Month: October 2005

Dear Level3:
Your homepage is full of useless empty spaces, including a very large screen full of empty space after the server response. Have you not heard of HTTP Compression?
At least I know you are using what used to be called ColdFusion to manage your content; ColdFusion is notorious for leaving large gaping holes in a Web page web the application code is stripped away for presentation.
Why would I by transit from a company that seeks to maximize their own bandwidth usage, not conserve it?

CLICK IMAGE

Level3 got greedy at about 19:00 EDT (23:00 GMT) October 5, 2005. [here]
UPDATE: News.Com has a longer article up. As of now, packet loss is the highest I have ever see at my hosting facility.

Every time Bush opens his mouth, he starts babbling about curridge.
What is curridge?
Never heard of it before.
Oh well…back to being tuned out.

So, Jeremy turned me on to Chitika this morning, hence the new ads you see.
Turns out that their offices are less than 10 minutes from my house.
Heh.
We will see what the head-to-head comparison between Chitika and AdSense will be.

So, I mentioned earlier that I have packet loss on the uplink from my Web server where GrabPERF and this blog are hosted. How do I know it’s packet loss and not some other issue?

CLICK THE IMAGE

Notice the banding of measurements around 3 and 9 seconds? These values are the set TCP re-transmission timeouts for new connections for almost every operating system. When you see this pattern, check your packet loss stats from your routers/switches/network equipment.
Now…I wonder what my connectivity provider has mucked up?

Apparently, the CBC wants all of the negative blog posts by the Canadian Media Guild members locked out for the last 50 days removed from their personal blogs.
CBC: Please consult the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Most notably, Section 2:

2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
a) freedom of conscience and religion;
b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
d) freedom of association.

Oh, and if the CBC isn’t going to hire Shelagh Rogers or Rick Mercer or ANY of the CBC Unplugged Bloggers back because of their blog posts, I will tear up my Canadian Passport and become a US citizen.
I am ashamed of my country, and especially of the CBC.
Via: Mutually Inclusive PR

I’m not sure where they are in the path, but there is a serious connectivity issue with the Newest Industry.

Going to re-boot the Web server and see if that helps.

When I look at my logs, I am always astounded by the items visitors come to read.
The one posting that I am most proud of is this one, where I do not sing the praises of Gutter Helmet.

b2evolution only maintains local hit logs for 30 days. In that time, there is a serious pattern appearing.

URL					NUM
----					------
Home Page				116
Why I Will Not Recommend Gutter Helmet	105
This is your host on South Park		30

I have been watching this for a while, so on Monday, I wrote a letter to some of the executives at Gibraltar Industries [here], the holding company that now owns Gutter Helmet.

Dear Gibraltar Industries:
I saw that your company has just purchased Gutter Helmet. Congratulations.
I thought you and your team would like to know that my blog post detailing my experience with a Gutter Helmet installation is near the top of Google Search for the phrase “gutter helmet”.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22gutter+helmet%22 –> it’s the link from the IceRocket blogsearch engine

I get between 5 and 10 visits a day where people are reading what my experience with the Gutter Helmet installation team was like.

Gutter Helmet is a great product. The team that installed it failed miserably in making us happy.

Good luck, and remember: the conversation you don’t hear will be the one that hurts you the most.

stephen

On Monday, there was a huge flurry of hits from Gutter Helmet IPs and others, including what looked like Gibraltar’s very high-priced law firm.

And you know what?

They didn’t bother to respond.

So, I will continue to de-evangalize Gutter Helmet, as they are stuck in a negative customer experience death-spiral. If they can’t get over the big company, “One complaining customer is nothing” attitude, they will continue experience the force of a customer scorned. And when new prospects research the Gutter Helmet product, they will continue to encounter my negative experience high on the search engines’ lists.

Gibraltar Industries: I am now defining the conversation around the Gutter Helmet product, and you have no control over that. If you don’t believe this has an impact, follow the thread and conversation around Jeff Jarvis’ experience with Dell [here].