Friendlier Drive Thru Service?

by DanB

It’s unnerving. I just come back from the bank and they have installed two way cameras in the drive thru lanes. So basically when you pull up you see a video of yourself, then all of a sudden it is a person inside the bank looking at you and talking to you.

Maybe these are the norm in the larger cities but I use a smaller local bank and live in a small town.

It was unnerving to me because I normally do my banking inside so I can interact with the employees. You can also hear what they say if there is an issue. In the drive thru you can not hear them unless they want you to hear.

So I normally reserve my drive thru banking to times when I am not dressed up or for some other reason do not want to go face to face. These new cameras break down these walls. After using them a few times it is getting better but it still feels a bit uncomfortable for me.

One the one hand I like that I actually know there is a camera there monitoring me. It is better than all the hidden cameras around.

How about you? Have you experienced these cameras and what do you think about them? Let me know your thoughts below.

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Are You Prepared?

by DanB

It’s scary. You may have heard the news about the giant tornado that hit near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. That is only a few hours drive from where I am typing this. My oldest son lives about 20 minutes from where it hit.

I have friends and relatives who live in the path of this recent tornado. One friend’s house was hit. It wiped out half the house. They say the other half of the house didn’t have anything out of place. Weird.

Last week the tornadoes were about an hour southwest and west of us.

Having tornadoes and hail this time of year is normal for this area. Where I live most of the bad weather goes just north or just south of us. Or both. We often miss the brunt of the heavy storms.

Why do I bring this up? My wife wanted to talk about our emergency plan. She had located some emergency planning documents and we were talking about them.

Ours needs are pretty simple even though there are a lot of us in the family. I work out of the house and we homeschool, and we live in a small town, so that limits how scattered we are much of the time.

Your emergency plan would include identifying information, important and emergency contact information, where to meet, and other information like that.

These are the papers my wife found. You can print them out and get started if this is something you would want to do. These papers are free and make a good starting point:

http://pinchalittlesavealot.blogspot.com/2012/03/free-family-emergency-planning-kit.html

Back to tornadoes. I found myself smack dab in the middle of one back in May of 2000. There was a local newscast showing that tornado live on TV. Their camera is mounted on top of the 40 story glass building I was in. In the video they switch back to radar. The tornado hit my building shortly after that taking out the camera and destroying thousands of pieces of the glass exterior. No one in the building was injured. Here is the 2 minute long video:

http://youtu.be/SjbVp6HSWR8

So stay safe out there and have a plan in place so you can make the best of a difficult situation should you find yourself in one.

If you have tips or experiences with weather or emergency planning please share them below so we can create a resource for people who are seeking information.

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Getting Better Customer Service

by DanB

It’s frustrating. You try to get customer service so you open the chat window and wait while you use the clunky process of chat to communicate your issue. Once I was using chat and suspected it was an answer robot on the end. Even asked if I was speaking with human or a robot. He called me shortly after. We resolved the issue.

Sometimes you call in and sit on hold for ever.

Maybe you email and hope they understand your question or issue.

I have run into all of these in the past. Enter a super useful free product called Jing. You can find Jing here:

http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html

It is free. I was going to make a video for you but the Jing folks have already done that for you. Just check at the link above.

So when I have an issue – like a website misbehaving. I use Jing to create a video of the issue as it happens. Jing automatically uploads the video then puts a link to it on my clipboard. I open an email to tech support and include the link to the video. If the answer from tech support doesn’t address the issue I simply send the original email and say “obviously you didn’t watch the video I sent so please watch that first and answer the actual question.” It rarely takes more than two tries.

The use I have for Jing is when friend, family, or clients write and ask me how to do some task on their computer. I will usually just record myself doing it and send them the link to the video.

Overall Jing is easy to use and I find lots of uses for it. TechSmith, the makers of Jing, have some more powerful tools for making screen captures and movies. These products, Snagit and Camtasia, are very powerful and I use them too. Anytime you see a picture of a computer screen or a video here on TNPC you can sure I have used those tools to make those.

This article is an example of a short movie I generated on using screen rulers:

http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/blog/2012/06/07/cool-tool-screen-rulers/

This article has a screenshot I annotated with Snagit:

http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/blog/2013/04/12/fixing-google-cant-be-reached-errors/

So give Jing a try and see if it helps you. If you have used Jing or another screen capture software tell us about it below.

Dan

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Fixing Google Can’t Be Reached Errors

by DanB

So you are using Google Chrome and it won’t let you load anything from Google. The errors that show range from “webpage may be down” to “app is unavailable” to “Error 15 (net::ERR_SOCKET_NOT_CONNECTED): Unknown error.” If you are seeing any of these here is a fix that worked for me.

First open a new tab in Chrome then do the following:

  1. In URL field type: chrome://net-internals/#sockets
  2. If the Sockets tab didn’t open click Sockets on the left
  3. Click the Flush Socket Pools button.

That should fix it. If you are still having problems try clicking the Close idle sockets button.

Here is what this looks like on my screen:

Flush Sockets in Chrome

Let me know if that helps and if you have run into the problem yourself.

Dan

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About Those Links

December 13, 2012

Several people write asking about the links in my emails. The email shows one thing but the actual link points to “clicks.aweber”. What is that about? This is nothing to worry about and quite normal. Aweber is my email service provider. They take care of sending the emails, bounces, and all sorts of other things. [...]

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Some More Quick Tips

December 12, 2012

It’s wacky. All the end of the world talk and the date is still in the future. Thankfully it isn’t as hyped as Y2K was. Nevertheless I posted this at 12:12 on 12/12/12. I’m sure I’m not the only one but this is most likely the last chance I will have to do something with [...]

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