Since several days already, flickr has video. Huge protest waves have been rickrolling the net and I must admit that I’m one of those people who still think that the internet is for text. But videos like this make me accept things, even video on flickr. Although I can imagine that there are things one does not want to see on flickr.

Such as 90 seconds of video, taken when sitting on the loo.

Disclaimer: Yes, I had almost uploaded a similar video. But in the end… the internetz iz 4 txt!!!1!!1!1!!!1

Dealing with technical support lines or customer services often can be a frickle thing, and when my 10 month old Samsung ML-2010 printer at work decided to start making weird noises, I was close to order a new printer. Colleagues convinced me to go through the tech support hassle and use my warranty rights.

Armed with everything I might eventually need (Model number, serial number, purchase date, invoice number and .pdf invoice), I rang 0870-SAMSUNG, although the printer was purchased at Pixmania, I first was greeted by a loudly laughing woman. Laughing, not greeting. No niceties. When after some seconds I hesitantly said ‘Hello?!‘, I knew from her reply I had dialed the correct number. Yes, I was connected to the Samsung Help Desk. Phew.

Optimist/Pessimist/Cynic I am, I had only given myself 5-8 minutes to sort this out or I would have ordered a new printer. I am in the first month of my new IT budget and honestly am too lazy to walk to the network printer. Network printing, a former pet-peeve of mine. My desk though… has its own printer.

I was really surprised when within less than two minutes I had received both a reference number and the promise that a technical agent would call me in the next two hours. Not once was I asked where or when I did purchase that printer, nor did I have to go into detail about my problem.

That was easy. Let the wait begin now.

But there was no wait. Only few minutes later a Samsung Tech Agent called me and asked me to describe the problem. Not knowing how a printer is engineered, this proved to be a much more difficult problem than expected. What can be that hard about explaining that a printer doesn’t grab the paper anymore, all while making loud, protesting noises, before throwing a ‘Online error’ at you? The agent luckily was whether a bad car driver or had several friends who couldn’t handle the gearbox of a car properly, because the analogy ‘If you can’t find’em, grind’em‘, immediately explained what my problem was.

Within the next 2-3 days Samsung UK will drop off a new unit for me. No need to send mine in, wait for weeks and pay shipping costs.

That’s what I call Customer Service. Service with a capital S. Especially considering the fact that the printer only cost GBP 47.99 (less than $100).
Well done Samsung.

Update 04.15.2008: The new (refurb?) unit arrived today¹. Hats off, Samsung Customer Care. :-)

1. Still no one bothered asking for an invoice/proof of purchase. Also starting today another 12 months of warranty on that same below $100 printer kicks in. :D [↩]

Compulsory to the heart and soul of every nerd geek is the love for numbers. One of the few services I actually do pay for and even regularly check is Last.fm. Every Monday, sometimes even on Sunday night, I check what I listened most to in the preceding week and also check my all time stats. With more than 80.000 tracks scrobbled to my profile, time after time all time stats like these make me grin.

But there is better.

And to continue the number game, even though I still am not sure whether to be proud or not of my Twitter hate/love relationship, here’s some tweetscan stuff. From my active and my inactive twitter account. Before you ask why I have 2 accounts, I’ll explain you the stuff you aren’t interested in anyway: my first account was a residue of the personal blogging area. A twitter account in the category of noise. Loaded with lots of personal internet drama memories. I wanted to and had to move on some day. My actual account still is noise, just much less.
But the important thing about both graphs is that I actually might have to listen to all my friends and try to get a regular life schedule. Not have the period from 0:00 to 04:00AM be my most active period of the day.

The best thing about twitter in my case is when I started tweeting.

November 2006. :-)

Invites for Multitweet (5 4) and for Socialthing (2) available. Comment to grab your invite as long as available.

Wanted: Spotify invite. I want to experience what is next now last.fm really starts to bore me.

Today’s story on LiveVideo in Valleywag made me laugh, made me genuinely LOL.

Yes, LiveVideo execs are losing the plot. Consider following concept to understand my joy more: run Blogexplosion on a monthly budget of $500.
After little more than a year ago, I, and Splashpress Media, tried to buy Blogexplosion for the sum of $135.000 plus 6 months of advertising (above the fold) for LiveVideo. Almost a year later we were contacted and asked for our highest bid. We offered $75.000 for the then already fast declining platform, but LiveUniverse had other illusions.

But only then the fun started. Regularly one LiveUniverse person started to contact me, whether it was to broker a fallen platform, Blogexplosion, whether to run it. After a while I sent in a proposal, based on a monthly $2500 budget, with an initial 5 number sum to totally revive the platform and redesign this outdated 2002 nuke-alike website. Answer: too expensive.
Nevertheless LiveUniverse still hoped to recover some of the $150k invested in BE when they bought it and continued to bug me.

Bug me with the option of equity. Equity in a quickly declining platform, a platform with most features turned off already. The offered equity would obviously be performance based, 20% spread over the next four years. With a budget of $500/month.

Dearest LiveUniverse,
obviously you are too greedy to throw in a basic MacBookPro (an investment of $1999, tax deductable even), knowing that the entire monthly budget will be used for your platform.
Here’s my answer to you: get a grip.