Posts Tagged ‘computer’

I love Sony!

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Seriously, I love Sony.  You all may remember that I received a Sony Cybershot camera in April.  However, when I went to Izeafest in September, my camera was dead.  I thought it was the battery.  However, it was not.  Instead, I ended up contacting Sony about getting it fixed.  All I can say is that their customer service team rocks.  They were able to send me a label, and I sent my camera back.  In a little less than two weeks, I had my camera back working good as new.  They also able to help me when I lost the cables that connect the camera to the computer.  Since my Cybershot saves to the hard drive first, I need this cable.  They were able to send me one. This kind of customer service makes me want to buy more products like a Sony Vaio the next time I have to buy a new laptop (which should be about a year since that is about as long as my laptops last).

Do you know of any companies out there that have given you excellent customer service?

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Public vs Private School

Friday, September 19th, 2008

If you follow me on twitter, you will know what this post is going to be about.  If you don’t, I’ll do a quick explanation of what’s going on.

I live in the Ridgeland School District 122.  We have had a school referendum fail twice.  After the last time it failed, my school district cut all of the music and art programs and supposedly the after school programs too.  After the last referendum failed, I had posted about it on my blog and had quite a response from both sides of the referendum.  However, here I sit, and Madison will go to kindergarten next year, and we have to decide where she is going to go.

I always said my kids would go to public school.  I went to public school and I turned out fine.  LOL  However, my class size was never higher than 25 kids and that was in high school too.  Since I have no experience with private school, I am reaching out to my readers to give me their opinion.

Here’s what I know for sure — there is no art class and no music class.  Instead it is being “facilitated in the classrooms” — whatever that means.  I had a huge concern regarding this “everyday math” I have been hearing about.  However, my public school is not teaching that.  Her class size would be 22 – 30 kids with only one teacher. In private school, she would have gym, music, art, and computer once a week.  Her class size would be around 15 – 19 kids with one teacher and a teachers aide.

Oh and let me add, the referendum is again destined to fail.  The administration gave them 10% raises over the summer!

If you were in my shoes, what would you do?  Public or private?

Edited to add:  Homeschooling is not an option.  Madison does way better learning when it isn’t me.  I can’t believe the amount of things she learned in preschool already.

Edited again 9/23:  The school principal will no longer answer my questions.  All my questions now have to go through the main district office.  According to the District 122 Ridgeland office, there is no music or art at all.  No classes will go over thirty.  However, they will not create another class unless there are 60 kids between 2 classes (I hope that makes sense), so it could happen that both classes could be 29 kids, and they would not make a new class.  They had no idea what the district was going to do if the referendum fails a third time.  In the past, it was threatened that one of the grade schools was to be closed and/or they would go to grade school centers.  When I asked about that, I was told that was up to the school board.

Also, the raise I talked about was given to the superintendent and the assistant superintendents.

Also the district was asked to put their finances online.  26 other local districts have.  Mine has refused and has publically stated that in a local newspaper.

Bluehost Woes

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I am seriously upset/angry/frustrated, and I am not sure what other emotions I am feeling either (and no this isn’t about those cicadas that have decided to leave their casings on our swing sets). Instead, this is a post about my hosting company. I have talked a lot of great things about Bluehost. They have always done right by me until now.  I sat through the CPU issues last fall that all of us Bluehost users were getting and being told by support that it was us and low and behold it wasn’t us.  It was Bluehost.

Over the last several weeks, I have been dealing with Bluehost’s ticketing system and phone support.  I have been getting CPU errors daily.  Since I monetize my blogs, it is very important that they do not go down either for 5 minutes or for 5 hours.  It is seriously frustrating.  I have gotten to the point that I can read the Bluehost Error Log and CPU exceeded logs better than their support people!  My frustration lies in that their support is a lot of times less than helpful.

I’m sorry, but I expect your phone people to know more than me.  I also expect them not to have to refer me to the ticket people who take days sometime to answer their tickets.  Also, if they don’t know what the problem really is, they shouldn’t be upselling me to the $20 a month plan.  When I ask if I’ll still get CPU errors since the problem wasn’t fixed, I don’t know isn’t the right answer.  I expect that after 3 weeks we would figure out what the problem is.  I expect your ticket people to read my prior tickets and know that what they are telling me, I ALREADY DID!  (and not close said ticket).  I expect that when you need my license to give me permission for SSH access that the uploader thing works, so your customers aren’t waiting for a week with nobody telling them that you couldn’t open the file I sent!

Granted, along the way, I actually had some extremely helpful support people who forwarded me links and documents to try.  However, my problem still isn’t fixed.  My sites are still going down daily.  At least the phone support person today was kind enough to tell me how to send in my ticket and have it escalated.  Whatever my issue is, the phone person couldn’t even access my file manager without crashing his computer.  I am running 6 WP blogs, so it isn’t like there is anything that is all that labor intensive or any special programming involved here.

I seriously could use some help here Bluehost.  I really want you to come through, but it isn’t looking promising.  I really need somebody to tell me why all my CPU errors look like this:  used  1.06 seconds of cpu time for php5 or this:  used  0.75 seconds of cpu time for /ramdisk/bin/php5  or  this:  seconds of cpu time for PROCESS : php5.  If anybody can tell me how to fix this, I would appreciate it.  In the meantime, I have started looking at other hosting companies, because I can’t let this go on to much longer.  You are costing me money.

Order Up!

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

If you read my other blog (Lisa Reviews), you will already know that a couple of weeks ago we bought a Wii.  Let me tell you, if you don’t have one, make sure you get one!  Yes, it is that awesome!  That being said, I came across a new game that I so want to try out called Order Up!

Order Up! is a game that I know I would love to play on the computer which is why I am so excited.  This is my genre that I love to play.  The fact that it is Wii game just makes it that much more awesome!  The game teaches you how to run a restaurant kitchen.  However, you will spend most of your time cooking.  You make dishes, manage cooktop stations, and also play manager.   You move up in the world too.  You start out in fast food and you are able to work up to working in a world class restaurant.  The coolest part of this game?  It simulates real cooking, so you have to pretend you are using real items like knives, spoons, tongs, and ladles.  If you think this sounds cool, you need to watch this Order Up! Trailer. I know it makes me want it even more. Think I can talk Bill into letting me get it if I tell him it’ll make me a better cook?

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Weekend Travels

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

We just got back from another weekend up in Green Bay.  I had a wedding shower on Saturday for one of my cousins who gets married in six weeks.  Everybody had a great time.  Since my parents only have dial up, I don’t bring up my laptop computer which means I am behind with both my blogs and my emails.  I am slowly but surely catching up, but I probably won’t be completely caught up till tomorrow.  I plan on going to bed soon.  However, I just love this picture.  I took it while we were at the Wildlife Sanctuary this morning (will be writing a review on it over at My Road Less Traveled By soon).  The kids loved the ducks and geese there.  We also checked out the buildings that are located there, and they had a blast.  Somehow, Bill managed to get two mosquito bites.  I think I am going to be going to bed shortly, so I’ll update some more tomorrow.

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