Another Small Site Update

Firstly I’m bringing this site home again. So from now on this site will be located on my server at home, the way it should be in my opinion. I have to dish out some $20 per year to make that happen but it’s worth in.

Also, I dropped the idea of having to register on the site, it just wasn’t a good idea, I’ll admit it. So I’ve gone to having password protect my image galleries. The password is the short swedish name of my current employer. If you know me that’s an easy one!

SL Sucks Balls Too!

SL, the company who’s job it is to keep the public transportation in Stockholm running, is really sucking balls too and quickly heading to the top of my hate list! Especially now that MyHosting (or their parent company atleast) are showing willingness to improve!

SInce we moved to Bro the trains to and from Stockholm have always departed at XX:15 and XX:45. And it takes 30 minutes into Stockholm which means we from Bro & Bålsta arrive to Stockholm central in the morning 7:45 which gives us 15 minutes to get to work which is perfect. Now our trains depart at XX:00 and XX:30 which means we can either arrive in Stockholm at 7:30 or 8:00. If you happen to work right next door to the train station, that’s great, you depart 15 minutes later and get to work at exactly 8. But how many is that? It leaves the rest of us having to arrive at 7:30 instead, meaning everything in the morning is turned back 15 minutes. I have to get up at 5:45 and take the son to kindergarten at 6:40 to take the buss at 6:45 and I’ll arrive at work 7:40. Great going, who tha hell thought of is?

And it’s only our two stations that are affect, the departure time from Kungsängen remains unchanged so nothing else changes except for our two stations!? It really makes no sense to me whatsoever! I’m hoping there’s a good reason that somewhere along the chain it makes sense, but to us, the consumers, it makes things worse! Because it’s not like I make up for it when I go home either! No I can either come home at work 17:25 or 17:55 depending on when I can leave. But now the earliest is 17:40 or 18:10. So in one stroke they’ve make it so I have to take my son to kindergarten 15 minutes and made it so I can’t come home any earlier than 17:40. So that’s 30 minutes per day loss at home with my son. Next thing you know they’ll raise the charges too!!

 

Site Update

A small little site update:

I bought a theme called “Axiom” for wordpress, looks pretty good I hope!

Secondly I’ve started moving from Imagevue for my image gallery to NextGens image gallery for WordPress. The old imagevue is still working fine, but all the updates will go here in WordPress. The biggest change is that to see if you have to register on the page – you can either manually register or you can use your Facebook credentials. After you’ve registered I have to approve you and add you to a either friend or family so you can see those images. I know it’s a hassle but shouldn’t be too much of an issue if you really are friend or family and want access.

Now They Can’t Stop Beating The Horse!

After putting this site up yesterday to vent frustration I thought I was done with it for a while. That didn’t even last 12 hours because guess what I found in my mail this morning?

“Kristoffer Strom,
We would very much welcome your feedback on support case: Re: Credit Card will expire soon (RUN-859550)
We are hoping to find out how we did assisting you with the resolution, what you think about your services overall and want we can do to keep you happy. Your comments are extremely valuable – please help us to serve you better. To take the survey, please click on the following link: https://helpdesk.softcom.com/index.php?/myhosting/Tickets/Survey/Index/867021/xj4e0dqwhr6h
Looking forward hearing from you! Thank you!
myhosting.com”

I don’t even know what to reply to that? My wife said “Oh my god, they know exactly what buttons to push!” and she’s right, they do. But for a company so dependant on customer service you would think that they wouldn’t want to push my buttons? Which says it all about their attitude towards customer service! But not only does it say what bad customer service they have, it also proves that they are in fact liars. I know there are some people in the customer service field that have an attitude to say anything and make up any story just to get rid of a pissed off customer. But I have never heard of that behaviour via emails, I didn’t know it existed! When you have a pissed off customer on the phone it may be very hard to actually want to help that person but once you realise it’s your job you just have to. But over emails you have all the time in the world – and especially when the customer specifically doesn’t want a reply it should be very easy. Yet “Allan M.” lied and said I had been removed from their system. Yet I get this customer survey email proving I’m not. They can argue that the customer survey system is a seperate system, but that would only prove that they are incompetent at integrating their systems. And to me, as a customer, it’s irrelevant what system is doing what! I didn’t want to be contacted by them at all and he replied that I “wouldn’t receive any further notifications”, yet I did – hence, they lied.

You know, I wish some company that specializes in customer satisfaction would, through some kind of miracle, get a contract to check up MyHosting. Because they are apparently blind to how bad they are that that is what it would take. And it wouldn’t be pleasant reading.

I mean, how many companies have a whole website with a dedicated address just to explain how much they suck? And how many of those have actual proof that they are correct and have every conceivable fact on their side to prove that “yes, MyHosting does indeed suck”.

Just How Much Does MyHosting suck?

Yes, I’m gonna beat this horse until it’s dead –

MyHosting sucks so much that they have even registered the domain name “myhostingsucks.com” (and several derivatives at $35 a pop!) just to stop customers they have mistreated so badly that we want to dedicate a page to how much they suck from doing it – because that’s how much they suck!

MyHosting And Customer Service

Ah, this never ending struggle of getting the customer service right, you know, some companies just can’t get that right. I went to Dressman the other day to buy some clothes – so very polite staff and a guy that even welcommed me into the store, without trying to get me to buy something specific, just a nice “welcome”. I liked that. Our company, knows as Ving in Sweden, has that as a major point all the time, treating the customer right and always knowing that “they have alot of other options than us, but they called us so it’s up to us to make their dream come true”. I like that thinking.

Then we go to the US of A. And a little webhosting company called “MyHosting”. We (as in NataliePortman.com) tried to run our site on their servers but it just wasn’t working and their customer service was kinda bad so I wrote that off as a bad idea and wanted my money back, cause I had double checked that they had a money back guarantee. Which they did. Unless ofcourse you used one of their promotional codes that the package builder comes preconfigured with! So lost $200 on that bad experiment and just dislike the company, wrote bad reviews about it – but thought it was over. But when my credit cart expired a few months ago they have mailed me over and over again to update my credit cart. Last night, after a couple of beers at our kick off party, I got another one and decided to reply. And in that reply I made it perfectly clear I wanted nothing to do with them, erase all of my information and ever contact me again. And less than an hour after I got a mail saying “I’ve deleted all of your information, please let us know if there is anything else we can do”. That just pissed me off how they could reply to an e-mail sayind “don’t ever contact me again”. So I replied “yes, you can take a reading comprehension course so you understand what “never contact me again means”. And guess what.. yeap, they replied to that one as well. Now it’s just not bad customer service. Now it’s a customer service out to provoke and aggrevate a customer. And that’s just so wrong!! So for anyone every considering hosting some website anywhere – stay clear of MyHosting, ok 🙂

Grazie Scuderia Ferrari & Fernando Alonso!

Did you see the last F1 race of the season yesterday? What an amazing way to finish the season! Sure it could’ve ended better for us Ferrari fans but still, as a race it was awesome!!

Even though Alonso didn’t win the driver’s championship and Ferrari didn’t win the constructor’s championship, I still think they won “Never Give Up Never Surrender”-championship! They never during the entire season had the fastest car. And they never had the best pitstop times. And never had the most amazing strategist at the helm. What they had was Alonso that never gave up! He gave it 110% every lap all the way! He spent the better part of the season fighting for every single point he could get! Just take his drives in USA and Abu Dhabi – he was never in contention of winning either of those two races but he fought and pushed it as much as he could to minimize the damage to his points as he could. And what a job it was! Ferrari was more or less counted as down and out for the season already at Australia but thanks to this “never surrender” attitude they only lost with 3 points which nowadays isn’t a lot. And Massa really cleared his act up in the last races as well, if he had driven like this all season… well who knows, but there are alot of those “what if’s”. Winning the trophy in the best car is one thing, but winning it in a car that has only been 3rd best all year, that would’ve been something, and so close…

Well fought!

Looking forward to next year!

It’s Been 10 Days Dude!

I dunno, not much is happening in my life to report on. I could go on about how I hate the world politicians for being too nice in regards to the current Isreal vs Palestine conflict but that get’s old very quickly, and me going on about it isn’t gonna do jack shit, babies and children are still being bombed and killed. It kinda makes everything else seem small in comparison.

But work is moving along nicely, still learning a lot every day. But I still hate computers – I’m trying to have HTPCs everywhere at home now that the online streaming is becoming a reality, it’s good to have a computer connected to the TVs and projector. But building HTPC’s and trying to make them efficient yet quiet enough is quite challenging, something I found out when watching the latest Batman movie which is almost 3 hours long which really heated that computer up! The latest F1 race from USA was almost ruined because I installed a new quiet CPU cooler on my HTPC that wouldn’t start after putting it back together again. So had to tear it down (my wife said it looked like it had been raped and pillaged) and eventually got it working and now it’s quiet, but still idling at 45 C which is way too much really.

Anyway, other than that, my son Sam is learning the language really really quickly now, every day he’s learning new things and putting words on feelings – “Wall-E is sad”!

Father’s Day

This weekend it was time for Father’s Day. Since Sam is only 2 3/4 he has no clue what that means so it’s as usual up to us to fix things. Usually we don’t really make that big a deal, but this time my wife had decided that yes we were going to make a big deal. But on Saturday she made us dinner and set a very romantic mood but was very secretive about her plans for the evening. And at 7 pm we got into the car and drove off. I had no idea where but soon realised we were going to her mother’s place. Reason for that was to drop off Sam for the night so we could go out to the movies and basically have a date night. Yeah, that’s pretty ironic, her “father’s day” arrangement had Sam staying at his grandmother, how about that 🙂

After we’d dropped him off as we were driving to Kista we kinda looked at each other, remembering the last time we tried to go there to see a movie, and decided to just go home instead, stopping by Willys for some treats and then got comfortable in our home cinema and watched “Ted”. Then we went to bed and we woke up at 10 am! I have no idea how long ago it was that I woke up that late! I mean I may “get up” at 10 but not actually waking up! That’s exactly what the doctor ordered!

Then we were off to pick up him and do the grocery shopping for the week and resume our normal lifes as homeowner and doing the last bits of tweaking in the garden before calling off the season.

I Used To Be A Millionaire

A few years ago when we were sorting out our bank loans we were millionaires thanks to the wrong press of a button on our banks side, but was was quickly fixed. Yesterday it happened again!

As I was sitting in the couch I decided to check our bank accounts. And as I was checking our funds that’s what I saw – we were millionaires! Of course I know exactly how much should be in each fund so I quickly realized that somewhere it had been multiplied by a factor of over 100. I know exactly how much but I’m not telling since that’s none of your business and it’s irrelevant to the question of how the hell this happend? If it was a factor of exactly 100 you’d just assume someone missed where the seperator between dollars and cents goes, but this wasn’t an even 100. It was a interestingly a prime so not even at all except that it was an integer. And as the programming nerd I am I was asking how did this happened? And considering our entire society is based on systems like this to keep working it’s kinda scary how it could make me into a millionaire just like that. And if it wasn’t a fund that takes two days to sell I would easily have transferred money from the account to the real one but that just wasn’t possible.

And this morning when I checked it it was back to normal. I will mail them and ask “what the hell happened here” but I’m not expected any answer, not anything more than “it was a glitch” when I wanna know the exact glitch. Only thing I can think of is that the file the system was importing and reading had a line missing resulting in it importing the wrong fund values for the funds which would result in this. Which of course begs the question “who can an import routine accept an input over 100 times what it should be?”?

But yes it was easy for the mind to wander off into the “what if it’s real?”-zone. Because for me it was easier to explain our funds increasing the value of a factor greater than 100 than a program glitch this big! And it was a pretty picture of my wife sitting in our greenhouse enjoying coffee and her creations while I work 50% for the rest of my life. But you also know that the entire economic system in Sweden is built to stop people like me from becoming millionaires. And once again that theory was proven correct.

So I Have “Plantar Fasciit”.. Woot?

I don’t know if you know this but during the summer I did alot of gardening stuff. The biggest thing I did was dig up some 30 square meters of grass and replanting alot of roses and bushes. And if you know me well enough you know that when I decide to do it I go full throttle with it. And then in August I started getting aches in my right foot when I woke up and went to take a shower. After that it was ok so I didn’t think much of it. Then it got more and more frequent and now it’s aching pretty much the entire day. So I finally called the doctor for an appointment and yesterday I went to see him and he kinda chuckled and said “you have a classic plantar fasciit” (or “hälsporre” if you’re swedish). Come again?

Apparently it’s an infection in my heal which comes from straining the sole of your foot either during a long period of time or short impacts. Say like digging up grass and thumping down the shovel with the sole of you foot over and over again while wearing completely inappropriate shoes? (yeah, 3 years as a homeowner and I still don’t have proper “get dirty and gritty”-shoes!).

“Ok, that sounds bad, what do we do?” … “Nothing! This is the kinda thing that usually heals itself in … oh I don’t know, say 6 months. So buy some comfortable walking shoes that don’t ache much and bu February next year call me if it still bothers you, ok!”

And ofcourse like any normal person on this planet I Google the shit out of that and read horror stories from people who have had aching feet for 2 even 3 years! And there’s even surgery for it! But I’m kinda happy noone said “it could become a chronic thing” meaning it will pass, just a matter of riding it out. He also recommended painkillers but I’m already limping a bit so I don’t wanna be that much like House. And I hate taking pills. ‘Cause if we’re talking 4-5 months and I’m taking painkillers that long I’m afraid they’ll just stop working. Like Clarityn, doesn’t do shit for me anymore, I’ve had to step that up to prescription pills!

And all these things that are wrong with me (like allergies and restless legs) are stuff that are helped by distracting your brain enough. Say playing computer games! Seriously, I’ve never felt like scratching the skin of my face while playing World of Warcraft. And I didn’t feel my heel aching at all when playing XCOM for 3 hours last nigh.

Busy Little Bee

Sharepoint is keeping me really busy at work. And not only work, I’m finding myself doing alot of work at home as well which is kinda annoying. Not only for my wife but for me – I don’t want to become one of those people who take my work home with me all the time! I wanna be one of those people who goes home at 5 and just stops working, totally disconnects. But when working with so many complex things at this level as well as the fact that here we can’t reboot the servers when we want, it forces me to take my home work with me.

I’m just hoping this is temporary and it’ll subside once the big upgrade is done and I’ll go back to going home at 5 in the afternoon. ‘Cause that’s the way it was all those years on the lawfirm. And at Carema .. well they never gave me the chance to get that into things there so wasn’t a problem.

Today Promises To Be … Different!

It’s Friday again. And Friday before payday which means spending as little money as possible. Which means using and abusing friends and families hospitality. Ok, that was an exaggeration..

But today I will actually be doing that! I’ll get off work early, 2:30, go home as fast as public transportation enables me to, pack the car, pick up the little guy at kindergarten and then drive 100 kilometers south to Södertälje, straight through Stockholm just as the weekend rush hour starts up! “Why would you ever do such a mad thing!?” you may be wondering? Well, first it’s because I love my wife and owe her so much that I’ll let her have a Friday evening with her friends at home with no worries. No Sam needing attention and being fed and helping him go to sleep, no husband in the way, nothing, just her, her friends, good food, wine and just talk girl-stuff all night. And for that I’m taking the son to Södertälje for reason # 2 – visiting my brother at his new place. I’ve seen it ever so quickly before but now I’m actually gonna have dinner and stay the night, barring any Sam-related incident. So actually looking forward to that.

I’m just not looking forward to spending time in traffic ’cause Friday rush hour in Stockholm can be a real bitch and with my son in the backseat I won’t just be able to relax and sing “don’t you worry be happy now”.

Being A Teenager Still Sucks

When I was a teen it sucked. It sucked really bad. No news there because it does for a lot of people. Had it not been for Knut Fischer I don’t know if I’d be here to talk about it. And when I saw the movie “Pump Up The Volume” it was dead on – it sucked being a teenager, it sucked being different and your parents or any other real adult didn’t understand you. Unfortunately it seems it’s still that bad – if not worse thanks to social media!

Check this YouTube:

It’s about a girl, Amanda Todd, who flashed some random guy through a web cam and it destroyed her life. And no matter where she went that thing followed her and after enough people screwed her over she comitted suicide, but not after posting that “somebody help me… anybody?”-video. That’s fucked up in so many ways. It’s fucked up it still happens and nothing is getting better. It’s fucked up that Facebook pulled the plug on an app designed to show how being bullied on Facebook feels. It’s fucked up that the first thought in my head was “is this real or fake” and had it not been for so many newssites picking it up and the police giving interviews about it I may have written it off as fake. But it’s not. It’s still a reality – that beeing a teenager still sucks.

I just hope I’m somewhat prepared to handle it with Sam in 10 years.

“Contact” .. Maybe The Best Movie – Ever!

I’ve been home sick 2 days now. I thought it made for an excellent time to watch some movies in my home theater on actual Bluray. So I decided to watch one of my old favorite movies – “Contact”. Yeah, that movie from 1997!

And .. yeah, probably the best movie ever in my opinion. The acting, the scope, the science, the ideas and thoughts behind it and the special effects, all of it is still today unmatched in my opinion. But one thing I didn’t expect is to discover a new aspect of the movie – that of a lone parent trying to raise a child. I’ve never thought much about that until now. That just goes to show how much being a parent changes your views on things, even a movie you’ve seen 10 times before!

Another Rant

There are a few things I really hate. And two of them happened today.

First one is people who work with customer service without having the least bit of interest in customer service. I’ve worked for years with support and customer service and I may not be the most service oriented person in the world with a constant smile, but I do like to help people and make their day better and I love to make things work like clockwork. In the past 2 weeks since our freezer gave up the go I’ve had to call a few customer service people and only the one guy at Bosch impressed me, but the other 5 people I talked to at Bosch and the people at If weren’t that well trained in customer service. But when we finally did get our payment from the insurance company we ordered a freezer from an internet retailer. Good prices and good service over the web and on tuesday morning I placed the order since they had it in stock. On Thursday it still hadn’t shipped, so I called them and got a complete nonsense reply from someone at their customer service that basically didn’t do anything to help me or anything. And today at lunch they finally upgraded my status to “shipped”.

And that’s when the other thing I hate came into play. I hate when PR people twists and spin things to make it sound better. Because they included a link to the distributor. And according to them they haven’t received the package. Only a notification about the package they are picking up this afternoon. This isn’t uncommon practice, I order on the web frequently so I know the routine. But I get annoyed at some PR person at “trettio.se” who thought it sounds better to print out “Shipped” as status when in fact it hasn’t been shipped, only “Notification sent to distributor”. But that’s confessing that they still haven’t physically sent the package. So now, according to these two websites, our big ass freezer is lost in cyberspace! I hate that. At my old work they instructed us to “spin” our weekly reports about disruptions in the IT systems. And I hated that too.

Score 1 For The Good Guys

After the 6th phonecall to Bosch I managed to get someone on the phone who could go on record with a exact figure how much it’d cost to fix our freezer. Fortunately for us it was a big number and once I had that I armed myself for another round with the insurance company. Only to have them say “ok, that’s that, so I’m sending 10 000 SEK your way, should be in your bank account before the weekend. Anything else?” 🙂

So now we ordered a new freezer with the extra service of them taking care of our old one since our car isn’t big enough for it. And money over for a “kräftskiva” this weekend as well. It’s all good right now, on that front anyway. Unfortunately Sam has come down with something so Helena is home with him.

Dealing With A Insurance Company

I haven’t had many dealings with insurance companies in the past. But now our freezer gave up so it was time to go at them!

Basically 12 days ago when we opened our freezer it wasn’t freezing anymore and everything had thawed up. We had to throw away alot, alot! of food! But after a quick defrosting problem it went back to freeze-mode again. But 2 days later it gave up and decided life as a refrigerator was better and kept a cool +7 degrees Celsius.

At first I called the insurance company wanting money back for the ruined food, something I found out by a colleague that it’s actually covered! I called them up with the aggressive attitude that “they are the enemy and I will have to fight for every crown”. But I was pleasently surprised when the first response was “no problem, this is covered and we’ll sort this out for you”. So I dropped my guard and politely assisted them with their request for information. And when it totally broke down I called them again to upgrade the claim and I was met with the same helpful “we’ll sort this out for you”-response and I gladly assisted with more information about the freezer. Little did I know this was all a part of their evil scheme to give me as little money as possible because now, when it’s close to payout time I am finding myself having to fight for every crown!! Had it been like that from the start I wouldn’t have been surprised or pissed, but I’m pissed at how in two weeks time it’s gone from “no problem, we’re gonna sort this out” to treating me like an enemy! If this goes sour I might not be their customer for long, because as it is we’re only customers because we haven’t bothered to switch. Much like our bank that I’m hoping got something to think about when we fulfilled our ultimatum of switching banks if we didn’t get the interest rate that I wanted.

Right now the ball is in Bosch Home Appliance court coming up with a guestimate how much it’ll cost to fix the freezer.

Movies

I’ve seen 4 movies recently, but this is mostly gonna be about one of them. Colombiana, The Dictator, Hunger Games & Love Bird. Out of all those I had the highest hopes for Hunger Games. And the least hope for The Dictator. ‘Cause Borat really isn’t my kind of humor!

And as it does so often in life the complete opposite happened! I loved The Dictator. The humor was dead on, the sarcastic speech about what a dictatorship allows the elite to get away with, it was hilarious stuff. I didn’t think anyone would be allowed to be that racist in a major movie, but there we had it all! Hunger Games was a huge disappointment ’cause I’ve heard so much good stuff about it and as it turned out it was a knock off of “Running Man”. Granted, most people involved wasn’t even born when that movie came out, but still … and throwing in a bit of teenage love story with a “imossible love”-theme alá Twilight didn’t make it better, quite the opposite. Had they completely dumped the love story it’d been a helluvalot better. In my opinion. I have no idea how the books goes (didn’t even know it was based on books but since I hardly ever read that’s irrelevant), but I was disappointed that they never ever went over “to the dark side” and had her kill anyone unless it was in self defence or by accident. But oh now, we had to take the high road and have this character win the entire thing “the good way”. THe one good surprise was actually the character of Cinna. And it was only after I found out Lenny Kravitz played him. I had no idea he could be so articulate and … good! Every interview I’ve ever seen of him he’s always seemed to be on some slow-motion trip and I’m think “dude have taken way too much of that!” but here he proved me wrong. Nice!

Colombiana was pretty much what I expected. Pretty darn good. Written by Luc Besson (and Robert Mark Kamen) and I could never shake the feeling that “this really should be “Léon 2” (or if it ever was one it’d been called “Mathilda”)! Unfortunately Natalie Portman doesn’t really have the physique to be an action actor and there is a stretch to come up with another long drawn out traumatizing event for Mathilda that’d keep her in that trade. But still, this should’ve been “Léon 2”!

Love Bird was just bad. Predictable, hardly much humor, best part of it was actually the end credits when characters from the movie were singing Queen songs.

As soon as we get a night off to watch another movie we’re doing The Avengers. And I’m afraid I may have gotten my hopes up for that one.

Busy Weekend

Wow what a weekend! Surprisingly busy!!

Friday started with a nice calm dinner in front of the TV after Sam had gone to bed. Then we kicked into overdrive going to Ikea and Netonnet and blew almost 10.000 SEK on stuff like a new bed for Sam, new shelves, a TV for our bedroom with an arm so we can yell PIVOT!!! I know we made a promise to each other that we were never gonna have a TV in our bedroom but we needed to relocate our exercise equipment and our bedroom was the only place big enough but then the problem is that it’s oh so boring staring into a wall when exercising so we bought a TV. And to make it so we could lie in bed watching TV as well we had to buy a special mount. Oh and a bluray player because … well surprisingly enough we didn’t have one before. We have the PS3 but that’s to our TV in the livingroom and we needed one for the home theater.

After that we went to Nykvarn (over an hours drive from where we live) to visit som friends and check up on their progress with the house and daughter. Then back home, sleep and on sunday it was time to mount up those shelves, the TV, all the wiring for it, change around the bedroom, move furniture, do the shopping for the week and all of that stuff, all the while Helena was entertaining some guests but once they left we really got going and by 8 pm Sam tried out his new bed which he loved. At first. Unfortunately at around 3 am he fell out of it and hit the floor so he spent the rest of the night in our bed. We went to bed early but not to sleep. Or that other thing. But to watch a movie in bed. Unfortunately it was a pretty lame movie (“Love Birds”) but it was still fun 🙂

So now we’re back to trying to make it to next payday 🙂