Bloggy Hell

Due to a scheduling clash with us and the State government (There was a public holiday we forgot about), the start of Rails Training 1 has been pushed back a week. It now starts on Monday 8th and Thursday 11th respectively.

There are still spots left! Go and register. I’ll wait.

Both Alex and I are web nerds. Throw us a technical problem and will be champing at the bit to solve it. This, like many other coders who start their own business, is what we spend all day doing. Unfortunately for us, being totally awesome at what we do is only a small part of running a successful business. Alex’s business, Brown Beagle Software has just taken on it’s first employee, and I’m ready to start selling the living daylights out of my CMS so we need to move beyond adhoc, word-of-mouth “marketing” and get a bit more serious. Of course, neither of us know a great deal about that…

Alex and I are both residents of the collaborative work space twotwenty and over coffee we were discussing some joint marketing stuff that would help the whole group get some work, and the topic of mail drops and social networking came up — and we noticed a pattern: I was speaking in terms of offline networking, whilst Alex kept going back to
online networking. Being the contrary type that I am, I laid down the challenge: We should see which type of sales and marketing works best: offline or online!

Rules

The rules of our little game are pretty simple:

1. Alex can use any marketing method he chooses, but it must occur
   online.This would include Twitter, Facebook, Google Adwords, SEO. He can’t count leads from people that originated in real life.
2. Myles can’t use the inter-tron with his quest: He can only use traditional channels, such as face-to-face, networking meetups, traditional media and offline advertising
3. A lead is counted as a genuine enquiry for work. For the sake of this experiment, we can sell any of our services, but we need to be able to do the work. A completion is counted when a job is accepted.
4. Once a prospect has been engaged, communication can continue into the other medium (e.g. Myles can use email, Alex can use a phone).
5. Myles and Alex can spend up to $250 each on their campaigns.
6. Both need to track how much time they have spent on marketing.
7. At the end of the month, whoever has the best ratio of leads vs. time spent marketing will be deemed the twotwenty marketeer of the month™, and will gain kudos until the end of time (or until April).

Head over to http://www.offlinevsonline.com to watch the craziness unfurl.

Alex Pooley (from Brown Beagle Software, and fellow 220er and Rails guy) are running some Ruby on Rails training sessions in March.

It will be an intensive primer designed to get web developers who work in PHP, or .Net up-to-speed in Rails in about four classes. We will cover Ruby, Rails and unit testing as well as deployment.

The classes cost $220, with one stream running on Monday 1st-22nd March 2010 and the other Thursday 4th-25th March 2010. So if you have been meaning to look at Rails, but haven’t had the time, then this could be perfect for you!

Head over to  http://railstraining.in and sign up!

I do a lot of front end development, and as a result, I use Adobe Photoshop a lot. I also use Acrobat Professional frequently and Flash and Illustrator enough to warrant purchasing the full Design Premium package. Said Design Premium Package is pretty expensive, so to spread my costs, I’m using the subscription edition. Recently, I had to change my subscription plan, so I cancelled it, and re-subscribed, and so begins my trip down the rabbit hole that is Adobe Support.

Because I had paid for my subscription online, and opted for the downloadable version, I should have received a serial number in my email. I didn’t. Thankfully CS4 goes in to trial mode, so I could still use it whilst I sorted out the serial problem. Time to call Adobe…

Firstly, it was neigh on impossible to find the Australian support number on their website - when ever you try to access support, it defaults to you the US - I assume because the subscription edition doesn’t have an Australian number. Thankfully, one of my friends had general support number in her rolodex.I call the number, and after 45 minutes on hold listening to horrific elevator muzak, I get through to the product activations. The operator was polite enough - but they have to be - the script they are reading would demand it. I give them my email address (and say yes to allowing them to contact me on it), and then give them my phone number in case I get disconnected. After the operator goes through the rest of their script, she realises that actually I need a different department, and asks if she can transfer me. Whilst I would have though that to be an obvious solution, I play along. Phone goes dead.

I can see why they ask for your number. I left it 10 minutes to  see if they would call back. Nadda. So I call them back, another 30 minutes on hold, plus 5 minutes going through the tier-1 product activation script, and the next customer server representative transfers me through. Finally I get to the right department - Subscriptions.Unfortunately, the tier-1 subscriptions customer service representative can’t help with missing serial codes, so they take down for phone number and email address (for the 3rd time) and setup an open case in their support console, in preparation for a tier-2 support officer.Now, I play the waiting game. By this stage Christmas has come and I’m away and forget about CS4 for the moment. Due to inactivity (on their part, mind you) it would seem that they closed the job off. Result: No serial number.

I get back from Christmas, and call up again - by this stage I only have a week left on my trial, so I need to get this sorted quick smart. I go through the exact same steps as above (including the phone disconnection), and once again, a ticket gets opened. After 48 hours, I leave a message following up, as I still have no reply. After 5 more working days (By this stage my trial has finished), I ring back. They ask for my case number, which I give them, which returns a completely different customer case. After giving them my email AGAIN, they find it, and transfer me through to subscriptions. Magically, the service agent finds me a serial number and give it to me. Unfortunately, the downloaded version of the subscription trial requires a serial number with only numbers. The one she gives me has letters. Her reasoning behind this is because I didn’t install it off the DVD.

So, I’ve just uninstalled CS4, and I’m waiting for it to reinstall, which has taken (so far) about an hour. I tell you what, the serial number better be right, or shit will hit the fan.To be continued…

UPDATE: It’s the wrong serial number.

UPDATE 2: I’m once again waiting for tier-2 or tier to email me back.

UPDATE 3: Well, it’s all sorted now! It turns out that the subscription pack is being trialled in Australia, so Adobe hasn’t quite got the process down yet (They might want to make this a little more obvious…). The issue I had was resolved by circumnavigating the Adobe store, and just using the eSellerate console to purchase the new subscription. So all is well that ends well - I’ve provided my feedback, so hopefully this drama will conclude with a better user experience for subscription customers.

Thank you to everyone involved in helping to fix the issue: AJ Mercer,  Brett Favour, @Adobe_Bing and Kirsten Harris. Special mention too to Tian Cheng and Nick Hodge for making some noise through their personal networks too.

If you have some sort of *nix (Linux, OSX, cygwin), then simply run the following in a shell:

ssh -L 8222:localhost:8222 -L 902:localhost:902 -L 8333:localhost:8333 your.vmserver.com

replacing your.vmserver.com with your ACTUAL VMware server.

Then point your browser at http://localhost:8222 (This is the unencrypted URL - which isn’t a problem, because you are tunneling over SSH)

Note, that this trick really only works if you have an SSH server running on your VMware host.