June 13, 2010 at 6:59 pm | Blog, Uncategorized | No comment
This weekend was supposed to be film production filled. Turns out, that wasn’t the case. The creative group I’m a producer for was to be filming a teaser/short film to promote one of our up coming web projects, Terminator:The Human Resistance.
The train wreck that was this weekend started earlier in the week when I woke up one morning with some minor back pain. Through the week, this minor pain turned into full blown back muscle cramps and spasms. This lasted for a few days, including minor pain today. The second influence on this weekend was the lost of an actor due to availability. We could have still filmed without him and just schedule a pickup day to film his shots. We proceeded as scheduled with rehearsals and scene blocking. During scene blocking we ran into our third and final straw. Our head writer and lead actor, Chris Neff, ended up cutting his hand open, ending up requiring 7 stiches, while running though a movement during the blocking process. Thankfully his still has full use of his hand and all fingers, he just won’t be driving himself for a few days.
When all was said and done, we decided to scrap this particular teaser for those reasons and a few others. Starting last night, we started focusing on another one of our feature length projects, and hope to start preproduction with in the next few weeks.
November 18, 2009 at 3:54 pm | Blog, Uncategorized | 2 comments
One thing that’s been bothering me a lot lately when I’ve had to make payments for bills–more recently try to get information for t.v. service–over the phone or in person because the website for that bill doesn’t support what I specifically need, the person taking the call tells me that I could have just done what I’m calling for via their website. They usual answer with, “Hello, my name is so and so, how can I help you today?” I tell them my dilemma, and most of the time they help me accomplish my task without question, then you get that one or two reps. that question your situation, and tell you could have done it “easily” via their site. They say it in a way that’s demeaning and not like, “Did you know you can do that on our website?” It’s always, “Well, you could have just done that on the website.”
Why not just assist me in my goal. Why must they question my intelligence in the matter. If I’m calling you, telling you that I tried doing on the website and it wasn’t working, why… Why are you, essentially, going to tell me I’m stupid for calling?!
I’ve noticed this is occurring more frequently these days. Is it a lack of education? Upbringing? Drugs? Well, whatever it is, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to customer service.
Coming from the theme park industry I’d like to think I know what good and bad customer service is. I like to think I know when to draw the line between what the customer wants and what I feel like doing, and how I should react.
If you work in a customer service position, you need to understand that you’re in a position in which you are there specifically to cater to whoever it is that’s coming to you with an issue or request in an appropriate and constructive manner.
I would like to hear your thoughts on this topic, whether is be to continue my rant or to tell me I’m an idiot and I don’t know what I’m talking about. Please leave a comment and pass this post along.
August 12, 2009 at 10:24 am | Blog, Uncategorized | 1 comment
So, you’ve moved your feeds location, be it from one directory to another or a whole new domain name or hosted service, and you want people to be able to continue to receive the correct feed?
Recently I was faced with the challenge where I need to make sure that the readers of our company’s blog were being brought to our new Feedburner feed so that we could do some stats tracking, without them having to subscribe to a new feed url. So I did a little research. I needed to know what the limitations were for RSS readers and how they handled redirects, be it through .htaccess or through php.
As it turns out, most RSS readers do follow the standard 301 Permanent redirect. So if you have an RSS but want your readers to subscribe to a new one without having to know the new feed’s URL you can simply add either a 301 redirect for the new feed via .htaccess or if you’re using one of the many popular php blogging formats, you can use php do achieve the same affect. I’ll show you how.
301 Redirect via .htaccess
To achieve a 301 via .htaccess add the following to your .htaccess file:
Redirect 301 /feed.html http://www.youdomain.com/newfeed
where /feed.html is the location of the file you want to redirect from and http://www.yourdomain.com/newfeed/ is the location of the new feed you want to have the reader redirected to.
301 Redirect via PHP using WordPress
If you’re using WordPress and want to redirect readers to say a Feedburner url of your feed with changing the feed URL on your WordPress blog you can add the follow bit of code to the following files:
For the main posts, you can redirect the four feed types: RSS, RSS2, ATOM, RDF.
The files you’ll need to modify are located in /wp-includes and are*:
- feed-atom.php
- feed-rdf.php
- feed-rss2.php
- feed-rss.php
*You only need to modify the feeds in which you’re serving to your readers.
In our case we’re only offering the RSS2 feed.
Open your feed file in your favorite php editor (notepad will work too), and add the follow to the top of the php file just below the opening <?php tag:
header($_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'] . ' 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Status: 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location: http://www.yourdomain.com/newfeed');
exit();
This will tell automatically have the RSS reader pull the feed from the new feed URL.
That conclude this howto on setting up a 301 redirect for your blog’s RSS feed. Hope it helped. 
August 6, 2009 at 11:04 am | Blog, Uncategorized | No comment
That’s right. Twitter is down once again. This time, not because it has too many users or because they’re updating their service, but because of a Denial of Service attack.
Reported on BBC News’ website:
“Denial-of-service attacks take various forms but often involve a company’s servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them. The outage began Thursday morning but the geographic scale of the attack is still not known.”
Since the attack Twitter’s site has come back online but seems to still be suffering from the DoS attack. Hopefully they will manage to resolve the situation and bring back our beloved micro-blogging service that we waste so much of our time on throughout the day.
April 27, 2009 at 2:35 pm | Blog, Uncategorized | No comment
Well here it is… My new wordpress theme. Anythoughts?
March 26, 2009 at 2:37 pm | Blog, Uncategorized | No comment
So today has been a very sad and unproductive day for tweeting via Twitter.com.
It seems the microblogging website, which has recently been seen in the spot light of much of the world’s media, has been plagued with very slow response times today. You go to post a tweet, and it shows up right away; however, the tweets of others are showing up twenty to thirty minutes later than than were posted.
At approximately 3:30p EST, things did seem to start catching up. Looks like we’ll have to wait and see how this one plays out.
February 27, 2009 at 11:40 am | Blog, Uncategorized | No comment
Wellthis is pretty much just a test of the wordpress iPhone app. Seems like it will do just fine. Now, I just need to figure out what I want for lunch.