Day: March 15, 2008

My Favorite Beatles Song

Do I have one single favorite Beatles song? Actually, yes, I think I do. Overall, I tend to favor John over Paul, but this one is my favorite.

[flv:/Video/2008/MAR/HelloGoodbye.flv 440 330]

And while I have the old Laser (pre-DVD) video disc player going, here’s a delightful short scene from Magical Mystery Tour. Seeing this, it’s obvious that John had a kid of his own.

[flv:/Video/2008/MAR/MagicalMysteryTour.flv 440 330]

Extra: That version of “Hello, Goodbye” is obviously not the original stereo mix from Thursday, November 2, 1967. Further, it’s slower. Or perhaps the mix for the record was sped up. I’ll put it here for comparison, taken from the original Capitol Records LP of Magical Mystery Tour that I first heard 40 years ago.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/MAR/HelloGoodbye.mp3]

In the UK, Magical Mystery Tour was a double EP, and it had only the songs on side 1 of the American LP.

Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge

i(ain’t got no)Power

Most bloggers use a blogging host, and they don’t go to the trouble to be their own Webmasters on a Web host, like I do. This Web site is hosted by a company in Phoenix called iPower, or iPowerweb. It’s a big hosting service, specializing in small businesses. Sometimes, like yesterday, there’s some unscheduled downtime, as we like to say in the high-tech biz when things go wrong. Everything was OK after a while, without me doing anything.

The last time I had something go wrong that absolutely had to be fixed and wasn’t going away on its own, I called iPower tech support, and after an hour I got somebody on the phone who was very nice and fixed the problem. But I know that my friend Bismo, who uses iPower for domain and e-mail forwarding isn’t happy, and there are many other customers with complaints. These problems have become widespread to the point where the Arizona Republic recently had an article about iPower’s woes. Here’s a bit of it.

Web host firm plagued by client criticism

Andrew Johnson
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 6, 2008 12:00 AM

Complaints about Web-site crashes, shoddy tech support and billing errors have spurred fast-growing IPower Inc. to revamp its approach to customer service.

In recent months, the Phoenix-based Web-hosting company has nearly doubled its number of customer-service representatives and adopted new software to manage customer feedback.

The changes have come as the company finds itself the focus of Internet blogs slamming its service and customers threatening to cancel their accounts.

I’ll eventually be confronting some major changes to this site, including an update to the management console. I’m not looking forward to this, because the potential exists for everything to fall to crud. Whatever problems come up, I hope iPower is ready and able to help me.