Customer Service is not Dead

Lately, I’ve been very disgruntled with many aspects of our society. I was quite pleased to see most of the democrats kicked out of office, though now we’ll have to see if all of those republicans will do any better.

I also have come to believe that customer service is just about dead and that a company will screw you any way they can to make a buck. Recently, I had sent my Diamondback DB380 (compact pistol) back to Diamondback to have them look at it under warranty. I was having a feed-jam issue and another minor issue. I called them and they said to send it in so they could look at it.

It took some time to find a FedEx / UPS site that would ship the gun. The regulations on shipping are roughly that you have to declare it as a firearm to the shipper, must not mark the package as a firearm, must send it 2nd day air, and one of the parties (sender or receiver) must be an FFL. Apparently, the local mom-and-pop shops don’t understand this and won’t ship them. After hunting one down and paying $60 to ship it with insurance I was in a particularly foul mood about the entire situation.

I checked the tracking and I knew that they had received my gun, but since it was close to the weekend I didn’t worry about it. Then, on Tuesday I get an automated message from UPS telling me that a 2nd day air package was on its way to my house and I had to be home to accept delivery of it (signature required). I was pretty sure it was my gun since I don’t have anything else on order at the moment. But why would they send it back? They didn’t contact me in any way, shape, or form. As far as I could tell they didn’t find anything wrong with it and it’s on its way back.

It really irritates me when UPS can’t be any more specific about the delivery. It’s a good thing I work from home, but being stuck at the house all day sucks. I couldn’t leave in case it showed up and I didn’t want to drive to God-knows-where to pick it up if I missed it.
So, side-note….all day I wait for this package. It doesn’t show up. Finally, at about 6:30 at night I am hanging outside with my neighbor having a beer. I see the UPS truck come around the corner. It stops down the street. The guy shuts the truck off, leaves the lights on, gets out and delivers a small package to one of my neighbors. He gets back in, starts the truck up and drives about 35 feet, stops the truck and shuts it off (leaving the lights on) and delivers another package to the guy that lives next door to the first guy. He then gets back in, starts the truck up, drives about 35 more feet turning the corner slightly and shuts it off again. He brings me my package. Why on earth couldn’t he have just parked “in the middle” and delivered all three packages? Must be some jacked up UPS rule or something.

So I get my package and I open it expecting to see some letter with b.s. about nothing wrong, etc., etc. But, to my very big surprise, they sent me a brand new gun! I don’t even know if they looked at the other one or not, but now I have one of the latest and greatest models. I am pretty stunned over the whole situation. In some ways, I wish they had contacted me to say something, but I am absolutely stoked about getting a brand new gun.

Way to go Diamondback Firearms!!

So I am out a few bucks for the shipping, but perhaps the worst part is that I now have to take the gun to the range and break it in!!

More iDiots

While doing some research for clients that are still having iPad WiFi issues I ran across this great example of what happens to seemingly intelligent people whenever they deal with Apple products. It’s exactly why I hate Apple iDiots and the iDevices. Take look at this article related to even more issues with wireless and the iPad.

Here is the article: http://www.wlanbook.com/ipad-wifi-issues-fix/

This was written by someone that appears to be fairly intelligent, but alas their IQ seems to drop suddenly whenever the iProduct is in their hands.

Note that he indicates that like all the other iPad users he was also having WiFi issues with his iPad. How does he fix it? By essentially downgrading his entire WiFi network to accommodate the limitations of the iPad. He turns off dual radio mode and anything to do with 802.11a. Problem fixed!! Fuck everyone else, the iPad works!!!

In the next section he briefly examines antenna placement (BTW, for those of you not familiar with wireless antenna placement, orientation, etc., is crucial to a good wireless connection). He then has the astounding revelation…and I quote “I’m pretty sure Apple wouldn’t release a product that would be impacted by how it [the antenna] is positioned like some blogs suggested.”

I almost can’t write….I’m caught between laughing so hard I can’t breathe and the sheer horror at the thought of Apple might have put out a product that wasn’t perfect!! I suppose the death grip on the iPhone 4 is also the fault of the user and that standard physics cannot possibly apply to Apple products.

Burning the Quran PT II

I just read a small snippet in the newspaper about the proposed burning of the Quran in Florida. In the paper, there was a picture of a protest by Muslims in which they were burning an American flag and an effigy of the pastor who plans to burnt he Qurans.

Is it just me, or does the public at large really not get it? Do people really believe this behavior is acceptable? Can you see the irony? It’s OK to burn MY flag, but should one do anything disparaging against the Quran then holy shit – kill people and burn buildings!!

To quote Chuck Morse (conservative talk show host and writer), who showed how successful “Islamic fundamentalist have been…in their international campaign of threats and terror…the world is now cowering in fear.”

When are we going to stop living in fear of Islam?

Burning the Quran

Recently, I heard about the preacher in Florida that plans to burn the Quran on September 11th. The guy or church obviously wanted the publicity as nobody would probably find out about a small church burning a book.

Now, before I go any further let me state that I completely agree with everyone who has said that this is not a good idea. I do not believe that if you want to resolve a conflict you do so by antagonizing someone. Clearly burning the Quran is going to antagonize Muslims.

So let me get to my second opinion – I say go for it. I am sick and tired of people being afraid of retaliation by Muslims. Doesn’t anyone get it? It’s not a religion of peace. If it were, we wouldn’t be concerned about a militant uprising, riots, and death threats. People get upset when there is flag burning, bible burning, etc., but the entire media doesn’t pick it up and run it as a story because ultimately we tolerate it and respect it as a First Amendment right.

In this case, however, the media has picked it up and is saying how terrible things are going to be. Why? Were it truly a religion of peace there shouldn’t be ANY worry of violence. Peaceful protesting? Sure. Saying it’s wrong? Absolutely. Threating people and blowing stuff up? What is wrong with you?

In my opinion, Muslims show their true colors in situations like this. Hey, look….if you are a Muslim and you are reading this – if you truly want to foster a positive relationship with American and the rest of the world then don’t do ANYTHING. That’s right. Ignore it. Let it go and simply ignore it. If you want to agree that it was in poor taste and let that be it that's fine, but otherwise don't do anything. I’ll believe Muslims as a whole are peaceful when they stop perpetuating and supporting violent behavior. If “radical” Muslims kill somebody over this and millions of “peaceful” Muslims flock to the street in protest of the violent behavior, then I’ll change my tune.

Are we placing bets?

Give up more personal time?

I’m out of town…again. I sure feel like I have been on the road way too much this year. I even told my boss that I was traveling too much. He agreed, but didn’t have a good answer for me. Unfortunately, we are still short staffed.
For some reason, we just can’t seem to find anyone that meets all of our qualifications and lives where we need them to, or is willing to move where we need them to. For that reason, I may start traveling up to Montana even more. I love MT, but I’m just sick of traveling. I had to work out a few details before I’d agree to start going up there. Looks like I am going to have to do 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off. At least until we get someone else trained to take over the position – I figure that will take a few months.

One of the conditions for me to start going up there again was no travel on the weekends. If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you know that this was a major problem for me last time I was going up there all the time. When I agreed to stay with the company one of the stipulations was that I would no longer travel on my time unless there were mitigating circumstances – regular work does not qualify.

Surprisingly enough the company asked if I’d meet them in the middle and travel on one of my weekend either going up or coming back. Basically, would I be willing to ignore our current agreement and forget the fact that I have been traveling my ass off this year, and forget that I am trying to do them a favor. I can see where they are coming from, but I’m not willing to give that up and said as much. Strange.

I hope we find someone soon. This is going to be tough….

Random Thoughts in August

I’ve been spending most of my free time on the www.twowheeltrips.com website. Little tweaks here and there. It’s not exactly taking off, but I had a feeling it might be a while before it gets heavily utilized.

I think NYC affected far more than I would have liked. Every since I’ve been home I’ve had a terrible time of feeling depressed and somewhat anti-social. I can’t explain it, but I’m not very happy right now and yet I have no real reason to be unhappy.

I may have to start traveling up to Montana a bit more. I’m trying to work out the details with my company – one of which is to be a shortened and definitive schedule. I can’t go up there for six months and not know when I’m coming home or anything. It would help if we could just find someone to work for us up there. If you are a Systems / Network Engineer and would like a job let me know!

I haven’t been feeling very creative (see above), but I had a jam with some friends and have slowly been working on some new material. Nothing to get excited about. I need to find a good way to lay down tracks on the computer, but haven’t made up my mind on what kind of interface to use.

I have to travel to WY this week for a gig with a customer. Fortunately it’s only for a few days.
One of my good friends came and stayed with me for a few days. Unfortunately, it was because he was going to leave his wife. They’ve had problems even before they got married and the problems just got worse and worse over the years. I think I have heard him say “I’m done” or “it’s over” at least 30 or 40 times. The thing is, he really needs to be done with her. They are both wrapped up in each other. I let him stay here so he would have a place to stay and continue to work while working through a divorce. But, he just can’t stay away from her and he ended up going back and staying over there and only coming over here when they would fight – almost every night. Then it was staying over there more and more. I finally had to ask him to get his stuff out. I’m not a ½-way house, but more importantly I can’t enable him to have a way out of a bad situation for only a night or two. He needs to deal with it. I really felt bad because he was asking if he could leave important documents over here. As he puts it everything gets destroyed when they fight. He can’t have a safety deposit box because that would mean he is hiding something from his wife and she will freak out on him (he’s not really hiding something, but that is how she thinks). He also asked if he could leave some socks, undies, or bathroom supplies over here in case he needed them. I said no. He doesn’t seem to understand that that would be enabling him to have a way out and allow him to not deal with a situation because his wife is a crazy psychopath.

Grasshopper is home from Iraq. I’ve been hanging out with him and his new wife a bit. It’s really good to see him and perhaps, more importantly, it’s really good to see him happy. Things are going well for them and I’m really glad to see it.

My g/f is in Costa Rica, but I couldn’t make it since I have to do the gig with my client….and it’s hot here. August in TX – we are in our third or fourth week (I forget) of triple digits. At least it will be cool in WY.

Lot’s of other things going on, but I just don’t feel creative enough to write about all of it.

Two Wheel Trips is Online!

Well I finally got my website online. It’s pretty much for and about motorcycle riders:

http://www.twowheeltrips.com

it took me way too long to get it online, but at least it’s up. We’ll see what happens over the next few months.

Client Climax

The project climaxed the other night – everything we had been working for came together and they moved from one building to another. I was on the clock for 33.5 hours straight without breaks or rest. What a beating. Now I just have a few more things to do and I am eagerly looking forwarding to going home for a while…..

Canoeing in NY

My g/f flew up here on the 10th of July. She had to motivate me a bit, but we took a train slightly north of here and rented a canoe from Great Blue Outfitters. Great people and a great outfit. They haven’t been open too long, but seem to be doing well. They offer hiking, backpacking, canoeing, and kayaking trips. If you are in the area, look them up!

The rivers were a bit low for kayaking, so we rented a canoe and hit a place called White-something Pond. Pond is a bit misleading as it’s really a small lake. It was a warm day and we loaded up on sandwiches, sunscreen and water. The outfitters dropped us off and we shoved off into the lake. The lake is small so they don’t allow motor boats on it. Fine with me. We quickly paddled to the other side of the lake and ate lunch in the shade of some trees. The water was pretty clear and you could easily see 10+ feet to the bottom of the shoreline. We mostly hung to the shoreline and watched turtles and other fishes scatter as we floated by them. You couldn’t see any buildings and you could only glimpse some traffic of the nearby road if you made an effort to do so. There were a few other people paddling around the lake as well. We mused at a couple that had rented a kayak and had managed to flip it over in the middle of the lake. They couldn’t get back in and quickly sank it under the water (kayak’s don’t’ completely sink). The best part of the day might have been floating in a small cove covered by trees and shade. We both practically fell asleep while dragonflies lit upon our toes.

It was great to get out of the city, even if only for a few hours. I really needed that.

A Plane Flies Overhead...

A plane flies overhead. Cars drive down the street, and people are on the sidewalk eager to get home before the rain, or see a friend, or a loved one. There is a rooftop party nearby. I’m still stuck in NYC and my great aunt Gladys will never see these things – she passed away last night.

She almost made it to her 91st birthday. She developed cancer in the last year. She didn’t want to fight it. As she put it, she had a nice long life and was very grateful for the things she had. She was one of those people that was always positive even in the face of adversity. I can’t say that I am built that way, but it was nice to see it in someone. The last time I saw her she was recovering from a broken hip and we all knew she probably wouldn’t make it another year. It seems that once the cancer got aggressive it was over pretty fast.

She died on a Sunday night, and the funeral was on Tuesday. She had her family around her and died in the comfort of her home. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it and even if I could have it would have been very difficult to get there from NYC in the length of time available. I feel bad that I couldn’t make her funeral, but I also am happy that I got to see her not too long ago.

Afterward – I wrote that the day after her death, on July 11th. I haven’t been able to find the time to post it.

iSuck

Recently, I’ve been more flustered by Apple products than usual. Thinking back, it seems that Apple has just about always been a thorn in my side with regards to my professional career. Even before I started getting paid to be a geek I would get questions from the occasional Apple / Mac user that I couldn’t answer since they were “strange” and did things differently. You say your floppy is stuck in your Mac and won’t respond to dragging it onto the eject button? Sorry, your fooked. My PC’s floppy drive has a hardware eject button so I don’t worry about that shit.

I even owned an Apple ][c for a brief period of time before Apple pulled the rug out from under its user base and went to the Macintosh. I also still worked on dos-based PCs and found them to be more useful than the Apple series.

Later in life, once I got was working professionally in the industry, the Macintosh would pop up from time to time particularly in media-related fields. Everyone else would have a PC or be on the mainframe except for the Mac user….and of course their shit didn’t work like everyone else. Apple thought it would be a great idea to network Mac’s together just like PCs, and mainframes. Only they thought they would do it differently, just like they did everything else so they invented a piece of crap protocol called AppleTalk that was incompatible with everything else.

So now not only did we have Macs in the offices that were incompatible with anything else we also had to start supporting their crappy networking protocol – even though IPX (Novell), SNA (IBM), and IP (open source) was available.

Oh! You are still having problem with your proprietary application and hardware doing something so someone else can see it? Fuck off. Not my problem.

Then it seemed like for a while Apple faded from the corporate world a bit and at the same time began to adopt universal standards like the IP protocol, and other formats that everyone else on the planet except Mac users were using. So even if they were around, they seemed to get along better with everyone else.

Enter the iPod – This is the little guy that really put Apple back on the map in my opinion. I was very resistant to the initial iPod. I was just getting into MP3 players and I had already had a bout with Sony and their proprietary format. I also didn’t like the idea of having a real hard drive and moving parts inside of a portable device. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the first gen iPods were pieces of crap, but I was skeptical.

By the 3rd, 4th, and 5th generation iPods I think they really had it down. Simple to use, fairly consistently reliable, and it supports open standards like MP3. But it’s the interface that really made the iPod so great. The form factor is a bit of a bonus but the interface makes owning one worth it. Apple got this one right.

And then the iPhone landed…and the iDiots came running. Not that the iPhone is a particularly bad product. In fact, it’s actually fairly nice. Other companies were doing similar things, but Apple released a product that did it with style even if it is a bit of an alien product to me. Why iDiots? Because, like I just said there were other products and still are other products that do it better. But…and it’s a bit but…they locked their product into the AT&T market place. So not only was it very expensive, but it could only be used with the AT&T network. Sure, you could jailbreak it (hack it) and use it with someone else’s network but you just voided your warranty and all support for it.

Is the AT&T network that bad? Perhaps not, but as far as I can tell the Verizon commercials are very appropriate. They have more coverage and for someone like me that travels all over the place this is very important. I’d rather have some coverage, even if at a slower speed, than no coverage at all.

And for me? Personaly? I just didn’t want something else that tethered me even more securely to work, the internet and other online “social” things like Facebook.

And of course, the whole time you have the iThin notebook and all of the iLaptop notebooks on the market. Never mind that they cost almost twice as much as comparable priced laptops that run PC / Linux, etc. And maybe that’s one of my big complaints with Apple products – they are marketing geniuses. They get iSuckers to pay a significant premium for Apple products that are no better than other competing products.

And so people are still buying them… And I’m still fighting issues with them. Oh, some Dr. buys a MacBookPro and we fight all kinds of issues with it. It won’t connect to the wireless network appropriately, then when it does his VMWareFusion doesn’t work right. And why is he running that in the first place? Because the application that he MUST use isn’t supported on a Mac. Yes, I see that all the time – iDiots that buy a Mac product knowing that the application they have to have for work doesn’t work on their stupid iLaptop unless they emulate a PC. Great, so now we have to fuck with that, too. And they do it in freaking droves.

And then BAM – the iPad comes out. I gotta tell ya, I have no idea why you iSuckers buy ‘em. They start at a price tag of about $450 for the lowest end model they sell all the way to about $1000 for the top-of-the-line with WiFi and 3G. And what do you really get? A glorified, portable web browser, or book reader, and…well that’s about it now isn’t it? Yeah, I know you can d/l an app to do something just like your iPhone but are you really going to be creating presentations and documents on the iPad without some external device? I mean, can you imagine typing this blog entry with the on-screen keypad? Yeah, that’s sweet.
And of course – the wireless sucks. Just like the goddamned iLaptops and everything else. We constantly fight iLaptops, iPhones, and now the iPad because they have typically have more problems that other non-Apple products.

And here is really what kills me – I still hear from the iSuckers how great Apple is and how intuitive it is and how it “just works.” And then they are upset and dumbfounded when you are trying to tell them it’s their fucking iWhatever that is the problem. Really? You think it’s the network when I have 600 other devices connected to it both hard-wired and wirelessly but all 8 of your iPads have the exact same problem so it’s the network? Did I tell you that ALL of my clients have same problems with Apple products? My phone is on Verizon and I get a great signal, but it must be something else because your iPad, and iPhone both can’t get an AT&T 3G signal. Aliens perhaps?

These are otherwise fairly intelligent people but they cannot seem to accept the glaringly obvious answer that Apple products don’t always “just work” and that sometimes, every now and then, they are they problem…. So when I see an iWhatever, I cringe. I hate them.

Happy 4th Of July!

Last night, I sucked it up and went down to check out the Macy’s 4th Of July Fireworks Extravaganza!! (just kidding, that isn’t the official title of the show). It was pretty warm, but I managed to make it to 12th Avenue and 25th where I could catch a breeze off the river.

I got there at about 5-til-9:00 and the people just kept coming and packing it in. Before I knew it, I was deep in a crowd of people I didn’t want to be in, but I had a breeze so I felt fairly lucky. The fireworks kicked off at about 9:20 and lasted until about 9:45. It was quite an impressive show and I just happened to have a view that put all of the fireworks in my entire field of vision (including my perhiphial). I have seen a few internet videos where people clearly didn’t have as good of a view. I think I just got lucky.

I’m glad I took the time to go down there, but I as I was there I was thinking that the people that really deserved to see the show were the folks that were thousands of miles away in a desert land. While we celebrated our independence the men and women in foreign countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan were carrying on with their duties. I hope they got to celebrate some and I hope that they got to see some fireworks. We take things for granted far too often.

Happy Birthday America!

Stuck in NYC - ammendments

I almost forgot two very important reasons I don't like it here that much:



NYC is dirty and it smells - the stench of decaying garbage is everywhere. It's the first thing I notice when I arrive in NYC and now that the summer is heating up it is particular offensive to my olfactory sense. The people also tend to smell, and I'm not referring to the homeless. I don't know if it's because there are a lot of foreigners here and their hygienic habits aren't as fastidious as typical Americans or what, but I constantly keep catching very strong BO from people while walking around.



In comparison, Tokyo has over 13 million people living in it (compared to 8 for NYC) and it's so clean you can practially eat off the sidewalk.

Our Country is in Serious Trouble

Recently the US Supreme Court upheld the Second Amendment in the Washington, DC case by a very narrow 5-to-4 vote. Let me say that again, 5-to-4!!! This is our second amendment right granted to us via the constitution from our founding fathers. It should not be that close. If anything, it should be a 9-0 vote.

Just think about it for a moment. A few more liberal appointees and you would have just lost your second amendment rights as interpreted by “the law.” I’ve often said that I think the most powerful thing a president can do is appoint a judge to the US Supreme Court. It’s a lifetime appointment and there isn’t any way to remove a judge from the bench – only death or retirement removes them from the bench.

These judges shape our lives and the course of our country in untold ways. Look at things like the commerce clause – a very poor decision by the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) has allowed virtually unlimited power of the federal government through this clause.

Now, Obama is trying to appoint even more liberal judges. I suspect that one or two more of them will ride the bench for a while. You will see a shift and that shift will not be good if you believe in liberty, democracy, and the Bill of Rights.

Was it any real surprise that Justice Sotomayor was one of the judges that dissented in the recent decision? This is the person that not only said that they would respect previous SCOTUS decisions as law (she lied and dissented anyway):

SEN. PAT LEAHY (D-VT): “Is It Safe To Say That You Accept The Supreme Court's Decision As Establishing That The Second Amendment Right Is An Individual Right? Is That Correct?” JUDGE SOTOMAYOR: “Yes, Sir.” LEAHY: “Thank you. And in the Second Circuit decision, Maloney v. Cuomo, you, in fact, recognized the Supreme Court decided in Heller that the personal right to bear arms is guaranteed by the Second Amendment of the Constitution against federal law restrictions. Is that correct?” SOTOMAYOR: “It is.” LEAHY: “And you accept and applied the Heller decision when you decided Maloney?” SOTOMAYOR: “Completely, sir. I accepted and applied established Supreme Court precedent that the Supreme Court in its own opinion in Heller acknowledged, answered the -- a different question.” (Judiciary Committee, U.S. Senate, Confirmation Hearing, 7/14/09)

She finds nothing in the second amendment that grants us the right to bear arms for self defense:

DISSENT JOINED BY JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: “I Can Find Nothing In The Second Amendment’s Text, History, Or Underlying Rationale That Could Warrant Characterizing It As ‘Fundamental’ Insofar As It Seeks To Protect The Keeping And Bearing Of Arms For Private Self-Defense Purposes.” (“Otis McDonald, Et Al., Petitioners V. City Of Chicago, Illinois, Et Al.” Justice Breyer Dissent Joined By Justices Ginsburg & Sotomayor, U.S. Supreme Court, P.180-1, 6/28/10)

And now the Chicgo dick-cheese of a mayor (is that libel or slander?) wants to pass new legislation that insofar as I can tell is in direct conflict with the second amendment. He expects “legal battles” which to me says he knows he’s violating the second amendment and just doesn’t care. What happens the next time these laws are challenged and reach SCOTUS?

And folks, this is ONE very small instance – look at the expansion of government and encroachment upon our rights by the government since Obama took office. These are troubling times indeed.

Once in Lifetime Fireworks?

Most years, Macy’s has their fireworks on the East side of Manhattan. I’m about 2 blocks from the e. side. However, this year they are having them on the West side of Manhattan – about 2 miles away. That’s not that far and I’ve walked over in the general area several times already.

I’m a bit on the fence about going tonight. I’d really like to see the fireworks as it’s supposed to be pretty incredible. On the otherhand, I have absolutely ZERO desire to be stuck in the throng of the other 2 to 3 million people that will also be crowding the public areas. The papers all say to show up four to five HOURS early to get a good spot. Fuck that. I mean, hey, it’s just fireworks!

Years ago, we would take the boat out on the lake on the 4th. A few of the people that lived on the lake were filthy rich and would bring in semi-trailers of fireworks with professionals to set them. I’m not kidding and I’m not exaggerating. These people would then try to out-do each other, but they never launched them all at the same time. Rich person-A would do theirs, then rich person-B would do theirs and so on. We’d float on the water for hours watching some pretty incredible shows from right underneath the fireworks. Sometimes you could feel the ash lightly raining down on you. So for me, the fireworks would have to be pretty freaking incredible to beat that experience and being stuck in a crowd of people in my current state of mind is not it.

I looked into some rooftop parties or a boat cruise or something. Rooftop parties start at about $90 and the pictures show people stuck on top of each other…. The boat cruises are mostly sold out, but they also started at about $100 and went up from there. One cruise is $270, not including taxes, fuel surcharges, boarding fees, etc. I figure that’s about $300 and while it includes a buffet it does not include your beverages – and then you are stuck on the boat for five hours. Might be different if I had a friend to hang out with. In any case, I don’t feel like spending a bunch of money to be stuck in a throng of people watching fireworks – I’d spend the money to NOT be stuck with a bunch of people and see some good fireworks.

And let’s face it, if I ever decide I really have to see the NYC fireworks I can simply come back. So I don’t see it as a once in a lifetime opportunity. I see it as a big pain in the ass. I’ve had a few people ask me if I can watch them from the hotel rooftop. I don’t think there is any roof access – I already tried to go all the way up and the elevator doors wouldn’t open. Even if they did have access tonight the w. river is about 2 miles away and it’s NYC – there are a ton of skyscrapers in the way and you wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway. I’ll probably just head that way this evening and when the crowds start to get thick I’ll stop and chill. If I can’t see anything, I’ll head back.

Stuck in NYC?

I’ve now been in NYC for about a month and a half. My only venture outside the city was to Las Vegas for a couple of days to attend Grashopper’s wedding. I’ve had a lot of people ask me “why don’t you go home for the weekend?”

Well, quite simply it’s almost more stressful to do that than to just stay here. If I have to work Friday, that means I don’t get to fly home until late Friday night or early Sat. morning. I then have to return back to NYC by Sunday so I can be working on Monday morning. That means I basically get ONE day (Sat) at home for all of the hassle of traveling back and forth. Is that really worth it?

My g/f was having a conversation with a friend and associate of hers that lives here in Manhattan. She mentioned how I was still stuck in NYC and her friend exclaimed “Stuck in NYC?” as in she lives here and this is her home and it’s so great how could anyone feel like they are stuck here?

I’ll tell you how. I realize that some of you (about 8 million) live here and call NYC home. Please try to understand that while it may be great for you, that it is not great for me. I’m not a “big city” person. I never have been. Sure, I like to visit but that’s about it. For me:

• There are too many people. WAY too many people. And going to events where people are on top of each other is just not enjoyable. I don’t care if it’s a bar, a museum, or a block party. I don’t like having people on top of me.

• It’s too noisy – yes, the city that never sleeps. And along with that comes constant noise. You are always attacked by nose. Large trucks and buses driving by on the street, sirens all day and night long, people talking on phones, people talking to themselves, chicks (and guys!) saying the word “like” every 6.3 seconds, horns honking all day and night long (I feel like setting up a .50 cal on the windowsill and picking them off), you get the idea.

• There isn’t any grass or trees. Ok – yeah, there are a few trees embedded into the concrete, and you might find a patch of grass here and there but for the most part it’s concrete for as far as the eye can see. Every time I try going to Central Park there are too many people and too much noise (see above).

• I don’t have my truck here so I can’t easily get out of the city and if I did I wouldn’t want to drive here (people are freaking nuts!)

• I don’t have my bike (motorcycle) here.

• I don’t have my guitar(s) here.

• I don’t have my friends or family here.

• I have a shitty internet connection at the hotel.

• I don’t have my kitchen and my things to enjoy cooking a nice meal.

• There isn’t any place to go hiking or just chill outdoors.

• Everything costs a fortune (Manhattan is expensive!)

• Everyone is rude – I don’t care what the reason is, but people here are rude for the most part.

Call it the New York Attitude, I call it being a jerk – and nobody trust anyone.

iPhone iDiots

This pretty much sums up what I think about people that have to have a new iPhone (or any new product) on release day.....

Stereotypical, Loud, Obnoxious Black Women….

….are even more loud and obnoxious in NYC.

Regretfully Guilty?

One of the things I try to do is live my life without regrets. If I think I will regret something later on, that will have a profound impact on my thought process and the actions that may follow. I’ve done fairly well, especially once I got out of my teenage years.

But recently, I got hit pretty hard with some sad news. A girl I once new recently passed away. She was the first girl I ever really had a “thing” for. I am pretty sure she felt the same way for me, but we never did anything about it. I can’t say why we never did anything about it, but we didn’t. I introduced her to my best friend (at the time) and they ended up getting married and having some kids.

A couple of years ago I saw this guy at a bachelor party for another friend. We hadn’t spoken much in the last few years for no particular reason. Sometimes people just grow apart. He told me that she had recently been diagnosed with congenital heart failure. I was fairly shocked, but I also had heard that she had put on a lot of weight since having kids so while it made sense it didn’t mean that it was easy to hear.

About a day or two ago another friend called me to tell me she had recently passed away. Her husband didn’t know how to get in touch with me but wanted me to know since we had all been friends as kids and I had introduced them. I hadn’t talked to her in over 20 years, but it still saddens me to hear that she passed away. Over the years I had heard a couple of times she had tried to get in touch with me – probably just to say hello and see how I was doing, but I never responded. I am not sure why I didn’t. Maybe I was too busy. Maybe I was afraid of how to respond to her. Maybe I just wanted to remember her the way we were when we were kids. It doesn’t matter now, because she is gone and I’ll never have the opportunity again. I blew it. I fucked up and right now that is a regret I am realizing that I’ll have to live with the rest of my life.

I understand my friend (her husband) is hanging in there and has plenty of people surrounding him right now. I reached out to him, but I think he’s a little overwhelmed at the moment with people calling him and stopping by.

I also feel really bad for her parents. They had two kids, her older brother and her. Her older brother was shot and killed in front of one of my other friend’s house (purely coincidence –they didn’t know each other), and now she has passed on. She was a few years younger than me and her parents were a little younger than mine so I believe they are still alive. You shouldn’t have to outlive both of your children.

She will be missed by many.

Like…Like…Like…..

I’m not much a grammar and literacy snob – let’s face it, my own grammatical skills could use a lot of work – but lately the poor use of the word “like” has been driving me batty. Maybe it’s because I am stuck in a city with 8 million people jammed on top of each other and I can’t help but overhear a lot of other conversations.

Last week I was in a fairly nice restaurant having a really nice meal of steamed mussels followed by some sautéed soft shell crabs. At the table just in front of me were these two fairly young chicks having martini’s and dinner. My first impression is that they shouldn’t have been able to afford to eat there on a college budget, but eyeballing the shopping bags told me they had other means of income (daddy?).

Well one of the chicks was the talker and the other chick was the listener. Unfortunately, the talker was facing my direction so I could hear her just fine. She really enjoyed using the word “like” to the point it really started grating on my nerves. I would estimate that on average she used the word “like” at least two times in every sentence, perhaps more. It started to ruin my meal.

I was seriously close to offering to buy them a bottle of wine on one condition – she would have to stop using the word “like” for the remainder of the meal unless she actually used the word in a preposition / simile, a conjunction, or a verb. In other words, as non-slang because you can’t figure out how to speak properly and choose more descriptive words. I buy the wine, and I pay for it until the word “like” spews from you mouth.
My guess is that she would have found it fairly insulting – which it would have been. But it’s driving me nuts lately. My favorite is when someone says something to the effect of “I was like….”
NO. You weren’t “like” whatever. You had a thought or a feeling or something and you either were or were not in a particular state. You weren’t “like…”

I catch myself using the word from time to time in the same manner and I try to stop myself and remember there is always a word or phrase that is more descriptive and appropriate. Maybe I’ll get some business cards printed on them with this URL and drop one off next time I am stuck to someone that has to use the word every ten seconds.

Feeling Selfish

One of my best friends is coming home on leave from Iraq. He’s going to get married in Vegas when he gets home. His original dates for getting married worked great for me, but the new ones are coinciding with a big project I have to do for work. No way I could get out of it. Now the dates (for work) are slipping so I am going to try to make it to the wedding.

I feel bad, because when I get to Vegas I’ll have been on the road for over a month. It will also take me about 8 hours of travel to get to Vegas so I can be there for him. I’m working long hours and the city (NYC) is really grating on me. I know when I get there I’ll be tired and burned out with one main thought on my mind – home.

Why is this selfish? I’m pretty sure I wrote about this before, but let’s look at it from my friend’s perspective. He’s on his way back to the U.S. right now. I don’t know if he’s in Iraq, Kuwait, Germany, or over the ocean somewhere. It takes him two to three days to get home!! That makes my eight hours of travel seem pretty insignificant right there.

Let’s also not forget that he has been away from home since November of last year. He’s been out of the country for almost as long. Again, I’ll have only been away from home for about 6 weeks once I make it to Vegas. I have a nice room, good restaurants and bars, and most of the creature comforts we have come to know in the U.S. He’s been standing guard duty in sandstorms, rooming with multiple people, and generally living a much harsher life than most of us.

So, while it doesn’t make me feel any better…it does kind of help me screw my head on straight. Whether you personally believe in the war, or whether or not “we” should be there, it’s really “they” that are there….the men and women of our armed forces and we should respect the sacrifice that they are making.

I’m going to go out and have a nice dinner tonight, and I’ll sleep safe thanks to those people who make that sacrifice every day – regardless of where they are. And, when I get to Vegas and I’m tired and worn out I’ll remember that one of my best friends has been through far worse to make it back home and marry the one he loves. Oh yeah, the party is ON!

Perspective is Everything!

Here we have Duke’s – a “famous” Manhattan BBQ restaurant and hang out (btw – not worth a crap in my opinion)





And here we have Dyke’s – an equally famous hang out for those urban man-hating lesbians that enjoy ribs, beer, and “finger” foods.

Jack in the Box and Assault Rifles

I just woke from a very strange dream. The dream was also a bad dream, though not necessarily a nightmare. Almost everything in the dream was related to things that have been happening around me:

· I was on a road trip (I am on a road trip, now)

· We were traveling in an RV and had stopped for a bite to eat (I’ve been emailing / IMing about traveling lately. I was also thinking about dinner before I fell asleep. My neighbors are competition Chili cooks and travel to cook offs in an RV. I was exchanging emails with them recently).

· In the dream I was in a generic fast food joint, though it could have been a jack-in-the-box. (haven’t quite figured out the relationship there).

· In the dream, I was naked, though I seemed to alternate between being naked and wearing my “I Love Midget Porn” t-shirt. Everybody was staring at me and was offended – especially the parents of the little kids (lately I’ve exchanged some emails that are dealing with academic freedom, and freedom of speech issues as well as having read some recent articles on it.).

· The fast food joint had run out of buns and people were really angry (not real sure about the buns, but I’m not partial to a burger with a ton of bread. The angry part is probably ‘cuz my window was open and I could hear the random noise of a NYC street with people yelling and screaming at each other, or because I was naked).

· For some reason, I couldn’t get my food so I was sitting there mostly naked and holding an M4 (hey! I like big guns, and I remember thinking “this isn’t illegal since it isn’t concealed.” I just had a recent email regarding handgun concealment).

· And last, but not least, I was then suddenly in the RV. It was warm and I was buried under a bunch of blankets and pillows and was suffocating trying to get up. (I was napping on the couch and knew that I should not stay asleep long so I was trying to force myself awake).

Anyone with an RV and an assault rifle want to go to Jack in the Box with me?

Is Everyone In NYC Gay?

It seems to stand to reason that in most big cities you have a higher percentage of gay people than in other locations. I’ve seen this in cities such as San Francisco, LA, Dallas, Houston and even Salt Lake City (which surprised me a bit).

But NYC takes the cake. Maybe even more-so than San Francisco. That’s a toughie. It seems like you either have the rough-and-tough NYC construction worker that has been in a union since the womb (and yes, they are all named Vinnie, Joe, Murray, or Mario), the “Metro” sissy boy (who are really gay and just don’t know it, yet), or the outright flamers. There just isn’t a lot of middle ground here.

The other night me and my co-worker were trying to get to a particular area where they were supposed to have good food and music. The cabbie clearly dropped us in the wrong area and we ended up in the gayborhood which had even more gay people than usual. A big clue was the rainbow flags hung out of all the windows with “NYC” on it, and the guys wearing tight shirts/pants/whatever, walking little foof dogs with high heels on – the guys, not the dogs.

We didn’t find any food or music we were interested in so we made our way across town to a Brazilian BBQ place (think meat, meat and more meat). We walk in and on the big screen TV is some flaming guy talking about something. People…seriously, I need a break. I don’t mind that someone is gay. I even have some gay friends. But I don’t necessarily enjoy being immersed in it 24 x 7.

As I said the other end of the spectrum is the manly-men construction workers. Those guys are freaking hysterical. We have been hanging out in a new building where the guys are working all the time. One group of guys in particular is like watching a comedy routine. And yes, a guy name Mario is the one that is the most stereotypical of the group, and the loudest, and the funniest. Hanging out in the room with those guys is a much needed break from all the flamboyance and metro sissy boys street-side.

Cold Pizza and CableTV

Last night I was pretty wiped out. I wanted nothing more than to get a good NYC pizza and kick back to watch a flick. I had brought my NetFlix movies with me and was going to watch them.

The first thing I did was hook my laptop up to the TV via an HDMI cable. No problem there, even if the TV couldn’t support the resolution I was using. Then I popped in my BluRay disc and…..nothing. Apparently, the piece of crap software provided by Dell wants to go out to the Internet and download 54MB of updates before it will play a disc. Over my crappy hotel internet connection this just doesn’t work, so it won’t play anything. I fought this for about ½ and hour while my pizza got cold.

Next, I took a non BluRay disc and popped it in hotel provided DVD player. So far so good, until the disc started to pixilate and then stopped working altogether. I popped it out, but it didn’t appear to be particularly dirty or scratched. My guess is that the DVD player is old and abused and has gotten bumped one too many times.

So I resigned myself to watching whatever I could find on the cable channels, eating my cold pizza and having some wine…..

Back in the Big Apple

Yesterday I returned to NYC for the first time in, I don’t know, at least five years. Maybe longer. It was cloudy when we flew in, but you could still see the urban sprawl going on forever and ever. Sometimes, when we land in DFW I hear people commenting on our urban sprawl, but we have nothing on NYC.

I grabbed a cab and headed into the city to my temporary apartment. I’m going to be here for a month and staying at a hotel that was just big enough to open the door wasn’t really an option. Besides, we lucked out and I found a great place for under $300 a night – in Manhattan that’s almost unheard of.

On the drive in, I again noticed how old everything looked. I always forget how long NYC has been here and that while there are about a billion buildings towering into the sky, most of them are fairly old, not new. The architecture and the clash of architectural styles is always interesting.

Of course, the first thing that really hit me when I got into the city was the smell. Just general food and garbage. Strange. I’m staying roughly at the corner of Third and 37th. I don’t quite have my bearings but I think it’s just at the edge of the Manhattan district because it’s not quite “snooty” yet.

I had a nice Italian dinner and there are plenty of things to eat around here – typical NYC. I crashed early because I was tired, but the sun started coming up at about 4:30am. I lost track of when the sirens and noise stopped – if ever, but they were in full swing by 6:00am. I have a feeling I’ll be tired by the end of the day…..

A Friend's DUI

Recently, one of my good friends was attending a going away party for another friend of mine. My first friend apparently gets pretty messed up and acts a bit obnoxiously. The other friends offer him a ride home, etc., and of course he declines.

Now, I’ve had to deal with drunks before and I’ve had to deal with this particular friend when he’s been wasted. I have never, not one time had a problem getting his keys from him so he wouldn’t drive home. Sure, he’d give me a bit of shit about it but he always gave them up without any real confrontations.

My other friends say that they “gave him every chance in the world,” etc., but what do they do? They called the cops on him. I couldn’t believe it. I have never even heard of such a thing. So my friend gets a DUI and now is in a pretty hard spot. He’s facing a lot of legal problems, fines, etc.

I was pretty pissed off about it and let my other friend know, in no uncertain terms, that I was not happy and that I thought the situation was handled poorly. Again, they professed that they gave him every chance in the world. I wasn’t there, but I find that really hard to believe. Instead of getting any kind of apology I get a rebuttal about how one guy was hit by a drunk driver and still has problems and how this friend had to deal with an abuse husband, etc. Great. So it sounds like they decided to take their anger out on my friend – and this friend is one of the nicest guys I have ever met. I’ve never even heard him say anything bad about anyone.

The other thing was this whole sense of self-righteousness that I read into it. I’ve hung out with these people before and I’ve seen ALL of them get blitzed. I still can’t believe that they did that. I am still reeling I am so angry over it. I hope one day I am not as angry as I am today because I do value the friendship of this person. Still, right now, I don’t even want to talk to them and I may never get over feeling like I won’t ever want to hang out with them at a party or anything. Who knows when they might decide to call the cops on me for some reason?

It kind of sucks to write off an entire group of friends, but as I was told – they all pretty much agreed to the course of action and upon further debate said they’d do the same thing again. I guess fucking over a friend isn’t that big of a deal to them…..

Getting Fooked in DIA

I hate flying through Denver. It seems that every time I fly through Denver something happens. Flight is delayed….flight is cancelled….get diverted to alternative airport and then get fooked by something else, etc. In fact, in the last two years I think DIA has a 100% track record for fooking me in some way shape form or fashion.

Today, there are storms in Dallas and it’s screwing up my flights to get home. Now I know you are thinking “That’s not because of DIA!”….but I disagree. It’s a Karma thing, or maybe a conspiracy thing. If I had flown through SLC, there wouldn’t have been storms and I would have made it on time.

Bling! Says it’s because of the Latter Day Saints – the Mormons. But I’m pretty sure that those are the ones in SLC, not DIA. Still, it does kind of play into a nice Jesus Freak conspiracy theory. So do you think there might be something to this? I think it warrants further investigation. We could do some research about it tying in all the Jesus Freaks and how they conspire to screw us non Jesus Freaks up when we travel. We can even call the book “How would Jesus Fly?”

I took about a month of from writing in here. For those few of you who read this and are interested in keeping up, my apologies. I kind of had a bad snap there with a bunch of things happening at once including another big trip to work out at the power plant. Those trips are brutal – 6 and 7 day work-weeks pulling 15+ hour days.

I also was struggling with the loss of some of my relatives as well as my own personal issues and struggles with death. I am going to be 40 next year. I always wondered if I would have a mid-life "crisis" and I think that in some ways it’s already started. It’s been hard for me to not think about that, but I seem to be getting back to normal.

Since my friend and co-worker quit, I’ve also had to carry his workload and as luck would have it all of our project s are hitting at the same time. To top it off, we also have a lot of customer requests hitting and while they sat there for weeks or months not ready for us to work on their projects they are suddenly all ready. I just can’t keep up.

But!!! I did get a new laptop and it’s pretty sweet. It’s a Dell Studio XPS 16 and it’s totally loaded with features and whizmos!!! Unfortunately, it took me almost three days to totally wipe it out, re-install it the base OS and move all of my files over to it. Why did it take three days? See above – I’ve had NO time to work on it. Last night I stayed up until about midnight so I’d be ready for the work day today. There is nothing like being in the middle of two laptops and you can’t really quite use either one.

As usual, when I don’t write, I’ve had a lot of thoughts and ideas to write about but simply did not feel like getting to it.

However, you might find this interesting –
We have a few systems that monitor client networks. This is a service we provide to them. Last Thursday one of the monitoring systems freaked out and sent out, oh, maybe 1000+ alerts. These alerts come to my inbox in the form of an email. This same email also goes to our trouble ticket system and opens a trouble ticket. When a trouble ticket hits the system, I also get an email.

So right now, that means I am getting at least two emails for each alert – and as I said there was well over 1000 of them.

The initial email was also supposed to go to an old email address for a guy that used to work for us. Let’s say his name was Fred. Our email administrator had just killed his email account. So all mails that were supposed to go to Fred were getting rejected by the email server. The email server would send a notification of the reject out to the ticketing system – generating more tickets, and thus more alert emails to our in-boxes.

So now, figure for each alert I am getting three email – that’s over 3000+ emails. Then, the coup de grace… if a trouble ticket is opened for more than about 15 minutes, it sends and alert to my phone, and then it sends another one 10 minutes later if nobody responds. My phone was hit with god knows how many text messges. It had to be in the thousands. It basically crippled my phone. I had to mute the phone because I was getting a text message on the average of about one every one-to-two seconds. So if people called me I couldn’t tell. When I would try to call out I had to wrestle with the phone since it was constantly alerting me I had a new message, and, oh, did I want to read it right then? If I could get a call out it would beep at me constantly due to the new messages coming in. How long did this last? Until Saturday evening. Roughly 2.5 days.

First Day of Spring?

Isn’t today supposed to be the first day of spring? It doesn’t much feel like it. Sometime my birthday falls on the first day of spring, but this year it doesn’t. Yesterday was a nice day outside – almost 70, today it’s 37 and raining. I kind of like it. It seems to fit my mood.

One of my great aunts passed away yesterday. She was a pretty interesting person and one of my favorite stories about her was when I was significantly younger – my parents and I were in E. Texas visiting everyone. We were talking to her and the phone started ringing. They didn’t have answering machines or anything fancy and the phone kept ringing. My dad asked, “Are you going to get that?” She simply replied, “No, if it’s important they’ll call back.”

At the time I thought my dad found this amusing and probably thought this was an usual response. I liked it, but at the time couldn’t quite understand why. Later, as I got older, I understood why. Today, most of us still get way too caught up in being connected in some shape or fashion to everything else around us. We take text messages, and phone calls at all hours of the night and day. But I don’t. If I am eating dinner I don’t answer my phone. If I’m having a conversation with someone else or out with friends you won’t find me engrossed in a texting with another friend. Why? Because I’d rather be in the moment with those around me. And my great aunt was very correct – if it’s really important they will call back, and today they can leave you a voice mail.

I always connected with her and I’ll miss her. I can’t make the funeral because it happened too fast and it was being held on short notice in E. Texas. I understand she didn’t want a big funeral and she didn’t want everyone to make a fuss. That sounds like her.

Another one of my great aunts passed away about 2 weeks ago. I wouldn’t say that I felt quite as connected with her even though she was always very kind. She loved having kids around and always made us feel welcome even though we weren’t adults, yet. She was well respected in her church and in the community.

The both lived long and good lives (almost 90 each) and while I am not sad for them, I am sad for myself because I won’t get to see them again and enjoy their company.

My last remaining great aunt has been diagnosed with cancer. The docs give her less than a year to live. We are hoping that she can make it to her 91st birthday and I have a feeling if she does there will be a big celebration. I just saw her and she was as sharp as a tack and in good spirits. She decided she had lived a long life and had done all she could do. She didn’t want chemo, but I think she agreed to some radiation therapy provided that it showed positive results.

And one of my other distant friends was just diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer. He was talking to someone at work, was feeling fine, and then his face went numb. Docs quickly assessed the situation and removed a mass from his brain that they couldn’t identify. They sent it to the mayo clinic and the came back with the bad news. He’s a great guy, wife, kids, etc. He’s going to fight it, and I think he should, but it doesn’t look good. They have given him less than a year to live. I think he is a year younger than I am.

So I’m not in a great mood today. The rain and cold weather are fitting. In a day or two it will be sunny and beautiful. Plants are already blooming and wildlife will be coming out of hibernation. My friend’s daughter is getting married in about a week. I remember when she was a tiny little thing in diapers. It just goes to show us that the cycle of life continues. And while I know this feeling will pass it just doesn’t make me feel any better today.

Minimum Card Charges and Donuts

I’ve posted before about some of the merchant service agreements with credit card services such as Visa / MasterCard. One of them is that they do not allow a merchant to enforce a minimum charge limit. I’m not saying you won’t see the signs all over the place and that the merchant won’t try to enforce it, but it is against their agreement and they are not supposed to do so.

The other morning I was at a donut shop with my g/f. I was out of cash (rare for me), but she had some. We ordered some breakfast and got her some coffee. It wasn’t much and I noticed they had a $5.00 minimum credit card sign. I whispered “I feel like charging this just to prove a point.” She said “you don’t want to do that.” The problem is, that I very much DID want to do that. I wanted to cause a scene right then and there and to get the bank on the phone that very moment and tell them to shove their donuts up their ass while Visa jumped their shit for violating their terms.

Now, the foreigners at the donut shop didn’t really deserve that. They surely made an honest mistake, but I didn’t care. I wanted things to be right. I’ve always been like that. In school if I was getting expelled that day for wearing a Slayer t-shirt with a pentagram on it I wanted the other kid getting expelled for having a Jesus t-shirt and a cross on it. My father likes to point out that there is a difference between equal opportunity (liberty) and equal outcomes (suppression). Even as a kid I was a big advocate of equal opportunity and fairness. The hard thing is learning that life is not fair…. But I was really pissed about donuts.

Customer Service Sucks

What is it with customer service lately? You would think that with the economy having problems, consumer confidence down, and companies hurting in general that they would be making more of an effort to keep their customers, not trying to piss them off.

Credit card companies have taken the extra step by charging you more for less. But recently, I’ve had two experiences that could have been better.

When we went to Japan we stayed predominantly in Hilton hotels. We could have chosen other hotels, some costing less money, but chose Hilton to keep accruing points. Besides, the hotels are nice. At any given hotel in Japan I noticed that they didn’t have my Hilton Honors number. They were willing to put in, but I didn’t have it on me, either. In the states this isn’t an issue since I always have my laptop and can easily look it up.

When I got back to the U.S. I sent in a request to get my points. It was denied because I booked through a third party, or it was a discount, or a foreign country, or the moon was full, or any other number of bullshit reasons. I wrote them and tried to politely explain that I wasn’t interested in playing games and defining what a “stay” was. I explained that I slept in their beds, spent my money at their hotel, and as far as I was concerned that was a “stay” regardless of whatever ridiculous conditions they wanted to wrap around it. They responded back with another denial – and more ridiculous citing of rules. I wrote them back and reiterated my first email with a follow up of my money being important to me, I would hope that their customers are important to them.

They finally relented and gave me the points, but really…should I have had to write them three times to get it? No. It should have been a simple one time request. They could have informed me of the rules and permitted the request. That’s poor customer service in my opinion.

The second issue came with United Airlines. I was on a return flight from a trip and ordered a couple of jack and cokes (herein referred to as “cocktails”). They don’t take cash anymore so I had to pay with a credit card. The flight-chick was having problems with the machine and even told me it was trying to overcharge me. The drinks were supposed to cost $6.00 ea. I had my drinks, got my receipt and came home.

On my recent bill I had a charge for $12.00 (2 x cocktails) and another for $24!!! That would be a grand total of $36.00 or six cocktails on a sub 2hour flight – I would have been pretty hammered and probably would have had problems getting off the plane.

You also can’t call UA, so I sent them an email on one of their stupid form thingies. I was nice, explained the discrepancy and asked for a refund of $24 on my credit card. Guess what? DENIED!!! They gave me a $100 voucher for my next flight. WTF? I was not happy – and I had to think “am I cutting off my nose to spite my face?” but, no. It was there are multiple issues here. The primary issue being that they charged me for goods and services I did not receive. The secondary issue is that most of my flight funds are from work, but drink funds are from me. This didn’t put money back in MY pocket. And last, but not least, I shouldn’t be forced to spend more money to get a refund for something I never received in the first place.

I wrote another email to them explaining theses points. Bottom line – if they are going to go to credit card transactions only then they are going to have to deal with these types of events.

A representative called me and we discussed it. She was very polite and in the end I got my $24 back (to show up on a future cc bill) and she gave me the $100 voucher for my troubles. Kudos to her for taking care of the situation, but I still wish that it would have been made right from the start.

Lawnmower Steve

This isn’t new, and has been on the internet for quite some time. Have you already seen this guy?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNPxIibhcKY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95qZtwJNjxk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fds_hupE2vQ

Sometimes, I think about this and I just crack up. My two favorite things are that he clearly knows his rights, and when (in the second video) he gets tased and screams and finally says “GOD DAMMIT!” I love people like this. This guy is a moron. But we need morons. I need morons. They are my comedic relief when life gets too serious.

Sure there are intelligent people that are funny. And I need them too, but there is just something about someone who completely lacks the fundamental understanding of how to interact with society that I appreciate in my own sick way.

My First Blu Ray Experience

Other than probably casually seeing some Blu Ray on a TV in a store like Best Buy I’d never really sat down and watched a Blu Ray movie until last night.

My folks had given me little extra scratch as a Christmas present and I’d been wanting to pick up a Blu Ray player for quite some time. If you aren’t aware of what Blu Ray is, it’s the DVD equivalent of High Definition. Output of 1080i / 1080p (depending on the player).

After some research it appears that the Sony PS3 is still considered one of the best players out there as a function of picture quality and bang-for-the-buck. With the PS3 Slim 120 down to $299 you get a lot more function than from other comparable Blu Ray players. In short:

Blu Ray player w/1080i/1080p and BD Live
Video Game Console – and yes the games have HiDef output
Built in networking
Built in WiFi
Connects and plays media from servers (music / video)
And more!

Two minor complaints – it’s a little slow to load, and if you want to use your existing IR universal remote you will have to buy an adapter since the PS3 doesn’t support IR, only Blue Tooth (RF).

I then upgraded my NetFlix account to send me Blu Ray discs “automatically” for movies in my queue if they were available. Due to timing, DirecTV decided to increase their rates and drop all of my promo discounts – my DirecTV bill was now going to be almost $60 a month (almost double what it was)!!! So I cancelled DirecTV.

But last night I popped in one of my new Blu Ray discs from Netflix and fired it up. It only took a few moments to realize what I’d been missing and why I spent all the money I’ve spent on my TV, sound system, etc. It was quite impressive even if the movie wasn’t spectacular. Even the previews were sharp and clear. My other DVD player was an upscaling DVD player and while the picture was good this was far better.

So now I am hooked. If you have a few extra bucks and are looking at Blu Ray you should get one if your system can support it. Look into supporting features like Blu Ray Live (BD Live). You don’t have to spend $300 on a PS3 or other player, but if you were looking in that range I’d consider the PS3

Japan - A Surreal Moment

Well, I knew I’d forget to write about something. One of the oddest moments we had in Japan was in the Akihabara district of Tokyo. We were a tad lost and trying to find the correct subway rail system. There were people crammed in all over the place and we were in an underground subway.

Suddenly, we could hear singing and we recognized the song. It wasn’t unusual to hear American music in Japan. In fact, we heard more of that than anything else. But this was different. This was the Battle Hymn of the Republic… being sung in by a bunch of very high voices that sounded like the Chipmunks, with a Japanese accent.

My g/f and I just looked at each other and we both could see the “WTF” look in each other’s eyes. It was pretty surreal…

Japan - I'm Back!!

I’m actually still reeling from jet lag. For some reason, I can always travel west far easier than I can travel east. When I’ve gone to Europe it’s always harder for me to adjust. The same is true about coming home from Japan.

Going over there wasn’t really a problem. We flew business class (on miles) on a Boeing 777. The new cabins are pretty slick and it made the 12+ hour flight pretty enjoyable. We had to get a connecting leg in LA, so our total trip time was almost 20 hours by the time we caught our flights, busses, etc., and got to the hotel. Still, I adjusted to that fairly quick and within a day or two was pretty much on-track with the exception that I was getting up and going to bed fairly early.

Coming home, though, hasn’t worked out so well. Japan is approximately 13 hours ahead of DFW. From a time difference perspective we left Japan before we landed in DFW. The flight was also shorter since we flew direct to DFW and we had the jet stream with us (700+mph ground speed!! Nice tailwind) and were going against the rotation of the earth. Oddly enough, we landed in the biggest “snow storm” on record at DFW. Of course, we love the snow but everyone else on the plane and most people in DFW were freaked out about it. All in all, we got about 12.5” – highly unusual for us and it caused some damage with breaking branches and what-not. Here is a quick pic of my house with snow all over it.



By the time we got through customs and got a ride home from the airport it was about 10:30 or so in the morning and we had already been up for a long time. I don’t sleep well on flights even with the free-flowing Jack and cokes. I was pretty wiped out, but managed to stay up until about 3:00pm and then I crashed for an hour or so. I got up and then stayed up until midnight. But this morning I woke up promptly at 4:00am and was really dragging by 4:00pm. I took another “quick nap” and woke up almost 7 hours later and here I am writing at near midnight.
I figure I’ll just be a train wreck for a few days but I’ll get over it and it was totally worth it. Besides, I have over 1338 emails to go through only 25 of which are spam. That, plus laundry, organizing photos, gifts, thoughts, etc. is just going to take a while.

Japan - I'm Back Pt. 2

I wrote that after only being in town for a day or so. I’ve been home for several days, now and have almost got my jet lag under control. I’ve also finished my write up on Japan. I’m sure I’ve forgotten something or left something out. If you want to read it it’s all posted below. If you just want to skip to the pictures, click here.

Japan - The Prequel

As you can tell by the previous post Japan Bitches! We were scrambling to get things organized and done. One of the problem with both of us working so much right at the end was that neither of us had much time to organize and coordinate planning a 2 week international trip.

We had some help planning the trip from friends and acquaintances that live in Japan and the JTB travel guides were really quite nice even if we had some communications difficulties due to the language barrier.

Still, I felt just a little ill-prepared going over with the attitude that I’d figure some things out while I was there and that just the way it was going to have to be. I made my g/f promise that she wouldn’t show up at 2:00am the day we were supposed to leave with her hair on fire and completely stressed out. She kept it by showing up at 2:00am without her hair on fire and other than being tired she wasn’t too stressed. It was about 3:00am when we got in bed, leaving about 1.5 hours to sleep before we had to get up at 4:30am. I had a private car coming to take us to the airport – I figured we deserved it and I wasn’t about to try to mooch a ride to the airport off of someone at 5:30am.

My g/f was going over to Japan initially for work so we met her father at the airport in the Admiral’s club (international travel in business class gets access!) and sort of chilled in a zombie-like state until it was time for our flights. I showed my g/f a 747 and we talked about them for a while – little did we know this would foreshadow for what was to come.

We also jumped on the Internet kiosks and made an effort to reserve our ski and snowboard gear once we got to Niseko. Working with the Japanese web sites can be fairly difficult because it’s a mixture of Japanese and really fucked up “Engrish.” We were pretty sure we got our reservations made, but they had to confirm them so all we could do now was wait.

Unfortunately, in making the reservations my g/f had taken her little tiny bag that holds her credit cards and driver’s license up to the kiosk. The bag is black, the countertops are black – you can see where this is going and we realized she had left them behind once we landed in LA. Not much we could do about it at that point so she started calling to cancel her cc’s prior to the next flight. I told her not to sweat it and that I still had my cc’s and plenty of cash.

And finally, we were on our way…..

Japan - Misplaced Health Concerns

One thing we felt that the Japanese are a little off on are their health concerns. You see a good portion of the population wearing air filter masks. You also see them use wet-naps prior to every meal and they are fanatical about taking your shoes off and wearing slippers inside the house, hotel, or restaurant. If you go to the bathroom they even have a different pair of slippers to wear.

When I was going through the airport I would take my shoes off due to them being steel toed and heeled. I know they would set off the metal detectors so I just took them off. The security folks would force me to wear slippers. I kept trying to tell them that I didn’t want them, but they were very insistent about it.

So my question is, how is slipping on a pair of slippers that everyone has had their feet in any more or less clean than me just walking 10 feet in my socks?

When you hit a public restroom don’t expect anything to dry your hands with. There might be an air dryer, but I only saw one public restroom the entire time that had paper towels. Soap was 50 / 50. Due to all of this, most guys didn’t wash their hands after using the bathroom. My g/f says that the women’s bathrooms were no better and often didn’t have any toilet paper. She also said the Japanese style toilets often times had some type of liquid substance all over and around them – and then no soap or towels.

In the U.S. we know that washing your hands is one of the single best defenses against becoming ill. Not masks, and not taking your shoes off. We just found it a bit odd.

Japan - Chillin' in Tokyo

You’ve probably heard that things are a little more expensive in Japan. That is true to an extent, but our first experience was Tokyo. In some ways this was good because big cities are similar the world over and it was a good way to ease into being in a foreign country.

Things aren’t much worse in Tokyo than they are in NYC as far as expense goes. If you go to Manhattan, NY it’s pretty expensive. It’s about the same in Japan but they don’t tip – it’s already included in the price. That helps. Of course, as you wander around you do come across the oddball things like the $100+ cantaloupe, but this was not the norm.



I also ended up ordering a $25.00 Jack and Coke by accident. The night we arrived it was really late when we got to the hotel and I was fried. We were at the bar at the hotel and I didn’t even think to ask what the cost would be. It’s always a little more expensive at the hotel bars, but when we got the tab there was shock and amazement all around at the cost of my Jack and Coke. My g/f is not letting me forget that a self-proclaimed cheap bastard ordered a $25 Jack and Coke.

My g/f had business meetings the first few days we were there so I was left to explore on my own. My first real experience on my own was walking out of the hotel lobby early in the morning to find some coffee (for my g/f) and a coke for myself. Most hotels in Japan included some type of kettle for making hot water and tea bags. There wasn’t much in the way of coffee in the rooms and I don’t drink coffee so we took the streets most mornings trying to find that vital sustenance to wake up with.



As I left the hotel and hit the streets I noticed that there weren’t that many people out and about. It was still early, but back home in a big city there would have already been throngs of people. A younger couple turned towards me, laughed and ran off. I couldn’t tell if it was because of me or something else. Regardless, I was on my way exploring.

Tokyo is a huge city – about the size of the entire DFW metroplex and it is home to over thirty-million Japanese. That’s more people than the entire state of TX. It’s pretty much wall-to-wall people wherever you go and at almost any time of day or night – except the mornings. It seems like they like to get going a little bit later than we do, but they also seem to work later in the evening. For that reason, we didn’t find much to eat for breakfast except at the hotels. There was a Denny’s across the street and while none of us wanted to eat there, the $30 breakfast buffet at the hotel was a bit much so we tried it out. Check out the section on eating in Japan.

As I said it was pretty much wall-to-wall people. Especially if you visited a market place or alley. While these were great to experience, I quickly found myself wanting to get out of the crowds, though you could buy just about anything there:





Our hotel room in Tokyo was large, especially by Japanese standards of which we would later find out. They are also fond of their heated toilet seats and fancy bidets / showers, etc. This one had a seat warmer, a “shower” for the front or back, and a pulsing water option. I found some later that also had a “no odor” option. Aside from spraying an entire bathroom wall with jetting water as I was trying to figure these things out I sort of came to like them.



Our first bathroom was also built into telephone-booth-style stalls. I don’t think the photo could capture it very well, but the doors on both the stalls were hinged like a phone booth and you did your business (whether shower or bathroom) in one of them.



All of this was odd as we quickly found out that the public restrooms often did not have soap, toilet paper, or anything to dry your hands with.

But one thing I was very impressed with while in Japan is their attention to detail. No matter what they did, no matter how menial, they took great pride in their work and did it with enthusiasm. Only once or twice did we come across anyone who didn’t seem to care to be at their job. As a result, they kick our ass in certain things, little things, like this control panel in the hotel room – alarm clock, and lighting controls all right by the bed. This was not unusual in any of the rooms we stayed in.



I also found their elevators to be smooth as glass. So smooth that you might not have realized that the elevator begun to move. Even the leveling at the landings was extremely smooth and controlled. But it didn’t stop there. It was at nearly every level of their products, culture, infrastructure, etc.

Here is a picture of a bathroom mirror. They heat them up over the sink so that they don’t fog and you can continue to shave or get ready after stepping out of the shower (note the socks hanging to dry!):




As I was saying, my g/f and her dad had business to do so I was pretty much on my own to wander the streets of Tokyo for a few days. I walked every day for several hours and really enjoyed it. It was quite cool in Tokyo but only “cold” on a handful of days. The Japanese were dressed fairly warm with heavy coats, sweaters, scarves, and other items. One thing about the Japanese is that they apparently like it really warm once they get inside somewhere. Everywhere we went we would start sweating almost immediately upon entering a building of any type. We would be stripping our jackets and things off and the locals would stay bundled up. This got old really fast as I was constantly sweating and felt icky on most days and in need of an extra shower. I had brought mostly warm clothes since I knew it was supposed to be cold, but I really didn’t need them in Tokyo and found it difficult to dress so that I would be cool indoors and warm outdoors.

Everyone in Japan was extremely friendly even if we couldn’t easily communicate. They are a very humble and proud people and always willing to help out. Most of the communication we did was visual, especially if we didn’t speak the same language. Finger pointing and gesturing went a long way with just a few words of Japanese or “Engrish” between us.

Tokyo was also very clean in spite of the large number of people that were all over the place. I think part of this is due to Japanese culture and the fact they just take a lot of pride in their country and where they live. Here are a few quick shots just to show you the city a bit:







And of course, enter The Matrix:



At the parks it was interesting that there were these huge freaking cats everywhere. They seemed pretty nonplussed by us, but I wasn’t so sure about them. I had visions of trying to explain to people that I was mugged by a cat while walking through a park in Tokyo.



A Japanese duck – note the slightly slanted eyes eyes:



The Emperor’s palace is in Tokyo. It’s moved a few times, but currently resides there. I took a few quick shots as close as I was allowed to get to it. It’s kind of cool because it’s surrounded by moats.

Japan - Snowboading in Niseko - The Sickest of the Sick!

We left Tokyo and headed to Niseko, on the Hokkaido island. We had heard that they get consistent and reliable powder and I was dying to get some runs in and check this out. Leaving Tokyo was a little sketchy because we were now completely on our own and had to switch trains, catch flights, busses and other forms of transportation.

We grabbed a train to the airport and only had a little difficulty putting all of that together. Supposedly the rush hour was supposed to be over, but it was still pretty packed. Once we got to the airport we whizzed right through security. They were some of the nicest and friendly people I’ve ever had to deal with.

We showed no ID, ever. We also were not required to remove our liquids or our shoes (though I knew mine would set off the metal detectors so I did anyway). There was no rudeness or people on power-trips. We simply got through security efficiently and without any problems.

On the flight, it was again stuffy. I never quite figured it out, but the Japanese are just not into having air flowing. They seem to like it stuffy and hot and I was freaking dying on the plane, but at least it was only a 1 hr. flight. Something they did that I thought was really cool is that they show a forward facing camera on the big screens during take off. Once the gear is up, it switches to a downward facing camera until it’s time for the in-flight entertainment. Upon landing, the sequence is reversed. I really enjoyed that and wished we did it here in the U.S.

After landing in New Chitose we met up with a representative of the travel company and got on the right bus. For some reason we thought it was only a 45 minute bus ride. Fortunately we found out it was close to 2.5 hours. This gave us a chance to grab some chips to take on the bus as we were close to starving at this point. It also would have completely freaked us out to have not stopped after an hour and we’d have been wondering if we were even in the right place.

But we made it to Niseko and I was amazed at how much snow there was. Granted, I haven’t been all over the world in the winter, and I’ve experienced some good hard dumps in MT, WY, UT, and CA, but this was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was dumping snow when we arrived and it pretty much didn’t stop for the entire three days we were there. Morning, noon and night it dumped snow.



We walked down to the main village to get a bite to eat. We were really starving at this point and saw a pizza joint so we stopped in and ordered a pizza. The guy making the pizza came out to ask us how we wanted the tomatoes done – cooked in or put on top after? We said cooked in and it was an awesome pizza.

The guy’s name was Rob – like the bank – and was a very friendly guy. He said he was from Alaska and was very adamant to point out that it was not part of the U.S. He was very disgruntled with American politics. When I asked him why he left the U.S. he said because of George Bush. I had to commend him. He is the first and only person I ever met that put their money where there mouth is and followed through with leaving the country after Bush got re-elected.

There is a fire hydrant buried somewhere under there…



Me in front of a sign for a restaurant…



There was so much snow in fact that some of the folks had taken to using snow blowers to get it off the roof. I wasn’t sure which was more amusing, that there was that much snow, or that it was such a common occurrence that getting the snow blower up there didn’t seem to be a problem.



At some point we decided that this would be the 9th Circle of Hell for our friend Bling! so we just started snapping pics of the snow for him.

The ice bar…



We stayed at a nice little bed and breakfast called Locomotion. It wasn’t anything grandiose, but it had a warm shower, was cozy, and all we really needed after a day on the slopes. A view from our window:



Note the snow drift on the left side of the pic…here is what it looked like from inside the room:



We used the snow as a refrigerator at the B&B where we stayed:




Did I mention that this was a room on the second floor? Look again… I’m telling you it was sick.

We finally hit the slopes and it was awesome! As I said, it never really stopped snowing so there was fresh powder and TONS of it everywhere you went – even on the groomers, though you couldn’t tell they were groomed because of all the fresh powder.

Niseko is also largely built up from the Aussies and Kiwis so just about everyone speaks English and you will hear a lot of accents and see more Caucasians than anywhere else. But I gotta tell ya, the Aussies are wusses when it comes to the cold. It was about 15 F, when we got there and they were already complaining how cold it was. “Going to be a lot colder tomorrow!” “really? How cold” “-15 or so.” That is -15 Celsius, which is about 5 Fahrenheit. My cut-off for boarding is about -10 or so Fahrenheit. We did see -22 Celsius up towards the top, which is almost -10 Fahrenheit. I was still OK with that, but it was definitely getting colder. Still I got tired of hearing them whinge about the cold over and over again.

We hit a good warm-up run and my g/f said her legs were already tired and she didn’t want to kill them so I should take a run on my own. No problem! Up I went and I lucked out as the sun broke free of the clouds and I was able to take black runs all the way down the mountain in the deep powder. It was awesome and one of the best runs I had the entire time as my legs were fresh, the powder was largely untracked and deep, and the sun was shining, but only briefly. It was quickly obscured by clouds again.

In fact, one of the few times the sun came out and it quit snowing we realized we were on the other side of a valley from another mountain / volcano! We had no idea it was there. This sequence of pictures was taken in the span of about 10 minutes:





By the time this next photo was taken you can see that the clouds were already backing in and within a couple of minutes the view was gone again:



At times, the snow was almost overpowering. We went up to the near top of the mountain and the winds picked up and started blowing like crazy. It was getting under our helmets and through our goggles and making my head literally hurt from how cold it was. The visibility dropped and once we got off the lift I was literally almost blown over by how strong the wind was. Visibility reduced to about 10 yards, and I don’t mean it was good visibility. There was a warming hut about 30 or 40 yards away that would “disappear” and we’d have to wait for the wind and snow to die down so we could find it. Even at 10 yards you had to be careful because you couldn’t see very well. We waited most of that one out in the hut and warmed up enough to trek across the mountain to the other side and skied / boarded down. Once at the bottom we stopped to get a beer. Here is a view from the window:



Can you see the huge lift towers? Same view a few minutes later:



That’s why I don’t have many pics of us actually hitting the runs. Visibility was poor and the poor camera was having problems with the cold. I would like to see Niseko on a bluebird day, but we simply didn’t have that many days to hang out. The second day of boarding I got my g/f to go up and try the black under the chairlift. She did OK even though she had a nice yard sale and a face plant.

I know it’s not a great pic, but we just never had good visibility during the day.



Most of the time you couldn’t see the valley floor at all and it was very flat light which made it difficult. For that reason, we tried out the night skiing.



Again, this was totally sick. The lights put great shadows on the slopes and you could read the runs!! We were able to ski / board harder and faster than at any other time and because it was at night most people were gone. Wide open powder fields were all mine and I conquered them in the same clumsy fashion as I do any other deep powder run. There was even enough light to run trees, though I was a lot more cautious because it quickly got dark in the tree line out of the lights. I am now hooked on night skiing and if I ever have an option to do it when there is a flat-light day I am going to save up for the night skiing.

I would love to go back there some day and spend about a week snowboarding. It was our understanding that this is consistent and reliable year after year. None of this taking a trip and worrying about there being snow stuff. Just go an enjoy deep powder. We were there when they are averaging over 155+ inches of snow. During the peak season they get even more. Nice.

I almost forgot, in Niseko we saw food vans and busses. These were converted vans or busses that they served food out of. The g/f got a crepe from a school bus…