Just reading Slashdot about technical support (and some of the calls I have come through – kak!), and this comment with the remark: Although I think the funniest, in terms of "what was this guy smoking?" was this one kid who, during a reboot, felt the burning need to ask: "So, know any good warez sites?"
Reminded me of a telephone call the other week with one of our hosting customers (as well as internet web hosting, the company I work for is also one of the UK leaders in search engine optimization). We had this customer ask “Do you know any good sites about search engine optimization?” – now, if most of you time is spent finding good sites, forums etc etc about your main sector of business would you respond with anything else then “Yes”?

Obviously, they asked “Well, can you tell me a few?”, my response (knowing roughly how much this customer was spending on hosting: he’s in the top 5 spenders btw) was “Unfortunately not – but if you use a search engine you’ll be able to find them”. Bad customer support? Well, the tech support team supports our webservers and that’s it so it was a “correct response” plus the fact that a few days later he signed up with us for a mid range search engine optimization package so

I’m just getting a few emails tricking through my mail system which indicates that my domain has been used in a “joe job” for sending spam. Basically, this means that a spammer has forged one of my domain names for sending out spam to people.

Damn.

If you’re not sure what a “joe job” is, have a look at the spam jargon file which defines it as:

To ‘joe’ someone is to forge e-mail messages or Usenet postings so as to make another person or domain appear responsible for it. Usually done in order to harass the person or domain being joed. Named for joes.com, an ISP which was damaged as a result of being joed.

At the moment I’m only getting vacation/auto-responder replies, but as soon as I get my hands on the spam and I’m able to trace it to the source…Grr….

It’s 1.30am on the night of the hottest day of the year so far – so why on earth am I STILL working? I’ve handled around half a dozen technical support queries (most of them through our “Live Support service”), fixed a minor long standing bug in our helpdesk, checked settings in the billing system, rolled out Live Support to another site, have a “conference chat” with one of our suppliers and…

I’m a mug aren’t I? (and, no, not a cup of tea – mug such as “fool/loony”). I’ve got CODE to write AND blog entries to make (I’ve found a funny TV advertisement I want to blog about AND a new search engine which I quite like)…

Firda’s mother sadly passed away today

It also comes on top of the fact that a friend is having to attend their grandfather’s funeral today makes today a bit of a bummer

When you are writing a template engine for a new site, and want to test a bit of logic: the following will fail:

{%if 1>2%}
Logic works
{%/if%}

Why? Well, 1 is not greater than 2! Took me nearly 15 minutes to try and figure out why “Logic works” wasn’t showing – the logic was working, but my brain obversely wasn’t at that point!