KIXEYE employee no more

After 4 years+ I no longer work for KIXEYE. There are many things I could say about it, but that is for another day.

Posted in Casual Collective, News | Leave a comment

Updates, I ain’t dead!

Just over 3 years ago I managed to get a job working for a games company in the United States, specifically KIXEYE, though at the time it was still called Casual Collective. And I’m still there! This was pretty unexpected, although I’d been joking with them for a while that if they ever needed someone…

For over 10 years previous to that I’d been out of work, unable to effectively work for anyone, unless I could work from home. Not being able to work was not fun, so finding something where I could work from home was a perfect fir for me.

Now in those 10 years I didn’t sit there and do nothing, I learnt PHP(well I learnt some of the basics) amongst other things and in 2004 created eShop. That actually grew and grew until it became one of only a handful of shop plugins for WordPress. These days there are many, many, others on the market, most of which are considerably better than mine.

Since starting my job I have only done several bug fix updates to eShop. But it is getting to the point where I won’t be able to maintain it at all. However, I do have a plan should I ever get free time again, to rewrite the whole thing with better code and future proofing it even more than I have already done. This would not be compatible with previous versions, and would be a whole new product. However eShop took a very long time to create in the first place, so don’t expect this any time soon. But it is a long term plan, if I ever get to start it, I will be posting about it.

Posted in Casual Collective, News | 1 Comment

Tesco Support, bad, really really bad, and accessibility failure.

Follow Up to Tesco Contact Form!.

So they got back in touch, of the 3 issues mentioned, they only talked about one. the fact I couldn’t read their email properly. Being asked if I have adobe reader to read their email is perhaps one of the most surreal things I have been asked in some time. Trying to explain to someone how to fix it who hasn’t got a clue was a waste of time, though I do hope I’m wrong.

No Tesco you do not need to use that to read you emails, you need to send out a text alternative to the HTML crap that you sent out. It was malformed HTML and I couldn’t read the email unless I read it in HTML mode. I guess their concerns about web accessibility has gone down recently then.

Before the BS standard for web accessibility was released, I was part of the team from GAWDS (Guild of Accessible Web Designers) that was involved with PAS78. So yeah it’s nice to check up on some of the big companies that have supposedly good web accessibility every now and then. Tesco, you failed with this one, the email, and the customer service. Satisfaction: 0.

Posted in Rants, tangent | 3 Comments

Tesco Contact Form!

This is a follow up to Tesco Spam.

I had cause to use this contact form today. I had just ordered something from them and the email that came through was useless for reading without HTML, no text alternative and HTML tags make it very difficult to read.

So navigating to their site and finding the link to the form I had my first issue, the security certificate was invalid, for whatever reason. But then after filling in the forum I hit the mobile number required. Now I don’t use one, and I don’t really want one. So I tried to put in n/a, didn’t accept it. I then tried 999… but they didn’t accept that either. Thankfully they had given an example number, and that did work.

So one complaint turned into 3. Thanks Tesco.

Followup: Tesco Support, bad, really really bad, and accessibility failure.

Posted in Rants, tangent | 2 Comments

Tesco Spam

A few weeks ago I ordered from Tesco online. I then received one of their follow up emails suggesting I complete a survey, and then another and another … hourly.

I wrote to Tesco:

hi,

thank you for spamming my inbox on the hour every hour for the last 6
hours, I assume this will continue until the time has run out.

May I do the same in return and spam you, no? well please don’t do it
to me.

thank you.

next day I get a response:

Thank you for your email and please accept my apologies for the delay in my
response.

I’d also like to apologise that you’ve been inundated with messages from us, as
I too would feel equally unimpressed. Please rest assured that I’ve now
unsubscribed your email address to prevent this from happening in future. Please
kindly allow up to 14 days for this to take affect.

To which I replied:

thank you for you reply, I do hope you were being sarcastic when you said it could take up to 14 days for this to take effect.

That response does not instil me with confidence, and to be honest sounds like you are extracting the urine.

Follow up: Tesco Contact form!

Posted in Rants, tangent | 3 Comments

Thunderbird 5.0, what a load of crap.

No not the Gerry Anderson one, sadly. But the pile of crap that Mozilla has released as the update to Thunderbird 3. No I’m not sure what happened to 4 either.

  • Inbox keeps crashing, no idea why.
  • Basic plugins don’t work – why the hell can’t you navigate from one read email to another?
  • Can’t compose emails properly, seriously, unable to add subject to recipient is kinda needed for an email client
  • Looks pretty horrible as well, no color at all for the button icons makes them hard to distinguish

So anyone know of a decent alternative?

Posted in News, Rants | 5 Comments