Category: Tech

The earliest known recording of the human voice is from 1860, and it was recorded in dirt! Scratches made along paper with a layer of soot, to be precise. The phonautograph was invented by Frenchman Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, and it was the inspiration for Edison’s phonograph. Recently, engineers recovered this amazing recording of a singing woman.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/MAR/phonautogram.mp3]

Rough, but recognizable and thoroughly amazing! Compare this to the nanotube FM radio I featured at this link. Neither recording is high fidelity, but both represent the absolute state-of-the-art in technology for their time.

Most bloggers use a blogging host, and they don’t go to the trouble to be their own Webmasters on a Web host, like I do. This Web site is hosted by a company in Phoenix called iPower, or iPowerweb. It’s a big hosting service, specializing in small businesses. Sometimes, like yesterday, there’s some unscheduled downtime, as we like to say in the high-tech biz when things go wrong. Everything was OK after a while, without me doing anything.

The last time I had something go wrong that absolutely had to be fixed and wasn’t going away on its own, I called iPower tech support, and after an hour I got somebody on the phone who was very nice and fixed the problem. But I know that my friend Bismo, who uses iPower for domain and e-mail forwarding isn’t happy, and there are many other customers with complaints. These problems have become widespread to the point where the Arizona Republic recently had an article about iPower’s woes. Here’s a bit of it.

Web host firm plagued by client criticism

Andrew Johnson
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 6, 2008 12:00 AM

Complaints about Web-site crashes, shoddy tech support and billing errors have spurred fast-growing IPower Inc. to revamp its approach to customer service.

In recent months, the Phoenix-based Web-hosting company has nearly doubled its number of customer-service representatives and adopted new software to manage customer feedback.

The changes have come as the company finds itself the focus of Internet blogs slamming its service and customers threatening to cancel their accounts.

I’ll eventually be confronting some major changes to this site, including an update to the management console. I’m not looking forward to this, because the potential exists for everything to fall to crud. Whatever problems come up, I hope iPower is ready and able to help me.

The past few weeks have been brutal for spam floods, both in e-mail and blog comments. The Akismet service for WordPress does a great job of filtering out spam comments, but when the volume is bad, some slips through, especially when there are multiples of the same message. Here’s one example:

Name: best motorcycle insurance | URI: http://www.fullsizeinsurance.com/
| IP: 86.96.226.14 | Date: March 4, 2008

This is why I have to moderate comments. It’s not because any of the legitimate comments need censoring, it’s because I’d have to delete spam that would have already found its way to the RSS feed for comments.