So, I have a career in IT that has spanned over 15 years. Recently as some that read my blog may know, I started the path to having a college degree. I chose the University of Phoenix just because it seemed to be the best way to get in right away.

The UoP and the Axia branch are really fast at getting you enrolled. There is no proficiency exams and the pressure to sign a MPN is intense. The enrollment counselor was relentless in getting me enrolled. This does not mean the college is bad alone, just merely that they wish to have as many students possible.

I had a ‘facilitator’ that I could call during classes but only during certain hours of the day. There is an email address for personal and also internal communication. I will note that my last facilitator, Crystal McFall would take vacations during the class and not be able to respond to emails or phone calls. That was the straw on my so called educational back that broke it.

One thing bothered me in my last classes:  proof that the facilitators are real. Just words about their lives and a phone number that was at times even posted wrong. I for one did not let that bother me, I learned a great deal and made a good grade at most of what I did. After I had done several assignments, I had a past teacher read the syllabus and the grading sheet. I was assured it checked out to her academic standards.

I am a Franklin University student now due to the problems that Axia will simply not address. Counselors and even facilitators are not punished publicly since you are not told what the result of any investigation is. Yes, you will not even be told that the employee was punished. Even the local school systems have public meetings to discuss this type of problem and there is no hiding.

In closing, my first Franklin class has already impressed me. I logged in since the classes are available a week before they start and much to my surprise…. a PICTURE of (get this) my Professor!  I was already impressed with the CD material that arrived in which I was getting offline guidance for that class… the University of Phoenix does not do that.

I was happy at Axia until I started to realize that if the problem occurred again, I had no recourse. Switching to Franklin just might be the best thing yet. Axia is more expensive and a whole lot of problems that just are not addressed. Call Franklin if you are considering a degree and then call Phoenix. All my credits should transfer, which is good. What is bad? I do have to attend a couple audio chat or video sessions with my Professor.

Axia facilitators discouraged the use of voice chat in any way due to “overwhelming” students. Franklin does it right off the bat. You decide which one is better.

Feel free to post your comments with how you feel. I do not wish to discuss how you lost money at Phoenix as there is many ways a student can fail and slip through the cracks due to being helped so much to get enrolled.

I was once a supporter in the Axia branch that is the online classes for UoP. The curriculum appears sound from real people I’ve spoken to that should know what it takes to get into college.  The issue from what I can tell is the administration of the college in general.

In the next few months I will blog a little more about what drove me from attending for a second year. For now, I can say that it is lack of accountability inherent in what they do, the teachers that is. So a word of warning, your teacher can ignore emails requesting information and you will never know one way or the other what happened.

“I told you so” or “Did you read rip off report?” comments will be denied. I learned a lot in a year but the learning is not the issue here and if you want to wait there is a valuable lesson to learn.

I had this problem too, being told that something was wrong with SSL or TLS. My solution? Rapid click on the “Ok” and then back on your unactivated device in Itunes. Within 3 minutes my pre 2.0 iPhone was activated, with my previous “wait a few minutes” was fruitless after over 15 minutes of waiting.

I am assured that rapid clicking helped. The chances of getting that free server slot is just much higher if you click fast.

I recently had a conversation with a local man, who undercut the professionals in town.
This guy has no broad knowledge of how web sites work, the registration, or how we deal with having competitors.

W don’t mind a competitor, especially one that says DSN instead of DNS, but an interesting thing occurred, and I wonder why, so I elicit some responses from my readers what I did so wrong here.

Him: So when can the transfer of the domain to me be complete.
Me: Staring at the 15 windows, 5 ssh windows and list of 200 other domains I admin, I blink.
Me: It’s hard to say, we are not small fries here. We have 8 computers that need my attention now, and then there’s 200 other domains we take care of, some of which need my work today.
Him: I dont’ need to be insulted
Me: I thought he said consulted
Me: If you need consulted, we don’t mind, we are pretty easy going guys, just busy.
Him: Insulting me just isn’t right
Me: OH, I wasn’t insulting you, I was pointing out how these things work, how we work, since you had some problems with some terminology the other day.
Him: Well, I would never put my contact information on a customers domain, I’d give them their own username and password. You can just put in my email address.
Me: Hmm, so he’d love to be the one that has to adjust 200 passwords when crap hits the fan, let’s check that out. Obviously this guy doesn’t understand I can change the contact email, but I’d much rather just get it out of my account at godaddy
Me: lestat-root>whois current-customer.com
Registrant: Insulted
Registrant address: Insulted Tech Way

Me: Listen, that’s just how we do it. We shield from complaints, handle everything for our clients. You have a really good day Mr. Insulted.

The bottom line, if he didn’t bring his soapbox and try to tell me how to register and transfer a domain name, I would have dropped everything to help. Instead, I called his boss, told him what a demanding jerk he was, that I tried to educate him.

I then dropped what I was doing, intend to stay late 5-10 minutes, and did the work for the boss, not for Mr. Insulted

The top ten (almost) ways to tell you just hired a webmaster who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

15. All pages are numbers, not descriptive
14. Site takes longer than 4 seconds to load on a 3mbps cable modem
13. Opening music with no way to turn off
12. All images are odd letters and numbers
11. Uses keyword cramming to try to boost your ratings (but only hurting you)
10. Uses Frontpage
9. I asked how he liked Java, he said with cream
8. He doesn’t have a single style sheet applied
7. You ask him if he does Apache, and he says his wife is a Blackfoot
6. He asks for the user name and password to get into a domain name that is administrated by another company.
(He wants the main account password for all domains)
5. He steers you towards $7.00 per month hosting
4. You say you’re sure he knows how domain transfers work, and he says yes “I’ve done DSN changes before”
3. He asks for root access to the entire machine
2. He copies images knowing it’s a copyright infringment

And #1 is: He uses domain ‘framing’

If you just hired a guy that did more than 3 of the top ten ways to tell your webmaster is an amateur, congratulations! You’ve just hired an idiot who will represent your company in a filthy, dishonest way, and will stop at nothing to ruin your image!

I must note that all of these have been uttered to me at some point in my 15 years of doing web design/management. One individual does take the cake as saying or implying greater than half of these, making him truly a greenhorn of monster proportions. Good luck! I’d much rather wait 2 months for a diagnosis from Mayo Clinic than a 2 day diagnosis from the intern, just my own opinion, deeply rooted in this type of amateurish webmastering.

I noticed a site, http://www.sbcatest.com/installers_help_d10.pdf is no longer hosting the file that contains the serial commands needed to do all sorts of neat things to your USB port on the D11 series of receivers.

A bit ago, my receiver was lucky enough to get a helpful ‘update’ that knocked it’s port speed down to 9600 bps, so not even a single command would go through, even with Com Port Toolkit, until those values were changed. Well, that file isn’t on sbcatest.com anymore, but I have hosted a copy here. I see no copyright notices on the file, so I see no problem providing a copy.

installers_help_d10.pdf

I had been receving the netflix C00D11B1 error, and had contacted netflix, to be told there was no fix. I decided not to wait for another ‘can’t fix’ email. I found this tip, it worked, and was something the paid help @ netflix didn’t know about.

8. Open the Documents and Settings folder
9. Open the All Users folder
10. Right-click the DRM folder and select rename
11. Enter a new name for the folder (i.e. Old_DRM)
12. Restart Computer

Searching netflix for:  C00D11B1 yields no results. Google gave me plenty.
Nice job netflix, and by the way, I think trained  fleas could have done a better job.

Best way to avoid making mistake like that again? Try writing it down in the knowledge base so the next folks get it right.

If you happen to get a Wordpress Error 28 when you are selecting posts, managing, or even trying to view the front of your site, there is Mysql error going on. (Duh).

Anyway, in most cases, check out the space available on your Mysql slice or partition, and you’ll probably find the culprit. (IE it’s normally out of disk space for tmp tables)
I know you’ll probably have plenty of RAM for temp tables, but Wordpress won’t do that apparently.

So after getting my number transferred to another customer of Vonage, after I had not been a Vonage customer for many, many months I filed complaints with the FCC who is charged with regulating telecommunications.

Why oh why do I think Vonage will stop their lies at any point? Is lying to the consumer enough? Did lying to the Better Business keep them up at night? I don’t think they had enough truth to give, so they decided to shovel some more lies (which they have plenty of).

I quote Vonage’s response to my FCC complaint that they trasferred my number to another one of their customers: