The company that manufactured my new computer case, NZXT, was offering a very nice poster for free that featured my case (I know that’s geeky - be quiet) so I ordered one.

FedEx just came with a large box. In it were three copies of this poster. That would have been really nice except that (1) whoever put them in the box folded them (!) two times rather than rolling them like, well, a poster and (2) the ends were all torn up like they’d been knocked around quite a bit.

Why even bother? They paid to ship these things via FedEx, and they’re in horrible condition, all cracked and torn. I’m disappointed.

I’ve been using Mozy’s online backup service for over a year now, I believe, and it’s been a nice service - the initial backup took days, but the subsequent ones all run in the background and never interfere with my work.

Thankfully have seldom had the need to retrieve anything from them; when I did this about six months ago, it went super-smoothly. But last week was an entirely different story.

My old Dell 2400 finally died last Monday. While I was scrambling to put together what I needed to rebuild it (which I was planning on doing anyway, just the timing was not that great) I logged into Mozy with my laptop to get the files I needed immediately.

No dice. I kept getting kicked out of the service, and when I could get in and stay in the screen that shows my files just churned. I let it go for most of the workday (I know it takes hours sometimes for all the files to appear) but no luck.

So I wrote customer support. I got the usual 24 hours response notice, and that was okay, I was busy anyway… but 26 hours later I had no response and still could not get to my files.

So… I have never heard back from Mozy. Not a word. Not in just under a week. Needless to say, I’m pretty unhappy with them. And I’ve asked for my money back and my account to be closed (no response to that either).

I suppose I’ll contact my bank later today and issue a chargeback for the annual fee they took out of my account a few weeks ago. I’m really surprised at this big change in the quality of their customer support - I’ve never had any problem hearing back from them before on the few occasions that I submitted a question. But when you devalue the customer relationship, customers leave. And I’m leaving.

On Saturday night my husband and I were talking on Skype, and the call quality was pretty much what it has been for the last few months - poor. Only on Saturday we got dropped four times in about a half hour.

This has been happening - though not as frequently - for the past few weeks; being dropped while talking so you don’t realize the other person can’t hear you.

Fed up, I went searching for ‘Skype alternatives’ and came across GoogleTalk. Hadn’t heard of this one, but it offered free voicemail (the main thing I use Skype for at this time) so I downloaded it and told my husband to do the same.

Five minutes later, we were on GoogleTalk resuming our conversation. The call quality was not crystal-clear (it sounded somewhat like we were in mutual tunnels) but it was soooo much better than how Skype has been for months. And how many times did we get dropped? None. Zero.

GoogleTalk is not as feature-rich as Skype for sure, and it’s mainly aimed at Gmail users (which I’m not) but its voice calling feature works very nicely.

So last night I ran that ClearType tuner I mentioned, on the Microsoft site. It turns on ClearType and runs you through a few text samples to supposedly get ClearType to a point that it works well for you. Didn’t work for me - I turned it back off, and everything looks fine. This is on a Samsung Syncmaster flat panel monitor - where ClearType was intended to work best.

This morning I’m checking my mail (in Thunderbird, not Outlook) and all of it is washed out and blurry. Was something wrong with my eyes?

Nope. After right-clicking on the desktop to check properties, I found that the ClearType tuner on the Microsoft site had apparently talked to XP Pro and turned on ClearType for all my screen fonts too.

Talk about Big Brother. I can’t stand sneaky things like this - ClearType had never been enabled on my machine and Microsoft decides that now I must want it because I check out an online tuning page for IE7. That doesn’t follow.

See what I mean by looking at this image of my email with and without ClearType.

If your screen fonts are blurry, try right-clicking on the desktop, go to Properties > Appearance and then Effects. Change ClearType to Standard font smoothing and see what happens (remember to click Apply in the Appearance screen).

Today I was putting the finishing touches on a client’s site built in X-Cart. All was looking pretty on Firefox, but side-by-side I noticed that all my fonts were looking a bit fuzzed out in IE7.

Confounded, I did a search and discovered that this is not a bug - it’s a ‘feature.’ A feature of IE7 called ClearType that’s automatically on in the browser.

I turned it off (do that by going to Tools > Options > Advanced and scrolling about halfway down to ‘Always use ClearType for HTML.’ Uncheck that box). And now everything looks great.

Now this may just be me (although I’m seeing a lot of unhappy posts about this subject) and I read that ClearType was intended to make things easier to read on LCD monitors. I’m using one, and it definitely doesn’t work for me.

However, my problem is that it’s on by default. Why not offer a choice? Why force users to accept a new feature without letting them know what it is and what it’s doing to the websites they visit?

I see that there’s a tuner you can use to configure ClearType for specific monitors and/or users. But do you think that the average web user knows this or even suspects it exists?

I haven’t posted in several days - my spare time has been thoroughly occupied with building a new web site for my web design business. I’m changing my look completely and have a new logo that fits my business much better…

I’m having a few issues with the CSS on my prototype site, though, frustrating… The first is that my Faux Columns (which I use all the time) aren’t working. I think I have an error but can’t locate it, so I’m probably going to wind up tearing it down to nothing and working back up to include all the elements. I don’t mind this, but I wish I didn’t have to do it.

Also, I got the footer to stick to the bottom of the screen, but because the Faux Columns aren’t working the main content area appears to end before it reaches the footer. I’m hoping that fixing the first issue will help get the second one under control.

Other than these problems, the site looks great, IMO. I’m very excited to get it up and running - my target launch date is August 1.

I’m having a weird issue… yesterday when I turned on my machine, the smallish light Arial-like font that shows up in many application dialogs is gone and replaced by a much larger bold font.

I didn’t get any errors and definitely didn’t delete any fonts. I ran a full virus sweep and didn’t catch anything either.

Here’s what WS_FTP Pro looks like now:

http://www.parallaxwebdesign.com/text.jpg

I’m using Linotype FontExplorer to manage my fonts, and I checked through there too to see if I’d deactivated something by mistake but no. Any ideas?

I found this fun post about what not to do with a website on one of my mailing lists this week. Josiah hits many nails right on their respective heads here…

Here’s my favorite:

6. This one is going to get me in trouble. If you are a print designer, and “do websites on the side”, STOP DOING websites and providing “advice” to your print clients about web design. Print design to web design is like designing an ad for a race car, and actually building and racing that race car. Don’t get me wrong, print is great and all, you make pretty pictures and wonderful messages crafted with great copy, but when it comes down to it, it’s still just a picture. People cannot buy the product with a print ad (yet), they can’t communicate with your business through a print ad. I can already here the grumbling coming from the print world, and look, it’s not that I don’t see a purpose for print advertising, just stick to print and don’t nose you’re way into a medium which you do not know and wouldn’t understand (same goes for general “geeks” who do websites ‘on the side’).

I couldn’t agree more. Earlier this week I got a call from a potential client - we were supposed to meet to discuss a site for her employer, who’s building a very large and very upscale business park.

She apologized but said that her employer had decided to ‘get a personal friend’ to build their site instead.

I wrote her back, thanking her for letting me know, and suggesting she contact me in six months if they need SEO help for their new site. I can just imagine what it’s going to look like - this is a huge mistake, IMO, that’s going to cost them down the road.

Just because you have Dreamweaver, that doesn’t make you a professional web designer, any more than having QuickBooks makes you an accountant. Sorry, but it’s too true!