Hope everyone had a great three day weekend. We decided on Saturday to wake up and try to finish the trail we started last time. We took the Slave Cemetery Trail. This trail is not long but understand we are all out of shape and fat. I don't believe in lying so there it is. We had a single goal to make it to the Cemetery and we did. We completed that part of it. We then followed the rest of the trail around back over to the Civil War reenactment and watched it for a while. We actually didn't stay for the complete reenactment but we got to see the cannons fire.

We have now decided we enjoy hiking. When I say "we" I mean "me", not everyone is on board but I think we are off to a good start. Being we are new I'm asking for your help. We are going to start off easy with some Oak Mountain Trails. Going to also being doing only single day hikes. I hope one day to do a multi day hike, but first I have to figure out how to explain to my girls that means peeing in the woods, and how my daughter can charge her Mp3 player. So here is the list of what I think we need, remember there are 5 of us including our dog.

• Water Containers - 140 oz (recommended for 4 hours of hiking for 5 people)
• Back Packs (We need 5, what do you recommend?)
• Tents (We think 5 individual tents)
• Water Treatment (We ran out of water last trip, not good)
• Cooking Gear (Same with tents will be needing eventually)
• Sleeping Bags
• Alcohol Stove

If you can recommend anything else please let me know, leave a comment. We are new so any advise is good advise. I also need a good "Trail Mix Recipe". If you have one please let me know.

Why do these companies have such a hard time figuring out people want good customer service. Here is a sign found in Hueytown, Al. Even this boils down to customer service. I want to find the companies that care about their customers. I want to find the companies that do not. If you want this to, you can help keep reading.

 

 

If you have an issue with a company, or  you want to tell others about a place that has good Customer Service email me z3r010v3@gmail.com and tell me. I will not give anyone your name or email address unless you tell me it is ok. You can either write up something yourself or you can just tell me about a good or bad place. I will either check on it myself and or post  your write up. I don't want to add a bunch of rules, but I think one should be common sense. You can't work at the place you are writing about! Remember to let me know how many *'s the place deserves.

I'm starting a new part to this blog. I have the whole family part, and the technical part, now its time for the bitch part. This is going to be an on going bitch about Customer Service in Birmingham Alabama. So why this part? It is a pet peeve of mine. I hate it when someone is employed in a customer service position and they SUCK at it. Why do people work in these positions when they should be doing something like I don't know picking up trash along the highway! I understand people have bad days, I understand life is not always fair but if you work in Customer Service "GET OVER IT".  For the Corporate People and Business owners around, watch your people.  CS Rating will * start for SUCK customer server, horrible period, up to ***** for Awesome Customer Service. If no * then the customer service is dead! The staff should be fired and the store closed.

 

To Start:
Walgreen's Store Number 6033 at 1815 9th Ave. N., Bessemer, Al 35023

CS Rating: *

We had our daughter call in our normal prescriptions, and we spend $300 easy a month on, being my wife and myself are both on monthly medications. Normally we go to Hueytown Walgreens, but knowing we where going to be late, we decided to call them into this store. They where called in at 3:30 PM with a pick up of 7:00 PM. When we arrived there was a small line of 3 people. We arrived at 8:00 P.M and the girl says "Oh these where called in for 7:00 P.M, give me a minute to get them filled." This minute turned into us leaving after 9:00! This is crazy at any one point they had three people working the back, one at the drive thru, and one up front at register. With a max of 5 people picking up prescriptions. This is in efficient and ridicules. The pharmacist was in the back literally throwing prescriptions and slamming things. He almost reminded me of a 3 or 4 your old, I was waiting on him to drop and just start crying.

What is the point of them putting drive thru's in? This is about one of the stupidist ideas someone at Walgreen's ever cam up with? Or it is an idea that needs to be fixed. I thought the idea of the drive thru was to have a place to drop off or pick up? Tonight there was a pick up at the drive thru and it was there when we arrived. It continued to sit there and was still threre when we left. I seriously believe they where dead in the pick up if it wasn't for the obnoxious ringing of the bell! I almost can't fault them since they where sitting so long, even though the two people working the front and drive through where arguing over who was handling the customer?!?! Yes they where arguing at one point over who was getting this customers prescriptions. 

One lady that was waiting very patiently for her prescriptions finally says "I'll just come back after 10pm and pick them up". So what does the pharmacist do... Fills her prescription keeping my wife and myself sitting waiting even longer.

Want to know where the manager was during this hell time? He was in the pharmacy filling prescriptions! He should have been at the front calming people down, but then I saw some of them women up front and I can't blame him I wouldn't want to be up there either.

The family woke up Saturday morning and just decided to take off and go humping (hiking for you non combatants) up to Tannehill Historical State Park. If you live near Alabama and haven't been there it is beautiful this time of year. It was good leaving behind what I could of technology and just wondering through the woods. I of course couldn't leave it all behind being I am on call this weekend and the pager had to go nuts, but we had a great time. We will be going back soon, this month on the 24-25th they will have Civil War reenactments. If you have never seen this before, it is like stepping back in time... but with a pager.

 

 

I get tired of people trying to sell their spam filtering and all they do is turn up every filter so that all email is marked/quarantined as spam and they expect you to whitelist everything you want to get.

So what is whitelisting? Well it is a list of accepted items, in this case email address or domains. When whitelisted an emails skip the filtering so that they are delivered. If I wanted to make sure that any email from z3r010v3@gmail.com would get delivered to me I could whitelist the whole email or I could whitelist @gmail.com and then it would always get to me. This is not the way to do it, I believe whitelists should be a last resort.

With computers being infected with viruses that allow spammers to send emails from them, and email servers configured wrong allowing for open relays there is always a chance a domain you have whitelisted will spam you. To top it off most whitelist use the "From" address and this is easy to bypass. I had a client for example that whitelisted *@*.gov so that all emails from anything ending in .gov would get through. That is fine till you have a person complaining at the clients office because they are getting spam from not.a.real.host.gov. Then you have spammers that are smart and figure out what email address to use based on the company. For example here in Alabama lawyers always want to whitelist alacourt.gov, yea didn't take spammers long to figure out they could spam any law office in Alabama if they just used the alacourt domain for their email address.

The same that goes here for whitelisting also applies to blacklist. I have had clients inadvertently blacklist everyone at aol.com or gmail.com. So the same goes here for blacklisting.

If you do not trust your rules and filters  work at them more. Don't just start whitelisting every tom, dick, and harry.com

Vbounce is the weapon!

What ever you are going to call it as some call it backscatter and some call it Joe Jobs, well it is annoying. People where complaining, it was an direct attack of this junk. No fear tho, I have added to my Ninja weapons. This time, I have activated.... vbounce. It was really that easy since it comes with Spamassassin 3.2.x and you are using that version right? Well you should be.

Configure

/etc/mail/spamassassin/v320.pre

Change:

# VBounce - anti-bounce-message rules, see rules/20_vbounce.cf
#
#loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::VBounce

to

# VBounce - anti-bounce-message rules, see rules/20_vbounce.cf
#
loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::VBounce

and then turn on if you have not shortcircuit see Justin Mason's entry at the Spamassassin Wiki here.

Then in /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf add
whitelist_bounce_relays myrelay.myhost.net you should add every server that sends email on your behalf. You must enable this or none of this will work correctly. Now also in /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf add score BOUNCE_MESSAGE 5.0.

What it does

So now when backscatter comes in, we are going to check and see if it came from one of our servers. If it does then we are going to mark it with vbounce and send it on in. Now if it is not from one of our servers it is going to hit BOUNCE_MESSAGE and get marked spam. I have enabled this on all my servers and have not yet got another complaint. This is one of those tools I think are going to be very important.

 

I've been using Twitter for a while now, and I know when it is something that I believe is going to be useful when I tell my wife about it and sign her up. So if you are not using Twitter yet, let me tell you what it is.

Well it isn't IM, and yet it is. It isn't a blog and yet it is. And it isn't a way to keep up with someone and find friends, and yet it is.

It is a way to chat with friends, meet new friends, keep up with people and read about what others are doing.

You can use Twitter via their web site, its real easy to sign up and get an account. I'm not going to go into that part of it here. Trust me it is simple. Once you have it then you can just use it to post your messages on the website. Then there is chat, using your favorite IM client (Pidgin) and your Google Talk account you can add a friend, twitter@twitter.com. Once you have done this, then you can chat your status/messages directly to Twitter. This doesn't stop here either. I can only speak as to what I have, but I have an T-Mobile Wing. Using it I can also SMS to Twitter, and I run ceTwit on the phone so when I have a network connection I can also send and receive twits. Twits are by the way messages from other people. We'll get into that in a minute. So I can send my updates and messages from web, chat, and phone while mobile.

Now when you add a friend, you can easily choose how you want to get updates. You can get them to any of the ways you can send, same as above web, chat, or phone. Just because you have a friend added you do not have to receive their chats via your phone for instance. You can set where you want to receive updates.  I have several people I follow, and some are really chatty or I just really don't want to know what they are talking about all the time. So I make sure not to follow them on chat and my phone. You can always check your Twitter site to see what people you are following have been saying.

A Blog you say? Yes it is a social blog. Remember what ever you chat on Twitter others will see. If you have clicked any of the Twitter links in this post you will see mine. It is NOT private, but then neither is IM unless you use a private server with encryption and we won't get into that.

It ends up being either a I love it! or an I don't get it? You will have to check it out for yourself to make that call. I also hear people saying it is a fad. I agree with that, but I see it leveling off in growth. I think it will stay around for a while. I can see a large company "Google" buying them. We will just have to wait and see.

Links for more information:

If you are a Birmingham Alabama Twitter user you can Follow Bhampulse (http://bhampulse.zerosource.org).

Twitters website is at http://www.twitter.com

Twitter Fan Wiki is at http://twitter.pbwiki.com/

 

Upcoming:

 Brightkite review, so far not looking good!

AndLinux nice... run Linux (Ubuntu) in windows

Sun VirtualBox good... acquired VM system