“There’s a mute button?”
Today I’m going to have a rant. This is only my second post on our blog, and the first was also a rant, so I’m sure you can see the beginnings of a trend here.
Many people can relate to being “the tech guy” for your family and friends. Being called on for every little technical query is par for the course in my line of work, but I’m starting to become really frustrated with the attitude a large portion of the population has towards anything remotely technical.
My laptop is an old Dell Inspiron and has served me well over the years, although apart from when travelling, my mother gets sole use of it. One of the things I particularly like about it is the array of media keys on the front which allow you to adjust the volume, pause, skip etc.
Yesterday she called me to ask “why isn’t the sound on the laptop working?”. I asked her if she’d pressed the mute button by mistake. Her response nearly floored me. “Oh, is there a mute button?”. Now as you can see from the photo, the buttons aren’t exactly subtle and she’s been using the laptop for about 4 years now, how the hell had she not noticed an array of 7 buttons on the front and had the curiosity to investigate what they do.
If the sound from her TV had mysteriously stopped she’d have picked up the remote, had a fiddle and probably figured out that the mute button had been pressed by mistake, but because it’s a computer, she - like many others - immediately assumes that some virus with malicious intentions is keeping her from watching Big Cat Diary on the BBCs iPlayer.
Why are people suddenly so afraid of fiddling?
The human race has evolved because we’re curious, we want to learn, to discover new things, and yet at the moment it feels like we’re being held back by a lazy portion of our population.
Posted in Randomness, Technology Stuff | No Comments »
El Gordo Spanish Sweepstake Lottery Scam
One can imagine our sheer delight this morning when my wife received a letter (to her maiden name), from Spain (Malaga Postmark) informing her she had won 815,810.00 Euro in a Spanish lottery. Fortunately my wife and I are not complete morons and saw this for the scam it was.
For those not savvy with these types of scam. They promise you the winnings if only you would cover the transfer fee, ranging from £500 to £5000, wired to one of their accounts and they will release the funds. Sounds stupid of course, but so many people fall for this. I told my mother jokingly and she was adamant I follow it up.
Of course the funds are never released and your ‘transfer fee’ is now funding further scams to people around the world.
Tags: El Gordo Scam
Posted in Randomness | 1 Comment »
Can you recommend me an eCommerce script? Actually No.
It’s a safe assumption that amongst the vast numbers of websites we host, a pretty decent portion are running some sort of store or catalogue system. As such, we get daily tickets from customers asking which ecommerce script we recommend. I hate these tickets, and I hate them with a passion. Oh, I don’t mind giving customers advice, infact I quite like passing on my experiences with scripts I’ve used, skinned, modified. My gripe isn’t with the customer at all, it’s with the position it puts me in.
If a customer asks a similar question about forum/bulletin board scripts or content management system’s the answer is easy and I can happily recommend 2 or 3 examples, along with my personal preference. If you care, I’d recommend vBulletin (if you’re willing to pay) or SMF (if you’re not) for forums and Joomla or Drupal for CMS. The problem however comes when I have to recommend an eCommerce script, because to be honest the only 2 free one’s out there are terrible.
Of course, I’m referring to OSCommerce and ZenCart, I’ve had the misfortune to skin both (fortunately for the most part I’ve managed to avoid having to modify them at all) and both made me want to tear my face off and stick it in a blender. Of the two, ZenCart is the lesser of 2 evils, but only marginally so. I’m not going to do some sort of detailed review of them, but comparing the two, ZenCart’s admin backend is better, but it’s skinning is significantly worse.
Ok, so you ask.. why don’t I recommend a non-free script. Quite simply because unlike their forum counterparts (you can lease vBulletin for around £40pa) they’re ridiculously expensive. Furthermore, none of them seem to offer any sort of demo of the product. Why would I want to recommend a product I have no way of testing for myself?
So, now you know why I hate that question. Because I have to recommend a vastly inferior product and hope our customers expectations are lower than my own.
I suppose we could write our own… just for our customers… and make it free… that’s a good idea we’ll call it 3DPixelStore. I’ll get right on it.
Tags: 3dpixelstore, bulletin board, cms, drupal, ecommerce, forum, joomla, oscommerce, recommend, smf, vbulletin, zencart
Posted in Technology Stuff, Web Hosting | 1 Comment »
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