Back to my former and still-existing host I found this: money-back guarantee if and I quote “If you decide – within the first 97 days of your time with us – that DreamHost isn’t for you, we will gladly close your account and refund any payments you’ve made to us within those first 97 days.”

So my conclusion: don’t trust your [tag-ice]webhost[/tag-ice] if there is no money-back guarantee. It’s always risky to entrust you [tag-ice]digital presence[/tag-ice] to someone you have no history yet. Thus being able to testdrive for some time is absolutely necessary. And give Dreamhost a try lot of value for few money.

Still, if you have any additional hints for a close and decent webhost, please let me know.
[tags]customer experience[/tags] [tags]webhosting[/tags]

Thus i’d say: never give them your card details for sure and in general try to avoid giving away your card details.
[tags]customer experience[/tags] [tags]travel[/tags] [tags]barcelona[/tags]

I can tell you all those self-publishing services are time bandits. First it took me two months to figure out that Booksurge (an Amazon company) is supposedly run by inverse mechanical turks. Either my sales agent didn’t reply for weeks or was not capable to answer my questions and sometimes after some time she (or it) sent me commodified marketing mails about their service. That really drove me nuts. She would have failed the Turing-test in any case.

Eventually I decided to cancel my engagement with Booksurge for the sake of making the book public before the turn of the decade. It’s a pity though because – and that was my interest in the first place – I wanted the book to be part of the Amazon.com directory and not only the Amazon.de one. I have no clue how to achieve that – I’m grateful for any help on that.

In the end I decided to go with Books On Demand (German) again: Another pain in the ass (ask Jan) to get the files the way their publishing engine can accept it. And we haven’t seen any results yet.

For your information here is the cover and the link to my (very personal) intro to the book.

For Success in the Enterprise, Think Platform:”Software architecture is an unintended consequence of social architecture,” Smith says. “If you have a dysfunctional organization, and you build software to align with it, you’re going to get dysfunctional software. We need to go in with our eyes open and understand. This may exacerbate issues. Don’t expect putting new technology is going to change that. it often exacerbates issues.”

Joe McKendrick is referring to David M. Smith from Gartner and discusses briefly the difference of [tag-ice]SOA[/tag] and Web 2.0 in terms of customer acceptance. The latter requires less changes in the business processes and therefore is more easily deployable.

That might be true but think of Smith’s notion of the paradigm shift that’s underway and not easily digested, accepted and utilized. This paradigm shift is about a move from monolithic platforms that reside in the bunkers of corporations to the web as a platform.
This is an important issue especially relevant for SMEs, I think. If you conceive of the web as platform that hosts your business tools than you have to grasp the idea of a virtual and distributed platform. You don’t put it somewhere although you can host parts of the internet on your premises – as long as those servers are connected to the rest of the network you can harness its benefits. The success factor of a platform is its ability to accommodate an ecosystem.
That means think precisely how your platform (this small part of the internet) supports exchange and conversation based on open standards.

Safari problems update and solution …: “most recent security update knocked out some of the settings for linksys routers”

Might be another security (t d f) issue as well. Although everything works fine if I’m online via UMTS.

[Update] solved it with some router tweaks and several reboots

Had a talk with them today: they were not able to understand that reliability is a key issue for that kind of service. I’d expect them to have a replacement car available at every spot. ‘d be willing to pay an extra for that kind of reliability.

Thus far I cannot recommend Denzel Carsharing (t d f) in Vienna unless you are not in a hurry and the usage of a car is just another spare-time activity,

There is an alternative carsharing initiative in the 9th district of Vienna: AGENDA 21. Since I’m not living in this area – no option.

Just grab the scripts from Ross Barkman and at least if you are in Austria choose CID5 (despite the instructions of T-mobile (t d f) that tell you CID3) with business.gprsinternet as APN. Can’t believe that T-Mobile’s support told me that they do not support Mac OS X. (I’m curious if they change their mind once I tell the how easy it is to get it working)

My next hurdle: I want an HSDPA (t d f)-card to work with my 12″ Powerbook. I’ll keep you posted how I will get thru this hardship since the 12″ pb doesn’t have a PCMCIA-slot.. Could be that l2n will help finally.

Then the seller (bluebuy gmbh D-14827 Wiesenburg) claimed for several days that they never received anything either. I stay with my argument that I paid and finally the seller let me know that he found the transaction and dispatched the tablet I bought. The next day although he let me know – via Email – that the tablet is not on stock anymore but he will add a digital camera once the tablet is available again if I withdraw me negative evaluation at Ebay. I told him that I do not want a digital camera but the tablet I purchased

Well, I wonder if I will withdraw my evaluation – I certainly will not do it for nothing.
So don’t forget to be cautious when buying at Ebay and from bluebuy (t d f) gmbh especially. It’s about trust and trustworthiness. I’ll let you know if I get the stuff I purchased and if they can convince me to withdraw my evaluation. Or do you think I should stick with my evaluation even if they offer me …