Customers Suck Party!

Last saturday I was at Val's place with a few friends (Val, Akuma, Mitch & Eli) and with Tiff, after a nice plate of Ribs at Bar B Barns (great place, btw). The desert, a nice cake because it was Val's birthday, was eaten around the kitchen table, where conversation took a turn to our worst experiences with customers. Stupid, arrogant, annoying, you know, clients that you would like to stuff a sock in their mouth!

It was like a Customers Suck.com party... Too bad I wasn't able to record them all and post them on the website. I also mentionned a recording of a videotron client's conversation with a tech. I remember hearing about this before working at videotron, and I had the recording already on my computer, but hearing the story was as interesting as the actual recording.

The way things are set up at Videotron, is that when you are on the phone with a client, at any time you can decide to hit the "Emergency" button on the phone, and the rest of the call (or until you press the "Emergency" button again" is recorded. In the past, the server where the mp3s were put was unsecured, so anyone could decide to copy it, send it to themselves at home just to get a good laugh when they wanted.

One tech went a bit too far though. He took the mp3 and started sending it to his friends all over the internet, by email.. The recording soon propagated, and eventually it was traced back to the person that had recorded it, taken it from the server and sent online. That person was sanctionned, and from that day on, a password was put on the server to protect any further outbursts. To say this was a bump in Videotron's image is an understatement, and I was surprised to hear that they tech that did it was actually kept under Videotron's employement, though his identity was kept secret to all.

For the curious ones, here's the recording. It's a fine example of Quebec's wonderful blasphemous talk, very common in rural towns and in frustrated debates between folks here.

I think this recording is becoming pretty rare, possibly because Videotron hunts down it's copies and has them deleted. I'll take my chance though and will help people find it if they google the following terms (as the mp3 was known in the past):

Y flashe ton osti de modem
Y flashe ton crisse de modem
Y flashe ton estie de modem

Until Google CL2 comes out...

You've seen my previous post about Google Calendar (CL2), and you can't wait to get your own online calendar that just looks cool?

Until Google rolls out their own solution, why don't you hop on down to 30 Boxes and signup for free? It's a very nicely done interface, with comprehensive functions, and a very cool "One Box" that lets you add events using real human language instead of checkmarks and buttons.

30Boxes is the coolest service after anything google (it's a wonder they didn't get bought by them...)

The loss of a series...

I will be brief for I have little time, Tiff and I are going out for diner tonight.

I have just finished the last episode of the last seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise. Belatedly I'll admit, but since I had been out of the Cable loop for a while the best I could do is to make with what I had right now.

The series satisified me I'll admit, but only a few minutes after ending it I find myself longing for more, cursing at UPN for cancelling a show that was so amazingly enjoyable to so many people. Like thousands of others, I put my hope in the hands of someone so that they one day start production of something new, something greater than all of them.

I implore you all, don't let Star Trek die down!

Google Drive, Google Music, Google Browser... It's all in the works.

It's all been said and done in other blogs, but for my own readers I'll compress these bits and pieces of information together.

GDrive: Some rumors from Google seem to be set up to be just that: informations is leaked on purpose for people to speculate. This seems to be the case here, as last week's Google Analyst Day yielded a powerpoint presentation that was later removed, but not before being seen by just enough people that it's content was relatively widely known. The powerpoint mentions something about GDrive as being "Infinite storage, where we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)." This seems extremely interesting considering there is already evidence pointing towards gdrive.com belonging to google. I can't wait to see this coming!

Google Music / Google Tunes: Following up on an article by forbes, Garett Rogers does some research on the subject, and discovers that a google music player might be available for download soon. Considering the Google Video Player download link from which the information was deduced, in all probability Google Music will soon be available (though the rumor of their buying napster was denied by google...). I can easily imagine free songs from artists on the rise, and a small fee for commercially available songs (or does Google make enough money from ads already? :P)

Google Calendar: By sorting through source code, some curious bloggers have been able to explore pages that were not meant for publication but were available through tweaks of URLs and such. Note that those methods are no longer available, so other than conjectures and the fact that calendar.google.com redirects to google instead of giving an error, there's not much to go about for now.

GMail enhancements: The first of possible enhancements is a Voicemail features, which is given away by the fact that the name "Voicemail" is now forbidden of use as a label on gmail. I noticed about a week ago that my voicemail filter on gmail was not working, and when I tried to recreated it it gave me an error message saying the name could no longer be used... I should have taken more attention to detail, I didn't realize at the time what this meant.

The previousely mentionned Google Calendar could also be integrated into GMail by default, and as you can see from the links, a Google Links service seems to be upcoming.

Google OS: It's logical to think that Google will come up with a centralized solution for all their software and services in the future. Some think it will be a browser, others think it will simply be a software interface. Whatever it is, it's probably going to be dubbed the Google OS by most people. It would provide access to your GDrive, GMail, Bookmarks (cached versions for speed?), your favorite news with the rss reader, and all that crazy useful stuff. Google already registered gbrowser.com, but I wonder if they know that googleos.com is already registered to someone else...

Seriousely, I just can't wait for all of these things to come alive!

Best Blonde Joke ever...

Ok so you've all heard blonde jokes, and you all laught at them.

Well, laugh at this one all you want.