04/10/2000

Gas Prices Today: 62.9ish

Actually got gas for 61.3 yesturday. Spent 13 hours in line and burned 2
tanks idling, but I did it! (ok, maybe not). Actually I just waited a couple
of hours and got it on the way home when there were no lineups.

Yes, new stuff to the cam coming RSN. I just have to edit some images k?

Things here at home (that would be the NetMaster offices), are good. Except
for stupid idiot support people (not us), I’d have much more done. See, I’m
writing a shopping cart. Pretty neat stuff. Anyway, I’ve gotten to the point
where everything is done. New graphics, the look is all integrated into the
new website… everything. Well, except for the little detail of actually
doing the credit card validation and charging. For that we’re going to use a
perl module supplied by a company. After trying it out I wrote them with a
“this doesn’t work, and here is why I don’t think it works” email citing such
things as functions that expect two variables but are only passed one and so
on. Anyway, the response was “your keyfile might be bad, here’s another one”.
So on faith (pah) that they knew what they were talking about, I tried it.

Same thing.

So I email them with a “that didn’t work, here is why I don’t think it works”
message again. No response. We had some other things happening so we sort of
ignored it for a while. Then it got to the time when we needed it to work
ASAP (that would be now). So I send more emails. Eventually we find out that
the people we’ve been talking to have been forwarding our support mail to a
non-existant office.

Somewhere along the way we were sent another keyfile which worked just as
well as the previous one.

Finally getting a hold of a real person this morning I was told that she’d
passed on a message to the main guy here in Vancouver, and he’d be getting a
hold of me RSN. At around 5 I all him and he’s like “yes, I do remember
seeing some email about that somewhere along the way”. Gee, nice to know what
good attention they pay to emails marked urgent (if it was in fact marked
urgent). He emailed me (take a wild guess here) a new keyfile. This time he
included the complete perl module at my request, just in case I had an old
copy of the software or something.

Same results (except their test program that I was using was slightly
different so the error message had some more text above it).

I eventually got a hold of the original developer of the program who of course
doesn’t support it anymore, but said he’d take a quick glance at my screen
dumps and if it was a quick and dirty thing no big deal.

So this is where I am now. Tomorrow morning I plan to call back to the
Vancouver office and demand in the most polite way (at first) to speak to
someone who actually knows about this. I mean, I admit, I could be just
stupid and have no clue about this all, but from everything I can figure you
should be able to run their test script after installation and have it
actually do something. Right? I could not know anything and all my bitching
might be due to me missing something obvious… I hope so, cause I’d hate for
this to be the way that this company does business (name withheld to protect
the accused (for now)).