8 posts tagged “tech support”

When Vox goofs, someone responds. Unlike some sites I can mention.
   Not only that, Daisy herself is a Voxer, which means whatever we go through, she goes through. That’s living your brand.

I can’t believe it. After two incidents spread over five or so years of Yahoo! being unable to answer my questions, Vincent at their customer support desk has finally done so!
   Now, one out of three support personnel actually reading your question is not very good (and the odds are worse when you consider that in 2002 no one could answer my question, and I must have been through three support staff then), but hope is not lost.
   For completeness, here was what he wrote:

I am sorry we were unable to direct you to the appropriate department. For information about forming a content partnership with Yahoo! in the United States, please complete the form at:

   http://add.yahoo.com/fast/yahoo/content/cgi_form

For information regarding other relationships with Yahoo! (e.g., advertising or adding your web site), please visit the Yahoo! Information Center at:

   http://docs.yahoo.com/info/

Whenever you have further comments or questions, please feel free to contact me.

   Thank you, Vincent!

Once upon a time, Lucire supplied content to the AltaVista Entertainment Zone, back in the day when AltaVista was the top search engine. Then, for years, Yahoo! News Full Coverage would use Lucire headlines, until its site was rejigged. These days, Google News does a reasonable job of spidering our news coverage, but I noticed at the end of 2007 that Yahoo! News Full Coverage still had a fashion page. I asked if we could recommence our old relationship, on January 2.
   I have had experience dealing with Yahoo! before. Earlier this decade, one of our Yahoo! Groups went missing, even though we never broke any of the terms and conditions. The group shell was still there, just all its messages were deleted. We kept sending questions and all Yahoo!’s personnel could do was copy and paste from FAQs we had already read, none of which were appropriate. It’s why we contacted the support team in the first place—duh!
   It’s sad to know that nothing has changed this decade. And that’s sad. I remember when founders Jerry and David were answering questions personally and when they first listed our sites.
   Here is the dialogue with the salutations, technical details and conclusions omitted. Note that they never answer the question and tell me things that anyone with an IQ around the level of a marijuana-smoking Rastafarian politician might know.

To Yahoo!, January 2, 2008
Years ago, Yahoo! News Full Coverage quite happily linked to us:

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/Entertainment/Fashion_and_Modeling/feature_articles/9

Then one day around 2002 or 2003, it stopped, after a site rejig.
   I want to say that we at Lucire (www.lucire.com) are still churning out articles and op-eds nearly daily, and Yahoo! News would be more than welcome to tap into one of the internet’s longest running fashion news sources.
   How would we best recommence our earlier partnership? …

From Heather at Yahoo!, January 3, 2008
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! News.
   All company press releases and news stories available on Yahoo! originate from other sources. We cannot take individual press releases and add them to our service.
   If you are interested in having your press releases show up on Yahoo!, contact PR Newswire and/or Business Wire. For a fee, either of these services will make sure hundreds of news services are aware of your company announcements.
   Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! News.

   Well, thanks for giving me answers to a question I never asked, Heather. And thanks for telling me stuff I already knew. Did she even read my question? I replied pretty soon afterwards. Maybe, I thought, I made it too hard, even though I had chosen a category for my question that had nothing to do with what Heather told me.
   OK, simplify, Jack. Maybe she was just too busy, maybe the silicone from her fake tits had been eating its way up to her brain, maybe she had had a fight with her boyfriend during the lunch hour.

To Yahoo!, January 3, 2008
That was not my question, though I appreciate you have a selection of stock answers.
  For many years, Yahoo! News Full Coverage linked news articles, not press releases, from our publications. This stopped without explanation about four or five years ago when the site was rejigged.
  I am simply asking for Yahoo! News Full Coverage to recommence linking our stories.

From Derek at Yahoo!, January 4, 2008
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! News.
   We appreciate you contacting Yahoo! News regarding this issue & apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
   Please be assured that we are aware that the local news module does not always appear.  The information you have provided will be forwarded to our Production team and/or content provider for review.  Any necessary changes will be made as soon as possible.  If we can be of further assistance, please let us know.  We appreciate your patience as we research the issue.

   What? Or, in modern internet parlance, WTF?! Did I mention anything about a ‘local news module’? Derek, are you as illiterate as Heather? Were you too preoccupied after reading a penis enlargement email? Are you going through some withdrawal because the doc took the heroin away?
   Since this sort of BS happened back in 2002 with the Yahoo! Groups service, you can see I was getting impatient.

To Yahoo!, January 5, 2008
Your reply does not address the original issue, either. I know it's easy (and Yahoo! practice) to copy and paste answers from your database (and yes, we know when you do this), but I wouldn't write you if it was already covered in your FAQs.
  Please address the original question. It remains at the end of this email.

   Anything?
   Anything?
   Yahoo! seems to have placed this in the “too hard” pile because it has nothing left to copy and paste from.

To Yahoo!, January 17, 2008
May I please ask after a response to this issue? Please do not copy and paste. As you can see, I have had two stock answers already, neither of which are intelligible given the question.
  The original question is at the end of this email. I would appreciate it if it was read intelligently and answered intelligently. The category is partnering with Yahoo! News, which should at least narrow the topic down for you.

   Nothing.
   Today:

To Yahoo!, January 28, 2008
With respect, may I please get an answer?

   I’ll keep this up. People need to know how lousy Yahoo! gets. And I’ll be happy to dig out the earlier experience with Yahoo! Groups if they push me to.
   What also gets me (beyond the fact that Yahoo! staff are illiterate) is that among the questions is a category you can choose (which I did) called ‘Partnering with Yahoo! News’. This would normally mean that even if these idiots are copying and pasting answers, there must be a set of them relating to the topic. Otherwise, why would the category exist? They seem to be going out of their way in providing answers from another category.
   Last time we just shut the group down and moved all our company groups off Yahoo!. We win, Yahoo! loses.
   So, why are people buying their stock again? With this sort of behaviour, Yahoo! looks like a company heading south fast, pissing off netizens left, right and centre. Eventually it’ll get to another person, then another person, and so on, and so on, and so on. (Thanks to another Heather for that one—Heather Locklear.)
   Well, at least I don’t live in Red China and Yahoo! isn’t passing on my confidential information to the People’s Secret Police there so that the Politburo throws my ass in jail and takes my organs for Communist Party members. I guess I should be happy.

I came across this error from a Windows XP-based Adobe InDesign CS2 user on the Adobe forums:

While I'm working on document (journal with pictures, photographs, graphs arround 150 pages) indesign cs2 suddenly crashed. It happend after I pasted some text from Word 2003 (it was last article in that journal). After I reopen document, choosing recover document, indesign crashed again, and then again... So, I'm not able to open document at all. I try deleting preferences, repair installation, new installation but nothing help.

Related was this error message from another user, on the same page:

AppName: indesign.exe
AppVer: 4.0.0.421
ModName: text.rpln
ModVer: 4.0.0.421
offset: 0005d98e

And yet another had a problem despite using the last CS2, version 4.0.5.688.
   Following that is excellent advice from some very generous people.
   The usual advice is given: empty the font cache, reinstall InDesign, etc. But what is causing the problem is a particular Microsoft Word file and its styles conflicting with ID.
   I thought I’d post here as I am reasonably sure that this post is going to stay Googleable. I never know with forums.
   For those for whom the font-cache-emptying and reinstallation suggestions do not work, here’s what we did when we came across crashes involving text.rpln.
   1. Find someone with InDesign CS2 or CS3 on Mac. Strangely, this might be able to open the PC file without crashing.*
   2. Export the file as InDesign Interchange (INX).
   3. Reopen in InDesign on PC.
   The rebuilt INX file should not have the buggy styles of MS Word, hence overcoming the error.
   It took 11 hours of going through the above and then adopting some other techniques to find that out—hopefully I can save people some time!
   Sometimes, all you need is a layman who knows nothing about computers (me) to sort this stuff out! (Thanks to Gary at Format for being the guy with the Mac.)

* InDesign CS2 and CS3 will crash if you try to edit the Word document that caused the error on the PC. So do not edit it—do the export to INX first, and edit from the file that InDesign rebuilds.

Yesterday, Logitech upgraded its QuickCam software. Now it works with the camera. The image does not freeze at will, though I still get some interference.
   Once again, I was proved right: I did nothing wrong with the installation. Or the reinstallation that I wasted my time doing on their recommendation. It was the software all along.
   Why does the computer tech support industry always tell us we are the dickheads, that we have done it all wrong, and that their product is perfect?
   Eventually, we find out that they have sold us software for which we were the quality controllers.
   Guess these folks were too young to remember the Dodge Aspen and Plymouth Volaré and what shape Chrysler was in back in 1978.
   I suppose wasting two months on this was better than dealing with TelstraParadiseClearSaturn for two years on a fault which I insisted was related to the actual cable wire and they insisted was related to my set-up. The tech boys would get me to change this setting and that setting.
   That time, I was proved right, too.

Logitech keeps insisting that the problem with my QuickCam is installation. Of course: Logitech itself can do no wrong. It must be my fault.
   Although the chap was faultlessly polite and courteous, I’m getting sick of hearing, ‘Uninstall and reinstall,’ as the tech support solution to everything.
   I know the QuickCam I have works with Skype Video and I have now discovered that it works with Windows Media Encoder. Surprise: it does record segments as long as I want them! It doesn’t conk out at will! The program is free as long as your Windows is legit.
   For anyone else whose Logitech QuickCam stops recording at will, there’s my answer. Give up the original software and use WME instead.

Any CSS experts out there with experience in Pligg? We’re tweaking something and I wouldn’t mind an extra pair of eyes who might be able to advise us on the stylesheet.

Check out this video from Six Bucks a Monkey’s blog (pasted below for your convenience). You know it’s fictional because the help desk guy actually knows what he’s talking about.

Weird, I can read Danish now.

PS.: The video has gone from YouTube after a few short days, but remains available here.