Featured Vent, VB Launch, Internet Down, TWC Sucks

Well, I'm killing a lot of birds with one stone with this post.

First of all, we're getting closer and closer to the official launch of VentBox. Tomorrow we'll be moving from our shared hosting account at TextDrive to a "bling" set up using dual Container Accelerators from TextDrive. We did a ton of research before deciding to stay with TxD, and after a great hour-long conversation with Joyent's CEO, Jason Hoffman, I was convinced that these guys had the best set-up and approach to launch VentBox. As things progress with this company, I'll do a post dedicated solely to hosting issues.

As far as application development goes, we're still cruising along. I got a lot of great feedback from beta testers in the last week. I sent out an invite to nextNY members and emails poured in with advices and bug alerts. Thanks to all!

One new feature we're going to try and get out before launch time (looking like February 5th, by the way) is a "VentBox PopChart" page. We want people to be able to see who's venting the most, which targets are "hottest" and other info. This will be like a Zeitgeist page and should be fun to watch.

Now on to the "Featured Vent"
If you're reading this on my blog (instead of via RSS), you'll notice that above and to the right of this post is a "Featured Vent." I'll be putting this up for people to see which of my vents I'm most passionate about on VentBox. This week I'm wholly disgusted with Time Warner Cable.

Of course, of all the ironies in the world, two weeks before we launch VentBox my Internet connection (and the cable along with it) stops working. On Saturday the whole thing went out, and then on Sunday it came back for about 3 hours, only to go out again. On Saturday we called TWC to make an appointment for Monday and got the 12 - 6 time slot, and of course the fella came at 7:30. Now, this guy was especially nice and really did try everything in the book to get everything working, but to no avail. A new team of people will be coming back on Thursday to try and fix it, but until then, I'm working out of Starbucks.

Well, for all this, and for all problems we didn't bother reporting to TWC leading up to now (but did blog about on the VentBox Blog), I'll definitely be giving them a call for some rebates or something.

If you're with me, click on my "Featured Vent" and join in on the venting about Time Warner Cable.
(If you're not yet a member, send me a message through the Contact Page and I'll send you the Private Beta info for VentBox.)