I often rant express poor customer service experiences in this blog, so thought it was only fair to put on record a very positive customer service experience. I hold two domains with two separate providers (in case one provider is down), and one of those domains is hosted by Servers Australia. One of their support staff, Jared Hirst, takes most of my support calls and he is consistently courteous, polite and helpful – and an asset to his company.

Peter Baker and Donna Benjamin (with only a little bit of help from me I have to admit) have been hard at work putting the finishing touches on the preparations for Software Freedom Day in Melbourne. We have a great venue this year – The Hub at Docklands – and have an array (no pun intended) of great speakers lined up, including;

• Tyson Clugg – Melbourne Wireless
• Dale Clapperton – Electronic Frontiers Australia
• Kat Clancy  – Deakin University
• Brianna Laugher – Wikimedia Australia
• Gerry White – Internet Society of Australia

I’m actually quite excited by what is in store on Saturday – with most of the Pub Standards / Linux Users of Victoria people in attendance. There is just so much value in FOSS that non profits, community organisations and educational institutions can benefit from.

I recently bought a cheap USB Bluetooth dongle because my older Acer TravelMate 4070 came without Bluetooth support. Big mistake. The dongle (a Laser N1968) ships with BlueSoleil – a suite of Bluetooth drivers for windows. My Nokia 6110 Navigator and PC Suite simply hate BlueSoleil – after umpteen pairings and unpairings of the devices, driver installations and re-installations and checking all congifurations, I simply cannot get BlueSoleil to work properly with PC Suite. What a piece of rubbish! C’mon people, Bluetooth is all about interoperability!

• PC Suite version : 7.0.8.2
• BlueSoleil version: 2.1.2.1

Will try the Widcomm drivers as an alternative to BlueSoleil and see how they go…