I've been using GMail for the last few months for all my mailing lists. I find it incredible with its auto-threading of subjects which makes it useful with mailing lists. I used to have all my mailing lists come in as feeds into Bloglines but not since I discovered GMail.

However, today I noticed that there were an extremely unnacceptable amount of false positives in the spam folder. Not a single one of them actually was. Whatever GMail is doing for spam filtering is totally horrendous.

I wish I could turn off there spam filtering but I see no option for doing that. If I wanted to I would pass the mail through SimpleFilter first and then onto GMail and I've have no problems.

I'm curious as to why but not surprised to find out that Mark Tilden is behind this:

Mark, the designer of Robosapien, is a robotics physicist who has worked for NASA, DARPA and JPL through Los Alamos National Laboratory. He developed the basics for biomorphic robotics in 1988; Robosapien is the first commercially available robot based upon this principle.

I've blogged about Mark in the past here.

I like this one:

Source: http://wizbangblog.com/archives/003622.php

I thought I'd start a catagory on Corporate Blogging. Basically I'll just point to others making points about business/corporate blogging.

Here is the first one: Six Types Of Business Blogs - A Classification

Well, I haven't posted much to this category because it would require a full time job of updating. Plus, basically the connection has been horrible all summer so there wasn't much new to say until recently.

Except that last week another technician came out to check things and after determing that the signal was OK decided to try his test modem. He was reluctant to switch me to the new modems saying that the older modem I had worked better in this area. Well, his test modem worked fine but that could have been coincidence since I was getting good patches for 30 minutes at a time here and there. However, we decided lets just go with a new modem. He unpacked a new modem and called in to Rogers to provision it. Unfortunately their provisioning system was down so there was no way to get it up and running. The only thing to do was wait till provisioning was back up and try it then. Of course that gave me the chills cause I knew as soon as I try it there would probably be a problem.

Rogers was supposed to call me to tell me when their provisioning system was up but said they had no idea how long it would take 1 hour, 2 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, pick a number at random. I've been told similar things in the past so I knew I would never receive a phone call. I gave them a couple hours then called in and of course the system was up so I could try the modem.

Much to my utter amazement it worked and has been working pretty well since then (thats a week counting). I'm still not holding my breath as I expect problems to creep back in out on the street but for now things are looking good for once.

Looks like the CRTC in Canada may finally do something about this or at least they are having a hearing about this coming up. Its about bloody time.

Of course, Bell Canada could take some measures to thwart this pretty easily. They could have an option allowing me to set that I do not want to receive voice messages from people who don't actually ring through the phone number. I don't need anyone leaving me a message without trying to call me. Just make this an option and along with call blocking this is pretty much the end of it. Unfortunately that would require people with clues working at the phone company.

Also, the article mentions Infolink Communications Ltd but I've had voice messages from a number of companies.

From Roland Tanglao comes Chatango:

Inspired by Joi Ito, I added Chatango. So far so good. Looks to be BlogChat on steroids. Chat with me (if you dare)!

If I recall correctly Roland was one of our first 10 BlogChat users.

We initially thought of doing BlogChat in Flash but decided to keep it even more lightweight and again to not require anything other than a plain old browser. Plus there were all kinds of Flash chat programs already available some 2 or so years ago that it didn't seem that interesting or unique. I will admit though that you can get a much nicer experience with Flash.

Haven't been able to checkout Chatango since nobody I can find with it is online. I can't be bothered to set it up myself right now but probably will at some point.

I've always had great Dell Customer/Technical Support in years past but tonight erases that memory completely.

I called about a very simple issue. The power adapter for one of my laptops is making a clicking sound which doesn't sound healthy. Since I've heard about power issues with this particular Dell and there are articles on Dell's site about this, I just wanted the thing replaced. Simple right? Wrong. Very wrong.

No word of a lie, I was transferred 4 times. The 5th person I spoke to was finally able to help me. Now, part of that may have been my fault in calling the wrong number to begin with but there were 4 attempts to transfer me to the correct department after taking my information each and every time.

Now, apparently Complete Care next day onsite service has some qualifications to it. If they send a part out instead of sending a technician, then next day is not next day. I guess they have never heard of overnight parcel delivery which would be satisfactory. I tried to get them to send a technician anyway just to deliver the power adapter but that didn't go over well. Apparently just about anything that a user can install themselves is sent unaccompanied by a technician and therefore void of the next day onsite service. The rep on the phone listed just about every component in this thing except for the motherboard and any components that are unremovable.

About all I can do is call Customer Care and complain. I really don't care to waste another hour on the phone and get nowhere. So I'll just post this and watch it rise to the top of Google.

Dell can contact me just like Linksys and Mattamy homes did after seeing their potential customers googling over to my weblog instead of their websites. Rogers still hasn't figured it out. What they don't know and likely won't because they aren't smart enough to visit here is that I'm likely to have some decision making influence for a multi-million dollar contract that they thought they had in the bag. Too bad they are a clueless organization.

In any event I highly recommend people to not waste their money on Complete Care next day onsite service and just go with the 2-3 business day service as it seems to be the same anyway.

Also, for the record, the reference number for the call was 76734170. The rep I spoke to at the end who was actually helpful was Alex (#54196).