Monthly Archives: January 2007

The Thin, Blue Line

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The Thin, Blue LineLast week, on Wednesday afternoon, my Dell Inspiron E1505 developed a blue line on the LCD panel. It was one pixel in width and spanned the entire height of the display just left of center. Man was I ever annoyed! I immediately submitted a support request to Dell, not really expecting much.

My impression of Dell is very much improved from what it was. I was never really one to speak ill of Dell (I think the Inspiron is a great notebook computer), but neither has Dell really struck me as a great company. I’m not the type to buy a desktop or server computer from Dell, but the notebooks are a pretty good deal, particularly with the employee discount through Qualcomm. Well, apparently, I have an on-site service agreement with Dell and today a tech came out to replace the LCD panel. It would have been done on Friday, but we had some scheduling problems.

Really, I’m impressed. A support representative (likely in India) contacted me almost immediately to help me isolate the problem. I knew it was the LCD panel, but I went with it. By Wednesday night, I was informed that a replacement part was on its way to a tech to be replaced on-site.

I find Dell’s support even better than AppleCare. First of all, I don’t have to deal with the pretentious “geniuses” at the Apple Store’s Genius Bar; second, I don’t have to ship my computer anywhere to have it serviced. Congratulations Dell, I may even be a repeat customer.

Okay, enough cheerleading.

Analyze This

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I’ve been reading Google Hacks as an “assignment” from my local Linux user group. Basically, we raffle off review copies of books donated to us from O’Reilly. One of the requirements of this is that we review these books. Well, I’ll have my review finished soon. But that’s not what I wanted to write about in this post.

One of the final chapters in the book contains hacks for webmasters. As the master of my own as well as a few other web sites, this chapter was very interesting for me. It pointed me in the direction of Google’s tools for webmasters, in particular Google Analytics. I’ve known about this tool for a while, but I finally decided to check it out. I love it. All I have to do is add a snipped of JavaScript on all of my web pages (view the source of this one and you’ll see it there at the bottom), and Google gives me all sorts of pretty graphs.

Webmastering SanDiego.pm

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As of tonight, I am the new webmaster for the San Diego Perl Mongers. This is pretty exciting for me. I have a vision for what I want the SanDiego.pm “web community” to be, and I hope I’m able to achieve it.

My first order of business was to create a public calendar for our group. Now anyone can subscribe to our calendar to find out when we’re having meetings or any special events. Not only that, using Google means less work for me.

I have much more in mind, which I’ll be sure to announce here and in my use Perl journal. Of course, I don’t intend to run this web site in the dark. I’m open to any and all suggestions. I want this to be a community effort on the part of SanDiego.pm.