Return to Sender
If you move, you should go ahead and delete the old shipping addresses from your Amazon.com account. You never know when you’re going to order something, let’s say like toner for your printer and not pay enough attention to which address it’s going to, and when it doesn’t arrive in a week you find the reason is because it tried to go to your old house.
Thankfully, it was shipped via the Post Office (free super saver shipping, which is why I didn’t notice that it never arrived) and since the forwarding order has expired, it was simply returned to sender. Amazon is a pleasure to deal with on the phone, even on a Sunday! I didn’t expect to get through to a human, but I did. Easily. As soon as Amazon gets the box back, they’ll issue a full credit. It was my stupid mistake, and they handled it well and I got my answer quickly. Nice.
Nice backup software
I needed to find some simple Windows backup software for my Mom. She has an external drive, I just needed to use software to get files on to it without her having to think about it. It needs to do open file backup, and be reliable and easy to configure. I use Retrospect Pro on my PC because it came with something years ago, but it is by no means simple to configure and it’s overkill at $120 for when she needs to move around 10GB of data from point A to point B and know that she can recover if anything goes wrong.
PC World did a comparison of backup software and came away giving top marks to NovaBackup. I installed the demo on Mom’s computer this morning (remotely, via LogMeIn free) and so far, I’m impressed. Nice and easy interface. Fast. Scheduled backups. It backed up her Outlook .pst files even though Outlook was running (but I told her to walk away and not actually use Outlook during the backup process). A test restore of a couple of files went perfectly. The only files it couldn’t backup were inconsequential. I set it on a schedule to back her up every night at 1 am and we’ll see how it does.
Salesforce implementation continues
I can certainly see why geeks love Salesforce. It’s so easy to configure once you know your way around the Setup screens. I’m still not going anywhere near S-Controls or workflow rules (I’ll wait until our consultant gets back from vacation for that). But I’ve been tweaking layouts and running reports to my heart’s content. Really fun stuff.
I installed DreamTeam which is a really cool project management and document management application (through the AppExchange). Yet another wonderful company giving away licenses to Salesforce nonprofit grant recipients. In this case, 5 of us can use this software to manage our projects without paying the monthly fee.
Still counting down to the day when everyone is using it.
Closer to Movable Type 3.3
I just installed MT 3.3 Final Release Candidate 2. I’m not sure what they’re waiting for to release the thing, but so far so good. I’ll wait until the actual release to install it anywhere else. This has to have been one of the quietest beta releases in Movable Type history. I haven’t seen anyone talking about it, compared to the buzz when 3.2 was being tested. Maybe it’s just the sites I visit these days. Or maybe that many people have moved to WordPress. Who knows.
Judi Sohn 
2 responses to “Miscellaneous stuff for a Sunday”
I’ve only once has to deal with customer complaints at Amazon. I ordered a book. I was about half way through it when it I found out the the next 100 pages were a repeat of the last 100 pages I had just read.
I rang Amazon. They refunded me without question. They didn’t even want me to return the faulty book. They just took my word for it.
The only other company I’ve had such service from was Games Workshop. They sell fantasy wargaming models. I ordered a model from one of their old back catalogues. when it arrived there was a note saying, “Our catalogue has a mistake and we have two models with the same reference. We didn’t know which one you wanted so we sent you both.”
How’s that for service?
another backup tool of note, that i use quite a lot, is SyncBack SE. you can encrypt the files, backup open files, etc. you can even use it to send stuff offsite (after encrypting) to an ftp/sftp server of your choice. i use it to send all my stuff via sftp to my parent’s house (to get it offsite – a backup that is sitting right next to your PC is giving you a false sense of security)