Due to some rather vexing issues with Charter Broadband, I decided to make the switch to the alternative. CDE (Clarksville Department of Electricity) offers what appeared to be quite a deal, at the time I decide to switch. Unfortunately there’s a few setbacks.

Every good ISP needs a call center. Technical support is required with every form of internet provision. Unfortunately, CDE does not offer such support on weekends. When I called the customer service line, the nervous young lady on the other end kindly explained that she didn’t know what the problem was, but she used her walkie talkie and politely offered to set up an appointment for the following Monday.

Since there isn’t a proper technical support channel, and the customer service representative available is untrained and therefore unable to walk me through basic troubleshooting steps, it makes CDE very unappealing to a customer willing to trade ease-of-use for power. By power, I mean the insanely fast connection I’m getting.

If you’re looking for an easy-to-troubleshoot service… you might want to think twice about CDE. Also take care to consider that “lightband” is a form of fiber-optic. Meaning it “should” be the most reliable and easy-to-use connection available. Unfortunately unscheduled maintenance, uninformed customers, unprepared staff, and untrained support representatives are proving detrimental to the good of the company, and may prove a deterrent for future CDE customers.

Come on guys, you can do better.

Here’s a few things you can fix:

• Get a call center set up
• Train a weekend crew on basic connection troubleshooting
• Set up group-training sessions with staff
  • Confidence
  • Leadership
  • Initiative
• Notify customers of upcoming maintenance (Channel Guide Notifications)

Just a suggestion.

Ok, so everyone has their own preference on instant messaging, email, blogging, so forth and so on. Well, here’s a useful tip! Instead of having 8 different apps/windows open, use one! There’s a few options you’ve got here, so I’ll touch on the more popular ones, and let you decide.

Definitely a smart choice, supporting most of the common protocols. Here’s a list!

• AIM
• Bonjour
• Gadu-Gadu
• Google Talk
• Groupwise
• ICQ
• IRC
• MSN
• MySpaceIM
• QQ
• SILC
• SIMPLE
• Sametime
• XMPP
• Yahoo!
• Zephyr

There’s even added support via plugins. To name a few:

xfire, facebook IM, twitter, encryption, spam protection, snarl support, and customized buddy notification sounds.  There’s quite a few more.

Visit: Pidgin

Digsby

Digsby is the “uber” messenger. It does what Pidgin does, and tends to use a tad more memory (RAM) when it does, but the experience is very gratifying. It integrates the traditional buddy icons, allows for voice/cam chat, file transfers, all of the normal stuff, and also supports Facebook IM, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pop3 email and webmail like Yahoo and MSN. Not convinced? Here’s a screenshot!

Your “Current Status” box can be moved anywhere within the Digsby window, as well as all of the other major componants. Just grab and drag! It also comes with the option for taskbar icons so you can see your message count and access the various windows right from there.

These two are probably the top two multi-protocol messengers out there, but there’s a few others. To name a few:

• Miranda (A little like Pidgin)
  
• Tokbox (Video Messenger plus MSN Yahoo etc)
• Trillian (The old client fails, bad. There’s hope. Trillian Astra)

There’s a few more out there. If you know of one that I didn’t mention that you think deserves a second look, let me know!

My choice? Digsby owns when it comes to checking my webmail and updating social networks. <3

Digsby Icon/Logo created by Michael Knight and is protected under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Michael Knight is not affiliated with Digsby, it’s creators, or its affiliates. Asoldier.net nor David Bixler are affiliated in any way with Michael Knight except for the use of the Digsby Icon intended for use with the Object Dock application.

I got another call from that super guy at Suddenlink with all of the useful information. He enlightened me on some of the finer points of what’s going on. As far as the CMTS (Cable Modem Termination Service) they have it, it just isn’t installed yet. They’re still waiting on some of the pieces of that puzzle to come together. On the flip-side of that, they did a little restructuring of their current facilities, and managed to provide some of us with a much more stable connection. Thanks Suddenlink!

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it should be to get noticed by some of the “higher-ups” that make things like this happen. Fortunately there are people who care about their customers. However, it is ultimately up to customers to take their stand on quality deficiencies regarding services they’re paying for. If you pay for it, you should get it. Sometimes, you’ve got to fight for it though.

In a perfect world, this wouldn’t be necessary. This isn’t that world, yet.

According to a correspondent from Suddenlink, they’ve been reading my blog, and what I have to say about the whole mess. Honestly, I was flattered to know that they actually took the time to do that.

There are some things Suddenlink is doing right, and saving its customers tons of money by doing:

I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that my Internet and Cable combined only costs around $100.00 / month. I could probably scale it down to $80.00 /month if I wanted, but I like my current plan. Phone service (landline) in my area runs about $60.00 / month (long distance not included).

Combining these services? Golden. That’s another 30 bucks, plus “TV Caller-ID?” Wow.

There’s still a few thing’s that are sort-of vague when it comes to the Suddenlink website though. For one, it’s fairly easy to configure a javascript to display “Open” or “Closed” text or image according to the local time (Taking for-granted you specify the intended time-zone) in-reference to the sales/billing department. When you call the 877 number for service questions, the only thing available after business hours is Tech Support. Save us the frustration, let us know you’re closed!

There’s a few things about the Suddenlink website itself that I hate. One is this My Suddenlink setup. This looks like Excite.com’s attempt that harshly failed. This isn’t what we want! We can get that type of thing from at least a dozen other very popular websites. Scrap that project Suddenlink! Instead, open a Social Media center. Allow the Suddenlink users to build the community on their own. Why? Let’s consider:

• Facebook < User driven

• Twitter < User driven

• Myspace < User Driven

• Linked In < User/ Business Driven

• DevianArt < User Driven.

Simple version? You can’t give us something we can already get from a zillion other sites. We want open-book, easy-to-use user-driven communities where OUR voice is the one that counts. If you REALLY want to provide a personal portal for Suddenlink users, then that’s what you should do, from a customer’s point of view.

Now, I won’t shoot you down for having the online billing account setup… that’s priceless. But, it’s lacking some relevant information that tech support personnel and customers both need when fixing issues. As mentioned in earlier posts on this blog:

1. List of modems + modem related issues
2. Age of current modem
3. Uptime statistics
4. AVG Down/Up bandwidth (Sort by 9am-5pm)x(5pm-9am)x(weekends)
5. Running count of support calls+ recurring issues
6. List of support calls+notes+ticket# (Ticket numbers allow tech support and customers to easily return to the issue to review steps that fixed it before, or ensure those steps were already applied so other steps can be taken to restore the connection.

I’m going to talk about that for a second. Does it seem silly to have an online list of connection-related issues? Yes! The customer can go to a friend’s home, internet cafe, or library, print out the steps that fixed the the problem before, and fix it themselves, and save (potentially) hours of frustration waiting in line for tech support via phone, and troubleshooting (without guidance) their modem and/or router.

Also, since many (MANY) of us have the high-speed internet + cable TV bundle, wouldn’t it be really easy to drop a box in the Channel Guide for Internet Status? For Instance:

If you look at your own channel guide, it becomes pretty obvious what I’m talking about. This would save people minutes, potentially, hours of frustration, tech support calls, and maybe even a few bucks for Suddenlink.

Clear as day, Internet down for (insert zip code) and for brevity put “in some areas” so people know that it’s not just them, and that they should wait till the “light” turns green before trying other solutions. Honestly, I can’t believe that it’s not being done already!

A green/red/yellow LED image would suffice for “internet status” with a short explanation following.

Easy to do? No? Well we’ll settle for something close!

There’s much more that Suddenlink, like every other company, can improve on. I’m sure that Suddenlink’s power-wielding members will do everything they can to continue improving their service, like they have been doing constantly, since they took over Cebridge’s old network.

I will be moving to Fort Campbell soon, but I intend on writing a final review of my experiences with Suddenlink staff. If you have any questions about Suddenlink you can ask http://twitter.com/suddenlinkhelp

-David

So far, I’ve ran up against a few bumps with the WeGame client. A few issues regarding program detection, missing sound layers, and video upload flukes. Don’t worry, I’ll write a pretty detailed report and put all of the tasty bits down for you.

Aside from a slightly buggy client, the WeGame community looks promising. The community isn’t exclusive to wegame generated media, so users can post whatever they like.

Fortunately, the client is still in beta, so we expect to see great improvement at the imminent full version.

The site itself is pretty well-built, so it’s feature-packed, and proving to be pretty fun to navigate.

Looks good eh?

I have a few other things going on too, as you may or may not notice. I’m on the “Air testers list” for Peoplebrowsr.com‘s up-and-coming AIR app. So, hopefully, that’s another tasty review coming up.

I’ve got a few things on my plate, along with my imminant PCS move to Fort Campbell where I’ll be finishing the last 2 years of my current enlistment as Active Army, I’ll be job hunting. At the same time, I’m going to try to finish up my Associates degree. I’m not sure what I want to major in, but I assume it’s going to be pretty easy to figure out.

I’ll be writing a few reviews over the next couple of weeks. Next on the list is WeGame. A social video and screenshot recording and sharing service. Apparently there’s a good number of games already supported. I own a few of them, so I’ll be testing the free product out on a few games, including Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 3, and others.

Follow WeGame on Twitter and/or Visit WeGame.com

Shortly after that I’ll be doing a trial run of Affiliate Paradise. It was suggested to me by JR Razmus as a suggestion for making money online.

If you have a suggestion for a comparison or review, please let me know.

-David

I have three laptops and a desktop, and even though I don’t really need all three to get things done, it certainly helps to distribute the load between the machines. If something bad does happen, not all is lost, because not all of my work is on any one machine. It also helps by providing more workspace.

So, how do I turn multiple machines into seamless usable workspace? Easy! Stardock Multiplicity allows you to use one computer’s peripherals including mouse, keyboard, printer, sound system, and more. You can even move files from pc to pc simply by copying, dragging the cursor to the other computer’s screen seamlessly, and pasting!

There are a couple of conflicts here and there, but you can usually solve them by pressing ALT+TAB. Other than that, it works like a charm! Learn more about it here.

Well, after many hours, I have finished my review of Microsoft Expression Web 2 Versus Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. Check out the PDF to see my results.

View the full PDF file here. Dreamweaver CS4 Vs. Expression Web 2

It looks like I’m back in business writing software reviews again. I will be writing a thorough review of MS Expression Web tomorrow. It’s taking entirely too long to download this evening so I am left to install it and begin working on it tomorrow. A fellow Twitter pal has asked me to give her some feature comparison/requests. I’m currently downloading the software and preparing to install it. Tomorrow I will go through all of the focal points, test load times, and compare features. I’ve been using Dreamweaver for years and I have to say, it’s going to take some powerful improvements to get me to switch.

If there are some features you want to point out, now’s the time to speak up because this might be a real chance to finally get that doodad you wanted.