Friday, January 16, 2009

Software whinges

Since part of it is about a blogging resource, which I actually reviewed over on My Greetings to You at some length and praise, possibly this post ought to be there, but it's all thoughts from me, so I guess doesn't matter too much.

One of my blogs is hosted on Today.com who are supposed to pay per post. OK, it's not much, but it has potential to be more. Yesterday, I suddenly got an alert in my account to say that I would be getting a bigger payment per cpm, and my pay per post was reduced to ZERO!

Now hold on there. In December, I only had a couple of posts because I was struck down with a nasty flu virus, not to mention colossal depression. However, as things got better in January, I've posted on For the Love of British Food most days and much enjoyed the research and recipe tests that have gone into each post's production. Not ONE of those posts has yet been reviewed!

I posted a snotty note in the user forum, which was removed almost immediately - I thought it might happen, but I got some messages from sympathetic users who saw the message before it was deleted . They do say that when the posts are eventually reviewed that the payment status may change again. It had b***** better do.

The other software annoyance has been ZoneAlarm. Over the past 5 days I have expended many hours trying to figure out why the latest auto-update was trying to destroy my system. The advice from the user forum there was some help, but fell short of being really useful by suggesting something that was incomprehensible. My main PC which is running almost the same configuration has been OK, it was the laptop that was troublesome.

Why would uninstalling and re-installing through a wired connection rather than through my router make any difference. I will be on the forum again in the morning telling them that actually it didn't make a squit of difference. What DID work was downloading and using the clean utility they suggested, rebooting, then downloading and re-installing the latest version as two steps rather than a download and install in one process. It took several attempts since last Sunday to get back to normality.

There was also the irritation that ZoneAlarm tries too hard to sell you its paid upgrades. In my annoyance to get things right again, I didn't notice that I had the wrong box ticked and made the solution more difficult than it needed to have been.

ZoneAlarm used to be a really reliable well tested product for a freebie. Now I'm not so confident about it, but not rattled enough to be prepared to pay for a product I don't really want. And, the standard of customer support (it was an admin who replied) isn't too hot either.

I didn't sleep too well last night, so rather than posting on the food blog tonight, I have scribbled a few notes of an idea, which I'll pick up on tomorrow.

Shipping and weather forecast is telling me that the big winds aren't coming till tomorrow and the weekend and that we might have snow on Monday. Must buy the garden dickybirds some more food, I forgot today. Too much giggling with friend Cath in Caffe Nero and giving the male inhabitants of Havant scores out of 10 for fitness as they walked past where we were sitting in the window. Most didn't even make 50%.

Zeds time. Night night.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That Sucks about the Today blog. I started one but never updated it.. I have 3 blogs already and just didn't have the time, and wondered how much they really paid out anyway.

I hope you get your Zone Alarm working... I use Avast, I like it!

Mandy said...

Zone Alarm bugs me but my brother swears by it.

I use Windows Defender and Avast Antivirus and swear by them.

I started a Today.com blog but have never updated in it. I was worried about writing up good posts and not getting decent money for it. I still have to decide on that one.