This is a test post. Please Ignore

I mentioned in a previous post that I had good prospects on buying a house. I’m sorry to say that it fell through. Apparently the USDA loan we were going for is no longer available (The government ran out of money for that housing loan program). We could have gone for another loan, but since the USDA loan had such low interest rates we were able to offer more on the house than we might normally be comfortable with, so a new loan would mean a higher interest rate and a higher mortgage payment.

A friend of ours in the real estate business helped us feel better about renting a little while longer, moving along with other aspects of our lives and buying a house at a later date down the road. I personally believe that the market has quite a bit more falling to do anyway.

Such is life… but I figured I better update this blog before more congratulations roll in. For those of you that have supported us in this endeavor: Thank you, and don’t worry, we’ll still invite you over for a barbecue or taco night when we do get a house.

I don’t use Hotmail, at least I haven’t since 1999. I avoid Hotmail. I don’t even like that my wife still has a Hotmail account, even though it’s for her “Junk Mail”.

Truthfully, I don’t even like Microsoft. I’m not an apple geek though, and haven’t owned an apple product since I was a young kid. But I avoid using Microsoft products when there is a valid alternative. I browse with Firefox and occasionally Google Chrome. I use multiple Google services and have tinkered with Linux. I use open source software like OpenOffice.org frequently. Sadly, I still use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office regularly, as they are still the standard.

Outlook is something I would never use for myself, and only ever open it to service someone else’s machine. Windows Live Hotmail however is something I generally advocate against. I admit that it is mostly prejudice on my part since there are so many better options available. I’ve got other reasons not to like it, but the latest is a pretty strong one.

This morning, one of my computer service clients needed me to set up an auto-responder on their email addresses while they were away on vacation. No problem, I got it set up fairly quickly on all but one of the accounts. When I logged into a Windows Live Hotmail account to set up an away message, I found nothing relating to such an option existing in their service.

I couldn’t believe that such a service wouldn’t be available, so I first checked their own help section and found nothing using their own search. Then I searched google, and found mini tutorials for people wanting to do what I needed to do. These tutorials said pointed to an option right where I thought it should have been, and they even included screen shots. But in the Hotmail service I found no such thing. I even found the help topic on Microsoft’s website for the very thing I needed (using Google… funny that a Microsoft search came up with nothing).

But the option “Send automated vacation replies” under “Manage your account“ simply wasn’t listed in the account I was logged into. So I went to Microsoft’s forums and found that others were having a similar frustration.

Screencapture of the help forum

Here is what Windows Live Representative “Celeste G” had to say about the situation on April 20:

We regret the inconvenience caused by this, and are working to get the feature re-enabled in the future.”

And the following responses were just as upset as you might imagine. It is now more than a month since Celeste G posted that official response, and almost 2 months (as far as I can tell) since people first started noticing the missing feature.

There are many things I could say about this service, but the easiest thing to say is that this is unprofessional at best. It certainly wasn’t fun spending the time looking into this only to tell my client that I could not let their customers know why they will not be getting their emails responded to. My best option to get this done for them would be to change their email service. *sarcasm*Good Job Microsoft!*sarcasm*