Best. Invention. Ever.

Every once in a while a product comes along that just about brings a tear to your eye. I found that product today. I’m still weeping so I can’t type too much here. I’ll just share it with you. I give you the Beer Launcher. (you can check out their site at beerlauncher.com)

Worst Customer Service Ever

I am one of the best customers ever. When I find a service that I like, I will stick with it through the thick and thin. This is mainly because, at heart, I’m lazy. If I’ve found a company that provides me a service that I need at a reasonable price, I am very unlikely to change companies even if it means saving a little money on a monthly basis. This goes double or triple or more for a service that has taken a considerable amount of time to get set up to begin with and would require a considerable amount of time to move to a new service.

To give you an example, I had found a hosting company that I was really pleased with. I had set up an account and moved all my sites on to the one account. This took a week or two to complete. About 2 months in to hosting with them, one of my sites really took off and was getting a LOT of traffic. It was putting a strain on the shared server where I was at and they asked that I moved the site. They were quite helpful the entire time and never once shut my site down. At that time, I went ahead and bought my own server and have been hosting that one site on my server now for over a year. Since I was pleased with the service I was getting with my hosting company, even after the traffic wave had died off on my site and there was no risk of straining my server, I went ahead and continued to keep (and pay for) my account with the hosting company along with paying for my own server to be hosted somewhere else. True, it’s only an extra $20 per month, but that does add up over time. I only recently shut down my managed hosting account in favor of keeping everything on my own server, but that was after I sold off everything last month.

So, with something as delicate as DNS and domain name registration, if I find a place that I’m happy with, I’m going to stick with them basically forever. They are really going to have to screw the pooch in order for me to leave. Well, this is exactly what has happened with RegisterFly.com.

I’ve been a RegisterFly.com customer for 3-4 years now. At my high point, I had over 90 domain names listed with them. Most of which were purchased before they become an ICANN accredited domain name seller, so most of my domain names were actually registered through ENOM. Recently RegisterFly.com become accredited and you would think that their new found freedom and monumental moment in the company’s existence would be reason enough to make sure that all your customers are happy and that your systems are in tip-top shape. With RegisterFly, it seems they have done the exact opposite.

Over the past 2 months, here’s a bit of what I have been subjected to with them:
- I tried to renew a domain name that was set to expire in 2 weeks. Was unable to because it was registered through ENOM originally and there was some sort of issue with getting it transfered to RegisterFly. After sending 4 emails and leaving 4 voice mails with support over 2 weeks, I gave up. The domain expired and I was able to re-purchase it as it became available again (using GoDaddy instead)
- While trying to renew a batch of domain names, my credit card transaction went through, but there was an error in the renewal process so the domains did not get renewed, but my credit card was still charged and now my money is STUCK in my RegisterFly account and I can’t cash it out.
- While trying to transfer a domain name to GoDaddy, since I was using RegisterFly’s “WhoIs Protection”, the transfer request email went to a numerically tracked email address at RegisterFly. After a week of waiting for the confirmation to arrive, I sent my own email to the email address. It bounced.
- To get the auth code for any domain name I want to transfer away from RegisterFly that had been registerd before they were accredited, I’m forced to call ENOM since I don’t have an ENOM account to log in to. Average wait time, 35 minutes.
- Since I had some extra funds in my RegisterFly account, I figured I’d go ahead and burn them up by buying a couple domain names that I’d just transfer away at the end of their first term. When I registered a domain on Friday, while everything seemed fine and my funds were definitely deducted from my account, the registrant info for the domain name was not saved and neither were the Name Servers. So the domain is currently pointing to no DNS servers.
- While trying to update the DNS servers on this new domain, I get an error message on the form when I try submitting it.

At this point, I’m beyond pissed. I have sent several emails and left several help desk tickets with their support team. I have had no responses on any of them.

As for the $40 bucks still in my account, go ahead and keep it. I’m sure I’ll get it back in the Class Action Lawsuit that I’m sure is coming your way. No business can get away with absolutely turning their back on all their customers. You were bragging about having something like 900,000 domain names registered through your service. I would love to see how far and how fast that number is dropping.

Hey, RegisterFly, I would have continued using your service for the
next 10-20 years. All you had to do was not completely suck.
Unfortunately, you failed at that. I wasn’t looking for greatness. I
would have settled for mediocrity. You couldn’t even pull off
“average.” You had to shoot for “really fucking lame.” Well, you hit
that mark perfectly.

And if you think I’m the only one who is having issues with RegisterFly, well, let’s see…

2007 New Years Resolution

Stop procrastinating.

Open Wide!

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As a kid I had a bad experience with a dentist. No, he didn’t touch me “there”, you sicko! But, even to this day, I have a bit of a phobia of dentists I have several cavaties that I should get fixed and you are supposed to get a teeth cleaning ever 6 to 12 months. My last cleaning was…. I can’t remember when.
After the filling fell out of my tooth yesterday, a trip to the dentist was pretty much mandatory. So I made an appointment for this morning. My mother-in-law, who also has had a bad experience with a dentist years ago, recommended her dentist. So I figured if he’s good enough for her, then he’s good enough for me.
When I got here this morning, I went through the “first time patient” forms and initial exam where they took about 20 x-rays. Since my tooth wasn’t in pain, the doc wanted to schedule me to come back to start taking care of the many cavaties PLUS I was going to need a root canal on the tooth where the filling came out of. I asked the doc to file down the sharp edge on the one tooth and then I was headed out.
As I was discussing my upcoming appointments with the nurse, she asked when I wanted to come back. I said “as soon as possible.” WTF did I just say?
I scheduled myself to return today at noon for the first cleaning session. Then she asked how serious about how soon I wanted to get the root canal. She checked the schedule and says “he has an opening right now” so back in the chair I went.
I had some time between the end of that session and before my cleaning starts to grab a bite to eat (soft food!) and write this post…
I do have to say, the words root canal send shivers up my spine! But, this went pretty smoothly. Even though, while we were in the middle of it he found that my tooth had two canals. Just my luck! I think I will be less apprehensive before my next appointment. This is a good thing.

my tooph hurths

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The item next to the penny is (or was) part of a filling in a tooth that was, until this morning, causing me no troubles at all. Now that it is no longer connected to the tooth, it seems to be causing me far more trouble. I guess this means I’ll be going to the dentist soon.

Oh, did I mention OUCH! My tooth with the gaping hole that seems to be a tunnel straight in to my skull friggin’ hurts!

Working on the shoulder

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What better way to spend a Tuesday evening than to be stabbed a few tousand times a minute? Yeah, I couldn’t think of one either.
My tattoo artist, Austin, is very much like me in that he has too many project ideas and not enough time to get them done. I came up with another idea for him to do a blog site with all his crazy daily activities. After a bit of explaining how it will work, I offered to help him out. He’s stoked on the idea and so am I. Once it hits the web, I’ll drop an update.

For a purse?

Ahhh, Valentine’s Day. What to get the wife on Valentine’s Day is always a good question. Flowers? Sure. Candy? OK, fine. But, I want to get her a gift as well… But what? After asking her several times what she wanted, she finally came up with an answer the day before the big day.

“I want a Coach purse.” she says.

“Excellent! No problem!” I say.

I then remember back to our trip to the outlet mall around Christmas time. There was a line to get in to the store. Without exaggerating, the line waiting outside the store was easily 100 people long. The thought that went through my mind instantly was, “You are all waiting in line for a purse?”

As we left the house on Saturday morning headed back to this same outlet mall, I remembered a conversation about how there were going to be something like a million extra people in town this weekend for the NBA All-Star game. I had a flashback to the line at Coach from Christmas. When we got in to the parking lot, my fears were realized. The mall was packed. We had to park on the 3rd floor of the parking structure. This was NOT looking good…

Amazingly enough, the line outside of Coach was pretty short. A line, yes, but only a few people deep. No sweat. We got in and Chris found a white with blue polka-dots purse that she wanted. Waite through the queue to pay and off we went.

As we exited the store I noticed that the line was now considerably longer than when we had entered. There were probably about 40 people waiting to get in… I felt like yelling at them, “FOR A PURSE?!?!?!”, but I digress.

That door is wired!

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At work we have two entrances to our office. I have an assigned parking spot so i always enter through the same door. As a matter of fact, i have exited out the other door one time and, until today, I have never entered through it. Not using that door may save my life! I watch enough 24 and have learned enough from Jack Bauer to recognize when a door has been wired with explosives!
From now on, I will use the back door only when the front door is blocked off by hostals holding machine guns. Even then I may use some of my Jack Bauer training and yell “Who Are You Working For?”

The start of something good

On Saturday, Chris, Blake and I walked from our house to the Galleria mall, walked around the mall and then back home. It probably worked out to being about a 3.5 mile walk. It felt great. Other than the exercise, walking to the mall had an excellent side effect - we sent no money at the mall. Nobody wanted to buy anything because I instituted a “You buy it, you carry it” rule. Not so much as a DVD was purchased because nobody wanted to lug it back home. I think I’m going to turn all of our mall trips in to walking trips, too!

I will admit that I was probably the closest to buying something before leaving the mall. We stopped by the Cingular store and I got to check out their new BlackJack phone. I’m at the point in my contract with Cingular that I could get the phone as part of my extension, but it’ll still cost $199 (after a $100 rebate) out of pocket, which I’m not overly concerned with. I’m more concerned with the monthly “data plan” that I’ll have to pay for which is $39.99 a month. So, for now, I’ve left the phone with Cingular. If I can justify the extra monthly cost, I may go back and get it. I’m not holding my breath, though.

Chris and I followed up our Saturday walk with a 40 minute walk on Sunday evening. It was just as the sun was going down and the weather was great. A little bit of a breeze and the temperature was just about perfect. I’m hoping that we can get out and walk 3 - 4 times a week. We both really enjoyed it and while the weather is like this, we certainly shouldn’t pass up the opportunity. It won’t be long before it’s 100+ making walking a little less enjoyable.

Timing is everything / Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity I’ve said it a thousand times, Timing is everything.

Today while checking out cnn.com I ran across a link to an article titled “Cutting through the clutter to get things done.” Since I’ve recently been in the mindset of clearing out the brain clutter and actually enjoying my new ability to get things done, the timing for finding this article was spot on.

The article talks about a guy named David Allen who wrote a book called “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” - The guy talks about some things that I have tried to implement, like creating lists of projects. But, he takes it a step further. He talks about breaking down the project in to sub-tasks. This explanation is spot on:

“Nobody gets two hours to do anything these days. You get 12 minutes here, you get five minutes here, three minutes there,” he said. “But most people’s systems and their behaviors aren’t set up so when they get a surprise window of six minutes they don’t know what to do with it.”

I can totally relate!

The article goes on to talk about how he’s received emails from dozens of people who have said they’ve written programs based on GTD. I ordered a copy of the book from Amazon and I plan on searching for some scripts tonight online. What would be really excellent would be either a Netvibes plug-in or a Yahoo Widget that I could add to my desktop. That would be fantastic.

I have found that MUCH has been written about GTD. A really nice post can be found over at 43folders.com

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