Vonage Business Is Down Hard. It's Not Just You. cc @VonageBusiness

Are you a Vonage Business customer? Can't make or receive phone calls can you? Well, join the club! Oh, have you tried to call their support number but can't? Yep, join the club! Did you try to go to your control panel, but that is down too so you can't even contact Vonage support using their ticketing system? Yep, join the club!

Vonage Business is down for millions of customers across the country right now. You're only option is to sit and check their status page which for the last hour or so has looked like this:

You can also check their Twitter posts too, and see some seriously pissed off clients in the process, but all you will see is them telling you to check their stupid status page:

Just a tip Vonage, you can't tell people to check your status page and NEVER update it!

Well, my company is joining the HUGE list of clients that will be leaving. Their support has always been attrocious, and their service has always been very spotty. This really is just the straw that broke the camels back.

Do you use Vonage? Are you leaving too? Tell us about it in the comments!

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Short URL Service… With Ninjas!

I know what you are all probably saying, “Why do we need another shorten URL service?” The answer is simple, you can never have enough! That is a fact!

Besides that, how many of them out there have Ninjas? Not too many! How can you possibly want to post a short URL on Twitter, or Facebook without the help of Ninjas? You wouldn’t!

So what am I really getting at here? I am introducing you to my personal alternative to TinyURL, and it is called NinjURL.us! Use it for all of your small URL needs! Take really long web addresses and turn them into something useful and small!

Do you want to make your own TinyURL like service? You can use the free PHP script I used. It is called Broken Script! All you need is a hosting service that supports PHP and MySQL, or build your own LAMP server.

The next time you are posting a long URL on Twitter, a forum, or something like that, why not give NinjURL.us a try?

Technorati Tags: ninjurl,ninja,tinyurl,shorten,url,service,alternative

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Another Example of Poor Service From Acer

After last week’s post about my problem with Acer, and their lousy customer service I decided to seek out some other like-minded individuals with similar Acer horror stories. I honestly think that it is important to spread the word about companies like this to help protect the unknowing out there.

This lady bought an Acer laptop, and one year later it started making a ghastly grinding noise. She sent it back to Acer, and they reportedly fixed some random stuff and sent it back to her. When she got it the grinding noise was still there. She sent it back two more times with no results from Acer, and finally the warranty ran out on it.

Here is her video from Youtube:

Now I got a lot of flack from various people who barely read my last article, and obviously don’t understand the importance of customer service, and support. That is certainly a quality that is lacking in our modern culture.

I wanted to share this video so everyone can plainly see what a piece of crap product Acer makes, and just how bad their customer service and support really is.

Technorati Tags: acer,customer,service,sucks,terrible,poor,computers,laptops,aspire

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Digsby Goes Down

Sweet bastard! Why, oh why did Digsby have to go down today? For those of you not familiar with Digsby, read my post I wrote a few weeks ago about my new favorite IM client that not only handles all IM networks, but also handles Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc.

Well, after being rudely awoken by the east coast at 5:30am because they couldn't access Sharepoint (Seriously! You couldn't work on something else for 30 minutes until the morning Help Desk guy came in?), I took a gander at Twitter and saw a tweet from the folks over at Digsby that they were having server issues. I didn't hink much of it because I wasn't going to be signing on until I got to work anyway.

I got in this morning, and they were still down. No big deal right? I'll just wait a little while and try again later. Three hours later, they are still down! I decided to check out their blog to see if there are any updates. Here is the most detailed blog post I have ever seen:

Really? We'll be back shortly is all you can come up with? Come on guys! I know when a server is down, the last thing you are thinking of is updating your site, but still. Your users want to be kept in the loop!

Anyone else having problems with Digsby? Anyone from Digsby want to shed some light on this morning's outage? Lets hear some comments!

[EDIT] - Just checked the blog again, and they now have this update:

We are having server-side issues that brought down the service. We are working on the problem now and will be back up shortly. If you want to be notified when we come back online, send an email to bugs@digsby.com.

After a year of almost perfect uptime, this is the second outage in the last week. This is completely unacceptable and we will make sure this does not become a regular occurance!

[EDIT 12:45 Pacific]- I got this update about Digsby via Twitter:

[Edit 2:52 Pacific] - Still down... WTF?!

[Edit 3:23 Pacific] - I wonder how many users will go back to Pidgin, Trillian, or some other IM client?

[Edit 3:40 Pacific] - And Digsby is back! Just two hours shy of a 12 hour outage! (At least that is when I first saw their post on Twitter!)

Technorati Tags: digsby, down, im, client, service

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