2009 October | Jesus Geek

The Bleeping Support Call of the Week

This week’s Bleeping Support Call of the Week comes from listener David Cervera:

It’s 4:57 p.m. on a Friday, and a call comes in (we close at 5:00). I sigh and pick up the call, hoping it’s a really simple call. It turns out the user is having problems connecting to a server at another, affiliated organization. I know the server exists, but I don’t know enough about our connection to it to troubleshoot at all. However, by this time, everyone else in IT is gone for the weekend. I end up paging people, calling people at home, even calling the Help Desk at the other organization trying to resolve the issue. It’s now 5:45, and I get back with the user to let her know we’re still working on the problem, that I’m paging people, etc., and she mentions, “Yeah, I’ve been having this problem all week.”

“Hold please…”

I think everyone in IT support has had their share of last minute support calls. They are frustrating and if they come before the weekend can make for a rough beginning to a much needed break.

If you’d like to submit your own story, here’s the low-down:

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Interview with Jeff Roney Part 2

JeffLargePic This week features part two of a three part interview with award-winning podcaster and social media advocate, Jeff Roney.

Jeff recently released Hosea: A Love Story, a full-cast audio drama adaptation of the book of Hosea. Before we get to Hosea, Jeff and I talk about his podcasting history and social media.

Sponsor: Try GotoAssist Express free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.GotoAssist.com/techpodcast

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:47 — 44.9MB)

The Bleeping Support Call of the Week

Starting today I will post a brief story every week about real support calls received by support technicians.

To begin with, I’d like to start with a voice mail I received this week.

The user left me a message that went something like this:

Hi John. I’m trying to work from home and I can’t get in through the VPN. I know you prefer email but I can’t get into the system.

This particular user was calling me from a Blackberry.

If you’d like to submit your own story, here’s the low-down:

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Using NoScript with Firefox video tutorial

This is a refresh of a previous tutorial I posted on YouTube. For more information about NoScript, visit http://www.noscript.net

Let your voice be heard

I got this in my Inbox the other day and thought I would pass it along. If you’d like to be able to express your opinions about advertising in podcasts, now is your chance!

RawVoice is asking that you consider participation in important research on consumers’ thoughts on advertising within their favorite Podcasts. The Association for Downloadable Media (ADM) Consumers Attitudes on Advertising & Sponsorship in Audio and Video Podcasts research project is a survey that should take your listeners about 10 minutes and does NOT ask for personal contact information.

The ADM, a nonprofit organization serving podcast producers, is looking for the podcast audience’s reactions to topics such as ad style, delivery and placement. The research will help podcast producers best fulfill the expectations of their listeners and viewers.

So, if you’d like to participate, go to http://www.takethesurvey.com/rawvoice and speak up! When asked to fill in the name of the podcast that referred you to the survey make sure you type “Jesus Geek”.

Lessons learned from the Dreamhost outage

Monday morning Dreamhost lost one of their FTP servers. It just so happens that my sites (all of them) are hosted on that one server. I’ll spare you the details of the outrage that ensued from other Dreamhost customers. Suffice it to say, this could happen to anyone unless they’re paying for some redundancy which most hobbyists like myself can’t afford. I’m not here to dump on Dreamhost. Given the situation, I think they did a fairly good job. Communication about the status of the server could have been more up-to-date and forthcoming but otherwise they did the best they could given the situation.

There were some lessons learned that I thought I would pass on to you. Most of this has been repeated in many other blog posts across the Internet but by looking at the comments on Dreamhost’s website, nobody seems to heed the advice.

You get what you pay for. Now, I’m not saying Dreamhost is an awful or sub-par hosting provider. What I’m saying is don’t assume you’re getting a particular service if you’re not paying for it. With a basic hosting package, DH doesn’t guarantee up-time, availability or that they will have a recent backup of your data.
Backup your data frequently. If you blog once a week you should be backing up your database and files on your website at least once a week. If you post more often (daily or multiple times a day) you may want to look at backing up more often.
Pay for upgraded services, if needed. I can’t stress this enough. If your livelihood depends on your website being up constantly then you should fork over the cash for redundancy, backups and a dedicated server. $10 a month goes a long way with most hosting providers but $50 will go much further.
Have a plan B. If you want your website to remain online no matter what happens, it might not be a bad idea to pay for a cheaper hosting service with another company and keep a shadow copy of your site there that you can get up and running in a short amount of time. It’s easy to do and all you’d have to wait for is DNS to propagate.
Chill out and be nice. Barraging your hosting provider with nasty email, comments and threats of a lawsuit will get you nowhere. In fact, you may be the last account restored once everything is up and running again.
So what? Podcasting is a hobby for me. I make a little money off the advertisements but not enough to say that an outage is going to hurt my bottom line. There are more important things in life.
I like turtles. I thought there needed to be a seventh point so I added this one for good measure.

To sum it all up: YOU are responsible for YOUR data.

Interview with Jeff Roney Part 1

JeffLargePic This week features part one of a three part interview with award-winning podcaster and social media advocate, Jeff Roney.

Jeff recently released Hosea: A Love Story, a full-cast audio drama adaptation of the book of Hosea. Before we get to Hosea, Jeff and I talk about his podcasting history and social media.

Sponsor: Try GotoAssist Express free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.GotoAssist.com/techpodcast

Read more

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:46 — 20.0MB)