Earlier this year, I spent more than four hours working on a first time customer’s Power Macintosh G5. I spent more than two hours in the car driving the 80 mile round-trip to his home office location. The customer sat next to me and watched every move that I made.  My methods were methodical and logical and lead to the determination that the aftermarket RAM installed in his machine was defective and was causing corruption of the file system.  Nothing in his demeanor lead me to believe that he was not in agreement with the diagnosis.  During the troubleshooting process, I transitioned his computer from being unable to complete almost any task or diagnostic to completing a successful Archive and Install of the operating system and subsequently passing diagnostics.  This was a valid benchmark of the state of the computer at that point, and he made it clear that he agreed with that assessment.

I came away believing that he understood that his computer was in a state of having a renewed strong foundation on which he could begin to rebuild functionality.  While I was onsite with him, I also configured and ordered a new Mac Pro for him from Apple, including the arrangement of a rare discount and helping him decide on a printer.  (This was a billable consulting service, as well.  Macsolv received no compensation from Apple for the sale.) When I left, he indicated that he was pleased with my work.  In fact, he offered to make payment then and there (and even talked of plans to have me perform work at another local business that he co-owns with his wife).  I told him that I would invoice him instead.   [At some point in the next few days, he received and setup the new Mac Pro I arranged for him to receive.]

A week later, I sent the invoice. Instead of paying me, he complained that some Adobe applications were misbehaving.  (Adobe's applications are notorious for misbehaving if any aspect of their installation becomes corrupted.)  I explained that if any changes had been made to these installed applications (by applying updates, etc) while the bad aftermarket RAM was installed that it would be extremely likely that they would have been corrupted by those changes.  I helpfully suggested that he reinstall the applications, verify the effectiveness of the recommendation, and let me know the outcome.  I even offered to have another look at the machine at his location.

Instead, he told me that he had moved-on from the G5 and, as a result, had no intention of determining if I was correct in my assessment. Due to that refusal to follow-through on my suggestion, we will never know in what state the G5 actually is. Quite the double-bind.

In the meantime, he did not pay me for my services for almost 90 days. I eventually received payment upon sending him a Certified Letter asking for it. When he finally did pay, he included a letter lecturing me on my practices and suggesting that he was going to drag my—and my company’s—name through the mud.

This customer engaged my services to determine what the issue was with his machine, not to rebuild every aspect of his user environment. He lured me into working for him in a geographic area outside of my normal business area, and even managed to procure an up-front discount of $25 an hour with promises that he would help to get my company’s name better known in this market (obviously in a positive light). Instead, I had to wait almost 3 full months for payment, was promised that I’d be slandered and libeled in the local Mac community (perhaps you are reading this as a result of hearing/reading some of it), didn’t get the satisfaction of seeing that the solution was correct, and won’t get the positive word of mouth that I paid for via the discount.

What would you have done?

I’ve had it with the Contact Form Spammers.

We’ve been getting between 5 and 20 junk inquiries a day from spamming robots. This started a couple of months ago. With the first few, I looked at our webserver logs and found the offending spammers and blocked them with the .htaccess file. Still, the spam came. It seems there is a zombie army of Windows computers out there with nothing better to do than vomit garbage all over contact forms. Here’s an example:

Your Name: xahAxYAHoakdYISFh

Your Email: evXeDwsFSgqESxvpX

City: QBxymQfMqeitFAAsL

Subject: fohFHYyQdeJsjkyq

Message: comment2, ice cream flavor list, someotherspamurl ice cream flavor list, pvfid, ice boat, someotherspamurl ice boat, vljrfo, pop music quiz questions, someotherspamurl pop music quiz questions, 7555, carb free ice cream, someotherspamurl carb free ice cream, %-DD, big ten network, someotherspamurl big ten network, kay,

Telephone (optional): HdUjxhsZbQ

How did you hear about us? comment2, ice cream flavor list, someotherspamurl ice cream flavor list, pvfid, ice boat, someotherspamurl ice boat, vljrfo, pop music quiz questions, someotherspamurl pop music quiz questions, 7555, carb free ice cream, someotherspamurl carb free ice cream, %-DD, big ten network, someotherspamurl big ten network, kay,

(In the above example, I’ve replaced the active URLs with “somespamurl” and plain text URLs with “someotherspamurl.”) If you look closely, they’re even obscuring spam URLs with other spam URLs.

Bottom line is that this is the single most stupid form of spam that I can imagine. I mean, instead of reaching thousands of targets, they only get the webmaster of the site they’ve targeted. And, webmasters generally don’t fall for foolishness like this.

Up until this point, I simply set up a rule on the company’s email client to automatically place the spam messages in the trash mailbox. No more. As of today, we’ve implemented a CAPTCHA system. This means that new potential customers will have to determine and type-in a 6-character code to prove that they’re human when making an inquiry. I’m sorry that we’ve had to do this. Nobody likes dealing with CAPTCHAs, but they’re one of the only (mostly) effective ways of dealing with Contact Form Spam.

UPDATE: I don’t really like CAPTCHAs... so I’m going to be investigating the possible solution I just read about here.

There's a nice article in Business Week this week describing how Macs are becoming more and more likely to turn-up in the enterprise, how little Apple does for this to happen (or needs to do, given that it's not really a market that they pursue), and how CTOs/CIOs are finding them easy to integrate with little additional overhead or costs. The pull quote?

"Steve Jobs doesn't need a sales force because he already has one: employees like the ones in my company."

Well, tomorrow (February 19th) will be my first time teaching Mac OS X 201, Server Essentials 10.5. I've got the required test score, I've got the teaching certification, I've got the AATC, and I've got the students. I've been preparing for actual presentation of this class since last Tuesday morning, and the fact is that I'm co-teaching with another Apple Certified Trainer.

So, why am I so jittery about the process? Well, it's a big deal to me, as it's very important to me that my customers receive the training they deserve plus I have to travel hundreds of miles and be away from my family for days at a time to do this.

To my St. Louis customers and colleagues, I'll be out the rest of this week. Have a great week, and I'll see you during the following one. In the meantime, please wish me luck!

Early in December, Apple Certified Trainers representing Apple Authorized Training Centers around the world descended upon Austin, Texas for two weeks. Did they choose to do so during prime Christmas present shopping season because of Austin's retail offerings? While several of them were seen shopping at The Domain, they actually were at Apple's facilities in Austin to participate in beta training sessions for Mac OS X Support Essentials v10.5 (Mac OS 101) & Mac OS X Server Essentials v10.5 (Mac OS 201).

About 40 trainers attended, and got to know their neighbors pretty well after having to attend the classes together for two weeks straight. During their time there, in addition to taking the class as students, they worked on editing and perfecting the course's textbooks, student workbooks, and presenter's slides. Since that time, Peachpit Press has actually brought those textbooks to market and Apple has updated the training and certification websites to reflect the new content contained in the courses. At the end of each week's class, each student trainer all took beta versions of the official certification tests. Provided that the test taker passed the score at the "instructor" level, s/he is now (1) certified with the Apple Certified Support Professional 10.5 and/or the Apple Certified Technical Coordinator 10.5 and (2) authorized to provide these courses to students. Another noteworthy new development is that participating AATCs are now able to offer Apple Certification tests onsite, although students can also continue to take the tests at Prometric testing centers.

Be on the lookout for these new courses, tests, and certifications in February at your local Apple Authorized Training Center across the globe.

A recent exchange with support staff @ Realmac indicates that the %site_logo% URL issue is a known one and, while not remedied in RapidWeaver 3.6.5, a fix is on the horizon.

Let's see if this fixes the %site_logo% URL issue.

Well, I have decided to let my seed in the Apple Developer Connection expire. Once Leopard ships next month, there won't be a major new OS X release for about 2 years, so I won't need seeds during that time. Sadly, my subscription was supposed to run long enough to include the release of Leopard, but we all remember what happened to the release date this Spring in favor of getting the iPhone out on time.

Not being a major (or even a minor, really) developer, this decision won't be a huge impact on the business and I will, of course, retain my basic, free ADC account.

I've been thinking about adding a blog to this site for a while. I'll see how that goes and whether or not it's a good idea to include this on business pages.

Stephen