How to communicate with your customers
Posted on July 31, 2006
Filed Under Internet & Technology | Leave a Comment
Ironically, both Dreamhost and Media Temple had the same problem on Friday due to a power outage at their building.
Here’s the way Media Temple addressed the issue to their customers.
(mt) Media Temple Operations
Availability issues on Friday, July 28th 1:00pm
2:05 PM on Jul 28, 2006 PSTAt approximately 1:00PM PDT today (July 28th), the building where (mt) Media Temple’s (LA-IDC2) data center is located experienced a power related failure. Unfortunately, information from the building management at the Garland Building is sparse - lacking important detail. It is speculated that one of the building’s back-up generators created an anomaly in the power system that caused a building-wide momentary outage. This information has not been confirmed however.
(mt) Media Temple’s staff has responded to this issue with the utmost urgency by fully staffing the company and answering all customer phone calls and support tickets. At the time of this writing, all power systems are operational and (mt) engineers are currently bringing customer servers back up and repairing file systems that may have become temporarily corrupted.
This incident is clearly an unacceptable situation for our company and our customers. One aspect of (mt) Media Temple’s Scheduled Maintenance notice, sent yesterday (July 27th), was a proactive measure to address situations such as this. In light of today’s situation (mt) Media Temple has decided to accelerate its plans to move all customers in (IDC-LA2) to its new data center which is already built, and has undergone exhaustive testing to insure such power issues will not be a problem in the future. More details about this will be sent shortly.
Our President and CEO, Demian Sellfors, is making himself personally available to call customers back who wish to discuss these issues in more detail. We encourage any customer who wishes to receive a call back from Mr. Sellfors to please indicate so inside your support ticket. Shortly, he will be calling customers back individually to address any concerns and to discuss any relevant issues.
Here is how Dreamhost responded to the exact same problem:
Brief Explanation for today’s power outage
Posted 2 days, 15 hours ago (July 28th, 2006 at 3:05 pm PST) by DallasThis note came from our building just now:
The Garland Building experienced a dead short which resulted in a
brief power outage today, July 28, 2006. The air conditioning,
elevators, and the electrical utility have all been restored.While on generator power, a dead short occurred from one of our
internal telecom users. We are investigating where the dead short
occurred. A follow-up memo will be sent by the end of the business
day reconfirming our transfer at 11:30pm tonight. We are currently
on DWP power until further notice.Posted in System Outages
Power restored
Posted 2 days, 16 hours ago (July 28th, 2006 at 2:34 pm PST) by RalphPower has been restored and most servers are up again. The few servers that are still down are being rebooted by our administrators. Still waiting on further information from the datacenter. Our apologies for the downtime this caused.
Posted in System Outages
Power outage at the datacenter
Posted 2 days, 17 hours ago (July 28th, 2006 at 1:46 pm PST) by RalphThere has apparently been another power outage at the datacenter. We’re waiting for more information and we’ll post here as soon as we hear anything.
Funny thing is, I was so busy on Friday working on C3 stuff (which is on Pair) I didn’t even notice if momathome.com had any downtime.
Neither Dreamhost or Media Temple are to blame for a power issue in their building. But look at the two responses side-by-side and judge for yourself which company has a better handle on customer service. When I am responsible for the well-being of something, no matter how much I’m paid for it, I take it personally when I can’t live up to my client’s expectations. That’s why I’m moving sites on my own time. It’s not my fault that Dreamhost went downhill so much in the past few months, but I still feel that I owe these folks an explanation and I have to do everything in my power to correct the situation so it doesn’t happen again. When will Dreamhost finally take responsibility for the fact that their customer service and support model sucks?
Sounds like a conversation I have over and over with my kids, “It wasn’t your fault that (whatever)…. but you had choices in how you reacted to (whatever) and that’s what has to change. The only thing you can control, and what you are praised or judged for, is what you do and the choices you make, even when it’s ‘not your fault’.”
innatstarlightlake.com has just been moved. 7 more to go.
Computer therapy
Posted on July 29, 2006
Filed Under Kids | 3 Comments
The school district here has been fantastic for Laini academically. But the related services (speech, occupational therapy, physical therapy, etc.) haven’t been as good as she got in Stamford. (Thank you, Norwalk Rehab). The team in Stamford recognized that Laini had signifcant sensory and motor planning issues so the OT & PT worked together with the classroom teachers to address those issues. We all agreed that as long as her handwriting was legible, it wasn’t something to spend a lot of time on.
Here, all the OT does is handwriting. It’s a waste, completely ignoring the bigger issues. Laini is able to do grade-level work, but she has to be in a small classroom with a lot of attention given to her sensory needs in order for her to succeed. I raised the sensory issue at her annual review and I was told “sensory diet is something that you should do at home.” Yes, but….
I got some referrals and we took Laini to see Sara Seemann, an Occupational Therapist in Princeton who specializes in sensory integration issues. She referred us to an audiologist, who found that Laini has central auditory processing issues, and a pediatric opthamologist, who found that Laini has “convergence inefficiencies” which means she can see 20/20 but her eye muscles are weak so she doesn’t track moving objects well. Her sight and hearing are near perfect (audiologist said she can probably hear grass grow), but her brain is not properly interpreting the signals it receives.
When I was a kid, I had similar visual issues and I did visual therapy for a while. What did that mean in the mid 70s? I had to spend 15-20 minutes a day staring at pencils and working my eyes to keep the pencil in focus as I moved it closer to my nose. Gave me headaches.
What does Laini have to do? Play computer games! Five days a week, for about 20 minutes at a stretch, she has to wear 3-D glasses and work through exercises in the HTS vision therapy program. It’s a series of exercises designed to address very specific issues as coded into the system by the eye doctor. Most exercises are a 3-D space invaders-type game that makes the left and right eye muscles work harder in order to keep the moving targets in focus. Her results are uploaded over the Internet to a server that the eye doctor can access to follow her progress. The program runs just fine on the kids’ Mac Mini, and the $200 cost is considered “durable medical equipment” so insurance is covering it as an out-of-network expense (at around 80% after deductible). She’ll also be starting a similar listening program to work on her auditory processing issues (likely something like FastForWord, but we’ll see what the therapist recommends after the reports come in).
This isn’t the first time that there’s been homework from Laini’s therapy, but I always wonder if I’m doing it right or long enough. With the computer, I only have to be there to look over her shoulder for moral support and if there’s a technical glitch. The computer program does the rest, and stops when it’s time to stop. Good stuff. We go back to the eye doctor in two months and we’ll see if the therapy is making any difference. We’re hopeful.
Diigo: a decent new social bookmarking/annotating site
Posted on July 29, 2006
Filed Under Internet & Technology | Leave a Comment
A couple of weeks ago, I received an email inviting me to join the private beta of Diigo, with the hope that I’d blog about it when it launched. I’m almost a week late but here’s my entry about it.
I tried Diigo out of curiosity, not expecting that I’d like it enough to switch from del.icio.us and Evernote for keeping track of websites. Well, I tried Diigo and it’s not bad. I’ll probably keep it and hope that it will grow into something ahead of the pack instead of being yet-another-social-bookmark site.
Like del.ico.us, Furl, Blinklist, etc. it’s a social bookmark site. Save and tag your sites, find them later. See what other people are saving with the same tags (or save private). Nothing groundbreaking there.
What I like about Diigo is the Firefox toolbar.
It’s the little things…Diigo’s toolbar has a visual indicator showing you whether or not you’ve already bookmarked the site and/or whether others have left comments about this site.
Not bookmarked:
Bookmarked with comments from others:
When you have a lot of sites saved, it’s nice to have the visual feedback to know whether a site is already in your collection or not. You can highlight and “sticky note” a page to remind yourself as to why you bookmarked that page in the first place.
When you highlight over text on a website, a little Diigo mini-menu automatically pops up with some handy options (no clicking required):
The Google Toolbar has been acting up on me so I had to uninstall it a while back (it was causing text in windows to partially disappear…known issue). Diigo’s toolbar has many of Google’s features, particularly the ability to highlight search terms on the page. Enter a term and then select which search engine you want the search to happen at, including Google, Technorati, IMDB, music sites, Blogpulse and others. I wish it had Google Suggest or the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds, but maybe in another version.
The only thing I don’t like is the fact that when you bookmark a page, all the tags that anyone ever tagged the page are filled in the pop-up:
I’m rather careful about my tags. I don’t want 400 different tags, each used once. I don’t need webdev, webdevelopment, websitedesign, webdes, etc. I want to evaluate how the page has been tagged by others and then access my tags and make a tagging decision based on a combination of what I’ve already done and what makes sense for that page. In that respect, I much prefer the del.icio.us implementation which looks at your existing tags and makes suggestions, as well as what others have tagged the page. Click those that work. Who needs to create 30 different tags on every page and have a cloud of 876 tags all with the same weight?
So I find myself wiping out diigo’s suggested tags (which can be many irrelevant and similar tags) and using autocomplete to tag based on the tags I already have, keeping the overall list under control. The diigo does have the ability to add bookmarks to del.ico.us simultaneously, but I’d rather do it manually to take advantage of the better tagging window.
A good work week
Posted on July 28, 2006
Filed Under Nonprofit | Leave a Comment
Okay, so it didn’t start out that great. We didn’t get the Salesforce grant. But that’s okay, I’m managing to import transactions from GetActive to Salesforce without a lot of headache and I may still be able to get some of the process automated.
But it’s been mostly really good:
- We got mentioned in the Washington Post.
- We scored a victory in New York! Governor Pataki signed the Colon-Prostate Treatment Act into law. This makes New York the first state with Medicaid coverage of treatment for colon cancer, if the cancer was found through a state-funded screening program. We got hundreds of folks to call and email the Governor urging him to sign, and I’m sure the extra pressure from us helped seal the deal. Now to get the rest of the country to follow New York’s model.
- We hired an Executive Director! This has been a long and careful process, and we’re very happy with our final choice. An offer was made and accepted this week. I won’t say more about her until we make our formal announcement, but I’m thrilled. My job will evolve a bit. I’ll get to spend more time on the parts of my job that I love doing (technology, website, visual communication, branding, messaging, strategy, etc.) and less on the day-to-day grind of managing an organization long distance.
3 down, 8 to go
Posted on July 28, 2006
Filed Under Internet & Technology | Leave a Comment
Sheesh, there are advantages to having a lot of sites on one account. This isn’t one of them. Still no regrets about my decision to cut and run, especially after Dreamhost had yet another extended power issue today. Yeah, I know it was a California problem…maybe it’s time to move? 
Eric’s site and ctcdd.org have been completely switched over to Media Temple. I just put in the name server change for ctkasa.org. That one is now hosted at 8-95.com. I never heard of them, but one of the folks working with CT KASA likes them, so it’s good enough for me. Certainly it has one of the easiest control panels to navigate.
That leaves only 8 more sites to move. ::sigh:: What concerns me is that I haven’t heard back from 3 of the site owners at all this week. I have to think that they’re on vacation or something. I’ll give it until Labor Day before worrying too much about it. In the meantime, I have quite a few more evenings watching FTP upload progress bars. Most of the remaining sites I have to worry about are really easy…just email accounts and files. No databases to futz with, which has been the most complicated and time consuming part of these moves.
