June 2007

The conclusion for today’s series-o-rama needs no introduction. Ladies and Gentlemen: Dallas.

Number two for today, one of the most dramatic dramas of 80s television.

Two men and a obscenely expensive helicopter fighting machine add up to the little boys’ dream of one day being the big hero that saves the United States from evildoes everywhere. Airwolf is one badass military helicoper and those two pilots manage to hide it from the military pretty much forever. Another life-inspired 80s TV series – by Donald P. Belisario.

Check this out: Pimp Your Name

I believe nothing needs to be said here. Either you loved it or you hated it. Or you completely ignored it. What gives, here we go…

This is just a great art project.

Link

…must be that we are not allowed to listen to music all day. At 8+ hours daily this really gets you down, especially if you worked as a radio promotion agent before. Rationale: it would be too noisy in the workplace. But we’re not even allowed to wear earphones. That would shield the noise. Rationale there: we could miss to answer the phone (in time). Yes, no one wants that to happen. Ever.

Media Temple has been my hosting provider of choice for a year now. I’m leaving now because I’m sick of seeing the above message in my web browser.

I had migrated all and every of my own sites and sites I administer for others over to their “Grid” system. Well, I guess I should have known better than to trust in a new system that has been fresh out of beta. But I was decieved by the promise that all the cool kids on the block and everywhere host with Media Temple. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s their promising web site layout, their decisively relaxed language or the slick admin interface. When things seem to be to good to be true, they usually are. Lesson learned.

Right from the start there were massive problems with availability and timeouts. My sites were down for hours at a time, sometimes as often as every day for two weeks in a row. Against my gut feeling, I decided to give them their time to get things on track – they could just be overwhelmed by the interest in their new product. Being an Apple sales professional in a small company, I know how dense customer support sometimes get.

Shortly afterwards, a major upgrade was rolled out which apparently fixed things. But then, access speeds went down the drain. The sites were still online and accessible but with speed below everything I have ever seen except maybe for a home server running on a slow DSL line. Definitely unacceptable but I decided to stick with them. Their bang-for-your-buck-ratio seemed just to good to refuse.

A second major upgrade was scheduled which fixed more reliability problems but the overall speed did not increase, at least for me. Since then it has become pretty standard to open Mail.app, looking at a warning sign with a prompt that pops up, asking for my passwort (which is futile of course because the “Grid” mail server is down again). Email and web are slow as molasses, the only thing quite snappy is the FTP access. I still don’t get why.

Whatever, I’m leaving Media Temple and will not return. There is just too much marketing lingo involved and too little real improvements made. Keep your “some customers are affected” for yourself because I was always affected and I believe so was everyone else on the “Grid”. Get your act together, Media Temple or lose your customers one at a time.