Not Diminishable

Amusing kerfuffle over this picture:

To those uptight about seeming misapplication of the term? Get over yourself.

Here's the thing about being "brave" or exhibiting "bravery": to reduce it to its most basic meaning, all that bravery is, is taking an action when you fear the consequences that action might bring to you or those you care about. It doesn't really matter the scale of the consequences. Nor does it even really matter the likelihood of those consequences. The degree to which those consequences are likely and/or the scale of those consequences don't impact whether or not the action undertaken was brave.

While there are degrees of bravery, any given brave act isn't diminishable. Least of all is one act of bravery diminishable by another act of bravery. At the very worst, two acts of bravery establish a relative scale. At the best, bravery being common improves the world as a whole.

Shady as Fuck

Much like car-repair shops, there are certain car dealerships that foster the stereotype of sleaziness in the car sales and service industry. It's even worse when both the dealership and its service departments are sleazy.

DC seems to have several bad actors in this regard. It's probably because there's a few, large ownership groups that have conspired to own big, non-overlapping areas of the car-buying regions. Because of these ownership patterns, it's easy for the ownership groups to take a view that any one buyer is insignificant. And, even if not insignificant, that most people aren't going to go out of territory just to avoid dealing with certain ownership-groups.

Since moving to the DC area in the early 90s, I've learned not to do business with some ownership-groups. The first group on my "won't buy from" list was the Rosenthal group ...a group so shady that they ended up being investigated by the FBI in the late 90s.

Early in my ownership-history of BMWs, I had to add BMW of Fairfax to that group. At the time, I'd been really surprised that I'd had to do so: the dealership that I'd bought my Z3 from, in Pennsylvania, had given me the impression that BMW was a reputable marque that policed their dealerships for quality. It had been reinforced by the service department I'd gotten from another BMW dealership that was located near my place of work at the time. However, I'd eventually left that job and it no longer made sense to go there for service when BMW of Fairfax was just a couple minutes from my house. It only took two shoddy service-encounters to blacklist them.

Ultimately, when it came time to trade in my Z3 and get my first e46 convertible, it was the service-experience to drive a half hour out of my way to buy my second BMW ...and to get it serviced. I even returned there, six months later, to buy my second e46 convertible after my first was stolen. I took it there for all of my warranty maintenance work.

I've had my e46 since 2002. After the warranty expired in 2005, it was no longer economically sound to get service work done at a dealership. As a rule in this area, the labor rates at dealerships are about 30% higher than marque specialty-shops. So, I'd consulted my local "Bimmer" club to get recommendations for alternatives. The recommendation I got was excellent and I've been getting my car serviced at that same place for the past decade with no reasons for complaints.

My e46 was one of the first eleven million cars effected by the Takata airbag-recall. The only place to get the recall-service is at the dealership. So, I had to find a local dealership to get the work done. With one BMW dealership already on my black-list, and now living in Alexandria, it made sense to have the work done at the dealership six miles from my house. That dealership was BMW of Alexandria. Sadly, they are now on my blacklist, too - and, at this point, I have to question whether BMW is asleep at the wheel when it comes to ensuring a consistently-good ownership experience.

How did BMW of Alexandria end up on my blacklist? Other than the whole taking nearly six months to get the work done - after they canceled four appointments due to a supposed lack of parts - it was what they did during that warranty work. I'd taken my car in to get the airbag done. The service department opted to take it upon themselves to look for other service opportunities on my car. They found that I needed significant suspension work. Now, I already knew that I'd bunged my suspension on a horrendously bad pothole the month prior to the service. In fact, I'd been specifically not driving my car because I knew it needed work, but didn't want to get it done until the local road repair crews had started fixing the roads. But, whatever. A touch creepy but not altogether out of the ordinary for dealerships around here.

Now, what was out of the ordinary was that, during the time my car was with them for warranty work, My car's daytime running-lights and highbeams stopped functioning. Flash-to-pass still worked, but anything that required the highbeams to stay on was no longer functional.

Since the "malfunction' had coincided with my car's time at BMW of Alexandria's service department, I took it back to them to return to functionality. Naturally, they assured me that there was nothing they could or would have done that would have caused the issue. Further, if I wanted them to investigate the issue, it would cost me a minimum of one hour's worth of labor ($180). I asked how something that should be a software issue would require any "investigation" that would warrant a $180 minimum charge. The assured  me that, on my model of car, it had to be a hardware issue, not a software issue.

I took my car to the shop I've been taking my car to for the past decade. They verified that the problem was as I described and took it into the shop for a quick look. They quickly returned my vehicle with the lights fully functional. When I asked what had been wrong, they indicated that "somehow", the highbeams had gotten disabled in software. All they did was reset the switch.

So, now I need to figure out if it's worth contacting BMW of America to file a complaint against the dealership and/or whether it's worth contacting my local Better Business Bureau about it. I guess, at the very least, I'll be posting reviews on any Yelp-like sites.

Forced Migration

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

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

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

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

PC users must have:

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

Seriously??? My shit's out of date???

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

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

Dude: Do You Even Merge?

Ok. So, it seems like, when the sun comes out and it's a beautiful day, people lose all concept of what lane goes where. Saturday was a clear, dry, beautiful day and so was today when I left work. Both days, people act like they have no idea how to merge - even when plenty of signage is present.

Leaving my one office to head to my neighborhood, you turn out onto southbound-road that's three-lanes wide. About a 3/4 of a mile from where you turn onto it, it splits into two, two-lane roads. The left lane has signage indicating that it's to be used for both left and right traffic-split; the far left lane is left only and the far right lane is right-only. A few hundred feet after that split, the far right lane becomes a single-lane ramp to another two-lane street. The left lane becomes a ramp onto an interstate highway.

All pretty straight forward. All very well marked by signs and lane-markings.

I'm in the middle lane heading to the highway on-ramp (meaning my split goes immediately to the ramp to the highway giving me the through-lane to the highway). The toolbag in the rightmost lane decides "oh, I don't want to go straight through, I want to merge onto the highway ...oops there's someone there, already". Dood slams his brakes to avoid hitting me as he tries to merge onto the highway ramp from the wrong lane.

Dood also gets all road-ragey. I see him flashing his headlights, honking his horn and gesturing as he runs up on my bumper. As we reach the top of the ramp, he decides to "show me" by going through the stripe-painted apron between the ramp's actual marked lane and the highway so he can try to cut me off.

I figure, "whatever, dude: enjoy driving your BMW through the gravel and construction debris (glass, nails, screws, etc.). With luck, you picked something up."

Funny part? For as much of a hurry as he was in to get by me, he runs up on the bumper of cars in the right lane of the interstate ...and just stays there, tailgating the other car. I'm accelerating to highway speed and, as the traffic in the left lane clears, I merge left. Eventually, I catch up to the ragey tailgater and give him the politest "wave" I can manage.

Guys like the one who nearly clipped me today are why I used to be against the idea of ever owning a BMW. Oh well.

Huh... It's Not Completely Sucktacular

So, I'm not a complete curmudgeon, when it comes to tech. Doing time-math is a lot easier with PowerShell than bash:

$DaysBack = 14
$DateHorizon =  ([DateTime]::Now).AddDays(-$DaysBack)

[…ELIDED…]

$SnapId = $SnapStruct.SnapshotId
$SnapStart = $SnapStruct.StartTime
Write-Host -NoNewline "Found snapshot: $SnapId (started @ ${SnapStart})"

if ([DateTime]::Compare($DateHorizon, $SnapStart) -gt 0) {
    Write-Host " - $SnapId is older than defined horizon"
} else {
    Write-Host
}

No having to ass about with having to convert from LOCALE-time to epoch-time to do the math or having to convert the result from epoch-time back to LOCALE-time.

Are You Experienced

Eating "new" foods is a great way to create and "fix" memories. When we go out to a place and have a particular dish I've only had infrequently, it always reminds me of the first time I had it or the different times I've had memorable (good or bad) variants.

One of the reason spending on good food is a good practice is that it's experiential ...yet still cheaper than many other kinds of experiences.

For me, things just don't compare to experiences.

Arms Race (No, You May Not Spam Me)

Here's the deal:

My phones each ring under two numbers: their "real" number and GV. I've got default ringtones that tell me whether its the end-point's "real" number or the GV number that's being rung.

If I hear the "real" number ring, it gets ignored (and then blacklisted and/or reported, since I've registered all my numbers, real or GV, with the do not call registry). If it goes through GV, then it's subject to the layers of rules I have there (screened unless explicitly excepted).

Robo-Call (from Ars)

Technology can be used to harass you, but it can also be used to shield you.

No Diving

Couple of notes to anyone on the highway that's nearly missed their exit:

GPSes are a boon for helping you know where your exit is so that you can be ready for it, well in advance of needing to exit. If you don't have a GPS and don't have a smart phone, get a GPS. If you don't have a GPS and you have a smart phone, download something like Waze. If you have a GPS and its maps are a year or more out of date, update them: devices without updated maps are more dangerous than not having a GPS.

If you're in any lane other than the one immediately adjacent the exit ramp and you've just discover, "crap: that's my exit right there", drive on to the next exit, then loop back. Slamming your brakes and sutting across multiple lanes of traffic in a vain attempt to make an exit is dangerous. You put your life in danger. You put the lives of the occupants of your vehicle in danger and you put in danger *many* other lanes as you make your dive for an exit.

If I have to stomp on my brakes to avoid you taking off my car's front end as you slide across six-lanes of traffic, I should get one free punch to your head ...as should every person whose properties and lives you've jeopardized.

To all Mail Administrators: It's 2015 (DNS Ain't That Hard)

Wow... This is just an IT-learnin' day:

Wife comes upstairs to complain that she's not been getting email notifications from the public library, the past few weeks, and it's resulted in missed "due" notices and missed "reserved title is ready" notices. I investigate the problem and find that Postfix is rejecting her library's emails because it can't match the mail server's advertised name to an IP address.

About a month ago, to cut down on SPAM, I'd changed Postfix's config to reject traffic from MTAs that didn't have properly-setup DNS. I figured "it's 2015: mail administrators have been at it a sufficiently long enough time (or have outsourced to services like Gmail) that legit senders should have their DNS sorted". Besides, it's a great way to cut down on SPAM.

Apparently, my wife's library's mail administrators either don't have an A record or the A record they have has a typo in it. Either way, PTR lookups work, but A record lookups fail. So, now I have to be less fascist with my Postfix configuration.

I guess it's a good thing I'm not insisting on TLS for MTA-to-MTA transit or even SPF or DomainKeys records.

Ok, So Maybe She's Got Some Boxer In Her

When we got Lady, the rescue organization had claimed she was part boxer. Given her appearance - Lady pretty much looks like she's 100% pitbull -  that the rescue is based in Maryland and the rescue had her fostered in Maryland, we'd sort of assumed that the "boxer-mix" description was to avoid any problems with Maryland's anti-pitbull laws (that were on the books in 2011). I mean, does this dog look boxer-y to you?

Yes, she's a fairly vocal dog.

Yes. she's very "handsy".

Yes, she's got (ever so much of) an underbite.

Yes, she breaths like she has a bit of brachycephalic syndrome.

All of these are things that are common in boxers. They were things exhibited by our prior (very boxer-y) boxer-mix ...but she just doesn't look terribly boxery...

A little before Thanksgiving, I noticed a growth on her right ear. Having lost her predecessor to skin-cancer, and that she is a white dog, I was, to say the least, "concerned". I decided to watch it and see if it grew or went away.

It didn't go away, by Christmas, so we opted to take her in the weekend immediately-following Christmas day (was planning on the following Monday, but our vet has no-additional-cost Saturday hours and offered us an earlier appointment). The vet took samples of the growth and said she'd call as soon as she got the results. She cautioned that, with the time of year, it could be a little longer than usual.

Tonight she called back. The good news is, it's not cancer. The bad news is that she apparently has canine leproid granuloma - something for which there's not really good treatment options other than "management". That said, they're primarily cosmetic in their impact.

Oh... And they're fairly rare (most vets only see a couple occurrences in their careers) and predominantly found in (in order of prevalence), boxers, mastiffs and other bull-breeds. So, maybe this is just another indication that Lady may actually have some Boxer in her.

Why Baseball Stadiums??

I really think the NHL needs to rethink the Winter Classic.

For starters, I hate, hate, hate when it's hosted in baseball stadiums. I get that the baseball fields are unused, this time of year, and that NFL football stadiums aren't predictably-free because of playoffs. That said, there's a crap-ton of college football stadiums available. What's more, it's not even an argument to say "baseball stadiums are big": the largest baseball stadium doesn't even make the top 100 of the largest football stadiums in just the US (Anaheim's is like #122?). Worse, baseball stadiums' geometries pretty much ensure that there are zero seats that could be called meaningfully close to the play surface.

Supposedly, part of why the NHL puts these games on, in the first place, is they're big revenue-generators. Couldn't the NHL generate more revenue by having more seats available to sell? Wouldn't people be even more likely to buy seats if those seats were actually somewhat close to the ice? And don't talk to me about travel-distance to games: people travel stupid distances to go to bowl games year in and year out, even when those games are meaningless.

It's also kinds sucktastic that, before every team has had even one chance to play in a Winter Classic, that you've got some teams that have now played two or even three times. Switch to a format where you're hosting at a fixed-selection/rotation of college football fields - rather than cities that have both a hockey team and another large, outdoor venue - and you can allocate team appearances less clumpily (not going even going to argue "fairness").

Using "neutral" fields means you also get rid of the season ticket holders' potential complaints about losing a home game from their plan. Have the NHL scheduling-gods treat the game as an away game for both teams.

Further, as a mutual away-game, you can either have the NHL sell all the tickets and split the proceeds to all the teams, or you could have something like give each of the playing teams 50% of the tickets to sell. This could give you a college game like atmosphere where fans of each team tend to be clumped together. If there's a concern that the smaller market teams might undersell tickets, make the 50/50 allocation-split time-limited. Give each team a few weeks to a month to sell out their allotment, then take back any remainders. Take-backs then get sold by the NHL, the proceeds of which get profit-shared.

Yes. I know that many of the college stadiums are in the middle of freaking nowhere, relatively speaking. But that doesn't stop them from being able to oversell seating, week in and week out, year-after year, at stadiums that have tens of thousands more seats than the largest stadiums. Plus, all of those stadiums offer ample opportunities for tailgating (I looked at NBC's blimp view of today's game and it looked like Nationals' stadium has almost no parking???) Tailgating is an awesome part of going to sporting events ...and is yet another avenue that the NHL could cash in on.

Dunno. Something needs to change.

The "Rightness" of Heros

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain

Is a great line. There's a resonance to it. There's something to it that feels right and true. But why is that? Is that simply because, as watchers of heroism, we so recently end up with disappointment when the heros fall. Is it because such falls seem so commonplace that there's almost an inevitability to it?

And why is that it that such seeming inevitability has set it? Is it that, once you become a hero, you feel compelled to do more and more to achieve that heroic affirmation ...and that with each successive heroic act, that affirmation conveys a feeling of what was done was The Right Thing^TM? And is it similarly inevitable that, with being so frequently credited for doing The Right Thing^TM that you begin to assume that you, yourself, are inherently Right^TM. And being Right^TM, you reach a state of feeling above reproach? And, once you reach that state, you start doing things that you think are right, but are, really, only right in your mind?

I dunno. Don't really have answers - just questions that are probably very trite. It only really comes up because some neuron was provoked to fire in response to all of the turmoil surrounding various PDs ...especially of the NYPD. In any case, it feels like similar forces are at play.

A Case for the Divine?

Today, I was grazing through my news feed when I found a post that linked out to an article in the Australian Business Review positing that the failure to detect intelligent life might be indicative of humanity being extra-special. Specifically, it posits that such specialness might be an argument for the divine.

Reading the article, the author makes one argument that particularly stands out to me:

As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

To me, this seems a flawed interpretation of what science has shown. To me, it's less a question of uniqueness of life than of life that is intelligent, technologically advanced and sufficiently proximal to us within a given temporal/spacial radius.

As noted in the article, science is telling us that there should be a mind-boggling number of planets within just our galaxy, let alone the universe as a whole. Also as noted in the article, even if only a small fraction of that mind-boggling number is in their host stars' habitable regions - where habitable is defined as capable of supporting lifeforms relatively similar to our own, water- and carbon-based biologies - you still have an absolutely huge number of planets that could potentially support life. Yet, in spite of this, there is apparent silence. So how do we explain this without resorting to "we're special and it may be because God made us special".

To my own mind, we have to take a different path to our conclusion. Admittedly, my path isn't one that necessarily says that we're unique in all the history of the entirety of the universe. We're probably unique, but it may just be a matter of timing.

First, let's surmise that there's a planet 50 light-years from Earth.

Then, let's further assume that this planet is capable of supporting some form of life.

Let's further assume that this other planet has had the capability to produce life that evolves to the point of sentience at least once (before calamity strikes or something else happens - see The Great Filter).

Let's further assume that this sentience has evolved civilization (before calamity strikes or something else happens).

Let's further assume that this civilization has progressed, technologically, to the point that they are broadcasting the type of detectable signals into space (before calamity strikes or something else happens) that we're expecting to be able to find.

Now, let's look at the history of signal-radiating life on our own planet. Using the most common understanding of the history of technologically-evolved life on this planet (because, who knows, maybe modern society isn't even as unique as our common understanding suggests), this planet has been leaking detectable signs of technological life for a little over 100 years. It's really only in the second half of that 100 years that the broadcasts were at both high-power and happening from significant portions of the planet's surface. It's also really only been in the second half of that 100 years that we've been listening for similar types of signs of life from other planets. In other words, we've really only been listening for 50-60 years.

What am I driving at? Even if, somehow, that planet 50 light years from ours evolved to the point of broadcasting and/or listening, there simply not a heck of a lot of temporal-overlap to when we would have had the opportunity to detect it or they ours. At minimum - and that's assuming that, as technologies advance, broadcasts within the spectrum we're listening in don't tend to disappear over time (e.g., broadcast methods are changed to other parts of the spectrum or using techniques that don't leak) - emanations from that planet 50 light-years from ours would have had to have started at or before we started listening (to account for the 50 years' communication-time/distance). If emanation of the sought-for signals started and ceased more than 50 years before we started listening - either due to technological changes or hitting the Great Filter - then that planet's signals would be past us and, likely, no longer detectable.

My point? To me, the apparent silence doesn't automatically indicate to me that we're unique - other than perhaps temporally. It doesn't even necessarily imply that there is even a Great Filter working against us discovering other life or even waiting ahead for us. By extension, such a lack of provable uniqueness doesn't indicate to me that we must be unique because of God.

In general, I'm both open to possibilities yet still a pretty skeptical person. Generally, I want evidence, one way or the other, to prove a given position before I'll buy in. To me, absence of evidence is not even remotely the same as evidence of absence.

Which, by extension means that, while I'm skeptical of the divine, I also don't rule it out.

Ninety Minutes of Customer Service Hell

Tangents and rage to follow...

See this?

This is the excerpt from my Google Voice call log that shows the length of my phone call with Verizon FIOS's customer support.

In general, I've had very little in the way of problems with any of my various Verizon services. ...Which is a good thing, because dealing with telcos' customer service departments is never anything less than a frustrating trial. To be fair, unlike my recent run-in with Sprint (on my mother's behalf), I came away from things mostly satisfied (or, at least as satisfied as one can be having had to call customer support in the first place).

At any rate, the long, bloody story.

I'm a convenience fan. Thus, I use things like electronic billing. I've had my Verizon bill and other utilities on automatic payment plans for years, now. To most of my billers' respective credits, such arrangements have been mostly without incident. That came to a crashing end, today.

I'd gotten email notification from Verizon that my auto-pay was due to be processed within the next 48 hours. I limit my exposure to auto-pay problems by having a special eBill checking account linked from my main checking account. Each month, as my direct deposits come in, a budgeted amount is transferred from my incoming checking account and distributed to my bill-paying account, my investment account, my "rainy-day" account and my "playtime" account. That auto-pay warning email is handy, because it allows me to be 100% sure that my bill-paying account has sufficient funds to cover any pending direct-pay arrangements.

When I looked at today's notification, the number looked higher than I was expecting. So, I logged into my Verizon account to see what was up. Perusing my bill, "Oh: my promotional-discount for upgrading my Internet to the 50/50 plan has expired." ...but then I noticed a $0 line-item for a service that I'd thought I'd canceled previously.

Then I noticed that my prior month's bill was $90 more than I expected. Given the $0 line item, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. So, I clicked on the "detailed bill" for the prior month. "MOTHERFUCKER!" There, on my bill was a $90 auto-renewal charge for the "canceled" service ...number 2 of 2 (really amusing that the three prior years' versions of the package were billed in four installments).

I'd managed to not notice the out-sized bills because there was always enough in my bill-pay accounts to cover things. Granted, the slack-balance was lower than expected, but not precipitously so. At any rate, it was a service that I'd previously tried three different ways to cancel:

• You see, last winter, I'd had some glitches with my NHL Center Ice option. The tech support guy I spoke to was able to resolve the technical problem. However, after a couple of years of NHL Center Ice, and recent acquisitions of suitable mobile devices, I was looking for alternatives. So, while I was on the call with the tech support guy, I'd asked, "can you ensure that my NHL Center Ice doesn't auto-renew after this season." He'd informed me that he'd be able to put the note on my account and that it should not renew come the 2014/2015 season. Thus, I assumed I would not see further NHL Center Ice line-items on my bill.
• Come May time-frame of this year, I was doing one of my periodic reviews of my accounts. "Huh... There's still an NHL Center Ice line-item on this account. It's a $0 thing - maybe it's a leftover from the just-past season". Still, I called in to verify that the auto-renewal was, indeed, set to be canceled. The person I spoke to verified that such was the case. Dunno why, but this made me think "ok, yeah: that will not renew itself this fall" and went on my merry way.
• Around the end of September/beginning of October, I opted to pull the trigger on getting an NHL GameCenter Live subscription. It was slightly cheaper than NHL Center Ice, and it let me watch hockey games via my XBone, my Rokus (awesome when visiting my mom since I could still see hockey using her Roku), my cell phones, my laptops and my notepads. With NHL Center Ice, I'd always been stuck only able to watch from home (yeah, I coulda done the SlingBox thing, but that was more effort than I wanted to deal with). With the new NHL online service, I noticed I was having some issues with streaming-quality/stability. I figured, "upgrade to a higher speed-tier - that'll fix it". So, I logged into my Verizon account to do the online upgrade. As Iwas reviewing the account prior to upgrading, I noticed another $0 charge for NHL Center Ice. "Ok... well, there's a button here for letting me alter my services: I'll just use that to delete this thing." I ran through that process, but, by this point (finally), I'm suspect of the damned package actually deleting. Before I committed to the cost of upgrading my Internet speed, I opted to use the web-chat tool to speak to a Verizon representative. I pointed out my continued problem with the persistent NHL Center Ice subscription. I asked if she could ensure that it got deleted. She verified that, yes, it was set to be deleted. I hit finish on the upgrade-transaction, thinking that I was now good to make the switch from NHL Center Ice to NHL GameCenter Live.

Obviously, that last thought was in error. So, I girded myself to deal with phone support. I hit the "call me" button on my Verizon accounts page. A few seconds later, my phone rang.

I navigated the call tree, selecting the "billing questions" options. I got connected to a CSR, and laid out my problem to her. She informs me, Oh, this department only handles payments not billing issues or credits. I think to myself, "Okaaay... Of course the billing questions option wouldn't allow me to actually do anything about a billing problem". But, "whatevs", right? She tells me she'll need to transfer me to the department that handles such issues.

About a minute later, another woman in another department picks up. We do the dance of "what's your phone number" so she can do an account lookup. I inform her, "I don't have a phone number associated with my account: I don't have a Verizon landline and every time I've tried to get my cell number (actually my GV number since 2009) associated to my account, my account's phone association fails to update". This isn't super surprising, given that whenever I've tried to use the web-tool to update my profile, it tells me my GV number is not a valid phone number. Fuckers.

I'd always assumed, however, that the CSRs had a different access method to the account records and could force the number into the appropriate place. Given that the number always seems to fall off my account, I'm assuming that Verizon's accounts system has some kind of de-linter that looks at profiles and prunes out any "bad" data. Too bad that de-linter is as broken as their web UI's number-validator. Probably the same code segments.

 So, I tell her, "I can give you the account number to look-up, directly". She insists that she has to look up by phone number. So, I give her my GV number - along with the admonition that it probably won't work. As expected, she tells me that she can't find an account with that phone number. Shocking, I know. She prompts me for other information so she can find my account. Apparently, they have a half dozen or so options to find an account, but giving them the actual account-number is not a valid option.

Ultimately, she finds my account. She then asks me what my problem is. I tell her the long story of the ghosts of NHL Center Ice plaguing me. I ask her to remove the plan from my account and reverse the charges. She tells me that the plan has been removed from my account. To which I reply, "...and the charges reversed, correct?"

She replies that she can't refund me the charges.

I ask her if she's serious. I point out to her that, what she's telling me, is that Verizon has siphoned $180 out of my account for a service that I didn't want and haven't used, and, are now going to make it so that I can't watch the channels I've already paid for.

She tells me she can re-activate the plan and that I can get the auto-renewal canceled at the end of the season. I want to scream at her, "are you fucking crazy? Have you not heard one fucking word of my description of how failfuckingtastic canceling auto-renewal has proven to be?" Knowing that this is unlikely to prove fruitful, I only respond by reiterating the prior travails I'd gone through. She informs me she only has record of the first service call and that she can't help me any further other than the options given.

I fight back the urge to completely lose my shit (yes, it's possible to "even", even in the face of borderline Kafkaesque "customer service"). I ask her to connect me to her supervisor.

She responds by telling me that the wait for a supervisor will be at least thirty minutes. I respond "whatever", because, at this point, I'm committed to riding this hell-train to the end of the line.

Long-silence. Seriously - it was a good three minutes before I hear her ask "do you want to wait for the supervisor?" She had seriously been sitting there, waiting silently - not understanding my "whatever" to mean "yes, connect me, I'll wait".  So, I had to explicitly state, "yes, put me on hold for a supervisor"

(Commence crappy hold music...)

(...Continue with atrocious hold music)

Twenty minutes later, the original CSR breaks into the hold music. I'm thinking, "wait, did I seriously just wait another twenty while she waits to put me into the supervisors' hold queue???" Fortunately, she was breaking in to tell me that I was next up in the queue for a supervisor.

Huh... It was actually going to be a warm-handoff. That's a good sign, right?

Eventually, a new voice comes on the line, identifying herself as the supervisor. She asks me for my account info. We go through the "there's no phone number associated with the account" dance. I'd be apoplectic, at this point, but I've worked for the companies that became Verizon and otherwise had to deal with telcos, in a professional capacity, to know that only calls get transferred, not support session or account information data. So, I just shuffle morosely through the steps.

She opens my account. I walk her through the sequence of events, noting that the first CSR had indicated a lack of records on Verizon's side that supported my case. But, I was able to point to the fact that I'd upgraded my account to support my position that I had previously made requests to cancel the NHL Center Ice service. Still, she had no record of the chat session. Apparently, with Verizon's disjoint information systems, just because you're talking to someone using their web-chat tool doesn't mean your account will reflect it. Fortunately, because of the January customer support call, it had established that I'd previously communicated with them. And, even though the tech support guy hadn't actually noted the cancellation request (he probably had, but, given Verizon's crappy inter-department data-transfer, the note probably got dropped in the transfer from one Verizon IT pond to another), it, combined withe the timing of the upgrade, was enough for her to justify issuing me the credit for the service.

So, 81 minutes of phone-hell later, I appear to have finally gotten the service canceled and the charges reversed. Still, I should probably log in, next week, and verify both things.

The worst part of all this? While there is an alternative to FiOS, that "alternative" is to Cox. I could probably link-out to the various Cox customer service horror stories that actually made the evening news, but Cox's CS issues are well known enough to make that redundant. At any rate, assuming the service is actually canceled - and stays canceled - and the charges do end up reversed, I don't currently have to consider dancing with the Cox-monster.

Uber vs. Lyft: A Customer-Based Review

So, finally got a chance to give Lyft a try, tonight. Given the various scumminess that Uber has displayed, this year, really didn't want to have to do business with them, any more.

I gotta say that, from a customer experience side of thing, Uber is definitely the more polished offering. The phone app is a much more polished design. The dispatch process is transparent and the arrival estimates accurate. Lyft doesn't even seem to offer the capability to get a fare estimate. If you want to contact customer service, all I can say is "good luck with that".

Overall, as a passenger, the service felt like it was designed more around the drivers' needs than the passengers'. I may give them another try, or I may try to see if one of the local taxi services has upped their game in the face of competition from Uber - and now Lyft.

I really don't want to go back to Uber. But, right now, they're definitely the best from a customer-experience standpoint.

The Sublime Frustration of Convergence

I occasionally get cranky about converged communications channels - thing like merging Email and SMS or merging SMS and IM. For starters, I don't like how it tends to blur the "appropriate forms of address" lines for a given communications medium. While "RU ther" is almost OK in an SMS, it's less so in an IM and pretty much not tolerable in an Email. The other thing is, convergence means too many things jangling and, when there's errors, it's even worse.

Three times, today, I had convergence-related issues:

• Buddy calls me to thank me for his Christmas present. I, first, get an inbound call-notification on my laptop's GV/Hangouts browser-plugin. I answer on my cellphone as soon as it rings (hate trying to voice-chat via my laptop - also, see not about "too many things jangling") Just as I'm picking up the call on my cell, the VOIP line starts ringing ...and then continues to ring and ring while I'm starting my conversation on the cell. Wife comes up to find out why the hell the landline's ringing off the hook. I tell her "GV's being a butt". I'd yet to try to deal with the VOIP line as I'd noticed my cell's battery was down (apparently, I'd not snugly seated the charging plug, previously) and was tied to the wall by the (now seated) charging-cable. So she does us both a solid by tracking down a VOIP handset and terminating the errant ring-through.
• Boss tries to arrange an after-hours video call. "After hours" is about the only time everyone on my scattered team is available to talk since our "scattered" is across time-zones and, even those of us in the same time-zone are frequently working places where we can't do phone-calls (let alone video chats). His initial invitation to everyone had apparently gone awry, so he SMS'es me to ask if I'm available. I SMS back to affirm that I am. He states that he'll send out an invite to the video chat. The scheduled time for the call to start passes and still no email-invite. I assume it's gone into the Ether, so I SMS him again to ask what's up. He "dials" me into the video conference. This time, my cell rings before my browser starts jangling. I pick up on the cell and I'm in the video call. The cell isn't really stable for being on camera, so I'm a touch put out that what I'd *thought* was my cell ringing for a call was actually ringing for a video chat. My annoyance is subsequently eased when the invitation email finally arrives and I'm able to switch over to my laptop for the video-conference.
• While the video-call is going on, my messaging widget pops up a long-assed text message. It was from the customer-lead for one of the projects I work on. I reply with an SMS - failing to notice that the text message was actually a transcription delivered via the text messaging component of the messaging widget. Worse, he'd called from a land-line rather than his cell, so my SMS gets delivered to the Ether.

Actually, three and a half times...

While working on one of my projects, I encounter a mis-documented security-fix. I go to call one of my co-workers about it. Both he and I have ZRTP widgets on our cellphones and our phones each "know" that the other's phone is ZRTP-capable. When I got to hit the call button, my phone helpfully asks, "do you want this to be an encrypted call". I think, "sure - it's about a security-related documentation-bug, so why not do the call encrypted". His phone rings and rings with no answer. It occurs to me that the ZRTP widget actually doesn't dial to his VMail-enabled "number". So, I hang up, re-start the call and select "no" when asked if I want to encrypt the call. Eventually, the call rings through to his voicemail (DAMMIT). I leave a message for him to call me back.

An hour or so later, he IMs me to tell me that he got the call but the voicemail was garbled. Irony: the encrypted VOIP calls frequently have better sound-quality than the PSTN calls do.

Just convergence-annoyance all over the damned place, today.

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.