Will You Still Love Me When I'm 64?

The thought of getting old - turning into an old man - has never really held much appeal to me. The only saving grace to the entire prospect was that I could reach that "don't mind his outrageous statements. H e's old: he grew up in a different time and just doesn't know any better" point in life. Problem is, it occurred to me, today, that part of the reason people say that now is that the whole "PC"/self-censoring thing didn't exist in the first half of the 20th century. During my "peak" years, that shit is/was an everyday reality.

Will people 40+ years my junior still be saying things like that to excuse my outrageous statements? Will it be excusable to stand out on my front lawn in a tatty robe and slippers, yelling at those damned kids to get off my lawn?

The genesis of this whole train of thought was something I saw on my drive home from work. I was at a different office, today. This one's in DC. I haven't worked there in months. At any rate, the Waze-directed route home took me down I295 past National Harbor. As I was crossing the Woodrow Wilson Bridge back into Northern Virginia, I passed one of National Harbor's shuttle vans. Now, if you're not from the DC area or have never had cause to know about National Harbor, you'd need to know that the full name of one of the facilities there - the one to which this van belonged - is "Gaylord National Harbor".

Now, when I was a kid, it was a pre-PC time. Whereas kids today might refer to things as "gay", something you might have heard when I was a kid - if you did something stupid - was something like "way to go, gaylord". Naturally seeing that van, I was transported back in time and my inner 12 year old laughed - and my adult side laughed at the absurdity of the humor my inner 12 year old found in such a mindless epithet. And then I grew sad that I might never reach an age where I can simply revel in stupidity.

A Foray Into "The Internet of 'Things'"

Last year, an online acquaintance had pointed me to what looked to be a nifty bit of gadgetry. It was an IP-enabled LED lightbulb that you could control from your iOS or Androd mobile device. Not only was it advertised to be able to remotely power it on and off, you could dim it and even change the bulb's output color.

I followed the link that was posted and it took me to a Kickstarter page. When you go to the page, what's shown is an LED bulb that looks like it packs all this functionality into a standard lightbulb's form-factor:

So, on March 3rd of 2013, I placed an order for four of them. Total cost: $300 plus shipping fees. Original expected arrival date was August of 2013. Halfway through August, get an email saying that there's been a manufacturing delay, but it should only be a couple months. Eventually, in December, get notification that they should be arriving in Q1 of 2014. Today they finally arrived.

I was quite chuffed to open the box and start using my new bulbs. I read the installation manual (no small feat as, apparently, the folks at Lifx really like small print - I'd say the user booklet is probably printed in the 6-8pt range). I download the Android app to my notepad (odd, it's got a really low rating on the Google Play Store). I install the first bulb, power it on, and follow the instructions to set up my bulb. Gets to step 5 and the app tells me "can't talk to the device".

I flip through the manual to find the troubleshooting section. I go through the factory reset steps and retry the setup. I try using two different WiFi routers and two different Android devices. Each  (of literally a dozen) attempt ends in the same failure.

So, I send an email to their support address describing my problem. We go back and forth for a while, with them telling me "the Android app is mostly broken" and asking me "can you use an iOS device to set it up: that App is much more functional". Seriously? I reply back, "no, I can't: I don't have any iOS devices". They assure me that a replacement app is in the works and it will fix all the issues ...but it's "just a couple weeks" from being ready for release. Pardon my concern about what "a couple weeks" means from a company that was a couple quarters late in delivering this PoS.

Speaking of dubious descriptions... See that picture above? Yeah. What came looks nothing like that. To be fair, they'd sent pictures of the updated design. The updated design isn't horrible in the pictures, but when you unbox it? Yeah, it's nowhere near as small as the image above. It won't fit in any of my light fixtures and it's mad-heavy.

I've got other LED bulbs, so I know they tend to be on the heavy side. But my other bulbs are positively frail compared to these beasts. Each socket I managed to fit the bulbs into, the socket is being visibly torsioned from the weight of the bulb.

Also, the default color? Suuuuuuuuucks. My other LEDs provide much better quality of light - better color, less harsh projection and less-stark shadowing. Those other bulbs also cost half as much.

At any rate, at this point, I'm thoroughly disillusioned. I ask, "how do I get a refund for these since they're not functioning as advertised". Their helpful response? They inform me that I'll have to ship them back to Australia - on my dime - before they'll credit back the $300 I've wasted on these.

Wow.

Just...

Wow.

A product whose shoddiness is only exceeded by the shoddiness of their customer support. Oh well, at least looking at the threads on their FaceBook page, I'm not alone in this flooding boat.

Lifx: from your CEO on down, everyone in your organization should be ashamed of this disgraceful product-release. A lot of your buyers are people that like to support small/new businesses - it's why we "sponsor" stuff on sites like KickStarter in the first place. You spat all over that. I dunno about others, but it really makes me question whether I should pony-up on any other similar products.

Philips has a better product for a more reasonable price. And, having dealt with them on other support issues, they actually have a worthwhile customer service organization. 

Disgraceful.

Christmas disaster (hopefully) averted

Had ordered a Christmas gift for my mom and had selected the overnight delivery option so it would get here well before we began our trek north, next week. Figured I was in the clear when the shipper shown was +UPS and *not* +FedEx "SmartPost". Was happy when I saw that the package had gotten to the local shipping facility at 12:20 ...and was chilling on the couch, with the tracking page open, waiting for the truck to show up.

Then, shit fell apart. A little after 17:00, UPS updated the tracking page to say that "package delivery has been rescheduled to Monday by 3PM (or evening for home deliveries)". There was never an "on truck for delivery status". There was no "delivery miss" status. Nope: they simply hadn't bothered to even try to deliver it.

*WHAT THE FUCK??*

Looked up the facility on Google to see if I could call and come pick it up - the location is less than 3mi from my house. Go to the information page and see that, while they're open until 19:00 Monday through Thursday, on Fridays the facility fucking closes at _17:00_. Wasn't even any point in calling them.
Needless to say, I went ballistic. This was two late-deliveries, in a row, from Amazon. Granted, both were due to crappy service from the shipping companies, but that's cold-comfort when you're looking at not being able to give someone their Christmas gift.

I let the apoplexy fade, and then hit the "call me" button on Amazon's site. First attempt was a failure: sounded like the CSR was talking through a couple inches of insulation. Hung up the phone, all spun-up, again.

Chill. Must chill...

Hit the "call me" button, again. This time, the (different) CSR came in loud and clear. I pre-apologized for my rather irritable state and explained the situation. She offered the resolution of shipping a new version of the item directly to my travel-destination vi their next (business) day shipping option with shipping fees waived. Was a fair offer, so we went through the process of placing the new order. On the plus side, the replacement item was also 10% cheaper (last minute price-drop on the product!).

Hopefully, by the time we arrive at my mom's house, her Christmas gift will be there waiting for us.

Hopefully, Amazon bitch-slaps their shipping companies for 2014. This is the second order in a row that had shipper-caused late-delivery. So, at this point both FedEx and their USPS proxy have fucked me and UPS has tried to fuck me. The sandpaper condom treatment from the different shipping services is getting old.
Maybe shit like this is why Amazon was pie-in-the-sky'ing about the drone-based delivery?

Cold Comfort

Somewhere along the line, I missed a critical lesson. I think I missed it very early. I think I missed it at each time someone - or maybe even just "life" - tried to teach it to me. It's probably an important lesson, I just don't know how to learn it: "how does one find comfort?"

I look around at the culture I live in. I look around at many of my peers. I see a lot of people who find - or at least think they'll find - comfort in things. There's even a term for it: "retail therapy". For some people, the comfort is in the hunt. For others it's in the having. For me, there's neither. I don't enjoy shopping. I don't enjoy bargain-hunting. I don't particularly enjoy, even, the having of things. Things are functional. Things serve a purpose. Things don't give comfort.

While it's fading - albeit noisily - in western cultures, religion seems to bring many folks comfort. Me? I can't get on board with it. That's not the same as saying I'm an atheist - I know how little I truly know to eliminate the possibility of its basis. I just can't subscribe to it. Even if I could, I don't know that I'd find it a comfort, as, even if the afterlifes accorded to the good and the just are accurately portrayed, for me they'd be a hell. I don't know what to do with the life I have, I can't imagine eternity yawning before me being any kind of good thing.

Most people also seem to find comfort in other people. For the most part, people make me uncomfortable. Except in very specific contexts - work being chief among them - I can't really relate to most people. The people who it did feel like sort of "got" me - that I had a connection to - are all gone ...and I'm adrift.

All I can really do is think to myself. All I can really do is ruminate. And, when the thoughts gel enough, I can type them out ...but doing so isn't a comfort. At best, it's an ordering of things - a setting of a mark to come back to and ponder some more.

Thoughts on Endings

As of today, I've now seen to the disposition of the four grandparents I knew.

• pallbearer for paternal grandfather
• pallbearer for maternal grandfather
• scattered the ashes of my paternal step-grandmother on a church green in London
• pallbearer for maternal grandmother

On top of that, during the spring of 2010, I helped my mother scatter my father's ashes at the site of their first date.

Death and its trappings have rarely been the kind of sad event that it feels like they should be. Maybe I just process things differently. Dunno.

Even my own father's death wasn't as sad it they felt it ought to have been: the news of the death; the viewing at the funeral home prior his cremation and the scattering of his ashes. The thing that felt the most immediately sad was the extinguishing the last embers of his existence - the paperwork of terminating professional memberships and licensures, seeing to insurance papers, recovering passwords to computers, ensuring the smooth transfer of bank accounts from deceased father to surviving mother. Eventually, the sadness of realizing that the one person who most got me, who I could most easily talk to, hit me. However, that was more sadness for my own situation than true sadness at the death of my father.

I think the thing that came closest to saddening me at today's event was the family picture atop my grandmother's cask. It was a picture of my maternal grandparents, my parents and me taken early in my sophomore year of college. What I found sad was three of the five people pictured were all gone, now - and that, barring misadventure or unexpected disease process, I would be the last of those pictured to draw breath. Piled on top of that, the knowledge that, with no children of my own and no neices or nephews, my final disposition is entirely likely to be at the hands of strangers.

Fmeh.

Then again, I'll be dead and hopefully won't have any capability to know or care.

I Might Have a Problem With Letting Things Go...

I'm working on a technical project where there aren't a lot of software solutions available - commercial or opensource. Thus far, I've found two that look like they might do what I need to do.

Today, while I was killing time with StumbleUpon, a website came up for a company that's developing what could be a third option. So, I sent them a quick message to see if I could get more info. They replied back quickly, asking if I had Skype and could do a video call (they appear to be a smallish company and are eager to line up potential customers). I'm guessing the Skype thing was both because a lot of people like video conferencing and because they're in Europe and I'm in the US (Skype means no international calling-rates).

I don't really like doing video conferencing to begin with. When I'm required to be on them, I generally try to find a spot in the meeting room that's off camera. What's more, I dislike Skype and really don't want to load it on my system. Since I've got several SIP-enabled devices (both a TA for our house and my mobile devices and laptop), I offered up SIP-to-SIP as an option.

After I sent off the email with my SIP info, I realized, "crap: I've never actually used my VOIP in a SIP-to-SIP capacity. I better test that it actually works!" And thus began the geeky-waste of the rest of my day.

While there are plenty of things out there for testing outbound SIP capabilities, I wasn't turning up too many options for testing inbound SIP. Eventually, I opted to load some soft-phone software on a couple of my cellphones and try dialing my home SIP number. There were ...issues. I eventually got them sorted out (turns out that the free SIP service I'd set up on my cellphone's soft-phone software only did anonymous calling and my home SIP account was set up to reject anonymous calls). But, in the process of getting it sorted out, I ended up sucking in another geeky friend of mine to help with connection-testing and troubleshooting.

Probably would have been a lot quicker to just load Skype. I just have a hard time doing the "easy" thing when I both want to do it another way and have time to work at getting that way to work. I was on vacation, today, so...

Musings On Decay

Earlier today, a former co-worker pinged me on FaceBook asking me "what happened to 'X'?" In this case, "X" was a mutual friend and former co-worker of ours. Several of us had worked as consultants for the same company for a number of years. However, as happens over time and when no longer joined by a common thread, we'd all ended up going our separate ways. We've each stayed in casual touch - using instant messaging tools, social media, email and the occasional phone call to stay at least somewhat connected. But still, we drifted and time hurtled past in a way you don't really recognize until something calls your attention to it.

This time, what called attention to it was death. Our friend had, apparently passed away this weekend. My attention to FaceBook being fairly infrequent any more, I'd not yet seen all the "goodbye" messages posted to his wall. It was only the notification being lit up from my other friend's direct wall-post that alerted me. When I clicked on the notification, I found the question, "what happened to Warren?" waiting for me.

My initial response was, "huh? What do you mean 'what happened'?" Just the prior weekend, I'd received an "are you there" kind of message via instant messenger from Warren. It had arrived to my computer while I was out doing weekend things with my wife. By the time I noticed the message, it was four hours stale and he was no longer showing as online. I figured, "I'll chat at him the next time I see him online". So, my initial response was going to be "what do you mean".

Given the nature of the message, I'd figured it was worth investigating what might be behind it. So, I clicked on our friend's wall to see if I could glean anything I didn't already know. That's when I saw all the "good-bye" messages. That's when I realized that I won't be chatting to him, again.

It's been four years since I've seen him. The last time I'd seen him was at a work function. Last I'd actually spoken with him was by phone and it had been a few times late last year. At the time, he'd been going through a rough patch - being in treatment for cancer. He'd sounded like the treatments were kicking his as. Each time we'd talked, he'd sounded worse than the last time. The final time we'd talked on the phone, he'd indicated that they were finally done with the treatments. I'd made - what turned out to be - the foolish interpretation/assumption that it meant he was in remission and the treatments were over. The cancer he'd indicated he'd had was one that had a decently-high survival-rate.

And now, he's gone.

Haven't written any good-byes on his wall yet. He won't be the one to read them and I don't really know his friends to be able to say anything that makes a statement seem a sensible thing to do. Don't know that I will write on his wall. I have emailed the other folks I knew who knew him trying to see if anyone knew more than what I could glean from what was already posted on his wall.

Recently, I've been looking at where I am in my own life. Even prior to today's revelation, I was in one of those "decay" states of mind. I'm 43 and my wife will soon be 40. We have no children. My father has already passed and it seems like I have less and less contact with the various folks I've been friends with over the years. It feels like I peaked somewhere along the lines. Ironically, probably during the period in which I worked with Warren.

Full-circle kind of moment, I guess.

On Milestones

A former co-worker hit the big four-oh, this week. He posted that he wasn't bothered by it and didn't see how it could be any kind of milestone to be worried about. For the most part, I agreed, but I did point out to him:

• At age 32, you've likely been legally driving for as many years as you waited to be able to legally drive.
• At age 36, you've been legal to vote, legal to sign contracts, tryable as an adult, able to go to war for as many years as you werent - also, that porn model/actress you're ogling likely was only recently evicted from her mother's womb when you were the age she is now
• At 42, you've likely been drinking legally for as many years as you had to wait to be able to legally do so. For Douglas Adams fans, this is also your answer year.

So, yeah, 40 isn't really a milestone kind of year. All forty really means is that:

• You're now out of your thirties - an age-range that had already begun to stretch one's ability to argue about still being "young".
• You're now, actuarially speaking, truly middle-aged. After all, what percentage of people are living much past their 80th birthday when you're living in a country with an average life-expectancy of less than 80 years?
• If you only had 12 years of primary schooling, you've been working for at least 22 years ...but still have 27 left before you can retire and draw your full Social Security alotment
• If you went the 12+4 years of schooling route, you've been working for at least 18 years, but still have that same 27 work-years left to slog through.
• Chances are, when you're filling in one of those age verification things, taking part in a survey, etc., you're likely having to scroll one line further down to find your "I'm between X and Y years of age" box

Could probably think of a few others, but, I'm depressed now (and 43). Think I'll go grab some whisky - a drink-choice that really only seems to make sense once you've reached "a certain age" - and try to forget these milestones.

Any way, happy birthday, buddy!

Ghosts of Futures Past

This past weekend, a friend of ours got married in Detroit - his now wife's home town. On the plus side, the wedding was rather lovely - quite a good time was had with a great group of friends. On the minus side, I had to bear witness to what's become of Detroit.

It's not that I've never been to Detroit, before. It's not that my prior trips to Detroit weren't somewhat disturbing. In various IT jobs, I've had cause to travel to Detroit several times in the mid/late 90s and the middle third of the 2000s. Fortunately, I rarely had to go too deep into Detroit and, when passing by the heart of Detroit, it was usually at night. Dunno if it was so much a case then as now, but not having really seen the real Detroit in the light of day was probably a blessing.

The Detroit of 2013 in the stark light of day is ...soul-wounding. Block after block of derelict warehouses, factories, office complexes, apartment blocks and various types of houses. Many burnt-out husks. Windows either graffitoed, smashed or boarded up (usually with graffiti on the boards). Many houses with partially or completely collapsed roofs - either failing from their own decay and the forces of weather or from things falling on them. The ones with external causes were varoiusly-disturbing. All were long-collapsed and left untended. Roofs collapsed by tree-fall were probably the least disturbing. It was the houses with utility poles (or other civic infrastructure) crushing down on them that were perhaps the most disturbing - after all, it's one thing for a single house to be mortally wounded, it's entirely different when you realize that an entire area and its infrastructure have been abandoned.

Graffiti ran the gamut from artless tagging to pieces of art. Much of the graffiti was grim and gang-related. Some was almost "inspired".

Perhaps the most bitter-sweet was the abandoned, derelict school building with "School's out forever" emblazoned in large, colorful letters across the entire length of it the crumbling building. I suppose on the plus side, at least in that kind of desolate landscape, some vandals are at least able to maintain a bit of humor - even if gallows humor. Who knows: perhaps it was technically an art installation. Dunno. In all cases, it was very sobering.

There were also vast swaths of the city that appear to have been razed. Found out that, in many such cases, as neighborhoods died, the city had the stragglers move out since they no longer had the funds to provide EMS services or utilities.

As I was passing down one of the interstates, I saw a sign for one of the mega lotteries with an advertised value of over $80Mn. Given some of the real estate prices I'd heard people quoting - even for the more intact properties, it seemed like I could buy a significant chunk of Detroit with such winnings.

I don't know that Detroit is on a mortal path. But I gotta think the chance of a meaningful recovery is somewhere well less than 50/50. Worse, the same economic forces that created the current Detroit still seem to be at play elsewhere. Makes me dread might be in store for the rest of us.

Vintage Virginia Wine Festival (2013 Installment)

In previous years, going to the Vintage Virginia Wine Festival has been a fun way to spend a weekend afternoon with friends. It's always had its down points (lack of shade, long lines for tastings, chaos at the wine-pickup and middling food). However, all of those were at least bearable.

This year's installment? Not so much. And, it started at the opening gates and pretty much continued throughout the day.

In previous years, there were two entrances for getting in. We parked midway between the two usual entrances - slightly closer to the one. We saw the line at the closer one and decided to walk to one we'd used in prior years. When we got there, we found "vendors only" (and similar) signs. We asked if we could still get in there (since they had the usual table full of sampling-glasses) but were informed that there was only one gate usable by patrons this year. So, we made the long trudge back to the other gate. It turns out the reason there was such a line, this year, was that there was only the one patron-gate. Two, perfectly serviceable entrances, but they were only allowing patrons in by way of the one.

Fail.

Even better? If you'd bought (and brought) your ticket ahead of time, the line to get your ticket taken was much longer than either the line to buy tickets or the will-call line. So much for being smart and getting the tickets sorted out ahead of time.

Double-fail.

In previous years, the place was organized with with trinket and other sellers arrayed along the fence at the top of the hill, interspersed with food and beverage sellers. They also had what was, essentially, an outdoor food-court. Granted, the food that was sold was middling, county fair style and quality food - nothing to write home about. That said, these food-vendors knew how to move a large number of people through their lines, sold food at a surprisingly reasonable price for what's essentially a captive audience and they gave you more than just a few morsels for the price paid.

I guess this year they were trying to respond to prior years' attendees complaining about the quality of the food. This year, they decided, "lets bring in chefs and 'gourmet' food trucks". While this would have been a great way to supplement the prior years' offerings, they opted to have the food trucks completely supplant the prior years' food sellers. Unfortunately, this caused a number of problems.

At this venue, there's a paucity of shady spots. Given that most years, the weekend they hold the event tends somehow always seems to manage to be both sunnier and warmer than normal for the time of year, the lack of shade really sucks. That said, there was at least some shade available to take refuge in. This year, all of the shady spots were occupied by food trucks. In prior years, these areas had either had cooling tents in them or trinket-sellers who didn't object to you spending time under their tents, even if you didn't actually end up buying anything. All of those sellers were now pushed to the inner area of the field and, apparently, their tend-sizes restricted.

The food trucks were also troublesome from the perspective of service pace. The prior years' "slop-slingers", while pushing middling food, pushed it quickly. If they were operating a 15 foot wide food-stand, they were servicing four to five lines in that space. This year, the food trucks each hogged up 15 feet of shade yet could each service only one line. And, because of how the food trucks operate, that one line they were able to service moved much slower than any one line previously serviced by the slop-slingers. To say that the lines were long and slow would be an exceedingly charitable characterization.

Now, don't get me wrong, lines by themselves aren't an inherently evil thing. If what you get at the end is of sufficient value - tasty, adequately filling, etc. - then it can be a worthwhile tradeoff of the time spent. However, when you're getting gouged for tiny portions of middling food and have to wait in the scorching sun and humid heat for a half hour or more, it's not a good value. It's rage-inducing.

Further, when the food trucks have displaced the cooling tents and reduced the number of places for getting water, particularly in a place where people are consuming a dehydrating substance like alcohol, it's a recipe for fainting spells or worse. Saw the medical assistance golf carts go by on more than a few occasions. Sadly, with the huge lines caused by the slowness of the food trucks' service, those medical assistance carts had a tough time getting to their assistance-targets on a timely basis.

And, whose brilliant idea was it to have a cupcake truck? Really: you want to try to serve up heavy, overly-sweet baked goods in northern Virginia heat? The market definitely spoke on that one: I didn't observe a single person attempting to buy a cupcake. The only people I saw were those who stopped to see if they had any water for sale (they didn't). Otherwise, the cupcake truck sat there completely unvisited (yet still soaking up 15 feet of space that could have been used for sitting down or seeking refuge from the sun).

About the only good part of the food trucks? With everyone stuck in line waiting for food and water (the food trucks displaced prior years' beverage sellers, too), the lines for the wine sellers were much shorter this year than in prior years.

Unfortunately, the value of the shorter lines was greatly reduced by the size of this year's pours. This year's pours seemed to be maybe half the size of prior years' pours.

While this may be a positive from the standpoint of making it harder for people to get blind-drunk, it also makes it difficult to actually tell "do I like this wine enough to buy a bottle of it". And, to be honest, the reason I go to wine-tasting events is to see what wines I'd like to buy and to take home a case (or so). I'm not there to get smashed, I'm there to find stuff I want to buy. However, when you're pours are so small I can barely fully wet my tongue with it, let alone swish it around in my mouth to fully experience its flavors and textures, it's not going to make me want to buy. And saying to me, "this one has a really great mouth fill" after having poured me something that doesn't allow me to experience that feel makes me want to just punch you in the goddamned throat.

Needless to say, the usual case-plus that we've bought in previous years wasn't repeated this year. The folks we were with also bought radically less. Prior years, one of our complaints was the wait to pick up the wine we'd bought inside. Judging by the nearly non-existent lines at the wine-pickup area near the venue's exit, it wasn't just our party that was buying considerably less. If I were one of the wine-sellers, I'd be pissed at this year's changes.

I'm pretty sure that 2013's incarnation of Vintage Virginia will have seen the end of our attendance at these events.

Reason #57 To Love My Job

I work for a global enterprise. Literally: we have locations all over the globe. We have locations ranging from small, satellite offices of less than two dozen people up through datacenters hosting thousands of servers and office parks seating thousands of cube-rats.

I, myself, have three or four locations I work-locations that my badge(s) will get me into without having to file any additional paperwork. On top of it all, I can even sometimes work from home. I have my designated seat at one of our enterprise lab facilities. From that facility, I can reach production systems as well as the lab most of my engineering/test systems are in. My secondary work location is much closer to my house, but because it's at one of the "thousands of cube-rats" office parks, parking and traffic are a nightmare, so I generally avoid going there. Because my secondary work location is part of the core enterprise network, I can reach the production servers from there. I also have the ability to reach the resources at my primary work location.

Recently, I got put on a project that requires me to access assets at a secondary lab. This lab is more than double the distance from my house that my primary work location is. From there, I can reach assets in production, assets at that lab, and, depending on the workstation configuration, assets at my primary lab/work-location. However, given the distance an the nightmare that is traffic in Northern VA, I've gone to that facility once in the past 18 months.

Lastly, I have the ability to work from home. From here, I can reach either lab via VPN. However, because it's via VPN, I can only connect to one or the other at a time. Oh... and I can't connect to our production networks from home.

So, when I'm working three projects and supporting production, I end up having to split my day. Mornings are spent at either the main lab or the headquarters facility so that I can work on production networks. Afternoons and evenings are spent working from home so that I can reach each lab's resources.

On the plus side of time at home, the only things interrupting me are my dogs asking to go out to pee.

Social Graph Search? I Don't Geddit...

So FaceBook's announced its "Graph Search" functionality. The tech publishing community, looking to create a story where one likely doesn't meaningfully exist, wants to grab eyeballs by loudly asking, "should Google be worried" or stating "FaceBook is encroaching on Google's turf". I'm not sure I can buy into this attempt to grab page-views.

In order for something to be "social" it has to be more than two dorks, each sitting by themselves, doing the same solitary activity. To be honest, I don't really care if my friends are watching the same movie on NetFlix or listening to the same tune on Spotify that I am. If we aren't sitting in the same room, able to MST3K it together, what's the point.

And, before someone chimes in, "you could be on chat or headphones doing just that", no, actually, you can't. None of the media services currently offer a synchronous consumption capability. Ironically, about the only way you have that is if you happen to both be watching one of the legacy "on demand" cable services from the same cable company - not one of the "new media" service providers' offerings.

If I'm watching something that's even 1s ahead of the other person, my MST3K'ing is going to be a spoiler (in our house, this is seen with hockey where the feed to my wife's set-top box is usually 1-3s off of the feed to my set-top box. Instead of being a good thing, it's actually rather annoying when watching the same sporting event and one of you hears the other "woot" or "groan" in reaction to an even the other has yet to see.

And, while I value the opinion of friends on services, movies, etc., most of my friends are geographically distributed enough that I'm much more likely to get a valuable recommendation for a plumber/restaurant/etc. from a nearby stranger than I am a friend who lives 30 miles away.

Thanks, I'll take a basic Google search or a Yelp search to a "Graph Search" when I'm looking for more than "what is my friend doing right now". Even when I want to know the answer to that question, it's mostly because I am thinking of calling them to see if they're free to do something that's actually "social" rather than something that is communally-solitary.

Red Tape for a Red Car

This past weekend, we received the replacement for our 2004 Saturn VUE.

At eight+ years of age, the Saturn was starting to make some alarming noises and had some alarming handling characteristics (a really horrible shudder at about 72MPH and tendencies to buck when attempting to hold speed, uphill, in the 25-30MHP range). So, back in September, we'd decided "this car's probably going to be very expensive to try to keep for much longer: time to look for a replacement".

We didn't need a vehicle the size of the VUE. The VUE had been bought when we were trying to have kids. Now, with no kids or ability to have kids, we only needed a vehicle suitable for holiday trips with two 50lb bulldogs. So, while a Fiat 500 would be well too small (though, having test-driven one, they are quite nice), we still wanted something smaller and more fuel-efficient than the VUE.

"More fuel-efficient" wasn't a major challenge. Even when brand new, the VUE got 18 city/25 highway. In the past year, it had been averaging around 17MPG with mixed-use (though, primarily city) driving.

• While a car with the mileage of a Prius would have been nice, they're utterly joyless cars - purely utilitarian.
• While a Tesla S would have been a rather nice choice, the $85K for the range and other options we wanted made that choice a non-starter.
• The concept of the Chevy Volt was nice, but, for a $40K+ vehicle, it felt really cheaply made.
• Most of the other hybrids and EVs suffered similar problems to the Prius and the Volt.

Having been well-impressed by the A3 TDI sport-wagon I'd driven for over a month while working in Germany, we sought out one of them. Unfortunately, Audi had decided to discontinue making it after October of this year. All that was available were the ones already stateside. All of the A3's within an eight-hour radius of the DC metro region were: A) automatic transmissions (*ick*); and, B) some boring shade of silver/grey/white/black/beige (double *ick*). We really wanted a stick-shift and we wanted something that wasn't one of the boring colors that seems to have taken over northern VA in recent years. We also really wanted the sport wagon, not its sedan replacement. So, the Audi fell off our list.

Our next contender was something from Mini. They have decent fuel economy. Even more, for that fuel economy, we didn't have to compromise on performance or comfort. They were a bit lower on fuel economy than we wanted (26/32 for the Cooper S variants) and a bit more expensive than we'd been hoping for. But... At any rate, after taking several different Mini variants out (tried the classic Cooper, the Clubman and the Countryman, each in two-wheel and all-wheel drive variants and turbo and normally-aspirated variants), we decided we wanted a manual Countryman. For the options we wanted, they didn't have anything on the lot. Much like all the other Northern VA dealerships, most of what they had were automatics and in colors we weren't interested in. So, we opted to order one.

Then the waiting began. For three weeks, the order status (on the Mini Owner's Lounge) stayed stubbornly on "order submitted; awaiting scheduling". Then, one day, it changed to "slated for production" ...but stubbornly stayed in that status for a further 2+ weeks.

It seemed odd that it would be scheduled but not produced for so long. So, I called our salesman to see if he had a more granular view of its status. He checked his system and saw that it had actually left port!

On the one hand, it was great knowing we were on the home stretch. On the other hand, it just ratcheted up the pain of anticipation. Every day, I logged into the Owners Lounge to see if its status had changed. The magical "at the distribution center" status update finally happened. So, I called my salesman to see how long it would be till it was on the lot.

I know when I'd ordered my last car, it came into the port of Baltimore and was at the dealership three days later. I was hoping for the same, especially given that such a timetable would have meant we could have had it in time to take our Thanksgiving roadtrip in the new car. Alas, it got hung up at the processing center. We were due to leave for my mom's house on November 20th. It wasn't due into the dealership until the evening of the 21st. DRAT!

We slumped off to PA sans new car. Was an enjoyable, relaxing trip. Good company and good food. Donna and my mom did some Black Friday shopping, but Donna was eager to hurry back to DC to try to pick the car up as early as possible. I told her, "even if we leave now, it will be dark by the time we get there" (early sunset of a daylight savings time day!) and I don't pick up new vehicles in anything but full daylight. Too many things can hide in low-light conditions.

We got up Saturday and did our normal morning farmer's market run. Upon hurrying home, Donna pestered me to ping our salesman on when we could come pick it up. I sent him a text message and we sorted it out that we'd meet around 12:30.

We headed over to the lot at the appointed time. I'm glad that I'd insisted on a full-daylight pickup. When we got there, I noticed that the racing stripes had some bubbling and peeling (and some other shipping blemishes). Turns out that all those striped Minis you see out there have those stripes applied at the distribution center rather than the factory. They're hand-applied, not machine applied. I was disappointed at both the application errors and the fact that they were a post-shipping, manual application rather than part of the paint-job. Oh well.

So, we did all the paperwork on the car, but left it at the dealership for them to fix. They dropped it off Monday:

Donna took the picture with her phone. Framing's a bit squished, probably due to her excitement. Any way, it's a nice little car. Unfortunately, it's still not free and clear...

When we'd done the paperwork, Saturday, we couldn't find the title-release for the car. No major problem, normally: just go to the DMV and get a copy from them. Today, Donna headed down to the DMV to do just that. Unfortunately, the DMV didn't have a record of ever having received the title-release from the lien-holder. Joy.

Went online - pulled the VIN number from our insurance company's web site and looked up the phone number for the bank we'd financed the VUE through. Wouldn't you know it: the bank we'd financed through had changed ownership. When I called the new bank, their automated system couldn't find our record by either VIN or SSN. So, I did the "find the human" dance with the new bank's call-tree.

Eventually, I got hold of a nice woman. She informed me the reason that I couldn't use the automated system to get my account info was, having paid the car off nearly four years previously, it was no longer in their online system. They'd have to pull the record from their archives. She'd found the vehicle information and was requesting the restore. They'd mail it out and it should be at our house in 3-5 business days. I thanked her for her assistance and hung up.

Given that the dealership was expecting to have the turnover paperwork, this week, I called them up to let them know "ran into an issue - won't be able to do the DMV paperwork for another 3-5 business days". They seemed to be cool with it. Probably isn't the first time they've had this happen. But still can't get this all sorted out till at least next week.

On the other hand, the loan paperwork for this car won't even have gotten into my new bank's hands for nearly two weeks. I'd tried to login to their electronic loan system, last night, but they had no record of me. Turns out, they typically don't have the stuff available in their loan system for up to two weeks from the purchase date. 

"Waiting for procedures" seems to be not only the story of my work life, it's the story of my personal life, as well. Fmeh.

Soulless in Suburbia

So, I live in Northern Virginia (also known as NoVA). These are the Virginia suburbs of the Washington, DC metro region. All in all, it's a fairly well to do area. Sadly, it's a fairly soulless area. If you come from a city like New York, Philadelphia, Boston or Baltimore, you're used to areas that have "neighborhoods" - distinct communities that have common cultural bonds.

I've lived in NoVA for just shy of 20 years, now. In that time, the only things I've noticed to dominate the area are homeowners associations. NoVA is the shining example of what's wrong with HOAs and the types of people that love them. HOAs are part of an overall pattern of enforced blandness and suburban ennui. Worse, in areas like NoVA, the HOA mindset seems to permeate all aspects of life here.

I guess it almost naturally follows that if your stuck living in neighborhoods of cookie-cutter neighborhoods of hundreds of HOA-approved beige single family homes, the unrelenting beigeness will come to fill the empty space left by your shriveled soul. So, I guess it only follows that, if you live in a house that looks almost identical to your neighbors', you'll want to dress like them, drive the same vehicles as them, eat like them, etc. In NoVA, you can be an interchangeable clone, just like all your HOA-dominated peers.

You start your day by slipping into your khakis and stumbling down the stairs to take in breakfast. You take your McKids to their school because, god forbid they walk the five blocks to get there (and the local school district won't bus them if they live closer than 1mi. to the school). I mean, it's too dangerous for little Brayden to walk a few blocks to school. And if there's bad weather? Heavens: no one has invented boots or umbrellas yet - they'd catch pneumonia if you didn't drive them to school!

So, out you go in your silver or grey (or other automotive beige-equivalent) minivan or SUV. Kids bundled in back, watching the mandatorily-installed mini-LCDs. It'd suck to have to actually talk to your kids or have your kids pry their eyes away from a TV set for more than the length of time it takes to transit from the house to the car. Thank god for iPads, though, because even that gap can be filled!

Kids safely deposited at school, you take your drab little soulless car and hop on the beltway.You make the two hour, thirty mile trip to work. You find a space to park your car - not too close to the other cars, lest someone ding your grey pride and joy, though! You lurch into your non-descript office building and trudge your way into cubicle-land. You talk about the latest thing you've TiVO'ed while taking half a bagel or donut from the tray in the break room. You spend your day staring at a computer monitor while what's left of your humanity dies a little more.

The day crawls by in a blur of pointless meetings and pointless smalltalk. You stumble out into the parking lot trying to remember, "where did I park my car" because, god knows you can't tell your little grey or silver suburbia-mobile from another. Thank god you got that "clever" personalized license plate, those "funny" bumper stickers and the family window stickers to help you tell your little grey or silver suburbia-mobile from the others. Ah! There it is - the one that chirps when you press on your keyless entry system; the one saying "it's me you're looking for!" You toss your laptop case in the car and ready yourself for the slog home.

Two hours later, you've navigated the thirty miles back to your drab, beige house. The spouse is home, but the kids are still off at the mall. You can't remember which one, because there's so many nearby and the all look the same and have all the same stores in them. Time to send out the "come home for dinner" text message.

Eventually, the kids come home (yes, somehow, deepest, darkest suburbia is safe enough for them to be out at the mall, just not enough to walk to school). No one feels like cooking, so you pack the kids into the family truckster and head off to the nearest place to get chain food. You ignore each other over dinner, staring into your respective cellphones or notepad computers - catching up on the latest that FaceBook has to offer. Dinner is acceptable but utterly forgettable - it's just like the thousands you've had before at this or some other chain-food outlet.

You trundle the kids back to the family truckster and drive home so the kids can do their homework and so you can lose yourself in all the things you've TiVO'ed this week.

It goes on like this for the rest of your life. It all goes blurring by, featureless. One day, you actually die, but you don't really notice.

New Car Blues

My wife's car is getting long in the tooth - especially for a GM, apparently. It's making noises as though it's going to require some non-trivial maintenance (at eight and a half years of age it's got less than 80,000 miles on it - so those noises may just be paranoia on my part). So, we were looking at replacing it.

We've decided on the vehicle we want and the set of features we want. Unfortunately, the dealer doesn't have the car with anything really approaching the combination of features that we want. That means we have to order it from the factory. Absolute best case for delivery is approximately four weeks. Expected worst-case scenario is approximately twelve weeks.

<SideRant>
Why the fuck is it so hard to get an on-lot car: A) with manual transmission; and/or B) that isn't only available in some shade of silver or grey)
</SideRant>

My bank is currently offering about $1800 in discounts off the price of the car we want ...if we use their financing. Mostly, that discount makes up for the 1% higher interest rate for their offer versus dealer-financing). That offer, however, is only good through 11/14/12.

I'm good if the car takes less than 8wks to arrive. If the car takes more than that, I'm boned with respect to my bank's package (unless they extend the current package's end-date or initiate a new, similar program afterwards).

Looking at BankRate.Com, the direct-loan offers I'm seeing from the banks they aggregate data for start at about 0.5% higher than my bank's current promotion. But that costs me both the $1800 discount and a higher interest rate.

Only bright side is that the dealer offered to lock me at their current rate. Would cost me the $1800 discount. However, I think that would be about a wash. Oh well, I'll take my wife's truck in, tomorrow, and see what they can quote me for a trade-in.

Man. Shoulda bought before the economy started to recover and banks and car companies were both starving for business. :p

WTF, BMW?

I'd been hoping to get a small, fun, fuel-efficient car to stand in as a daily driver for my BMW Convertible. Unfortunately, things seem to be conspiring to put the kaibosh on that.

My wife's Saturn has been showing its age, lately. Things coming loose (e.g., keep having to re-seat and re-tighten the hood's latch-bolt). The A/C has been a joke against this summer's heat (so, probably a leak in the coolant system) - and requires driving in a lower gear to keep the car a reasonable temperature. The car shudders under low-throttle conditions (e.g., when in going through an uphill 25MPH zone and trying to maintain a constant speed). In all, it means I've had to turn to thoughts of finding a suitable replacement for it.

We'd bought the Saturn when we were still hopeful of having children. At the time, we were hoping to need a vehicle the size of a VUE. Plus, it was one of the few SUVs in its class that had comfort features like heated front seats (this was 2004).

Since the prospect of children are no longer an issue, I'd really wanted to replace it with a smaller vehicle. I was thinking something more in sport wagon form-factor. Basically, a smaller, more fuel-sipping car, but still larger than my convertible. Since we've still got pets to haul and pack heavy when going on road trips (e.g., the holidays), this seemed like a good compromise.

One of the vehicles I'd been considering was the X1. Tonight, traffic was such that I had to take bailout routes (actually, bailouts from the bailouts). The GPS routed me past BMW of Alexandria. I figured, "I'm in the neighborhood...". I'd figured that, since the X1 was positioned similarly to the Audi A3 sport wagon, that it'd have similar efficiency specs. Not so much, though. Long story short, the X1 is pretty much off the table. While it's the right size, I'm just not gonna pony up $50K for a 3500lb+ (base weight) sport wagon that only gets 17/27.

My goal for any replacement for the SUV is a vehicle whose lowest MPG is 30MPG. In other words, I'm looking at hybrids, diesels and other fuel efficient gas vehicles to replace the Saturn. Given that I have the A3 and (had the) X1 in the list of considerations, I'm not looking for an econo-box, per se, I'm just looking for a nice ride that doesn't require weekly stops at the gas station.

To be honest, I don't understand BMW's direction, at this point. I have a 2002 e46 convertible. I bought it new (custom ordered, actually, when BMW still offered their "BMW Individual" program on the 3-series). I'd always considered it to be a bit heavy for it's class, but dealt with it. It also got respectable mileage (rated at 18/26 but I usually get closer to 30 on the highway). However, when I look at my e46's current siblings/cousins, I'm just lost. This years' 3-series vehicles are bigger than my model year's 5-series vehicles were. Granted, for their size, they get decent mileage, but that's about all I can say for them. I look at competing models from Audi and it's even more apalling (the most feature-fitted A3 still has a efficiency rating of 30/42).

I like small, sporty, efficient cars. BMW used to offer cars that were relatively efficient for being sporty. Now, their cars are all too freaking big, their rides have been softened and their efficiency is abyssmal. It's like, "WTF". It's no wonder Audi has been eating BMW's lunch, lately.

Open Letter To Google:

I get that there are and should be standards for public posts on sites like Plus. I don't have a problem with that, beyond the ones of how uneven and seemingly arbitrary the enforcement of standars is. That said, Google does provide mechanisms for private- or limited-sharing. The presumption of such a system is that, so long as everyone in those closed-circles/groups are in agreement on the "rules" of what's appropriate to share, Google really shouldn't insert themselves as the no-no police (obvious exceptions for material that is, in fact, illegal in the jurisdictions that the material is shared to).

That Google appears to want to insert themselves into semi-private communications and make determinations as to what should be allowed in those private communications is, at best, "troubling". It leaves a tremendously bad taste in ones mouth. For all its failings, FaceBook (and other social media that offer private communications options) doesn't seem to have inappropriate editorial actions as one of their problems. Frankly, logging in this morning and seeing delete actions against non-public posts where the people shared with/to have all agreed on content rules, was both a touch unsettling and rage-inducing.

I know that Google's reported active Plus-use numbers are going up. So, perhaps they feel secure in their place with Google Plus. Perhaps that feeling of security it making them feel like they have a freer hand. I dunno, but it's definitely making me reconsider my place on Plus.

So, if I drop off of Plus, it's because I have decided that Plus is no longer a suitable home for me. There's too many other options, out there, where I don't have to worry about what I say or to whom I say it.

Who knows: maybe it's less Google in this instance than it is other posters on Plus acting dickishly or simply carelessly (resharing private or even semi-private things publicly is "careless" at best). I really don't want to consider that one as betrayal of trust makes things decidedly not worth sticking around for.

Test

Narf

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.

Observation From A Party of Friends

It's a lot easier to not notice that you're getting older if you don't hang out with the same group of people (periodically) over time. The problem with infrequent get-togethers, is that it's a stark reminder that your friends are all getting old (and, by extension, that you're getting old).

Used to only notice this when I would go home to visit my parents. Each time I did so, they looked older - particularly my father. It got to the point where the visible aging became hard to bear and made it such that, even though I really loved my parents, I couldn't bear the psychological toll of seeing how much older they looked each time I saw them. It meant that visits became more and more infrequent. Sadly, with reduced frequency of exposure, the progressive effects of aging would be all that much more apparent because the snapshots had longer intervals between them.

Who knows: maybe the key to not being bothered by it is to see people more frequently That way the changes are less stark and the resultant shocks less jarring.

Dunno, but people need to stop getting older - it makes me feel too old when I see.

TMI: It's Not Just a Nuclear Disaster in Pennsyltucky

In news of the TMI (seriously, just go ahead and skip this post, now...)

Yesterday, shortly before bed, I stumbled on one of those dubious "interesting facts" web sites that seem to litter teh Intarwebz. If you saw the sperm/exercise post, last night, that's where it came from. At any rate, one of the "interesting facts" listed on the site was something to the effect that "if you dream that you're peeing, you will actually end up peeing in your sleep". This is probably from the same school of wisdom that says "if you fall from a fatal height in your dream and hit the ground before you wake up, you'll die in your sleep".

Apparently, my brain took this as some kind of challenge. I was having some really freaking bizarre dreams (thank you, double-dose of melatonin!), last night. At one point, in one of those dreams, I ended up dreaming that I was taking a piss. This wasn't just some ordinary, run down the hall for a quick squirt kind of piss, either. No. It was an epic piss. It was the kind of long-lasting, bladder-voiding monster-piss that would have turned me into a desicated corpse had it not been a dream-piss (look, I already told you "TMI" and "skip this": you were warned).

I did not wake up before or during this epic void. Nope. I continued on with the rest of a night full of freaking bizarre dreams. I woke up in the morning and all was dry. So, either the bed has amazing absorbancy and odor-killing properties, or my brain won the challenge (#MythBusted).

Musical Brain

Here I sit, at my laptop, looking at the clock, not yet 03:00 and I know that I'm probably up for the day? How do I know? I've a simple barometer of whether I'm done sleeping for my stretch. If I wake up, and I hear music, I know my brain has woken up and likely won't go back to sleep - at least, not easily and probably not for long.

Since I need to get up before 06:00, today, attempting to sleep till my alarm would likely result in less than two hours additional sleep. Probably not worth the effort. Probably not worth the anxiety of sitting there, watching my alarm clock click onwards towards my target waking-time, wondering "can I actually get back to sleep for a meaningful ammount of time."

The funny thing with my internal wakeup music is that, as much as I can tell by it's presence that "I'm up", I can also frequently tell how "up" I am. If the music is strong, loud and relatively complete, there's no point even trying to go back to sleep. If the music is just barely there, especially if whatever my inner-DJ's playing is at a low volume or is just a line or two of whatever music is coursing through my head, I know there's a chance that I might get back to sleep. I just have to wait it out and hope the music fades or comes to a stop.

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?

Better?

Found this image, today, while looking at my "all circles" feed on Plus:

I fin this image is interesting from a couple standpoints:

1. For starters, the Nexus appears not to have a spoon or even anything spoon-like. Sometimes, all you want and all you need are a spoon. Everything else is just pointless distraction that doesn't help you accomplish whatever it is you're trying to do.
2. At the same time, you'll notice that with the Apple device, there's little possibility of the hockey-helmeted set hurting themselves with anything pointy or sharp. I suppose the really determined could accidentally scoop out their own eyeball (or, more likely, get it stuck, rectally), but that's about the biggest "danger".

For the record, unlike a lot of the devotees of each maker, I don't really have a religious affiliation with either device. For me, what I want is a tool that works well for the tasks I need to use it for. If I need a spoon, it does me little good to use the device that doesn't have a spoon. If what I need is a knife, it does me little good to use a device that only offers me a spoon. It's just a question of the right tool for the job.

My Time-Sense Is Shit

My last job, I was an IT consultant for a five year period of time. In that period, I averaged 150+ nights/year in Marriott hotels (earned a lot of hotel points, Hertz points, airline points, etc.) all over the US and Europe. My boss owned my schedule Monday to Friday and my wife owned my schedule on weekends. Between those two individuals and Google calendar, I never really had need to keep track of my time. My only worry was getting to the electronically-scheduled appointments on time. Absent my eCalendars and the readout on my cell phone, I really had no firm clue of what time or day it was (beyond knowing "it must be M-F since I'm on the road" or "it must be the weekend since I'm home").

I don't think my mind has ever recovered from this. Even now, rolling up on three years since leaving that job, if it ain't on my calendar or I don't have my phone, I don't really know when it is (whatever "it" is).

All of this is prelude/background to why I didn't specifically remember when I spent six weeks - a non-trivial chunk of time - in Memphis. I'd sorta always thought it was 2007. Turns out it was 2008. The only reason I know that it was 2008 was that Flo Rida's _Low_ was all over the goddamned radio in Memphis (and the particular Hertz outlet I was renting from didn't have XM in the cars they were renting me).

I should have remembered it was 2008 because it was shortly after spending six weeks eating lots of barbecue and fried-food in Memphis that I ended up hospitalized with pancreatitis (not related: that was medically-induced because of a toxic reaction to Topamax - a medicine I was on, at the time, for my epilepsy).

You'd think the pain that led to the hospitalization would have been an adequate time-marker for when the Memphis trip happened. But, for as freakishly detailed and complete my memory tends to be, my memories are ordered more in relation to each other than they are to a date on a calendar (*shrug*).

Incidentally, the only reason I know that Low came out in 2008 is because I just got done looking at Flo Rida's Wikipedia entry. And, the reason I was looking at that was because one of his more recent songs was featured in the promotional soundtrack of a Disney movie I'd Stumbled, earlier. I found the video to that song (which led me to Wikipedia) because I'd liked the song in the Disney promo and had punched in "song from wreck it ralph trailer" into Google.

Lions and Tigers and Bears (Oh My)!

So, this week LinkedIn, eHarmony and Last.FM all had their user password databases hacked. I was potentially affected by the first and by the last. Being married and not overly a fan of eHarmony's working-model, at any rate, I'm not a member of their site.

It used to annoy me when web sites forced you to login with your registered email address rather than your userid. To be honest, I've come to the point where I'd rather they only allowed you to use your email address as your login token. It raises the bar on brute-forcing your account, that way. Not only does an attacker need to guess your password (and I'm generally a fan of four-class pass-phrases), they need to guess your email address, as well (and email addresses tend to be much longer than userids, at any rate).

Granted, if attackers have breached an entire site via the back-end and dumped out the entire user list, they have access to your email address. And, if you use the same email address and password-pair across multiple sites, you're still fairly boned. Fortunately, that's not the case for me. I use unique addresses for each site I register with. So, just because the LinkedIn and Last.FM attackers have my authentication credentials to those two sites, they don't have my credentials to other sites - even if I happened to use the password component across more than one site.

Overall, one of the easiest ways to create unique email addresses is to do a "+TOKEN" email address. Sites like gmail support adding a "+token" to your base email address and still have resultant emails delivered to the base address. As an additional bonus, you can set up delivery-rules to automatically process such emails based on the original target address. Unfortunately, many of the websites I visit consider "ferricoxide+TOKEN@gmail.com" to be an invalid email address. This is just about as annoying as websites that limit me on the password string-length and on the characters I can use. C'mon, guys, this is 2012, not 1992. It's a different security environment out there and you should be doing everything you can to foster good security habits in your users - not hamstring them (this goes double for banks who seem to be the worst offenders with regard to forcing poor userid and password policies).

Tony Awards? Seriously: Who Cares

I'll start by admitting that I don't understand the point of award shows. To be honest, I don't understand much of what I see in my online viewing guide. Maybe that's colored by the fact that, when I was a kid, there were like three channels (ABC, CBS and NBC) - four if you counted PBS. There just wasn't a lot of available air-time to put genuine garbage on the air, let alone niche-appeal garbage.

Award shows, in general, always just struck me as self-congratulatory wanking by entertainment industry X. That said, most of the award shows were about subjects that had wide enough appeal that I could at least sort of understand how a national audience might be interested in watching. The same can't be said for the Tony Awards. I mean, from a wide viewership standpoint, how many people (that don't live in the NYC area) actually see Broadway shows more than once or twice in a lifetime? I understand there's a decent amount of cross-over between more widely-popular entertainment mediums and Broadway. I also understand that some of the really successful shows have road versions of their shows - widening the audience of people that can see a show. But, all that aside, how many people are there that are both consumers of Broadway and Broadway-style productions are there out there and, more importantly, how many of them are interested in watching a self-congratulatory wank-fest? It just doesn't seem like there'd be enough to soak up an hour or more worth of prime advertising time. I guess that's why it's aired during summer repeats season though - it's the only way it can come even marginally close to having enough of an audience to draw advertising dollars.

The Mighty Keep Falling

I was Stumbling around, today, and found this article. To be honest, I've got mixed emotions on it.

I'm sitting here typing on an HP laptop. I chose this laptop because my laptop is my life and HP (and Dell, too) has superlative service when it comes to getting you quickly and conveniently back online in the face of inevitable breakage. Can't even come close to saying the same for Apple, Toshiba, Asus, etc. as they all have "service" offerings that are like a nightmarishly bad joke (seriously: if you own any of their products, buy a spare). The prospect of the likely loss of a quality service offering is a bit of a downer.

I also work for an organization that bought big into HP's software suites. Many of those products show a lot of promise. However, many are also poorly executed and even more poorly engineered, tested and supported.

HP tries to sell us on their professional services to make up for some of the inherent shortfalls int their products. However, when we've had the "experts" from HP's Professional Services group come on site (specifically that group - folks in their other groups - the ones that aren't really supposed to live or die based on their expertise and ability to provide post-sales services), it's been an exercise in pain and frustration from the abysmal quality of the people they send.

This probably comes as a good example of, "you get what you pay for". HP's services folks seem to be of the "whoever's cheapest" variety. I've worked in the professional services realm and "you get what you pay for" definitely comes into play in that line of business.

According to the linked article, HP is supposedly hoping to find salvation in the same path that other companies have - by selling professional services. Unfortunately, when the people that represent your company as "experts" and "professionals" come across so appallingly-poorly, it makes hiring qualified folks that much more difficult. Much as birds of a feather flock together, elite talent tends to avoid working for places they perceive to be well beneath their talents. So, this makes it a self-perpetuating problem and makes salvation through that pursuit even harder.

Oh well, should be interesting to see how this all plays out. I have to deal with some pretty hateful design flaws in HP products. This doesn't bode well for those flaws getting adequately addressed any time soon.

Modern Taxi Service

Friday night, my wife wanted to go to the Jack Rose Dining Saloon (in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, DC). Donna was wanting us to liberally avail ourselves of their rather complete whiskey menu, so she wanted to cab or Metro into the city. The closest Metro station to our destination was a five block walk from the restaurant, so we opted to take a cab, instead.

Normally, I call Red Top cab (out of Arlington). Unfortunately, their corporate policies preclude them from taking reservations between 20:00 and 03:00 on Fridays and Saturday nights. Worse, they could only promise us a cab in a forty minute window. Since Donna was not yet done prepping for a night on the town and we had reservations, I couldn't afford to risk using their service. So, I hit up Google Maps to see what other taxi options we might have.

I found a listing for Alexandria Yellow Cab and gave them a call. They were able to promise me a more reasonable service window and a cab that took credit cards (I don't frequently carry cash), so I set the reservation. Ten minutes before the cab was due to arrive, I received an SMS indicating the cab number, the time dispatched and an ETA. The cab arrived within five minutes of when the original call promised. We hopped in and were on our way.

As we got close to our destination, I slid my card in the back-seat credit card reader. The driver asked if I could pay cash, instead ("it's better for me," he said). I said that I preferred to pay with plastic as I was short on cash (not quite a lie: I was saving what cash I had for the cab back since cabs in the city, more often than not, don't take plastic at all - though DC is supposedly trying to change that - it's only 2012, after all). When we got to the drop-off point, the cabbie claimed that the credit card reader wasn't working. Odd, given that it had indicated that it had accepted my card.

I didn't feel like starting the evening out on the down note of arguing with the cabbie, so I dug through my pockets and scraped together exactly enough cash to pay the fare. Fucker was obviously dicking me over so I figured that turn-about was fair play. Need to call the cab company to find out whether or not the meter was actually broken or if the cabbie was trying to do something off the books (or whatever).

Oh well, at least it was a good night at the "saloon".

Dark Shadows: About What You'd Expect

My thoughts on Dark Shadows:

Was it worth the $36 that the local AMC charged for a pair of seats? No. Not by a long shot. That said, was I expecting it to be? No, not really.

I remember growing up with reruns of the original Dark Shadows running on one of the (very few) local broadcast TV stations. Frankly, I never really thought it was all that good. I really couldn't get past the production value and the, frankly awful story lines and dialog. Plus, I'm not really a fan of "all things vampires." Don't get me wrong, there've been some excellent vampire movies made, but they would have been excellent movies had they centered around vampires or not. But, maybe I was too young to understand it. Dunno.

I get that the original Dark Shadows had camp value. I get that a lot of people like that. My feelings tend to be that I need more than just camp and nostalgia to enjoy something. Something can be enjoyable and still be awful. I'm a fan of a lot of crap TV shows and movies.

At any rate, the Tim Burton version of Dark Shadows loses the camp associated with the original's shoddy production values. It replaces those shoddy production values with the, now, eminently predictable Tim Burton treatment: pancake makeup; pointlessly-blonded actresses; the presence of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Danny Elfman's music; the "color" palette of muted pastels and greys and high-contrast, "never found in nature" colors. Don't get me wrong, I like that aesthetic, it's just "predictable", even if very well executed.

For better or worse - likely worse - they left the original's quality of dialog in place. They even opted to set it in the time-frame of the original serial. Dunno that I would have done that. If I'm gonna resurrect something, I think I'd do more than just update the visual production value and ape the rest (insert a shrug, here).

Oh well - I assume that my wife, Donna, liked it - and, to be honest, she's the only reason why I went to see it. She seems to love all things Burton. I just found it to be "meh". On a scale of Beatlejuice to Cabin Boy, I'd rate it somewhat lower than Alice in Wonderland: AIW was a decent pure-style work that's story/dialogue isn't quite clunky enough to be distracting; Dark Shadows is high on style, but the preservation of the original serial's clunky dialogue was distracting.

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.

The Adventures of the Cheap Geek

For starters, I'm a cheap bastard. Dunno if it's just upbringing or whether it's in my genes (since my family's more than half Scotish on both sides of the family and Scots are known for their thriftiness). I've also got geeky tendencies (I'm in IT, so that sorta follows, I suppose).

Having been a road-warrior for five years, I almost exclusively used my cell phone for my calling needs. For starters, I was gone five days out of seven, most weeks, and it just got to be habitual to use the cell phone, even when I was home. I was gonna straight up ditch the land line, but Donna wasn't comfortable with that notion (even though she almost exclusively used her cell for voice communications).

At any rate, after yet another price increase in my Verizon land-line service, I started to investigate other solutions. I'd finally switched off of DSL and moved to Cox's high-speed internet solution. Other than phone service, switching to cable internet utterly removed my need for a POTS line. Technically, I coulda gone VOIP when I still had ADSL, but, Verizon's "dry line" pricing for xDSL was, to say the least, "regressive". Freed of any compelling need for a land-line, I opted to cut the cord and go down the VOIP path.

Vonage was doing some kind of promotion, at the time, where the equipment and first two months of service were free on a 12 month commitment. So, I signed up. Things were ok for a couple of years. I even got my folks on Vonage because, they too, were tired of the continually increasing expense of POTS, even for the most basic of plans.

Still, I found myself just NEVER using my Vonage line. I did some research on options and discovered that, if I threatened to leave, I could get them to reduce my rates to about $10/month. So, I did that. Unfortunately, just like with POTS, miscellaneous "fees" started showing up. Still, it was cheaper than POTS.

In recent years, I'd started using Google Voice. So, even when using the Vonage line to make calls, I wasn't actually using any outbound minutes. I was going to see if I could get switched to a "no minutes" plan. At one point, Vonage used to offer such a plan, but had discontinued it in recent years. What's a cheap bastard like me to do?

Well, it turns out, that there's a company, ObiHai Technology, that makes a cheap and easy to setup VOIP TA. Even better, they occasionally team up with Amazon to run specials on the device, making an already cheap and easy solution even cheaper. I opted to buy an OBi100 during one of these promotions.

The nifty thing with the OBi100 and OBi110 (and, now, the OBi202!) is that they're configured to make leveraging your Google Voice account dead-easy. Basically, you plug the device into your home's IP network and let it sync up, go to the ObiTalk web page, create your account and follow the steps to locate and register your device. Then you go to your device's service configuration menu, plug in your Google Voice account information and you're able to make free outbound calls.

Unfortunately, Google Voice doesn't allow you to directly setup direct-to-SIP dialing (maybe that will change over time). That means, that, without some additional steps, the home line becomes and "outgoing only" type of thing. In and of itself, that's not awful - given that the only calls I seem to recevie on the home line seem to  be telemarketing. However, it means that using GV as a "follow me" number is negatively impacted.

That said, there is a way around that problem. It requires setting up two other services: 1) a free SIP provider (I chose CallCentric - since if keeping my Verizon/Vonage number is a priority, I can get it ported for a fee); and 2) use a free DID provider like IPKALL to provide a bridge from Google Voice to the SIP provider. I followed the steps at Acrobits to set it all up. Basically (in case that link ever dies):

1. Open an account with the free SIP-service provider of your choice
2. Configure that account into your OBi device
3. Set up an IPKall account to get a free DID - if using CallCentric:
   1. Choose your account type: SIP
   2. Choose Area Code for your IPKall Number: your choice
   3. SIP username: callcentric number, starts with 1777
   4. Hostname or IP address: in.callcentric.com
   5. Email Address: any valid email address Password: Google Voice Email
4. Set up Google voice to forward calls to that DID

Couple notes:

1. Supposedly, Google is only continuing free calling through the end of 2012. However, they've previously announced they'd be discontinuing free calling but changed their minds before the prior deadlines. So, "who knows".
2. I've also heard that CallCentric has some stability issues. There's other free SIP providers out there: a quick Google search will show you your options.

Thus far, works like a champ. The OBi devices also come with dialers for iPhone and Android that allow you use your data plan for your calls rather than using minutes. You just connect your smart-phone's OBi-dialer to your account and it leverages your OBi device as a call forwarding bridgehead.

An Exercise for the Reader

I think the various mathematics courses I took while in grade school and college may have permanently warped me. In particular, I think the various "advanced" mathematics did it. If you've never experience the joys of trigonometry, calculus and the like, they you may have never heard the phrase "the rest is left as an exercise to the reader". Each and every math teacher I had that was teaching a discipline that required doing "proofs" or running large calculations loved to hit us with variations on that one. Oh... And "you must show all work".

These days, I earn my living in the IT field. While much of what I do is designed to support the smooth running of Operations, I am not - nor have I actively been - part of Operations in nearly a decade. While Operations has its challenges, its challenges quickly fall into the category of "been there - done that". For me, once I've solved a problem once, the closest I want to come to solving that problem a second time is figuring out how to make it so I never have to see that problem again. For me, the joy isn't so much in executing the solution to a problem as it is identifying what's causing the problem and figuring out how to solve the problem for now and forever. I much prefer to come up with the solution and allow others to execute that solution (so I can go on to finding other problems' solutions). In essence, I like to give people the tools/paths to the solution of the problem but otherwise leave the fixing of the problem ans "an exercise to the reader".

Revelations

Prior to my married years, I ate a lot of Taco Bell. I'd always had my "food" covered in the magical Fire Sauce.

Today's dental surgery's post-operative care instructions said "no spicy foods" and soft foods like "ground meat". So, I decided to stop by Taco Bell. I ordered some ground "beef" soft tacos. I was amazed at how utterly bereft of flavor Taco Bell's tacos are when not slathered in fire sauce. In fact, were it not for the taste of bandage in my mouth, the meal would have been utterly flavor-free.

Fmeh.

On Technology and Vendor Presentations

I hate sitting through vendor technology briefs. At the end, everyone's always asking "so, what'd you think". And, frankly, by the time some vendors' sales team is doing a technology brief, they're doing it about technology that's been around, in one form or another, for years - sometimes decades.

Technology generally tends to be iterative (even the "groundbreaking" stuff isn't all that earth-shaking if you were into the things that lead to it). As such, if you've worked with a given set of technology long enough, you can tend to predict where it's likely to (or at least "might") go. Thus, when it finally gets there - particularly when it finally gets there to the point of (sorta) being "easy" - there's just nothing all that surprising about it. So, it's hard to be impressed.

I kinda feel sorry for the people that are presenting the shiny/nifty/"new" stuff. They're spouting off stuff that is "new" to 90% of the people they present it to. Instead, when they run into me, they're hit with a barrage of "this sounds like a combination of technologies X and y: how does it differ from them and what do they have in common", or "this sounds like it's based on a product you bought X years ago: is it that same product and, if so, what have you changed/improved in that product since you bought it" or "this sounds like a product one of your competitors was peddling 'X' month/years ago: how is your version different (or why is does it appear to be missing a competing feature of the older product)".

Oh well.

Overall, I don't care about shiny/new/etc. At the end of the day, all I really care about is "does it solve a problem I haven't already solved" and/or "does it make it easier to do things I'm already doing". The rest is just window-dressing.

Sportsmanship Versus Honesty

I'm a fan of the Philadelphia Flyers. That means, after Sunday's 5-1 win over the (hated) Pittsburgh Penguins, I'm a happy camper. My team moves on and the Pens start playing golf early.

After the game, the press had their interviews with each team's players and coaches:

In that video, the Penguins coach, to me, says the honest thing. He acknowledges the Flyers win, but he doesn't go on to fall back on the trite "we wish them luck" bullshit.

For whatever reason, we've come to equate "sportsmanship" with non-genuine displays. We expect the losing team to be "gracious in defeat". So, when someone says something honest rather than polite, people get their panties in a bunch. 

It's not like Bylsma said, "I hope those fuckers lose and lose embarrasingly". No, all he said was "I can't wish them luck". I'm fine with that. In fact, I gotta kind of respect the man for being honest in a time where we value politeness over honesty.