I've had it up to there with Orcon

You can read the rest of my story on my WordPress blog, but the service these guys have given me is unbelievable, BAD that is.

This is my status for today for the rest follow my link below.

So if you read my previous blog you will know that our phone line died yesterday. So This afternoon I rang Orcon to find ut what is happening. I rang the 0800 number and selected landlines and waited for a response which came pretty quickly and I got a very polite response from Jamie who advised me that she had to pass me on to a different department because the other department was responsible for the port change. She also explained that the port change affected the landline and the broadband connection.

So off to another department and another woman who advised me that they were still waiting for a technician to advise the date when someone would do a port change!

I said “Are you telling me that I have no phone and that you can’t even tell me when someone will advise when they will look at it?” Correct, it might be this afternoon, they do work on Saturdays so someone might turn up then or, well they just don’t know because it is another department.

I asked if they would forward incoming phones to a mobile and they have agreed to do that, but why couldn’t they suggest that in the first place? Basically this now means that people can contact us without having to know our mobile numbers and without having to pay for the toll call, but it does also mean that we have to pay mobile call rates for the outgoing local calls, but at least we have communications.

But we have no idea when our home phone line wll be reconnected.

Since last night I have had 2 people come to me saying that they had been planning to move to Orcon and now won’t. Would you like to be in on a sweepstake as to when I will have a home phone line? Or perhaps hw many times my internet will disconnect today? Yes, funny isn’t it, I still have a Broadband connection at home even if I don’t have the phone. I just checked, so far my broadband has disconnected 18 times today.

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Microsoft Office is vulnerable to remote code execution through specially-crafted OneNote URLs. Read More

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Ingredients:

1x E4800 2.4GHz C2D workstation w/4GB RAM, 250GB HDD ~$1000NZD (It does some other tasks too)

2x Logitech Z2300 THX Cert 400w RMS 2.1 speakers ~$200NZDea (Director + IT Guy)

1x Logitech Z4 2.1 ~$70NZD (Reception)

1x ... (more in the full post)

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Last Friday, Microsoft finalised the code for the RC 1 (Release Candidate 1) prerelease versions of both Windows Small Business Server 2008, and Windows Essential Business Server 2008. See below for download links.

Rumour has it that organis... (more in the full post)

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Multiple Mozilla products are vulnerable to a stack buffer overflow allowing remote code execution by enticing a user to click on a specially-crafted URL. Read More

Isn't competition in the mobile marketplace fantastic? It's a concept that unfortunately New Zealanders are missing out on due to the cosy duopoly that exists between our two mobile providers - Telecom New Zealand and Vodafone.

Optus have just launched unlimited "timeless" mobile plans into the Australian marketplace. For A$99 per month you get unlimited calling to other mobiles and landline phones in Australia as well as unlimited SMS and MMS messages. This $99 pack however isn't quite $99 - it requires the purchase of a A$14.95 mobile pack that gives you 200MB of included data.

For A$129 however you receive unlimited calling, SMS and MMS along with 2GB of data.



Now compare that to what you're paying in NZ. Competition really is a great thing.

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How well companies that offer something for "free" can do with a subscription option?

When there are so many "free" things on the web, one has to wonder how companies can keep their products up and running (or even if they can manage to get out of beta).

Some companies just don't. They close the service and tell the customers to get out of here:

Personal Media: Bluestring, Xdrive and AOL Pictures will be sunset. These consumer storage products haven't gained sufficient traction in the marketplace or the monetization levels necessary to offset the high cost of their operation. We have found that building media management applications within the context of a social experience is a more rapid and effective way to grow the business. For example, today the Bebo audience is uploading over three million photos per day. To effectively grow the XDrive online storage business we would need to focus on subscription revenues vs. monetizing through advertising revenue, and this business model is not in strategic alignment with our company's goals. We are exploring plans to migrate our users assets to ensure the best possible transition experience.

This is part of the memo AOL sent out to staff explaning the end of some of their services - including Xdrive an on-line storage service that offered 5 GB of storage free to anyone.

There's a reason why people buy external drives for home or buy Windows Home Server or NAS boxes. First broadband speed sucks around the world. Then the services don't work as expected or not as easily (Xdrive is only one that I know that could be mounted as a drive on your OS so you could just copy things from and to instead of having to open a browser window). And even so it was very unstable.

Which leads me to the next one: the on-line service businesses seem to be quite unreliable - unless they are a subscription service with a SLA, not a freebie. But even so sith happens.

When there are lots of free things, some won't last long.

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