brettbrewer.com

Recently I had experiences with two different companies that do business online that perfectly illustrated the difference between good and bad customer service and how important customer service is for an online business. I have always said that "content is king" on the internet and that this should be the foundation of any successful online business, but I haven't talked too much about the customer service aspect. It wasn't until I worked for a company that provided superior customer service that I realized how big a difference it makes in the long-term success and organic growth of a business. It is hard for me to tolerate bad service when I am subjected to it now that I know the difference between good and bad service, and that it can actually cost less for your business to provide good service if your employees are properly trained. I will now compare two experiences I had today with two different companies so you can see how drastic a difference it makes, simply to have a well trained customer support person who understands the underlying business and has the power to make a useful decision for the beneift of the customer.

I am officially embarking on my long-time dream of establishing permanent residency in Canada and am focusing my current job search on the Vancouver BC area. If you are a Canadian employer or you know a Canadian employer who would be interested in importing an expert PHP/MySQL/Flash developer with over 13 years of experience in print, web and multimedia design and programming, please contact me . It is much easier to emigrate to Canada if you have a job lined up, so I probably won't be too picky about what offers I consider so long as they are in Canada, preferably somewhere south of the Arctic Circle and most preferably in the Vancouver area. I have already received offers from US recruiters for companies based in Hollywood (CA), San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, which is somewhat comforting, but for now, I'm holding out for my dream job in Canada. Where are all the Canadian recruiters? Meanwhile, I should be getting my Zend PHP5 certification by the end of the month, renewing my passport, and learning a lot more about the Canadian immigration process. Any interested employers should check out the employer page on the Canadian immigration site and, of course, you can view my resume on my resume page.

I've seen several methods of integrating WordPress and vBulletin, but none of them really seemed to solve my problems, so I've created yet another integration method for Wordpress and vBulletin using their plugin APIs. It basically allows you to use your vBulletin forum as the comment system for posts on your Wordpress blog, but does not integrate the Wordpress and vBulletin user systems as I have no need of that and other plugins already exist to do just that.

I've been testing out a few download managers on my site and so far my favorite is the VFM File Repository component. It's got some nice AJAX functionality, but lacks a functional category feature, so all downloads simply display in a list. When editing the descriptions via AJAX, I discovered some issues with quotes not being properly unescaped. To fix this, simply open the "components/com_vfm/vfm.php" file. On about line 191 you will see the following code:

 $result = $vfm->setAttribute(array( 'description' => $_REQUEST['contents'] ));

 Simply replace it with 

 $result = $vfm->setAttribute(array( 'description' => stripslashes($_REQUEST['contents']) ));

This will fix the escaping problem and allow you to embed quotes and html with attributes into your descriptions. You can do the same thing for the title field by making a similar edit to line 179 of the source file. 

I have been speculating for years about alternative methods for generating electricity. Recently I was thinking about how plants are able to efficiently store solar energy as sugar and wondered if it might be possible to coax them into generating free electrons that could be siphoned off directly as an electrical current. I wondered if there might be some way to splice some genes from an electric eel or some other bioelectric organism and get a tree to produce a similar electrical field. Of course, this seems somewhat impossible since they biological systems in a tree are nothing like those in an eel. But after a bit of searching I came across this article which describes a method of extracting current directly from a tree using a method that most elementary school science fair participants will probably be familiar with from their "potato battery" experiments. Apparently Gordon Wadle, an inventor from Thompson, IL. was thinking about how lightning eminates from the ground, often near large trees. He basically did a variation of the "potato battery" experiment with a tree instead of a potato and it worked.

"Simply drive an aluminum roofing nail through the bark and into the wood of a tree -- any tree -- approximately one half inch; drive a copper water pipe six or seven inches into the ground, then get a standard off-the-shelf digital volt meter and attach one probe to the pipe, the other to the nail and you'll get a reading of anywhere from 0.8 to 1.2 volts of DC power," he said.

And apparently, no matter how many spikes you put into a tree, they all produce the same amount of energy, so a single tree is probably capable of putting out much more energy than the simple experiment suggests. Talk about a sure-fire way to get people to plant more trees! Anyway, the inventor and a company called MagCap Engineering, LLC. have applied for a patent, so hopefully we will hear some more about this in the near future. In the meantime, I think I'll see how much electricity the oak tree in my back yard is producing.