Showing posts with label have. Show all posts
Showing posts with label have. Show all posts

Review: Amazon Affiliates Program

No comments:
I don't use it all that much. Why? I can never remember my affiliate code, and even if I did I'd probably be too lazy to put it on the links. It could be a nice source of revenue, as they pay 4% on general stuff, 6% on gift cards, and 10% on Kindle stuff.

My Affiliate id is adventuinbaby-20. I'll go ahead and add a few widgets here.

(Note that this greasemonkey script would be very easy to adapt as a template script that would add your affiliate code to all Amazon links in the page. However, I like the idea of just inserting the product name into the search widget. No, you don't get a pretty picture but you make the process simple for the author.)

(Note: adding widgets to this post made the entire blog not load correctly. It seemed like an HTML parsing problem on Blogger's side.)

Review: TheServerSide.com

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From the about page: "TheServerSide.com is an online community for enterprise Java architects and developers, providing daily news, tech talk interviews with key industry figures, design patterns, discussion forums, satire, tutorials, and more."

The meat of the site is Enterprise oriented social media, with some (generally pretty good) original content. I particularly like the Tech Talks which are videos of presentations and interviews with JEE luminaries.

I don't hang out there very often anymore, since I'm mostly doing internet development these days, but it's on my radar.

I've been a member since 2004 or so. My username/password are:

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Review: Kate Bush holds up well. Very well.

No comments:
Hounds of Love coverKate Bush wrote and recorded Hounds of Love in 1985, and there is not a bad track, and several magical ones - including "Under Ice", "The Morning Fog", and "Waking the Witch". Some of the instrumentation sounds a little dated, but it's not distracting at all. Highly recommended.

(I should re-rip this in lossless format.)

Review: My Mouse (Logitech MX610)

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MX610 Laser Cordless MouseMy mouse is a Logitech MX610. It's a right-handed, wireless (2.4GHz) laser mouse. I generally like it and thought it was time to review it after using it for about 18 months. (It's funny how people always want to review things when they're new, rather than when they're old; it seems like a review is more useful in the latter case.)

Links:
It's a good mouse; wireless, laser. Some quirks, of course:
  • Ugly transciever sticks out of the computer (needs bluetooth)
  • Uses batteries pretty fast: 2 AA every month or two (needs recharger)
  • I sometimes hit the special mouse buttons on accident (needs fancy buttons removed)
  • I never hit the special mouse buttons on purpose. (needs fancy buttons removed)
  • Occasionally disconnects for no reason; powercycle is a workaround (needs better QA)
  • Logitech's product page is very hard to find, and when you do find it and click "support" you have to select your mouse all over again from drop-downs! Quite annoying, and it affects all of Logitech's products, apparently. (They could fix this with a small amount of JavaScript on their support page that can infer a product from referrer.)
For the most part I've been running quite happily without SetPoint, Logitech's driver/utility package, quite happily. I just installed it and it remains to be seen whether it's worth the cost (11M of RAM, and a taskbar icon). I'm pretty happy with it's ability to remap buttons to things I actually need; I'm VERY happy with the ability to horizontally scroll (equivalent to left and right arrow keys). I'm thinking key remapping will be a useful in Photoshop.

You can get this mouse for about $40-$50. There is a new version, the 620MX, and it looks like the only difference is the texture of the mouse wheel.

iPower: The worst Registrar ever?

3 comments:
For the love of God, don't do business with iPower (or iPowerWeb as they are also known).

What a horrible registrar. I wanted to transfer a domain away from them, so I got the login information from my client. I login and search around for a while (20 minutes or so) looking for the transfer authorization (EPP) code. It is nowhere to be found. So I check the help documents. There's plenty of info on transferring domains...in. NOTHING on transferring them OUT.

So I call the "24 hour customer service" line. I am on hold for 40 minutes. I get a kid who sounds like he's 12, but happy to help. He gives me an EPP code over the phone - a 5 digit number. "That doesn't sound right" I said to him. "Normally they are much longer, and consist of numbers, letters, mixed case, etc." He assures me it's right. "Oh," he says, "you have to unlock the domain from opensrs. I'll send a DIFFERENT username/password to the account holders contact email." "Fine," I said. Privately I had misgivings.

So I get off the phone and contact my client again - and ask him to forward me the new email. He does, I plug them into OpenSRS. They don't work. Oddly, they are the exact same crednetials as for the ipower.com site. Basically, that kid didn't know what he was talking about, and I resign myself to calling them again.

And I do call them, and this time the wait is 50 minutes. But it seems the person knows what they're talking about (he sounds like he's early twenties which is an improvement, I suppose). The end result is that he sent the OpenSRS credentials to my client's email address. But by now it's too late to call, so I'll have to wait till tomorrow to ask him to forward the email.

Even godaddy's process isn't that messed up, and that's saying something.

(I discovered I'm not the only one who had a bad experience.)

[Update: I had to bother my client to check his email, and it turned out that NO EMAIL EVER ARRIVED from iPower. So now I'm on the phone, and on chat, hoping to get this resolved. This will be my third and final attempt. I'm thinking that I'm not getting paid enough to deal with this bullshit; alternatively, I could/should have told my client to get the EPP code himself, as he's the one who picked this god awful registrar.]

[Update: I finally had an epiphany: I should update the admin email so I don't have to bother my client. I got on chat, and after a 2 hour 40 minute wait (!), I got someone to email me to the new password, and it works! But get this, because the initial clueless person gave me the WRONG EPP code, and I initiated a transfer, I have to figure out how to stop the transfer with the bad EPP code and restart it with the new one. Lovely. But at least I don't have to deal with iPower ever again. And hey, at least now I know.]