Friday, April 30, 2010

Toshiba Support

Need to have a laptop fixed. I sent it to a local repair place. Toshiba sent a bad motherboard to replace the bad motherboard with. They would not send another one. Need to send laptop to toshiba themselves for repair. Would not give me a shipping label via email, so I need to pay for shipping just to get this unit out the door.

Guy who I spoke with at Toshiba was "trying" to be helpful, but ultimately made things hard and made me repeat myself several times. Dumb support is not better than no support. Please note this.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Updates


I am going to be expanding to business clients, so the higher priced phones will definitely be updated and added, just to have them listed. I think, though, I will have the website itself have them listed as a "call us to purchase" type of option.

Also, as an FYI, a future plan will be to lease out this database of phones and images, so that I can make some money back on it. You see how much trouble it was to create? Anyone would be crazy to bother doing it themselves,

After I recently updated the server, my website has been completely broken. I needed to hire a programmer to fix the worst of it. I am hiring another programmer to fix the next wave of problems, like the SSL security will not work with Virtual Hosting anymore. And today I hope to get through the last of the visual updates... the website has looked partly beige like always, and now partly like the new blue waves and steel. Has not looked right at all.

I am going through a major growth spurt for all my businesses. The phones are about to reach a business customer base with newspaper based advertising. I fixed 4 computers last week. I have been picking up retouching work from eLance, and I am also going to start getting more local recognition from photographers I think too. Maybe I should send out postcards to local photographers?

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Ebay Sales

eBay sales sucked this month. Not for lack of trying, it's just that I received many emails from people telling me that Paypal would not let them pay. Nice. Really nice. Luckily, I just made a sale from there, so at least my fees for the month are covered.

Bonanzle First Sale

Three weeks, and I made my first sale with Bonanzle. Overall, the traffic is abysmal. Not sure if I made the sale because I signed up for their pay servicees, or despite them.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Social Side Effect

Unexpected thing happened when I signed up with Shopzilla last month. They are attach to BizRate I guess. Bizrate is attached to dozens of smaller sites. I also signed up with Facebook, linked in, twitter, etc. Apparently, when I just did a search for my company name, I am now all but dominating the top 100 search. I would say, half the stuff on there ultimately points back to my own website. Some of this stuff we intentionally planted, but much of it are residuals. For example, coupon websites all read from each other's databases.

To completely dominate in a search with 34 million pages, is no small feat, I assure you.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Waiving the Bounce Fee

In one week, my wife and myself had 6 bounce fees from our bank.

Hey, don't look at me like that. You know how it is. One penny off, and they start bouncing everything. In my case, I blame my Merchant Provider helping themselves to my money without warning of pending chargebacks (which are bullshit unto themselves).

Anyway, I digress. So, I go to Wachovia, tell them I want out of the Bounce Fee program... don't pay it and charge me extra for that wonderful service, just deny the transaction. So, the woman said no problem, blah blah blah, she chnages it and we leave. So, here I am like 2 weeks later, and I have another bullshit $35.00 fee. I call up to find out what happened. On my side, I put extra money for my eBay fees into the wrong account (yeah, I know, my bad). The issue here is that they didn't pay ebay, but they charged me a $35.00 fee anyway! Fucking banks, and companies, always out to screw you anyway they can.

Vonage

I needed another telephone line, so I signed up with Vonage which currently has a $14.99 special going on. While the price is right, and customer service3 picked right up, I was needed to speak with 3 people, who did not resolver either of my issues within the first 10 minutes of becomeing a customer.

Issue #1: I noticed I also have to pay an extra $2.00 per month for 911 service. Despite the fact that I said I do not want it, and do not need it, they said it was government, and could not be waved. I said it was just an extra fax line with no phone attached. Didn;t matter, still cost extra $24/yr for no reason.

Issue #2: I realized that they billed my credit card right away, and will bill my credit card again in 4 weeks, however I can't do anything with the service, since they will not ship the Phone Adapter for 2-3 more days, plus the weekend, plus shipping time. Basically, I am paying for a week to a week and a half for services that are not being rendered. I was told, too bad, I should have read the fine print on page 5, where they pointed that out.

Nice. So, I told her I would post about it on my blog, and to have a nice day.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

SMTP Relay Server

I have had spotty on/off good/bad service from Comcast's built in relay server for years now. They finally broke what I had going on here, so I could not longer send my email out. After some searching, I found companies that will allow me to use them for relaying my email. The cost is quite affordable. I finally decided on DNSExit.com where I picked the 150 emails a day plan for a whole 1.99/mo. They actually had it less for a full year, but I wosn't sure if it was going to be worthe it or not. However, I CAN say that I no longer need to worry about my internet providers garbage anymore trying to restrict me running a business from a residential service.
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