My hosting provider lost a server, and their most recent backup of my database was from Wednesday. That was newer than what I had, so that’s what I’ve got. Any comments submitted between then and mid afternoon today have been lost. I was luckier with my posts: I write most of them in ecto and had them backed up on my lappy.

At least the Sox won.

crash, recovery, suck

I’m back in Oakland Airport, but this time I’m bringing my own network and I don’t have to deal with Sprint’s WIFI mess.

See, the problem isn’t just that it costs too much. The problem is that once you pay, you’re plopped at the login page where the login I just created doesn’t work.

And worse, the error offers absolutely no clue about why the username I just just created (and paid for!) would fail. NONE.

Fortunately, I’d left my signup confirmation open in another tab and was able to go back to look at the fine print. It was there that I learned I might have to log in with my username@wifi.sprintpcs.com. Might!

error message, errors, oak, oakland airport, sprint, suck, ui, wifi

I gave up on Hostgator a while ago, and I thought I’d cancelled my account until I noticed they were still charging me monthly (yeah, I should pay more attention to what’s on my CC bill). When I contacted them about it they claimed I never fully cancelled. Here’s a copy of the form I submitted:

HGSales #GSW-[[private]]
October 3, 2005 8:10:40 PM EDT
Subject: CANCELLATION
Department: Hostgator Sales
Request Details:
Your Email: : [[private]]
Domain name: : MaisonBisson.com
Your sites username: : [[private]]
Your sites password: : [[private]]
Why do you wish to cancel? : Poor service.
Do you give us permission to terminate your entire account
as soon as you submit this form? : Yes 

Hostgator’s complaint was that they then responded to that with an email asking me to confirm that I wanted to close the account. Here’s the text of that message:

Greetings.

Was there anything we could assist you with
to maintain your account today?

I ignored the message, as everybody involved knew there was nothing at that point they could do to keep my business. What I didn’t realize was that they were going to hold this over me a few months later when I realized they were still charging me the monthly hosting fees — even though I had checked the box clearly labeled “terminate [my] entire account!”

After being rebuffed by Hostgator, I contacted the Southeast Florida Better Business Bureau about the matter. I’m not exactly sure how these things work, but once the BBB interceded, Hostgator claimed they’d refund the hosting fees (though I have yet to see the refund).

Thing is, based on the comments I get on the original story, and the stuff I just read at Hostgator-sucks.com, I’m not the only one who feels screwed by Hostgator. And instead of fixing their hosting problems and shaping up their shady customer service, they’re trying to C&D the hostgator-sucks.com site.

billing, business practice, customer service, honesty, hostgator, hostgator-sucks.com, hosting provider, problem resolution, shady, suck

Brian’s comment at RemainingRelevant should resonate with many of us:

Something to consider about why libraries end up with bad interfaces (at least as far as catalogs go) is that it might be that the people who use the interface (and help the public use it) are not the people who decide which interface to use.

When it comes to demanding better from vendors [...] consortiums like mine seem to place more emphasis on “cheap and reliable” than in “useful to the patrons.”

More than identifying individual vendors, I’d like this to be a discussion about our decision making processes. Let’s look carefully at how we got here — not to point fingers (for we are all responsible), but to plot a path out and try to make sure we never find ourselves here again.

As Karen points out: it’s not enough to nod our heads in a knowing sigh, “the genius moment for you or anyone else will be figuring out what to do with it!”

It’s corny, but I’m serious. If you’ve taken the pledge, you’ll know to look skeptically at every product. You’ll ask yourself and a mix of likely users how it could be better. And you won’t buy anything or renew any contract on anything that sucks. There is no consortium, no institution that can afford to throw away money on products that can’t deliver the ease of use and quality of experience that users expect from competing (and more familiar) tools elsewhere on the internet.

The real challenge, of course, is making sure everybody involved with every decision-making process understands this.

compare, decision, decision making, market, market forces, process, software, suck, sucks, sucky, the pledge, training, usability, vendors

A: Because we compare them to the wrong things.

I’m in training today for a piece of software used in libraries. It’s the second of three days of training and things aren’t going well. Some stuff doesn’t work, some things don’t work the first (second, third…ninth) time, and other things just don’t make sense. At lunch, one of the other participants mentioned to the trainer that some of the activities in the software seemed to have too many steps, too many places to go wrong, too many turns between beginning and end.

The answer began by explaining that the most analogous activity would be the acquisition of books for the collection. Adding a book to the collection requires first identifying the book, reading the reviews, choosing to purchase, identifying a vendor and cost, identifying funding, ordering, receiving, cataloging…

The list went on, perhaps with too much detail, but it landed on the following: “there are at least 12 steps to just putting a book on the shelf. When you think about it like that, our software is easy.”

I bit my tongue at that moment, but I’ve been grinding my teeth about it since.

Here’s what’s eating me: You can compare one unlikable thing to any other unlikable thing and come out ahead, but what about “real-world” comparisons?

Paul Graham explains in his “Hardest Lessons For Startups To Learn” essay that developers often compare themselves to the wrong things, misunderstanding who their competition is:

A lot of startups worry “what if Google builds something like us?”

What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don’t know exist yet. They’re way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they’re cornered animals.

Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing. A corollary is that you shouldn’t relax just because you have no visible competitors yet. No matter what your idea, there’s someone else out there working on the same thing. (emphasis added)

Graham is talking to startups, but switch some words around and you’ll get my message: if you compare yourself to something that sucks, you’ll only be able to say you’re more or less sucky.

A better comparison for this product would have been against flickr, where activities that are closely analogous to those in the software we’re being trained on often require only one step. And taking Graham’s advice, the best way to approach it would be constantly ask “can we do this better?” “Could a competitor we don’t yet know about do this better?”

(Aside: social software is that which gets spammed, that which gets you laid, and that which you’ll need no training on.)

Please, stand with me now and repeat:

When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.

Together, we’ll fix the world one product at a time.

bad answers, compare, comparison, competition, crap, developers, development, failure, future libraries, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, software, startups, suck, sucks, sucky, training, vendors

“Web Pages That Suck: learn usability and good Web design by looking at bad Web design.”

web design, web, suck