Archive for September, 2011

The e-mail response

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

The e-mail response, I have now started avoiding companies that do not respond to e-mail, or e-mail me wanting me call them, so that they can deal with my request. The car insurance variety spring to mind. I am not interested in spending my day on the phone, I don’ t have time like that to waste. What I do want from a company, is a company that can respond to me in an intelligent way after I sending in an e-mail with optimistically intelligent information to them.

The classic case in point, was the insurance company that got all the necessary details from me over a e-mail and ended up asking me the same questions again over the same e-mail tread. That was the end of my interest in dealing with that company because if someone can’t read an e-mail then they certainly handle my car insurance.

If a company cannot read and decipher the information sent in an e-mail, or cannot give its employees leeway to make a judgment call on e-mail and how to respond then do you want to deal with that company. Does it question a company’s online presence and data handling structures? I can illustrate this with the case of a insurance company sending me there web-form off the web, but in a e-mail from, they already had the details in the initial e-mail from me. Now from a data handling and business process, web-forms are the way to go, but old business rules still apply, as in the ability to respond to an e-mail if you have a staff that are dedicated to it.

Darkness and Accountants

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

Our friends in RTE are reporting that their has been a major power outage in Southern California and parts of Arizona and northern Mexico

http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0909/california.html

This is why we shouldn’t sell the ESB! Or Board gas!, With all their accountant government reports, they fail to understand, that if one engineer, makes a tiny mistake in their 1’s and 0’s the accountants won’t have the power or the programs to do anything , in two words “respect engineers” as he or she will get the lights on! The Accountant will only tell you how much is going to cost or how much the outage will cost, but you will be still in the dark!



The cloud and when lightning strikes

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

A Dublin data center recently had a lighting strike, limited details are available but the companies that were running cloud services on the data center have had their services shut down.
So spending money on cloud services should always investigated, the hosting company should have at least two data centers, that are in different parts of the world or at least the country. This type of set up is expensive so if you see cheap hosts with cloud services be-aware.