Archive for January, 2011

Super Bowl XLV Bingo Cards – 2011

Monday, January 24th, 2011

It’s that time of year again!

This is a reminder blog post about our template bingo word list for Super Bowl bingo cards. You’ll find the list on print-bingo.com.

All you need to do to create your free printable bingo cards is go through a couple forms, customize the word list, and let our website generate a custom PDF for you to print. You can have your custom cards in less than a couple minutes!

This year’s Super Bowl is on Feb. 6, 2011.

As always, at print-bingo.com, you can customize the cards so that you have exactly the terms you want.

The Super Bowl themed word list is not specific to any given year, so you might want to insert a few extra terms like “XLV”, “Pittsburg”, “Steelers”, “Green Bay”, “Packers”, “Texas”  etc.

Enjoy the game, halftime, and the ads!

Shaw email SPAM filters for shaw.ca addresses are mediocre

Monday, January 24th, 2011

 

Shaw SPAM filter catches a lot of false positives.

Shaw SPAM filter catches a lot of false positives.

I have mentioned my disdain for Shaw’s email at least once on this blog.

Today, I’ll write a bit on Shaw’s mediocre spam filter.

We manage a fully legitimate, opt-in email newsletter for a local retail chain. This client has a large (relative to the business size) email newsletter list.  The vast majority of the email subscribers reside in the trade radiuses of their stores in the GVRD, Kelowna, Victoria, and Calgary.

By a slim margin over hotmail.com, shaw.ca email is the most popular email domain in these areas, at about 25% of email addresses on the list. The list subscribers is heavily female; however, I doubt that this affects the ratio of  email providers by very much.

The point is that for a BC or Alberta merchant, your email newsletter effectiveness is highly dependent on Shaw’s hit and miss SPAM filter.  We have a test shaw.ca email account, and subscribed to dozens of opt-in newsletters.  For months we have built up an archive of all the items flagged as SPAM. And we’ve seen many, many,  false positives.  See the thumbnail at the right.  Everything that I’ve highlighted in yellow is a false positive, in other words, they should not have been flagged as SPAM.

The Bay, Beyond the Rack, indulgeliving.com: Your emails are being flagged very frequently as SPAM at Shaw.  I didn’t count, but well over 50% of your emails are being SPAM binned at Shaw.  Many other firms get caught, though, less frequently.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any real secrets to sell you on consistently getting deliverability into the Shaw Inbox.  We have tried a dozen different changes in how our client’s e-newsletter is delivered to Shaw, and the results have been somewhat positive, but definitely not 100% successful.  Even the much touted Sender Score Certification did not work.

In brief, since this post could go on for pages and pages:

  • Email users – I do not recommend ever using your ISP’s free email accounts.  They really don’t care as much as the firms that specialize in email.  I would not trust that commercial email that I need, such as an invoice or receipt, would get to my shaw.ca inbox.  I strongly recommend any of the big 3 webmail providers instead.
  • Email marketers – if BC and Alberta are important to you, watch your open rates by domain.  You might find that some email hosts do not like you very much.
  • Shaw – if you happen to stumble on this, could you please just outsource the whole email system to someone who cares?  Cut a deal with Google or Hotmail and split the advertising revenues and be done with it.  You know, and I know, that email isn’t a profit centre for you, so it will never be as good as the webmail specialists.

Note: I have written about Shaw here; however, I can tell from the email open rates, that Telus email SPAM filters are also quite finicky; however, I do not have a telus.net email address to  use for testing this theory.

 

Today’s Edition of “Always do your backups” is a Win7 Netbook

Friday, January 14th, 2011

I was not pleased to see that the new netbook that I mentioned in a previous post, did not come with restore DVD’s.  However, I just realized that since there is no DVD drive, most regular people wouldn’t know what to do with restore DVDs.

Anyway, I decided to make a full disk image backup, in case the drive in the netbook crashes badly.   Hard drives have moving parts, they all die eventually, the only question is if you have retired the computer before it goes.

Without restore DVDs, my next thought was to use  the Windows 7 built-in disk image backup.  I re-discovered that this feature does not back up over  network drives*. You’re supposed to use  an external USB hard drive, which is OK, given the price of external drives. But since I’m not familiar with the Win7 backup tools, and in particular, I can’t figure out if it will backup the hidden partitions that contain the original install files for Windows and the rest of the software bundle, I decided to fall back on my favorite disk image tool, G4L.

I have used G4L (http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/) for clients and personal use for years, so I strongly prefer to use it. Without a DVD drive, I needed to make a bootable USB thumb drive.  That was surprisingly easy.

To create the bootable USB drive, I  followed the instructions here: http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1224777260/0

As I type this, G4L is busily sending a perfect disk image of the netbook to our on-site FTP server.  It’s not quite a factory image (the netbook has been lightly used),  but it’s close enough.  Plus, the real restore partition is being backed up in case I really need to return it to factory settings.

* There are some tricks to do Windows 7 disk image backups over a network, one using Virtual drives feature of Win7, and another using iSCSI… but I digress.

Contact Us Through our New Contact Form on perceptus.ca

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

We did a largish update to our corporate homepage, perceptus.ca.

There are little changes here and there such as a new background graphic, some updates to the copy, and some changes to the layout.

The most important bit, which really was the catalyst for the change, was our  new contact form, complete with reCAPTCHA to keep the spam to a minimum.  The contact form is actually a test page for us, it’s designed to be highly portable, and you’ll see it on most of our critical websites very soon.

We might even publish the class file – it is far  better than the top few  contact form scripts in PHP that turn up on a search on Google.

Disappointing Out of Box Experience of Gateway Netbook… in 2011!?

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Every once in a while I get a reminder of why Apple is able to make 10 times as much money per computer than everyone else.  The end user experience is incomparable. From the moment you walk into an Apple store, through to the point where you use the device, someone has thought about your experience.

I just had the opportunity to setup a brand new (entry level) Gateway netbook.  There’s nothing special about it. It has an Atom processor and Windows 7 Starter edition. After opening the box, plugging it in, and following the on screen prompts, things seemed pretty good.  Then, it required a reboot to finalize the settings.

It took literally 30 minutes from reboot until I was able to login.  Literally.  It felt like 10 times that long.  I wasn’t really watching what it was trying to do, but whatever it is, it is embarrassingly long.  There aren’t any install options, this netbook is exactly the same as the  rest in the pile, so virtually all of this time should have been done before it left the factory.

So, that’s my first impression of that computer, and Gateway. Sitting around and waiting.  And no, this didn’t include the Windows updates that I did later in the evening.  Actually, this reminds me of the time I setup a Gateway laptop for a client – that was a disaster also, IIRC, I had to drive around the neighbourhood trying to find blank CDRs in order to get past the required initial backup – they had included some low end blank CD’s, one or two of them were bad!

First impressions count.