Category: Office Tech

A smart watch is a watch that connects by bluetooth to your smart phone, and does lots of smart things.  It was not so long ago that your usual smart watch cost many hundreds of dollars.  Recently I saw that there are lots and lots of relatively inexpensive smart watches on the market.  I decided to give one of them a try.  I was astonished to find how many features a person can get, and how clever the watch can be, for a quite modest purchase price.  Continue reading “Inexpensive yet clever smart watches”

There are only about 900 slots still open for tomorrow’s ethics CLE program Securing electronic communications.

If you wait too long to register, maybe you would be the 901^st and you would find the webinar to be full.  Yeah, right.

Anyway, maybe somebody is scrambling around to pick up a couple of CLE units before the end of the year.  Maybe even a couple of ethics CLE units before the end of the year.  If so, this might be just the ticket.  For more information, or to register, click here.

The year was 1964.  I was a student in Mrs. Seiler’s elementary-school class in a school in rural Iowa.   Mrs. Seiler introduced a new topic that we students would be learning about for the next few weeks — the metric system!  Continue reading “Yes the US was going to join the metric system”

What’s wrong with the third sentence quoted below?

Duke Energy Renewables and Colorado Springs Utilities are developing a new solar energy generating facility in Colorado Springs.

With more than 220,000 solar panels on about 700 acres, the new Palmer Solar project will generate 60 megawatts of electricity for Colorado Springs Utilities’ customers. It generates enough electricity to power approximately 22,000 homes per year.

Continue reading “Innumeracy in the popular press”

If you are a law firm, and if until recently you did your banking at BBVA USA bank, you already know most of what I am now describing.  The acquisition by PNC bank of BBVA USA bank was a disaster.  We are now in the process of dumping PNC Bank. If you are a law firm and you formerly did your banking at BBVA USA, I’d guess you are likewise now in the process of dumping PNC bank. Continue reading “BBVA USA bank to PNC bank acquisition was a disaster for law firms”

Update:  I am pleased to be able to report that after about six hours, the server finished the “repair”.  The new drive is now a full member of the RAID-1 array.  The server has carried out the first of what will be a series of periodic SMART tests on the drive and it passed the SMART test.  All is once again well with the server.

I was minding my own business when I heard a faint beeping.  It turned out to be one of our Synology file servers.  I could see on the blinky lights on the front of the server that the “status” light had turned from green to amber, and the light for “disk 1” had turned from green to amber.  What did I do next?  Continue reading “A beeping file server”

I have written about how the swallowing of the service provider Afex by Cambridge Global Payments (aka Fleetcor, aka Corpay) has been a disaster (blog article, blog article, blog article).  One of the most recent developments is that, perhaps in retaliation for these blog articles, a manager at Afex unilaterally decided to close our Afex account.  This of course required figuring out how much money was in our account at Afex and then transferring it to one of our accounts at some bank account.   It now looks like the manager did his math wrong, transferring an incorrect amount of money.  And the so-called EZTrack web links that are supposed to tell us the status of the money transfer to us do not work.  You can’t make this stuff up if you try.  Continue reading “Afex even more down the tubes than that”

However bad I thought the swallowing of Afex into Corpay (Fleetcor, Cambridge FX) was (see blog article and blog article), I was mistaken.  It is worse.  I cannot in good conscience suggest that any Afex customer spend even a moment trying to preserve their customer relationship with Afex.  Here are the latest disasters.  Continue reading “Afex even more down the tubes”

It will be recalled (Afex Going Down the Tubes, September 30) that it seemed to me that money transfer service provider Afex, recently purchased by a company I never heard of before called Corpay, was going down the tubes as part of its process of being absorbed by Corpay. 

If anything, my reaction is that things are worse than I thought.

It will be recalled that the various documents and FAQs that are meant to reassure Afex customers that the acquisition process will be seamless say over and over again that your Relationship Manager will always be there to help.  The small problem being that our Relationship Manager had left the company a few months ago and no new person had been named as her successor as our Relationship Manager.  And it will be recalled that one of the FAQs helpfully provided a web-based form that a customer could complete and then a Relationship Manager would call the customer back Real Soon Now.  So I filled out the form and clicked submit and an email showed up a moment later thanking me for submitting the form and letting me know that my Relationship Manager would be getting back to me Real Soon Now.  That was on September 30, which is eight days ago.  And as of today, you guessed it, I have not heard back from anybody.

So yesterday I tried logging in on the Afex system for sending money transfers.  I did a test transfer to our firm’s own bank account.  That was yesterday.  The money should have reached our firm’s bank account by today or so at the latest.  Then every few hours I would click around in the Afex system trying to see some sort of confirmation that I had done the transfer.  Nope, no confirmation.  Finally today, about 26 hours after I did the transfer, a confirmation showed up.  The confirmation is worded and dated as if I had clicked “submit” today and as if the money probably won’t show up in our firm’s bank account until way next week some time.  Not good.  But so anyway I did happen do see that in the confirmation, it names an actual human being and provides two telephone numbers to call.  

I dialed the first number which is 303-471-1161.  I get a recorded message “your call cannot be completed as dialed”.  I dialed the second number which is 866-428-2151.  The call goes through and is answered.  But it is answered by the squeal of a fax machine.  Or at least I am guessing it is a fax machine.  It is definitely not a human being.

Not good.

I cringe to imagine how stressful things must have been in recent weeks at VOIP.MS, the provider of unbundled VOIP telephone services that we like to use.  As I reported in earlier blog posts, they were apparently attacked by a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacker that demanded a ransom as a condition of stopping the attack.  My impression is the attacker never penetrated any of the systems of VOIP.MS, but merely flooded its servers with spurious data packets that were intended to overwhelm the servers so that normal customer activity was not able to take place.  

Anyway, the result of all of this is that the people at VOIP.MS had to take a variety of measures to harden their servers against the attack.  This required them to devise sophisticated ways to turn away the spurious packets while still, hopefully, allowing legitimate data packets from ordinary customers to work their way to the servers.  

So by now in our firm, we have migrated all of our phones and ATAs and other devices over to the various newly hardened servers.  And we have been doing daily tests of the various functions, including test calls to the ever-popular test phone number 720-230-1331 (try calling it!).  And so far as we can see, things are stable now.