Burvil's Life: Sanctification in Progress

I’ve finally got our pictures from France online. I had installed wpg2 to integrate with WordPress, and I think it messed things up. I’ve fixed it, and it’s available here.

I don’t understand why support for servers that cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars is such a hassle.  I can’t remember a support call with any vendor I’ve worked with where it’s been painless – the one very notable exception is Netapp, where the few problems I’ve had were very minor and addressed very quickly.  (I’ve never worked for them and have absolutely no connection to them, financial or otherwise).

The vendors in the ‘support sucks’ boat include:  HP and Sun; Redhat, IBM can sometimes be bad, too.  Case in point – I’m on the line right now with HP.  I called the support number, and the automated voice system didn’t recognize the server name I put in (it did list Proliant and some other server systems, but nothing for my system).  I think for that reason, it dumped me to the consumer support line, and the support rep dumped me to another bucket, and after being on hold for a who knows how long, I was routed to the HP-UX PA-RISC department.  (Each time I had to give my name, etc.) .  The rep tried the contact the wrong (hardware?) team first, then realized it’s a software problem. I just got off the call, where the rep escalated to the next available engineer.  Again.  Well, at least on this call, the rep told me to call 800-633-3600, not 800-HP-INVENT – at least that’s one less level of annoyance.
This happens each time I call HP for this box, and it’s quite a waste of time.  Most times, the rep tries to connect me to an engineer in Atlanta, but isn’t able to get a hold of one (I usually wait at least half an hour).

That said, HP support is truly the worst of the vendors I mentioned in terms of wasting time.  Although redhat support you need to put in a case on the web and periodically check it, at least you aren’t tied to the phone, and they respond fairly quickly.  IBM also is very prompt, although there was a lot of back-and-forth communication and phone tag. And Sun usually calls back within a day.  I’ve been calling HP about this for the last week; in that time, I’ve called four times.   Even if I’d called the direct line, I think it would still take this long.
All to get HP-UX to print to a user’s printer.  This is the post I put on HP’s ITRC forums.

Hm, well, I just googled my name again, and now the hit doesn’t even show a link for the cache of this site.  But the address I deleted still shows in the summary.  Yet, I know from googling ‘burvil cache’ it does show the last post.

I’ve updated my page a couple times since 2/7/07, but google still has that date cached. In fact, if I remember correctly, it got a subsequent update, but then reverted back to the previous one. That previous one had a gmail address, which I’ve taken out. So I did a quick google search, and found someone else’s – jshin1987 at gmail dot com. I wonder if google will change its cache this time…

Susan and I saw Amazing Grace this weekend in the theatre.  Here’s the review at Crosswalk.com.  We thoroughly enjoyed it – I was in tears at the end, we were both inspired by the portrayal of Wilberforce’s mission to end the slave trade; to buck the trend of society.  The turning point in the movie may not have happened, at least we couldn’t find anything about it when reading up on it at Borders or on the internet, but was funny all the same.  We highly recommend seeing it – worth the price of movies these days.