This Is Why We Hate You

UHC is a righteous pain in the dick:

UHC, like more and more health insurance companies, has their own, mail-order pharmacy service. In the yearly open enrollment, we're issued a warning about coverage of maintenance-medications: "UHC may choose not to cover maintenance-medications that are not procured through their mail-order service". Like a good little boy, at my last yearly checkup, I had my doctor write all my scripts as one-year, mail-order scripts so I could have UHC's mail-order service take care of them. That was January of 2019.

Fast-forward to yesterday. I get an email from the prescription mail-order service telling me that my next order is being cancelled: my script had expired and they couldn't contact the prescriber to get my script extended.

Couple things, here: 1) my current script, written in the second half of January 2019, is actually good through February of 2020; 2) my doctor will write early script, but charges a fee to do so; 3) because my insurer's pharmacy won't pay that fee, the doctor won't extend my prescription; 4) all of this is only a problem because there's a 1-2 month gap between when my on-file script ends and the period that my insurer's pharmacy is filling for.

So, now, I'm probably going to have to pay a non-office prescribing fee because my UHC's in house pharmacy is full of idiots (causing a 12-month set of prescriptions to effectively be a 9-month set of prescriptions) ...meaning I potentially end up with a medication gap for epilepsy medications as well as leaving me on the hook for to cover an early prescribing fee.

UHC: This is why people hate you and the rest of your cabal.

Thanks For Nothing, Fuckers

Was kind of annoyed when I went to use my Hue app. Opened the app to control my lights, and the app announced to me, "you need to use the Bridge v1 application, now".

So, yeah, confirmation of why I'll never spend a huge amount on any given IoT device: deprecation. LED lightbulbs typically advertise lifetimes in excess of two decades. So, notionally, once you've paid the premium for Hue bulbs, you're done paying for bulbs for twenty or so years. EXCEPT! ...if you wish to continue being able to actually control those long-lived devices, Philips apparently wants you spend $100+, every few years, to buy a new damned bridge?

Fuck.

That.

Noise.

And, the thing is, you know that Philips won't be alone in that nonsense. So, sorry Samsung (et. al.): while I could maybe see my way to laying out $10K for a "smart" refrigerator that will last me a couple decades, I'm certainly not dropping that much, every few years, just so I can keep using all of those "smart" features.

Somehow, it feels like "IoT" is destined to become a further driver of burgeoning landfills.

GREAT Customer Service

Work/tech-related, so, almost worth putting in my tech-oriented blog. However, while I'm frequently cranky in that blog, I do try to reserve it for posts about how I solved a given problem.

Any way...

So, a couple weeks ago, I open a ticket for some software that purports to be "Red Hat 7 compatible" pointing out "you guys don't ship systemd unit files with your stuff; the manner in which your legacy-init files are installed makes them incompatible for use with a partitioned disk or a system with data-specific drives; and your legacy-init files invocation is so convoluted and dicked up that trying to create proper unit files is basically a non-starter". The CSR that responded to the ticket replies back, "you should open a feature request asking for unit files: use this URL".

Of course, I'm pissed that, what should just be a fucking given — shipping of unit files for an application that claims to be "Red Hat 7 compatible" — is apparently something that I need to request as a feature/extension. Take that already pissed-off state and then refer me to a URL that doesn't fucking work and you take that rage-state and dial it up.

I reply back to the ticket, "I can't get to that URL". The CSR eventually replies back, saying, "I'll have to look into the problem" ...then fucking ghosts, but not before marking the case as solved/pending-close.

Having marked it pending-close, their system kicks out a satisfaction survey. Of course, I give the CSR all zeros and fill out the "why'd you give these scores" box with polite-bile and asking, "do you really think you ought to be closing this ticket given the open-ended manner in which your CSR left it". Somehow, none of this results in an escalation or even a different CSR picking up the ticket.

Today, I get an auto-generate email saying "you haven't replied to the case in 10 days, so we're closing it."

So, if any of y'all are curious who this oh so helpful software's vendor is (hopefully you so you can steer-the-fuck-clear), it's Collibra. When you see their name on a product, run. Screaming. Far, far away.

Joys of New DSLs

Note: this document is very much a "for my own knowledge"/rant post. Don't try to use it as a reference unless you're really freaking desperate. Terms are likely wrong or inaccurate. However, I needed to capture the gist for posterity. I lost two days of my life teasing this shit out of Google (and across a few dozen only very obliquely-related search-hits) — particularly the last paragraph's contents — and don't wish to do so ever again .

One of the projects I'm working on, they requested that I take all of the previously-delivered CloudFormation templates and wrap them in Jenkins pipeline jobs. They wanted to be able to reliably an easily re-deploy things, have the deployment-options saved as code, and they wanted to be able to easily check whether a given deployment had errors or not. All are good, valid goals.

That said, the manner in which I'd constructed the CFn templates, I included a lot of built-in break-points and error-reporting. As far as easily redeploying, when you use the AWS CLI, one need only pass the --parameters flag to be able to feed a file of parameter values and settings to the command. Place those parm-files under revision control and all of their stated goals are satisfied. But, "whatever".

Main problem for me is/was, "I'm not a Jenkins guy." While it was easy enough how to deploy Jenkins via CloudFormation, doing so via Jenkins meant (at least partially) learning the Jenkins equivalent methods to using a parameters-file. When first assigned the task, I'd indicated, "I don't know Jenkins: got any examples you can point me to?" All of the examples they had were GUI-authored "Freestyle" Jenkins jobs. Not a GUI-jock, but figured, "if this is what they want, I can probably ape their current job definitions to create ones for these templates."

In a matter of a few days, I'd banged out the requisite Freestyle jobs. Pointed my customer's technical PoC at them to review. He gives me an incredulous, "what are these??" I stated that they were the Jenkins jobs. He stated that he'd wanted them as pipeline jobs. To which I asked, "then why did you point me at Freestyle jobs as examples to follow?" We discussed things a bit further so I was better assured that what I was understanding as the desired outcome was the actual desired outcome.

So, I set to the task of learning how to author jobs using the pipeline DSL. It's been... "unfun". Jenkins is composed of a lot of "contributed" parts. While the core of Jenkins has something in the neighborhood of "ok" documentation, many of the contributed parts' documentation varies from "slightly better than ok" (rare), down through "awful" (common) and, in some cases utterly lacking to the point that you have to read the components' code to see how to make it go (annoyingly far from uncommon). Worse, because so much is "contributed" and the contribution-sources so varied, what works in one context may or may not work (or at least not work the same way) in other contributed contexts.

Further exacerbating things is that there are also multiple methods for denoting action-blocks. And, depending on which method you usde for denoting an action-block, variable interpretation and interpolation is processed differently. This totally glosses over the fact that one can reference a variable in multiple ways: naked "VARNAME"; shell-ish "$VARNAME" or "${VARNAME}"; and, when embedded in a shell-block, "\$VARNAME" or "\${VARNAME}". For those still following along but not aware of the plain "$" and "\$" methods, the former is for Jenkins environmental variables and the latter is for standard shell variables.

Further, if one wants to fetch the value of a parameter, one can use "${PARAMNAME}",  "params.PARAMNAME" or even  "env.PARAMNAME" (or, within the context of a script-block, the latter two become  "${env.PARAMNAME}" or  "${params.PARAMNAME}"). Use of straight-up  "${PARAMNAME}" is frequently fine. When it becomes not fine is if you want to allow PARAMNAME to have a value or be null. If it has a value, all is golden. If you try to pass a null value, it blows the hell up. Instead, you need to use the "env.PARAMNAME"/"${env.PARAMNAME}" to refer to it. Using that method, Jenkins understands, "oh, you wanted to process this as an empty value, not as an undefined parameter".

"Shop Local" Only Goes So Far

For a decade-plus, now, we've bought wines from Northgate Vineyard. Today, I'm reasonably certain that I bought my last bottle of wine from them. It's a shame, really, because I really liked doing business with them. Unfortunately, times change and, too frequently, the things that make you want to do business with people go away as part of that change. 

Such has happened with Northgate. Earlier this year they were sold. Apparently, the buyer is someone that's buying up Virginia vineyards, presumably hoping to cash in on a stong "buy local" ethos that has powered the growth of the farmers markets, distilleries and the Virginia wine industry as a whole. Unfortunately, this buyer seems to want to recover his acquisition costs inside of the first 12-24 months of assuming ownership.

While I'm a proponent of "buy local", that desire has its limits. Admittedly, when we first started buying their wines a decade ago, they were a relative bargain: you could get a really decent wine from really nice people and spend well less than $20 to do so. Even over time, as their prices trended upward, the value proposition still made their wine an "ok" buy. Unfortunately, a wine that was a bargain at $16 and an ok value at $21 falls out of the "every-day drinking" price-range when it hits $30+. And, when the retail price goes up by more than 60% in the space of three months and you no longer cut frequent-buyers the same discount you cut for occasional case-buyers, you're really asking a lot of your existing customers. I'm concerned with value. If you're wanting to charge me better than 60% more for something I've been buying for years, you need to deliver a product that has a concordant improvement in value.

Funny thing with a better-than-$30 bottle of wine: you put it into the same price-class as some really decent "continental" or California wines. Yeah, you're still nowhere near the really superior wines that come from vineyards that have been making wine since before this country even existed, but you're definitely out of the "table wine" price category and into "special occasion" territory. You're no longer a wine that I'm just going to give to a newly moved-in neighbor as a housewarming gift. You're no longer a wine that I'm going to share with friends who are just as happy drinking a bottle of Barefoot from the local 7Eleven. And, hey: if you're able to make more money chasing the "occasional wines" market than the "every day wines" market, then "good on you" ...but I can't come along for that ride. And, like I say, if you're going to price yourself as an occasional wine, you need to taste like one. Sadly, I can't say that Northgate's wines fall into that category.

What's really sad is that they aren't the local wine-producer that's going down this path. Yes, Northern Virginia (DC Metro as a whole) has a lot of six-figure earning residents. And, of those, there's a non-trivial number — particularly the younger, less life-encumbered ones — who tend to have a "more dollars than sense" outlook on buying-decisions. But, that's a group that tends to shrink over time as they discover that there's plenty of things that are "just as good or better for less" and that spending money for the sake of spending money isn't really a sustainable path, no matter what your income is.

Point of fact, my income doesn't exactly put me in the "struggling" range, even given this area's cost of living. That said, I still measure everything I buy — no matter the price — on whether the reward was worth the cost. My spending habits are more about value than raw price. I've had "special occasion" meals that, at nearly $1000, were far better values than meals that were well less than 1/3 that price.

And that's the rub. "Shop local" is really only one point of consideration in the "value" equation. There's not many people I know that are going to completely ignore the rest of the value equation just to shop local. If people are going to ignore other aspects of a value equation, they're going to do it for a status-y "name", not "it's local". To be brutally honest, I don't know that there's a single Virginia winery that has a status-y enough name to overcome normal value equations.

It really makes me wonder how successful this vineyard-buyer is going to end up being. His practices, to date, have been pretty alienating. I've even spoken to a wine-buyer for a local wine outlet that has previously carried the labels effected by this vinyard-buyer's actions. And the opinion is basically the same as mine: "nice when it was at last year's price; completely not worth it at the current price."  Worse, that buyer has to factor in seller-behaviors into the bulk-buying decisions and the seller's delivery-behavior has apparently suffered even as the asking-prices have soared.

So, "good-bye, Northgate." It was nice when it was Mark selling me wine. This new guy can go screw himself ...because that's exactly what he's trying to do to the people that helped make Northgate an attractive acquisition-target.

Always Check Your Work (Order)

In news of "this is why you always read the estimate before authorizing the work"...

During the middle of May, we went to Vegas for a ten-day trip to take in a three-day EDM festival plus related shows before and after the festival. While we were gone, the DC area got stupid amounts of rain. In one 24-hour period we got 7" of rain and in a further 48 hours, the three-day rain total went up to 11". So, when I came home and my wife's car was poppping alerts, I wasn't super surprised. Even though the car was street-parked on a hill — such that there was no possibility of it actually getting flooded — it was still a lot of rain. That volume of rain often finds ways to get into vehicles that are parked for the duration.

What I was surprised by was when, on our way to replenish our vacation-bare refrigerator, the car completely quit. First the A/C fan cut out. Then alerts for the power steering, brake-assist, AWD, throttle, etc. all popped. As I limped the car to a safe pull-off — a semi-vacant strip-mall — the alerts went away ...because the electrics completely quit, taking the instrument panel with them.

I called the dealership where we got the car. When I'd bought the car, I'd paid the extra $3K for the extended warranty. They gave me the number for a towing-company they work with. I called the towing-company. When the dispatched driver called to say he was five minutes out, I called Uber. While the tow-man rigged our car up onto the flat-bed, we caught the Uber over to the dealership. This was two Saturdays ago, now.

Dealership gave us a loaner and, because it was a holiday weekend, told us it would probably be Tuesday before they'd have a chance to look at it. Tuesday came and went and no call from the dealership's service department. First thing Wednesday, I called to find out where the fuck the estimate for my car was. Around lunchtime, they mailed me the estimate. The total expected repairs were expected to come to a little over $4,000: alternator, serpentine belt, front-struts, alignment and battery ...nearly 75% of that total was the estimated labor cost.

I replied back to the email with commentary:

• "That's a brand new battery: it shoul accept a charge just fine. If it needs to be replaced already, I'll need to smack another garage around for this part of the repair costs."
• "I bought the warranty-extension to cover the mechanicals through 6yr/60,000. The car is less than six years old and has less than 45,000 miles on it. Losing an alternator at this point in time seems really premature - almost as premature as the warranty-covered loss of the clutch at 33,000 miles. Are you telling me that none of this is covered?"

So, the service representative said he'd check on the warranty-coverage. Meanwhile I'm thinking, "you presented me an estimate for $4,000 and you didn't even bother to see if the warranty I bought through you guys covered anything??"

Two days pass and I don't hear anything further from the dealership. I decide, "fuck this waiting," and call back to ask the status. "My" service-lead had apparently gone on vacation and hadn't passed the ticket down. They assigned me a new lead. We went over the estimate on the phone, and, again, I had to bring up the warranty. Again I was informed that they needed to contact the warranty guarantor.

Another couple days pass and it's now Friday with no word back. So, I call for another status check. I'm told they're still waiting on the guarantor. I note that I'll call again, Monday afternoon, if I don't hear back from them. I didn't hear back from them by lunchtime, so I called (at 13:30 - no point calling during lunch-hour). This time I'm told that the guarantor's adjuster is due to arrive any time, now, to check/ok the work. They'll get me an updated estimate depending on the adjuster's findings.

They actually did call me a little before 16:00. Even better, not only was the $1000 associated with the alternator parts-and-labor covered, so to was all the other stuff (with the exception of the warranty deductible and the cost of the wheel alignment). In short, my $4,000+ initial estimate drops to a little less than a $300 outlay. And, about that I'm happy.

The thing that gets me is, had I not pushed back, I'd have been on the hook for $4,000+ worth of repairs. Why the hell wouldn't they just automatically do right by me? Why the hell did I have to push to get what was due me from the warranty? I mean, had I not pushed for them to verify the coverage, I'd have essentially paid for the repairs twice: once for the unused warranty and once for the repairs themselves. 

Further aggravating is that it's been nearly ten days to get to this point. Granted, they'd given me a loaner, so I didn't have to rent a car during the period nor strand my wife while I worked had I not been able to afford to rent one. But it's still annoying to be stuck in a loaner for that long. Don't get me wrong, the loaner isn't shitty, but it's definitely the base-model ...and our car very much is not.

Daig Noise

Interesting progression in dog ownership.
 

Our first two dogs were, from a barking standpoint, very quiet. Lana earned the nicknames "Lana-moo", "Moo-cow" and just "Moo" because she liked to conversationally-vocalize in a manner that was somewhat bovine (obviously). Puckett was generally too goofy to bark or even growl. Only very rarely would he alert-bark or warn-bark - basically, just when he thought there was a threat I hadn't seen or that I had reacted to but that he thought needed further discouragement. Otherwise, his vocalizations mostly came when he saw other dogs that he wanted to play ...and then his low-pitched voice became an embarrassing mewl.


After Lana passed (euthanasia b/c of a combination of cancer and a degenerative spinal-condition), we got Cira. Cira was generally a very low-key dog. There were things that _did_ excite her to the point of actual exuberance, but it was a _very_ quiet exuberance. Her expressiveness was far more physical than audible. Her most-audible expressions were her expressions of gustatory delight - a very hearty belch after wolfing down breakfast. Her entire bearing before eating in the morning was one of, "OH MY GOD: _BREAKFAST TIME". The daily-BRACK would only come after she would come flying back into the living room and launching herself onto my couch. Usually, the belch would be followed by a bullie-grin ...framed by specks of errant rice stuck to her snout.

After Pucket passed (euthenasia b/c of very aggressive cutaneous lymphoma that spread to his lungs), we got Lady.  Lady... is the first dog that we had tendencies towards barkiness. She can be conversationally vocal in a manner similar to Lana. However, a lot of her vocalization comes as excited barking: get her spun up through playing and playful growling becomes playful barking. She will also bark when we leave the house and don't leave the TV on (at least the conversational audio) for her. If someone knocks on the front door or rings the doorbell, she also barks. Other than that, though — and if you don't count her snoring and brachycephalic snorting — she's fairly quiet.

After Cira passed (euthanasia b/c of severe, suddenly-manifesting end-stage renal-failure), we got Kaiya. Unlike the previous dogs who were all bullie/bullie mixes (Cira being the only "pure" bullie - a staffy), Kaiya is a bullie-mix that isn't all bullie. She's a bullie/lab mix. She's also considerably barkier than any of our other dogs had been. If she hears a noise, she's gonna bark at it. If it's a noise from out-of-sight, even if she's hearing the same noise multiple times in a given timespan, she'll bark each time she hears it. For example, my wife was just out in the front-foyer's closet, organizing it to store some new stuff in it. Each time Donna's activities made bumping-sound, Kaiya would bark. I love our nubby-dog (recently had to have her tail docked due to "happy-tail" related infection) to death, but the frequent alerting is maddening - especially the re-alerting.

Dear Physicians and other Medical Specialists:

Look, I get that HIPAA is a bitch. But you really shouldn't use it as a fucking excuse for not bringing yourselves into the fucking 21^st century. Requiring me to either show up and fill out a form, download and print out a form to bring with me or download, print out and fax a form is just fucking stupid. Really, that you're still fucking doing FAXing rather than secure email is fucking stupid.

There's 19Mn cloud-services out there that allow for the secure sharing of documents - many of them are even certified for HIPAA, SOX and other data compliance legislation. If you can't afford to set up your own, self-hosted system, use one of those many cloud services.

Fuck: if you can't figure out how to accept S/MIME- or PGP-encrypted emails just let me email you a link to a protected document on a cloud service of my choosing.

You might have room to talk to me about data protection policies if I wasn't about 99.999% certain that some hacker hasn't already rifled your databases. Really. There's lots of secure options out there. Don't be such righteous pains in the dick.

I Didn't Mean It Literally

2" of rain early Monday morning. Another couple inches last night. Forecast is calling for another 2-5" of rain each of the next several days.

Open door, yesterday, and get dripped on as I'm passing through the door frame. Rainwater is dripping from the (rain-swollen) interior-trim around my door frame.

Today, during one of the not-actively-raining periods (and while light enough to still see well), I get out a ladder and try to sort out how the water's getting in. Find that the moisture's coming from the roof-line. Step out into the yard to look at the roof over our foyer. Looks like the roof is ever so slightly sagging in one spot. Roof is 14+ years old (we moved in in 2002). I guess it's not unexpected that it might have age-related sagging. Unfortunately, the slight sagging looks like it might be allowing some capillary action up under the shingles and then between the backing plywood (at least when it's raining so heavily that the rain sheets on the roof).

I have rainy-day savings ...but this is a little too literal requirement for their use.

Traffic, Here, Is Ass

Illustrative of how dicked-up traffic is in the NoVA suburbs of DC:

Today is the last day at this job for a frequent co-worker of mine. Originally, they were going to have a going-away lunch for him. They rescheduled to a 15:00-17:00 after-work event. I got into work ass-early, today, expecting to leave for the day in time for the original lunch-window. Instead, I ended up coming home - figuring that, since the event-site is four miles from my house, I'd just drive back.

Unfortunately, that four miles is constrained by a bridge from NoVA to MD. Waze was showing red all over the damned place, already, with a projected drive time of forty minutes. I got to my route decision-point - the ramp onto the highway that crosses the river - and opted to turn-back. Traffic from the highway was backed up past the ramp and through the next-closest traffic light. No go.

Called my friend up to convey my regrets.

Forced Migration

So, my bank has been pretty damned good, over the years, about adoption of technologies to make doing business with them easy. They were way early to the web-based banking game, in general. They made it free from the get-go, to boot. The rolled out the ability to do deposits at home with your scanner years before any of the banks that advertise on TV did. Similarly, they pushed out phone-based depositing years ahead of their bigger competitors.

That said, I never really cared for the phone-based deposit capability. To me, it was always more reliable to slap a check on a scanner than to try to line it up and hold it steady in my phone's camera and get adequate lighting.

To be honest, it's a feature I only use once or twice a year ...because, at this point, most  people and businesses have sorted out ways to send me money electronically. Unfortunately, tonight I had to actually deposit a check. I fired up the browser-based utility, and it popped up alerts about out of date Java versions (I'm running the latest version) and out of date browser (I tried Chrome - which is always up to date because it auto-updates itself, Firefox - also up to date - and, finally, IE - up to date at least as of last week). Further, I'd adjusted my various security settings to whitelist my bank.

Still I get the alerts and no joy on being able to deposit. So, much like one RTFMs as a last resort, I finally hit the troubleshooter button. A window pops up informing me I need to meet the following compatibility requirements:

PC users must have:

• Windows XP^®, Windows Vista^TM or Windows 7 operating system.
• Internet Explorer^® 7 or 8, Firefox^® 3.6 or Chrome^® 10 web browser.
• A TWAIN or WIA and Windows XP^® (or later) compatible scanner.
• The latest version of Java^® for Windows.

Seriously??? My shit's out of date???

At that point, I figured, "fuck: the web UI's reached abandonware state". So, I grab my phone, download my bank's app, login and use the app to deposit my check.

Afterwards, I sent hatemail to my bank. To be honest, I'd rather they simply turn the web deposit tool off if they're not going to maintain it and it's not gonna work any more.

To Be Avoided: HFS Benefits

These guys?

Fucking worthless.

Prior to my employer's acquisition, they used these clown-shoes for administration of our FSA plans. As part of our plans, we were issued FSA credit cards that we could charge eligible expenses with so that we wouldn't have to dick around with all the reimbursement paperwork that I've had to file with some older plans (early 2000s). However, each time I used the FSA cards that these assholes administered, I'd get an email a month or so later saying "you have to provide detailed receipts in order for us to process this charge."

Really? You sent me this fucking piece of plastic to streamline the process, yet, I still have to submit supplemental paperwork in order for you assholes to approve the charge? What was the fucking point of those cards, then? Did you just want to have an excuse to waste plastic and print up a pretty card with your company logo on it?

Seriously: I didn't have these issues with the FSA cards at my last job.

Then again, why the fuck is a defense contractor operating a health benefits administration company? Talk about "operating outside your core competency".

Ass-hats.

Understand Who You're Marketing To

One of the things I like about being in the technology field? All the emails offering "free" tech reports, whitepapers and the like. Then, you click on the link to said "free" report, and you're greeted with a damned "please register" page.

I don't understand the motivation. You're marketing these papers towards technical folks. In other words, you're setting up login barriers to the people least likely to give you their real contact information. Sure, I'll register and give you an email address and a phone number, but precisely 10 minutes after I receive the "here's your login information" email, all the requested contact information will cease to exist. So, what was the point?

The funny part is when the toolbags that "offer" these documents are simply putting a registration banner in front of something that they downloaded from somewhere else. It seems they forget that: A) Google (et. al.) exist; and that, B) the document they're offering was originally available from a site that either had no registration requirement or one that was significantly less time-consuming to get through.

And, as a final note: taking what was previously published as an HTML document and providing it as a PDF doesn't make it worth me downloading it from your site and giving you my (fake) information. I've got a "print to PDF" tool installed (if you run Linux, OS•X or even a more recent Windows iteration, it's part of the OS) on my laptop. In other words, I get no benefit from downloading it specifically from you.

Lastly, if your registration process is too involved, such that it takes me less time to Google an alternate source than it does to get through your gateway, guess what I'm going to do. I'm big into instant gratification. Why the hell would I jump through hoops and waste time with your site?

Aggressive Billing Practices

I really have to wonder what the fuck is wrong with various merchants, doctors and other service providers. I mean, I get that there's a lot of deadbeats out there and that everyone wants to get paid on-time, but the billing practices of some providers has become insultingly-aggressive.

Last year, we'd gotten hit in a head-on collision that rendered our SUV undriveable. The local police called a wrecker for us. The wrecker came and picked up our vehicle and towed it to their lot. The next day, the insurance company came and towed it to the body shop it was going to be repaired at. Before the week was out, I had received a lien-notice in the mail from the wrecker. They'd sent it out within 24 hours of towing the vehicle without so much as even an attempt to bill me or the insurance companies for the initial tow (yet, they released the vehicle?).

At the time, this seemed unreasonable, but, I could at least sort of understand it from the standpoint that there was no previous business relationship between us and the towing company, so there was no good track record of timely payment. I could also understand it from the standpoint that a significant portion of their business is related to police-initiated impound-tows and impound-tows from illegal parking in private lots. Annoying, but at least sort of understandable that they might be aggressive in seeking liens.

In May, the company I worked for switched insurance carriers. My wife had had one of her regularly-scheduled appointments (she's got a chronic condition, so the appointments happen every six weeks) that month. Apparently, when the doctor's office submitted the bill for insurance reimbursement, they submitted to the wrong insurance company (and it was, naturally, declined). Last week, we received a notice from our prior carrier about a $3000 patient-responsibility and, a couple days later, a notice from the collection company her doctor's office had turned the bill over to. Now, this is a doctor my wife has been seeing since 2009. This is a doctor who has been paid, on time, every time, for just shy of three years now. So, we have a well-established payment track record. Yet, somehow, due to a billing mistake on their part, we get a collection notice - without ever having so much as received a call from their billing department or even a "we can't schedule you for your next appointment due to an outstanding balance issue" when my wife had called in a week or so previous to the receipt of the collection-notice.

Seriously: WTF? How fucking hard is it to reach out to customers - especially customers with a well-established track record of timely payment - before just kicking things over to collections?

Avenge Me

I would like to thank the local AMC theatre for screwing my day up.

We've got an after-hours maintenance event, tonight. So, I figured I'd use my late-start day to go see The Avengers. The earliest available showing was the 3D IMAX showing. Only reason I picked it was because it started the earliest.

We got our glasses, our concession and our seats and waited for the movie to start.

The local AMC likes to show "special features" and commercials before the previews. As we sat there, the "special features" and commercials were running but silently. Hmm... Fortunately, when the previews came on, so did the sound.

Midway through the previews, the thing pops up saying "put on your IMAX 3D glasses now". Did as instructed, only to find that the left eyepiece was oddly and distractingly dark. Took the glasses off and noticed that the screen was pretty much crystal clear. At first, I thought "ok, they played the 'put on your glasses' thing too early". Then, the movie started and still it was more watchable without the glasses than with. So, I began to wonder, "did they put the wrong disk into the projector?"

Just after Loki had tesseracted-in and was instructed to put his "spear" down, the screen froze. Apparently, one of the joys of "watching the future of movies, today" is that the projection system can crash.

I figured, "take an early bathroom break and maybe they'll have it sorted out by the time I get back". I get back and the screen's still black. Un-good. I walk back outside to ask the two theatre staffers what's going on. I'm told "we're hoping to get the projector back online in about ten minutes". I ask if the projector problems were related to why the 3D glasses weren't functioning as expected. They informed me that "yes: the projector had been miscalibrated but the glasses should work as expected once the movie restarts".

Fifteen minutes pass and still no movie. Just as I'm about to get up to ask how long the "ten minutes" is going to continue, a theatre employee comes in to tell us that, because the projector's taking so long to reboot, that they have to cancel this showing because it will cause delays to the next one. We're then offerred free passes and the thoice of either a refund or free tickets to the next screening.

Given that I'd chosen this one for its start time - it would have allowed me to see the movie and still make it to work in plenty of time tonight's maintenance window - waiting for the 14:30 showing of a 2.5 hour movie just wasn't an option. So, we got in line for our passes and our refunds: an hour of my day wasted; a movie not seen and $20 spent on "medium-sized" hoglegs of soda and a burnt hotdog - concessions not refundable.

Thanks AMC: you really Mondayed things all up.

Engineering Priorities

I know that Plus is probably more geek-oriented than other social networks, but the fact that the NHL playoffs don't really seem to be "trending" in any meaningful way is kinda ridiculous. It probably doesn't help that most of the NHL teams that have a social media presence have that presence almost exclusively on Twitter and/or Facebook (and, seems, most frequently, FaceBook by way connecting their official FB account to their Twitter account).

But why is it that entitities like the NHL concentrate their efforts almost exclusively on sites like Twitter and/or FaceBook? For starters,  FaceBook, Twitter and other networks make it dead-easy to post once and get your message out to a number of sites at once. Google's Plus? Not so much. Crap like this is why Google really needs to work on their cross-platform sharing APIs (have they even published anything meaningful, yet??).

For me, this lack of being able to see updates via Plus is the second biggest reason (behind friends' not being willing to move off FB) that I still need to log into FB and/or Twitter. I come to Plus because I want to. I have absolutely nothing I could (correctly or incorrectly) conflate with a need to login to Plus.

Just Like Old Times...

I used to work for Verizon (technically Digex, at the time) as a UNIX engineer (glorified systems administrator, to be honest). One of the most annoying things I had to deal with was getting customer call about problems with their host, doing diagnostics, determining that there was a networking issue, calling our NetOps folks to see what might be going on (usually after telling them what was fucked up on their side), then, minutes later having everything "magically working again, asking "what'd you change" and being told "nothing: everything's still the same".

Really? I called you with a problem. I told you what the problem was. I listened to you type for a few seconds and then things suddenly started working, but you made no changes on your side to cause things to suddenly start working again? Ok: sounds legit.

I'd thought I'd gotten away from that, given that I last worked for Verizon in May of 2004. Apparently, even though I've gone on to bigger and better, networking at Verizon is still the same.

Today, I was killing time, waiting for my wife to fill a prescription at the local Walgreens. Not wanting to participate in the slow death that is sitting at the pharmacy counter, I opted to sit out in my car and listen to Last.FM and mess around on Google Plus.

All was going well until the music stopped. I flipped back to Last.FM from Plus and found that I couldn't get the music to restart. Kept getting "insufficient content" errors. I flipped back to my profile page and noticed that the app couldn't load my user profile. At first, I figured "Last.FM must be having server problems."

So, I flipped back to Plus to bitch about it. I noticed that it was taking hitting "post" multiple times in order for a post or a comment to actually get posted without a "can't post at this time" error message popping up.

After about 20 minutes of this nonsense, I dialed *611 to see if VZW might be having issues. The friendly CSR representative took my information, checked her systems and informed me that she wasn't seeing any issues. She suggested that, after I got off the call with her, I should take my battery out for about thirty seconds and then restart my phone - that that should clear up any phone-caused issues.

Um. Yeah. Sounds legit.

At any rate, I opted to not pull my battery out. However, in about half the time that it would have taken to have followed her instructions and for my phone to finish rebooting, I had full, uninterrupted network connectivity back. Last.FM was happy and I had tunes again.

I'm almost certain that were I to have re-dialed *611 and asked "what'd you guys have to do to fix things," I would get the usual Verizon NetOps answer of "nothing. We didn't change anything".

Life As An Engineer

Today, I think I coined a new work-related term: "multi-blocking". It's sorta like multi-tasking, but different.

At any rate... "Multi-blocking" is the (necessary) habit of running multiple, concurrent projects, but letting "blockers" determine which project goals you're actively working towards at any given time. That is, you work on a project until some dependency stops you, then hop onto the next most pressing project that isn't blocked.

Other interruptions to multi-blocking can be "suddenly critical" things that aren't on your project plans being dumped into your lap. These either get added to the multi-blocking queue or supercede everything in it.

The big down-side of this working-model is when you reach a state where you're 100% blocked. Then, it's total frustration time. If this happens frequently enough, or you're given a superceding task that also blocks, it can cause a total freak-out of frustration and denial of satisfaction.

Sales Don'ts

Wasted two+ hours of my life meeting with a vendor for a lunchtime presentation.

The lunch was at a restaurant that, of the dozen or so times I've had to go, I've had an edible meal maybe twice. None of those two occasions coincided with a meeting. I'm pretty sure that Rosa Mexicano is unable to make meals for groups and have the results turn out well. Today, I just skipped th food altogether - which was easy, given that they opted for family-style service and I seemed to be sitting in a passing dead-zone (oh well). So, needless to say, as we were entering the second hour of the meeting, I was beginning to itch for the door so I might go some place and get food.

The seating, overall, was weird. Normally, when we've had meetings at Rosa Mexicano, there's five or six six- to eight-top tables set up and we spread ourselves out amongst them. The vendor's sales team didn't want people staying too far from the action, so they opted to array four tables into a horseshoe arrangement. Now, I get what they were trying to accomplish, but forcing my to sit cheek-by-jowl with others - especially when food's going to be served and even more especially when it results in tons of wasted space in the room - isn't a way to get on my good side. I like having plenty of personal space. I find being crowded to be unsettling and detracts from my ability to attend to things other than the fact that I'm being crowded.

Given who the presentation was for - a group of engineers who worked for an organization that uses closed networks - one wonders why the vendor's sales folks were so keen to crow about the ability to manage their storage with an iPad app. Given our environment, ability to manage devices from a moble phone or tablet just isn't a priority. Given my feeling about Apple, in particular, it quickly became grating how much time was wasted on the topic.

Lastly, I've been dealing with technology for a long time, now. I've used it in a lot of "edge case" and "forward-thinking" scenarios. That means that I've seen a lot of interesting technologies used in a lot of interesting ways. Giving me a presentation that slags on buying component technologies and going the DIY route, and then pushing how great your solution is when all I'm seeing is shit that I've done years' or decades' previous just doesn't sit well. The reason all your crap is, essentially, old hat to me is because the stuff I did was "DIY". Doing things "DIY" means that I don't have to wait five-plus years for some vendor to discover "hey, if we package this into a turn-key bundle, we could sell the hell out of this stuff". So, don't slag on DIY, especially if your solutions are all things I've already seen, played with or done.

I dunno ...the whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way. Yeah, some nifty, potentially useful stuff, but it was all presented so wrong. It was like a flashback to my SGI days: great technology that was poorly-sold.

They Call It Security

As someone who's had a history of taking liberties with poorly-protected systems (eveyone's young, once), I recognize the value of locking down technology. Because I know there are bored people out there and because I know there are truly malicious people out there, I make efforts to protect things against them. I understand the value of "systems security".

That said, I have to deal with others interpretations of what it means to make a system "secure". In general, security is at odds with usability and functionality. The key to good security is finding "balance". Sadly, so much of systems security is left to people who've never broken a system and who've only ever read papers, articles and/or books on security. So, when someone writes a security recommendation, the typical security person takes that recommendation as gospel or comes to the wrong interpretation of that recommendation (or fails to consider the impacts of what following a recommendation is).

This type of blind approach security always leaves me scratching my head. Invariably, the people implementing these policies in a context of ignorance leave gaping holes in systems. They'll lock down an avenue to a given piece of information. But, because they don't really understand the systems they're securing, they don't realize that there's a dozen other ways to get the same data (or that some data are critical to overall system usability and maintenance). In the end, it leaves you, as a system user, wondering "what the hell were they thinking" or "what the hell was the point of doing X". Today, what I found myself wondering was, "who the fuck removes `whereis` from a standardized UNIX deployment??"