Category: Rant!

Domain pain continued…

David Rostenne

So I took a bit longer than expected to get back to the domain saga.. I went in this evening and pushed the domains from my eNomCentral account to my new retail account (which worked instantly) and then proceeded to renew the domains, and found the price was better, but $29.95 is still not what I asked for. Much clicking around in the main account found a “report” of my price change request, and in the downloadable spreadsheet version was a notes column, which told me that the price I had set actually needed to be $15.36, and not the bare minimum I tried putting in before. Okey dokey.. I went in circles and set things to the new price, emptied and refilled my shopping cart a few times before the new price appeared. Yaay! I saved a bunch of money.. and have now renewed the domains. Whew.

Still stuck in eNOM, but I can’t move them for another month and a half, as that 60 day change limit set by CIRA still applies.

*sets note to self in iCal for early March*

Domain Pain!

David Rostenne

So I had a few domains left in my eNom account.. and I was slowly moving them out as they came up for renewal, and it came time to renew the last 2 domains. No problem, right? Well… I would not be writing this if it had been easy!

Why bother moving them? Well, my eNom account is a reseller account, and requires filling the account with a $100 USD increments. No way am I paying that for the last 2 domains in there.

I updated the registrant details, since both clients email accounts were no longer valid. Silly me I update the entire contact info to my data, instead of just the email account. Once updated I pushed out the EPP code so I could transfer the domains. I then logged into my Hover.com account to transfer them over.

Ugh. Domains are still locked. Did I mention that they are both .ca’s? That’ll come up again soon.. so I call Hover.com and they tell me that eNom must have a second level of unlock they need to do, ie. somebody has to push a button manually!

So I call eNom, and the nice gentleman tells me that the domains are locked by CIRA. Huh? Well, it turns out that when you update all the registrant details then CIRA locks the domain for 60 days. He suggests I transfer the domains to eNomcentral, their retail arm, so I can renew just one domain at a time, instead of dumping in a hundred bucks.

So I call CIRA the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, and am told by the nice lady that this is a security measure and that it has always been in place, and that there is nothing they can do. I wonder why they bother letting me change the email address, since that is all I need to change if I were going to steal a domain.

So I transfer the 2 domains to eNomcentral, a painless process I must add, it takes all of a few seconds to create a new account on eNomcentral and then push them across. At this point i’m annoyed, but happy that i’ve found a workaround…

Then I hit the renew button on the 2 domains and discover eNomcentral wants $39.95 each domain!? WTF? I was paying $13.95 each at eNom. $26 markup is outrageous.

After much time on hold I get through to Tech Support at eNomcentral. Can’t help me, passing me on to Sales. I’m on hold again… and they can’t help me. *sigh* i’m being passed off to support again.

Yaay! There is a way to resolve it: I created a sub account in my enom reseller account, which is a “retail account” and then push the domains into there. Since I set the price for my retail accounts I do not have to add any markup, and I can renew the domains for less!

Figuring I should do this early I set the renewal cost for .ca’s in that retail account to no markup. It’s in the queue.

More news next week!

 

 

Giving Marketcircle my 2 cents!

David Rostenne

The fine folks at Marketcircle, makers of the amazing Mac CRM, Daylite, and invoicing application, Billings, have got people riled up by a recent blog posting of theirs.

We (that’s not a Royal we, that’s myself and a few other folks I know who use their products) have always been frustrated with the Report Engine and the difficulty in customizing invoices and reports in it.

Anyhow, the blog post is here: Stop InDesign Invoicing – Templates Aren’t Enough, and a pile of comments follow it…

My 2 cents?

Dave says:

I know WTL and what he is not saying is that he is a designer and programmer.. and if he thinks the invoice designer needs to be “burned to the ground and rewritten” you’ve got a serious problem!

I’m a consultant, and when clients come to me asking about Invoices, templates, reports, etc in Daylite and Billings, I just shake my head. Not worth the headache, and I have had lots of time to try to figure it out, I have been using Billings since 2006.

So Marketcircle? Go look at Filemaker and see that a super powerful system can be made friendly, and we can all actually use it. I’m sure you can build a layer on top of the designer that would let us do what we want, or even a separate application.

While we’re at it, can we get PDF invoices from Billings Touch? And not these mobile invoices, please follow the numbering in the main app! It’s ok to check out a few invoice numbers when we sync and hold onto them in BT until we sync back. HTML invoices make me look bad. My clients want PDFs!

I recommend Billings to my clients. Keep it up, you’ve got fantastic products that really should only get better!

I’d love to know what you use for invoicing and time tracking.. drop me a line at dave at theconsultant dot net

The perils of VOIP and cluelessness!

David Rostenne

OK, so it’s really not VOIP’s fault.. here’s my clueless CSR story of the day:

My mom called to let me know that everything was fine, and that they would be offline until they come back from their home-away-from-home in Florida. What happened? Well, it turns out that when your phone is VOIP and you call Comcast (their local cableco) and tell them to disable the internet in a week, they just hear “disconnect”. The call dropped about 15 seconds later.

After a day of calling on their cell phone and trying to get the service reinstated *for just one week*, and not getting anywhere they gave up.

fun, eh?

Little Annoyances: Mail.app

David Rostenne 5 Comments

1) Next unread message.

I prefer to use a plain list view for a mailbox, and have to open a message to view it.

Remember Eudora? I used to use Eudora, and sometimes think I still should. It has this nice feature where you hit the spacebar, causing the current message to page down web-page style. When you reach the end hit that spacebar again and you jump to the next unread message in that mailbox. Nice, eh?

That does not work in Mail.

So, how about a key command to do that? Nope, not available either.

2) Invalid Email addresses.

What is so hard about telling me you can not send the email because I was too stupid to enter in a proper email address? Mail will happily harass you about opening too many windows at once.. so why not invalid email addresses?

Yeah, I caught myself BCC’ing several people, and some of them were not actual email addresses, just the domain name. Took me way too long to figure out too!

Looking for Disk Image Automator Actions!

David Rostenne

Does anyone know of an Automator action, or Big Cat script, that when you right click on a mounted Disk Image, will unmount it and *delete* the original image.

Why? Well.. My download folder is huge.. and I need a faster way to look into a mounted disk image, test out whatever is in there and then delete it. If I like the application, or whatever it is, I will copy it to a more permanent location, and still need to delete the original!!!

If no such thing exists I’ll cobble one together, which should not be too hard seeing as I can start with Laine Lee’s work: Show Disk Image File of Selected Volume

Kermit the Blog: That’ll be… Aw, heck. No charge.

David Rostenne

Over on the Kermit the Blog he’s having one of those days. Another friend gets free computer help, and now he’s wondering if he’s too nice or just a sucker.
Kermit the Blog: That’ll be… Aw, heck. No charge.

My take:

One of my clients, who runs a very successful jewellry business, explained it to me: When you charge little or nothing then there is no associated value. Which means there is no way to compare what you are really giving them to anything else they are familiar with.

So the next time you get a call to a ‘family or a friend’s’ house to fix something, interrupt them and tell them up front: “I am no longer able to help you for free. $$$ an hour, minimum one hour. When should I come by to fix things?”

Then things get really interesting! 😉

As he says “What’s your take?”