Blogs Tagged "Rant"

Baby Seal Hunting

Baby seals are the cutest things ever.

But their cute little heads are bashed in, and they're beaten to death. Their fluffy little newborn bodies are ripped apart. Their undeveloped skulls are sliced open with a metal hackapick and dragged back to the ship, or skinned and their carcases are left to rot. Each spring, about 300,000 baby seals, between 2 and 12 weeks old, are clubbed or shot to death.

Check out this video:

It's such a sad thing that people can actually do something to a creature like this.

Check out Humane Society's Seal Protecting Site and seal hunting on Wikipedia.

Self Referencing

Under only very rare circumstances should the web be self referencing.

Self Referencing Links

For example, here are some bad examples:

• Click here to see my website.
• visit this link to go to my website.
• visit dan's portfolio website here: http://www.dan-lev.com.

Instead, use:

• Dan Leveille's Photography and Design Portfolio.
• visit Dan Leveille's Photography and Design Portfolio.
• visit Dan's Portfolio.

Why? If someone has gotten to your website, they obviously know how to use links. You don't need to tell them that it's a link or that you need to click it.

Links should never need to specified that they're clickable. Use standardized styles - different colored or underlined words/phrases are links.

Who cares? Google does, for one. Google reads what the links say, and then classifies those terms with your link. For example, "Please visit Dan Leveille's Photography and Design Portfolio." When Google sees that link, it remember the terms "Dan, Leveille, Photography, Design, Portfolio" that are in reference to www.dan-lev.com. Now when someone searches "Photography potfolio," Google will display www.dan-lev.com a tiny bit higher in the search results. A few links will obviously not make a difference, but keep doing it and you'll see a difference.

This is why searching "failure" on google used to return the White House's biography of George W. Bush as the first result. It's called a Google bomb, because so many people linked the site using the verbiage "failure."

Self Referencing Pages

• Welcome to my website!
• This page outlines the uses of this product.
• Below is a list of links to other blog websites:

Instead, use:

• Dan Leveille's Photography and Design Portfolio
• Product uses:
• Other blogs:

People know they're on a website, or on the "product uses" page.

Never use "Welcome to". People don't need a welcome. Who cares? Google does. The terms in headings are very important in search engine optimization. No one needs a welcoming. What if they go from the contact page to the home page, they get welcomed again. That's uneeded.

I Hate Windows Vista
That's it. I'm sick of Windows Vista. I've decided that I'm going to upgrade to Windows XP.

The warnings "WARNING: Are you sure you want to change your resolution?" were annoying at first, but now I don't get them anymore. Vista was fine. It looked better than XP, had a nice search, and felt nicer, until I ran into some problems:

• My microphone doesn't work
• Applications constantly stop responding. After waiting a minute or two, they become responsive. SOMETIMES. Other times, they'll crash. It's great when you're typing a long message and haven't saved/sent it.
• Videos don't work - I've had to download so many different codecs and stuff, and some still don't work. Some don't have audio.
• Control Panel dialog boxes sometimes take minutes to response. If I open "Connect to a Network Connection" or other dialog boxes, It will show a blank screen. 3 minutes later, it appears.
• Sometimes the task bar doesn't work and when I click on an item, it doesn't maximize or minimize.
• It won't let me install Adobe Camera RAW

Those are just a fraction of the problems I run into. I'm sick and tired of it. So I'm going to finish backing up my files and then I'm going to uninstall Vista.

Conclusion: Vista sucks.

UPDATE: After posting this blog entry, only seconds before I was about to close Firefox for the last time on vista, I got a "Firefox is not responding" error and it crashed Firefox. Yeah, it's time.

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In other news, Verizon decided that I didn't need cell phone service. So I do not have cell phone service in my home town (or neighboring towns.)

Like this blog? You may also like I Hate Dell.

I Hate Dell
So before making my order on a Dell Inspiron 1720, I asked the sales rep, "I'm leaving for college on Aug 18th, will I get it before then?"

"Yes sir, you won't have to worry about receiving it before then."

• ESTIMATED ARRIVAL DATE: 16-20th

Customer Support Part 1:

• ESTIMATED ARRIVAL DATE: 15th

Customer Support Part 2:

• ESTIMATED ARRIVAL DATE: 14th

Customer Support Part 3:

So now it's early morning of the 14th and my laptop is still in production.


Please note their amazing English skills!

Customer Support Part 4:

Customer Support Part 5:

After complaining to Customer Support, the rep. said she would give me a Dell Coupon once I received my order. Yipee! Now I can buy more delayed Dell products!

So the manager says the SAME thing. If I change my color, it won't make a difference because then I'll pretty much be canceling my order and resubmitting it. The manager says that the last customer support rep will call me back tomorrow after she request to expedite it.

Customer Support Part 6:

She called me back and the request to expedite was DENIED. After complaining, I manged to get another courtesy gift.

Customer Support Part 7:

Once again, I went onto the chat after hearing about my delay. I told them I would NEVER buy from Dell every again, nor would my company (yeah... i don't have any employees, but they don't know that). I just made them know how upset I was and how it was drastically effecting my life (which it wasn't really).

Customer Support Part 8:

I went on the Customer Support Chat to complain to them again. Here's a snippet of the chat log:


After that, I talked to her/his manager. I managed to get a request to expedite the order. I got a call the next day and it was DENIED.
Just as I thought, I checked my order status on September 5th, and saw that my order was delayed another week.

Customer Support Part 9:

So I went into the chat once again. Nothing exciting. I'm getting pretty used to this customer support thing. I did get another courtesy gift out of them, and the representative told me to contact sales to see if they could transfer my order over to a local dell store. (see part 10) So I checked my order status the next day and had another delay - I was never notified of this:

Customer Support Part 10:

I talked to sales just like the last customer support rep. told me to. I asked them if they could transfer my order to a local dell store - even though I don't see how that could work. I was right. Sales couldn't do anything. Another waste of my time.

So to sum it up, I waited an extra 5 weeks / 4 delays because of my Espresso Brown casing. Now get this. I pull the laptop out of the box and it's so dark, that the brown is unnoticeable. (Note this image where it's clearly brown.)

Customer Support Part 11:

After two weeks or so of having the laptop, I decide to go claim my 4 "courtesy gifts".

To sum up the 170 lines / 1 hour and 20 minutes of customer support chat: I explained how I was offered these gifts and the representative asked me for case numbers. Now I was only given a case number for the LAST courtesy gift. The other 3 were over the phone, and I was never given a case number, nor did I think I needed one.

He claimed the best he could do was give me a $100 credit. - Even though the total courtesy gifts were: $100 and $50 credit, $50, a "courtesy gift", and a "dell coupon".

After arguing, I decided to go up a level of management and ask for his supervisor. After arguing with him, he told me the same thing. The max limit they could offer me was $100.

I told him I wanted to talk to his manager. He told me the same exact thing. He offered me either $100 or a printer. He claimed that each employee I spoke with was giving me an "offer" and at the end I could choose which offer I wanted. I replied:

I asked to talk to the manager's manager. Now you know your company has problems when a you've gone up 3 levels of management and you ask to talk to someone higher. Apparently it's their strict policy that they can't offer me any more than $100, and no one in Dell could offer me any more.

So that's the end. I was credited $100 and that's all I'm getting.

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My Conclusion

• Dell Customer Support Employees say whatever they can to make customers happy, whether it be a lie or the truth.
• Whenever you're offered something by a company, get a reference number or name.

Rant & Camera
I'm really sick of getting screwed over. This makes twice in the past few weeks where I get a GOOD design job request that I was happy about. I end up spending hours upon hours talking to clients about their website design, and finally, when payment discussion comes up, I loose a client. First example - A client requests that I be paid about $100 for the job, when I should be paid at least $400. Example Two - The client and I agree on a fair price. I tell the client that (s)he must choose to do one of the following:

1.   I send you a paper contract/agreement, you sign it and send it back to me
2.   You make a payment before the website is started, and the rest of the payment once it is completed.

The client had a problem with both of these REASONABLE choices. The last two clients have wasted about 6 hours of my life. But I have definantly learnt something from it.

Moving on:
I recent purchased a brand new Canon Digital Rebel XT. 8 Megapixels! Eleven Hundred Dollars. It's worth it. Check out the new photos I took with it. (1, 2)


Also... be sure to check out my gnome project at www.THEGNOME.tk