This video is pure gold; I wish I could inject the knowledge in this video directly into the brains of people around the world. There are also videos on using semi-colons, capital letters and more. And no, please don’t point out any grammatical mistakes in this post. 😉
Category: Random
Eating My Words: Never Tasty, But Necessary
I think self-awareness is probably one of the most critical human traits when it comes to personal growth and issues of integrity. It’s amazingly easy to think you’re right all the time – most people do, myself included – it’s much harder to look at yourself and admit that you might be wrong. Some people live their entire lives in self-denial. Self-awareness is something I strive very hard for, never trying to shield myself from the mistakes I make or parts of my persona that are ugly.
Take this morning for instance: I called Dell because I wanted to know what was going on with two of my orders. Dell has been doing their “Dell Day of Deals” event where they have computer hardware and accessories on for deep discounts, and I typically order at least a few things. Early in the deals (about a week ago) I ordered a set of two 5.2 Ghz cordless phones for the house, because our older phones were only lasting 15 minutes on a charge, and I ordered a stand-alone Asus GPS unit because I’ve always wanted a small GPS I could leave in my car and not have to worry about the hassle of configuring and using a Bluetooth GPS.
This week, there were two things I ordered: a black hard-shell MP3 player carrying case (two of them in fact) and two universal travel adaptors from Belkin. At the end of the ordering process I printed out my receipt. Strangely enough though, I never received the usual email messages from Dell with the order number and whatnot. Print-outs in hand, today I called Dell, and wasn’t surprised by what I was told: without an order number, the customer service agent couldn’t do much of anything for me. I explained patiently that I never received the order number email, but I had my receipts showing the time and date I placed the order. They transferred me to Dell online sales, which I immediately cringed at.
Dell online sales, in case you haven’t already heard, is based out of India. In my experience with dealing with the salespeople there, I’ve found them to be fairly pushy, rude (they talk over you), and quite frustrating to deal with. It’s not a language issues (usually their English is quite good), it’s a cultural or perhaps even sales training issue. One of the worst things they’ve done to me over and over is when I’m talking to them and I finish my sentence, they don’t respond – it’s just silence. Today was no different – I spoke to a salesperson and explained the situation. He explained that they had no record of the sales I was talking about, and that perhaps my orders were never placed because I forgot to click on the SUBMIT button. “That’s completely ridiculous,” I said, “I’m not some kind of idiot that would forget to click on the final button to place my order – besides, I have a receipt with the order date and time!”. He explained that it was possible to print out the receipt without actually clicking the SUBMIT button – I said that was a ridiculous system, one where a customer could print out a receipt without actually ordering the product, and that maybe there was a chance that’s what confused me. We argued back and forth for a bit, but when I asked if he could place my orders again for me, he flat-out said no because the sales promotion was over.
At this point I was getting frustrated – I told him that I thought it was ridiculous that he wouldn’t even consider the possibility that perhaps there was a problem with the online ordering system and it was insulting to me as a customer that he was placing the blame on me. The call was finished and I hung up the phone, still fuming. I went back to the Dell.ca site because I wanted to order a new Logitech keyboard (the Wave) that was $50 off. This time I paid very close attention to what I was doing – sure enough, after you enter in your credit card information, at the very final stage, there’s a “Print Receipt” link but down below that there’s a final SUBMIT button to click, or your order isn’t placed.
I can’t say for sure, but it’s certainly possible that I printed out the receipt, closed my browser window, and thought I had placed my order. I can think Dell’s system is idiotic all I want, but I’m the idiot that didn’t click the SUBMIT button one last time…and I have to own that. So, Mr. Dell Salesperson, looks like you were right – it was customer error. Mea culpa.
China and Darfur: A Dysnfunctional Connection
“The U.S. and the international community have sought to secure the cooperation of China to use its political, economic and diplomatic influence on the government of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir to end the conflict in Darfur, which has resulted in the deaths of as many as 400,000 people and an estimated 2.5 million persons displaced to refugee camps. China’s relationship with Sudan includes close and comprehensive bilateral economic, political and military ties, as well as diplomatic support in multilateral institutions such as the United Nations.”
Sometimes you learn things that are just depressing – this is one of those things. I’m shocked and dismayed that China is attached at the hip with the people involved in the Darfur genocides. Some important people are trying to get them to stop, but ultimately it seems profit is their only motive. Lots more info about this here.
Facebook and Ex’s
Facebook, and indeed all social networking sites, are fascinating from a sociological standpoint. I bet psychology and sociology researchers are drooling in anticipation to study and data-mine everything that’s going on with those sites. One thing that I quickly realized when Facebook started to explode was the issue of the Ex’s. As in, ex-girlfriends. Life is all about cycles, and for a while you might date a woman (in my case), be involved with her circle of friends and family, and then that cycle either becomes permanent (marriage) or it ends and you begin a new cycle with someone new. I’m generalizing of course, but that’s usually how it works.
Sites like Facebook take those cycles, throw them in a super-blender, and make it messy! Ashley (my wife) and I had this discussion early on when the first ex-girlfriend invited me to be her friend on Facebook. First, it shocked the hell out of me to see her name and photo in my Facebook Inbox – I hadn’t seen her in about eight years, so it was bizarre to have her appear in my life again (even in only a virtual way). Ashley and I talked about what would happen, and what could happen, if we accepted our ex’s back into our lives. We talked about what good could come of it (not a whole lot) and the dangers of it to our marriage (a whole lot). Ultimately this isn’t about thinking our marriage isn’t strong enough to handle either of us chatting with ex’s (it is), it’s more about avoiding risks that we don’t have a good reason to take – we live in a divorce-prone society, so why tempt fate by introducing such factors? It’s all too easy to bring back memories and feelings from the past, and that’s not a healthy thing for a marriage.
In case this wasn’t already obvious, the reason I’m writing this today is that I finally got around to sending messages to the two ex-girlfriends that had sent me requests on Facebook. The first one I declined several months ago without a reason (I felt kind of bad about that), and the second one was more recent, which prompted me to craft a response that I’ll now send to any ex-girlfriend that contacts me. And, no, I haven’t had that many girlfriends in my life, so I don’t expect to be sending it out all that often. 😉
What about you? How does this issue impact you?
Being Sick Sucks
I’m so incredibly tired of being sick. A little over a week after I get over having the flu, wham, I’m knocked to the floor with a particularly nasty cold. Last week it started with a very sore throat (it felt like someone was pouring acid down my throat), that blossomed into a head cold with all the associated head-stuffed-up problems, then it moved down into my chest and now I’m coughing up a lung and all sorts of nasty-coloured globs of mucus on an hourly basis. Gross. I went on antibiotics as of two days ago, and I’m hoping it will start to clear up before I leave for a short vacation on Friday – there’s nothing worse than flying with a head cold. The pressure changes
What makes this particularly frustrating for me is that I delayed a few days on my HTC Touch video review, and then for the past week I’ve been unable to complete it because who wants to listen to coughing and sniffing on a video? Bah! I want to be healthy again, which is what I normally am – to be sick twice in a matter of weeks is unheard of. Stupid body of mine – heal thyself!
Taylor Mali Explains “What Teachers Really Make”
There’s nothing quite like a good teacher, so this video struck me as very, very true.
Having the Flu Sucks
This is how I felt from Sunday afternoon to Monday night:
(photographer bgaras2001, photo taken from this Smugmug contest)
Today I’m finally feeling better, but on Sunday I was puking my guts out and I felt like dying. It’s one thing to have a cold or a headache, it’s quite another to have a fever and have your whole body throwing a coups d’état. As I was aching I couldn’t help but think about what it would be like to be undergoing chemotherapy, suffering from cancer, or any other ailment that made you feel absolutely horrible, all of the time. God willing, I’ll never have to go through anything like that – but suffering, even for a brief period of time, gives you some small insight into the life that others who suffer on a regular basis go through.
I’m at about 80% normalcy today, so I’m hoping so get that HTC Touch video review finished and queue up two articles I wrote for Zune Thoughts. So much work to do!
Calgary Rocked by Storm: Flooding, Lightning and Fires
Last night (June 5th) around 7 pm, a fierce rain came pouring down from the clouds, and within an hour the sky was alight with flashes from lightning. The thunder was booming, and I working on editing some photos from a recent exotic car event I photographed on Sunday. We had a brief power outage, and I expected my three UPS units in my office to do their jobs. When the power outage was over less than one second after it started, only one of my computers was left standing. Hrmph. What went wrong? They say there’s nothing like an emergency to test how ready you really are, and this certainly proved that I wasn’t ready for a power outage from a technology standpoint. I sat on the floor and started to examine which power cables went where. Much to my surprise I had accidentally connected two PCs to the same UPS, and it couldn’t handle the load. While this was going on, another two outages happened. I re-wired things so that two of my UPS’ only had one PC and one monitor connected to it, and my main workstation UPS (a brand new APC XS 1300 with a slick LCD display telling me current load levels and power draw) had the guts to take two PCs and two 24″ LCD displays.
I turned on the other two PCs and sat back with a satisfied grin thinking “Ok, bring it on, I’m ready now!”. I didn’t have to wait long, because the next outage hit a few minutes later. This time only one of my PCs blinked off, but I was expecting none of them to shut down. I took at look at the UPS it was connected to and it turns out that I bought a wussy one that could only handle 200 watts of draw – and I bet I was pulling just over that, around 250 or 275 watts. I turned off that PC and resumed work on my main workstation. Four more power outages happened, but all of my back-room gear (cable modem, WiFi router, switches, etc.) were all holding up because they were split up among two more UPS units. I have six UPS units in my home.
The thunder continued to boom, over and over, and the lightning strikes blazed in the sky. I started to notice the odour of smoke, but I didn’t think anything of it (idiot that I am). Ashley told me that there was a house on fire down the street from us, and I couldn’t believe it! I looked out my walk-out basement window and sure enough, amidst the sheets of falling rain there was thick black smoke rising from a house just a few homes down from us. When you see something like that, it’s a strange sensation. I thought “Ok, fire in the rain, this can’t last long, we’re not in any danger.” (Well, actually, I think my first thought was “HOLY CRAP, WHAT THE HELL?!?”). I grabbed my Canon SD800 digital camera, put on a jacket, and went outside with Ashley. There were already police and fire trucks on the street (why didn’t they turn on their sirens so we’d know there was something happening?) so that was a relief that help was already there. That meant though, of course, that the lightning strike that started the fire occurred at least 20 minutes prior. It’s a bit scary to think that there was a blazing fire a few hundred feet from my home and I had no clue.
Since the fire was on the back side of the house, we walked to our back yard to get a better vantage point. Boy did we ever!
Our neighbour two houses over, only two houses away from the fire, was out on her balcony and she told us that the three people living in the house were ok, they got out safe, and they were across the street in another house. Once I heard that, I felt free to take pictures of the fire – I felt that if someone was hurt or killed in the fire, me snapping pictures would be insulting (even if the people in question never heard about it). Some might argue that the loss of personal property is also an injury of a sort, but property damage pales in comparison to the loss of a human life.
There are a few more pictures of the fire in this photo gallery. We watched the fire fighters spraying the fire from the ground with a single hose for a while, and it only seemed to be getting worse. I don’t know much about fire fighting, but what they were doing didn’t seem to be doing much good. At that point it might have been more about containment than actually trying to put it out. What’s amazing of course is that it was still pouring rain, and the fire was blazing. Our neighbours (Ken and Adrian) on the opposite side (away from the fire) came out and we were discussing the situation with them. When he heard about the fire Ken wisely moved his work truck – which is full of compressed gas – down a block, just in case. I didn’t think we needed to worry about evacuating yet, because it would take a strong wind and a cessation of the rain to make things more dangerous. I noticed that someone had parked a car on our driveway, so I pulled my other car out onto the driveway just in case we needed to drive out of there. Here are a couple more pictures of the fire fighters:
Did I mention the insane flooding? Below is a picture of the green space behind our house – and no, it doesn’t normally come with a lake. There are storm drains there act as a pressure release for water being drained in other parts of the area, so it comes slamming up fast and in 30 minutes it was full. Our house is thankfully about 20 feet above this, so there’s little fear of flooding.
This morning I went out to see what the house looked like, and thankfully it didn’t look like it spread or did enough damage to collapse the roof in. I can’t imagine what the house looks like on the inside though, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire inside was destroyed by fire. I know nothing about building repair, so would damage like this be repaired with a new roof? Or would they rip the house down to the foundation and build a new house? Calgary is undergoing a massive boom right now – house prices have doubled from what they were five years ago – so I hope the family in question can get the help they need and fast.
Oh and remember the flooded green space above? Here’s what it’s supposed to look like (photo taken this morning at 6:30 am):
How did my fair city fare elsewhere? Well…not so good. The amount of water caused all manner of problems (note that I didn’t take any of these pictures below):
See that yellow truck under the bridge? It’s free floating – I bet the water was 20 feet deep. Now, to be fair, this was no Katrina-level disaster. On the other hand, Calgary is remarkably unable to deal with water problems because we have so many low-land points and little to no drainage – so even a moderate water problem causes problems. Kind of like when five snowflakes fall in Seattle. 😉 We can deal with six feet of snow easier than 12 inches of water.
Last night Ashley and I had some good discussions about what we’d do if our house caught on fire. Given that all of our photos, music, and data is backed up off-site (via Carbonite) we decided we’d grab our dog, my laptop, and a few important documents and that’s it. Everything else can be replaced. Although now that I think about it, I don’t have an inventory of our DVD collection, and those aren’t ripped to a digital format, so replacing all of them might be difficult. A flaw in my plan! Emergencies like this sure do make you think though…
Be sure to check out the full photo gallery for all my pictures of the fire and collected images of flooding around Calgary – I’ll be adding to it as I find more images of what our city went through last night.
UPDATE: I thought it would be worth pointing out that I no longer use Carbonite because, frankly, they suck. Here’s an article why (short version: they don’t back up all your files). I was quite happy with Mozy for a while, then they jacked my rates by 1390% and I left them in a hurry. I’m currently using Crashplan and their pricing and service level is great.
A Good Day for Customer Service
Today was not only a holiday across Canada (and thus a good day), but I managed to score back-to-back customer service wins: first, over the weekend Ashley and I tried to assemble a Boltz Multimedia Rack…only to discover that I ordered a stand-alone MM-252 rather than the expansion unit that I should have ordered to link up with the four units we already have. The stand-alone unit was more expensive, and lacked the connector bolts that we needed to connect it to the other units. The unit came up from Arkansas, so shipping and brokerage/taxes were a bit pricey and it wasn’t practical to ship back. Thankfully when I phoned Boltz today I was able to order the parts I needed, with shipping, for around $30 or so – I was afraid they were going to tell me to return it at my cost. Score one for the consumer!
Here’s the big win: I have a Dell W2600 LCD TV, which is a 26″ monitor that I purchased back in November of 2004. In my office I used it with Vista Media Center to watch recorded TV, DVDs, and listen to music. Unfortunately for the past six months or so it’s been flaking out on me: the power button wouldn’t reliably turn it off or on, nor would using the off/on button on the remote. I’d have to disconnect the power plug, leave it for a few minutes, then re-connect and try to get it powered up. I felt like Han Solo punching a control panel on the Millennium Falcon (I watched Empire Strikes Back this weekend). I already had it replaced one for a similar problem in late 2005. Since that’s so much hassle, I’ve left it turned on for months now, only allowing it to go into a suspend state. That’s worked really well, until last night when we had a power outage at 2 AM and the monitor turned off. I tried for 15 minutes this morning but was unable to get it turned on.
I decided to phone Dell to get the name of a local authorized repair shop, but instead they shocked me by saying they’d replace the whole LCD TV and ship me a brand new one. I was shocked because it was long out of warranty, but they’ve apparently had abnormal failure rates with some of their TVs and are replacing them if the customer calls in. I’ve had my problems with Dell monitors in the past – boy have I ever – but I’ve always thought highly of their products and this situation certainly made me feel loyalty as a Dell customer.
So by the end of the week I’ll have my DVD/CD collection back together again in our TV room, and I’ll have a brand new Dell LCD TV (that I’ll promptly purchase an extended warranty for). It’s starting off to be a great week!
The Phone Call You Hate To Get
Other than a phone call telling you that a loved one has been hurt, I think getting a phone call saying “there’s been an accident, no one was hurt” is right up there on the list of phone calls you wish you’d never get. It’s 7:05 am right now and at about 6:40 am Ashley phoned me as she was on her way to the gym to tell me that she had hit a parked car. 🙁 She wasn’t hurt thankfully, and hit the other car doing about 40 KM/h – she said the damage was minimal, but we all know that means at least $1000 to repair each car, if not more. The weather here went crazy yesterday…
I was out last night at a music practice, and it was snowing but still semi-warm – but that meant a lot of condensation that wasn’t immediately freezing, just getting slushy. Driving home it was windy and getting colder, a sign of bad things to come. Before going to bed I commented to Ashley that the roads were going to be incredibly bad in the morning. She said she heard it wasn’t supposed to get that cold, but when we woke up this morning there was a good six inches of snow on the ground. Light fluffy snow doesn’t give you much traction, and when you have hard, frozen ice underneath it’s a recipie for disaster. And hence, the car accident. It’s hard for me not to get a little upset when I knew the roads were going to be horrible – it’s always the people that go out first thing in the morning that are the most vulnerable to the road because no cars before them have been cleared. I feel like I should have warned Ashley again. Or maybe I should have asked her not to go? Begone stupid voice of hindsight!
I’m relieved that Ashley wasn’t hurt (hopefully there’s no whiplash/neck damage), but I’m not looking forward to either paying a few thousand dollars out of my pocket, or claiming it through insurance and having those blood sucking leeches charge me many more thousands of dollars over a period of several years (I have a special, burning dislike of insurance companies). Here’s hoping the damage is less than I fear…