The Quiet House

When I was a kid, we had cats and dogs in our house. The order of things was that the dogs were noisy and the cats were comparatively quiet. The dogs alerted at the slightest provocation - wind, cars, bird shadows... you get the idea. On the other hand, my cats were fairly quiet: the first on only mewed when you were getting his breakfast ready or hissed when the clumsy dog stepped on him too hard; the pair I had as a teenager were a bit chattier - doing the usual mewing for food and could sometimes be coaxed to "talk back" if you mewed at them first (the one would also "click" when stalking bugs or spying birds and squirrels outside).

In my 20s, I'd had a couple rabbits. In general, they are very quiet animals. My second rabbit, Bambam, earned his name, however, as he had a tendency to stamp his back foot when he wanted attention. In his indoor hutch, this created a very noisy rattling. When he was roaming the house, it sounded like a shotgun going off.

After cancer took my second rabbit, towards the end of my 20s, I opted to get a cat. I found a local woman who had a litter of pet-quality Bengals she was selling off. I'd really only intended to buy one - the female named Bella - especially given the (then) astounding price of $550 (for one cat!). But, I realized that I actually wanted two of them. There were only four kittens in the litter, and two of them were spoken for. The only one remaining was the litter's runt - a male who quickly earned the name Grumbles (I can't even remember what name he came with: perhaps it's in his veterinary packet, somewhere?). Because he was the runt, she cut me a deal on him and only asked for $350.

As seems to often be the case, the runt grew to be the biggest of the litter. In his prime, Grumbles was a shade under 16lbs. Bella only clocked in at a shade over 10lbs. Neither cat was fat as both pretty much ate only enough to sate their hunger. I could have opted to simply free-feed them and they wouldn't have gotten overweight. So, those weights were very lean-weights. Being relatively short-haired, their muscle-definition and abdominal tucks were very evident.

At any rate, as Bengals, they lived up to many of the breed's peculiarities. They were very people-focussed: Grumbles followed me around the house in a way that you might normally expect of a dog. They also loved playing in water: this meant water bowls always had to have big mats around them and that I had to be very careful to latch the bathroom door while showering if I didn't want to have to towel off two cats (though,mostly Grumbles) after my shower. They were also very talkative. They didn't need to be prompted to converse. Wake up in the morning and you'd be greeted with meowing. Come home from work, be greeted with meowing. Leave the room not allow them to come with you and there'd be chastisement when you came back. And, if you just wanted to converse, you could go back and forth with them for a half hour or more - they never seemed to tire of conversing.

What's more, when the two of them did their twice-per-day exercise sessions (fighting), it would be a half hour of mad scrambling about the house, chasing each other. The thundering noise of these chases were punctuated by hissing, spitting and yowling by Bella (and the occasional "THUNK" as she'd run headlong into an obstacle that she'd misjudged in her flight-path). Grumbles, on the other hand, fought in eerie silence with an devilish look on his face that was a combination of anger and joy (and a whole lot of "fuck you").

In 2003, a few months before we married, Donna wanted a dog. So, after much searching, we got one (Lana: a Boxer/American Bulldog mix). The following summer, I discovered that I wanted a dog, too. PetFinder was quick to find me a good match (Puckett: an American Bulldog/Bull Terrier mix). Both were rather much quieter than any of my childhood dogs.Both really only alerted if they were certain you hadn't seen the potential danger. Lana could be convinced to "sing". Puckett would bark a bit when we rough-housed. But, other than that, they were quiet. The cats were as noisy as ever.

We lost Lana in December of 2010 and Puckett the spring immediately following. Both were lost to cancer.

A few weeks after Lana's death, we found a little, brown staffie (Cira) to fill the hole that Lana's passing had left in our home. When Puckett passed, it took several months to find a dog that: a) wasn't prone to chasing cats; b) was compatible with Cira; and, C) that said "take me home" to me. That dog was Lady - a blue-eyed, Pitbull/Boxer mix (apparently, I have a thing for blue-eyed bulldogs). Compared to the prior pair of bullies, these two are noisy. Not nearly so noisy as my childhood dogs, just in comparison to their immediate predecessors. Cira will quietly "moof" or whine when she wants you to invite her up on the couch or throw a blanket over her. Lady will talk - if you prompt her - and will bark madly if there's someone at the door.

Still, the cats were, on average, far more vocal than the dogs - especially when you measure it in interactive vocalizations.

Even knowing how vocal - how much company - my cats were, the house seems sooo quiet without them. No longer do I come down to a cacophony of "good morning" mews as I rush to get ready and out the door for work. No longer does Grumbles follow me into the bathroom to chat at me while I take my biology-break. No longer do I have anyone glaring and mewing at me to clear the laptop out of their way so they can lay in my lap.

How much of an impact was this vocalization? For the past several years, my wife had been lobbying to get a third dog. With two dogs and two cats in a small house, I'd demured. I'd told her, "maybe after the cats have passed, we can think about fostering". Donna also made frequent mention of how much she disliked having to clean up after the cats - litter box, water splashed out of their bowl, the drifts of fur, etc. Suddenly absent the cats, Donna is finding that she misses them. She misses their talking. She misses their company. And, today, she brings up the topic of adopting a homeless bengal or two (after the day before reminding me that, with our small cars, three, fifty-pound dogs might make holiday travels problematic).

Umm... "I thought you didn't like living with cats".

To be honest, if every cat were like Bella and Grumbles, I think you'd probably have a lot less people wondering "why do people have cats as pets". And I think that less because of my own feelings about them, than the fact that my wife is having to fight the urge to try to fill the hole they've left and seriously thinking about cat(s) rather than a dog.

End Times (Again)

Not that I want her to feel bad, but the problem with pets with a terminal diagnosis is they often "rally" during their decline-trajectory. So, in the days leading up to the appointment with the euthanizer, you're periodically left to wonder, "wait: did I jump the gun on this? Do I need to delay?"

Last night, while she was pretty low on energy, when I took her over to the food dish, she ate well. This morning, I came down, and, for the first time in days, she was off the couch. She was actually down at the water dish, drinking. There was no pee smell on the towel she'd been sleeping on. The secondary (low-sided) litter pan had been used for urination (and the absorbant was pretty much soaked).

I guess I'll see how she's acting when I come home from the work: if she's still in a rally, I'll call the vet who's scheduled to come, tomorrow, and ask her opinion on the matter.

Bah. I don't want to send her off, prematurely, but I don't want the rally to end, be in worse shape than she was before, and have to seek out an emergency euthanization.

I'd made a similar mistake with Puckett. We'd scheduled him for an appointment, based on diagnosis and earlier trends. Difference was, I'd scheduled further out. Then, a few days before he was due to go to that appointment, he crashed. We'd gone for a walk to enjoy the weather. He'd been especially energetic on that walk. However, when we came back and I went to feed him a chunk of cheese slathered in peanutbutter, he refused and gave me kind of an "I'm ready, now" look. I knew that if we waited for the appointment, he'd have been "beyond ready".

I don't really want that for Bella - especially given that I can't even really make the gamble worthwhile (she doesn't do treats).

:(

My Brain Hurts

Customer Rep: "We urgently need your help to fix this problem we're having. Stuff is on fire!"

Me: "Ok, cool. I can give you some time this week and next."

Customer Rep: "Alright. As soon as you can, please come on site and help us"

Me: Arrive on-site. Listen to customer's problem report. "How long has this issue been going on?"

Customer Rep: "The customer alerted us of the problem last month. We've been trying to fix it since then, but things are only  getting worse as time goes by".

Me: (brain showing first signs of imploding) "...aaaand when did your customer first notice this critical problem?"

Customer Rep: "Maybe a few weeks or a month before they reported it to us?"

Me: "...and this is a critical problem?"

Customer Rep: "Yes: the customer can't do any of the things they need to do and the stuff that was working the last time you were here no longer works."

Me: "Did anyone open a support case with the vendor?"

Customer Rep: "We wanted to wait for you to help us. However, we do have some vendor consultants coming in, next week."

Me: "Aaaalright... Just so we can get the most out those consultants, I need you to open a case so we can get appropriate notes put in and appropriate backline experts looking at the problem so that the guys coming onsite don't have their time wasted."

Time passes

Me: "Can you give me the number of the case you opened? I want to put it in my notes"

Customer Rep: "No. We didn't open one. We figured we'd open one next week when the rep got on site if he said he needed one."

Me: "...Open the case, now, please. It takes the vendor time to identify appropriate resources and we need to ensure those resources lined up ahead of time. Give me the case ID when you're done."

More time passes. I have time to begin preliminary investigations prior to vendor's arrival. I make an initial set of recommendations to help address some of the issues reported.

Customer replies (through customer rep), "we don't want to make those kinds of changes."

More time passes, and the vendor comes on-site. By this time, I've done a lot more digging and have identified a set of more concrete symptoms and potential causes and cures. Consult with the vendor's on-stie and backline engineers. Some of the observed issues can be addressed via a very recently-released emergency-patch.

Me: "Vendor has supplied a patch that will address some of your customer's problems. We'l need to take the service offline, for a bit, to apply the patch."

Customer Rep: "Ok, cool. Lemme go ask the customer for a downtime to apply the patch."

Me: "Aaaalright. I coulda sworn you told me that this thing was useless to your customer in its current state?"

Customer Rep: "Well, he's able to do some stuff on it, it's just taking a really long time to do those things and we had to turn off a whole bunch of other things. I know that the customer will want his active tasks to complete before we take the whole shebang offline".

Me: "You do remember me telling you that I saw your customer's scheduled tasks kick back off, every day, at X o'clock, right? You really need to get the patch applied and verified well before that time ...and there's less than two hours till X o'clock."

Customer Rep: "Customer said we can't do anything until his task finishes."

Me: "Remember me telling you about the new task kickoffs? Looking back in their task-tracker's history, those currently running tasks are going to overlap the soon-to-be-started tasks. And the soon-to-be-started tasks will overlap with the next day's tasks: there's not going to be a window during which nothing is happening. We need to take an outage to apply these patches if you ever want to start getting this software back to a working state."

My brain hasn't completely imploded, yet, but I feel this expression crawling across my face every time I have to deal with customers like this one.

First: if something's been going on for days, weeks or months, it's not an emergency

Second: if fixing your problem is less important than continuing to limp along in your "broken" state while you wait for always-overlapping tasks to finish, then your problem really isn't an emergency.

Third: if someone suggests adjustments that can improve performance without causing a downtime, yet you refuse to make those adjustments, your problem really isn't an emergency.

There Isn't a Dilemma

I love articles like this one that I found on Salon via a Stumble. When you have statments like:

Death is serious business that, for farm animals, denies them a future they’d otherwise have had

The author is ignoring that - were these animals not being raised for food-production - they would, at best, simply not exist. That is, there's no future have denied them. If you want to think that these animals were destined to exist - raised for food or otherwise - you ignore that such existence would be wholly wild. They'd be dying of starvation, illness, misadventure or predation.

Is it nice to think that food-animals raised with non-industrial techniques lead a better life before they end up on my plate? Sure. Is that the only reason for caring about where your food comes from? No. Note even close.

So, for me, there is no dilemma. The reason for non-industrial techniques is that the resultant product is generally a better product. I don't have to worry about the chemicals typically found in industrial food products. The food is I get is generally a better eating-experience.

Similarly, I have reduced worry of add-on ill-effects. I also don't need to worry that industrial techniques are going to create super-resistant, cross-species illnesses. I don't have to worry about shocks and shortages caused by explosions of illnesses in closely-confined stock (or the propensity for large stocks to have the kind of reduced genetic diversity that makes them more easily targeted by a single strain of illness). The impacts of other industrial products are also spread out to a degree that they're more-easily absorbed by the environment rather than overwhelming it.

Then again, what I've found in talking to people, is that the outlook of people who grew up like I did had a very different formative basis. I, and many of my peers, grew up outside of cities. Even if you weren't a farm-kid, you were close enough to where food was produced to have been exposed to what went into it.

To me, the only "ethical dilemma" that exists is that more people don't know where their food comes from. To most people, their exposure to the food-production process is what they see in the local supermarket. In an ideal world, everyone would have the opportunity to see how their food starts and how it finally ends up in the supermarket and on their plate.

Panic At The Benefits Site

Bit of a panic moment, this morning. Got an email from my former employer's benefits plan administrator telling me "because your ESOP plan had less than the required minimum balance to be retained under the current program, your plan will be cashed out, taxes assessed and a check sent". This struck me as odd, because the only plan I was aware of that was managed by the brokerage was my 401(k), which, if it was below the minimum balance, would have meant that a not-inconsiderable chunk of money had somehow managed to go "poof".

The initial panic wasn't helped by the fact that, the link that the plan-administrator sent to me to view my plan info was erroring out in a way that could have been interpreted as my account having been deactivated.

Decided, "calm down. Go run your morning errands. Try the site again in a couple hours and see if it was just a transient problem and not something more serious."

Get home and try the link again. Same damned error. Opt to try logging in using a different method. The different method worked. Found all my funds still present ...plus an ESOP that I hadn't specifically known about.

And, no, the email wasn't bogus, just broken. I'd checked the headers before clicking the links ...and the fact that it was sent to an address set up specifically for use by the plan-administrator meant that, if it was a phish, they'd have had to have already compromised the administrator's site to get my address. Lastly, the site's URL and SSL certificate were all good. All those details in place, were it an exploit, they likely would have had a better effort-ROI by just extracting data directly from the site-owner than trying to phish me.

Cloud, The Vogon Way

Me: "I'd like to be able to send account-validation emails to people who register to my bug-tracking system".
 
AWS Dox: "Sure... but if you mail direct, most sites will treat your email as spam"
 
Me: "Ok... How do I get around that"

AWS Dox: "Well, you can relay through SES"

Me: "Cool. Lemme go set that up."

AWS-SES: "Rejected!"

Me: "Your SMTP message is a bit vague - are you rejecting the relay because of the sender or the recipient?"

AWS-SES: "REJECTED"

AWS Dox: "To relay with SES you have to validate senders - or sender-domains - and recipients"

Me: "Ok... The SES console says my domain is validated and that any sender in the domain should be good."

AWS-SES: "REJECTED"

Me: "Guess that means the rejection message applied to the recipients. Lemme verify a recipient ...even though that makes SES crap as a smart-relay"

AWS-SES: "REJECTED!"

Me: "Fuck... I only validated the recipient in one region and the rejecting relay is in another. Lemme verify my recipient in _multiple_ regions, then ...You do realize this makes SES a real horror-show for smart-relay services, right?"

AWS-SES: "REJECTED"

Me: "What the actual fuck??" (dig through shitty AWS dox some more) "Srsly? I gotta validate my domain in each region I want to relay through SES??"

I swear: Vogons had to have consulted on the design of some of AWS's service-components.

There Are No Easy Answers

So, the latest "easy answer" (to the U.S.'s gun promlem) that seems to be washing across the various social sites I visit is the idea of "require insurance for gun ownership and you'll make guns too expensive to carry!". On the face, it sounds good. I mean, car insurance isn't cheap for most people and medical insurance is stupidly expensive. So, why wouldn't gun insurance be expensive, too?

Problem is, the cost of insurance isn't high just as a matter of course. Insurance costs for many things can actually be extremely low. What drives insurance prices is generally how much it costs for an insurer to provide coverage to a risk-pool. This includes things like administrative costs, but the real drivers of costs are the annual payouts to be covered. Those payouts are driven by two main things: the costs of claims and the likelihoods of having to pay out those claims.

Car and medical insurance are both expensive - particularly medical - because the likelihood of having to pay a claim and the size of the claims are both high.

If you've ever been in even a fender bender and looked at just the cost of body-work, even trivial incidents can be stupid expensive. Throw in personal injury claims and then take the number of claimable incidents that happen over a given amount of time, and you come up with fairly high risk-exposure for an insurer.

Similarly, if you've ever been the customer of an ER for something minor and then looked at your EoB, you've noticed that even "small" emergencies are stupidly-expensive.

With both automobile and medical insurance, insurance rates are highly variable. Some peoples rates are punishingly-high while others' may border on trivial. Why? Actuarial tables and claim-history. Insurers look at your age, your health, your personal habits, where you live and other indicators of risk (likelihood of payouts and likely sizes of payouts). Those factors are evaluated and you're put into risk-pools of people with similar evaluations. The insurer then has to determine, "give a pool of size X with a likely annual payout of Y for that pool, how much do I need to charge each of that pool's members to be able to turn a profit". Insurers can further decide "do I make my profit by providing coverage to a small number of subscribers that I get fat margins on or do I make my profit by providing coverage for a larger number of subscribers but where each subscriber earns me a lower margin". In non-competitive markets, insurers tend towards the former. In competitive markets, the temptation to do the latter is higher (gain customers by undercutting your competition).

Thus, even if one were to pass legislation saying "gun owners must be insured" (and courts don't ultimately see such legislation as infringing on exercise of a constitutional right), it's entirely reasonable to assume that not all insurance will be prohibitively expensive. Indeed, if such mandated insurance were to prove prohibitively expensive, it would increase the likelihood of courts deeming an insurance mandate an infringement on exercise of a constitutional right. You  have to figure that, unless there's artificial restraint of competition, there'll be at least one or two insurers that would do the math and figure out that they can make serious bank by providing low-margin/high-volume insurance policies.

Fix-em' Up

Good article:

Fix-em' Up

The reason I bought an HP Zbook instead of the HP Omen was that the ZBook is user-serviceable.

I'd made my previous EliteBook last for five and a half years because I could get replacement keyboards, wifi cards and upgrade-parts either from the vendor, Amazon or eBay.

The Omen was _not_ user serviceable. I couldn't even do something as simple as swapping out the damned hard drive without an HP repair kit, since the only way to open it was to sever some glued-on parts, first.

And what were factors in recent phone purchases? The ability to swap out batteries and SD cards.

Planned obsolescence is semi-fine for a toaster or a hairdryer. But the further north of $100 you go, the less acceptable it is to not be user-serviceable.

Regal Really Cares

Today, I received a reply to a message that I sent through Regal Cinema's web-based contact form. This is a form that asks you for contact information - including asking for your name. I wrote to them to complain about their plans to implement bag-checking:

Dear Ms. Patron:

Thank you for contacting our office regarding Regal's policy to inspect backpacks and bags of any kind prior to entry into our auditoriums. We certainly appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Security issues have become a daily part of our lives in America. Regal Entertainment Group wants our customers and staff to feel comfortable and safe when visiting or working in our theatres. To ensure the safety of our guests and employees, backpacks and bags of any kind are subject to inspection prior to admission. We acknowledge that this procedure can cause some inconvenience and that it is not without flaws, but hope these are minor in comparison to increased safety

Again, thank you. We appreciate you taking the time to contact us over this matter. We value your patronage and hope to see you in a Regal Entertainment Group theatre soon.

Sincerely,
Customer Relations Department
Operational Services
Regal Entertainment Group

My first reactions were: "Ms"?? "Patron". That's like "wow". Talk about making a customer feel like you're taking the time to give them special attention. The above was sent with a From/Reply-To address of "Jamie.Stafford@regalcinemas.com". So, at least I know the robot's name, eh?

I sent a reply to "Jamie". I did not make the assumpiont that "Jamie" is a Mr. or a Ms - more likely an "it" is it appears Regal bothered to pick a gender neutral name for their bot. I'm assuming it will never be read by a human, but it felt good to write it:

Thank you for your form letter. Its utter lack of personal response speaks volumes about your business practices and is a testament of your concern for your customers. I'm reasonably certain that nothing in my initial contact email provided indication that you should address me as "Ms.". Addressing me as "Patron" - when your web form asks for a name - means you can't even be bothered to do a simple mail merge. Your missive gave me the same kind of warm-fuzzies that receiving a letter addressed to "occupant" does. Way to really set a high bar on customer relations.

Having seen your bag inspection in practice, this weekend, I'd be embarrassed if I were associated with Regal Cinemas. If you're going to engage in this kind of farcical security-theatre, you should probably train your staff to at least not half-ass it. Asking my wife to open her purse and then just sorta glancing inside it is really pointless. While I'm not asking you to have your staff pawing through our bags, at least do something that indicates you're committed to the farce. If you're going to inconvenience me, don't make it such an obvious waste of my time. Frankly, your current bag-check execution makes the TSA - and their +80% failure-rate look like paragons of security. Your security efforts make feel more secure going to a nightclub in a bad part of town.

-tom

Should be interesting to see if I get any kind of response. I'm guessing either no response or yet another, completely impersonal form letter.

Oh well, fuck Regal. Their theatres are always filthy and poorly run, any way. Somehow, they even manage to fuck up the execution of theatres with luxury seating (seriously: no table service??).

I really wish Alamo would take a stab at closer-to-the-city locations.

Rising Medication Costs

So, NBC news decided to do a click-bait style piece on the rising cost of prescription medications, tonight. They talked about the end-user effects but none of the underlying causes, so I decided to see why prices for existing medications were generally trending upwards in price rather than the downward that would be expected as mature products reached the point of "economies of scale". I found a ConsumerReports article on the subject. Interesting read.

Point #1 is kind of maddening. If you weren't covered by a large, powerful lobbying group and did the same thing, you'd end up jailed for price-gouging.

#3 is kind of a difficult nut to crack, if you're on multiple drugs and the lowest prices aren't found all at the same source. Who has the time to shuttle from store-to-store to score the lowest price (especially if you receive no co-pay difference for having saved your insurer money)

#4 I haven't found any of my doctors to be anything other than neutral on cost-concerns. Frankly, it's not my doctor's job to factor in price when prescribing to me. If price is a concern, he should be willing to work with me - and, when I've raised the concern, no doctor has been anything but happy to ensure that I am able to most-affordably acquire my medications (they'd rather you take something affordable than not fill scripts due to price problems)

#5 One of the medications I'm on is over $5,000/dose. My annual out of pocket maximums go up, year by year. The maker of the medication has an assistance program that, thus far, has made it so my annual out-of-pocket maximums are bridged.

Still Haven't Seen It All

I suppose it's nice to know that, even on the wrong half of my 40s and after two decades in IT, it's still possible for a vendor's "technical" presentation to be the worst one I've ever had the displeasure to sit through.

Seriously, vendors: if I'm asking you a question, it's an opportunity for you. You can either use that opportunity to impress me - to sell to me - or, like today, you can use it to completely turn me off of you and your products.

If I ask you a question, "I don't know" is actually an acceptable answer. If I ask you a question you don't fully understand, it's also ok for you to tell me you don't understand the question as asked and ask me to elaborate on or restate my question. Bulling ahead and trying to give an answer to a question I didn't ask - especially if it demonstrates you didn't understand my question - is not ok. Giving me an answer that can't possibly be correct and that you can't defend if I challenge the response is also not ok. Giving me an answer that contradicts something that the later slides in your PowerPoint say is so is also not ok. Framing your answer as an opinion rather than fact - particularly if your slides are making a contrary assertion - is decidedly not ok.

It's been a good, long while since I've left a vendor presentation completely furious.

Godzilla's Refuse-Haulers

Getting our cube-area ready for renovations, so we all have to move out. As part of that, there's a lot of trash cleanup involved. They asked for volunteers to help take rollaway carts down to the dumpsters. Got to the dock and was told "you need to take it to the end of that ramp and empty it into the big dumpter". Pushed my cart to the end of the ramp and leveraged the cart over the lip of the dumpster so I could empty it wholesale.

Get back to the bottom of the ramp and the dockmaster's shaking his head. He says to me, "was really expecting that you'd scoot it to the end and then dig the stuff out manually to empty it."


"Yeah, well: my way seemed faster".

Cut Loose

One of the realities of working on geographically-disbursed teams is you need a group calendar to help keep track of where everyone is (and who's out on vacation, training, etc.). The one weird thing I've noticed is that many of my co-workers, when posting their PTO days, indicate _where_ they're taking their PTO.

When I see the "where" notation, all I can think is, "that's nice, but why did you feel the need to post that detail?" Are you trying to demonstrate "I'm someplace that I can't really help you even if you do try to call me?"

I mean, you're on vacation. It shouldn't be the business of anyone on the team where you are. Set your Out of Office on your mail account and hit the road. Don't check your mail. Don't answer your phone (the latter is easy if, like me, the only number you give people is GV - since GV's really good at enforcing contact-hours and you can always set a group-level "I'm on vacation" voicemail greeting). BE on vacation.

Traffic, Here, Is Ass

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

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

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

Called my friend up to convey my regrets.

Hit Or Miss

Went to this week's Lana Del Rey concert in Bristow, VA. It was supposed to be a friend and his wife plus me and my wife. Unfortunately, circumstances conspired to prevent his wife from coming ...and she was the primary reason for going to the show.

Still, Lana Del Rey has a pretty damned good voice. That said, she's not someone worth going to see in person. For being the headlining act, her set was much more like an opening act's. It was both unusually short for the main act and included no encore sets.

Look: I get that a lot of the people that go to your show might normally have worry about going to school the next day, but that's no reason to give me a $50 performance when I've paid $130 for each of my seats (not including the various "convenience" and other fees I'm forced to pay). And, while it's great that you decided to "interact" with the audience by walking down into the buffer zone between the stage and the pit area, that you failed to even give the token hello or acknowledgement that you knew where you were playing was kind of weak. I'd really hoped that the two times the camera had closed in on your face, what looked like an eye-roll was something else. But, given the other things, it just really seemed like you didn't want to be there.

Oh well. Maybe you're just more comfortable in small night clubs. I can't think that that many people showed up and keened if this is what you're like all the time. Then again, given the age of your primary demographic, it'd be unsurprising if this was a lot of those people's first concert-going experience. At least, for them, things can really only go up from here?

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.