That was epic fail…or was it?

This time, trying to do the right thing, and not jump the gun. I lost a chance I had. FOR NOW. Time to be the loyal, good and true guy friend, really, just as I always am.

2012 a year for personal change too, this time, IT’S FOR REALZ!

To the three people that have read my blog for some time. (truth be told it’s probably more like zero) I have from time to time let lose a bit of personal stories, a window to my own life so to speak. As a bit of an update, for about a year or so I have been living in my own converted apartment, which is like a townhouse or a condo. A close friend has been living with me as well, he did move out for a few months for various reasons, but he is back again, as is my thing to do, I will nickname him Navy Boy, since like Army Boy/Former Army, he was military.  Navy Boy over the last couple of months, introduced me to a friend of his he met at a bar. Since she appears to like wearing my Jayne hat when she’s in my car, I will call her, Hat Girl.  Hat Girl, I find to be fascinating, and as they say, truth be told, I think I have a bit of a crush. Now those that know me, know it’s not THAT hard for me to wind up doing that, and usually such things either don’t go anywhere, or they end in failure, because I was motivated too much by the crush, and didn’t really realize the person I was crushing on wasn’t worth my time.  Yeah, I just had my 33rd birthday yesterday and I still have crushes.  I think everybody does, although they don’t admit it, I bet she does, but one of them probably is not me.  Some of my crushes just generally don’t see me that way, or I am not the type they look for, which in a lot of cases is actually a good thing, because it saves me from making a horrible mistake, and like I said, I have made a few.

This new friend, Hat Girl, I find fascinating, because she is kind, sweet and outgoing, and she appears to be an honest person too. A good friend to keep around really, if she’ll keep me around, with all the texting I did the last couple of days, and  my silliness, she would say that I am weird, and I called her different, though she didn’t get it, and asked my point, I often have trouble expressing myself, and so I fumbled and explained that I didn’t even know what my point is. Having had a discussion with a friend later, call him Gator Boy, I realize, that we are ALL weird in some way.  Hat Girl at the very least, likes me as a friend, and that is perfectly perfect because, really all I want is friends, friends before all else, and knowing of my bad decisions, maybe that’s the best thing for me.

I find her fascinating, and amazing (which I told her she’s amazing) because of what makes her, well, different. There are certainly some things about her that are familiar, and things that are not, we are all unique in our own way, but certain aspects of our personalities can be similar. We do have things in common, such as Weird Al, and things that are grape flavored.  Where as she likes horror movies, I am a sci-fi and fantasy nut. Now, the three do collide at times, so that’s cool, and I don’t necessarily hate horror films, although I generally do not chose to watch them, unless someone else makes that decision and I am just along for the ride.

I look forward to seeing where this goes, hope she’ll want to hang out with me again, we’ll see after my weird self  messed up, and possibly said way too much, although she sas “Ur cool babe”, I have been lied too about such things before. There is a point, where some things I say or do, I get carried away, she even caught me once when I said “shutup” and told me I needed “to be a little nicer” and she was correct.

If your app, does not send information in two or more directions, as in, it only downloads some information. Then it is NOT a sync app, it is an IMPORT app. , please learn the English language. Merely downloading some information from Facebook for a preexisting contact, or downloading a complete contact, this is called importing. The word sync is short for synchronize, which means to make two or more things match exactly.  That is not what most of the “sync” apps on the iTunes app store do.  Please do not use the word sync, unless that’s what it actually does, otherwise it is false advertising in your app name. Ok? It’s really THAT simple.

Talk about not user friendly.

ProGold i2, installer is a self extracting zip file, which extracts an MSI file, which installs a download app, which downloads an installer, and that part takes several hours, and all you wind up with, is basically, an MS Access database that can run without Access. If this install fails somehow,and it doesn’t work, to get it to try again, all traces of what it did install has to be removed first.

This is NOT user friendly by any means, and if a company does not have someone like me, they wind up having to deal with support, which over the last couple of months has been little to no help to us fixing a feed problem. We are happily going to something else instead.

Also, having a domain name, that you have to change every time you release a major revision to your product (their previous was ProGold XP) is also a bad idea, and a waste of money, because then you’re stuck, a new domain ever time, and in order not to lose people, keeping the old one every time.

Supposedly unlimited file storage…

300kb file size limit

excuse me?

So this weekend, I had it ALL working.

Then yesterday I discovered I had a problem, I could not dial out to C*NET.

I thought, it must have been a FreePBX module I installed.

Nope that didn’t fix it.

Oh well, reinstall time.

BAD idea, this made things much worse, because I didn’t even think of ONE little thing, see,  as I discovered someone told me after I ranted on the C*NET mailing list. CentOS has an issue with setting static domains with netconfig.  See I had a problem with that before, and fixed it, but didn’t realize what it was, or if what I did actually was what had fixed it.

I ranted and grumbled and wasted those guys time, when I should have know better.

and you know what the problem was? There was an outbound route that was getting in the way that I should have deleted anyway.

dork!

What’s going on there PhoneGnome? For more than 5 hours my device has not been connecting, and I can not get to my.phonegnome.com.

Data center problems? No status update on the blog?  That’s not good customer service!

Telling your users/customers nothing, is worse than giving bad news.

When I was a kid I liked the idea of being able to pick up the phone to find out the time, or the weather. That’s REALLY what fascinated me about phones, not talking to people, but having a machine talk back to me, locally we always had phone numbers you could call to do that, like the time number 358-1212 or the number a local TV station, channel 17 had provided to get information, 641-1717

As I got older, I also became fascinated with Voice over IP (or VoIP] technologies, I once had a phone attached to my computer and had Vocaltec Internet Phone software, back when I still was on dialup. I also played with a Windows port of Asterisk once,  just to see how such an awesome VoIP PBX actually worked, and a FREE one no less.

Just before I moved into my own place, I started thinking about setting up my own Asterisk server here and doing some cool things with it.

As a starting point, I got a new magicJack, and  a PhoneGnome, and a cordless phone that I could blue tooth link to my mobile phone. Once I got that all set up and working, I wanted MORE. Then I got Bria for my notebook, and started playing with that, BUT I still wanted Asterisk.

In my searches of what all I could do with Asterisk, I stumbled upon C*NET. DANG so if I get onto that, I can call all of those numbers?  People with phone switching equipment and old phones connected to Asterisk? WANT! Oh and wait, I can get check the weather too?

So, I asked if I could take some of the old computer equipment home from the office. I have been working on this for a few weeks now.

And guess what!?!? I AM ON C*NET

Now what I have at the moment, pales in comparison to, for instance, Los Angeles Telephone or Green Mountain Telephone

But it’s mine. 1-260 on C*NET is MIIIIIIIIIINE!

Right now I am running PBX in a Flash (PiaF-Purple) and I can dial out to PSTN numbers with a 9+number, C*NET with an 8+number, and tollfree numbers just as they are.

More to come

Why, does Document Manager STILL not install on Windows 7 64-bit? Hello? HELLO MCFLY?  Anyone home over there? Windows 7 64-bit has been around long enough for there to be support for it, and for that matter, we can’t be the only people having this issue. GET WITH THE TIMES!

Also, please, please stop screwing with your site, I have to Google for the drivers for our Document Center, because you make it impossible to find the right part of the site! NICE with the complicated junk and the redirects… also, your “business support” link just takes me back to the front page of the site.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a brand new, 3rd generation Amazon Kindle, my second Kindle I have ever owned. Today, after realizing my iPod didn’t sync right, I decided I would pick up my Kindle today instead, slide the switch….uh oh

Part of the screensaver remained on the screen, and from there it only gets worse! Tried to troubleshoot it, and reset the thing, and reset the thing, and reset the thing, and reset the thing. After each reset the screen got worse.

Shot an email off to support, they told me to call, so they could go through it with me, and possibly file a warranty claim, so I called, and was told to charge it and follow the hard reset instructions in the email I was sent. Guess what, it’s exactly what I already did, about four times.

This is really beginning to make me mad, this was a brand new barely used Kindle.  My “Oh that site is awesome” view of Amazon is gone. Don’t hate, never hate, but am just blah over it all. Especially after so much has been breaking in my office the last week or so, I really am not happy with machines right now.

EDIT: New Kindle coming next week, just had to get to the right people on the phone, no hassle at all the second try.