First Computer Services

Mr. Yankovic offers his usual entertaining advice … this time on the subject of email.

According to Research In Motion, a Blackberry email outage has now spread to the U.S.  While this outage may be somewhat mitigated for large enterprises which run in-house Blackberry Enterprise Servers, individuals and small businesses who depend on Blackberry devices for mobile email access could be affected for several days.

News reports indicate that RIM experienced a core switch failure that took critical email servers off the Internet long enough to create an enormous backlog of messages that will need to be processed more or less in chronological order.

By Tom Brown

The people you meet–that’s got to be one of the most rewarding benefits of running any business. For example, a few years ago, I met Gordon Hopper at a local retirement community where he had taken up residence. The task was to set up his new computer and printer, Internet access, and get him started with his system. After all was working properly, Gordon sat down in front of his Internet browser and asked, “How can I find out about something?”

Back to Gordon in a moment. I have always been intrigued by submarines, especially the role they played in World War II in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of combat. One of my favorite movies is “Run Silent, Run Deep,” adapted from a novel of the same name, in which Clark Gable gave one of his final cinematic performances. So it was no accident that many years ago, when the company I was working for at the time sent me for a week of training in San Francisco, I took time to visit Fisherman’s Wharf and tour the Pampanito, one of the last surviving submarines from WWII.

Now back to Gordon. We had set up Google as his preferred search engine, so I just suggested that he click in the address bar of his browser and start typing some key words pertaining to what he wanted to read about. As I watched, he typed the letters “P-a-m-p-a-n-i-t-o.” Long-ago memories came to me and I remarked, “Pampanito? I have been on board the Pampanito!”

Gordon replied, “So have I. I lived in her for four years.”

This remarkable man had been on Pampanito’s crew during the entirety of her six war patrols in the Pacific during WWII.

In the months and years since, I met and talked with Gordon several times and would like to think that we became rather good friends. He was one of many thousands who made the great sacrifice of going to war for his country at a turning point in history. Like one of many thousands, he returned to pick up his civilian life, pursue a successful career, raise a family, and become a blessing to the rest of us with his knowledge, wit, wisdom, and kindness. Unlike many other thousands of his comrades in battle, he had to grow old.

Gordon’s name (misspelled) appears on this page, which details Pampanito’s third war patrol. You can find links there to historic photographs–and even some silent motion-picture footage–of that patrol.

Yesterday, Gordon Hopper passed away. I will miss him. You should, too.

For all of you DirecTV fans / customers:

If you have a problem with your DirecTV dish, receiver, or (basically) anything, they will send out a technician. However, there will be a significant fee for the service call.

If your DirecTV receiver and/or DVR malfunctions and has to be replaced, DirecTV will be happy to ship you a replacement. You have to pay the freight. The freight is around $25.

You can avoid all of the above unexpected fees by purchasing the DirecTV “Protection Plan,” which will add around $6 to your monthly bill. Whether you need / use it or not. If you use it (in our experience, anyway) it will take about 5 business days to convince customer service to either (1) dispatch a technician or (2) ship a replacement DVR. The replacement will be older than your original equipment, may very well lack functionality you have become used to, and may or may not work.

If you cancel your DirecTV service and have had your DirecTV “Protection Plan” for less than one year, DirecTV will charge you a $10 Early Termination Fee because you are canceling your “Protection Plan” as well as your DirecTV service.

Other fees and/or charges may apply. Read the (extremely small) fine print on your contract for details.

Just FYI.

Believe it or not, this is one of the most common questions we receive in the web-hosting area of our business. The answer to the question is: Just throw it away.

Everybody is used to receiving spam in email, and junk mail from the post office. This is spam from the post office. I actually received this in today’s mail, but I receive these multiple times per year, despite having complained directly to the sender. Let’s look a little closer at the return address:

You would think that the U.S. Government itself had sent this to you!

Inside the envelope you will find what looks very much like an invoice. If you read closely, however, you will see that it is just an offer to transfer the domain name registration for a domain that isn’t going to expire for several months. I received this particular one because I am the Administrative Contact for the domain in question. The problem is, the Registrant (who is a client of mine) will also receive one of these “invoices.” Either one of us might happily pay this invoice, but if we did we would be initiating the process of giving the “Domain Registry of America” at least $30. In return, they would initiate a Transfer of Registrar from wherever the domain is currently registered (Verisign, GoDaddy, Register.com, or wherever) to the “Domain Registry of America.” For various reasons which I won’t take the time to explain here, that transfer is never likely to succeed. Nor are you likely to ever see that $30 again.

In a day or two I will receive an inquiry from my customer asking, “Do I need to pay this?” The short answer is “No.” The long answer is “Just throw it away.” That’s all you need to know about this one.