Losing Again

Posted by on January 9, 2013 No comments

In my Internet travels, I’ve seen the good and the bad and the tasteless and the strange.  One thing that I saw that struck my fancy was a writing genre I think are called “BAWW Stories.”  These are short stories – either true or not – that exist for the purpose of being heart-wrenching and emotionally hyper-charged.  Usually, the story involves a close friend, family member, or pet in a terrible series of events.  The end result is that you just break down and bawl – “bawwwwww!”  I’ve wanted to try my hand at writing one, so let’s see how well it turns out.  Gratefully, this is total fiction.

…and that’s that.  I’m single now, I guess.  Who am I kidding, I know I’m single.  When you call your girlfriend up and you hear from the background noise that she’s at some party that you had no idea was planned, when you hear a guy asking “Is that him?”, when she stutters and hesitates when you say you’ll see her tomorrow, these are some pretty obvious signs.

It’s not like I didn’t see it coming.  She’s always been more social than me and I could tell I was holding her back.  I’m not going to bother deleting all the emails and texts just yet.  I just want to sit for a bit and think about the good times.  We had, what, maybe a month?  That’s pretty good for me, considering all the first/last dates I’ve been through.

Bub is here beside me.  Bub is my closest friend, even though he’s a cat.  He always knows when something’s up.  I take good care of him and he never fails to show his appreciation for it.  Bub chose me, which is something I could never expect from any human companion.

Bub was a stray that showed up at the house one afternoon.  Who knows why he chose my house.  He was thin but clean and he seemed so happy to see me.  As time went on, Bub became closer and closer to me, like a child.  And he’d seen many of my ups and downs as I stumbled through my failed relationships, so he understood how I was tonight.

I figured I should go for a drive to clear my head.  That’s usually what I did in times like these.  Bub seemed to know what I was up to (as usual) and headed to the door.  That was one of the coolest things about Bub, that he was so dog-like.  He actually enjoyed car rides.  So, I hauled him up and we got in the car together, Bub settling down in my lap after I buckled my seat belt.

As I drove through the back roads, I ran through the last few days in my mind and analyzed how my latest relationship fell apart.  Yeah, she had become distant.  Yeah, I didn’t seem to care about it.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  It was me.  Bub was in my lap, purring.  Bub didn’t care about all that stuff.  If I ignored him, he just hung out with me.  That’s how a relationship should be.  No, no.  I’m being selfish again.

I turned on to the interstate for the drive home.  The back roads are nice, but sometimes you actually want to get somewhere in decent time.  Although Bub liked car rides, the Interstate made him a bit nervous.  I reassured him frequently as we drove on.

Suddenly, Bub tensed up and I looked down at him.  While I looked down, a truck horn blared right beside me.  Bub scrambled off my lap and down onto the floor.  Freaking out myself, I look up and see a wall of stopped cars straight ahead.  I look down again quickly for Bub.  He’s pressed himself down at the front of the floor, under the brake pedal.  All the blood drains from my face when I realize what was going to happen.  I only have seconds to react.

The tears burst from my eyes as the screeching of tires is drowned out by the screaming from the front of the floor of my car.  I’m so sorry.

Customer Service, Done Right and Done Incredibly Wrong

Posted by on January 7, 2013 No comments

I’m writing this on a day that hasn’t really been in my favor, so it’s probably going to be a bit more harsh than usual.  But anyway, to have a post in the rant category with a tag of kudos would be rather odd.

Sometimes it takes a spectacular display of behavior to elevate something very good to the excellent level, and at the same time, showing the bad as very bad.  A couple of weeks ago at Fuddruckers, the GF and I ordered our food and sat down to wait for it.  When the server arrived with the food, she asked, “Did you get your shake, yet?”, which we hadn’t.  The server said, “Hold on just a minute,” and immediately went over and made the shake herself and brought it right over.  While she was doing that, I commented “I’m impressed she has taken personal responsibility for the problem and is fixing it.”  When she brought the shake, the GF gave expressed the same and thanked her for her level of service.

Fast-forward to a meal this weekend at Cracker Barrel.  I order my usual plain cheeseburger, which arrives not plain.  This isn’t the first time this has happened.  Cracker Barrel cooks don’t seem to understand what plain means.  As is typical at restaurants, a “runner” brought the food and when it was commented my burger wasn’t plain, she was confused. She offered a fresh bun and I accepted.  Just as she was walking away, our waitress came over and asked if everything was ok.  She saw the burger and commented defensively, “I put it in as plain” to which I sarcastically replied that it’s nothing new.  The GF asks the waitress if we can get a new bun, and incredibly, the first word out of the waitress’ mouth was “no.” 

“No?” 

When, ever, do you flat-out say “no” to a customer?  She immediately started back-tracking when she saw the looks on our faces and I think (or I hope, for her sake) she had intended to say that instead of just bringing a bun, she would take the plate back and fix it in the kitchen.  But, as it turned out, we commented that the runner was going to bring a new bun, and the waitress dismissed herself.

Time passed, and no bun appeared.  I assumed that would happen – that the runner and waitress would each think the other was taking care of it.  As I finished my fries, the waitress came back around and saw I still didn’t have a plain bun.  Again, she didn’t really apologize, she just refused to accept blame for someone else not doing something correct.  At that point she went back and got a new bun in under 20 seconds.

The rest of the meal was uneventful, but we were still shaking our heads at the level of customer service provided.  As I’m paying for the meal at the checkout counter, my cashier is talking to another cashier, discussing that they are both done for the day.  She asks me how my food was.  I responded in a tone that should have roused suspicion, “It was… good.”  There was a short pause while she processed the payment and she asks, “and how was the service today?” and before I could answer, she turned away and picked up on her conversation with the other cashier.  My eyes grew wide.  When she turned back, she didn’t seem to realize that the question had gone unanswered and finished the transaction.  As we walked out, I had plenty of expletives in my vocabulary.

Notice how little description it took for the positive experience and how much more was devoted to the shitty experience.  I’m not sure anyone thinks that good customer service is recognized, but everyone knows that bad service is immortalized.  It is pretty clear that the Fuddruckers we were at empowers their workers to do what it takes to make the customer happy.  It’s also clear that this particular Cracker Barrel does not.  It’s entirely possible that the individual employees contributed to the success or failure, but in the case of Cracker Barrel, it was four employees’ failures – the waitress, the runner, the cook, and the cashier.  That speaks volumes about that location, which we will never return to again.

So, in conclusion, kudos to Fuddruckers for giving their workers the power to fix problems themselves, and no comment to Cracker Barrel for not taking responsibility for mistakes and being too wrapped up in their own selves to find out that they screwed up.

Technology Can Do That, So Let’s Not

Posted by on January 2, 2013 No comments

I wonder what technology is coming to and at the same time, I wonder if I’m just getting old.  I look at things that were normal for me at the peak of my programming days and wonder if older developers thought I was an idiot for doing things that way.  For example, did the old procedural programmers of old see object-oriented design as ridiculous, slow, and inefficient?  Maybe.  But OO programming is pretty much the standard now.

But for some reason, I am confused as to why implicit typecasting is suddenly “awesome".  We had that way back when in VB and Classic ASP and we were hated for it.  Then .NET came along and strong-typing became the thing to do.  Now we’re back to implicit typecasting and scripted languages just like we had with ASP.

But the thing that’s really got me confused is cloud computing, why everyone thinks it great to rely on someone else instead of relying on yourself.  I guess the argument is “they can do it so much better than we can, so why not let them.”  There’s no more building yourself up?  You have to start at the top?  Talk about immediate gratification.  That’s bitter old man talk, there.

At my job, a co-worker (thankfully not me) has an integration project using Amazon Web Services (AWS).  As best I can tell, it’s a web service that sits in front of a message queue system.  To be slightly vague about the project, our client sends us a request with a questionnaire.  We collect the responses to the questions and send each individual answer back to the client as a message via AWS.  This infrastructure was forced on us; not our choice.  So, my old-timey brain is thinking, “why must a unit of work (a completed questionnaire), be transmitted in discrete pieces when it needs to be a single unit on their end?”  The answer to this is “don’t worry about it.”  The reason is a new crazy programming concept: eventual consistency.  Apparently our client is so hip and modern, they are using both “the cloud” and “eventual consistency” in their application design.

Eventual Consistency is nothing new.  Airlines have been using it forever.  Did you lose your luggage?  Is it now five states away?  It will eventually get to you and everything will be fine.  FedEx started using it with SmartPost.  If you ever had something shipped via SmartPost, you could watch the package get shipped all over the country, but eventually it would get to you.  With every real-world application of Eventual Consistency, you are guaranteed to get what you want, but never sure when it will happen.  Why, in any case, this became an acceptable solution is beyond me.

To wrap this up, but to leave it with some final, head-shaking, “why is this acceptable” thoughts, here’s some of the documented guidelines when using Amazon Web Services:

  • When you make a request for new messages, you may only request up to 10 new messages at a time.
  • If you request 10 messages, you may not get 10.  You may get less than 10, even if there are more than 10 messages in the queue.
  • If there are a very small number of messages in the queue, you may get zero.
  • Despite the inability for AWS to deliver the messages you request when you request them, all of the messages are available for viewing through their control panel.
  • When you send a message, you get no acknowledgement that it was sent successfully.  If you did not get an error during sending, you assume it was sent successfully.
  • You have no idea if the message was delivered to the destination queue successfully.  You will only know when the receiver picks up the message, and that is send as an acknowledgement on another queue.  You must query that queue and match up the acknowledgements with your initial sent messages.
  • The acknowledgement queue has all the limitations of the aforementioned message requests.

This is true progress.

The Violent Life

Posted by on December 27, 2012 No comments

Today, I made a follow-up call to one of my mortgage companies, who confirmed some bad news to me.  I guess relatively, it’s not bad news at all, it’s just information.  Time is quickly running out for HARP refinancing, and my primary mortgage company extended me a really nice offer that could save me a couple hundred a month in payments.  However, when I called to redeem that offer, I was deemed ineligible because my secondary mortgage holder wasn’t on the “approved list”.  So I called the secondary company today and they confirmed that they were not participating in that program.

So what did I do then? Nothing.  I politely thanked the woman and ended the call.  I didn’t rant at her.  I didn’t punch a wall or cry and yell.  I didn’t curse the politicians or banks.  And I didn’t start scheming.  I just kept driving home.  Nothing had changed.  I wasn’t any worse off than I was before I started this re-fi process.  As I drove, I thought of a moment a couple days ago where I forgot to provide my rewards card at a costly restaurant and missed a decent amount of reward points.  Again, I didn’t get angry.  I didn’t insist on having the staff accommodate my mistake.  I shrugged and moved on.

Some people may hear these stories and say “Look at what you’re missing out on!” or “You’re ripping yourself off!”  And that’s what I’m trying to explain.  There’s a certain segment of the population that believes life is difficult and unfair – a battle that must be fought in order to succeed.  They’ve come up with motivational sayings like “Seize the day!” and “Grab life by the throat!”  They implore you to “take what’s yours” and “settle for nothing less”.  Such violent, aggressive images – why would life freely offer anything to them when they are constantly attacking it and taking whatever they can?

However, I feel I am a model case of success caused by working in harmony with life instead of fighting it every step of the way.  When opportunities are presented to me, I take them if I can, and if I miss them, there will always be another in the future.  If you would scoff and say I’m too passive to be successful, what’s your measure of success?  I’m very sure it’s not the same as mine.  If I had to get up each day and mentally plan an attack on everyone that’s out to take something that I might feel is rightfully mine, I would be miserable.  And I’m guessing those that do this are miserable, they just don’t know any differently.

I’m not making an excuse for laziness and total passivity.  You have to be engaged enough to act on your good fortune, and that can mean working and sometimes working hard.  Further, you have to be engaged enough to recognize your good fortune and give thanks for it.  Finally, you have to have the attitude that you are losing nothing.

So I wasn’t able to get a couple hundred off my mortgage payment.  I didn’t lose that offer; it was never mine to begin with.  For me to be upset about something that wasn’t mine is selfish and dwelling on it would make me lose focus on the real facts that I am getting by without that change.  I should be very grateful that is the case, with so many others that are not as fortunate. 

In summary, as cliché as it is, you need to focus on what you have been given and not what you feel you have been denied.

Window Pains

Posted by on December 18, 2012 No comments

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was posting about how my computer had frozen during startup and I ended up buying, effectively, a whole new computer.  After returning from a week-long vacation, I found my new computer frozen again at the exact same place.

This time I spent a bit longer trying to get the computer to work, because I had just gotten everything installed and set up the way I wanted it.  I booted to Ubuntu and checked the hard drive – no problems at all.  I did the “automatic repair” multiple times until it told me it couldn’t fix the problem. 

Finally I booted up the Windows 8 media and looked at the repair options.  None were satisfactory.  The closest thing I could find was an option like “Refresh this PC”, which would replace all the Windows files (which I wanted), but would wipe out all installed programs (which I did not want).

With a heavy heart, I made the decision to reformat and reinstall… Windows 7.  In the span of a couple months, I’ve had two Windows 8 installations on two different computers that have been unrecoverable.  The worst part for me is the lack of recovery features, namely, Safe Mode.  If I could only get to a goddamn desktop and look at the event logs to see what happened leading up to the failure, I could troubleshoot it.  Whoever eliminated these diagnostic options out of fear that they would confuse or intimidate novice users is an idiot.

In the previous failure, I had put the blame on hard drive errors, but it was a convenient excuse.  I didn’t really believe it.  I now suspect in both of these cases, it was the Automatic Update process.  I have always had my Windows Update settings where it would download the updates, but I would install and restart the updates when I chose to.  With Windows 8, I decided to let the system do what it felt was best, meaning restart whenever needed.

So I guess I’m going to have to run Windows 8 in a virtual machine, if I even find I have a need for it.

A Lot Of Nonsense (But Torture is Discussed)

Posted by on August 1, 2010 No comments

I’m generally pretty good about hating on the human race, by which I mean I generally hate the human race and am pretty good at it.  But in light of recent research on my part, I feel I need to give us some credit.  It’s hard to say this is the pinnacle of civilization, but…

A lyric in a song made a reference to “Catherine wheel” and I felt inclined to find out what it was all about.  It turns out to be a torture device.  Not a particularly clever one, but rather grotesque.  I’m not sure why the wheel was needed, but the technique employed was essentially breaking all the victim’s bones then letting them die on their own.

Of course now that I knew about this particular torture device, it would be a disservice to not understand it in context of other torture devices in use at the time.  So I had a lovely time of reading and understanding many different methodologies for punishing people.  Sounds like fun, huh?

It made me wonder how it must have been to live in that age.  Just like now, you have your rich and elite who can get away with most everything, and there’s probably a pretty narrow “middle-class”, who garner some respect and a small sphere of influence in their region.  But then there’s the working class, and working might be a generous term.

The thing that strikes me is that physical torture was entertainment to the common people in those times.  And it might have been a perpetual worry that they might be an entertainer some day.  Could they ever have imagined what the world would be like now?  Living back then, could you even visualize cities that were clean, buildings like malls and office complexes that were kept sparkling all the time?  Paved roads, lit-up city streets, safe, secure houses?  The pessimist in me is right there with you.  “Clean cities?”  “safe houses?”  But let’s all think in relative terms, here.

Our current time would surely seem like literally heaven to them.  Of course, they don’t understand anything modern, so it would all be “magic” to them.  And how could they comprehend a civilization that didn’t employ torture as a standard practice (except for those rich and elite previously mentioned)?

So, looking around, yeah, we have a lot of stupid people.  We have some bad people that do some pretty bad things on a local level and some at a global level.  We have cases where people’s rights are violated by people in power.  But at least we don’t have rotting corpses hanging in cages in our cities, or exhibitions of torture downtown.  We don’t have to fear someone coming to town and randomly accusing people of heresy and torturing them for show.

I think short-term things look bleak, but long-term – like not in my lifetime – things should continue trending toward a global social structure.  Currently, we define ourselves by race, nationality, and religion.  Nationalism is in its death throes as the Internet allows global communication.  Nations have less power to convince their populace that outsiders are “evil”.  The more we communicate disconnectedly, the less race will be a concern.  You could have years of partnership and communication history with a person and never know he or she is of a race you dislike.  That proves the ridiculousness of racism.  Religion?  That’s going to take some work, but at least the religious leaders don’t have the power they used to, so maybe in time, we can work something out.

Adjusting the Brightness

Posted by on July 25, 2010 No comments

I love how things work out sometimes.  Friday morning when I woke up I was so, so tired.  The sun is coming up later and I’m a pretty SAD person (meaning I get Seasonal Affective Disorder).  So I thought this year I will finally buy a sunrise light.  I know they’re around $100, so I started the buying process by mentally preparing myself to spend $100 on a light.

I went out for dinner Saturday and stopped by somewhere I’d seen but never looked in – an HSN outlet.  I love outlets, junk stores, pawn shops, etc.  So I get in there and right up front is a light therapy device with sunrise feature.  Priced at $70.  Awesome.

The store is pretty much how I thought it would be.  Lots of crap I’d buy before I entered my mature "I don’t need shit" mentality.  So, on the way out, I grab the device and head to checkout.

I didn’t pay attention to how the outlet priced their crap, but apparently, the longer a product sits there the cheaper it gets.  This product must have been pretty old because it rang up at $17.  Holy crap!  I was mentally prepared to spend $100, happy to spend $70, and ended up paying $17.

Last night I hooked it up, but misunderstood and misprogrammed the sunrise alarm feature.  I wanted to be up at 6:00, so I set the alarm for 5:30 with a 30 minute ramp-up time.  That’s not how it works; it started glowing at 5:00 to finish at 5:30. 

So, at 5:30 this morning, my room literally looked like the middle of the day.  Damn that thing is bright!  And I woke up.  I woke up, immediately turned it off and went back to sleep.

It was interesting that the device really did wake me up.  And the waking was pretty easy, not jarring like an alarm.  This week will be the real test.

Yeah, and also on Saturday morning I got to stand my theological ground against a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses.  The most interesting exchange was when they tried to convince me God was a person. 

“So you’re saying, like a person, he has likes and dislikes?” I asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“So he’s biased?”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘biased’ with God…”

I pretty much summed up my beliefs for them in that I do give thanks for what I have been afforded, although I don’t feel compelled to give thanks to a specific being with a name.  And lo and behold, that night I find something I put into my subconscious the previous day at a price I never imagined.  So I’m giving thanks for my fortune here and now.

Unclear On The Concept

Posted by on July 3, 2010 No comments

From a Yahoo Finance article:

“Bottom line: If you don’t have the discipline to list your credit cards in interest-rate order from highest to lowest and pay them off that way, try an online tool such as DebtGoals.com (about $15/month) that literally tells you what to pay off first to minimize your overall debt.”

If you have balances on multiple cards, maybe another recurring bill is exactly what you need.  I’ll remember this.

Take Pride, not Lives

Posted by on May 28, 2010 No comments

I see mass-manufacturer Foxconn has been pretty heavy in the news for all the suicides of their workers and now they have a solution: higher pay.  How American of a solution is that?  We’ll buy your happiness.  Little do they know they will only make the problem worse because now workers won’t be able justify quitting because they can’t make that much anywhere else.

Pondering this, I had a typical impractical thought.  But who knows,  it’s “so crazy it just might work” ™.  The root problem is job dissatisfaction.  Some of it is long hours, some is monotony, but I might speculate a lot of it is a feeling of uselessness.  It comes back to the Gung Ho principles.  These anonymous, tireless workers don’t understand the good that they are doing.  They don’t know the joy they are bringing to someone by assembling these products.

It’s not just Foxconn, it’s totally rampant.  It could be the #1 American export.  Automobile builders, apparel assemblers (shoes, shirts, jackets), farmers, everyone that makes something for someone else, they are all anonymized by a company name.  When people buy something, they say “Apple made this” or “Nissan built this.”  No, actually, people made these things.  We’ve forgotten that people do the work.  Take a look at some of the stuff around you.  People made those things for you.  Even if people didn’t make them, they maintained the machines that made them.

So, how to get this human connection back?  What if every automobile running through the assembly line had a “Thank You” card on it that each worker would sign as it went through their post?  What if an assembly worker would slip a note into each device they assembled stating “This was assembled by Dave Smith.  Let me know that you enjoy it at www.companyname.com/feedback/DaveSmith.”  You offer a chance for the worker to connect with the customer. 

And another thing happens as well.  You create accountability.  And it’s personal.  Can you imagine how people felt putting tags that say “Inspected by #11”?  That’s all I am, is a number.  If that’s all you are, who cares what quality of a job you do?  But putting your name to your work is incentive to do a good job.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong.  The current generation seems to have no problem posting stories of exceeding stupidity and embarrassment on Facebook, tying it directly to their names.  Maybe there is no value anymore to “having a good name.”  On the other end, maybe it’s completely impractical for a large company with massive turnover.  Then again, maybe there’s a reason for the massive turnover.  Hmmm. We can’t implement this idea because of the turnover cost, even though the idea might improve the retention rate.

Back in the Game

Posted by on May 12, 2010 No comments

I’ll just toss out a story I have on seating and lumbar support.  Before owning the MX5, I spent 10 years in an Acura TL.  Its lumbar support was pretty pitiful – just a lever that would push a bar forward in the seat.  But still, I used it from day one because I heard that lumbar support was good. 

A few months after owning the car, my back went out while I was standing up in the office.  I had never had back problems before and at that time, I wasn’t really overweight.  That injury put me out of commission for a week and changed my life forever.  Those of you that have had back failures know you are never the same afterwards.  But at the time I never considered why it happened.  It was a mystery.

Almost 10 years later, I had another significant back failure (and blogged it).  Another week of lying in bed, afraid to move at all.  I attribute this failure to poor riding posture on my then-new motorcycle.  The hump for the passenger seat was pushing very hard into my lower back.  Still though, I never wondered why my back failed to begin with.

At this time in my life, I’m doing a 150-mile commute a day and working 9 hours at a desk – nothing but sitting.  This is literally destroying my back.  The pain was constant, I was popping Advil for days straight, and I was hating life.  After a business trip for a few days, I was feeling better but when I got in the car, within 10 minutes my back was killing me.  I was cursing Acura for having such crappy lumbar support, not like some cars like the old Ford Taurus with the inflatable bladder.

I fiddled around with the seat positions for a while and found two things that turned me around completely.  One, sitting with my legs together.  I used to drive more (ahem) spread-eagle and the bolsters on the seat were pushing on my hamstrings and the sciatic nerve.  Two, turn off the lumbar support.  This shocked me.  After ten years of leaving that bar pushed against my back, I found I never needed it.  In fact, I’m inclined to think that it caused my first, life-changing back failure.  It makes sense that the same pushing of the motorcycle seat and the Acura lumbar support have the same result.

When I was planning the purchase of my MX5, I read as much as I could on the seats and it’s kind of a love-it-or-hate-it thing.  I found a store that sells inflatable lumbar support and budgeted to buy one (at around $100).  After a few weeks in the new seat, with proper seating posture, I don’t think I’m going to need it at all.  I have a slight concern about the side bolsters pushing against my hips, but if I flex my glutes, I can push myself up and the pressure is relieved.  This is kind of motivating for me to (re)develop those muscles that have atrophied from years of deskwork.

So, if you have back pain and are constantly searching for better or stronger lumbar support, maybe you don’t need it.  Maybe the lumbar support is what is causing the back pain, as it was for me.