I’ve put this off for so long now but I’ve finally decided to start tweeting, follow me @danwissa.

Not so bad so far!

So I’ve recently decided to register a .au domain name so that I don’t frequently communicate with people here in Australia using my NZ based email address, as a result I’ve also decided to have my blog accessible via both URLs you can now get to my blog by visiting http://www.wissa.net.au or the old URL http://www.dan.net.nz and of course if you already subscribe to my RSS feed via FeedBurner then you don’t need to worry about the URL you use and just subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/dandotnet.

You can also email me on either my NZ email address or my .net.au email address, I’m sure it’s not too hard guess what the new email address might be!

Hopefully this is the beginning of more frequent posts, with Tech.Ed coming up there couldn’t be a better time to get this up an running again. If you’re attending Tech.Ed in Australia next week and would like to meet then drop me an email…

A couple of years back when Windows Vista came out I blogged about the several Windows Vista Shutdown options that were available back then after reading an article on Joel Spolsky’s blog.

It’s really great to see that a suggestion I had back then on a possible solution to this problem has actually been incorporated in Windows 7! I may not have been the only person who though of this but hey I did think about it and now it exists as a feature!

Here’s a snippet from what I wrote back in January 2007

“So Microsoft here is my suggestion, I would like to be able to do something like this, right click the sleep button, click a menu item that says set default action or something like that, and then choose the one that suits me. I think this way the problem that Spolsky mentioned of too many choices would be minimized and I would be able to shutdown my computer by clicking the button...” link to the full post is above.

Now if you are using Windows 7 you can change the default action of the shutdown button – a.ka. the power button to be whatever you want from the possible options by doing the following.

From the start menu right click on the word Shutdown as shown below then select properties

when the properties dialog pops up go to the second tab as shown below

In this example I’ve chosen restart to be my default option. Now after updating if I bring up the start menu again I see Restart as the power button name/action. Cool!

This is one of my best liked features so far in Windows 7 aside from the document grouping by application.

I’ve thought about not posting this a few times but my patience is now fully exhausted thanks to the quality – or lack of it – of service from Telstra here.

Just over 3 weeks ago I shifted to another house that’s about 2 or 3 blocks down from my previous address. Before moving we made arrangements for the Phone number and internet connection (which was ADSL 2+) to be transferred to the new address. Now this is where it all started (and continues to) go wrong.

After moving to the new address and having the phone number connected I had to ring up to notify Telstra that the phone is up and running so that the internet can get activated. THIS took about 12 business days to happen with me having to call Telstra several times during that period to sort things out. Here’s a quick summary of some of the things that caused this to take so long.

- I talk to a customer support person on the first day the phone gets connected and they say that all has been sorted and that I should have internet connectivity within 3 business days.
- 3 days or so later I call again after finding out that there’s no internet connection so I ring again
- I get told by the person I spoke to this time that apparently no order was put through and apparently we only arranged to get the phone number transferred but not the internet!! WTH? and that an order needs to be put through to transfer the internet, and I get put on hold for the customer support person so that they can put an order through. During this time as a result of call waiting on my phone my call with the operator got disconnected.
- After getting disconnected I ring again to ensure that the order went through and all is confirmed ok.
- 2 days later I ring again to follow up on the progress and I get told by the operator that NO ORDER has actually been put through and that I have to wait another 3 business days for the internet to be connected. Apparently when my call got disconnected while I was on hold with an operator they CANCELLED the order!!!!!! and yet after I rang again on the same day the last person I spoke 2 has not mentioned anything about this!

Anyways to cut the story short, after a few more days of calling Telstra and speaking with several different people and getting confusing information …etc …etc I finally had *some* internet access and even though I’m supposed to be on an ADSL 2+ service I was getting about 300Kbps speed but the person I was speaking to at the time (Friday) said that my service is currently running at about 70% but will reach full speed when it’s at 100% which should happen by Monday afternoon.

So ok, I’ll wait to see what happens on Monday.

Stay tuned for part 2. The story gets worse… by a lot. I wonder if anyone at Telstra listens to the supposedly *recorded* customer calls to improve their customer support and service.

Wow. It's been over 6 months since my last blog post! I'm sure this will change in 2009 and here goes the first post this year, and I'm sure many more will come. I received the email below on Tuesday and for some reason it does not surprise me! What's seems a bit strange is that the news did not seem to be picked up by anyone. I havent seen any blog posts on the topic or even articles on Stuff or NZ Herald or anything and I probably wouldn't have known if I hadn't received this email.

I'm in many ways not surprised and I'm sure others probably share my view.

UPDATE: It looks like this has actually been covered in a few articles including the following articles

- Telecom shuts web shopping site on Stuff
- Ferrit to close on Geekzone forums

and a few other posts out there. Thanks for the heads up Mauricio. I missed a lot of news somehow.