#pizzahut #fail then #pizzahut #redemption

Chad

I thought I’d save myself the trouble of preparing supper tonight by ordering a pizza. Though I wouldn’t normally order from the Hut, Pizza Hut has a new pizza called the Big Italy that looked interesting and caught my attention. Being of the technical age, I went ahead and ordered online via their website. I chose carryout, because I am cheap and this saves me the delivery fee and tip, plus I get the pizza sooner. The order was placed at 5:42 and would be ready to pickup at 5:58. I arrived to pick up the pizza about 5:55. There was one person there in front of me when I arrived who was speaking with a clerk when I walked in. After he was done, the clerk left the counter and headed out on a delivery. The other guy behind the counter was taking phone orders. I stood there for 10 minutes before I was acknowledged by anyone. I was becoming annoyed and I figured my pizza was sitting in the back somewhere getting stale. Finally, an employee who looked like he was just arriving at work took over the counter and asked who was next. It was me! I told him my name and he took the $12.66 I owed for my Big Italy pizza and then disappeared in to the back. I was confused, by this time I ordered my pizza 30 minutes ago. The guy taking phone orders was telling everyone they were under staffed this evening and behind schedule. I was told nothing. I then realized, my pizza hasn’t even been started yet. Now I was really annoyed, because they had no issue taking my money, but never told me that my pizza was extremely behind schedule. After about 10 more minutes, the guy who took my money, came back out to the counter and apologized for the delays and gave me and the other guy who was waiting 2 free pizza coupons each for the inconveniences. Ha, they redeemed themselves!

So I eventually got my pizza and it was pretty tasty. I just wish something was said earlier, instead of allowing me to stand there wondering what is going on. Plus, during this whole time, I had my kids in the car. But in the end, the employee did the right thing by compensating me for the inconvenience, so I’m no longer going to hold this experience against them.

[SOLD] For Sale: Nokia N810 Internet Tablet

Chad

[Now sold]

It’s time for me to part with this device. I bought it in Oct 08 and have hardly used it. I just recently updated it to the latest Maemo release. It’s in great condition and I still have the box and everything that came with it.

I will also throw in the the additional 2gb micro sd card I bought for it and its adapter.

I’m asking $180 $170. I will ship it for free anywhere in the US.

If your interested, contact me via this form or DM on twitter. I will sell on a first come, first served basis. If I get no takers, I will post to craigslist.

Here’s some photo’s I took this morning.

Nokia N810 Box

Nokia N810 in box

Nokia N810 booted up

Question about automatically updating wordpress plugins

Chad

Is the server that is hosting my wordpress blog required to have an FTP server running in order to use the automatic update feature?

I recently moved this domain to a VPS with linode.com and one of the big things I want is ‘NO FTP SERVER’. I do all my transfers to and from the server using scp.

I refuse to add an ftp server for this one nice feature. Guess I need to find out if one is required, or if there are alternatives, or do I just have to upgrade my plugins the old fashion way.

Blackberry issues for a client

Chad

A client of mine, whose has about 5 Blackberry users contacted me early yesterday morning in a panic. They were reporting that no one was receiving emails on their blackberrys anymore, and that it’s been happening since last Friday. Here’s the back story, on Thursday of last week I promoted one of their servers to a domain controller as we’re getting ready to decommission an older server. So the client was quick to blame my changes for the blackberrys stopping to work. Now this client does not run a blackberry enterprise server, and I really had no idea how they communicating with the Exchange server. I’ve heard they connected through Outlook Web access, and OWA was working fine.

I spent the majority of Monday digging through server log files searching for anything that could be causing the issue. We rebooted every server and their Cisco, and the Blackberrys still were not getting email. My onsite contact was freaking out because the blackberry users are all upper management and she was under a lot of pressure to get them working again as all the users were traveling and were relying on the phone for email. At some point in the afternoon, she asked if I could revert the changes I made to the one server. I told her that I didn’t believe the issue was caused from my change and I didn’t think it would be wise to demote the server back to a member server. As the day ended, we got new reports from the users that their email was working until sometime Saturday morning. Now I was more confident it wasn’t because of my changes. I told her I would come onsite the next day and work with one of the blackberrys and blackberry support and get it figured out.

So today I drive an hour to their office and with blackberry in hand begin looking in to how they are setup. Find that the email setup happens through a blackberry website that is particular to their provider. While in this setup, there is an ‘Advanced Settings’ area, and that is where I found the issue. I find a form that has their OWA URL, except that it was wrong. The URL that was listed was almost right, but was simply missing an s, as in https://. Once I added the s and saved it out, they phones started syncing again. I have their OWA requiring and SSL connection and it has been that way for a long time, which makes me ask, what happened? Did the URL in the setup change for 5 users on 3 different providers? Or was that address always missing the s, but it was smart enough to redirect to the https page and that broke on Saturday? Regardless of what it was, it wasn’t my fault or related to promoting a server on their network.