Tag Archives: rant

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I am sick and tired of useless automated Email replies. Just turn them off! Because nobody cares. It’s a waste of bandwidth and a waste of everyone’s time! It messes up automated systems such as my support tickets or it ends up in spam anyway.

I don’t mean the real ones where you actually have something to relay to the original sender.
You know, when you’re away for more than a week. That’s fine, annoying sometimes but useful at the same time. It keeps me from wondering why you are ignoring me.

But, then this happened…

Earlier this week someone posted a support ticket. Which generates a confirmation email. Which got replied to by the persons auto responder which created another ticket and confirmation which got replied to by the auto responder. This created a 3rd ticket which again generated a ticket confirmation. Which got a automated response which made you end up in my servers spam queue.

Yes!! Serves you right!

And quite regularly when clearly the person is present and actively emailing me. There is this cheery message telling me the person is out of the office for vacation.

No you’re not, you just emailed me an hour ago! So turn that thing off!

And then the spammy ones that say;

Thanks for emailing me, check out my website in the meantime!

No, I won’t. Unless it’s work related I’m fairly sure I do not want to know about your website. Nor will your site tell me the stuff I emailed you for.

Or this;

Thanks for emailing, we’ll reply shortly.

Great, I didn’t expect a reply immediately anyway. And yes, you will reply shortly because we’re talking business.

So do everyone a favor and just… turn off the email responders! :(

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imagesYou know, that site where people accept each other in their “connections” without ever talking. Where peoples worth is valued on how many connections they have and not on the contents of their profiles. Where the profile feed (or whatever that thing with updates is called) is so full of irrelevant stuff that it’s beyond useless. Where you are constantly talked into upgrading to a pricey monthly fee for no useful extras and where product pages are skewered so badly that I’ve decided to rather not list any more or my products on it than have Linkedin “promote” them.

Groups

The groups I joined, some with several thousand members, are quiet. The few discussions that do pop-up occasionally are about self promoting “I’ve launched this site/product/idea, what do you think?” or are about support/tech related things that belong on a forum for the product/item.

And since everyone does that, I thought; “well that could be useful.” So I’ve put some stuff out there. My recent OmniCard plugin for example. This was last week, so far I got 3 pageviews from Linkedin and Linkedin even imported the wrong url into the post which I couldn’t correct afterwards. So the only reaction on my “discussion” was me, correcting the link. I got a few profile views. But again, nobody clicked my link.

Skills & Reviews

I did get some good reviews from people I’ve worked with or for. But only after Linkedin prompted me to ask for them.
I did get some of my skills endorsed. But only after Linkedin asked others to do so.

Where is the initiative here.

And the other way around, nobody really asked me for a review. But neither do I feel inclined to write any. There is no incentive.
I endorsed a bunch of skills, sometimes I remove a few of them because I know the person doesn’t know shit about that. But I’m sure many just click “endorse” to get rid of the question.

My Profile

I like to think that my profile is fairly complete and more importantly, true. But what’s the point if no one reads it and nobody acts on it. You may as well go to my real profile immediately and skip the Linkedin “experience.” Inmail is not free. But contacting me via my own site is… So why bother with Linkedin.

Luckily I’m in the somewhat “privileged” position that I do not need Linkedin to get me work so the lack of visibility and initiative isn’t a big deal for me. But imagine I would expect to find work, a proper day-job on there. I’d be pretty disappointed.

Product & Business pages

Maybe I’m missing something here other than an intuitive setup. I’ve made a business page on Linkedin a while ago. It looks like crap. It’s bland, boring and doesn’t invite people to contact me. I can’t really see a way to improve that.

Product pages are worse. Take the AdRotate page or Omnicard page for example. The logo… I uploaded a carefully made logo in high resolution. Look what Linkedin did to it. Pixelated and unreadable. And again, it’s a boring bland page which doesn’t invite the viewer to use the product.

Conclusion

With the growing number of people looking for work and the image that Linkedin has where “professionals” find work on there everybody now uses Linkedin. This made Linkedin into the new Facebook. Filled with uselessness and garbage.

And I’m guilty, too. This post goes on the Linkedin feed adding to the fluff. And I have a bunch of people in my connections I never talk to and so on.

A few exceptions aside of course. But overall, Linkedin has been fairly useless for me.

Note: This article is based on my experience with Linkedin and what I hear around me from other people. This article does not necessarily reflect the experience of others.

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For the last 2 weeks I’ve been trying to find a aquirer, bank or whoever able to process credit cards for me on my websites.

Turns out none of them want my money…

This business is so fucked up that they can’t even advertise their services properly. They’re all hiding behind vague sales jargon claiming it is easy, instant, secure and whatever else kind of bullshit they’re spewing. Meanwhile. Once they see that you don’t meet their non-published bullshit requirements they throw you out on the curb.

A quick rundown of the companies I’ve approached and their stupid reasons why they don’t want my money:

  • Skrill (Moneybookers) – Their site invited me to register and anything was possible. Their response once I registered and wasted a day on setting up my account: We’re too busy.
  • SagePay – Took 5 days to respond; You must be in the UK. (Why that isn’t on their site is beyond me, and why does it matter where I am anyway)
  • Braintree – Tells me anything is possible, so after 2 days I register for an account only to hear I must be an incorporated company otherwise the risk is too high or some bullshit like that.
  • Ogone – You can be our customer (yay!). But…. You need an Aquirer contract from a 3rd party. Which doesn’t respond to my inquiries. And Ogone doesn’t respond anymore too.
  • 2Bcheckout – Wasted another bunch of hours of my time to tell me; No, you must move more than $20000 a month to be our customer. Also you must be in the USA.
  • Authorize.NET – Worst site ever, and I must be in the USA or Canada or UK.
  • Worldpay – Doesn’t respond at all.
  • IcePay – Doesn’t respond and has horrible reviews.
  • Paypal Pro – Only available to US account holders.
  • PayLeap – I must be in the US.
  • Insipire Commerce – Took 3 days to tell me that it’s too expensive to have me as their customer because they don’t want forgeign trade.
  • FirstData – Only available in the US.
  • Stripe – We only do business with US Citizens.

And then some…

And the prices, insane. 2-4% here, 20-75 cents per transaction there. Montly fees. Extra transaction fees. Secondary costs. Startup fee. Interchange fees, Creditcard annual fees. And almost all stack up PER transaction. I’m not even going in to that.

Seriously. It’s too much and for the lousy experience so far… Hardly worth it! Greedy fools!

They’re all obsessed with security and all of them are better than the next in their own special way.
So fine… If they’re too dumb to want my money. Fuck you then. I’ll make my own software and deal directly with the bank. But wait… To become PCI Approved (some marketing security bullshit that allows you to handle creditcard details) will take 6-18 months and costs generally more than $44000 to be able to apply and see if you qualify. Then several thousand more to actually become PCI approved. Or atleast that’s what I understood from it.

*sigh*

I give up…

Oh wait – My own bank is a PSP too. Yes yes! And they accept creditcards and stuff. Yay – So I’ve applied there. And they accepted. After I explained the product to sales. Yea… They didn’t even know themselves what their Omnikassa (that’s what it’s called) does. Awesome folks! Fucking idiots!

And worse; The reviews from other users are shit. Their support is shit. I can’t find working software to implement their payment gateway into my sites and their manuals to develop things myself are shit and seem incomplete.

So that’s a horrible experience and I didn’t even start using them yet…

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At long last! I took the plunge and now you can give me your money! Oh yeah!

This being my first commercial plugin with releases and files and all that there will probably some hickups and I was actually a bit nervous to release it. But BOOM! here it is.

For more information – Check out the AdRotate News page.

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And so the umptiest product of Apple becomes “idiot-and-retard-proofed”. While removing distinctive features and breaking everything that I liked about iTunes 10.

Soon we Apple users have nothing to say but “Yes Apple, thank you Apple for taking away features, options and functional apps!” Or the better alternative – “I’m buying a PC!”

Whine whine whine!

Give me back my sidebar!

Yea! I liked having a sidebar in iTunes, where I can switch to a different section of iTunes in 1 click and at a glance can see what’s what.
Now? It’s 2 clicks, no oversight and it’s just a stupid interface. For example, by chance I saw there were 5 App updates and 2 podcasts downloaded. Great. With the sidebar I could just see that. Now I have to accidentally stumble over it because I might switch to a different section. If I didn’t I would probably not see that for days.

Playlists are useless now, too!

I have a smart playlist “Never Played”. It worked like magic. New songs, podcasts – They would show up there if there were 0 (zero) ‘plays’ and it wasn’t an audiostream (radio). Great!

Now? There are 60 items in there that aren’t downloaded (but bought and removed) and thus have 0 plays. Suddenly I have to add “location is on this computer” to the playlist rules. Fine. Small change… But after I changed that half my library reverted to 0 plays. Awesome! Why? Because iTunes, without telling me, removed the files from the library and downloaded DRM free files. Another automated convenience that I…Do…Not…Care…About… And only inconveniences me.

And another… I had playlists made that took a bunch of similar genres and put them in a smart playlist. Since the rules for smart playlists are either ALL or ANY for matches. Suddenly I can not have such playlists anymore. Because Apple thinks it’s convenient to list iCloud shit in there too. Music I don’t want anymore, podcasts and Books. And because there are several genres and songs are only in one the rules must be set to “match any”. Thus the label “location is on this computer” is a free pass to have most items in the iTunes library to be listed. Suddenly I was listening to Trance music when I was expecting Massive Attack or SepiaMusic.

Of course I’ve tried a few things and combinations. But due to the amazingly useless iCloud integration half my playlists are now unusable and completely inaccurate.

And where the hell is Coverflow! I like coverflow! Google tells me a lot of people like coverflow! Why the hell is it removed? How do I get it back. It’s just a neat eye candy trick. But I liked it. What good is album art now, since the only usable option is the text listing.

And that’s iTunes 11. Amazingly new refreshed and super stupefied iTunes 11.

It’s a trend!

And I hate it!

Awesome Apple! Thanks! Yet again I must alter my comfort-zone because you want to be groundbreaking things!

Grrr!