The Perceptus Back Story

An example today about how an error message can make the difference between a happy end user, and an annoyed end user that is willing to blog about it – that’s me.

If you try to login to your account on the Fido.ca website, at about 11:30PM Pacific Time, you will get this error message: “Sorry! Your request cannot be completed at this time. Please try again later.”

On any other website, I would assume that there is a temporary, generally one-time, issue. Maybe the site is overloaded, or it might have a technical glitch. That’s OK. In Fido land? This error means that the website is down for it’s nightly maintenance and I should give up and try tomorrow, but earlier in the night because Fido doesn’t like people on the West Coast.

This isn’t listed anywhere – it’s something that I’ve deduced over months of using the Fido site to pay my bill by credit card. I’m not impressed that Fido’s website has a nightly maintenance schedule, especially one that seems to kick in before midnight Vancouver time, but I’m really not impressed by the wording of the error. All they need to do is follow the banks and fess up to their maintenance schedule. Something like, “Hi, the Fido.ca user site is unavailable from 11PM to 6AM PST. Please try again during our operating hours.”

As an aside, if you’re wondering what the error message is if you have entered your phone number or password wrong, it’s “No match for that phone number and password was found. Please try again… Sorry! No match was found for that phone number and password. Please retry.” in a red box right above the login boxes. I kept getting the “Please try again later” error, so at one time I wondered if I had been using the wrong password.

Is this a big enough annoyance to make me switch my cell plan away from Fido? No, but this added to various other annoyances and… well… I’ll certainly be evaluating my options when the new wireless providers in Canada start up in 2010.

Perceptus Solutions Inc. is proud to offer our ADSL service, Ivy DSL, to the public as of today!

We have been providing two retail chains of 8 and 12 stores in BC and Alberta ADSL service in a private beta test for a year. We’re happy with our product, and we’re now ready to take on new clients.

The back story: Perceptus does a lot of IT contracting work for local, Vancouver based, retailers. We realized last year that we could offer retail chains a great deal on basic Internet access. We know your situation well. You need multiple ADSL lines, one for each store, plus your offices, and you deserve to get it at a better price than the incumbents will offer you. And you need someone on the other side of the conversation that understands the complexity of a retail environment.

Our private beta test chains saved 30% and 38% of their monthly ADSL service charges after moving to Ivy DSL. We offer business grade 3MBps ADSL lines with a static IP address for $40 per month ($55 per month for a 6MBps line). Further, their ADSL uptime and service quality is as good or better than before. And they’re happy to deal with a smaller provider. Most of the time you’ll be able to deal directly with me, Leonard Chan, the main guy behind Perceptus Solutions Inc.

So, for the best value in ADSL based Internet access for retail chains, visit IvyDSL.com.

If you’re looking for some family friendly fun for New Year’s Eve, try our New Years themed bingo cards. You can customize our bingo cards with your own words an phrases for truly custom entertainment!

As always, basic use of print-bingo.com is free. You’re welcome to upgrade for $10 to get our full feature set.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

My teacher friend is excited that Christmas break is coming up soon. This means it’s time to remind readers about our free, customizable, Christmas themed bingo cards.

Of course you’re free to create any style of holiday themed bingo cards. You can start your custom bingo cards by editing our word list for the Winter Holidays Bingo Cards.

As always, basic use of our site is free. But you’re welcome to upgrade to a Premium access account for only $10 to print hundreds of bingo cards at a time, create calling cards, and more.

Merry Christmas!

A little while ago my custom user script for Chrome stopped working. I’m currently using the “dev channel” at home. When I first switched to Chrome, that was the only version that supported user scripts (basically GreaseMonkey from FireFox integrated into Chrome).

My script is simple, it makes some font and color changes to a few websites that I view regularly to make them more legible (IMHO). I should bundle it into an extension some day…

Anyway, it took a bit of research to figure out what happened. Look here on the Google Chrome blog:

[r33013] Disable –enable-user-scripts. (Issue: 27520)
NOTE: You can now install user scripts by navigating to them. You will have to reinstall your current scripts (they aren’t migrated).

– http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2009/12/dev-channel-has-been-updated-to-4.html

So, scripts are still supported, but I have to install it again. I didn’t quite understand “navigating to them” meant, but it actually means exactly what it says. In the address bar browse the file system, e.g. go to here:
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User Scripts

Then double click on your .JS file, and a little extension installation prompt pops up. It’s pretty cool actually.

Hmm… now that Google Chrome regular version supports extensions, I might be able to take myself off the dev channel.