They used to rock
So, here goes. I really, really liked stonehaven dental, so much so that I actually paid out of pocket for my father’s emergency tooth removal for him (before he had dental insurance). I have referred several families there. [I'm going to start un referring them now]

Office Mixup
Well now my father has dental insurance (and the same name as me). Somehow they got our insurance mixed up (we pay all our dental work out of pocket, always have) and got his insurance on my file. It was a mistake, mistakes happen.

WTF?
Fast forward who knows how many months later, we all come in for checkups, etc. The bill was over $600 for the four of us. (I was expecting $200, maybe $300 or so). At one point during my examination I even asked how much something was going to cost because I am paying out of pocket. The lady said she didn’t know and that I should just get that information from the desk when I leave.

When we finally get out or start checking out, I am plenty annoyed that it is about twice what I was expecting to pay. It takes them a while to adjust things by about a hundred bucks (Xray’s are suddenly free). Turns out that they still have us as having insurance in their system. WTF?!

The lies
Here is the kicker, they said my wife told them we have insurance. (Completely untrue). In fact a few months ago my wife even called (when they mixed it up the first time) after her appointment to make sure they knew we pay out of pocket and don’t have dental insurance. This is when I am visibly upset. They are lying to me and my wife. That is when they pull us into a room with a door and repeat the same lie. At which point I try to stop them, she then tells me that she isn’t talking to me, she is talking to my wife. Ok… I think to myself. You can talk to your kids that way, even your subordinates, but not my wife, or me. So now they are lying to me, then they are rude about it when I call them out on it.

What really upset me
The thing that upsets me is *not* the extra hundred or so dollars I ended up paying. It is the lying and talking down to us.

Moral of the story
There are plenty of other dentists who have office staff that are not going to lie to you and talk down to you.

So, ignoring the people who just wanted to attack and the people who were commenting about something else on a tangent thread, we have these results…

Seems Mac and Windows are fairly close....

While it is hardly scientific, it is somewhat interesting (more windows then mac preferences? [my vote was not counted]). There might have been more mac votes from the “attack” section, but usually after or during their rant they never really said what they preferred– they complained about spelling, grammer, intelligence (or lack of it), blamed the problems on the previous poster (or me), and so on… fairly typical for the internet.

That all being said, the comments definitely tell me that I am not the only fool that got duped into getting a mac.

I used macs back when they were monocrome uni-boxes and only had one network game that we would sneak onto the computers in the highschool lab to play. We wrote our computer assignements in pascal. (I had been using Turbo Pascal @ home on PC side so I used command my teacher didn’t know (cuz they weren’t in his book) and he tried to fail me for it. — After I entered the source code in the mac’s pascal and showed him that it worked, he gave me a passing grade. But he never talked to me much after that.)

Fast forward to now. 15+ years as an application programmer, IT manager, database designer, web app creator, GIS app development, blah blah blah, and now internet marketer. I used windows mostly. (I had to pick something in the late 90’s and it was either Windows or Linux/Unix side (mostly Unix at the time)). So where was I… oh yes.

So about a year+ ago I buy a pair of macs. (No way I was going to get Vista) A Macbook pro for me and later a MacBook Air for my wife. (She still loves hers except when it doesn’t work then she throws a fit till I tell her to reboot it. Then she huffs, reboots it and it works again for a while.)

Ok, after several months of relearning everything on a mac (Hint: Going from Windows to Linux is WAY easier than Windows to Mac) I am kinda happy with it. Pretty slick UI. But how do I make it hibernate? Oh there is a known problem with MacBook Pro’s regarding sleep mode. But there are some cool command line utilities to kinda fix it by forcing it to hibernate no matter what. Grrr. Fine. (May as well be using linux w/ all the command line tweaking I ended up doing — I have no problem w/ command line tweaking and all that, it just seems weird to have to resort to it so much on a mac, aren’t these things supposed to be user friendly?)

You know my first warning should have been when they tried to sell me an extra warranty plan. That should have been a redflag.

For the price of this “premium” macbook pro I could have gotten a windows laptop, and a desktop with 6 monitors. I am kicking my self about it.

In about a year, the left internal fan has died (but first it made horrible, horrible sounds for about a month), the hibernate issue has NEVER been fixed, since a mac update broke it a few months after I bought the thing. I realized I spent 90% of my day inside VMWare inside Mac OSX anyways since there is hardly any of the software I need/ want on the mac. So now I boot in windows 99% of the time. The only reason I still keep the mac around is to code on the iphone. Oh yeah, but even that is an issue because no matter what, it will *not* update the Mac OS with the latest auto patch. I need to wipe the system and reinstall. Boy good thing I got a mac so I wouldnt have to deal with all these stupid little issues that I used to deal with in windows.

Oh yeah, on top of that it would crash randomly and grey screen of death on my just as much as windows 2000 used to do to me. (And don’t even get me started on the lack of a killer IDE….)

Ok, rant almost over. Long story short. Mac is fine ONLY if you stick with just the Mac software (the stuff Apple makes) 3rd party apps tends to cause problems. [WTF firefox why u so slow on a mac?!]

But. If you JUST install Microsoft software on a windows machine u can say the same thing about stability. Oh yeah, duh, games. I don’t really play games like I used to anymore, but srsly. Games.

So… Don’t get a mac just cuz everyone else is doing it. I bet if I had just bought my wife a nice fujitsu laptop (dont get a dell) she would be just as happy with it. (Except she *does* like iPhoto — so that iLife stuff is cool if your into that kinda stuff)

But the bottom line is: Macs freeze, crash randomly and have update issues (and even get worms) just like the Windows machines. Let this be a fair warning to you that you will have plenty of problems with a mac over the same time period as you would with a windows machine (or Linux), but you get to pay a lot more for the pain.

Hmm I suppose I could just get a Mac Mini for my iphone dev stuff. Anyone want to by a used 15inch (non-shiny screen) macbook pro w/ 4gigs ram. I think I can use the cash for something that would fit me better… (I’m booting into windows all day anyways)

Update: Somebody posted this to ycombinator (apparently there are plenty of people there who have had somewhat similar experiences http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594576 — and there are some people who’s macs crap gold every morning, they are lucky )

Wake up, learn how the internet works before you come accusing people.

/rant

Shout outs to Kris of Pepperjam, Jeremey of Shoemoney, DK of purposeinc, and prolly a bunch more..  ER has been pretty fun so far.

This is 5 computers linked w/ synergy on 7 monitors  (6 shown)

But its too hard…

No, not really there are a bunch of ways to do split testing.  You can make two simliar web pages, send traffic to both and track which on converts more.  Easy.  What if you want to test a bunch of different changes?  Also easy.  There are several different resoruces out there for multivariate split testing (yes, they is a real word–i think)

Google’s Website Optimizer is a good free one that is easy to use.  (If you aren’t afraid of a tiny bit of html, javascript, css and probably ftp — and who doesn’t love all that?  I know I do. )

Anyways here is my little story.  I’ve been doing all sorts of split testing on our own internal systems.  I decided to give googles’s website optimizer a test.  This things is easy to use.  So I threw some tests out there.

EASY TO USE IS A BIG DEAL BECAUSE NOW TESTING NEW IDEAS TAKES 10 SECONDS PER IDEA.

It took me about 15 minutes to set everything up and come up with some random changes to text and colors.

Well here is how cool this is:

Fill Out This Form Form More Information On How To Get Your… <– Original
Complete This Form Form To Discover How To Get Your… <– Change – 148% increase in conversions with this little change.

TEST TEST TEST

Seriously, u need to use google website optimizer or something similar to test your landing pages.  I’m making more $$ cuz of it.  Are you?

So, I figure.. lets ask the internet, cuz the internet is never wrong. I spent a few min using google docs to make a quick free survey. Here was the resulting quiz I put on twitter, facebook and reddit.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=plloKEhVW8LveJkPpo2ZYDg

To save you some clicking

Pic A (above)

Pic B (Above)

Pic C (above)

A few hours later we had over 130 responses

My choices in order were
#1 Pic A
#2 Pic B
#3 Pic C <– seriously, horrible picture IMHO

Her choices were
#1 Pic B
#2 Pic C
#3 Pic A <– she absolutely hated my favorite picture

Random sampling of people I know and people I don’t know on the internet
#1 Pic B
#2 Pic A
#3 Pic C

So… she now has Pic B on her facebook profile, and I am somewhat vindicated that everyone else thought Pic C was the worst.

We both win. And by both I mean her, which means I win too.

The Old campaign that produces a steady stream of clicks and revenue’s CTR today on Google is 1.36%, the new KWGrouper campaign’s CTR is at 2.03% so far after just a few hours.  On the Search partners it is even better, Old: 0.11% New 0.50%.  I’ve looked at the new adgroups and there are a few with a fairly low ctr (less then 1%) and others with 2 digit CTR (10% or higher).  After enough data I’ll be trimming any adgroups that aren’t performing and optimize from there.

I really need add the MSN and Yahoo Export to KWGrouper…