Entries Tagged 'Tech commentary' ↓

So the drama of switching from Paradise to TelstraClear has been somewhat shifted to Genesis Energy, although entirely at the hand of TelstraClear.

Because TelstraClear stuffed up the lifetime redirect for my Paradise email to my Clear mail box a power bill from Genesis Energy did indeed bounce back to Genesis. Being true to my word, I got back on Twitter and expressed my displeasure at this, directed at TelstraClear. They were most apologetic and made up for me being out of pocket by sending me some vouchers to put towards my TelstraClear bill – nice of them, but I have yet to figure out how to see and pay my Clear email bill because every time I ask them to send me the forms to pay by credit card, they send me direct debit forms …

However, I digress. Back to paying my Genesis bill – also want to pay this with new credit card to get airpoints so was pleased to see how easy it was to find and submit a credit card payment off their site. But. Amount X is due if the bill is paid by 11 August and Amount Y is due if paid after. Clearly I have to pay Amount Y with it being the 14th, in fact the site has big flashing “OVERDUE. PLEASE PAY IMMEDIATELY” all over it. So, click the ‘Pay Now’ button and I’m only offered the choice of paying Amount X. What? I want to pay the full amount and they won’t let me? I paid the smaller Amount X, thinking it would leave the difference on my bill so I could just use ‘Pay Now’ again to pay off the bill. No. ‘Pay Now’ button has gone. I’m dubious that this amount is going to stay on our account as an overdue amount and will not be included in what’s on offer via the ‘Pay Now’ button next month, so I’ve had to pay the little extra bit via online banking.

Boy oh boy I am getting SO frustrated with all this. TelstraClear has been pretty good, the guys manning the Twitter account very patient with me but generally the websites for these big companies SUCK. The Genesis FAQ page is erroring today, the TelstraClear site for adding alisases to my email address keeps looping back to an ‘Account Summary’ page … The other day I gave up on the TelstraClear website and phoned their 0800 number to find out about paying by credit card. The automated voice system said “I can understand most of your commands. Tell me what you want from the following options. You can interrupt me any time.” One of the options offered was ‘Your account’, so I said ‘My account’ (thinking she was addressing me) but she ignored me, so I tried ‘Your account’ … that didn’t work either. So I hung up on her and tried again. This time interrupting – not sure how many times I shouted ‘My account’ before the voice switched to an ad that said you could now pay by credit card by selecting Customer Zone on the website, so I hung up again! GRRRR!

No I’m not talking about my life on an island sipping cocktails while enjoying a view of the endless blue ocean lapping at white sands bordered by palm trees, I’m talking about Paradise dot net dot NZ.

Received a call out of the blue this morning asking what my decision was in light of Paradise being ‘retired’ by TelstraClear … hmmm … I was supposed to be making a decision? Seems I’d missed an email about it … ironic really. Anyway, the offer was on the table to switch to Clear (well, back to Clear in my case) and keep my existing Paradise email address, well, for an additional $2.99 per month. So I organised all that over the phone then they guy told me I had one day to forward all the email I wanted to keep to my new Clear address because once the redirect was in place for Paradise, mail would go straight to Clear and I wouldn’t have access to my old Paradise mailbox. So I spent ages doing that. And it all worked fine.

So no more Paradise webmail for me:

I know a few people at work who use it so I asked them if they were going through the same thing. Seems they weren’t and were rather alarmed that they hadn’t been told that their Paradise email address, that they’d also had for 10 years, was going to disappear. We began to worry it was a scam. So being a good Internet citizen I phoned Paradise to see if it was a scam … overlooking the fact that it’s TelstraClear who answers Paradise’s phone now, I spoke to someone who assured me that it wasn’t a scam and that the person who’d phoned me that morning was indeed a real person, and employee of TelstraClear who worked in the Auckland sales team.

So I’d been tweeting about all this as the day went along, wondering online why none of my colleagues were going through the same thing and wailing about someone else already having orangegirl@clear.net.nz as their address. Then what do you know but TelstraClear tweeted me back! We swapped a few tweets then email addresses and I got the full low-down on why it was me and no-one else who was loosing their address. Seems customers of 10+ years who were paying by credit card and didn’t use cable had some whole lower level of security that meant through lack of address, drivers licence and secret question information collected at the time of becoming a Paradise customer all those years ago meant they were getting rid of all these accounts. Seemed plausible. And I was pleased to get the personal help and to be able to put the minds of my colleagues at rest.

For everyone out there who emails me at my Paradise email address, this doesn’t change, I can give you a new Clear address if you like, but my Paradise email is going straight into my Clear inbox for the duration of my time with Clear.

Update several days later:

So, am going through all stages of loss here. First the denial/disbelief that Paradise was going, then the sadness associated with no longer logging in (although I was glad to see the back of the ugly web site used for reading my mail) and now I’m firmly in the anger stage. Someone emailed me at my Paradise address and it turns out the redirect is not working, it bounced. I have all our electronic bills going to that address and let me tell you if Genesis cut off our power through non-payment, TelstraClear will be covering all costs associated with that! And I received a ‘Welcome to TelstraClear’ pack in the mail asking for my bank account details for the monthly payment – what? I want to pay by credit card – I have a shiny new card that gets me air points so I want to pay by credit card like I have done for the last 10 years!! Although given that credit card paying customers seem to be those who lost their Paradise accounts it seems that they perhaps don’t take credit cards for payment any more, perhaps it’s too much trouble to chase around updating card expiry dates, although it never was a problem before.

So I’ve emailed the person who ‘convinced’ me to swap to Clear to tell them of my annoyance, and I returned to Twitter, although now I’ve conversed with a real person at the end of that Twitter account I feel kind of bad that the person and the company are one in the same and that they’ll think I’m mad with them. Although it happens to me all the time with the Xero account and no-one holds back their displeasure even if they do know who ‘OG’ is receiving the tweets at the other end.

Of course, it’s the weekend, and no-one is responding. Sigh.

Well, this is belated … got so caught up in the real 4th of July that I forgot to acknowledge another year of blogging – 6 years since my first tentative (smaller) posts in July 2006. Last year I’d done 1230 posts, this year it’s up to 1514 so as I say every year, can’t believe how much I ramble on! Mind you 4 months of this year I’ve had plenty to ramble about – my ‘travel’ category is full of New York!

Many of you will have seen me wearing, or my photos of my range of Tweet4yourtee shirts – a company started in Wellington recently by friends-of-Xero who are building their business using social media alone, mostly Twitter (twitter.com/Tweet4yourtee / www.tweet4yourtee.com). Hence ‘tweet 4 your tee’ – you visit their site to see what your Twitter name would look like on a range of tweet-themed shirts and then order online. I have 3 (one of them super super special and a 1-off because it has orange on it):

Hi, my name is @orangegirlnz

I heart @TeamXero

I tweet @Xero

Recently the company made a promo video and asked Tweet4yourtee wearers to join them in Wellington to take part – of course I couldn’t be there and was so disappointed, but have always sent them photos of me wearing my t-shirts (from both sides of the globe it turns out!) and if I could’ve joined them I would’ve!

However, I got a really nice surprise today when the promo video promo was released as a teaser …

Then the real video was released a few hours later

Famous me! Am getting a spot up the front when they do it in a year – I wonder how many tweeting t-shirts will be around by then?

WOW – got a GREAT surprise today when I saw a message come through for me in my Twitter stream:

Tweet 4 Your Tee have changed their homepage to recognise me for a day! I’ve only ordered 4 t-shirts from them, some posted all the way over here, some hiccups when I got a man size instead of a girl size, not to mention the SPECIAL treatment that allowed me to have my Twitter username written in orange!

I feel very special today. And strangely compelled to buy another t-shirt!

Living here means I get to attend at the last minute amazing conferences that just wouldn’t be run or have the attendance in New Zealand, although this conference was very like one of a series of Ignite conferences we went to at the Paramount the night before we left Wellington to come here.

So for 2 days in late April I attended the NYC 140Conf - a conference about social media – aptly named 140 Characters (that’s how many characters are available to you in a tweet) where 140 people spoke for 10 minutes only, or took part in a 15 minute panel, over 2 days. A very engaging format – sure some people were a bit boring and by the end of it we were starting to hear the same things again and again – but still a very cool way of presenting a conference.

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Realised today that The Mister’s desk in New York is beginning to resemble the command centre he had back in Wellington … when he had a desk there …

I’m not so fussed with the iPad, sure it’s clever, but because I have an iPhone it feels a bit like a giant clumsy fingerprint-magnet version of it. However The Mister really wanted on (for work apparently, pressure from the Boss and all that) so he pre-ordered and we went to stand in the special line for pre-orders at the Apple Store on 14th Street yesterday morning. I’m hoping he picked that store because it’s right next to Chelsea Market for me to wait with a coffee … although it turned out, it was so I could deliver him a coffee. It was quite fun hanging out and waiting, and the whooping and cheering and fuss made by all the staff was quite neat to be part of.

Anyway The Mister wrote about it on the Xero blog (including a tiny video I took on our new camera) and here’s a couple of pics we didn’t put in the post.

Oh, and funny story about what happened when I got the coffee. The guy at 9th Street Espresso asked me a couple of times if I was sure I wanted takeaways. When I assured him I did he said “Oh, I’m guessing with that shirt you’re a bit of an authority on coffee so I’m surprised you want takeaways.” I looked down and remembered I had on my Supreme shirt. I quickly cleared up that I wasn’t a barrista, just a Supreme fan, an also a 9th Street Espresso fan and showed him the pin on my jacket. He was very impressed when I said we lived on the East Side but went across to the Chelsea Market (on the West Side) for their coffee. I only wondered afterward if he knew who Coffee Supreme were or the fact that the picture on the shirt was a piece of espresso machine that he referred to me as a ‘coffee authority’. Either way I was chuffed!

Very VERY excited to be one of the first to get this new orange Canon camera – 14 megapixel – what a massive leap up from 4 megapixel!

It’s so tiny and so lovely and orange. Generally it’s the same operation as our existing camera so not too much to learn and apparently The Mister will take better photos with it because it has an image stabilizer!

I think it has a design flaw though, because it’s so thin and slightly rounded (to fit comfortably in your pocket one assumes) it isn’t very stable standing by itself with the lens extended, which is very important for the self-timer that we use quite a lot!

Attended my first ever Webstock conference at the Wellington Town Hall last week. It’s a collection of internet celebs & cool dudes talking about things they’ve done and places they think internet and our lives online are going to go. About 20 of us from Xero attended the 2-day conference – all decked out in our Xero gear (which didn’t go unnoticed!)

Half of us went on to the ONYAs Awards (as in ‘Good On Ya’) on Friday night to recognise stars in the online world. Xero picked up 3 of the 4 awards we were nominated for which was great and The Mister had to go up to accept one of them. I did a quick write up with some photos and a video of an amazing digital light-show that used the Town Hall pipe organ as its centre piece on the Xero blog.

Following are some notes I took during the 2 days so you can stop reading now if you want to, no more pictures, just notes to self really!

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