photo credit: ph0t0 {loves you too}

I’ve just had a run-in with my old hosting provider ServerGrid and it has just escalated to a point where I can’t work with them any more. The latest debacle consisted of them turning off one of my websites last week because they alleged that I was using a section of  it to send spam! Those pages hadn’t been in use for a couple of years, so this was highly unlikely, but they deactivated the site without any notification. I realised this a couple of days later, so raised a ticket about the problem. It’s now 5 (FIVE) days later and I’m still waiting for the ticket to be resolved! How shoddy is that!

I’ve just looked over my ticket history and I raised 27 tickets this year, most of them caused by sites being down or non-responsive. Most of the tickets were pretty frustrating. I would raise a ticket that there was a problem, they reply a few hours later saying that it looks fine at their end, I tell them I still have a problem, then a few hours later the box gets reset (problem goes away) and they email back saying that it still looks fine from their end.

As I’m writing this post The Only Network is still offline but I’ve already made the domain change to move it to my new host (Tubu, whom I love). I raised the ticket last Thursday about this and it’s Tuesday now and well, I’m sick of being treated like crap. The ineptitude of their staff and their sheer reluctance to help means that they have lost one customer who was happy to sing their praises in the past.

Goodbye ServerGrid. I won’t be missing you!

Things were a bit more complicated for my wife as she was running a company called The Joke Shop before she got pregnant and we moved to the Isle of Man. So besides her personal tax affairs there were also the company things that needed sorting out. Unfortuantely she had a dodgy accounting taking care of things for her and he pretty much left her in the lurch once she told him she wanted to close down the business. Today, she recevied a penalty letter for a substantial amount because some paperwork hadn’t been filed. As she stopped trading around 2 years ago you can imagine how the penalty has grown and compounded into a sizable sum, so she was in the middle of a panic attack when she called.

Now, there are quite a few causes of anxiety, and some can well develop into an anxiety attack. But the best way to overcome a panic attack is to share the problem with someone you trust; which is why she got straight on the phone with me.

My advice when dealing with tax issues (well, most issues really) is to take a step back and take stock of the situation. Many times problems which seem insurmountable are simply a result of miscommunication between different parties. In this case I suspect that some paperwork got misfiled and the penalties should be cleared by bringing the tax authorities up to date. Being frozen in a panic can only exacerbate the situation as it interrupts the flow of communication that’s the number one way of resolving these sort of issues.

So always remember to take a step back, take a deep breath and re-examine the situation. Sometimes things aren’t as bad as they seem.

Apparently a webpage I created around 6-7 years ago, where an ASP version of a Magic 8 Ball can be asked a question a will give you an answer in true Magic 8 Ball fashion, has been noticed by one of Mattel’s lawyers (Perkins & Dunnegan) and they claim the webpage “infringes Mattel’s MAGIC 8 BALL trademark in violation of 15 USC 1114 (a), and dilutes the MAGIC 8 BALL trademark in violation of 15 USC 1125 (c).” Copy of the letter here.

The thought that crosses my mind is “How does having this webpage in any way cause a negative impact on the brand that Mattel has created?” If anything, it’s increasing awareness of the existence of this “Magic 8 Ball”. Contrary to what some people believe, the world extends way beyond American borders and the majority of the world’s population are totally unfamilier with American brands. I’ve never seen a Magic 8 Ball here in the UK and I’d be surprised if many people knew what it was. Yet, having more references to this product may help stimulate international demand and raise curiously as to what this magical item may be.

Looking up Perkins & Dunnegan on the web I see that they have represented Mattel previous, in the “Showing
of Barbie Doll’s Head on Sex web site” case, where the judge ruled in favour of the defendant.

“Defendant’s ‘touch-ups’ of the dolls plus the setting she creates for them transform, to put it mildly, the original doll to an extent beyond merely supplanting it,” Swain wrote. “A different analysis would apply if Defendant had, for example, dressed Barbie dolls in a different style of cheerleader outfit than those marketed by Mattel. To the Court’s knowledge, there is no Mattel line of ‘S&M’ Barbie.”

I wonder if I can claim the same defence in that my implementation of the Magic 8 Ball is really a website and not really a ball at all. It seems like Mattel’s laywers have a track record of chasing people to remove any reference to the Magic 8 Ball (here, here and here). I wish them all the luck in the world and wonder how long Mattel will see this as being constructive.

In the meantime, I’ll be complying with Mattel’s demands and removing my Magic 8 Ball page .. and replacing it with a NON-Magic 8 Ball page

It is much more complicated if you can’t stop and restart SQL server. The first part of this procedure is to follow the procedure from the article above, but don’t actually restart SQL. Then things start to get complicated.

You’ll have to improvise, but the general plan goes something like:

1) Get the SQL design team to help you determine where in RAM the buffer is that holds the value for @@servername on your machine.
2) Call in the team that designed the server hardware to determine where that buffer physically is on the chips in your machine.
3) Disassemble your server while it is running, being very careful not to unplug anything in the process.
4) Bring up a scanning electron microscope, and prepare it for use.
5) Issue an IO_Freeze call (the documentation is in the IO device driver developers guide, but I don’t know of a copy of that online).
6) Fire the electron microscope to change the contents of the buffer in RAM. This will require repeated firings for each bit you need to reset.
7) As soon as possible, issue an IO_Thaw call so that the server can resume writing to disk.
Reassemble the server hardware.
9) Pack everything up, and send everyone home.

I’ve never actually done this, but serveral of us discussed the concept one night at Tech-Ed. I’d estimate the cost somewhere around 750-800 million dollars, although that could be reduced significantly if you can get some of the technical expertise donated. I’d still strongly suggest that you consider restarting SQL Server instead of going to this amount of trouble.

Good stuff Pat !!