On a personal basis I can be slow to respond to private emails, mainly as my work emails get a high priority and there is an awful lot of them. I would expect any company which offered an email route to contact them to treat that communication as being as important as if I picked up the phone and called them.

So - why do companies still seem to think an email is less important than a phone call?

Would you accept picking up the phone and being told that it could take up to FIVE DAYS before you can speak to someone in the call centre?

Dear T-Mobile UK, I don’t expect to chase up a service fault with a local Wi-Fi point and then get a response telling me that it will take up to FIVE DAYS to just reply to my message - especially as the message I sent was a complaint that the local Wi-Fi point had been faulty for over a week. I would have phoned you, only I left my mobile phone at home, and noticing that you had an email contact service thought (naively) that it would be a suitable way of contacting you.

More fool me.

It is ironic that the Wi-Fi hotspot which is faulty happens to be inside a branch of Starbucks, who have a track record of replying to emails very quickly, usually within the hour - based on the two times I have messaged them over the past few years.

The coffee shop can respond swiftly, but the communications firm needs days to communicate with its customers

(and calms down)

update: The company has responded already, and while the response is not really conclusive, they did reply in a fairly tolerable timeframe. I am still spluttering at the idea that a company thinks it can get away with taking FIVE DAYS to reply to a customer email though.

I am moving the blog to a new web hosting firm this weekend, so there may be the odd glitch where posts seem to be available then vanish as “the internet” updates itself as to the new web server location.

The reason:

I am actually testing the new host to see if they are stable/reliable etc - as I am currently forking out some $600 per month to host a number of different websites and am looking for a cheaper host.

My difficulty is that one of my sites is very bursty so needs a powerful box to cope with a very high traffic load that only lasts a few hours per day. I am experimenting with MediaTemple who bill not by total server capability, but by processor power actually used - which may be suitable for my needs.

Fingers crossed - and it better not break as I want to go out to the Lord Mayor’s firework show this evening!

If you use the RSS feed, this blog posting will probably be meaningless to you - but if you are reading this on the website itself, then you might have noticed that I have changed the aesthetics of the blog.

Not out of boredom (although that was a slight factor), but as I am working on a new toy for the blog and it really needed a 3 column layout for the website, so I took the opportunity to hunt for a new template for the blog at the same time.

Still making a few tweaks over this weekend - hope to launch the “new toy” in a week or two.

For various reasons, I was googling around for a bit of background info on the Maoist terrorists in India’s Bihar State to pad out a news article I am writing, and Google decided to ask me the following:

Google Link

Downloaded it yesterday - mainly to make sure my main business websites work in it - and to have a bit of a play.

Initial thoughts:

Generally, fine it isn’t too radical that I take one look and run away crying, and there are naturally some pluses and minuses.

A big plus for me is the user controllable text box size - so the (far too many) websites which provide a text box to type in which is the size of a proverbial postage stamp can now have the text box enlarged by the user.

That is a really, really clever idea and on its own almost enough to make me switch browsers.

However, they have completely removed the url bar and its history - which is going to really screw up how I use a browser for some of my applications. I guess it is something I will have to get used to as Firefox effectively killed off the url bar with its bloody stupid “awesome” bar a few months ago, so I presume the death of the url bar drop down history is inevitable.

So far, there is no Google toolbar - and while it can be argued that it won’t be necessary for the average user, the toolbar did have some useful extras which I used for my work.

I feel uncomfortable without the status bar at the bottom of the page, or a strip of menu options at the top - but that is a personal foible.

The lack of a “page refresh” option in the right-click menu on my mouse though - that is annoying and very odd.

Search:

The url bar doubles up as a search bar as well - and you can customise the search options if you don’t want Google as the default.

However, it is rather difficult to further customise the Google search so that is sticks with the .com site and doesn’t keep bouncing you to the local version (in my case, either .de or co.uk)

The method to fix the search to the country (or .com) of your choice is as follows:

Go to tools, then options.

Now click on the default search manage button:

Now click on “add” to add a new search function.

Type in a suitable name (google.com) and a keyword (google), then paste in the string below into the search box.

http://www.google.com/search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s

(edit the .com bit if you want to lock it to a specific other country)

Save the entry and then highlight it in the list of search options and click on “Make Default”.

Now all your Google Chrome searches will run via a fixed Google site and not keep bouncing to the local option where you happen to be (or your IP address thinks you are).

For tidiness sake, you might want to delete the old google search option while you are there.

As an aside, when I was begining in web work - the Netscape browsers called the toolbars/url bar/status bar the “browser chrome” which surrounded the main display section for the website, so there is a bit of heritage in the name Google has chosen for its new browser.