Yahoo! Small Business Customer Care

Lately I'd been writing some code to post on a website that is hosted by Yahoo! Small Business.  At some point this website requires the customer to input his/her name, e-mail address and so on, and then it's supposed to send an automatic confirmation e-mail to the customer.

In order to get those tricks going I checked Yahoo! Small Business help pages, and used their sample code as reference.  However, I ran into problems even with the sample code.  It happens that when the e-mail address that was provided is good, the confirmation e-mail is sent, and a confirmation message is printed on the screen.  But unexpectedly, and unlike what is explained in the same page of the help files, when the provided e-mail address is bad, you still get the confirmation message on your screen.  The expected outcome is, or should be, that you get a message on the screen saying that there were problems sending e-mail to that address.

Well, since I'm a paying customer of Yahoo! Small Business, I called their help desk on the phone.  But the guy who answered couldn't help me so he provided me with the e-mail address of the department in charge of that kind of problems.  He said that if I write to them, I would get a reply in less than 24 hours.

So I did, and they really came back to me within a few hours.  But the reply they gave to me was completely lousy and unrelated to the problem I had explained to them.  I wrote to them explaining once again the situation, and they wrote to me for a second time saying that they would need to access this and that in my company's Yahoo! account so I have to provide to them with this and that confidential data to confirm I really am who I say I am.  Fine.  I did send them all of that confirmation data.  But the next mail I get from them is again a reply for something I didn't ask.  So I write one again describing the problem for a third time.

Then a couple of days passes with no sign of life from them.  And this morning I got a request from Yahoo! to fill some customer satisfaction survey in relation to my recent interaction with their help desk.  Hell that bitch already flagged my case as closed even though she never took the trouble of sitting down and trying to understand the meaning of my e-mails!  I am mad.

Really bad shoes

Last year in June or July I bought a pair of shoes and a pair of sandals at the same store.  At that time I was very happy because I thought I'd been very lucky to find these locally made shoes at a great discount.  Yeah, I felt very good about buying local.  But stupid me, very quickly I saw my sandals' sole unglue from its base, so I had to glue it myself with superglue.  Then a couple of months later, one of the rivets of on my right shoe detaches, and today one whole side of the same right shoe has detached from the sole.  Not to mention that the "Bargain Sale" sign is still up there at the store.  What a crappy experience.

The previous time I'd bought similar shoes, I'd bought them abroad, and they were made in China.  I was able to use them heavy duty for about three years.  These didn't last even one.  Even the shoe laces are not that great since they tend to untie very easily just by walking.  What a shame.

Netgear wireless access point

There's a guy who's been helping me out quite a lot lately.  Whenever I need something from him, he gets it done really quickly, and I'm very thankful for that.  Last Friday he asked me for help to set up a wireless access point at his office's new location.  I told him that the following day I'd go to buy one and set it up on the same day.

Well, come Saturday and I went to some shopping center and found this really nice Netgear wireless access point.  It was much cheaper than I thought it would be, so I didn't bother walking all over the shopping mall comparing prices, plus I wanted to get done as early as possible.

So even before lunch time, I was already on my way to his office to set this thing up.  But when I plug it, arggg!!!  It refused to power on!!!  I couldn't believe it.  Right out of the box, and it already doesn't work!  WTF?  So I run again to the same store to let the guys check the damn thing for me, and fuck, the problem was the little plug adapter they'd given me.  Whatever came from Netgear itself was very fine.  The problem was that its power adapter's plug was for British sockets, and in this store they'd been kind enough to give me a plug adapter at no extra charge.  It was this freebie that was not good.

Back in the office, I start to install this thing, and find that Netgear has provided a "Setup Wizard".  How cool!  It promises to auto detect the ISP settings (save for the user id and password, of course), but when the moment of truth comes, it fails miserably.  What's worse, when I try to run it again, it remembers the previous run's settings, so I'm stuck.

At the end I have no choice but to push the Factory Reset button and manually configure this thing.  I think I wasted about 30 minutes with the damn wizard, and it didn't do the job.  On the other hand, when I did the set up by hand, everything was up and running in less than 5 minutes.

It's a really nice access point.  So nice that I'm tempted to tell my friend that instead of him giving me the money for the new wireless access point I brought for him, I can give him mine for free and I get to keep his new one.

Freaking power adaptor

Yesterday a friend of mine asked me for help with his wireless access point.  Although the warranty has already expired, I thought perhaps they can take a look.  The problem is, we cannot power it on any more.

Now that I'm about to go to the shop, I thought perhaps I should test the power adapter with my multitester... and holly shit!  That piece of crap is giving 16V when it should be supplying only 12V!  That's a whole 33% more than it should, and it's been operating like that for about a year.  That power adapter came with the wireless AP, and it's clearly labeled as 12V output.  The wireless AP is also labeled as requiring 12V input.  I'm not surprised it's broken.  Fuck.  Stay away from LevelOne wireless access point model number WBR-3407A.  How annoying.

Channel re-numbering plan

Today I'm gonna bitch about my cable TV operator's channel numbering plans.  I wonder what fucking moron was behind this plot.  It happens that from early January I'd been seeing subtitles saying that during the early hours of Jan. 16 or so on most channels would be unavailable due to their channel number re-allocation work.

As the date approached, suddenly I started to notice the same subtitles, but with a different date.  It had been pushed back one week.  Okay, fine by me.  The thing is, when the day came, they weren't ready by the time they said they would, 6:00 am.  We'll, this being the Third World, I'm not surprised.  What surprised me was that even one day after the changes should've been completed, many channels were still unavailable.  Huh.

Believe it or not, soon after this happened, the cable operator started to put those subtitles again announcing one more renumbering day, exactly one week later.  That second time around, the works really ended by the promised time.  Perhaps we should give them an award for keeping their word.

But what pisses me off is the way they allocated the new numbers.  Being a guy, I like to flip the channels a lot.  I like especially the documentary channels, but the way they set them up this time, they're spread over non-consecutive numbers.  What kind of idiot would make a plan like that?  Oh, and by the way, I can't program the cable box's remote control to skip the channels that don't have a signal, so by all means I have to push multiple buttons to go from documentary channel to documentary channel.

Maybe the guys who run this cable company don't watch their own channels.

Unpleasant surprise

What a shame!  I think this is the first time I have been disappointed in many years of use of this distinguished programming language called Python.  I think it's almost six months ago that the latest version of Python, 2.5 was released.  I waited a couple of months before upgrading Python in my own computer to give time to other developers to update their libraries.

And just this past weekend I got the nasty surprise that there're no libraries to access MySQL that are compatible with Python 2.5.  Arghhh!  MySQLdb only works with 2.4, and it's the same situation if I want to use ODBC.

Well, I really really need this little project to work as soon as possible, so yesterday I ended up DOWNgrading my Python to 2.4.  Well, for my own purposes 2.4 works very fine, but shouldn't we be moving ahead rather than going back in time?