I’m the New Guy from The Office who can’t play Call of Duty

Go watch this: The Office: Call of Duty (It’s a two minute clip.)

The new guy? That’s me right now.

So my job does a little bit of Team Building now and then. It’s great for morale. Unless you’re me. And the team building exercise happens to be a first person shooter game that you basically suck at. (I still think I lag too much and that’s part of the problem. At least thats one of my excuses.)

If, on a Friday, my only concern about my job is my lack of ability to play a first person shooter game, I must be doing OK. But it still has me bummed out that I suck that bad at it…

Technorati Tags: the office, call of duty, the office call of duty

Saturday’s child works hard for a living

(6:54:19 AM) Jay: and good morning
(6:54:19 AM) Jay : didn’t realize you were awake
(6:54:20 AM) Jay : heh
(6:55:56 AM) Space: lol
(6:55:57 AM) Space: yep
(6:56:05 AM) Space: start work ‘officially’ in five minutes
(6:56:10 AM) Space: (but I’ve been working for the last half hour)
(6:56:12 AM) Jay : ahh
(6:56:22 AM) Jay : typical Tracie
(6:56:33 AM) Space: lol
(6:56:46 AM) Space: yeah but I’d rather do OT if needed in the AM than at night when all my kids and hubby are home
(6:57:00 AM) Space: it’s not really needed today but we’re going to be short handed and I wanted to be sure we’re caught up
(6:57:20 AM) Jay : naw, that’s cool.
(6:57:23 AM) Space: plus, my email addy is plastered all over creation since my promotion so I get customers emailing me directly a lot now
(6:57:24 AM) Jay : it’s still typical
(6:57:49 AM) Jay : you have a well honed dedication to your work
(6:58:03 AM) Jay : definitely one of your redeeming qualities
(6:58:14 AM) Space: lol well thanks?

Just in case anyone was wondering… you know with the accusations some ex loserlunarpages employees are flinging around about me in retaliation to a few of my posts. Jay’s my buddy and has been for a long time.. but he was also a co-worker in the past, and at one time my superior… so he’d know. And I really was born on a Saturday. That’s proof enough right there, right?

I’m glad it’s Friday, though. I’ve been fighting a cold for a week.. and not sleeping well. I’m hoping it’s due to me not feeling well and this will be short lived. I love my bed but it’s times like this I wonder if a foam mattress would help. I seem to go through insomnia struggles once or twice a year that last 2-3 weeks at a time and it’s maddening. And makes me a cranky bitch.

Technorati Tags: saturday’s child, she works hard for the money

It’s not even my birthday

Yesterday I needed to be able to edit a document for work. It was a PDF document and I didn’t have a PDF editor. I downloaded one that I found via Google search and promptly hated it. So I uninstalled it.

The program was Abdio PDF Editor. This piece of crap program screwed up my computer when I uninstalled it. It took with it my search assistant when I uninstalled it. This meant the search function on my computer failed to work until Jack disabled the search assistant. To ensure it was that program, I reinstalled it and guess what? Search worked. I uninstalled it again… (using the custom uninstall option with Jack checking every file to ensure it was only claiming to uninstall its own files) but no luck.. It took my search assistant again. BOOOOO!

There’s a few other minor issues with my computer. It’s been years since I’ve upgraded it (except the video card). I was supposed to upgrade it almost a year ago when we sold our house. In fact the money for it is still in the bank. We just never got around to it and there was always a higher priority. Tomorrow we’re getting the parts and hopefully the next time I post it will be from my shiny new computer!

P.S. My birthday is next month. *hint hint* I was looking at watches since none of mine are functional at the moment. Look at this Chopard ladybug watch. Cute in concept… but I wouldn’t wear it.

Lunarpages on the brain?

So…

I was recently promoted at my job. I’ve been doing the tasks for a while now and had been given a list of things they want me to accomplish. They finally announced the promotion Friday making it all the way official. Today was the day to start the tasks on my list I couldn’t do until the announcement went out.

First thing… I needed to email some of our staff about a new procedure. Should be easy enough…. right?

OOOOH no. Not for dopey ole me who was nervous about sending my first official email in my new official role…. I fretted over the details… which.. seriously, there wasn’t enough details to be fretting over! I’m just a bit gun shy I guess having not done this role in a while and wanting to be sure my first “Please do this from now on” email came across positive.

I fired off the email and breathed a sigh of relief, kinda kicking myself for being all nervous about it. It was painless!

[named removed to protect the innocent] from Lunarpages emails me back right away:

Did you accidently send this?

Hope you are doing good

I scratched my head a second wondering why *** would email me back. Then another person from Lunarpages emailed me.. and another. Some were like OMG HI how are you? WE MISS YOU! But I was a wee bit mortified. And the replies to it started coming in faster than I could respond.

Um… OOPS?

So apparently Thunderbird still had a lunarpages email address in the collected addresses area that partially matched the address I was trying to send to. I never even thought to check because I thought I had typed out the full email address of who I was actually trying to email. Heck, I had deleted all Lunarpages addresses long ago. I just didn’t think to look in the collected addresses area. (I forgot that even existed.. as I don’t use Thunderbird much..)

I sent another email to them and said:

Well… Hi!

That was sent in error. Please stop notifying me about it.

Thanks!

~Tracie

At this point, I am thinking I need an alarm system monitoring all the things I do so I can be alerted when I’m about to do something stupid.

Please, feel free to laugh at my expense over this one.

Technorati Tags: Tracie is a dork

Dreamhost and Lunarpages

There’s been quite the scandal in the web hosting world lately. Dreamhost, a rather large web hosting provider and the company that happens to be my web host, had a major billing snafu. In a nutshell, during a manual update of their billings they accidentally billed for December 2008 (it should have been 2007). This resulted in their computers thinking everyone was past due on their bills and it automatically sent out late notices, charged accounts, suspended accounts, etc. It was mistake of large proportions and I imagine extremely embarrassing for Dreamhost.

But that isn’t the scandal.

Dreamhost owned up right away to what happened. The same day (within hours even) they discovered their goof they had a post up on their status blog with updates, and shortly after that a post on their regular blog that explained in detail what happened. The posted in their usual casual/joking style and this did not go over well with many, so they added two more serious posts with updates and what they were going to do to fix the mess: Refund any erroneous charges, reimburse overdraft fees, and even allow customers to cancel their account with Dreamhost for a refund even if they were outside the 97 day money back guarantee period.

Lunarpages chose to respond to the billing issue at Dreamhost by posting a comment on the Dreamhost blog with a link to their post about the situation. Take notice the post title now: “Robbing Your Customers?”. This is not what the post title originally was. The title was, “Dreamhost Robbing Their Customers”. This is what I saw originally. The proof is in the wordpress permalink (url) for the post:

blog.lunarpages.com/2008/01/15/dreamhost-robbing-their-customers/

Here’s where the scandal lies.

I used to work for Lunarpages. I worked for them for three and a half years. I know who Amy Armitage is and I know how she thinks. I was the assistant manager for customer service and worked side by side with upper management so my knowledge of how they operate is from deep on the inside. Amy prides herself on her ‘quick thinking’ skills and her ‘go get ‘em’ attitude. The problem is she rarely thinks before she reacts and this often makes Lunarpages look like fools. Her Dreamhost post proves this tenfold. Instead of leaving it as-is and taking the flack they instantly received for their vulturous attitude towards Dreamhost, they changed the post title, re-worded the content of the post and censored all the comments. The only comments allowed through are the ones bashing Dreamhost and praising Lunarpages. You don’t have to take my word for it either. There’s screenshots over at Web Hosting Talk of comments people have tried to post that haven’t been allowed through. Lunarpages has even gone as far as banning people for stating their opinion about the situation on their blog.

Now go look at Dreamhost’s blog about this situation. They have literally over a thousand comments across three different posts and threads about this situation. Note the many many comments bashing Dreamhost right on their own soil over this billing faux pas.

Dreamhost endures the heat.

Lunarpages can’t. Lunarpages won’t. In fact, Lunarpages wouldn’t admit there was even heat to begin with. Don’t even bother trying to call them out on their turf. Your opinion would never be allowed and you’d likely get yourself banned. It’s already happened.

Dreamhost made a statement about the Lunarpages situation and admit they (Dreamhost) likely started it with a post last fall about Lunarpages stealing 404 traffic from their own customers:

Full disclosure: I believe they made that post in response to DreamHost offering ‘refugee codes’ and blog posts about their company like this one: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2007/10/10…our-customers/

They finally had an opportunity to strike back.

The commentary from the ‘Renown Web Development Technician and Software Development Lead’ did make for some funny reading, though. What’s a ‘portal infrastructure’ anyway?!

Do you see the difference in how the two web hosting companies operate? Are they both being childish? Sure. They remind me a bit of the Mac -vs- Windows commercials. But who’s honest and up front in these situations? It sure isn’t Lunarpages. And it’s no surprise to me.

In my opinion, Lunarpages routinely uses dishonest and unscrupulous tactics to promote their business.

This includes requiring their employees and staff to post positive comments on their blog posts and to write fake reviews on various review websites, especially if a negative review had been posted by a true customer. We were asked to bury those real reviews with positive fake ones. Lunarpages gave us free web hosting accounts so it was easy to “prove” we were “customers” and our fake reviews got posted. I have lost count how many fake reviews I have posted across tons of review websites in the 3.5 years I worked at Lunarpages.

Here are some examples of the fake reviews:

http://www.besthostratings.com/web-hosting/lunarpages.html

The post from Kiri? That’s me. I did that at Amy’s request while on the clock. So I was paid to write it. The reviews from Ryan Jackson, Scott, Craig Sadil, and Miraenda were all paid for by Lunarpages as they were all staff members.

http://www.webhostingjury.com/reviews/Lunarpages

The ‘reviews’ by Kiri (me again), chase, twitch, James, chapterthree, David, Ryan were all paid for as again these people were staff of Lunarpages at the time the reviews were written. We were asked to post them during our shifts.

I was also asked to start this thread at Web Hosting Talk. The first post isn’t even Kiri’s (my) words. Amy wrote it. She wanted to exploit an accusation that she was using sex to sell web hosting that came about over her ’sexy’ photo on the Lunarpages MySpace page. The rest of the posts on that thread were mine, but I don’t use words like “lamer” or “cyberland”, trust me.

(07:20:52) amy: check this
(07:21:09) amy: we are gonna create a PR slut storm
(07:21:13) amy: [digg link]
(07:21:45) Tracie: lol
(07:22:29) amy: can u get a few staff to digg it please
(07:22:31) amy: not mods
(07:22:36) Tracie: sure
(07:22:52) amy: and later someone can link it on the forum in that post and we’ll get all MAD bout what they are suggesting
(07:22:54) amy: ;0
(07:23:04) amy: my seo guy suggested it
(07:23:15) Tracie: hehe fun stuff

Note she says “not mods” meaning not the volunteer moderators.. she wanted PAID staff members. Then later that day:

(09:43:20) amy: do they have some kinda gossip section over at wht? Imagine if the host haters over there got a hold of the story
(09:46:32) Tracie: not that i know of
(09:49:53) Tracie: i just lost all lp connection?
(09:50:12) amy: my mail is down atm too
(09:50:14) amy: lemme find out
(09:50:43) amy: maybe just email?
(09:50:50) Tracie: no
(09:50:53) Tracie: everything died a sec
(09:50:54) Tracie: no irc
(09:50:57) Tracie: no mail, no web
(09:51:10) amy: maybe check with Lee
(09:55:05) Tracie: dani says she’s notified adam and marcus
(09:59:32) amy: okies
(10:02:44) amy: ah HAH!!!
(10:02:51) amy: webhosting lounge at WHT
(10:02:55) Tracie: ahh
(10:03:02) amy: do we have a remote with an anon profile?
(10:03:24) amy: can kiri do it all pissed off like women who are successful in IT don’t necessarily do it on their backs
(10:03:26) amy: heh
(10:03:55) Tracie: sure
(10:03:58) Tracie: tell me what to say
(10:04:14) amy: ok lemme write
(10:08:24) amy: I’m not sure if this is the correct forum to address this, but I’d really like to open up a discussion on women in IT. I’ve been seeing more and more articles and blogs lately on women in IT or the lack of women and since I ventured into cyberland, I also see it a lot.

I’m a regular on the forums of my web host and I was really upset today to see suggestions that one of the women there is successful because of her sexuality. Some lamer posted a rumor on Digg (link)

I know that majority of users on this forum are men, however are we so in the dark ages that beliefs and rumors like this are acceptable?

(10:08:31) amy: see didn’t mention lunarpages
(10:08:35) amy: they can’t delete it
(10:12:39) Tracie: lol ok
(10:13:58) amy: wonder if they will delete it
(10:15:16) Tracie: Title: Women in IT ?
(10:15:20) Tracie: for the subject thread title?
(10:16:34) amy: no
(10:16:37) amy: make is saucy
(10:17:08) amy: Sexual Discrimination in IT
(10:17:25) Tracie: ok
(10:20:09) Tracie: http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=539850
(10:29:33) amy: u rock
(10:29:38) amy: wonder if they will pull it
(10:30:10) Tracie: guess we’ll find out
(10:30:12) amy: are u a member on sitepoint?
(10:30:28) Tracie: yes but there I’m Staff
(10:34:20) amy: me too lol

http://digg.com/users/alderoneas — This is the user who first dug this, and it’s actually Amy. Most of the comments on the digg article are Lunarpages staff as well.

The photo in question isn’t even Amy. Here’s the MySpace photo and a photo of Amy to compare. The only similarities is the hair color. I asked who the photo on the MySpace page was of and was told she was a friend.

(12:41:46) Tracie: whoa.. wtf? that’s not Amy: http://myspace.com/lunarpages
(12:42:08) chad: lol
(12:42:16) chad: no, its a friend of ours
(12:42:23) Tracie: k. it’s trippy

Coincidentally, Lunarpages very recently made their MySpace profile private. Maybe I’m not the first one to call them out on the fake picture of “Amy”?

I’m not proud that I was a part of these tactics.. at all. In fact it’s one of things that bothers me the most about my time with them. At the time I was told all web hosting companies do it and that most review sites are bogus anyway. They are owned by affiliates who get a commission if someone signs up using the links to the hosts on their sites. Several review sites are actually owned by web hosting companies.

In conclusion, what happened with Dreamhost sucked for a lot of people. But they were open and honest about it and have endured the megatons of heat thrown at them. Lunarpages proved once again they don’t even know what the word ‘honesty’ means, and that they run and hide from any sort of heat thrown their way. Unfortunately, this is only one of the serious issues that plagues Lunarpages.

Maybe sometime I’ll tell you all about the time they orchestrated their biggest reduction in force ever, and left a few of us to play it out alone while they ran off to a vacation in the Grand Canyon on the week the RIF took place.

If you want others to know about this, please Digg It!

Update: Here’s a couple more articles on this situation.

• DreamHost made mistake and fixed it; Lunarpages spreads lies
• Lunarpages Lies About DreamHost’s Billing Fiasco

Update #2: I’ve been asked about Lunarpages stealing 404 pages. Here’s a few articles.

• When a Web Host Goes Bad
• Why I Left Lunarpages Web Hosting
• Lunarpages client’s 404 error pages issue (16 page thread about it at Web Hosting Talk).
• Lunarpages 404 Fiasco – How NOT to put out the fire

Update #3: Be sure to check out the comments on this post. Another former staff member of Lunarpages weighs in with their opinion.

Update #4 Here’s yet another great post from a former Lunarpages customer that explains in detail his perspective of the Lunarpages 404 blunder and how it compares to the Dreamhost billing accident: Dreamhost, Lunarpages, $$$, and integrity

Update #5 This thread gets mentioned quite a bit on various web hosting forums. On April 28, 2008 this post was mentioned again over at WebHostingTalk under the thread titled, Lunar Pages now doing direct spamming!! What a thread title! Amazingly it seems it’s true as the original poster posted the headers of the email spam he received and sure enough it came from Lunarpages servers:

Return-path: Envelope-to: ed@xxxxxxx
Delivery-date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:22:46 -0400
Received: from mail.lunarpages.com ([74.50.13.2]:55552)
by host.lakecountyhosting.com with esmtps (TLSv1:AES256-SHA:256)
(Exim 4.68)
(envelope-from )
id 1JqW7i-0005Jy-4N
for ed@cxxxxxxx; Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:22:45 -0400
Received: from 69-178-184-66.static-ip.telepacific.net ([69.178.184.66] helo=D3K76Y81)
by mail.lunarpages.com with esmtp (Exim 4.63)
(envelope-from )

Check for yourself:
Received: from mail.lunarpages.com ([74.50.13.2])
http://whois.domaintools.com/74.50.13.2

Technorati Tags: Dreamhost, Lunarpages, Dreamhost billing mistake, lunarpages lies, lunarpages sucks, web hosting reviews

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