The dream starts on a holiday to Egypt with my girlfriend. In a parking lot we discover an entrance to an ancient tomb where we find two buried people wearing elaborate bracelets. We grab the bracelets and other valuable items from the tomb to get them evaluated – perhaps they could be sold to pay for our holiday. It turns out that the tomb along with all the items inside were fake. What a bummer.

Anyway the bracelet episode leads us on to a nearby mine where miners have gone missing under suspicious circumstances. My girlfriend, being an expert in ground radar analysis (which was completely new to me), suggests that we check it out to see if we can solve the mystery. We arrive on scene underground together with the miners, who inform us that terrifying mutant rhinos started appearing in the tunnels a few weeks ago when they started blasting into a new area of the rock.

On the way to the control room we barely escape a particularly nasty looking mutant. Inside the control room my girlfriend sets up her ground radar equipment and soon finds an abnormally large density of amino acids directly underneath the floor of the control room. We all start digging frantically and soon discover the remains of what looks to be an alien skeleton. It appears this skeleton infiltrates all the rock in the new blast area. We start excavating the area with the help of a giant laser. The work proceeds rather slowly in the beginning because we constantly have to dodge the mutant rhinos. Now here’s where the dream takes a strange twist. At some point the laser unearths a huge skull like feature in the skeleton with an opening in the top. Suddenly the mutant rhinos start jumping into the skull one by one. As they do this, the laser picks up speed and we find ourselves throwing everything organic we can find into the skull.

In no time the laser has excavated the entire skeleton and within seconds it morphs into a pink convertible Cadillac and Elvis. It turns out that the entire mining incident has been part of the grand opening celebration of a new underground casino. End of dream.

Emancave -an electronic version of the sacred mancave

A mancave is a place where men can be men, and indulge in all the things women find stupid. The emancave is an electronic version of a real-life mancave. You will find a bunch of articles here, all relating to important man stuff. Women should only enter with extreme caution.

My life’s To-do list

Danny put together a list of all the things he wants to do in his life. This is a great place to find inspiration if you are lacking big projects in your life.

iCan’t Internet – All a blogger needs

I’m a blogger, and chances are if you’re reading this post you have a blog of your own as well. On the ICan’t Internet blog you will find many helpful articles on how to improve your blog and promote it through online social networks.

Retro-Gaming and Emulation – Memories recent and modern of retro games

Growing up during the 80′s and 90′s I have seen my fair share of great games for the Commodore 64, Atari, Amiga 500, Sega Mega Drive and so on. Bubble Bobble is still one of my all time favorite games . This blog let’s you take a trip down your gaming memory lane.

Conditional Cognition – because knowledge is not absolute

Sounds trippy? It is! Is the author simply over thinking trivial everyday happenings, or is there a deeper understanding to be found in the world we live in. You be the judge.

Young Cadence – University of Music

Jeff and Robbie made this great blog about music. Browse through their posts and if you’re lucky you will find your next favorite artist.

Hot Aussie Chick – Poker Down Under and Every Where Else

Most poker bloggers are male, but that does not automatically guarantee quality. Here’s a great poker blog written by Danielle, director of PR in an online gaming software company. Definitely worth a visit.

POKERKNAVE’s blog

Follow the thoughts of PokerKnave – a professional gambler who pursues the 3 B’s – birds (women that is), booze and betting, but not necessarily in that order. I will be posting selected blog post from PokerKnave’s blog on a regular basis….now you’re warned

Poker Hot Chick – The Princess of Poker

Lina takes pride in writing quality posts about poker and making money online. Combine this with loads of great pictures and an good blog design and you have a poker blog worth following!

You could be posting your articles on the Poker Bankroll Blog. Read all about it here.

Check out our Poker Freeroll and Tournament League.

]]> http://pokerbankrollblog.com/my-favorite-blogs-from-blogcatalog.htm/feed 5 http://pokerbankrollblog.com/how-not-to-deal-with-the-slow-customer-support-at-uk2net.htm http://pokerbankrollblog.com/how-not-to-deal-with-the-slow-customer-support-at-uk2net.htm#comments Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:16:27 +0000 Mark http://pokerbankrollblog.com/?p=1448 October 27th the pokerbrb.com domain was up for renewal with our host UK2net. Somehow UK2net managed to screw up the DNS for the domain which resulted in our site crashing for 5 days until now. In the process they have managed to charge us 3 times for the domain renewal. This short summary sets the scene for the 5 days of frustration we went through until our site came back online today. I’m writing this piece because I do not want you to make the same mistakes we did when dealing with the customer support at UK2net.

The customer support at UK2net works through a ticket system which they seem to be very proud of. McKay Howell from the technical support team at UK2net explained to me in a very nice way how the system works:

“I would like to take this quick opportunity to remind you how our ticketing systems work. Our support technicians answer requests on a first come, first served basis which means that when you first submit a ticket it will be at the very bottom of the queue to be answered and gradually work its way to the top. However, each time you submit a response before we can reply to your ticket just causes it to be pushed back down to the bottom. We are very rarely getting a chance to even look at your ticket because you have replied numerous times hour after hour and this just sends it right back to the bottom of the queue. We recommend that you simply submit one request with all of the relevant information at once in order to get the quickest response.”

So basically you are supposed to send in a ticket and wait patiently until they answer. This could be in hours or days…there’s really no way of knowing because there is very rarely an online live support available. I forgot to mention that if you by mistake (or simply because you did not know any better) send in a ticket to a wrong department you have to wait until the ticket is passed through the elaborate Uk2net support system to the correct department. In the meantime your site is down and you are losing customers and potential income every minute that goes by. See how frustration can build up?

I’m afraid to say that in my case I was not very patient and in fact this caused delays in fixing our site as McKay Howell points out:

“In the future PLEASE only submit one ticket on the same issue. You are correct in saying that this is very confusing for our technicians. You have also submitted tickets on the same issue to numerous departments and this causes even greater confusion. Please note that it does not speed the resolution of these issues any further and indeed actually takes longer for us to solve as we have to track several tickets to determine if another technician already replied to you.”

Sorry Uk2net…my bad. I can see how the slow process of fixing our site is totally my fault. In addition I would also like to apologize for some of the childish support tickets I submitted during my mental meltdown…..brace yourselves this might get ugly.

I started my dialogue with Uk2net mildly agitated, but still relatively calm

Shaheen

When can I expect this problem to be solved????? I am completely at
your mercy here and hove no way to fix the problem myself. You have
made a mistake that is costing me money every minute. Where’s your
sense of responsibility for your customers? I cannot believe it can
take this long to solve the problem. Do something!!!!

Mark

I would really appreciate if you could tell me what I can do to speed
up the process of activating my domain. We run a league and today is
the start of November’s competition. It is critical for our success
that our site is up and running again.
You have made a mistake…please fix it.

Mark

Then after a few days of downtime for our site things started to escalate. Especially because UK2net assured me the problem was solved which is obviously wasn’t. Guys seriously, do yourself the favor and go the the site url before you claim that the problem is fixed.

Hi

I was told my site www.pokerbrb.com would be up and running again this
morning. As this is clearly not the case I would like to know when it will
be up. I am amazed you have taken this long to solve the problem. Your
customer service sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mark

On the 4th day I finally lose my mind and go mental on the UK2net support system

My site is still down. It is absolutely critical that I get it up and running tomorrow. WHY IS IS SO DIFFICULT FOR YOU TO FIX THE PROBLEM????? WHY DON*T YOU ANSWER THE TICKETS?????

FIX MY SITE!!!!!!!!!

You’re responsible for my site being down for 3 days now. Do you have any sense of responsibility? FIX IT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How fast can we fix the pokerbrb.com website….doesn’t that sound like a fun game to play?

LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA ……I want my site fixed, I want my site fixed…I will not use you as a host anymore, I will not use you as a host anymore LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA

You cannot seriously mean that is takes you in excess of 3 days to update the DNS of my site. Get you act together for fucks sake. You are supposed to be a support not a bunch of headless amateurs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When looking back on the incident I cannot help but feel a bit ashamed. I mean these guys are just sitting there trying to do their job the best they can and then some basket case owner of site which has only been down for 5 days starts spamming the support system with angry messages. Sorry UK2net. I will end this article with my final feedback to UK2net and just want to say that if anyone from UK2net find their way to my blog I hope you take my feedback seriously and implement some systems to improve your support so you don’t have to deal with people like me in the future.

Hi McKay

Well it was about time you fixed my site. I cannot believe it has
taken 5 days to fix a simple DNS error. I recent the fact that you try
to push the blame of the slow fix back on me. It is YOUR
responsibility and only YOUR responsibility to fix sites that are down
ASAP. People lose money every day when their sites are down.
When people’s livelihood is on the line they get frustrated when the
problems do not get fixed. This is amplified when the only way to get
into contact with you is a support ticket system. And even more so
when it seems that all that is happening is you guys bouncing tickets
back and forth between your different departments.
I do not see anywhere on the support website that one should only send
one ticket. Hence the most obvious reaction to a severe problem is to
send as many tickets as possible to wake you up.
You say that it takes longer time to fix the problem when people send
multiple tickets but I do not buy that. If one of your technicians had
taken the responsibility they owe to their customers and checked up on
my site on a regular basis then this problem would have been solved a
lot faster.
I am not the only person who has experienced problems with your
support. For one of my friends it took 30 days to get his site back
online.

IMO the biggest problem with your support is that one feels completely
powerless when the only thing one can do is sit and wait for a ticket
to be answered. In addition one feels resentment because you make
people pay for mistakes you make. This does not paint a positive
picture of your company.
You would benefit SOO much from having a 24/7 online live support
system where technicians can be contacted directly.

I am sorry to say that this whole incident has left us with a very
negative feeling about UK2net and we are currently discussing our
options regarding changing host. Sure our site works now, but what
about next time you make a mistake….will it be offline for weeks then?

I hope you send this email to the person responsible for support and
customer service. You owe it to yourself to improve your company.

Mark

My first thought was spawned when we started comparing what we had seen so far on Skiathos with one of the best holidays we ever had in Croatia. I have come to realize that you should try not to compare the holiday you are presently on to great holidays you have had in the past. You run the risk of belittling your current holiday which can lead to disappointment and regret. In my opinion you should live the moment while you’re on holiday and reflect after you return home.

Also I realized that when you make your holiday budget you should remember to take into account the living expenses you would had at home if you weren’t on holiday. These living expenses should be mentally withdrawn from the amount of money you spend on your holiday.

Granted they are not the best thoughts I have had  by a long shot, but hey what do you expect from a lazy beached out brain.

Now on to my review of Skiathos. On the positive side the beaches and weather were great. Crystal clear water combined with sandy beaches fringed with green pine trees make for a great setting. Our favorite beach was Eleni so if you ever have a chance to visit it….do it.

The local buses run every 15 minutes from 8 in the morning to 9 in the evening. With only one main road on the island it is pretty easy to find your way even if you are orientational retarded like me. You can rent both cars, motorbikes, scooters and bicycles on the island but if you stay in a fairly central hotel this isn’t really necessary to get around. If you like tormenting yourself try renting bicycles and take the main road to the beach of your choice.

On the minus side it seems that many businesses on Skiathos have grown accustomed to a steady flow of “fresh” tourists. As a result business is taken for granted and people do not take pride in what they do. In our experience this is especially the case in restaurants. You would have a hard time finding a restaurant in Denmark where the staff does not ask you if everything is to your satisfaction during your meal. On Skiathos however this is pretty common. Therefore if your food sucks, and it will, make sure to let the staff know as soon as possible. You won’t get an opportunity to complain presented to you by the staff on a silver plate.

You may have guessed that we had crappy food served to us on more than one occasion. I would like to take the opportunity to say to the people at Mouragio that the lamb kleftiko I ordered was dry, uninspired and pricey. In addition you took way too long to get us the bill and give us back our change. And why on earth do you put bread on table without informing people that you will bill them for it if they eat it?

To the owner of Mitsa’s house I would like to say that your grilled lamb platter was a f…ng joke. It contained 80% fat and bones and 20% meat. Your rice was dry because it was heated from a frozen mixture and your bread tasted like cardboard. If you lose customers due to this article I will be the happiest man in the world.

If you ever go to Skiathos there is only one restaurant we find worth recommending. Maria’s pizza close to the church near the old harbour. The staff is friendly and attentive and the pizzas and pasta dishes are great!

As for organized tours we found several boat tours of the island. At 20€ they are good value as you get to see all the beaches of Skiathos and swin at some of them as well. If you’re totally beached out consider taking a day trip to the island of Skopelos where the main town is more scenic and less busy than Skiathos. The fare takes 1 hour each way and costs about 24€ in total.

Finally, if you are not a fan on mosquito bites that start out as harmless small spots but then all of a sudden explode into giant mounds of pain, get a room with air condition and keep the doors and windows closed at night. Also do yourself the favor of taking a round of your room before you go to bed and kill any little f…ckers that may have sneaked in.

Old harbour of Skiathos

Mandraki beach

Scenic view on the island of Skopelos

Maria's pizza....best place to eat in Skiathos

A very rare sight of me riding a horse (horses scare the bejesus out of me)

Trying to avoid the bloody mosquitos

Last Saturday I was on the All In Radio Show again. This time I talked about poker player levels and how to apply the concept to online poker tournaments. I think I did an OK job explaining it,  although I definitely find it a lot harder to get my points across verbally as compared to writing them down. I think it has a lot to do with English being my second language.

In addition to the interview I also got to play some large (in my view at least) online tournaments together with my poker buddy Artur. We didn’t win anything but played really well; debating each hand and making good decisions all the way through. It’s difficult to win online tournaments when you lose with AA vs. 88, AK vs. KQ and KK vs. AJ. But hey we got our money in as favorites every time, and you can’t really ask for more than that. The rest is up to the poker gods.

Finally Artur and I also managed to complete our testing of the database systems underlying the pokerBRB freeroll league. The systems passed inspections, so we have now opened the league for registrations. We are in the process of hosting two promotional freerolls at Power Poker to kick off the league. One of them will be played this Sunday. I will post an article about it as soon as the details are confirmed by our affiliation manager at PowerPoker.

As for the garden it has really picked up lately. We just picked and  consumed our first tomatoes today. One of them had actually been left too long on the plant and was overly ripe (lesson learned). The other tasted marginally better than the tomatoes you buy in a supermarket (so with the time spent on watering and pruning the plants I’m not sure it has been worth the effort..LOL). Check out the pictures below:

My good friend Artur visited me this weekend and as usual we played some medium buyin online poker tournaments. I actually had planned to give Artur an introduction to the pokerbrb freeroll league and especially how the database tables are updated since he will be helping me with that from now on. Unfortunately my website host shut down SSH access to all database files due to some security issue and hasn’t reopened access yet.

We busted out quite late in most tournaments (as favorites of course) without hitting the money though. Fortunately we finished 31st in a 50000$ guaranteed 50$ rebuy on Bet24 which broke us even for the weekend. Once again we were reminded that you can’t just sit around late in tournaments and wait for good hands to come along. It is essential to steal blinds and make moves on your opponents on a regular basis in order to stay above average and avoid being blinded out.

The pictures below show how our small garden looked like about a week ago. Some new and more exiting summer flowers have started blooming. Our tomatoes are still green…wonder how long the take to ripen?

The most exiting thing that’s happened in my short but glorious poker blogging career took place yesterday. I had 10 minutes of fame on The All In Radio Poker Show together with Vic Porcelli, Andy Kazen, Craig Hogard and Cody Duffey. I think I was the first European on the show which makes me kind of proud. We talked about some of my favorite blog posts and about poker and blogging in general. It was all over in a heartbeat, but now I can say that I have been on the same live radio show as Mike Matusow (he came on later in the show). You can download podcasts of the All In Radio Poker Show at All In Podomatic and listened to it live each Saturday through the Team 1380 website. Look out for episode 12 that should come online in a couple of days. It will feature me…yeah:-)

As for the garden it is doing great. Everything is growing at an amazing pace since the last couple of weeks have been dominated by warm and sunny weather. The first summer flowers have started blooming as you can see in the last picture. They are rather boring so we are hoping the others will be nicer. I estimate that our tomatoes will be ripe for picking in a month or so.

A couple of days ago I played in a 6000$ guaranteed Multi table tournament on Titan poker which is my favorite site for tournament poker. We were down to 33 from around 1200. Average is about 80000 chips. Blinds are 2000/4000. I have 70000 chips.

I pick up AK suited (hearts, the best suit possible) in SB. BB has me covered with 108000 chips.

UTG+1 raises all in for 40000 chips, the next player who is short stacked also calls.

Do you fold AKs in this situation, do you call, or do you push all in? Let’s have a discussion in the comment section of this post.

Now back to the garden:

As you may have read from my Twitter updates we have had a lot of rain lately which has been really bad news for our little garden. First of all, most of our new summer flower seedlings apparently are not designed for heavy rain (if you are reading this Mother Nature please take notes; you didn’t do a good job on these particular species). Whenever it rains heavily they are all flattened to the ground. Here’s where our second major problem has come into play. Snails. Apparently snails have some kind of radar / sensory organ that can detect flattened seedlings. Each morning after heavy rain I have killed up to 25 snails that were having a feast in our garden. Unfortunately the rumor of our yummy garden has spread; now I have to deal with snails every morning even though it hasn’t rained. It’s not all bad news…..I have devised a very cruel and efficient way of killing the snails involving pair of toothpicks.

I also suspect that the massive amount of rain we have had lately is also responsible for the appearance of multiple brown patches on our tomato plants. However this may also be due to some disease that I don’t know about. The life of a hobby Gardner is challenging to say the least.

The main bed of our garden. The Sweet Peas (Lathyrus odoratus) are coming along nicely along the fence. Quite a few of the summer flower seedlings have survived the continuous snail attack.

Our two tomato plants

Close up of the biggest tomato we have right now. I estimate that it will be ripe in 3 weeks time. Notice the brown patches on the leaves I mentioned before. Does anyone know what this is?

Our small summer bed. The seedlings come from a packet of mixed summer flower seeds. There’s a whole bunch of different plants there. It will be fun to see what they look like later.

Therefore before I continue with tales of plants I thought I would write at least something about poker…..

I have started listening to a new poker radio show, “The All in Radio Poker Show“, hosted by Vic Porcelli, Andy Kazen and Craig Hogard every Saturday (I have forgotten the exact time due to the time difference between USA an Europe).  You might recall that Vic Porcelli has contributed with some really good articles on this blog.  Anyway in the future I will be writing a weekly review of the show and also contribute to it from time to time.

Now back to the garden

Here’s what it looks like now

As you can everything is growing nicely and our tomato plants have their first flowers. We did have a bit of a set back a couple of days ago when a massive thunder storm flattened most of the summer flower seedlings which caused an invasion of slugs and snails. I managed to kill all the snails (killing snails isn’t that hard actually) and  pick up most of the seedlings, so we are in the clear for now.

I will update you again in a couple of weeks.

The toothpick, apple and fork balancing trick

Nobody at my work thought the trick was cool, but they are all physicists so what can you expect?

IMO this is an exceptionally illustrative example of the Lever Principle in action, and best of all it only took me about half an hour to master.