Daily Archives: December 22, 2005

A pet peeve

General

You know, I really hate it when e-mail inquiries to customer support departments are second-class citizens. The same company that will have me on hold for less than 30 minutes, then resolve my question in 10, won’t even attempt to look at my e-mail inquiries to the same department for 1-2 business days.

Ugh.

What’s the deal here? Why should e-mailers be treated poorly?

Today’s company to shame: Shutterfly, which otherwise has been very good. I’m e-mailing them because my UPS next day air package was delayed by UPS. UPS said they’d issue a refund, but I have to ask for it through Shutterfly.

Firebird was almost interesting…

Software

I was looking at the Firebird database recently. Free Software, very feature complete, and one neat feature was that it could run either client/server (like PostgreSQL) or as a standalone .so (like Sqlite). I was starting to look into using it.

Then I discovered it only supports i386 on Linux, and no progress has been made in 3 years on that.

So I will not be trying Firebird.

I thought we had all learned by now that portable code is a good thing. Guess not.

I will be sticking with PostgreSQL as my preferred RDBMS for awhile.