Friday, March 11, 2005 Today’s tally is the same as yesterday’s. And Wednesday’s. And Tuesday’s. Nothing. Zero. Nada. Tuesday we didn’t find any money. Wednesday, Thursday and this morning, we didn’t walk. We didn’t walk because there no sidewalks and we have to walk in the street and the heavy fog we’ve experienced just doesn’t make walking in the streets a very safe thing to do. You’ve got those morons who believe the “m” in 25mph, means “minimum” and they aren’t safe in perfect weather, no way I want my butt go flying and having the pavement stop my progress. So, we haven’t been walking. I’ll be glad when the fog is gone.
Yesterday, I went over to the vet’s office to pick up more fluids for DeeJay. (I poked a hole in a brand new bag Wednesday afternoon, my last bag and it isn’t a good idea to use them once they’ve been exposed to the air, no longer sterile.) I got two bags, then came home and checked my email. I use SpamEaterPro which checks all of my email clients. Well, I’m getting a message that I’ve been locked out of my lisaviolet.net mailbox. I go over the site and instead of my website, I see a huge message that my account has been suspended, to contact support/billing. I call billing. “It’s not a billing problem, you’ll have to fill out a ticket.” Great. I fill out a ticket.
“Account suspended?” was the subject. “What happened”? was my message.
Within ten minutes, I get a response.
“An Admin will update you on this shortly.”
I respond.
“Can I have a hint? All I have on that site are pictures or my cats and our vacations/trips.”
Twenty minutes later, no message (but my site is back up). I add to the ticket.
“Well, it’s back up, but I’m sure you can understand my concern, especially since three of my sites hosted by ace-host.net were lost when your server crashed.
*sigh*”
Two hours later, they respond.
“We will let you know if we experience any other troubles with your site. If you are not running any scripts that are resource intensive and are not sending more than 200 emails per hour, you should be fine.”
Fifteen minutes later, I let them know I’m not a happy camper.
“I run one script, emAlbum pro and I don’t think I send 200 emails in two months time. And I don’t send them via any of my websites, I use XXXXX.net, who is my internet service provider.
So, I’m not sure what the problem could have been. I have no message boards, no chat rooms, no forms that can be filled on lisaviolet.net. I’ve had the same photo software since January 2004. I was at a loss as to why I was suspended.
My first thing I did was to make a long distance call your billing department, since I couldn’t think of anything else it might have been. They couldn’t help me and told me to create a ticket, which I did. Looking at my stats, my site was fairly busy on Tuesday, but visits were down yesterday and so far today.
This is very frustrating, since I don’t know what I did wrong and not knowing that makes it kind of hard to fix, don’t you agree?
It was nice that you got the site up so quickly after my first contact with the helpdesk, I appreciate that.”
It took them six hours to come up with an answer, very unsatisfactory.
“We appologize that we cannot provide more information. However, we will provide any information in the future if more arises.”
So, why can’t they just tell me they screwed up? Well, you pay for cheap, you get cheap. You can bet your ass I did a backup of the site, though. Just in case.
And I started getting orders for free samples of Benny’s nip. Months since the last one. They started trickling in, then this morning, there were thirty mails, then another fifteen, then….
Then I checked my tracker. Seems that the page for the free nip had been put up on a freebie forum. And from there, it got put on other freebie forums. Uh, sorry, that’s not the point of the free nip. The point is for people to see the other merchandise I’ve got, look around the store a little. Not to just come in and say “send me nip!” I have to pay for the bags it’s in, I have to buy the envelopes I send it out in and I have to pay for postage. Besides the fact that the supply is running low.
Since midnight, there have been 275 unique users to the lvdesigns.com website. A week ago, Friday March 4, from midnight to midnight, there were only 16 unique users.
Well, I do have a disclaimer that “supply is limited” and I stopped the free samples. You only get a free sample if you order something else. And guess what? Nobody has ordered anything. And very few have even looked at the other things I’ve got offered. Well, at least that helps me not feel too bad about pulling the freebie offer.
Remember the Ranger’s transmission breaking last year? Well, guess what? A couple of weeks ago, Brian was working on his old tractor, he had to go to an auto parts store to get a bolt or something and he called me to come get him, that Ranger was broke. He thought it was the transfer case, turns out it’s the tranny. Not even a thousand miles on it. The guy who rebuilt it, well, did a bad job. So, Brian takes it up to his friend’s house (the guy who put it in, not the guy who rebuilt it) last Sunday. And earlier this week, he called and said “did you know there’s a scratch on the side of the truck below the driver’s window?” It wasn’t there before. This just isn’t good.
I finally got all of my ironing done yesterday. Still have laundry to do. I wash those towels I put down on the laundry room floor about every other day. I realized that DeeJay isn’t the only cat using them as a pee area. I’ve even seen the kittens squatting on them. And I can’t let them pile up in the laundry basket because they really start smelling like ammonia. But I’m getting caught up a little at a time. The headaches aren’t as bad and I haven’t been as terribly tired as I had been. I think catching up on paying bills might have helped there, too.
Speaking of paying bills, our mail is very screwed up. You don’t know what time the mailman will be here from one day to the next, there is absolutely no continuity. We’re on a crummy route, a large route and when mailpersons have a chance for a different route, they jump at it. Sometimes, we’ll have two different mail carriers on our street on one day. One does our side, the other does the other side. Earlier this week, when I had all of those checks to put in the mail, a carrier came to the door in the morning, before the checks were ready. He handed me a package. No, he wasn’t delivering the mail, he was just doing packages. (???) The mail would be delivered by someone else. Imagine my surprise to find mail already in the box when I took the mail out. So, the checks didn’t go out until yesterday.
Because of the trees, I can’t see the mailbox in front of our house. I have to go out and check it. It does help when the neighbors put out mail and the flags on the mailboxes are up. I can see those. But Wednesday, the mailman apparently didn’t put the flag down after delivering the mail. At eight that night, I went outside and brought in the mail I had that needed to go out. Frustrated, I did a little searching and found this. A wireless mail alert. Now, I’ll be able to tell when the box has been opened without going out to check a hundred times a day. Garage-Toys had it for the best price and I’ll be glad when it gets here. I hope it works.
I would like to move the office stuff around a little. Move Brian’s monitor over to his corner instead of in the middle of the desk (a piece of glass goes from one wall to the other). Bring the fax machine back over to the middle. But I’ll have to move some of the binders I don’t use from the bookshelf and put the pricing catalogs that he never uses to wehre the binders were. Then I can start doing some major reshuffling. Maybe this weekend. I’d like to open it up a little more in here. So, if the cameras are doing weird things this weekend, that might be why.
I guess that’s it for now.
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