Absence
News Flash: I haven’t been posting much lately. Duh. I’m due to submit my PhD thesis on August 17, and I’m about halfway through editing chapter 4 of 8. Sorry, too, to all my friends who haven’t heard much from me recently.
Server Downtime
In response to my server downtime woes, I eventually got a conciliatory email from WorldSuperHost, who had evidently read my post which said I wouldn’t recommend them. They gave me some free days of hosting, but the site and my email access still drops out every now and again. Mind you, it is extraordinarily cheap…
Death to landlines
In a much worse example of customer service, my landline has been dead for the past three days, and has only just been fixed. This was all a result of me switching over to Ozemail’s broadband2 for both my ADSL and phone services. I thought Ozemail gave me the worst customer service ever already, but their poor efforts were finally trumped when I called Telstra to report a line fault. I’d already called Ozemail, and they said that my service hadn’t come over to them yet. When I called Telstra, they said it had, and the phone operator gave me what could only be called the “talk to the hand” script. He even told me that it was against the law for him to tell me anything about my service, but when asked, couldn’t tell me what law that was. No law at all, I suspect, but Telstra’s awful customer service policies.
日本
About an hour ago, I got a call from AACE’s ITR division, telling me that they’d like to offer me the position I applied for teaching English in Japan at one of NOVA’s language schools. NOVA’s language schools. Unlike when I was offered a position on the JET program in July 2003, about 9 months after applying, this time I’ll actually be going. No word on what city yet, though I’m excited no matter where I go. Thanks to everyone at AACE for being totally unlike the JET interviewers and actually having a clue about how to select employees: your interview process was challenging, enjoyable, and meaningful.
Come September, I’m out of here!
Ecto
I’m trying out Ecto to post entries to my blog now. So far, I’m loving it. It’s payware, which I usually don’t go for, but sometimes you just have to pay for good tools. Part of the reason I wasn’t posting much was that WordPress’s web interface just really isn’t up to scratch, and makes things like posting graphics much too hard.
