The memory card snafu has been solved! Pantech pointed me in the direction of an incredibly useful piece of software called Easy Photo Recovery which recovered – get this – all but two of the photos that had vanished from the offending memory stick. (The two casualties were from this week’s ToyBox piece, and since that’s already posted the originals aren’t needed anymore.) This program is just amazing, and I had no idea anything like it existed – and I’ll probably be calling on its services in the future, since this isn’t the first oddball disappearance of memory stick photos I’ve ever experienced, and because I take a lot of pictures. (I don’t know anyone with kids who doesn’t, actually.)
Evan will be nine months old on Friday – in other words, give or take a few days, he’s been out of the womb longer than he was in it. I guess this means we’ve gotta keep him! Here are a couple of recovered photos from the other morning:
Finally, if you’ve noticed a lot of internal server errors lately on theLogBook, you’re not alone. I’ve just about had it with the site’s hosting provider, Globat.com, and I have pretty much settled on a new provider to move the site to in July or August – i.e. as soon as I can afford to (which is a good trick with OVGE falling in the same interval). Anyone else who’s hosting or considering hosting with Globat…I strongly recommend going elsewhere. Almost anywhere else, in fact.
Where Globat pissed me off: You mean aside from the epic amounts of unannounced downtime, and their refusal to prorate that on the billing end? Aside from the sudden unsolicited $100+ “upgrade offers” that you have to opt out of if you don’t want to be charged for?
The story starts about a year ago, when I started up a second hosting account with them for GreenhouseFX.tv – a site which just never really got a lot of traffic. Early this year, pre-Easter early, I copied the database for that site to theLogBook’s account, redirected the URL to lead to a new subdirectory at theLogBook with a WordPress that would grab that database, and cancelled the hosting for GreenhouseFX. In late May, I got an e-mail notice which cryptically announced that I was about to be billed for another year’s hosting, to the tune of just under $100. The e-mail didn’t even specify for which site. I then got an e-mail from them letting me know that my debit card on record was expired and had just declined the charge. (It expired last year, but I have a new one with a 2009 expiration date; I just never bothered to change the info.)
I called Globat to find out what the hell was going on, to which they calmly replied that they were initiating a yearly billing for GreenhouseFX. I reminded them that I had cancelled, and the person I spoke to in billing even admitted that they had a printed record of that cancellation which somehow managed to elude inclusion in their database. She promised that the account was now cancelled. Really. Honestly.
The next day my debit card – with the 2009 expiration – was successfully charged, putting my bank account (which handles all site business, whether for domain/hosting renewals, supplies and shipping for the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVDs, and other upcoming projects) over $50 in the red.
I called Globat immediately after learning this, skipped the formality of asking what the hell was going on, and went straight to demanding to know what the f*** was going on. A different customer service rep told me that their system had searched the customer database to see if I was hosting anything else there, and copied my correct and current billing information over from theLogBook’s account info, so my card could be charged. I told her that just the day before, I had been assured that the GreenhouseFX account had been cancelled. Once again: oh yes, I found a written note about that, it just hasn’t made it into the database. I told them in no uncertain terms that they needed to get a refund rolling, along with a call to the financial institution in question admitting that the charge was in error, or I’d be introducing them to the Attorney General of the State of Arkansas. Oh yes, we’ll get right on that.
Two days later, I receive an e-mail informing me that my refund request will be considered in the last half of July. In effect, I’ve involuntarily made a short-term loan to a company that looks like it’s willing to do anything to cover monthly expenses because crap like this probably has customers running for their lives. I don’t make it a practice to go in all guns blazing on some poor call center worker who didn’t make the decision in the first place, but all of this crap about “oh yes, there’s a written note but nothing in the database” is indicative of one thing: lying and stealing is standard operating procedure at Globat.com. Keeping your site running effectively isn’t. Steer well clear of Globat. At this point I’m pretty much settled on eBoundhost.com as the site’s new home, but there’s a lot of file and database migration to do between now and then.