11 years with my girlfriend. Interesting case of Meatball vandalism. Funny to think that we will still be around when the fool is long gone.
The domain name thing is getting more interesting. The person involved I mentioned in my last entry is my contact at the new web hosting company contacted me via IRC (we met on IRC, too), and felt that I had misrepresented the situation. Obviously, looking back now, it seems clear to me that the old registrar (tucows.com) had a buggy web interface (opensrs.com), and that this is probably the reason it wouldn’t accept the new nameservers. Looking back now, I can also see that in the hours I waited in front of my computer, went to practice Aikido, came back, waited more – I can see now that in that time, one of the guys from the new hosting company did his best and was able to enter the data in some weird and contorted way such that the web interface would accept it.
So what do we learn, here?
Lesson one: When you use a medium that allows instant feedback such as IRC, people like myself will expect help faster. The old web hosting company sent one mail every 24h and was much slower in reacting. On the one hand, I didn’t get that angry with them. They were just loosers to me. On the other hand, I am planning to terminate my service with them. But not just yet, I am making extra sure that I have a backup server somewhere. So I guess instant feedback still is better.
Lesson two: When you use a medium that allows instant feedback, support must *use* it to give feedback. One of the frustrating things was to say something – an idea, a question – and be faced with ten minutes of no reaction, and then maybe a very terse response. When you are using IRC or a similar medium, customers want to be cared for, talked to – it is much closer to real life. Only that in real life, I can see the tech guy is busy hacking. I can see that I has problems and can’t talk right now. When I come back after Aikido, social rituals would make sure that the tech guy explains what he has been doing – even it is just two words. I did get mail the next day with some explanation, of course. So in the end it all worked out for me.
Lesson three: The increased exposure you allow when you write a MeatBall:OnlineDiary can bite back, when your business partners start reading your diaries. In the spirit of MeatBall:TransparentSociety, perhaps we should demand that our business partners also maintain online diaries. Or we should go the other way, and self-censor information. In a way we already do, protecting those we know in real life to some extent, for example. But it gets more difficult when doing business. Anybody could have determined the new web hosting company based on the URL using some whois searches. It therefore shows that MeatBall:FairProcess can sometimes be hard. Should I have told them earlier how frustrating it was, sitting there in front of my computer? Should I have just not mentioned it, or in such general terms that it was not even apparent that the problems had to do with my domain name? Remember MeatBall:VulnerabilityToCommunity.
MeatBall:VulnerabilityToCommunity
As to the non-social aspect of the entire thing: I am quite happy with the new web hosting company. The site is much faster, and I have ssh access. Yay!