Philanthropic work is a big part of what we do here at TCG. I myself serve as the secretarial officer for two local non-profit organizations. One of those organizations is the Cumberland County United Fund. Several Weeks ago, Colinks of Crossville donated to the United Fund a large number of Dell PCs. We here at TCG have been preparing those systems for final delivery to partner organization of the United Fund, other local non-profit groups.

I am very happy to report that this project is well underway. We have put many computer to work helping local non-profits, thanks to the generosity of Colinks. I would like to recognize Mr Owen Kenne, one of our new team members here at TCG, without his efforts this project could not have been done. Thank You Owen.

That is how I feel when I have to deal with rip and tear paper jams.

Printers are such mechanical devices, and color laser printers perhaps the most mechanical of them all. However in a world of software, malware, OS installs and data transfer, there is something almost therapeutic about working with gears, rollers, and paper. In this case, some heavy bound paper had become jammed in a Minolta Color Laser Printer. In the process of trying to free the paper, it tore, leaving a small bit unreachable under the magenta drum. Being such a small bit of paper, the internal sensors on the printer didn’t pick up the continued jam. The problem was compounded by a subsequent paper run, which “accordioned” up under the first and wrapped around. Pulling this bit of jammed paper lose resulted in a few larger bits in the works, which were now unconnected.

Thats where I found the printer.

When you look at a bad rip and tear paper jam, you are confronted with 2 options. First, you can tear the printer completely down, free the jammed bits, and reassemble the printer. This is a non-trivial task which can run up a clients bill in a big hurry, but sometimes it’s the only option. The second choice is to try and go in with tools to free the paper bits, assuming they are seeable and reachable. If this works, you can free a rip and tear jam in very little time, thus saving your client in more ways than one.

On this Minolta I got lucky, and was able to local and remove almost a quarter page of debris. The paper jam being right on the path for the Magenta drum meant I had to take special care not to touch or scratch the drum with the tools, but I pulled it off.

It’s been very interesting this weekend watching our President in Ghana. All politics aside, it’s good to see some high level atention paid to a part of the word which is very dear to my heart.

It turns out that Ateiku has made it to Google Maps! Granted the resolution is such that it’s noting more than a brown dot in a forest of green, but at least its on the road maps now. 

Apparently in response to the president’s visit Tigo, MNT, and One Touch have all given free calls to the USA to there subscribers. Needless to say, I’ve been getting some calls.

One of the places Obama Visited was the Slave Castle in Cape Coast, a place I remember well. Some of my friends tried to get in to see him but the streets of Cape Coast were jammed packed.

After talking with some of the friends, I almost feel “home sick” for the place. I really want to go back.

We’ve been in the process of migrating all our domains from GoDaddy to other domain name registrars for the past 6 months. The reasons for this were three fold.

First, we’ve been concerned for sometime over reports of GoDaddy’s heavy and miss-handling of it’s costumers.

Second, the look and feel of GoDaddy’s site has bothered us for some time. While we are not necessarily apposed to using attractive scantily clad women to market products, it just never seemed to fit with selling domains.. The excessive use of Danica Patrick was also an annoyance. Maybe if she gets good enough to do the real thing in Formula 1 they’ll use more than just two pictures of her on the site…. (sorry, but the Indy/Champ thing completely killed open wheel racing in America, thanks Tony)

Third, we constantly were miffed by GoDaddy’s non-stop “up-selling”. We actually published and internal memo with a guide to keep our people from accidentally buying something other than “just a domain” from GoDaddy during the checkout process.

For these reasons, we decided to start a gradual migration away from GoDaddy as our domains came up for renewal. This process  had be underway for several months. The final straw however came the other day when at 7:00pm durning my evening meal, I get a call from a GoDaddy employee, presumably “checking on my account”, but after a few moments it was clear that it was just a telemarketing call.

The next day, we decided that enough was enough, and opted to move our entire domain collection in one push from GoDaddy.

Yes, the process was expensive, nearly $1,500 for all our remaining domain names. While our experiences with GoDaddy were not as bad as some of the ones I have read about, the few experiences we have had were enough to prompt the move. In the end we at TCG do feel that businesses and people should be held to a higher standard, and it’s a nice feeling to know that we could, in a some small way, fight back against a company that violates those standards.