When Apple announced MobileMe back in June and announced that it would be replacing .Mac with a far superior service, I for one was excited. At last, .Mac/MobileMe was actually worth something. (I still think $99/year is a bit pricey, but I’m willing to live with that here.) In fact, if I wasn’t doing all of my stuff from one single computer, if I had one of Apple’s handheld devices, and if I actually had money to spend, I would have purchased MobileMe the very first day.

Boy, am I glad that I’m dirt poor right now.

As completely strange as it might seem, it appears that Apple has flubbed up MobileMe in every conceivable way these past few weeks. Take first the fact that it took about three times as long for the .Mac-to-MobileMe transition to take place (leaving many many .Mac users without any access to vital .Mac services that they needed for a few days), then throw in the whole ongoing fiasco with the so-called “1%” who lost use of their e-mail and actually lost a few days worth of their e-mail in the process. Many of these people weren’t even people who signed up for MobileMe, they signed up for .Mac, and were not expecting MobileMe to happen or for them to have to go through this. I mean, I can see something like this happening to a free service, but when Apple is getting $99/year from these people, that’s pretty ridiculous. Plus the fact that Apple was completely tight-lipped about this for nearly a week says some pretty bad things about how Apple handles its services and its customers.

Now, today, it turns up that Apple is limiting support to those people who were part of that 1%, and only people whom Apple thinks was on that 1%, according to TUAW. I mean, for the love of Pete, has Apple considered that other people may have other problems with MobileMe too? Just this morning, my friend Daniel Brusilovsky was trying to get support through one of those online live support things. After just saying “hi” to the support representative before even having a chance to type his question, the support guy said “Sorry, I can’t help you with this issue, I can only help with MobileMe Mail,” and closed the chat connection. What gives?

Apple, I know that you’re all big and successful now with all of the Macs, iPods, and (now) iPhones you’re selling, but it appears you’re starting to let that go to your head. If you want to be able to rebuild the already-ruined reputation that MobileMe has garnered, you’re going to have to do a lot more things correctly, and you’re going to have to start with the way you treat your paying customers. Otherwise, I’m not giving you a single blood-red penny.

Tags: Apple, e-mail, Mac, MobileMe, outage, reputation, ripoff, support

Well, those of you who have been following my Twitter recently know that my MacBook, as semi-wonderful as it may be (you know, I still sort of miss my clamshell iBook), has developed the infamous Random Shutdown Syndrome (RSS). I mean, it’s just ridiculous! It doesn’t happen as often as others have had it (I’ve read of some past MacBook users whose computer shut down every 10 minutes or so), indeed mine has happened very irregularly. It might do it twice in an hour, or it might go two or three days without doing it, but there’s no doubt that it randomly shuts itself down. I’ve been trying to pay attention to what I’ve been doing on the MacBook when it does shut itself down like that, but there’s absolutely NO consistency, other than that it only happens when the computer is unplugged. Sometimes the processors will be churning heavily, other times I’ll just be reading something on the screen, processors quiet, when the screen suddenly goes black without warning.

Nevertheless, it’s enough to drive me crazy and be unwilling to trust my work when I’m not plugged in. Therefore, tomorrow, I get to take my MacBook into the Genius Bar, and they’re going to ship it off somewhere to examine the logic board or something like that. In the meantime, I will be temporarily shifting my stuff over to our Mac mini that my brother primarily uses, and anything that’s relatively non-trivial that I can’t fit over there, I will be putting in an encrypted disk image and storing it on a secret location on Webmacster87.info, thanks to the 375 GB of disk space my new webhost gives me.

I don’t know how long it will be until I get my MacBook back, but we’ll just have to see. All I can say is, my iBook never had a random shutdown issue…

Tags: Genius Bar, iBook, MacBook, random shutdown, repair, support

The title is a pun on the classic joke “Why does a fireman wear red suspenders? To hold his pants up!”. Except that the only problem with the joke, “Why does WordPress.com wear red suspenders?” is that I don’t know the punch line, and it’s apparently going to take me awhile to find out.

I woke up this morning, about a half hour ago, actually, wanting to update one of the blogs that I host on WordPress.com, when to my surprise, I wasn’t logged in. I went to try to login, and got a thing saying “Error: Account suspended.”

WHAT? WHY?!?

Now, I’m trying to figure out on my own why on earth my account on WordPress.com could have been suspended. The only blogs that I have on WordPress.com are Aragon Peace Club, which hasn’t been updated since August 30th (I was about to update it this morning, actually) and The Neglected Former Existence of Webmacster87 which hasn’t been updated since July 2nd! I’m also an admin on the Don Havis 4 SMUHSD Board site since I function as the webmaster, although the blog actually “belongs” to another user. Even then, that hasn’t had much updating in awhile. The only other blogs accredited to my WordPress.com username are my self-hosted blogs that plug into the WordPress.com Stats plugin.

Frankly, the only real recent activity that I’ve had on my WordPress.com username are the couple of guest blog articles that I’ve done recently on Lorelle on WordPress. I’ve even read all of the legalese on the fascinating terms of service and haven’t seen anything listed there that I’ve done that could prompt me to be suspended. Did someone hack into my account and do bad things? I haven’t seen any evidence of that, especially considering that all of my blogs are still intact. What is going on?

Well, I’d just love to send an e-mail to WordPress.com’s support to find out what the heck is going on around here, but check out their lovely support page which says that “Support is currently closed.” Now forgive me folks, but almost every website keeps a website contact form open 24/7 (as opposed to having limited hours for, say, telephone support). Is there anything wrong with keeping a contact form available, and then when support “opens up” on Monday, you can go through the queue of support requests that have been piling up through the weekend?

Apparently not. But do you know how inconvenient Monday-Friday, 9 AM-5 PM is for me? I have a little, minor activity I do every Monday-Friday called school which makes it really difficult for me to have to try to send in a support request during your limited hours. And I can only imagine what it must be like for people in other areas of the globe to try to get support, if they can only fill out the form during a working hours in the Pacific time zone. There’s 168 hours in the week, and WordPress.com only lets you TYPE in the contact support box during 40 of them–that’s less than 1/4 of the week!

So here’s my current situation. My account on WordPress.com has been mysteriously suspended. I can’t find out why it has been suspended for a few days at the least. And now I’m unable to post important, time-sensitive information on one of my WordPress.com blogs, which is going to be very bad news for something that I’m trying to get organized within my school this week. So, what does that mean that I’m doing about it? What any good WordPress blogger would do if he was cut off from any other means of action. Blog and rant about it! Which I’ve just done.

Please WordPress.com people, why is my account suspended, and could you please allow people to leave a message in your contact support box 24/7?

Tags: Automattic, Blogging, contact, Personal, rants, support, suspended, WordPress, WordPress.com