The Blog of Hans Eisenman

Brighthouse gets it right

I think it's important when something goes well to make a note of it in the same way that we would complain about something when it goes poorly. I see people bitching quite a bit about BrightHouse and I've had my issues with them too but I just had a really good interaction with them and so I wanted to be fair and note that as well.

For the last several days I've been trying to trace down a very elusive problem with my Internet connection. I have two different computers here on my desk: one is a Mac and the other is a Windows machine. They are connected to my router in completely separate ways, one via Wi-Fi and the other is hard-wired into the router.

A few days ago I started noticing problems where I would go to some of my regularly-used websites, and my PC (which is the computer I use the most) would tell me that that site is "not available" or "could not be found". It would be like saying CNN.com was not available or MSN.com was not available. In fact, tonight MSN.com was not available!

The other things that would happen is I would go to a website and it would load only partially. It would be as if all the formatting of the website was removed. So I'd only see text and maybe some hyperlinks.

In speaking to BrightHouse several times over the last week we didn't have much luck troubleshooting the problem.

At one point I thought I might have some malware so I spent some of today getting that pulled out by the roots. (Actually handling the malware was easier than I thought it would be because I was able to go back to an earlier point on my Windows machine and restore it to the point where there was no malware.)

In any case, the mysterious browsing problem was not going away. I sat here and watched MSN.com be unavailable on both computers for a good 15 to 20 minutes tonight while I was on the phone with BrightHouse.

Also in my in my favor was the fact that BrightHouse came out today and gave me a brand-new router so that eliminated that as a potential source of the problem. I was still having browsing issues and the router was not the cause.

This is kind of an elusive problem because it would come and go--sometimes it would be on one computer and not the other and other times it would be on both computers and it was just very hard to pin down.

So, to be honest, I was kind of dreading dealing with a tech support rep over the phone at BrightHouse trying to convince them that what I was seeing was a real problem.

Tonight I got kind of lucky in a few ways. The first was that MSN.com refused to come up on both machines (which means it was probably not a problem at my house but rather "upstream" if you will). So that was good and it was refusing to come up for pretty long period of time--long enough for me to get BrightHouse on the line.

Also before I tell you about the call, I should note that I learned during all of this a few days ago that when you call the 888 number for BrightHouse, you get connected to a group probably in the Philippines. Those guys work for RoadRunner. When they take their notes those notes do not make it onto the screens of the guys here locally who work for BrightHouse; and so if your problem is of a more difficult nature and it gets escalated, chances are all that discussion you had with the Philippines group will not show up in the notes in your account at BrightHouse.

So you'll end up repeating yourself.

The number I was given for the local BrightHouse group handling Internet issues here goes almost immediately to a rep. That number is 727–329–2056. I hope you won't abuse it.

I called the number this time and got Kathy. I don't know her last name. She sounds like she might be a heavy smoker and of course that's totally irrelevant (sorry Kathy) but it might help somebody at BrightHouse know who I'm talking about.

If you're a BrightHouse manager and you know who I'm talking about, give that Kathy a big, fat raise. She was great.

The best thing that Kathy did was not assume that my problem was just like any other. Now to be fair I made it easy on her because I started off with a really good summary of my problem and some of the things that we had tried in the past. It so happens that I'm an Evernote geek and I take really good notes most of the time. Before I started this call I made sure to clear my head and write up a new summary of the problem as I currently saw it.

Kathy listened attentively to my summary and then clarified her understanding of what I had said.

Oh, one thing I didn't bring to the table was a lot of emotion related to this issue even though I've been beating my head against the wall and my hands against my desk for the last week over this thing. I guess I'm old and wise enough now to recognize that somebody like Kathy isn't the actual source of the problem.

So chock one up for getting older!

Kathy was fantastic because she didn't make me retrace all of those tier 1 tech-support steps that they always put you through. She merely asked me whether or not certain things had been done before and what I had tried. I felt like she was really on my side and she was working to understand the problem just as much as I was. 

After we tried a few different things that didn't fix the problem, we were both nearly giving up when at the last moment Kathy noticed something in my account. She noticed that I am actually an EarthLink customer.

Of course I worked for EarthLink back in the early days as most of you know and I've just kept my account ever since. But I didn't think to mention it because I'm always calling BrightHouse and I just sort of feel more like their customer these days. EarthLink never contacts me anymore and I think I'm even paying BrightHouse directly. 

So it's just kind of a weird relationship.

I also want to say that all along I've been suspecting that this issue was (sorry for techno jargon here--I'll clear it up for you in a second) a DNS issue.

DNS stands for Domain Name Server and it's the part of the Internet that resolves or translates the English word for a website like "website.com" into a series of numbers (aka: an IP Address [IP = Internet Protocol] that represents the actual location for that website. That keeps us human being able to talk about all our Internet adventures in English instead of numbers.

I'm not even sure why I knew this was probably a DNS issue. I was just seeing some weird stuff on my screen and that's what it felt like to me. Also I'd ruled out just about everything else!

Getting back to the end of my conversation with Kathy, she noticed that I was an EarthLink customer and that there were different DNS numbers they used than the ones for BrightHouse. Long story short [and I'm only including this detail in case someone else out there on the Interwebs has a similar problem one day], she thought it might be worth a try to force each computer to use different DNS numbers to see if that fix the problem. 

I can't tell you how relieved I was when I saw how quickly MSN.com loaded after we made the change on the first computer.

Then I checked MSN.com on my other computer and it was still hosed.

So it sure looked like we had a fix. There's still a small question or two I have around this issue (like why it happend in the first place and how permanent is this fix of forcing certain DNS settings) but it looks like we got it fixed enough now that I can go ahead and get back to work instead of losing so many hours on this problem.

Anyway, I just wanted to take a moment at the end of all this (hopefully the end) to give a shout out to Kathy and BrightHouse for a job well done in a situation that could've easily been dismissed as just in my head or something too elusive to bother with.

Having been in that position myself (or close to it) at EarthLink, I know it's not always easy fixing everybody's problems and keeping all those customers happy.

I do know though, that when you get it right it's commendable. That's why I wanted to take a moment to jot this down. On the one hand if anybody else is having similar issues to what I had, maybe this will help them. On the other hand I wanted BrightHouse to know that I'm a happy customer and why.

And don't forget to give that Kathy a raise and/or promotion if you can find her!

Electroshocking kids "safe and effective"? On what planet?

Uh yeah, I'm not sure how they see running electricity through a child's body as "safe and effective".

Funny how none of the purveyors of this "technology" will subject themselves to it. I remember a guy who used to go on TV and challenge psychiatrists by saying he'll give them $30,000 right then if they will subject themselves to electroshock. Not one of them would do it.

"Safe and effective". I call BS.

http://www.cchrint.org/2013/07/02/electroshockingkids/

Is "Gluten Free" all it's cracked up to be?

Are you really making a positive dent when you remove gluten from your diet? My thoughts (in a brief audio) on a fine Friday morning...

 

Download Gluten free

 

How to link a non-Gmail email address to your Gmail account

This could also be called "how to get notifications from Google Docs sent to your work (or other) address".

Or "how to log in to Gmail with a different (and even 'non-Gmail') email address".

It's just five quick and easy steps:

 

Step 1

 

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Enjoy!

Related articles

How to search your mailbox remotely using a BlackBerry

Transfer your Gmail Messages to Another Email Address

5 Gmail Tricks you must Know

Return to Smartsheet

Been working with Smartsheet to get a couple projects under control and I am very impressed with it. Definitely recommend you check it out. Go back a couple posts for the full review.

Using the spreadsheet interface is brilliant. Almost no learning required.

Also the sharing capabilities are more thought out than most.

More soon!

Posted via email from Hans's posterous

Amazon.com: Your loaned book will expire in 3 days

This seems like a pretty short-sighted view on Amazon's part--purely in place to force me to buy a book I couldn't finish in three weeks. 

My wife bought this book (The Paleo Solution) a few months ago and read most of it. Then we started the diet based on her knowledge of it. Recently, I wanted to read it myself so I could fortify my knowledge in the area. So, I had her loan it to me. I'm not going to buy it twice, not when it is right here on the household "bookshelf" so to speak.

I knew I had only three weeks to get through it, but "life happens", ya know? (And this time it really  happened with my wife in the hospital--she's ok, but I can tell you my priority is not rushing through this book right now when I'm being Mommy and Daddy to our four little kids.)

It would be much more ideal if I could work through this book one bit at a time when I have a moment (like just before I doze off at the end of the day). After all, that's how it works in the real world. My friends (and least of all family) don't say "here's the book I wan to loan you, but if you don't get it back to me in three weeks, I'm gonna break into your house and take it back!".

So this seems grossly out of sync with the way the world conducts itself. The lender should be able to control how long the book is loaned to someone. Just like life.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 9:40 PM
Subject: Amazon.com: Your loaned book will expire in 3 days
To: 

	Your loaned book will expire in 3 days
Hello Hans Eisenman, We wanted to remind you that your loaned Kindle book will expire in 3 days. You can purchase The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet and continue reading at your leisure.
For more information on Kindle lending, visit our Kindle Lending Help page.

Posted via email from Hans's posterous

Smartsheet: A New Take On Spreadsheets

I was asked to do a quick analysis and summary of an online collaboration tool called Smartsheet. Thought I'd publish it to the blog in case anyone else is looking for a way to improve team efficiency and the flow of info within their organization. I don't know if we are going to use this where I am working right now, but it's an intriguing option in my opinion.

What is Smartsheet?

Basically it is a cloud-based app which combines the familiarity of spreadsheets with access to templates and additional features which would make spreadsheets more useful for a variety of purposes.

Purposes of sheets might include:

• All the things we use spreadsheets for already
• Project tracking
• Marketing goals and tasks
• Sales pipeline reports
• more

So imagine a spreadsheet for any of the above purposes, but which also has value-add features built into the spreadsheet like:

• Engage in a chat with other users about a particular row in the sheet. This is very powerful, IMHO. You can have asynchronous communication with other users assigned to the sheet at a row level -- in other words, an entire, recorded (written) conversation about that line item. 
• Associate files with a row. So you could attach, for example, a .docx with a specific row to provide more information about a task (or whatever is in that row).
• See all user revisions in the sheet 
• Email specific rows to others
• Reminders about approaching milestones
• Gantt view of all tasks and their dependencies. 
• See the spreadsheet's contents in a calendar view (example).
• Publish spreadsheet for outsiders to see 

• Branding of spreadsheets

all key differentiators listed here

Of course, there is a more fundamental benefit to have it be a spreadsheet in the cloud in the first place: there would be no emailing back and forth of the various version of the document. All the users go to it. The doc stays in one place.

Pricing

Smartsheet offers the oft-seen "good, better, best"  tiered pricing and is based on (among other more typical things like # of projects and users, etc.) on the number of "creators".  If you would likely have more than 10 users creating sheets, you would need the Enterprise tier account, which is $150 per month (you could get two months free by prepaying the year).

A single user account is $15.95 per month.

Summary

Basing this kind of collaborative software on something as familiar as a spreadsheet is a unique approach that could give a collaborative tool a big boost in adoption in an organization. "Learnability" is already pretty high. Google Docs also does this, of course and there there are a  few others that offer basic, cloud-based spreadsheet apps. However, they lack the templates and value-add features like row-level discussions and file association, just to name two.

If larger company would entertain the idea of spending the money for it after the trial (i.e. if the pricing is not a deal breaker in and of itseelf), it looks like it could be worth engaging in the 15-day trial and  I would suggest piloting it on a specific cross-departmental project of some kind--in other words engage the maximum number of departments across the greatest distance. Then do a post-mortem and decide whether all involved found it to be productive.

Posted via email from Hans's posterous

Simplifying task management

This is going to be a short post because I just want to log a little epiphany related to managing tasks.

Basically it is this:

Tasks always require a certain degree of focus to be completed.

Not very romantic, I admit. But it came to me when I saw a coworker's task list and she had all sorts of color coding and other markups on the list, probably to help her differentiate priorities.

I've been there myself so recognized the m.o. immediately.

But I've since thrown all that out for the most part. The only thing I track about a task is: 

• The task (of course) in as finite a wording as I can (e.g. something like "stop being so thirsty" isn't really executable. "Drink a glass of water 3 times per day" is much more doable.). Wording it in measurable terms is sometimes another way to look at this.
• Simple priority.  This is either it's position on the list or I may mark a task as P1 or P2. But that's as far as I go with it.
• Who owns it, if not me
• IF it has to be done by a certain time, I mark it as such.  This can get out of control sometimes so I try and reserve it for things things that really have a due date in the real world and not just in my head.

That's it. Anything more elaborate than that is a waste of time for me usually--it's time I could have spent focusing on the task.

In short, you can waste a lot of time meddling with tasks. In the end, you have to pick one of them and drive it to completion--then go to the next. Sounds overly simple, I know, but it's very easy to do other things (like prioritize, organize and pretend like we're multitasking and all that).

Focus is senior to all of it. "Dones"--task completions--require it.

So should we (mostly of ourselves).

Posted via email from Hans's posterous

Checking in with Google vs. Facebook vs Foursquare

checkin with google vs facebook.amr Listen on Posterous

Hopefully this audio file from my phone can be played back by Posterous.  But here are some quick thoughts about whether it is better to check in using Facebook or Google. 

Posted via email from Hans's posterous

Google+ vs. Facebook

FB vs GPlus.mp3 Listen on Posterous

Without question Google+, Google's new social network, will be facing off with Facebook over the next several months if not years.

After using G+ for the last few days, I have a few observations about it and thought I'd take a moment to share them in a short podcast.

There is also a very well written piece on this which posted here (on Google+ no less) by another user. It's written a bit more from the viewpoint of someone with a technical background, but you should be able to glean some good points out of it even if you're not very techie yourself. 

Why and How Google+'s Interface Is Kicking Ass

Either way, leave your comments below!

Posted via email from Hans's posterous