Srcasm

Do you love people, geeks, Twitter and the bar?  If so, then National Mechanics is the place to be on December 9, 2008 from 6-9 pm! (Facebook Evite)

GeeksWhoGive is a great, new, Philly group that is trying to bring together the awesome power of the indie/geek scene to the masses by putting on events that help both individuals and families.  This event is being run to bring food to the people in the Philadelphia area through an organization called Philabundance.

Philabundance can use all the help that they can get this year as more and more people are cutting back their budgets and donating less food to this great organization:

[Philabundance is] the region’s largest hunger relief organization. [Their] mission is to end hunger and malnutrition in the Delaware Valley by acquiring food and distributing it through organizations serving people in need. [They've] been around since 1984, and have provided food for over 60 million meals! 

Please, if you have the time, the will power or you’re just curious, come out with at least 5 non-perishable food items to National Mechanics at 22 S. 3rd Street on December 9 and show your support for the people in the Philadelphia region!

I am in no way a Mac-head or an Apple Fan Boy but I have been asked for the top 10 reasons to get a Mac instead of a PC — Without the obvious, “it’s a fun new toy” remark.  I decided to poll the community (Strands, Facebook and Twitter) and these are my results:

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I have some pretty awesome news to share with all of you, my faithful readers.  As of now, I’m working for Passpack, the secure, online, password manager that I’ve been talking about for almost two years!  This is starting out as part-time community/product/technology evangelism and educator for both Passpack and online identity protection.  No one wants to wind up like Sarah Palin and her Yahoo account, right?  That’s what I’m going to do — I’m going to to help you to protect yourself (and your digital self) both online and off — and we’ll do it in style.

To start off, I’ll be helping Passpack and their awesome team ramp up their blog and education strategies.  We’ll try to teach people how to choose stronger passwords, better security answers (for password resets) and safeguard all of their important data.  We’ll try to help answer any questions you might have about how Passpack (or any other password manager) works and educate you on the ways that people get comprimised online.  Once we get some of those things in order, we’ll move on to helping to spread the Passpack, secure messaging and shared host-proof hosting love around the world.

Now, I have one simple request from you.  Let me know how I can help you.  Whether it’s with Passpack or online security, I want to lend a helping hand.  If you’re not sure on something that I’ve talked about, let me know.  If you have an idea of how to make Passpack or online identity protection better, I want to hear it.  Not so hard, right?  Go ahead and ask away and remember, as my 3rd grade teacher always told me, there’s no such thing as a stupid question.

So, I was just browsing these here interwebz today and what do you know, a video where someone thanks Viddler for hosting their vacation videos on Viddler.  If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

It takes a strong company and a great product to get their users and guests to take time out of their day to write, talk, vlog or draw about them and that’s exactly what a company like Viddler does.  They take time out of their day to make sure that their customers are served.  When issues arise, they let everyone know that they’re working on them and if they make a mistake, they aren’t secretive about it — They make everyone who uses their product feel like they matter to their world (and you do).

When was that last time you thanks a product/company for what they do?  37signals makes people’s lives easier, IndyHall and Citizen Space both help to foster community, spark creativity and new ideas and Comcast, with all of their faults, are working to help you out when you need their support.  Take a few minutes to think about it.  Maybe you too should thank/hug/kiss/love a company the way that they love you.

Frank Eliason (aka @ComcastCares) and his team of phenomenal people are at it again!  They’ve had a bit of publicity on ZDNet, Brian Solis’ blog and even the Get Satisfaction crew is getting satisfied.

Today, I had a strange issue — I could no longer get the music channels on my digital box.  A quick reboot of the box didn’t fix it so I sent an email to Frank’s team.  Within the hour Catherine, from PA/De Corporate Escalations, had both called me and emailed me to see if we could get to the bottom of my problem.  After a quick call back, she had booked a service call for 7-9pm on Thursday (that’s right, a two hour window next day).  About 5 minutes later she called to ask if anyone had sent a signal to the box yet.  Nope?  She did and within seconds the music channels reappeared.  The fiancée was happy and so was I and she got to close a ticket in probably near-record time.  I want to make sure I say thanks to that whole team.  And keep up the great work, Comcast.

As for everyone else, learn from this.  Comcast has had historically poor support but they are working their butts off to get better.  When I call Verizon, AT&T, PGW and the rest of the bunch, I would love to actually get an educated, nice person on the phone — or at least be able to reach out to them on Twitter.