5 fun things to start September

September 1, 2010

Picture of fall in New England September has sprung. To kick off the month here are five things to ponder.

First up as fall comes so does the football season. Tackling, blocking and trick plays abound. Perhaps the Western Athletic Conference should have considered Boise State's bragging on the radio about "creativity on the football field" to include sharing trick plays with their new conference, the Mountain West Conference. So far the most entertaining plays have been the off-the-field plays between the WAC, BYU and the MWC. Ultimately it's bemusing to see the mis-management that's kept the WAC in the basement of athletic leagues sink the ship. Having gone from courting BYU to not enough teams to remain a conference in the blink of an eye.

Great customer service makes or breaks businesses

August 31, 2010

Bongo Billy's excellent service makes for coffee love.From time to time I write about experiences with customer service. Recently three customer service experiences stood out and a brief examination provides some great take-aways.

The customer is never right service

The first of these experiences is that of interacting with a company, not even worthy of being named here, that provides medical and dependent-care reimbursements for Acquia's pre-tax plan. I signed up with the company some time back and had received a debit card and welcome email. The welcome email describes different ways of having claims handled from using the debit card, to faxing them or emailing them.

Boise is getting an Apple Store

August 29, 2010

dsc05678.jpg Two years ago I wrote about Boise needing an Apple Store. Since then plans for the store, even the whole shopping center, where the Apple Store was expected to go went off the rails. The land, the Whole Foods that never got built, and the whole shopping center remains an irrigated field on at the corner of Eagle and Fairview.

The good news for the Boise Mac User's group all all others who would love to see an Apple store is that soon one will be open. The location has changed but the iconic white apple on a black background can be seen at the Town Square Mall.

If the rumors are correct Saturday, September 11th, 2010 will be the opening day for the store. On Saturday several members of the Boise Mac User's group gathered for a photo outside the shop. Unable to resist a peak in the open door it appears things are moving along nicely as the store already looks very much like an Apple store on the inside.

Getting there

August 29, 2010

us_airways_767-200.jpg Arriving at Boise Airport this morning I checked the board for my flight. While it wasn't listed yet something surprising was. US Airways has a flight listed on the board from Boise to Boston. How could I have missed this?

Immediately thoughts of being able to get from Boise to Boston in a matter of four or five hours sprang to mind. Gone are the stopovers and hours in the airport lounge. All with a simple change of airlines. And since both United, my frequent carrier, and US Airways are in the Star Alliance the benefits of accrued mileage and accruing more miles will all be transferrable. What good fortune.

Failure to order

July 27, 2010

apple_order_failure_0.png This morning a fresh batch of technology devices landed at the Apple store. This included the magic trackpad and a slick, energy efficient battery charger. Who can resist?

Plus I had a couple of gift cards around that had small balances and Apple is good about allowing multiple cards on a single order. Well sort of. So everything went well and the order went in this morning. This afternoon, however, the word came there was a problem.

When you order at Apple online they run a $1 pre-authorization for your card to make sure it's good. When they did this with the gift card it's available $7 balance was reduced to $6 so when they tried to run it for $7 later the charge failed. Oy!

Getting iPhone mail working from outside Mail.app on iOS4

July 24, 2010

This past week has been rather quiet but not in the way I'd hoped. Normally when I'm on the road as I was this week I'd get a series of photos and videos of the various things going on at home. While FaceTime is great and we had some great calls the videos and photos weren't coming.

As it turns out this isn't some issue with a lack of good intentions. In fact my wife was certain she'd sent them. Indeed there on her iPhone was an outbox full of messages to family members waiting for the last week to be sent.

It also turns out that she's far from alone in having these issues. And before Apple feels the need to post videos of other phones failing in the same way, yes there are other phones having similar problems that aren't running iOS4 or made by Apple.

At the same time my phone is having no issues sending photos and videos from the photo gallery. So I started to compare the differences between the two phones.

An unusual iPad 3G activation problem

July 10, 2010

AT&T Logo This afternoon I got a call from the folks who had spent hours trying to activate the cellular data plan on an iPad. Having called Apple and AT&T didn't help. The frustration level was understandably very high. At the end of the day it boils down to an odd little problem that AT&T never anticipated.

First the interface for activation isn't great at dealing with errors. The cycle would run like this. You enter all the data and submit it. The system doesn't like your physical address and tells you so. When it presents the form with the error it also removes the password you've entered in your last attempt. However it doesn't highlight the password field so you don't know readily it's been removed. Your next submission is rejected for not having a password. Once you fill that in it gets rejected for the address again and around, and around, and around you go.

Pages

Subscribe to