Posts

Marketing Campaigns

Two days ago, I received a call wanting to take 40 seconds of my time to tell me about a great movie and that this was not a sales call.

Several things pissed me off about this one.

  1. If you are taking the time to focus marketing at me, you’re selling to me. Just cut the BS and move on.
  2. This was my cell phone which is used for work. My company pays for it, its a business line. Luckily, the poor schmuck on the other end of the line decided to end the call after I stated it was a business line. Because I was going to state after that, “This is a business line and you’re 5 seconds away from an ass chewing.” At which point I would teach him words he had never heard of while threatening to do things that I’m pretty sure are illegal in this country as well as most of the Northern Hemisphere.
  3. Do you honestly think I’m going to go to your movie after this “marketing” tactic? I used to fight email spam, the last thing I’m going to do is go to a movie that is promoted through phone spamming.
  4. What the heck happened to the do not call list? My cell number IS on there. Yes, yes, I need to report it for it to do anything, but why haven’t others so these assholes get shutdown

Luckily, Verizon is laying the legal smack down on these jackasses. Thank you Verizon!!!

Safari 4 Beta – First Impressions

I’ve been messing around with the new Safari 4 Beta release and so far I’m pretty pleased with the browser. There is a bit getting use to some of the new features but overall, I think that they have made some changes for the better.

Here is a run down of the big features:

Top Sites – This is a nice feature that gives you a nice display of the top sites that you visit on a regular basis. You can easily make this your home page by setting your home page preference to

7 things you didn’t know you could do with OpenOffice 3

Recently, PC Mag ran an article titled OpenOffice.org: 7 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do. I’ve always been a big fan of Open Office and have found it a nice alternative to shelling out the major bucks for the Office suite from Microsoft.

Here’s the run down of the list.

  1. Edit two or more parts of a document at the same time.
  2. Use OpenOffice.org to open legacy documents.
  3. Play a vintage Space Invaders game.
  4. Turn off the blinking light bulb.
  5. Save files in Office formats by default.
  6. Automate actions easily.
  7. Fix those single quotes.

Looking through the list, #1 seems like a good one, #2 is very useful when digging through old files, #3 wait…what the f*ck?!?

Ugly Code

With my recent project, I had to do some research for the bits that make up the msRTCSIP-OptionFlags field in Active Directory for OCS users. There were certain operations that are not 100% supported by HMC so often times you have to fill in the gaps. The definition of this field is as follows:

This attribute specifies the different options that are enabled for the user or contact object. This attribute is a bit-mask value of type integer. Each option is represented by a bit. This attribute is marked for Global Catalog replication.

First!

There are very few times that a company gets to claim that they are first to do something. But today, my project is launching and LightEdge Solutions gets to claim that we are the first service provider to provide this integration. Today we are announcing that we are rolling out our Hosted Office Communication Server 2007 service. The real kicker for this is that we have been able to successfully tie together the hosted OCS system with our hosted Broadsoft phone system. So now when you are on a call, it automatically updates your status so everyone in your company will know not to bother you at that time. This is taking the presence integration to that next level.