LessThanHumble.com

So for those of you that know anything about the BBB, let me explain why I think their whole system is a scam.

Apparently a ‘potential’ customer of mine called into their hotline to see if I, or my business, was a BBB member. I’m obviously not, and never will be (mark my words) for a number of reasons. But none the less, the representative that called me got me right to walking through their membership process, sold their whole pathetic story, “we’re 92 years old, we only represent legitimate businesses, we help customers resolve complaints with members, we provide free litigation services to save you from wasting money on a attorney” (mind you I’m planning on pursuing the legal profession). Then at the end, the representative couldn’t pull the deal together, not to mention didn’t know how to tele-sale worth a damn. I’m not claiming to be an expert, but she definitely needed to work on her obvious phone anxiety.

I now refuse to become a member, pay them a penny, or waste any more time on the phone with them because outside of the mentioned branding, resolution, and litigation services mentioned, the BBB really doesn’t do a damn. I finally told the lady I didn’t want the service and she kept pushing the fact I was losing a potential customer and couldn’t find out who that customer was until I paid their membership ‘dues’.

I don’t really care about the potential lead/customer/whatever, but I am insulted that they tried to extort me to become a member in order to get in contact with this lead.

To give you a better idea why I hate the BBB, here’s kind of a funny story. I used to work for this ISP who was an active BBB member. Well every year each BBB chapter has their own little, self-nominated ethics awards - yes you read that correctly, self-nominated ethics award. This particular company actually won the award for being ethical. Now I had worked for this company for every a year, found their business practices pathetic, their pricing strategies unethical, and the way they treated their employees scrupulous. This employeer ended up winning the ill-earned award even with these issues and parades the award around.

I brought this to the attention of the BBB representative that called me, and stated that I did not want this crap image (that they pass of as ‘required for business success’) touching my company. Her only resolution to this complaint was that I should have filed a complaint with the BBB regarding the company, and then I responded, ‘are past employees allowed to file complaints?’. Here convuluted response was ‘only if they were a customer’. So what’s the point of them giving out the award cause they clearly have no wholesome way of monitoring a companies ethics because all they really care about is direct customer complaints. That’s why I’m suggesting a name change for the award, something along the lines of ‘The BBB Ethical-Customer-Image Self-Nominated Award’.
I should add that the mentioned company/employeer is trying to ’screw’ me on a number of different levels, but that’s a story for another rainy day.

None the less, on to a better subject. Today was a fairly lazy day. I did the normal work till 2am and get up at 10am routine last night, and then went to Starbucks this morning, screwed around a bit then went to Lunch, made some calls, and hit ASU’s Science Library to get some work done with a partner from RuckusWorks. I also stopped by Arizona Golf Works on University in Tempe, and I must admit they were ungodly helpful - I will definitely be a repeat customer. It wasn’t that bad of a day at all and fairly stimulating and relaxing. I’m excited about going golfing soon.

I’m also happy to report that hopefully around the 1st of March, we’ll be moving our equipment from Tucson, AZ to Phoenix, AZ within TimeWarner’s datacenter in downtown Phoenix. We’re moving from an open relay rack, to a secured cabinet, which a lot better pricing on power, bandwidth, and so much more. We’re also bringing in a PRI which I’m totally excited about… More on that later.

Anyways - Have a great weekend.

“People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.” - Mary Kay Ash

For those of you that know me directly, I have been procrastinating for a long time about a new car. It is not an issue of money, it is all an issue of finding a car I will be happy with for more than, oh say, a month? Well because of this, job change/loss of company car, etc, I have had to revert back to my previous 1996 Buick Regal. It’s not a bad car, it has just been sitting in my garage for nearly a year. I pulled it out and tried to start it up earlier this month - but it was a no-go, do not pass go, do not collect twenty dollars and so on. So I have been bicycling (yes - me riding a bicycle) around since then, and although I’m in a lot better shape, I’m happy to report my car is now drivable. Now I have just boughten myself more months of car procrastination - oh well.

Aside from that, I have gotten a ton of work done lately, actually since the first of the year, nothing overly exciting at this point, but I am sure I will have more news about that shortly. We’ve also decided to start over on some old, original projects (for SophMedia that is) dating nearly back 4 years - I’m actually really excited about it.

Until next time, cya!

“In business, I’ve discovered that my purpose is to do my best to my utmost ability every day. That’s my standard. I learned early in my life that I had high standards.” - Donald Trump

I should note that I dislike Donald Trump with a passion and I am sure I will rant and rave about why that is later, but I did feel that the above quote did deserve quoting.

I have literally spent the last 48 hours reconciling all of the billing information for XStreamHost.com although, now that I’m nearly done it feels great. IT doesn’t help that the process has been nearly a year past due since we purchased the company. We found tons of non-paying, terminated, and past due accounts. The next step will be launching the new website, and then our new customer portal. Very exciting times, and about as timely as possible.

In other news, we’re getting ready to launch at least one website this week and begin the task of heavily promoting another that has lacked attention for quiet some time (Free4UGifts.com).

That is it for now - I should have some very exciting news this week. Until then - take it easy.

“If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.“ - B.C. Forbes

So great things are brewing in the works right now as far as business deals go, things that would make my life so much easier financial, stress wise, and work load. I’ve got a hosting project in the works that might triple our current customer base, as well as a screen printing project that could turn out to be great. I don’t want to say anything else in fear of jeopardizing them, but as soon as I have news I will be sure to post it.

For those of you familiar with Asterisk, I wrote a kewl, simple little system for recording voice prompts. Basically the way it works is that I identify every prompt/recording with a 3 digit code and then reference the recording by that ID. Here is the code I use the code to record and play them:

[recording-system]
; Voice Recording System
exten => s,1,Wait(1)
exten => s,2,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/802)
exten => 1,1,Goto(recording-system-play,9,1)
exten => 2,1,Goto(recording-system-record,9,1)
[recording-system-record]
exten => 9,1,Wait(1)
exten => 9,2,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/804)
exten => _XXX,1,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,2,Set(lastPlayedRecording=${EXTEN})
exten => _XXX,3,Record(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/${EXTEN}:gsm)
exten => _XXX,4,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,5,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/805)
exten => 1,1,Goto(recording-system-play,${lastPlayedRecording},1)
exten => 2,1,Goto(recording-system-record,${lastPlayedRecording},1)
[recording-system-play]
exten => 9,1,Wait(1)
exten => 9,2,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/803)
exten => _XXX,1,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,2,Set(lastPlayedRecording=${EXTEN})
exten => _XXX,3,Playback(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/${EXTEN})
exten => _XXX,4,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,5,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/805)
exten => 1,1,Goto(recording-system-play,${lastPlayedRecording},1)
exten => 2,1,Goto(recording-system-record,${lastPlayedRecording},1)

You then just reference every message with either Background(ID#) or Playback(ID#). If anyone finds this useful, post here, I’d love to hear about your implementation/modification.

Anyways, I’m off to finish a Nagios configuration for my network, I’ll share some stuff on that tomorrow. Take it easy…

“A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.” - John D. Rockefeller

Today has been a great day. The greatest Monday I have had in over a year. Nothing extrodirnarly special happened, but it was a picture perfect day. It is normally a pain for me to get going in the morning because I generally work till 3 or 4am 7 days a week and get up at around 10:30am. But today was different, a definite polar opposite of my continual morning apathy.

I am not entirely sure why it took this long, but I do know that it is directly connected to the fact that I work for myself now, make a great wage, and literally love working all of the time. For some reason today, I just woke up and everything clicked. Because of that, I was able to get a massive amount of work done and feel great about doing it all over tomorrow.

None the less, I better get back to work so I can finish up for the night - until tomorrow, have a great night.