Today 12 August 2008, I got an interesting email a subject of one that is close to my heart and that is the environment. Had the subject read something like the following I would not have even bothered looking.
"Easy Offline Riches", the maverick product which "sold out".
The email was from an aquaintence Todd Gross started out like. 

Let me be clear. Not only are people now searching for local businesses through google and not Yellow Pages, but the Yellow Page delivery is being banned in some cities for environmental reasons (such as Albany, NY)
Why do you care?
Because by the millions, local restaurants, contractors, shops of all kinds are suddenly desperate to get a website done.

It however was not the actual subject but the subject line that was well crafted to catch readers attention. The subject line read "Death of the YELLOW PAGES Means Income for YOU!"

It is rather funny that recently we were discussing the environmental raping these types of companies such as the Yellow pages are doing and what could be done about it to fix the problem. We came up with some common sense useful ideas then decided not to advise the Yellow pages as they are to sensible especially for a company named Sensis.

In Australia the Yellow pages is run by our local phone company Telstra, most people who have had dealing with either business have some sort of complaint or another especially with the Yellow pages. This is possibly due to the size of the company though with around 95% of the dealings we have had with them they have just been plain ignorant. Due to this fact and the many problems with the Yellow pages, Telstra is trying to distance itself.

The reason we are so passionate about the Yellow pages is that have cost many people a lot of money in some cases such as ours cost us our lively hood. Each time we have advertised with the Yellow Pages except for once or twice they have gotten the ads wrong. The last straw was the last mistake Yellow Pages made costing us the loss of a business, a friendship and a 10 year contract and over half a million dollars.

We think it is time for the big businesses of the world to wake up and smell the roses. The fact that the more people you rip off the less people will use your product or service. This is highly evident when in Australia recently Penny Miller who used to be Betterware who is a division of Magnamail a trusted company was apparently shut down. Sources say the treatment Penny Miller gave their staff but mainly the contractors and deliverers was archaic, appalling and should be outlawed.

One example of abuse from Penny Miller was as quoted. In the beginning of June 2008 the Queensland state manager of Penny Miller, Donna Barridge was requested to go to the Gold coast to help sort out some problems the team was having with the Penny Miller system. And all that happened was that Donna Barridge just abused everyone. After the abuse from Donna Barridge happened secret discussion were held by the Gold coast team later that day and week in which it was decided to do a walk out on the Gold coast.

Sources say Donna Barridge is mind you a big person and probably thinking she was in a big enough position to get away with the abuse. Penny Miller claims you are on a contract but in reality you appear to be employed this type of verbal & emotional abuse that Donna Barridge did should not be happening to business nor employees. Now that the world knows about Donna Barridge and Penny Miller a division of Magnamail we may see some justice.

NOW TELL ME MY FRIENDS WOULD YOU FEEL PASSIONATE ABOUT LOSING A HALF A MILLION DOLLARS…OR MORE.

Tags: big businesses of, big businesses problems, Yellow pages, sensis, telstra, Penny Miller, Magnamail, Donna Barridge, MILLION DOLLARS, Yellow pages problem, sensis problem, telstra problem, Penny Miller problem, Magnamail problem, Donna Barridge problem,

Before you get into the story on the bigpond movies problems below a few things you may consider. Before thinking of trying to rent movies through bigpond movies even though at the time everything worked out after a month or so, there is a host of problems surrounding this service.

Though Microsoft is great IE is a buggy and I feel unsafe browser, I use firefox mainly unless I have too use IE bigpond movies relies on IE. IE slows ANY system down let alone the fact the bigpond movies media manager locks up as a result of problems linking with IE. I feel a trip to the video store or getting a dvd delivery service such as bigpond movies DVD service is much less of a hassle.

Hi Again

After following everything & re installing win media player 11, also checking the i’s were dotted and T’s crossed and wasting time doing up this email it turns out that it may have been the dot net 3.5 update (which until now I could not find) as this is the only thing that needed to be done to NOW FINALLY have the media manager working.

Now we have a slight dilemma regarding the installed programs we have too many probably to mention. What we may have not mentioned yet is the only adjustments made to the system since watching the santa clause was our windows one care trial expired and we put in zone alarm and AVG free anti virus.

With relation to the system we run on XP with SP 2 Internet Explorer 7, hard wired to a lnksys wrt45g router which on all our computers we have administrator rights.

With regards to getting a local technician in we have not found a decent one on the gold coast in the last 15 years. Also the fact the only one we found that is decent is Joe Cheng from microsoft who helped us out with the first problem we have had in a microsoft program in the 24 years we have been testing for them.

To give you an idea of our knowledge just in case your not aware we run our own computer solutions business in which we not only build the computers from scratch but we also find & fix faults with programs, scripting and codes, we sell domains & hosting, we make websites in xhtml, flash java usually hand coded, we also do SEO, we build from the ground up & program and run our own servers with either IIS or technologies such as Xampp.

Based on the above fact and the fact you had no freeze up whilst trying to play “Are We Done Yet” not being able to be replicated on your test machines we made an assumption that it is one of the firewalls. However we tested the santa Claus which we downloaded from BP movies on 15 Jan 08 tried to play it in windows media and it asked for user and password however when we tried a new trailer downloaded from BP movies today Windows media just locked up basically the same as BP media manager.

One thing we found strange was the fact that windows defender ONLY today brought up a notice about requesting us permit Bigpond media manager access to the net. ALSO Before re installing the media manager last time we had found the DRM needed updating but that was all.

As quoted at Bigpond movies problems post at http://tecacentre.net/wpress/2008/02/16/bigpond-movies-problems/

I quote from what I wrote
“To see whether it was worth it the first movie I downloaded was a free test. This took 4 goes to get it after locking up the system a few times it eventually played on the Bigpond movies media manager which regularly locks up.”

As you can see from the video placed at the post the media manager is locking up not the system. The system locked up on trying to install the media manager which brought up a script error in the media manager install.

We have already deleted the media manager twice and re installed it twice after checking all the details mentioned about active x and java etc. We found that one step was missing from the instructions below that Michael sent us which was

from your ‘Shared Video’ folder in the following location delete the .wmv files:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Shared Video

Which in any case it did not help. On top of this fact in the hints section of bigpondmovies it says that the files will automatically delete upon licence expiry see the pdf attached named delet files bigpondmedia manager prob.pdf from bigpondmovies AND SEE ATTACHED PICTURE FOR WHAT WE found the case actually is.

SEE BELOW FOR DETAILS of instructions Michael from bigpond movies sent which we followed to the letter SOMEHOW.

I LOVE THE FORMATTING THEY “bigpond movies” USED

To Uninstall Bigpond Media Manager please follow the steps below: 1. Click on ‘Start’ 2. Click on ‘Control Panel’ 3. Open ‘Performance and Maintanence’ and Double click ‘Add/Remove Programs’ 4. Select ‘Bigpond Media Manager’ and click remove. 5. Completely remove the Media Manager files and folders from the system by following the steps below: 1. Open ‘My Computer’ 2. Open ‘Local Disk (C:)’ 3. Open ‘Program Files’ 4. Delete the ‘Media Manager’ folder. 5. Open ‘Local Disk (C:)’ 6. Open ‘Documents and Settings’ 7. Open ‘Username’ (Please replace ‘Username’ with your user account folder) 8. Open ‘Application Data’ 9. Delete the ‘Media Manager’ folder 6. Empty the recycle bin. To Enable and downlaod the ActiveX controls: 1. Go to Tools then Internet Options on your Internet Explorer browser menu. 2. In Internet Options, select the Security tab, and then click Custom. 3. There are five settings under “ActiveX controls and plug-ins.” You will need to set the controls as follows: 1. Download signed ActiveX controls = Prompt. 2. Download unsigned ActiveX controls = Prompt. 3. Initialise and script ActiveX controls not marked as safe = Disable. 4. Run ActiveX controls and plug-ins = Enable. 5. Script ActiveX controls marked safe for scripting = Enable. Make sure you have all the updates listed below: Update Java from http://www.java.com Update flash from http://www.adobe.com/downloads/ Update Windows http://update.microsoft.com and make sure you have the most resent updates. Update Windows media DRM visit http://drmlicense.one.microsoft.com/Indivsite/en/indivit.asp Once it is uninstalled, follow the instructions below to download and install the new version: 1. Login into your BigPond Movies account. 2. Click on My Account. 3. Click on My Media Managers. 4. Click on the “Install the BigPond Media Manager” link, and then run the setup.exe to install the application. Please note that after purchasing any of the movies you will need to go to the My Downloads section to select the name of the Media Manager you would like the movie to be downloaded on.

Regards

Michael