So last year, I literally never got into the waiting room to buy Cubs tickets, but this year I am in for two games! I am pretty pumped about it, this is going to be a good summer I can feel it. I am going to the June 14th game against the Twins (bleachers) and the August 28th game against the Mets (upper deck infield box). Should be a great time as always!
I was having some issues getting my development environment for ColdFusion setup today at home. I found ColdFusion 8 Vista SP1 Solution! posted by Dale Fraser explaining how to properly configure IIS when installing ColdFusion 8 with IIS7. I proceeded with his simple instructions for IIS and then uninstalled/reinstalled ColdFusion and everything is perfect.
Funny story. I forgot my login to this site I use frequently. After a few unsuccessful attempts, I completed the password retrieval form and checked my email for the response. I received no response after a decent amount of time had passed, so I started up their live chat feature to ask for assistance. They tried to send it again manually with no luck, so I figured it might be an issue with Hotmail. I asked if I could have the information sent to my work email. Here is the funny part. The response I get is that I need to provide my password and last four digits of my credit card. I had to laugh at the fact that guy is asking me to provide my password as authentication so he can email me my password that I do not know.
I know for a fact that I have justified not using a queryparam when dealing with lists as I was not aware of the attribute described in this post. Pretty helpful bit of information here posted by Dan Wilson.
http://www.nodans.com/index.cfm/2009/1/12/CFQueryparam-and-Lists
Seriously…arguably the worst customer service on the face of the earth. First off, after six months my “12 month rate” suddenly disappeared. They told me I was mistaken and it was only a six month rate. I thought I would bluff a little so I said I would consider canceling my service for satellite if they did not keep it going for the remainder of the year. Their response was simply, “Would like me to transfer you over to cancellations now?” I felt like an idiot since I really had no intention of canceling so I just said no and got off the call. Looked dumb, felt dumb.
So the other day we were having more problems with the service. Constantly it we were having pixelation and just these pauses that would happen here and there and had been going on since I could remember. I thought about calling them, but then remembered the above experience, so instead I just called and signed up for satellite. This will not be connected for another two weeks and I have not informed Comcast of this yet.
In the meantime, I had some issues with the internet the other day, so I gave tech support a call and waited on hold for over twenty minutes and finally just hung up. I thought I would try again, but this time select the option for purchasing new services. Shocker, someone picked up immediately. Good to see that they do not keep enough staff on hand to help existing customers, but keep plenty on hand to sell you more garbage. I told the guy that I needed tech support and asked if he could connect me without the massive hold times. He of course replies that he cannot and pretty much acted like an ass to me for having bothered him with this.
Something is seriously wrong because when a business is allowed to be the only provider for their designated areas they basically couldn’t care less about earning their business. Why would they when its handed to them?
Apparently ColdFusion doesn’t appreciate using the IN criteria multiple times in a query with 25000+ values each.
So I donated blood for the first time today. All went pretty well except for the fact that I moved my arm after they lined things up and caused them to misfire on the first arm. The second arm went off without a hitch, but I was pretty disappointed by the fact that I lost in my race with a coworker next to me. I like to win at things. So I thought about posting pics of my arms, but upon further review, it’s pretty gross so I won’t.
I guess I am not too surprised. The bears love to finish seasons just well enough to get a crap draft pick and still not make the playoffs. Bright spots are Forte looks amazing for the future, Grossman should be gone by next season, and some of the younger additions to our secondary have promise going forward. Sad things are that the Bears likely think Orton is the quarterback of the future and will not go out and find a real starter, no playoffs, Urlacher is developing a pretty bad attitude, and our d-line has ceased to exist. Here’s to what the season could have been and to a good season in 2009. Could be worse, they could be the Lions.
One more thing. Mike Brown will probably be done after this year, but I will keep hoping the guy comes back for another year or at least stays involved with the organization in some way. This guy is has the attitude you’d like to see in all players.
So the original review process was on Ebay was awful since as a buyer, you were practically handcuffed into leaving positive feedback for sellers in the fear they would retaliate with a negative feedback for you. The clearly recognized this with their recent change where sellers can only issue positive or neutral feedback to a buyer. This may solve some problems, but there are still several flaws in this process.
Here is my proposed solution. A seller is required to leave feedback before the buyer leaves theirs. This would required the seller to leave an honest note about whether or not the person paid on time and did their part, without taking what the buyer left them as feedback into consideration. Once the seller has left their feedback, the buyer would then have permission to leave feedback for the seller. This is the order the transaction takes place, so why not the feedback? Yes, some might point out that this could give the same opportunity to the buyer to leave retaliation feedback. I argue that in the sales industry, the customer generally gets the benefit of the doubt and an online retailer or seller should conduct themselves similar to that of a department store when dealing with customers. Anyone else have thoughts on this or some ideas they figure to be more productive?
I was looking to scrub some phone fields that allow for some dirty varchar values at the moment, so I needed a tool to strip non-numeric values from the existing data to determine which records had legit phone numbers and which did not. Here is a quick function I wrote to help me with this in case anyone needed something similar. I included both the StripNonNumeric function and a more generic StripPattern function that you can use to basically do the same thing, but strip any pattern you like.