We started using Zendesk to manage our tasks and trouble tickets in 2008. We started with ticket #1. We are now above nine thousand, on our way to 10k. To celebrate our progress, and because we like numbers, we’ve got a prize lined up for whomever is lucky enough to submit ticket 10,000. It’s both a surprise and a prize. A prize surprise. Keep sending us your problems and we’ll keep solving them.
Today is your chance to learn the answers to your questions. Technology is our forté, but all questions are within bounds. We’re even prepared to answer the question of life, the universe, and everything if you’re prepared to formulate it!
Example questions, to get you started:
Whatever your question’s topic: natural philosophy, sports, mathematics, art history, design, astrology, economics, literature, linguistics, alchemy, or general trivia - we are ready, willing, and excited to answer.
Post questions from any realm of knowledge to comments.
This day, the first of the month, bring you a new opportunity to have the answers to your questions revealed. All you must do? Pose them. Ask any question from any realm of knowledge and our nerds will answer. From cartography to caligraphy, from theology to philology, our nerds have everything marked, everything ‘membered! You wait, you’ll see.
Post your questions to the comments.
Today, July 20, 2011, Apple released a new major revision of Mac OS: 10.7 Lion. If you’ve got even a few drops of Nerd blood in your veins, this is an exciting event. I’m sure you’re eager to buy and install this upgrade, but I urge you to take a deep breath and verify a few things before you take the plunge. Putting your head into an unknown Lion’s mouth isn’t usually a good idea.
First you’ll want to ensure that your computer meets the minimum requirements for Lion:
You can check all of this by first selecting “About this Mac” from the Apple menu, which will tell you your current Operating System version. Clicking the “More Info” button in the same window will launch the System Profiler application, which defaults to a Hardware Overview screen. Processor and RAM are listed in that screen. If your computer is less than three years old, you’re almost certain to meet the minimum requirements.
If your processor isn’t on the list you are probably better off buying a new computer. Fortunately for you, new computers will include the new operating system, so you won’t have to bother with the rest of this guide. If you’re short on RAM, it’s possible to upgrade. Other World Computing is our favorite source for Mac RAM upgrades. If you’re running os 10.6, but not 10.6.8, you can run “Software Update” from the Apple menu and apply the queued updates. If you’re on 10.5.x or lower, you must first upgrade to Snow Leopard before upgrading to Lion. It’s available from the source itself.If you’re light on disk space, you should think about upgrading your hard drive or getting a new computer. Trying to install with only the minimum required space available will put you into an extremely low disk space situation, a recipe for a crash.
Once you’ve qualified your hardware and operating system for the upgrade, it’s time to tackle your software. Start by listing all of the software you use. For me, that list would include Microsoft Office, 1Password, Firefox, MarsEdit, VPN Tracker, and others. Make an actual list, because you’re going to need to check items off.
Armed with your list, open each piece of software, and use the “About” item from the application menu to find your version number. Do this for each item on your software list.
For each item on your list, visit the software developer’s website to check for Lion compatibility. They may require a free update, or you may have to pay for an upgrade, or you may find in the worst case that your software is no longer supported and you have to choose between continuing to use that software under 10.6 or switching to a new software and upgrading to 10.7. Notable software packages that will NOT run under 10.7 are Now Up-To-Date, Quicken, and old versions of EP and Movie Magic Budgeting.
You may have trouble locating Lion compatibility info on your software vendor’s website. Fortunately the internet is full of altruistic nerds. A few Aussie nerds banded together to create a database of Lion compatibility experiences, available for free to the world: http://roaringapps.com
If you’re using any kind of special hardware - RAID cards, video controllers or processors, PCI expansion bays - you should know better than to attempt an upgrade right away. Your computer is a workhorse, not a toy. Leave it in its current stable state for at least a few months longer.
Now that your hardware and software are in order, it’s NEARLY time to upgrade. First, double-check your backup. If you’re running time machine, verify that your backup has run recently. If you have a spare drive around, use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to make a bootable clone of your hard drive. Operating system upgrades are major software operations. Things can go wrong. We want to be sure that your data is safe and that you can get back up and running quickly in the event of an error, bug, or crash.
The install process itself is painless. Launch the App Store from the dock, click on the giant Lion, then click the “buy” button. Once the download finishes, you can run the “Install Mac OS X” application in your applications folder. The install will take about 45 minutes, so enjoy a coffee or an icy beverage.
If this process exceeds your capabilities, your interest, or your desire, we are here to help. We can handle the entire process for you, or help you through the sticky parts. Call (+1-310-984-6946), write, or send a pigeon.
Today is the first of the month. To me that day has an odor. It’s a distinctive odor, the odor of answers. Questions and answers. Come one, come all, ask your questions and they shall be answered. No realm of knowledge is off limits. Efficacy, intelligibility, and even grammaticalness itself are not guaranteed, but answers are.
I don’t mean to reiterate the double redundancy of repeating the same thing over again more than once, but you can ask literally any question you like and your question will be answered. Put on your asking caps and get asking. Post questions to comments, answers will follow.
If you’re a friend, colleague, or client of mine, you probably run some kind of antivirus software. It’s a Good Idea™ in Mac OS and an Absolute Necessity™ if you’re running Windows. I don’t want to diminish the importance of antivirus software. Install it, run it, and keep it updated. Unfortunately, malicious software can still sometimes get through the cracks. So what are the cracks and how do we fill them?
First the cracks. Software. All of the software on your computer is imperfect. Most of the imperfections are benign. Some of the imperfections may allow unauthorized parties to make your computer behave unexpectedly. These imperfections are called, “Vulnerabilities.” The worst vulnerabilities can be exploited to allow unauthorized people to run software on your computer without your permission. Such exploits and vulnerabilities are discovered all of the time. Take a look at a single week’s worth.
Now, the glue. Software vendors work diligently to fix these bugs as they are discovered. It’s your job to install their patches. In decreasing order of importance, you should keep the following things up-to-date on your computer:
That’s a lot to check. Fortunately there are nerds out there who care about you and have developed free tools to help you keep yourself safe.
On the Mac, after enabling automatic updates from Apple, I use AppFresh by Metaquark to scan my computer for out-of-date software. It’s free and it’s easy to use.
On Windows, after enabling automatic updates from Microsoft, I use the Personal Software Inspector (PSI) by Secunia to keep my software healthy. Secunia PSI can run almost entirely automatically. It’s a breeze to run and it does a great job.
If you need help with any of these ideas or processes, please don’t hesitate to contact your friendly neighborhood Feedwire nerd. Happy updating!
Welcome to the FIRST monthly Feedwire “Ask a Nerd Day.” You have from midnight to midnight to pose any question to us. Our knowledge is vast, our wits sharp, and our tongues loose. Be careful what you ask, because we WILL answer.
Post your questions to comments. We will respond in kind. To celebrate this kickoff, the author of our favorite question (a totally subjective title) wins a free hour of IT support.
Ask away, but ask fast. You don’t want to know what happens if you ask a nerd after midnight. You also don’t want to get us wet, but that’s an entirely separate issue.
First, the story:
A producer, essentially a 3rd-party contractor working for one of Feedwire’s clients, has elected to use a free gmail account for the bulk of her business and personal email. We’ll call her Sophie to protect the innocent. She’s currently on a business trip in Africa. Email communication is essential to her work and to her life.
Two days ago, her account stopped receiving messages. We’ve reviewed the settings, tested and re-tested the account. Her account is not full, her emails are not being forwarded, her messages are not being downloaded to some device or computer. Messages addressed to her are not being delivered to her mailbox. They’re just now starting to soft-bounce. Senders are receiving notices that delivery of their message has been delayed, and attempts will be made for a few more days to deliver the message before giving up.
We have concluded that there is something wrong with her mailbox. This isn’t an unexpected occurrence. There are millions, possibly billions of mailboxes out there in the world and every once in a while one of them has a glitch or a hiccup. Unfortunately for her, gmail’s free email service does not include phone support. There is a web-based support form, and the problem will probably eventually be resolved, but eventually doesn’t help her immediate and severe need to access her incoming mail.
Now, the solution:
Pay for it.
If you need a service, if you depend on it for business or for life, pay for it. You don’t have to pay much, but you do have to be someone’s customer before you can get any kind of customer service. Reliability has become free. Gmail is an extremely reliable service, among the best, but even the best fail. Failure is the expensive part. You get to decide whether you will pay a little in advance, or a lot on the back end. It’s your call.
What’s it cost to have a paid-for email? We can set you up for $22 / year. Three times that, and we can include a permanent secondary archive of your messages. $50 / year for an extremely reliable mailbox on your own personal domain with accessible customer service and support. I’m sure Sophie would have gladly paid $50 to avoid the predicament she’s in now. Probably even ten times that.
Everything breaks. The consequences of failure can be shaped. You have the power to prevent failure from becoming disaster. We’d love to help you with that process. Get in touch with us.
Two facts, seemingly intractable, but not for long:
Fortunately, we are technologists. We’ve deployed a new technology (called Nicereply) which will give you unlimited opportunities to share your thoughts with us.
If you work with us, you’re familiar with our ticketing system. This helps us track work done and ensure that issues don’t fall through the cracks. We’ve added a new line to every ticket response and closure notification.
When you receive a ticket response email, click on the nicereply link and you’ll have an opportunity to rate our work and to give us feedback. This will help us help you. We’ll get to share in your important thoughts without having to resort to telepathy. Win, win, win.
A thousand words would have been overkill, so here’s a screenshot taken from a ticket response email to show you the new link:
You may have noticed that the Feedwire website has a new look and feel. In addition to this facelift, we’ve received a bonelift. We switched from using Wordpress as a content management system and publishing platform, hosted by Media Temple, to an all-Squarespace site. 
Speed Boost While driven fundamentally by the desire to think less, we also got a nice speed boost on the new platform. If you will permit a bit of nerdery, our average homepage load time went from 0.842 seconds to 0.252 seconds. The attached graph shows how dramatic a change that is. How does this let us think less? We have fewer choices, we aren’t responsible for software upgrades, the platform is fully supported, monitored, and managed, and we have only one vendor with which to deal. So far, we are happy with the change.
In defense of Wordpress, we probably could have eked better performance out of it by either tuning our hosting environment or migrating to wordpress.com hosting, but Squarespace is more fun.
We’ve also started using Formstack to build new tools, both internally and for our clients. If you’re looking for a job and you think Feedwire might be a fit, or if you’re just curious to find out what a Feedwire-designed test is like, you can check out our online job application. If you’re pushing a lot of data around and need to estimate file transfer times, our file transfer speed calculator is free to the world. And if you need help, we’re ready to believe you.
If you think that your website might be a candidate for Squarespace or Wordpress.com hosting, or if you have some processes in your business that could benefit from Formstack forms, quit waiting and get in touch with us.
Michael Devin, Bassologist.
No Acronym Thursday Rules
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