Information Echo

A few weeks ago I signed up for Google Adwords. I figured I may eventually use it to advertise a few things that could return a few dollars in my pocket on a monthly basis, and I had been told that If I signed up and let my account remain dormant for a period of time Google was apt to provide some free credit for my Adwords account.

For the first few weeks, everything was fine - my account sat dormant, and Google did indeed send me some credit to apply towards it.

Then the phone calls began.

“Hi, this is (name removed) from Google calling regarding your Adwords account!”.

….and the emails.

I am contacting you regarding the AdWords account that was recently set
up. I wanted to introduce myself and my team.

The voice mails continued to pile up seemingly arriving from several different people, and I was sometimes receiving multiple calls per day. Based on how Google seemed to be adamantly wooing me, you might be fooled into believing that Google thought I am the head of some multimillion dollar multinational corporation, yet that couldn’t be further from truth.

Two days ago I sent an email (admittedly rather blunt) to the last person who had contacted me via email more or less telling them to leave me alone. I’ll setup my account when I’m ready, and with all due respect I don’t really need help, but thanks anyways.

I received no response indicating that my email had been received, much less acted upon, but for two days the emails and phone calls stopped.

However, the kicker arrived today in the form of not only one, but TWO nagging AdWords emails from two different Google Adwords reps, as well as yet ANOTHER phone call.

The email I sent today (to both reps, also quoting the third!) was even more short and I advised them that if the contact attempts continued I would be treating them as spam, which to be honest, after several attempts to stop the unsolicited contact attempts, it basically is.

I wonder how much success these reps will have contacting people with Gmail accounts when I start marking all of their own email addresses as spam generators in Gmail itself?

I recently purchased a modestly expensive software package for my Mac. It won’t take much hunting on my blogs recent posts to figure out what that application is.

However, it’s simply still not working. I was promised an impending update (which I patiently waited numerous weeks for) would fix the issue, but it didn’t. I was them promised that another point-release would fix the issue, which it didn’t. If anything, it made it worse - the software crashes hours into it’s task now, instead of days in.

Either way, all cumulative work done up to that point is effectively lost each and every time it fails. We’re talking in excess of 100-150 hours of consistent processing and bandwidth consumption.

So what do I do? If I purchased the software at retail I’d probably shove it all back in the box and return it to the retail location. But alas, I purchased this software online.

So, I requested that the developer rescind my activation key and process a refund. I don’t think that asking for a refund on an application that isn’t working as advertised is out of the realm of fair. Clearly this software doesn’t work for me, and likely isn’t going to anytime soon, so it holds zero value for me at this point - I won’t continue to attempt to use something that is broken, especially when I have something so critical and time-consuming involved with it’s use.

However, now the developer is blaming the failures on my FTP host. Failing that, it’s my computer - not enough memory, or two large of a set of source files.

Requirements for excessively gross amounts of system memory, or limitations on the size of source files I could use were not disclosed. My hardware is maxed out on memory, and the suggestion that my source files are too large (when in reality others are likely to attempt MUCH larger amounts) seems asinine.

And in the end, my polite (at this point) request for a refund is being denied.

What do I do?

I’m an avid user of Time Machine to keep all of my media (most importantly, digital pictures dating back 15 years, and scanned images dating back nearly 20 years) backed up and safe, but a few months ago I started to consider the possible issues of having a backup sitting right next to the source.

In a situation of hardware failure on our iMac, the Time Machine backup is indispensable - simply fix the hard drive, and restore.

However, in a situation of double-hardware failure (unlikely, but possible), corruption (again, unlikely, but possible), or (hopefully never) catastrophic loss of our household contents, a local-based backup is going to prove rather useless. I needed an off-site backup solution to complement the local backups. Risking nearly two decades of memories simply calls for more than a lackadaisical approach to backing up.

My current webhost provides me with an unbelievable amount of disk space and the logical solution was to simply backup to this otherwise underutilized space, but simply compressing everything up into a huge archive and FTP’ing the files to the server seemed like a pain in the ass, and since it wasn’t easily automated, it was prone to being forgotten and as the months pass by could still result in file loss.

Enter “Twin”, by App4Mac. It seemed perfect, and in testing the feature-limited free version, it also seemed to actually work. It was straightforward to setup, was highly automated, and was able to utilize my wasted server space as an off-site backup destination. It was exactly what I wanted.

I was a little put off by the nearly $80 price tag, but I tweeted the developer and was sent back a “20% off” discount code which took a bit of the sting away from the purchase, so I took the dive.

The problem is that although it seemed to handle the small amount of files in the demo version, once I was registered and I set Twin loose with my 60 gig iPhoto library, things started going horribly wrong. The first failure was a result of me pausing the backup (using the server applications pause feature) since I needed the bandwidth for something else, except when I went to continue the backup the server crashed. 30 Gigs of upload wasted.

The second failure happened after about 40 gigs of the backup had completed. Starting from scratch.

The third failure happened after about 50 gigs of the backup had completed. Once again, starting from scratch.

You see, aside from the fact that the program doesn’t seem to be able to reliably handle large backups (as is evident from the crashes), it also can’t recover gracefully from said crashes - if a backup is not completed to 100% (a process that can take a very long time with a slow DSL upstream connection handling 60 gigs of upstream content), the program simply orphans everything that was backed up to the point of the failure and wants to start all over again when you restart.

Ridiculous you might say, but after discussing the problem with the developer, confirmed. Apparently no interim index of check files are written during the backup, and if it fails to complete for any reason whatsoever, you loose everything. Checking my server I can confirm that my last backup attempt successfully transferred just over 50 gigs (spanning the period of numerous days worth of saturated upstream transfer) and the files are there, but there is absolutely no way to re-associate those files to Twin and make it continue where it left off. Even if I attempted to manually handle the files that it did manage to backup it would prove infuriating since Twin aggravates files into batches, ZIP’s them, splits then as required, and (I understand) renames the source files to fit it’s own backup schema.

There is a feature to “recover an orphaned backup”, however again, it only works if the backup in question was 100% completed (at least once) to begin with, and then the Server app somehow lost it’s configuration of such.

So, after wasting over 120 gigs of bandwidth, I’ve given up. The developer did last respond saying a future version will address this issue, but when I inquired as to the anticipated release date of the new version, I received no response. I’m considering asking for a refund and looking for an alternative backup solution that does what I need, but I can’t seem to find anything else that handles things quite the same way Twin does - this is of course why I bought it to begin with.

The only good part of the story is that I have an ISP that offers me a generous 250gb/Month allowance so these failures aren’t going to cost me an arm and a leg in overage charges, but I still can’t help but feel a bit ripped off.

Finding myself suddenly unemployed (a whole other story) I have started to spend my spare time scrutinizing our monthly bills not only to better categorize where our money is going, but to see where money can be saved.

Typically we receive our bills in the mail, open them, pay them, and forget about it. We are far too guilty of often not paying enough attention to the actual contents and charges on said bills unless the amounts seem grossly out of line, and even worse yet, we often do not pay enough attention to amounts that automatically debit from our bank account every month.

However, having a sudden increase in spare time I started to look closer and immediately noticed several problems and questionable charges. Simple enough, I figure - I’ll call the businesses in question:

1/ Fido, our cellphone carrier. They had charged me $20 for a long distance call that shouldn’t have been long distance to begin with.

2/ The Toronto Star newspaper. A 1-year promotional subscription price for which we paid $100 only a few months ago is mysteriously up for renewal already and they want more money.

3/ Scotiabank. A large payment we made against our RV last summer was apparently not applied correctly and has resulted in a large account problem that we didn’t become aware of until Friday because nobody bothered to call us and question the situation.

However, this is where the frustration begins. Why do companies just automatically assume that you are trying to rip them off, or you are just trying to be a thorn in their side when you dispute something?

The root of my complaint with Fido was a charge for nearly $20 worth of long distance for a single call. Now, I know long distances is expensive on my plan because I have an unlimited minute urban plan which despite offering unlimited minutes, also offers a high rate for long distance calls.

When I called to dispute the situation they instinctively assumed I was trying to scam them. Despite being nowhere near where the call states it originated on my bill (we were actually about 20 kilometers south when I started the call) they insisted that despite the fact that “it could be a network anomaly” that I was still responsible for the charge and no credit would be given. However, where I actually originated the call from (and to) should have incurred no long distance charge, so I remained steadfast in my rebuttal. When I pressed the matter the rep put me on hold and came back and offered me a 50% credit. Only when I pressed the matter further did a I finally get a supervisor who gave me a 100% credit.

It took nearly 45 minutes to accomplish and I’m convinced if I hadn’t pressed on I would have ended up simply eating the $20.

The Toronto Star conveniently had a computer system problem when I called and the representative couldn’t help me whatsoever, nor was he able to call me back when it was fixed, but instead suggested I call back “throughout the day” to see when their computers were back up. I have not yet solved this issue.

Of all three of today’s challenges Scotiabank was at least relatively straightforward to deal with, although it required an in-person visit to the local branch and being shuffled between several different people. In the end at least they admitted the mistake and offered to remedy it, but there was little done to address how the problem had occurred to begin with beyond fixing the results.

Customer service seems to be an increasingly lost art.

It’s bad enough that I’m looking at the greater then average possibility of getting laid off in another few months (yet another victim of the recession) but I’m also going to involuntarily loose a days pay when this years Ontario holiday “Family Day” arrives on Monday February 16′th.

This holiday was introduced last yet rather hastily by the Ontario Government in an effort to provide Ontarians with a break in the middle of the winter doldrums. Within the province it is a statutory holiday so employers are obligated to pay their employees for the day much like any other major holiday. However, there was a loophole that the government really didn’t consider, and the result is that quite a few Ontarians get the day off, but don’t get paid for it, like it or not.

See, the holiday is only recognized within the province of Ontario as an actual holiday - most of the rest of Canada with the exception of a few other provinces (that also have a similar holiday on the same day) do not recognize it. As such, it’s not really a universally accepted “Federal” holiday, but simply a “Provincial” holiday.

I work for a federally regulated company, but with one exception (General Motors) almost the exclusive majority of our customers are provincially regulated, hence, closed. What this basically means is that I’m not needed on Family Day, yet my company is not obligated by law to pay me for it either. So, I get forcefully laid off (without pay, of course) to “enjoy” my day.

Yes, a long weekend in February is great. Being forced to take it without pay, not so much.