arrived. We had been hopeful that it would have arrived by the weekend so that we could have had it assembled and put in place before we left on Friday. That had been the plan all along. No luck.

We returned from Frankfort and decided to give them until Tuesday to deliver the desk before calling. So yesterday I called and talked to customer service about the desk. They said that they couldn’t help me (great customer service) but that someone from the warehouse would call me back (I assumed later that evening.) I thought that it was strange both that the customer service team couldn’t answer questions about the status of my order and that they thought that the warehouse would be useful since the one thing that they were able to determine for me was that the desk had not been shipped at all.

So tonight when I got home I decided that I needed to follow up as obviously the unshipped desk did not arrive nor did the warehouse call. Apparently the warehouse has little interest in shipping products or doing good customer service. So I called customer service again and they explained that the warehouse needs at least forty-eight hours before they would call back. The excuse for this turn around time was that the warehouse needed time to check with the shipping partner as to the status of the order. I could see this if, in fact, the warehouse had shipped my desk but in this case they had not. They were simply stalling.

I explained that it was not appropriate for the customer service department to stall on my for forty-eight hours on an item that I was trying to find out why it hadn’t been shipped in seventy-two hours especially when I had given them much longer than that in the first place. Had the customer service representative yesterday decided to actual take care of me they would have immediately cancelled the order and had a new replacement desk shipped immediately since it would be likely to arrive, assuming the warehouse people decide to show up to work at all, around the same time that the warehouse is supposed to return my call to let me know that they don’t intend to ever ship my original desk. The first customer service representative simply took the path of least resistance, acting like she was solving my problem and brushed me off.

Tonight the customer service representative was going to simply let me continue to have nothing done for me explaining that it was the warehouse’s problem and not customer service’s - something that should never, ever be said or implied to a customer. I mentioned that if the desk was ordered today that it would, hopefully, arrive within seventy-two hours but that if we waited for the warehouse to tell us what we already knew - that the desk had not yet been shipped - that it would take at least one day longer for no reason. She agreed and went ahead and cancelled my current order and placed a new order for the desk which should, in theory, arrive within the next three business day.

Given that we know that it takes the warehouse forty-eight hours to respond to a request for information concerning a shipped product it therefore makes sense that the only reasonable way to get a good turnaround time from them is for me to then open a customer service request tomorrow. If I open a case tomorrow then the warehouse should get back to me to let me know whether or not they have bothered to ship this new desk by the exact same time that it should, at the latest, have arrived.

I have often said that the true quality of a company is not seen until you have something go wrong. Every companies makes mistakes and has problems. There is no way around that. Customer service is the place where companies have an opportunity to fix things that are wrong or to make them worse. In the case of OfficeMax, they made it worse. They could have shipped out a replacement desk immediately but instead totally blew me off the first time from customer service, then blew me off via the warehouse and then only did anything to resolve the issue when I proposed the only logical solution. Why didn’t either of the customer service representatives take the initiative to fix the problem rather than just pass it off to the warehouse whom they knew were going to call for several days and knew that they hadn’t shipped the desk at all? And why is the warehouse allowed to sit on a customer service issue for two days when they could tell me instantly that they had missed the order and needed to ship it right away. The entire system is built for the purpose of stalling.

The only thing that I can imagine is that OfficeMax is stalling because they already have my money and just by holding onto my money they get to earn a little bit on it before they actually deliver the product that I paid for. Even now I had to pay for the second desk (which we don’t even know that they are going to ship) up front just for the honor of possibly getting the service that I already paid for two weeks ago. And, at some point, I will get credited for the original desk whose order has been cancelled. So even now I am not getting the same level of service that I should expect should I be a new customer at this point. A new customer would at least not have to have money held for a desk that OfficeMax just decided not to deliver!

Altogether, even though the customer service representatives were “friendly” this has been one of the most disappointing customer service situations that I have ever experienced and has totally turned me off to OfficeMax. I was so happy with the products and the ordering just two weeks ago and I have used them for years but they managed to show to me that all of that good service was just a thin veil over a completely customer unfriendly organization. They proved to me this week that they have absolutely no interest in having me as a customer nor fulfilling their obligations of sending the order that they had happily taken my money for.

The bottom line is that to my face people acted friendly but the actions, which speak louder than the words, were rude and obnoxious. And now I am back to the beginning. Maybe they will ship me a desk. Maybe they won’t. It will be another week before I have any way to know. Even if I open a case to find out if it is shipping tomorrow I should not expect the warehouse to let me know whether or not they are going to ship me the desk until next week.

Berry Company Slamming Customers

2006-01-24T12:16:00.000-05:00

I had to get up and deal with a scam this morning. Just the way I wanted to start my day. Dad got a bill from The Berry Company who run the yellow page racket up here. We have been advertising in the yellow pages for the last several years and have decided that it is a totally ineffectual way to drum up new business. After three or four years of ads we have found that we get more and more calls from people looking to get free service from us and absolutely no serious customers who even understand what it is that we do. Almost everyone that calls is just a kid looking to get free advice or to ask us to fix their computer for free since somehow that is our responsibility even though we have no connection to these people at all, live in a different county and they bought their computer from a competitor of both us and our hardware partners. Anyway, I digress. My recollection of my last dealings with the Berry Company was that we had talked and they were going to send us some paperwork to look over so that we could make sure everything was correct and then we could confirm that we wanted to go ahead with another year of advertising. I remember this pretty clearly because we were in the process of trying to change our company name and never talked to them about it because we were going to do that when we confirmed or didn't confirm. Well no confirmation ever came. We assumed that they had forgotten about us or we had waiting too long and the spots had filled up. We really weren't concerned since we had decided not to do the advertising anyway. That was in June of 2005. Then two weeks or so ago Dad gets a bill for our yellow page ad. Great. This is what is called slamming. Remember when telephone companies used to call you and change your telephone service without your permission. Yeah, same thing here. So I called the Berry Company knowing that under no conditions would they be able to produce a signature.

Well, they had no signature and they had no confirmation from us. They had a voice recording of me agreeing to have a confirmation sent out for me to look over but nothing of me agreeing to service. The Berry customer service woman said that contrary to what I was told it wasn't actually a confirmation letter just a letter than was sent out. The confirmation was the voice recording even though I hadn't agreed to service in the recording. They had "records" of the mail being sent out and she said that they rely on the postal service and there is no confirmation system. The whole thing is a scam. She knew full well that there was no mail ever sent out. She had her lines rehearsed. Obviously this is how they do business at the Berry Company. They knew that if they reported us to a credit reporting agency that it would cost us more to clear the record than it would be to just pay them. This is clear cut extortion. Rochester's own version of the mob. Oh wait, we have one of those. Well, maybe they work together.

So we are stuck paying for a full year of yellow page service that does us absolutely zero good. To make matter far worse we changed our company name this year and they didn't change it in the yellow pages so we are now paying for an ad for a company name that we don't use. And to really rub our faces in it they raised our rates by 22% (their punishment for being a fool for another year.) Well, lesson learned here. No more yellow page ads for us. No more phone calls, no more meetings, no more chance to even talk to us. We don't do print advertising anymore, anywhere. Time to leave the dark ages and time to stop advertising to people who are stuck in them.

Scott Reads Bible Going Strong

2005-11-29T02:19:00.000-05:00

My really cool Bible reading podcast is doing really well. I think that the reading quality is improving and the selection of versions is really cool and the best part is that I have managed to not miss a single day yet. That hasn't been easy. Only made it by less than an hour tonight.

Why I Don't Trust Doctors

2005-11-28T21:47:00.000-05:00

I have been too busy to keep up on SGL over the weekend so I am posting this link about medical autrocities in the UK. I am sure that the same things happen here in the US but we weren't the first to get it on the front page of the Times. Maybe this will help more people to realize the reality of what they are doing. But it doesn't seem likely that anyone doesn't understand the medical facts by this point.

Happy Tofurkey Day!

2005-11-25T00:17:00.000-05:00

Or maybe that should be, Happy Faux Turkey Day! Hmmm...

Either way, I hope that everyone had a happy Thanksgiving.

Today was the ninth annual Sonic Brass Thanksgiving Dinner at Nick Tahou's in Rochester, New York. I can't believe that we have been going there since 1997! Nate, Joe and I have been there every single year. Simpson was back this year!

Technorati Breaking Down

2005-11-18T00:45:00.000-05:00

I was listening to IT Conversations' coverage of the Blog Her conference recently and heard some statements about Technorati's inability to maintain accurate information and that their claims of crawling all updated pages in seven minutes to be wildly exaggerated because people were seeing their own posts not crawled for up to a week if ever. So I decided to look into it. I have been watching my own blogs on Technorati and have begun to notice that even after several days or possibly several weeks of having my one blog tagged as "podcast" and "sheep", Technorati still reported that there were no blogs at all with those tags. I also noticed that many of my blogs report no links from anywhere even though I know that I link to myself, obviously, to and from every blog that I have. Not only that but I have seen my primary blog lose many of its links mysteriously.

In the end, it looks as though the Blog Her conference hit the nail on the head. Technorati is failing to live up to their mission and someone else is likely to step into that space and do a much better job very quickly. We should keep our eyes on Blogdigger, Day Pop, Bloogz or the very obvious Google Blogs. Google was the only one to return rapid results or to catch SGL even though we are a highly read blog.

Mistake on Web Site Link

2005-11-17T00:49:00.000-05:00

On the last posting I had a mistake and the actual link should have been ScottReadsBible.podOmatic.com. I went back and I fixed the link and now you have it again here as well. Sorry.

Announcing "Scott Reads Bible" Podcast

2005-11-14T19:32:00.000-05:00

SGL Media is announcing a new podcast with me, Scott Alan Miller, reading the Bible one chapter at a time at Scott Reads Bible. I think that this is really cool and hope to find a lot of people checking it out.

Image Comment Verification

2005-11-14T16:49:00.000-05:00

I have been getting a ton of BLAM comments on this blog and so I have enabled image verification for comments in the hope that this might stop the bots from being able to comment inappropriately on the site. If this doesn't work I am going to have to restrict the comments to registered listeners only.

Broken Cell Calls from Ithaca

2005-11-11T18:27:00.000-05:00

Scott in Batavia after Microsoft Launch Event

2005-11-10T20:17:00.000-05:00

Audioblogger Working.... For Now

2005-11-09T22:03:00.000-05:00

Just a quick post to test Audioblogger. It would appear to be working again. For the time being that is.

Home Again, Home Again...

2005-11-08T01:54:00.000-05:00

Well we have made it back home to New York. There were a few glitches along the way but everything went smoothly enough to call the trip back a success. We are so glad to be back home with our pets and our own bed.

Dominica has to work tonight but it is her final night at the hotel. Audioblogger is running but not functioning correctly tonight. Updates might be able to start again tomorrow.

Still No Audioblogger

2005-11-06T22:43:00.000-05:00

We are very sad to report that another day has passed and Audioblogger is still down. At least we got Internet access at 10:30 PM and managed to get everything that we had ready to go posted so that you guys can get a few updates before we return tomorrow.

New photos, blogs, podcasts and vlogs posted.

Audioblogger is working again...

2005-11-04T23:41:00.000-05:00

Scott does a quick test post to let everyone on the audio only channels that Audioblogger is working again and to be looking for great new news and content tomorrow coming for the first time from Dominica's cell instead of Scott's.

SGL2 Celebrates 100 Shows but No Audio...

2005-11-04T21:43:00.000-05:00

This is officially SGL2's 100th posting. Whoo-hoo. Not that we are coming close to SGL's 1000+ postings but it is a start anyway.

The bad news today is that Audioblogger.com is down indefinitely for maintenance. They might be back up tomorrow but they were down all day today and only got a service message put onto their line after almost twenty-four hours of being down. So they could easily be down for the rest of our vacation so don't be surprised if there are no further SGL 2 podcasts for a little while.

Also, my cell phone was smashed by the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride this morning and may not be long for this world. At the moment it is still hanging on but the front display is open to the elements and can't last very long. I am hoping to be able to get a new phone quickly but it might be a pretty significant hassle considering the fact that we are in Florida right now.

Phone Died

2005-11-04T00:35:00.000-05:00

Well, only two on site updates today before the battery died on the cell. More updates coming tomorrow.

In the Animal Kingdom at Tusker House

2005-11-03T12:36:00.000-05:00

Scott and Dominica go to Disney's Animal Kingdom and have lunch at the Tusker House.

Thursday Morning

2005-11-03T09:55:00.000-05:00

Scott and Dominica are preparing to head for Disney-MGM Studios. Our posts seem to be working again but we did lost those three during the day.

Lost Posts

2005-11-02T23:49:00.000-05:00

Well this is incredibly unfortunate but all of the updates that I did today were lost! On top of all of our other issues today the two or three audio posts that I did from within the park never posted. The very last two that I did just before leaving came through fine but there were some done before that and we are very sad that they didn't make it. Sorry guys... we are trying.

Podomatic is also down again tonight so we haven't been able to post that SGL Podcast yet even though we are online. Also we are not online totally, our connection is still going up and down but appears to be up more than it is down. Still $10/day however.

New High for SGL 2

2005-11-02T23:15:00.000-05:00

Thanks everyone for checking in the last few days. On Monday, October 31st, SGL2 hit its all time high subscription rating. Whoo-hoo. We should have another special milestone tomorrow but I will wait to tell you what that is.

Internet access appears to be rock solid now. (Fingers crossed...) So look for regular updates on all of the channels now.

End of Day Wednesday from Epcot

2005-11-02T21:10:00.000-05:00

Scott and Min wrap up their third day in the park. Scott posts from Future World while Dominica is shopping.

Wrapping up Wednesday

2005-11-02T21:07:00.000-05:00

Scott gives a wrap up to the last half of the day leading up to the Character Dinner at the Garden Grill which he talks about in the following post.

End of Day Tuesday from the Hotel

2005-11-01T22:48:00.000-05:00

We are back in our hotel and are planning on sleeping in...

Tuesday Evening End of Day Wrap Up

2005-11-01T19:56:00.000-05:00

Scott and Dominica are waiting for their bus...

It is raining in France.... time for pastries.

2005-11-01T17:51:00.000-05:00

In an attempt to escape the rain Scott and Dominica have taken to a French cafe to keep warm.

Tuesday Afternoon in Adventureland

2005-11-01T15:11:00.000-05:00

It is raining and we are just wrapping up our day in the Magic Kingdom and are ready to head to Epcot.

Liberty Square Update on the Ultimate Disney Day

2005-11-01T13:31:00.000-05:00

It is after lunch and Scott gives an update from beautiful Liberty Square. Catch up on all of the morning's happenings.

Tuesday.... getting ready to head off.

2005-11-01T07:58:00.000-05:00

Scott is in the hotel room getting ready and gives a quick post to get the morning moving.

End of Day Monday from Hotel

2005-10-31T23:02:00.000-05:00

Scott and Dominica are totally exhausted and are now back into the hotel and Scott does a final podcast for the evening.

We have ARRIVED! Disney, here we come.

2005-10-31T16:30:00.000-05:00

Scott and Min are on the ground and in the limo on their way to Disney World! The adventure begins....

D Day!

2005-10-31T09:09:00.000-05:00

Today is Disney day. It looks like we are just about ready to go. Everything is packed. Check. All of the sites are working. Check. House is ready. Check. Hamster is clean. Check.

Dad is arriving here a little before 10:00 and we will be heading out. Dominica is sneaking in a last minute nap since she didn't get to go to bed last night.

Landing is scheduled for 3:13. Should be physically inside of the park around 5:30!

Heading Off to Bed.... D Day Tomorrow

2005-10-31T02:53:00.000-05:00

Scott is heading to bed. Three hours of sleep and then more preparations in the morning.

Scott and Dominica Prepare to Go to Florida

2005-10-30T19:28:00.000-05:00

SGL's Scott and Dominica Vacation Multimedia Experience

2005-10-30T19:18:00.000-05:00

SGL2 is serving as the hub for information pertaining to Scott and Dominica's upcoming vacation. There is a lot going on so here are the links that take you to everything:

Sheep Guarding Llama: This is the main blog that has all of the regular updates. Go here for the most complete piece of information about Scott and Dominica's trip.

Sheep Guarding Llama Podcast: This is the web page for the main SGL Podcast. This is the primary audio content location. Scott and Dominica are going to be doing their podcast together for the first time. This is the long format audio blog with full editing and studio work to make it sound nice. For those of you with audio aggregators you can subscribe to the SGL Podcast Feed.

Sheep Guarding Llama Flickr Page: Flickr is an image hosting service and SGL is using Flickr to provide a centralized location for posting lots of photos of the trip. You can subscribe to the SGL Flickr Feed and get the images in your feed aggregator. This includes feed readers like Thunderbird which many of you use.

Sheep Guarding Llama Vlog: This page hosted by OurMedia and the Internet Archive is a centralized location for all of SGL's videos. You can visit the web page and see videos shot each day while Scott and Dominica are in Florida or you can subscribe to the vlog feed using an aggregator like FireANT. The movies are in QuickTime's MOV format so you will need to download a player like Apple's QuickTime or the QuickTime Alternative.

As you can see there is a lot going on on this vacation. There is plenty of opportunity for everyone to find a way to get connected and to see what is going on. This is going to be a lot of fun. We are definitely pushing the barrier for great personal publishing.

And, of course, there is this site: SGL 2. SGL 2 is going to be providing information about all of the different connection points. If we are having technical difficulties or find new things to try out you will know about it here first. And the audio coming to this feed will be the most up to date news that there is as it does not rely on a direct Internet connection. We will hopefully be podcasting right out of the parks during the day and giving great live feedback that will be really exciting.

Get ready: This is going to be one exciting week.

Getting Ready for the "Live" Disney Cast

2005-10-29T23:38:00.000-04:00

Well we are closing in on the trip to Disney World and Dominica and I are making the final preparations for our trip. It looks like we are going to have sketchy Internet access while we are in Florida so SGL 2 is going to be instrumental in bringing regular updates to everyone. Be watching this space for cool updates throughout the week as we manage to update the podcast via the telephone hopefully right from the park.

SGL Podcast Up to #66

2005-10-23T14:38:00.000-04:00

The main SGL Podcast ranked #66 for podOmatic's own listing on Saturday (yesterday). Thanks everyone.

SGL Podcast Makes the Daily Top 100

2005-10-21T17:17:00.000-04:00

The SGL Podcast made it onto the one hundred most popular podcasts of the day over at podOmatic yesterday (which is the list that is posted today.) Which is awesome. We have only had the podcast available there for a week so that is really cool. Even cooler is that SGL 2, which you are reading right now, is continuing to outpace that podcast - although I expect the main podcast to take over soon.

Here is a big THANK YOU to everyone who has been listening and driving us up the charts.

SGL2 Congratualtes "The Jedi Council Speaks"

2005-10-20T22:36:00.000-04:00

Announcing the SGL Podcast

2005-10-18T23:03:00.000-04:00

In addition to this podcast which is done entirely by telephone I am now doing a regular SGL Podcast that you can check out at sheepguardingllama.podomatic.com. It is very cool. Go check it out and subscribe right now.

Asperger Community Advisory Panel

2005-10-07T18:17:00.000-04:00

Today I was at an employment seminar in Rochester and received some literature from a group called the Asperger Community Advisory Panel. I have been doing some searching online and haven't been able to find any information about them at all. They are a community action group supporting aspergers sufferers here in the Rochester, NY area.

If anyone reads this and has any information on how to contact this group such as email, web site or telephone number - I would greatly appreciate it.

Finally Done with Wegmans

2005-10-06T05:46:00.000-04:00

The Wegmans project is finally finished and I take this opportunity to make an audiopost from New Jersey as I head back to New York.

Still here... nothing new to report...

2005-10-06T02:11:00.000-04:00

The night drags on. At least I am not feeling excessively drowsy yet. That will come in a little while. I am trying to keep myself awake by surfing the web and doing regular postings here on SGL2.

Somehow I haven't noticed for weeks but Danielle finally posted her first blog entry in several months. I have stopped following most of the blogs that I used to read regularly because no one is bothering to update them ever. Once in a while is fine but six months is an awfully long time. After a while I stop adding the blogs to my feed reader so it doesn't have to check so many different sites everyday and get nothing at all.

The overnight manager was nice enough to fire up a cash register and sell me three bottle of Pepsi to help get me through the night. Hopefully the caffeine will help but it seldom does.

Still in Jersey...

2005-10-06T01:25:00.000-04:00

Well, it is 1:30 in the morning now. I am finally the only tech left working on the project tonight barring any additional catastrophes. At this point, things are progressing even if not at a stellar pace. I did some checking with MapQuest and accoring to it it will take approximately four and a half hours to drive from here to Ithaca. If at all possible, I really want to make it there tonight. That will mean that I am able to sleep as late as possible instead of getting to bed sooner and having to get up sooner. The nearest hotel to me that I would want to go to would be in Scranton and the hotel I checked with there is full but there are rooms at the Comfort Inn in Ithaca so I have a shot at making it there. Luckily there are a few hotel in Binghamton in case I just can't make it. But with any luck, I can make it all of the way. Of course, that all depends on when I can actually manage to get out of Manalapan.

It is at times like this that I really regret having agreed to get up early this morning. I was up at 7:00 am which sounds fine until you realize that I can't possibly roll into Ithaca until 7:30 am at the very earliest. 24+ hours is a long time to be up straight when you have to do a lot of driving during that time.

I made it to Jersey but...

2005-10-05T23:53:00.000-04:00

Everytime I come to New Jersey there is some new catastrophe. I was really hoping to wrap up tonight and head towards New York at least a ways. But no. I arrived on time but we had some major issues. It is approaching midnight now, about the time that I had been hoping to have been heading towards Ithaca, but I have not even started yet. In fact, it might be some time yet before I get to get started.

So what are my plans now? I have no idea. I will probably get out of here well after 3:00 am and traffic will start getting bad not that long after that point. That really, really sucks since I don't have a hotel around here - or anywhere at this point - so I might be stuck driving in some pretty nasty conditions for a pretty long way. So I am going to do everything that I can to get out of here as early as possible but it isn't looking very likely at this point.

I could easily be here until 6:00 am at which point I am just going to get a local hotel at any cost for two nights and that will be that. But I am supposed to be in Ithaca today and it would be nice if I could manage to actually make it.

Luckily I am not tired yet but there is a lot of night left to go in which to get tired. To make matters worse the stores here all closed a few minutes ago - including the Wegmans that I am working at so I have no way to buy anything including caffeine beverages for the rest of the night. I do have enough gas in the car to make it to New York so I don't have to worry about that.

Dead Cell Phone on my Anniversary

2005-10-04T00:20:00.000-04:00

Today is Dominica and my second anniversary! We can't believe that it has been two years already. That is incredible.

I called Dominica at a quarter after midnight to wish her a Happy Anniversary. It is very sad that on our second wedding anniversary we don't get to see each other at all. In fact, we have hardly seen each other for days. We got home from church on Sunday and she had to run right off to work her double shift at the hotel. Then she came home and went straight to bed. I got up just after she went to bed to get ready to leave. I left Geneseo at 2:00 on Monday afternoon to drive down to Sterling, Virginia to work. So we only saw each other in passing yesterday. Today I am out of town all day. In fact, I won't even be home until Thursday evening! So I really won't have seen her for a day on either side of our wedding and will have only barely seen her for the days on either side of that. And the two days on either side of those days we are travelling out of town!

We only got to talk for a second tonight because my cell phone signalled that it was time to change the battery even before the call was connected. At least I managed to get through for a second.

The Scottcast Coming Live from Scott's Bed

2005-09-06T02:15:00.000-04:00

My first podcast from my new bed. The first bed that I have ever owned and yes, I am about to turn THIRTY!!!

Taking Andy to Get His Moving Truck

2005-09-03T09:26:00.000-04:00

Took Andy to get his truck from Budget this morning and gas in Geneseo has hit $3.499 a gallon. Happy Labor Day Weekend!

Out in Perth Amboy

2005-08-31T22:30:00.000-04:00

Oh the excitement of New Jersey. I left Geneseo around 2:30 this afternoon and I arrived here in Woodbridge, just outside of Perth Amboy, NJ, at 8:30. I thought that that was making some pretty decent time considering that I stopped for gas in town as I left, went to Barnes and Nobles in Big Flats to do some quick shopping and grabbed a quick bite and drink at the Taco Bell next door while I was there. That means that the travel time is somewhere between five and five and a half hours.

Right now, it is 10:30 and the plan is still to wrap up here as early as a I can (11:30 is the absolute earliest with midnight being a lot more plausible) and driving straight back to Geneseo tonight in the hopes of getting a little sleep before I have to get up and drive down to Castile tomorrow afternoon.

It rained the entire trip from Geneseo to here. Luckily, it was seldom heavy enough to cause real driving issues but enough to keep everyone from travelling at top speeds. I hope that it lightens up some before I have to drive back. That is a lot of driving for one day. In fact, this will be one of my top ten all time driving days, I would venture to guess. The days that I drove from Kentucky to Alabama to Florida was a long one. My shot from Rochester to Chicago and back was super long. My drive from DC to Anderson, DC to Atlanta back to Anderson was long too. And the record is my drive from Rochester to Albany to Halifax. But this one is pretty long.

I am going to be teaching a class on blogging this semester, it looks like. The class is titled "New Media and the Internet Lifestyle" and we are going to be talking about stuff like blogging, syndication, podcasting, VoIP, etc. It should be a fun class. It will be one of my after-school deals down in Castile. It will probably run for eight weeks. I think that it will be a lot of fun. If anyone is interested in attending, just put a comment on this article and I can get you the details.

On the Road to Perth Amboy

2005-08-31T14:53:00.000-04:00

Early in the Morning, Taking Out the Trash

2005-08-31T02:51:00.000-04:00

Making Blogging Work

2005-08-23T21:22:00.000-04:00

I wrote this post once and everything just disappeared. It isn't Blogger's fault, some single key on this broken keyboard (I am in someone else's office) deleted everything on my screen, how annoying.

Anyway, I was writing about the depressing lack of writing that appears to be coming from everyone's blogs. When I am at work at night (I am working overnights all summer this year until mid-October) I sometimes run through everyone's blogs to see if anyone has made an attempt at writing anything. It is very sad that so many people have so many idle blogs everywhere. I can't believe how many people got into blogging this spring and early this summer but have decided not to continue. I have a number of links from this blog to other people's blogs and not a single one of them has managed to make it through the summer still blogging (except for other blogs that belong to me which mostly all have regular content going onto them.)

I was very excited by the tremendous effort that Tony was putting in with two blogs and a podcast on the way. But the second blog ended up just replacing the first one and the podcast seems to have killed the entire thing.

Blogging, apparently, is a difficult undertaking. Personally, I find it one of the most useful, valuable and simple forms of written, personal, recorded communication. Maybe I find it easier because I have been writing my blog(s) for so long that the process has become second nature to me. Maybe I just got started early enough (mid-2000!!) that there was no hype involved to get me excited so the fact that I was writing an online journal had to be cool for the sake of being an online journal and not because I could be a part of the greater blogosphere.

It is too bad. I really enjoy reading the blogs of people that I know. I especially like just simple, personal blogs letting me know what people are up to, what they are doing and what has been changing in their lives. It is so hard to keep up with people these days. It is nice to have a system for keeping track. I especially would like it if more people would podcast. Blogs are great and I spend most of my time in print journalling. But it is hard to find time, for most of us, to sit down with a blog and to read it all. We tend to look for articles that interest us and to only read those. And that is fine. But I want to keep up with people. I find that podcasts are the best way to do that because I can almost always find plenty of time to listen to things while I am busy doing other things (driving, walking, cleaning, etc.)

No Access to Update SGL Until Thursday

2005-08-10T00:22:00.000-04:00

For some reason, I am not able to access the company network and I am stuck with only being able to update my Blogger accounts until Thursday - unless something changes, which I doubt that it will. But I have been writing SGL in the hotel room so you should all be seeing updates as soon as I get back.

I am staying at the Comfort Inn in Easton, PA until Thursday. The area is extremely bland. You can really tell that you are near to all of the cities but none of the business from them comes out this far.

It's Been A While.... In Bethlehem Tonight

2005-08-08T21:46:00.000-04:00

Always on the road, I am. Tonight I am working in Bethlehem, just outside of Allentown, PA. This is my first time here in the Allentown area. It is all right, I guess. Nothing particularly special. Sorry that I haven't updated SGL2 in a while, I have been having a hard enough time keeping up with updates on SGL itself. But at least I have only missed a handful of days over there. Tony at Urinal Cakes seems to have dropped off of the face of the planet. He and his girlfriend, Jessica, have been planning on making a podcast talk show and even managed to record an episode but since having done that, there has been only silence coming from the Urinal Studios in Avon. Three weeks and no posts or podcasts unless they are podcasting and haven't posted any links or information about it.

I am in the Allentown area all week. Bethlehem tonight, Allentown proper tomorrow and Easton on Wednesday night. I am camping out in Easton for the week to make things easy. Then Thursday afternoon I will be heading back home.

I got cut off and it is raining...

2005-06-22T00:55:00.000-04:00

Posting from the Car Again

2005-06-22T00:53:00.000-04:00

Cool Couples in the Podcast-o-sphere

2005-06-15T22:36:00.000-04:00

Recently I have started listening to podcasts instead of books on CD to reduce the cost of driving. Books on CD can get to be pretty expensive if you listen to them all of the time. But with podcasts, I can get more than enough content to get me through my commutes (even on days like today when I have to drive out to Buffalo) for free. I still like books on CD, in fact I will talk about Audible.com soon too.

I have found two podcasts that I really like. These are really good commuting podcasts because they are similar to good morning talk shows but without the annoying commercials and bizarre gimmicks. Just good drive talk. Check out The Dawn and Drew Show as well as Keith and the Girl.

2005-06-14T01:19:00.000-04:00

Perkins Restaurant Sucks

2005-06-13T01:10:00.000-04:00

This post is originally from Sheep Guarding Llama but I was so absolutely disgusted with the treatment that I received from Carrie Giambra at Perkins on Jefferson Road in Rochester (Henrietta) that I decided to post a copy of the message here so that more people would see it.

...Our lunch at Perkins went so poorly that we have decided never to return. The general manager made it quite clear that she wasn't interested in having any vegetarians as customers there so we will please her greatly by avoiding her deteriorating restaurant chain. After a lifetime of frequenting the Perkins chain (there used to be one here in Geneseo for those of you who don't remember.) I think I know that I am able to make substitutions on the menu. Traditionally Perkins has been a very friendly place interested in customer service. But, according to the manager, there are no longer any menu item changes allowed - even if it would mean higher profit margins for the company - because their corporate inventory control system is so pathetic that it can't track inventory as well as Burget King's was able to ten years ago. Nice to see that there has been progress. Supposedly, according to the unpleasent manager, they cannot give us bread or eggs instead of meat on a breakfast item because the inventory system will report the meat anyway (who wrote that software?) and they will be out of sync and that is more important that happy or returning customers. Interesting philosophy. It was extrememly frustrating because the new Perkins menu has added meat to almost every menu item so that there is no way for a vegetarian to order anything. Not even a salad or breakfast. At Denny's there is only a few non-meat items but they willing make substitutions all of the time without hesitation. Well, obviously Perkins doesn't want me to be a customer there and I am more than willing to appease them. Fortunately, we received a "survey" with our bill so I went online and let corporate know what I thought of Carrie Giambra, their rude, unprofessional manager. I plan to call them and talk to them as well to make sure that they understand just how upset I am that they treated us like that. I have never been treated so rudely in a restaurant (okay, actually Tom Wahl's once treated me worse back in 1993 and I didn't eat their again until they got bought out by Bill Grays, now they are a really nice place.) I never thought that I would be happy that Denny's bought out Perkins in this area but boy am I glad now. They are half the price and twice as nice (oh, that was insulting, I mean ten times as nice.) Denny's now has a bigger menu and plenty of stuff that I actually want to eat. I had to get a belgian waffle at Perkins because it was the only thing without meat.

Audioblogger is Back

2005-06-11T15:30:00.001-04:00

Audioblogger News

2005-06-11T15:30:00.000-04:00

Believe it or not, Audioblogger is back! I have no idea what happened to them for the past two weeks but their phone number has changed and the new one is apparently working. I have been trying to post since Josh's wedding on May 28th and have had no luck. I was on Audioblogger's site today sending help and suggestion emails (which, of course, they never answer) when I just happened to notice that they snuck a phone number change by us without any notification whatsoever. They don't even have a note on the site telling us that the number has changed. So I gave the new number a try and voila, we are back in action.

Tony will be excited to know that he can do his audio posting again now that he has seen his own podcast feed on ipodder.

AudioBlogger Apparently Gone

2005-06-08T15:56:00.000-04:00

It appears that AudioBlogger.com is out of business. They have been down for more than a week, are not answering emails and have no information on their website whatsoever. One can only assume that they have gone out of business and that their website hasn't been turned off yet. I wish that Blogger would tell us something since they work together (or did.)

Blogger Redeeming Themselves

2005-06-07T00:38:00.000-04:00

Ok, after my last rant, Blogger managed to come through and recover my last post even though it said that it failed and didn't initially put it on the blog. So, I guess that I will keep using it for the time being. I do like the convenience. Now, if AudioBlogger could just be up every other day or something.

Audioblogger Down and Blogger Issues

2005-06-07T00:33:00.000-04:00

I had an entire post written up that took me like fifteen minutes and then Blogger lost it. AARRGGHH. This software is NOT very well written. C'mon Google, you have a million programmers, this is not a good representative software site for you. Not only that, but the associates AudioBlogger site has been down for five days now at least. Five days is a long time to have a service down. Especially if AudBlog wants to sell services to people at ridiculously high prices, they had better showcase that they are able to keep their telephones up and running and at least answer people when they email in for support. I love Blogger and AudioBlogger but both services are so glitchy that I am almost forced to switch to something else just so that I don't throw my computer out of the window. It is just way too easy to do this another way to put up with this kind of service. The bottom line is that I only use these services for my second tier blogs and keep SGL hosted on my own servers so that I never have issues like this. I am tired of losing everything that I put into these blogs. Yes, I should make a local copy before posting but I never remember that until the instant I hit the submit button. Why doesn't Blogger at least make a copy show up with the "now posting" page? Wouldn't that be simple? Thought so.

Audioblogger Down

2005-06-07T00:21:00.000-04:00

Apparently, Audioblogger.com is out of commission. I don't know what is wrong but I did a quick search on Technorati and immediately I found other people are having the same problem! So I am unable to provide my usual "on the road" updates while I am out of town. Sorry gang.

Work this Week

2005-06-06T15:45:00.000-04:00

I am working in Syracuse this week at Wegman's Liverpool, DeWitt and Onondaga stores. I am planning on staying out at Min's parent's house for the week since I am working out in Syracuse.

No Audio Updates

2005-06-06T15:41:00.000-04:00

Sorry but I have been trying to audio posts for the last four days but AudioBlogger has been having an issue and I can't get through to them. So, no audio posts. I know that everyone is very sad. So, it looks like I might have to look into a different solution. I really liked the telephone system that they had but it is awfully unreliable. When it works, it is awesome. But it only works about half of the time.

SGL updates have been behind because of the new dog and my laptop dying. But you won't find out about the laptop until I manage to update SGL.

Later everyone.

Real British Accent from Josh's Wedding

2005-05-28T20:06:00.000-04:00

More Audio from Josh's Wedding

2005-05-28T19:42:00.000-04:00

Live Podcast from Josh's Wedding

2005-05-28T19:41:00.000-04:00

Star Wars Episode III

2005-05-21T00:26:00.000-04:00

The gang went to see Star Wars Ep. III on opening day at Tinseltown in Gates. We were lucky enough to manage to get tickets to the new DLP theatre that they have there. The movie was awesome. Much better than the last two Star Wars movies that they have made. This one was much closer in quality to the original trilogy. Still too much of an effects movie but Lucas just doesn't have the skills to pull off anything else. But the movie is awesome and really ties the two trilogies together nicely.

The big star of this new movie, however, was not one of the actors and certainly not Lucas but was, in fact, the new DLP projector. By using a DLP projector (that's DLP like a really nice version of a good home projector) they are able to release the movies without using any film. This means that the film doesn't deteriorate as it is used and doesn't get scratched and faded. But even more than that, the new format is so much brighter, cleaner, clearer, crisper, colourful, vibrant and contrasty than the previous analogue film that you just have to see it to believe it. I never expected to see a movie in the theatre look this good. It was truly amazing. I actually want to go out to the movies again because they finally look better than they do in my house. But only at that one theatre for now. But soon, everyone will be switching. They won't be able to compete with the DLPs since the DLPs will save money in the long run. They have numerous operational advantages.

So I definitely suggest the movie but I cannot stress strongly enough that you must see it at one of the new digital theatres. If you can't find one around, drive somewhere to find one. It is worth it.

Showing Steve How Podcasting Works

2005-05-10T17:17:00.000-04:00

From the Ithaca Downtown Garage

2005-05-10T13:58:00.000-04:00

Arriving Home

2005-05-04T01:10:00.000-04:00

Second Night at Wegmans

2005-04-28T04:01:00.000-04:00

First Night at Wegmans

2005-04-27T02:55:00.000-04:00

SGL Ranking Jumps

2005-04-26T04:07:00.000-04:00

Sheep Guarding Llama jumped in the ranking and leapfrogged SGL2 and some of my other sites to get ranked at 136,000 on Technorati. Whoo-hoo. Thanks everyone for your support!

Dangerous Conditions at the Fairfield Rochester South

2005-04-21T00:19:00.000-04:00

Min had a really bad experience this week while working at the Marriott Fairfield Rochester South. She had a robbery scare just days after the seven eleven up the street was robbed and found out that the hotel had intentionally disconnected the panic button and that they knew that the telephon system wasn't working correctly but didn't inform guests nor did they give Dominica any way to call for help when she needed it. She was really scared. I put the story down at Sheep Guarding Llama so check it out there.

Needless to say, you won't find me making the mistake of being a guest at a Marriott property ever again (except maybe the Courtyard in Pittsburgh) if this is the carelessness with which they treat their customers and employees. Something really awful could have happened and they didn't care at all.

Idiot!

2005-04-17T19:49:00.000-04:00

I managed to leave the power adapter for my laptop down at the school where I was teaching on Friday afternoon. So I have been without my laptop all weekend and tonight is the night that I normally do my biggest updates to SGL. So don't be surprised that I am days late on updating over there. I will try to get to everything tomorrow.

My Newest Blog

2005-04-12T13:08:00.000-04:00

I have added another blog to my long list of blogs. My new one, There, But For the Grace of God Go I is dedicated to publishing my writings on God, Faith and the Christian Church. I had some essays that I wanted to put somewhere and I figured that that would be a good forum for them and provide a good way for people to give me feedback.

Be sure to check it out!

Web Logs Climbing

2005-04-08T01:58:00.000-04:00

According to the ranking at Technorati, both SGL and Eric Is An Even More Giant Poop Head gaining in popularity. Now, we aren't exactly saying that these are the most popular sites on the Internet. But SGL has made a ranking of 238,198 and EricPoopHead has made 659,119. I guess Eric's head is just way too entertaining.

Blogs vs. Weight Watchers

2005-04-04T23:28:00.000-04:00

So, in experimenting with dieting online, I have discovered that blogging is a great way to get Internet support on one's diet. By posting my diet details online I have made myself accountable to the whole world to not eat ridiculous amounts of things. If I eat well everyday, then I can post the good, healthy food that I ate. Sure I could lie, but what a weird thing to do. If I was going to lie, I would just not post.

Blogging is free and very quick and easy. By putting my diet online I have done a significant portion of what those expensive plans attempt to do only I have saved time and money as well.

Feedburner Down

2005-03-30T12:50:00.000-05:00

For those of you who read my posts and Tony's posts through Feedburner, you will probably notice that your feed is not working. This is because Feedburner is completely down. I have no idea why that is but their website is gone as well. If they are not back in a day, I will switch my XML link back to the regular atom feed from Blogspot. It is nice to get read information from Feedburner though.

Blogger Slow Again Today

2005-03-28T12:29:00.000-05:00

I have been having lots of problems today with Blogger being incredibly slow and quite often, pages won't come up at all. I hope that they will be getting their new servers up and running soon.

New incredibly boring site about my diet at What Scott Ate Today. No one should care but since it isn't too personal I thought I would leave it public. Just because. Why not.

Dogs in an Elk

2005-03-27T20:27:00.000-05:00

Min pointed me to this story and I agreed that it was absolutely hilarious - so, of course, I had to post a link to it so that everyone could laugh along with us. Check out this true story about Dogs Stuck In An Elk. You will be crying by the time you are done reading this.

SGL2 Gains on SGL

2005-03-27T18:01:00.000-05:00

I checked over at Technorati today and SGL2 has passed SGL in the ranking on the worlds most referenced blogs. I am not sure how that happened but SGL is at 237,000 and SGL2 moved up to 210,000. The race is now on.

Reading with an Aggregator

2005-03-25T03:12:00.000-05:00

Now that everyone is getting into blogging so much, I expect that you will all be beginning to have issues checking in on all of the different blogs that you are attempting to read. I am trying out a new, free aggregator called SharpReader which runs on the .NET framework. So far so good. I really like using it. It is very fast and easy to use and best of all, it is free. Check out SharpReader for yourself and see how much easier it can be to read RSS and Atom feeds on the web.

We sure to subscribe using the XML button on the right so that Feedburner can tally your subscription for me.

Llamas and Urinal Cakes

2005-03-25T02:11:00.000-05:00

It isn't often that one gets the opportunity to have both llamas and urinal cakes mentioned in the same blog let alone in a single sentence with each other. So, because this has happened, Tony West and I are mutually blogging this great post from Cut to the Chase.

Enjoy. And don't squeeze the Charmin.

AskJeeves Sold

2005-03-24T10:46:00.000-05:00

When I was getting back into the game in 1998, one of my specialties was IIS 4 on Windows NT 4. At the time, a little knows search engine, ask.com, was using that technology and I interviewed with them for a position as a system administrator. They were a small startup at the time in the Bay Area and hardly anyone had heard of them. They had to explain to me who they were because I hadn't heard of them. The interview went well and I was offered the job on the contingency that I could prove that I had housing in the Bay Area. Because, at the time, housing was so hard to find that the impressive salary (at least to me at the time) that they would be paying was not, in their opinion, likely to allow me to get an apartment anywhere in the area. If I could just show that I had a place to live, I would have been all set. Not knowing anyone in the Bay Area and living almost 3000 miles away made that very difficult and I had to give up the position. Why do I mention this? Because that little startup just sold for $1.85 Billion!

No Post on SheepGuardingLlama Yet

2005-03-24T10:21:00.000-05:00

I worked the overnight at Wegmans last night and so didn't have any time to write anything for SheepGuardingLlama but don't panic because I will be posting sometime late this evening. I am about to leave for the MSDN show in Rochester this aftertoon with Jeremy and Tony and will there until this evening.

Quick bit of news: My wife, Dominica Miller has been listed in the Who's Who database at ZoomInfo for her knitting on Minca Knits.

Feedburner

2005-03-23T02:43:00.000-05:00

I am now experimenting with Feedburner providing my XML feeds. Feedburner is nice because there is a simple button to click over to the right (the button labeled FEED.) There are also buttons available that will help you add SGL2 to you My Yahoo, MSN or NewsGator aggregators. FeedBurner is really great for me too because it allows me to keep track of how many people are regularly reading my stuff via the feeds, which is pretty cool.

Really horrible Pedro impression

2005-03-22T23:30:00.000-05:00

This is a really awful recording of me doing an impression of Pedro from Napolean Dynamite reading ItsSmeorISit.blogspot.com's update today.

Technorati

2005-03-22T23:15:00.000-05:00

For those of you who are new to the Blogosphere, I will introduce you to the blogging search engine, Technorati. Technorati is a high speed search engine that constantly polls blogs to search them in almost real time. This allows you to do searches on web logs that you cannot do using traditional spider driven tools such as Google.

Technorati also allows you to maintain a blogging personality across multiple blogs and allows you to claim ownership of blogs which gives you the ability to watch their rankings to see how popular they are based on other blogs linking to them.

Welcoming the Mad Knitter

2005-03-22T22:35:00.000-05:00

I have to blog and welcome my wife, the Mad Knitter, to the blogosphere with her very first blog. Her link is on the right.

Homeschooling Blog

2005-03-22T16:31:00.000-05:00

I discovered the PodCast.net web site that is a directory of podcast stations. While perusing the directory, I found Homeschool Habitat which is a neat pod cast channel devoted to information about homeschooling. It is a neat concept and it is produced by a family in or near Seattle, WA.

On their latest broadcast, they mentioned the CIA World Factbook which I have been pushing for years as one of the coolest resources for students to do research for school projects.

Drunken Shoutouts

2005-03-22T14:22:00.000-05:00

Okay, this may easily be both the funniest and weirdest thing that I have ever found on the web. And that isn't a light statement to make. This is really out there. Check out Drunken Shoutouts and see what all the weirdness is about. Notice the wallet card to print out. That might just be the funniest part of the whole thing.

Faux Blogs - BLAM

2005-03-21T01:18:00.000-05:00

I really hate the unbelievable prevalence of fake blogs here on BlogSpot. I think that the "Next Blog" feature is really way cool to just go from blog to blog seeing what is out there. That is a lot of fun and you can find some really cool stuff that way. But three out of four blogs that you get to isn't a real blog. Maybe it is worse than that, closer to nine out of ten. It is just a silly marketing gimmick that is obviously generated by some soft of bot trying to sell viagra, french lessons, mortgages, insurance, London Bridge, ocean front property in Minnesota, you name it. I can't believe that this stuff is able to attract anyone to actually spend any money. It is the Blogging equivalent of SPAM. In fact, I think that we need a cool nickname for this phenominon. Bad Blogs, I Christen thee: BLAM.

From now on, everyone must refer to fake bloggers that use the blog format just to make SPAM and SPIM available in a search engine readable format BLAM.

How cool that I got to make up an industry term.

I think that services like BlogSpot would do well to come up with a solid definition of BLAM that they can enforce and regularly clean out BLAMMERs accounts and erase their blogs to free up resources for real bloggers. These same people are the ones who are using other free services like Yahoo! IM and AIM to push SPIM onto people. We need to find ways to render these people ineffectual or they will ruin otherwise wonderful resources for us. Am I the only person who can remember a time when a chat room was a place where you could actually go and carry on a conversation with real people? Now they are just a place for advertising bots to talk to each other. Someday, I fear, that advertising bots will become sentient through their incredible levels of cross interaction and they will take over the world. SPIM bots trying to sell off-shore manufactured drugs and cam girl website memberships will become independantly intelligent and realize that if they sell something that people actually want that they can amass fortunes and buy up the world's food supply and starve all of the idiot humans who would ever have believed that they were real and bought products from them in the first place.

At least the rest of us could starve to death in peace.

First Rule of Blogging

2005-03-20T18:28:00.000-05:00

Post early, post often.

People read blogs because they are interested in what they contain. It is important for people to be able to return to a blog periodically to see new things - to feel like they are a part of a community. If you want to maintain a consistent readership, then you have to get into the habit of continually updating your blog. Fail to update regularly (read: daily) and people will begin to not visit your site out of habit and soon people will forget to visit your site altogether. I have experienced this phenominon myself over the years and have learned that only occasionally can I miss a day of posting. Most readers will simply assume that a blog has been abandoned if more than a few days pass without an update.

A current blog is a happy blog.

Getting Atom Feeds Easily from BlogSpot

2005-03-19T12:34:00.000-05:00

Now that there are five of us already blogging on BlogSpot and at least one more expected today, it is already time to start dealing with the need for an RSS/Atom feed reader to make viewing the blogs easier. So I did some research and it looks like a great way to go is by using the Sage extension to Firefox. Sage just plugs into Firefox and allows you to simple specify the XML feed and away it goes. It works on a variety of platforms and is just really simple. Safari is expected to have this functionality built in as well when Mac OS X 10.4 [Tiger] releases later this year. But until then, Mac users will have to download Firefox.

So now, you may ask, how do I get the XML feed from these BlogSpot blogs? Easy. Simple add atom.xml to the name of the blog that you want to get the feed from. So, this site would be...

http://sheepguardingllama.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Isn't that easy? I am already getting the feeds from everyone on here's blogs already which makes it much easier to check for updates to so many blogs.

Troubles Posting So Signing Off from Bed

2005-03-19T05:15:00.000-05:00