Chess

Played three games of chess last night with Neil, and got my ass handed to me all three times. At my best, I was keeping up; at my worst, I'd make some incredibly boneheaded move and put myself in a position where there was no way I could win. I admittedly conceded all three games, but my logic all three times went something like this:
1) With a level playing field, I can maybe keep up. Let's be generous and give me 50-50 odds.
2) Neil just made an awesome move that made me waste about four moves and ended up with me losing a valuable piece. Therefore, I'm about four moves behind and down in points.
3) Conclusion: with a level playing field, I'm about 50-50. With the chips in Neil's favor, I'm probably more of a 95-5. Therefore, let's just concede rather than playing for another 30 minutes just to arrive at the obvious conclusion.

I remember when I backpacked with Runar, we played a ton of chess, and he beat me almost every time (meaning like 98%). We were discussing rankings, scores, etc, and Runar pointed out something interesting - chess rankings (or scores, or ratings, or whatever the hell it's called) are very specific, and you need to play with someone with practically an identical score to you. I think the points go somewhere from 0 to 2000 or something, and a difference of 100 points means that the player with the better score will almost always win, which isn't really any fun for either player. The Internet has been a a great tool for chess players, not because of social aspects or by eliminating the need to have a chess board, but because you can find someone whose score is close enough to yours to ensure a good, fair game. And (at least according to Runar), the best way to improve is to play someone at more or less your skill level - it's not like basketball or other sports where you want to play with people who are better than you (actually, it kind of is, but a difference of 100 points is the equivalent of migrating from your pickup game to playing with college starters - i.e. it's so far out of your league that you just get shut down and don't really improve).
I'm very impressed - I'm tempted to teach him how to play poker, because I think he could be far better at it than I am. Poker takes analytical skill, which he obviously has, and it also takes an intuitive ability to read people, which I think he also has. Of course, I don't want to be responsible for him getting in trouble or turning to gambling, so maybe I'll hold off on that.

Speaking of poker, Clau and I have decided to go to Massachusetts for the holiday weekend coming up. We're making the balls-out drive to Salem on Friday night, crashing, exploring Salem and migrating to Boston on Saturday, partying in Boston on Saturday, then exploring some more before heading to Foxwoods on Sunday. I'll play poker at Foxwoods (probably until the wee smalls), then on Monday we'll explore Mystic Seaport and head back home. Should be a lot of fun. I've never played in a casino before and I hope I don't get my ass handed to me like last night. But, the way I see it, even if I lose $500 on Sunday night, the proceeds from our apartment the following Wednesday ought to take the sting out of it.

OK, lots to do for work, and if I get a chance I'm going to review some chess materials: if I can at least not do anything really stupid, maybe I'll have a chance.
Choice quote from Neil last night: "Hey, you've been making some pretty good moves; not the one you just made, obviously, but overall pretty decent." My cup runneth over.

FedEx follow-up

Got an email from my dad giving more clarification:

Read your blog. You don't hate Fed Ex, you hate Fed Ex Ground. It's two different services and Fed Ex Ground verily sucketh a major rock. Fed Ex Ground is a separate service that Fed Ex set up fr the purpose of fucking the drivers. These drivers are not real fed ex employees, they are called "contractors" but they drive a fed ex truck and wear a fed ex uniform and the packages they deliver come in a fed ex box. The services is way cheaper for the shipper but the drivers are getting royally fucked by fed ex. You must have noticed that some fed ex packages (the overnight, the two day) have a nice tracking number and you can re rout and other good stuff, and some seem to be just sitting in limbo and nobody cares about the package or you. That's the difference between the two services. When you ahve to ship fed ex, pay extra for a true fed ex servie like overnight or two day. Thought you might like to know.

I'm not 100% sure that I don't still hate FedEx for doing this - I mean, I don't hate Indian call centers for their poor training as much as I hate the companies that employ them. And of course, this comes back to my gripe with vendors for not saying who is going to ship the packages - I mean, UPS has ground service too and we don't have any problem with it, and the price difference between ground and 2-day tends to be pretty substantial (especially when you're ordering something like a $10 DVD). Still, for big stuff I think it's definitely worth it to opt for 2-day delivery, just in case it's going to be sent FedEx...

I hate FedEx

I cannot describe how much I hate FedEx. Every time a package gets sent to our apartment via FedEx it turns into a nightmare. Points:
1) They will not leave a package with the super. Every time we ask them to do that, they say "the super wasn't there". Funny how he's always there for UPS.
2) For "home delivery", they don't give a time window - well, that's not completely true - they say "sometime between 8am and 8pm".
3) The delivery time is never consistent, as can be seen from the door tags and the few times I've been home when they deliver. Sometimes they show up at 9am, sometimes 5pm, usually sometimes in-between.
4) They don't deliver on Saturday unless your delivery time just happens to be on Saturday. So, in other words, it's not that they're incapable of it, they just won't do it on request.
5) They "might" deliver to another address, depending on their mood, but they'll charge for it if they have to change to another FedEx facility (so, for example, if you can't be at home in Hoboken and you want it just delivered to your office in NYC, they charge for that).
6) They hold all packages in the bowels of Brooklyn. There was a time when they held stuff in Manhattan (admittedly way on the edge of Manhattan, but Manhattan nonetheless) - now you're just screwed if you don't have a car.

This is just my opinion - a quick scour of the Internet will yield lots of people who have similar but opposite opinions (like "FedEx is just fine, but UPS is awful!"). Personally, my big gripe is with vendors. I think it should be a requirement that all online vendors specify which carrier will be used to transport your order. Actually, what would be best would be a choice - most people would probably go for the cheapest option, but for people like me for whom it makes a difference, it would be nice. The only reason I can think of for this is either:
1) Vendors don't want to have to update their sites when they change carriers
2) Vendors themselves don't know who they'll use until the day they ship it, depending on packages, destinations, weights, etc.
3) Vendors know that people like me are out there, for whom "It'll be shipped FedEx" is a deal-breaker (and like I said, different people have issues with different carriers).

We need government intervention dammit! At the very least, I'm going to start getting picky about this and, when possible, let vendors know that I will only purchase from them if I can know that they're NOT shipping FedEx.

The worst part? I don't even really want this package anyway - it's something I ordered and then realized I don't need. However, I paid 30 bucks for it and I figure I ought to get it. Maybe I'll just let it go back to the vendor and suck up the restocking fee. Grr....

Summer in NYC

So it's the middle of August, it's about 70 degrees and pouring rain. The worst part is that I left my window open this morning, even after seeing the weather report. I figured "well, worst case scenario is a quick burst of rain, a little bit might get into the apartment, but it'll be OK." I didn't figure for the biblical-proportioned downpour that I'm now seeing outside the window of my office building, complete with thunder, lightening, and lots of hail. I shudder to think of what will be waiting for me when I get home.
On the bright side, it's supposed to be nice for the rest of the week, so at least Neil will be missing it (although he'd probably get a kick out of it - you don't get any proper thunderstorms in the Bay Area).

Dr. Horrible

I just the story behind this is so cool - Joss Whedon decides to make his little pet musical project and distribute it any way he can, without ever actually putting it on the air. I hope it's doing well.
Here's a link to an interview in Wired magazine about it. And, of course, it's on Hulu (after originally being aired in small segments for literally a few hours, before getting put exclusively on iTunes for the hardcore, and now free to all of you. A DVD can't be far behind.)

Click here to see the whole thing, or check out this tidbit:

Interesting discussion about talking to the police

This is very cool:
http://www.tuccille.com/blog/2008/07/eight-reasons-even-innocent-shouldnt.html

A law professor gives a very simple piece of advice: don't ever talk to the police if you're a person of interest / suspect / whatever. He offers a police detective the opportunity to comment, and the cop says "That's exactly correct."

This reminds me a lot of a conversation I was having with a lawyer friend last Friday - basically I asked him "if the cops want to talk to me, at what point do I decide I need a lawyer?" Actually I think I asked him something more like "dude, if I ever get arrested, who do I call, and what do I do until the lawyer gets there?" His advice: "Call [list of mutual criminal law friends], and until he shows up you have a one word vocabulary: 'lawyer'." We then proceeded to role-play with me being the police and him being me, and he spent the entire time with his fingers in his ears saying "lawyer! lawyer! lawyer!". Let's hope I remember that advice if I ever need it (in my short time left in the U.S.)

Various crap

OK, for one thing - for those of you not in the know, Google Reader is about the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's an RSS feed reader which you can use to keep up-to-date on all your favorite stuff, without having to check regularly. Also, it's extremely easy to use - just click "Add Subscription", put in the main URL for what you want to subscribe to, and voila. So, for example, you could just enter http://staunchtech.blogspot.com into the subscription, and you'll have an instant easy dashboard into my musings.
So, what's in my reader? My list is actually pretty small:
slashdot.org - of course
morelightmorelight.com - My friend Matt's genius thoughts
hotdealsclub.com - because sometimes something awesome pops up
thevegasyear.blogspot.com - this guy is really into playing poker and it's fun to read
blog.rocketboom.com - I went and visited these guys a while ago and they're awesome, so now they're on the list
www.xkcd.com - popular web comic that's become so hip it's mainstream
feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video - this keeps me updated on the latest talks from TED
www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf - I've already professed my love for all things Schneier
www.wondermark.com/wondermarkrss.xml - I love me some Wondermark. I highly recommend wondermark.com and spending 2-3 hours reading all of them.

While we were in Grand Cayman I caught a look at Matt's feed list and it totally put mine to shame. On the other hand, I tend to read and be interested in everything that comes up on mine. To each their own.

So what else - well, here's the quick list:

• Our neighbor is going to buy our apartment, we just got into contract after hitting some snags and everybody's pretty happy and excited.
• The car is in the shop, because whether we take it with us or sell it, we'll want to have it in tip-top shape.
  
• Claudia has been in Central America for the last week training folks, she gets back tonight (happy times!).
  
• I've been going to the doctor a lot. Seems that every time I go to the doctor I end up going over and over again and spending boatloads of money, which is why I tend to avoid going to the doctor. But, it had been a while and I had something that I wanted checked out, so now I'm going for like my third visit next week, plus I have to go to a dermatologist for a once-over etc etc. Like I said, every time I go it snowballs.
• Claudia inadvertently paid a credit-card bill, in full, twice. I've used the bill pay for the bank she did it from and I can totally understand how she did it, and I probably would have done the same thing. Nonetheless it's put us many hundreds of dollars in the red for the last 10 days or so (because we didn't even know it had happened until I tried to get cash about 5 days later). After endless calling, hopping from branch to branch, etc I think I've probably gotten the balance to more or less zero. Very very painful, and even though I already convinced them to waive most of the fees, they're still there, which means that I'll have to go through the whole exercise again.
  
• Incidentally, this is a great way for banks to get out of waiving fees - just agree to do it and then don't do it. Why don't they all do this? It's not like they're going to get caught - the worst thing that can happen is that a customer calls again, says "why haven't you waived these fees?" and then the new rep can say "There's no record here of any decision to waive those fees, and you should really be more careful." After which the customer can complain again, maybe you say you'll take the fees off and not really do it, at which point all the customer can do is close the bank account, but after all that time spent they'll probably just say "screw it" and keep the account. After all, they just paid a whole bunch of money for it! It's foolproof!

• Of course the whole Munich thing is still weighing heavily on our minds. There's a big list of stuff to be done and we're not in the least bit organized. Soon enough we will have to put our family nose to the grindstone and get to it.
• I'm trying to figure out if there's any way I can go to CA for a last hurrah before I go to Munich. I don't know if I can but I will certainly do everything I can.
• Speaking of CA, my brother's coming over in August. Hopefully I will have more time to commit to his visit than last time.
• Speaking of siblings, Clau's sister is pregnant! Huzzah - the pressure is off! I'm going to be someone's rich foreign uncle! Of course Carina will be making the obligatory visit to NYC to stock up on baby stuff (even before the dollar plummeted, it was cheaper to buy baby stuff in the U.S. than in Brazil, now it's waaay cheaper). We've had our fair share of expectant mothers loading up, but this will be the first direct family member coming for that purpose. Good stuff!
• Work! My current employer and I are in discussions as to whether or not I might be able to continue to work for the Company after I move. So far it's looking promising but not by any means guaranteed. In the meantime I've got my (potential) swan song - the EC2 project. I may never be able to discuss it on this blog but it's fun stuff - if it doesn't catch on here, I'll ask my boss if I can release it to the open source community, and maybe someone can do something cool w/ it and give me some cred in the OSS world. Win-win!

There's definitely more but I need to get back to work. More to come (seriously!) soon...

It's official - moving to Munich

Well, it finally happened - Clau got the transfer. Her first day is Oct 20 and we're madly scrambling to try to get everything ready in time. Life is nuts right now!
Just thought I should share...

Finally - a music service I can dig!

Check it out! The new LaLa has a model that I actually can agree with - you can "buy" songs in two ways:
$0.10 - Put it on your dashboard and you can listen to it from any computer with the iTunes-esque web interface - haven't tested it on my Mac yet but it smells of Flash, so I'm optimistic. With the 10-cent option, you can listen as much as you want, but you can't put it on a iPod or CD.
$0.89-$0.99 - Get a DRM-free mp3 of it - if you already put it on your dash, then the $0.10 will be credited against it (so you get the mp3 for $0.79 or $0.89 depending on label).
Oh, and you get one "free" listen of any track on the site (so you can decide if it's even worth the $0.10 to put it on the dash) - after that you're limited to a 30-second clip.

This is totally the way to do it, and IMHO combines the best of everything that came before it (iTunes, Yahoo! music, etc). Also, when you sign up you get 50 free credits for the $0.10 option. I checked out Madonna's new album guilt-free, and three songs made it to my dashboard. I'm totally in love w/ this - I just hope that it doesn't get squashed or have the price get jacked up.

Tell your friends - if this takes off then maybe it'll become the new standard model for distribution!

Darth Vader Feels Blue

Just when you thought that the world had run out of (good) ways to mangle Star Wars snippets, along comes some genius who shows us that the keg has not yet been completely tapped. I've watched this thing like 10 times and it still makes me laugh.

Genius - defacing of us currency

One of those things that's better than you figure it's going to be...
A collection of currency from a bored guy - link.


--Nate

Babies babies everywhere

Clau finally got back from Brazil with tons of stories - I went on a quick Bay Area trip while she was gone and it was great - got to see almost everybody. Spent some time getting to know my little sister, which was also cool - she's getting big fast!
The day after Clau got back home, her friends Andre and Roberta came over to spend some time w/ us and they brought their little baby Gabriella along. Clau just absolutely fell in love w/ the baby so that looks good for us!
Other than that, life is progressing at its usual pace - projects, little stuff, returning back to marital bliss. Of course there's a slew of details but right now I don't have the time to get into it - just wanted to let the world know that I'm still here...

--Nate

This is brilliant

Fictional forum of time travelers in the far future. Exactly what I bet it would look like...

--Nate

My new wallpaper

I got a wallpaper-sized version of this beautiful oil painting of the Crazy German Kid (search for it on YouTube w/ English subtitles - it's disturbing but funny). I got it from this guy who takes suggestions from readers about what to paint and then paints it - usually some interesting Internet memes. Plus it's a good place to go and make sure that you're up on your Inet culture. For example, I was unaware of the awesomeness that is the Techno Viking until I visited this guys's page - would have been worth the browsing even if I hadn't picked up this nerd-pop-culture-kitsch wallpaper along the way...

Last-minute trip

As part of my new job, I will sometimes get called to go somewhere at the last minute (although it doesn't happen often). So, tonight I'm jumping on a plane to Hamburg, working Wed-Fri in Hamburg and taking the 6am flight back to NYC on Saturday. Awesome.
I went to Hamburg when I backpacked Europe, and nothing sticks out in my memory. I recall staying for a day or two, thinking "that was lame", and moving on. Maybe this time will be different, although I doubt it.

Anyway, if you're wondering where I am Tues-Saturday, I'm either en route or in Deutchland...

--Nate

Turks and Caicos

Just a quick couple of links - Clau and I spent last Thanksgiving in Turks and Caicos. Definitely a nice place to go, although I prefer Cozumel, both for the amount of stuff to do and the quality of the diving. However, if you like to dive and you really want to get away from it all, T&C is not a bad choice.

Here's a link of the place we stayed on Google Maps

Here's a link to the photos on Flickr (admittedly not a whole lot of 'em, I'm really bad about that...)

That'll at least give some idea of what it was like...

--Nate

Guests and diet

Well, we've been very popular folks lately. Attila, Claudia's Hungarian friend from college, came to NYC on a business trip (he works for Morgan Stanley in Hungary), and stayed with us over the weekend. I really like him a lot - he's a guy of few words but obviously brilliant. He invited a couple of his friends from his GE days to come hang out with us, and we all had a really good time. My mom just came and visited us for a couple of days (always a treat!), and it was great to see her. Unfortunately I had a ton of work I had to do, but I managed to get home on Friday at a reasonable hour so we could have a nice dinner of sushi and Yolato, followed by passing out. Mom left on Saturday morning, then we had one of Clau's colleagues from Venezuela come by in the afternoon - we went to a great Venezuelan place in our neighborhood, then headed back to our place for some marathon gaming sessions - I taught Clau how to play hold 'em and she's really good for a beginner.
Yesterday our latest guests showed up - Viviane (another college classmate of Clau's) and Marcel. We really like them a lot and it's great having them here - in fact the only complaint I have is the effect of all these visitors on my waistline. Needless to say, I have not been eating properly for the last couple of months (between Brazil, no time for Clau or I to cook, and all the visitors), and I'm starting to gain my weight back. Gotta put a stop to that.
So, for the next week, we're entertaining. It's ridiculously cold this week - today it's about 15 degrees and just brutal. Next week, Clau and I are going to take some time and just chill out...

Poker and Obama

I've finally changed my "books" list to reflect stuff I've been reading lately. I got called for jury duty in early November, and since I had just finished the big project I figured it was a good time to serve. It turns out that I was part of a criminal jury pool - in NYC you're pooled together with a whole ton of other people as potential jurors for the week - when a judge wants to select a jury, the judge requests some number of jurors from the pool (probably 2-3 times the required number of jurors), the clerk randomly draws names from the pool, the selected potential jurors go through the voir dire process, some are selected, and the rest are tossed back into the pool.
At the time I showed up, there was a really high-profile murder trial that was going to begin the selection process, so the judge ordered _all_ the pool (about 200 of us) to go to the courtroom. The judge explained that the case would likely take 4-6 weeks, and told us that if we had a reason we couldn't go, we better give it now. Since I already had our vacation planned for later in the month, I told the judge I couldn't serve without losing all my pre-paid items (airfare, hotel deposit, etc), and she let me off the hook. That was the closest I ever got to serving on a jury - the rest of the time I just sat there. So, at lunchtime on the first day, I purchased "The Audacity of Hope" at the nearby college bookstore, powered through it over the next two days, and decided right there and then that I'm voting for that guy.
For our trip (I'll have to write about that in another post), I borrowed "Dreams From My Father" from the library, and again was struck by what a great writer Obama is. I don't believe I had ever read a book by a politician before - I always imagined that they would be dull - but I really enjoyed those books. Incidentally, when I checked the book out of the library in mid-November, there were probably twenty copies sitting on the shelf (it was filed away in the History / Biography section) - keep in mind this was the main branch of the library, but there are probably another 50-100 copies scattered around the NYC library system. Later on, I tried to renew it online (it was raining and I was lazy), I found that there were almost a thousand people on the waiting list for the book! So, it looks like a lot of people are really interested in checking it out.

On a completely different front, I've started learning how to play poker. I've been playing for about 10 days now and I have to say I'm enjoying it - the time I normally play is between 11pm and 1am, after Clau goes to sleep - I usually play in one tournament per night. So far, I'm 10 bucks down, which isn't too bad! I got the book "Bigger Deal" from the library on a whim and I read it while we were in Turks and Caicos. A bit boring and dry, especially if you don't play poker, but it did get me interested - theoretically it's about the author trying to improve his game sufficiently to have a shot at the WSOP (he ultimately wins a satellite to enter, but does poorly in the actual event), but there's a lot of history and fun facts about the game interspersed throughout the book. So, I figured that since I'm something of a dilettante, I would be best suited to borrow some books from the library and see if I can get anything out of them.
After reading a bit about poker, I've discovered that the really interesting thing about it is that it's a game of both math and psychology - on one hand, you need to be able to quickly figure out what you have, what you _might_ end up with and the approximate odds of you ending up with it, as well as what your opponent(s) might have and the approximate odds of _their_ ending up with something better than what you have or might end up with. Sound complicated? It is! But, of course, most people (like me) can only get a general idea of these things, and particularly when you're playing online and the action is fast and furious, you don't have adequate time to really think all these things through - however, the more you can calculate in the short amount of time you have, the better off you'll be.
Now, if it were just a game of math then it would just be math nerds who excelled at the game - but then you throw bluffing into the mix and it gets really interesting. I've never played with actual people before, although some friends have a ongoing game that I'm planning on checking out next week, but even online you've got to build a quick profile of your opponents - do they call a lot of hands, do they raise more often than they should statistically have good cards (i.e. do you think they're bluffing or at least semi-bluffing), do they almost never play and then, once in a blue moon, start throwing all their money into the pot, etc? These styles of play all have different strengths and weaknesses, and it's a lot like paper-scissors-rock: what works against one style can get completely dominated by another, but there's no one style that beats all others (or else everyone would be playing that way!).
Finally, of course, there's dumb luck - sometimes the cards are coming your way and sometimes they're not. I haven't really learned what to do about that yet, although really good players can certainly take those lemons and turn them into lemonade. But, as you can tell, I'm definitely enjoying the learning process, especially since I can play a tournament and get a lot of practice for two bucks. And, truthfully, there's a lot of lessons that can learned from poker and applied to your everyday life - a lot of decisions in life are based on the same criteria: where do I currently stand, what are my potential payoffs, how likely is this to succeed, what's the likelihood of failure, what are the benefits of success vs. the costs of failure. Plug numbers into machine, chug chug chug, and out comes the "correct" answer - then you have to decide what to do with it. Not a bad series of life lessons for 5-10 bucks a week!

Long time no write

Well lots has happened - as everyone knows we went to Brazil, it was great - my Portuguese has definitely improved since last time, and it was an interesting experience to talk to a lot of Claudia's family for what felt like the first time. We also went to Joao Pessoa, the hometown of our friend Andrea, and stayed with Andrea's family there - they remind me a lot of Claudia's family: they're very close, very warm and wonderful people. Unfortunately Clau and I really wanted some time by ourselves and we didn't get it - normally we take a few days "off" in the middle of the vacation and retreat somewhere by ourselves, but we used that normally reserved time to go to Joao Pessoa. The funny part is, I think we were a bit of a burden on Andrea's family as well, but it was a cultural etiquette problem more than anything else; we didn't want them to think that we were using them as a hotel, and they didn't want to invite us to their city and not be there to guide us every step of the way. But, like I said, if you're going to be stuck with folks in a strange city, Andrea's family are great folks to be stuck with.
Other than that the trip was relatively uneventful - as always there are lots of fun things to gossip about going on in Clau's family, but then again what family isn't like that?
Doing some interesting work lately - I was pretty much twiddling my thumbs for the better part of November and December, but now things are picking up. I can't really get into stuff in progress, but suffice it to say that I have (at least on paper) a very cool job, and things have hit a good level of busy-ness, so that I'm not working my butt off but I'm also not bored. Overall not such a bad deal.
I know this isn't very interesting and I'll cut this off now, just that folks have been asking how life has been for the last few months - truthfully Clau and I have settled into a groove - if it were any city other than New York I'd probably call it a "rut", but since there's always stuff going on, it hasn't gotten boring yet. We both come home from work tired, if we're up to it then one of us cooks, if we're not up to it then we order something (this is one thing we're trying very hard not to do, but we're still at about 50% home cooking at this stage). On Fridays, if we have the energy, we go out with friends, if not then we stay at home and watch TV or a movie, on Saturdays we talk about all the errands we have to get done over the weekend and end up vegging all day, then usually go out on the town for our weekly drinking binge. On Sundays we vow to start taking it easier on Saturdays, or at least to start taking care of our weekend errands on Saturday so we don't need to do them with a hangover on Sunday. On Monday we go back to work and play bocce at night, Tues-Thurs we come home, get changed, and cook/order food.
Like I said, a groove.

I've got some resolutions, I'll write about those separately. One of them, however, is to write more entries to this blog, for my own posterity if for nothing else...

Done done done!

We finally finished last Friday, and so far everything is working very well (with the exception of an ongoing problem apparently caused by a partner this morning). Everything is working and groovy, and we now have premium content such as Arrested Development available on our partner's web pages. There were some snags but overall it went really well.
For fear of the mighty search engines finding me, I'm still not going to name names, but overall it's been a great experience. Things definitely didn't end up the way I thought they would, but I think everyone got a lot out of the project, and we are all really really happy that it's finally over.

Laying low

Just waiting to move from one project to the next. To break the ennui, I've started experimenting with a less resource-intensive alternative to Azureus. I finally settled on rtorrent - it's a really neat ncurses-based torrent client, has a very small memory footprint (less than 50M when it's cranking, and that's including shared libs), and can be conveniently run in a screen session (making it easy to check from anywhere). Furthermore it can be almost entirely event-driven so it's really easy to write hooks however you like. As an example, it's easy to define hot-drop folders for torrents, and when a torrent is deleted the program stops dl'ing / seeding. Very very cool.
So, Azureus has a few features that I really need - mainly SafePeer and RSSFeed. To replace SafePeer I've installed MoBlock - it's an extremely lightweight PeerGuardian-esque tool that works as a set of iptables queuing rules. So far it's been working out well for me, the only drawback is that I haven't found a good place to automatically check for updates to the p2p file, but I expect to have that sorted soon.
So, all that was left was RSSFeed. And, believe it or not, nobody seems to have written this yet. There is a Perl GTK client for this, but the whole point is to be light and (preferably) gui-free. And, oddly enough, nobody seems to have written a text-based client for this - what I wanted was something that could be daemonized, because further down the line I would like to have this all as part of the startup scripts for my home server.
I was able to find this script on the Interweb, and I've heavily bastardized it to fit my own needs. At some point I will probably re-write the whole thing entirely (since it now bears little resemblance to the original script), and then maybe release it into the wild. Let me know if you're interested in trying it out (it's still Perl, so theoretically it should work on a Windows box, although I don't know how useful anyone else would find it). It's definitely been a fun little project to work on.

WTF mate?

OK, so I've gotten a taste of the new 720p rips of shows that are now out there. Oo-la-la, they look nice. Unfortunately, the G4 Mac Mini just doesn't have anywhere near the horsepower required to play them, so I've got to look into getting a new Mac Mini. I took a quick look at the Apple TV, which I could hack to get it to do what I want, but really we're talking 300 dollars for a medium-power Apple TV plus a lot of hacking around (and voiding the warranty) vs 700 dollars for a full-power Mac Mini and a lot less hacking around. I'll probably go with the more expensive and easier option.
While I was shopping around, it occurred to me "hey waitaminute! I have a badass XBox 360 - surely it can handle some hi-def content?!?" But alas, the Xbox 360 suffers from being completely crippled, and it can't really handle much in terms of video out of the box. You can, however, connect it to your PC running Vista or Windows MCE, which will transcode your video from the Windows PC to the XBox on the fly and stream it. I suppose that just being able to mount a share on your PC and watch it over the network is so, like, 2003. No, it's way cooler to transcode my media into another codec and stream it - after all, why just saturate the network when you can saturate the network _and_ spike the CPU load on your desktop? I think Microsoft has become a lot less evil over the years, but stuff like that just completely chaps my ass.

In other news, Switzerland was awesome. It was great to see Fabienne and I felt particularly honored to be invited. I made an ass of myself more than once but overall it was cool. We brought home lots of chocolate and duty-free booze, which we later discovered was actually more expensive than just getting it in the states. Live and learn.

Work is nuts, I have a good idea of what I'll be working on next but I don't wanna jinx it. More on that later.

--Nate

Travel plans

We've been trying to work out travel plans for a little while and I think we're finally set. We're heading to Zurich this weekend for Fabienne's wedding - it's just a quick trip, leaving Thursday evening and coming back on Monday afternoon. Still, I'm looking forward to the wedding, and at least there should be good chocolate. Too bad the dollar is doing so poorly now, since it means I'll be paying a lot more this time around than the last.
We've been debating what to do for Thanksgiving - last year we went to Aruba, and we've decided to follow in that same vein this year - having two free days and employers that will generally give you a freebie day or two for TG is just too good an opportunity for vacation to pass up.
So, this year, we're heading to Grand Turk island in the Turks and Caicos - the island is 6 square miles and it's reputed to have fantastic diving (and not much else). It's also considerably less expensive than we initially thought it would be - overall it's probably gonna run about three grand for a week of diving and beach solitude, which is about standard for a week-long vacation these days. We wanted to drag Sam and Matt with us, but they're trying to save up for an apartment so they'll probably be responsible and stay in NYC. Claudia is jumping up and down in anticipation and I'm getting pretty excited, too.
For Christmas / New Year's we'll be in Brazil - it's been at least two years since we were there for the holidays and we're definitely due to spend them with her family (I can't for the life of me remember what we did last Xmas - I think we stayed in NYC but it's all blurry - hey, I suppose I can check my blog later and find out!). We'll be in Rio / SP for Xmas, then head up to Joao Pessoa for the New Years - another break of nothing but beach and beer - man, life is good!

--Nate

I have seen the light! Now what?

Well, the big project finally finished. In the interest of not drawing any attention to myself or the company for which I work, I won't get into details. Suffice it to say that I worked harder than I ever have in my life, and if not for the fact that I barely got to see my wife, or the beautiful NYC summer, I would have loved it. As it is, I enjoyed it.
So now what? We've basically gotten everything out the door and we're going through some validation. I will probably go to LA sometime later in the month to do a formal handoff of the SysAdmin duties and say goodbye to all the people I've met and worked with, and after that I'm pretty much done w/ it. I'm also assisting another team with another thing, but that's more of a 40-50% time job, so overall life is looking pretty good.
I had a meeting with HR yesterday, and they said they'll be presenting me with a few options in a week or so. We'll see what the future holds!

--Nate

rude people and life lately

This morning was like almost every other morning - I hit the snooze button on my alarm for about an hour (when will I learn? Either wake up or set your alarm for an hour later - sleeping in a 9-minute cycle benefits nobody!), showered, got on the subway, and went to the Starbucks for my wakeup. The Starbucks right by my work is pretty good - they know their client base is working fools like me who need a wakeup and not hipsters who want to hang out, so it's efficient. Even so, the line can sometimes get really long, and as an additional speedup measure they will occasionally ask you what you want while you're still about 6 people away from the register - they get started on the drink, you pay, you pick up the drink, you leave - everyone's happy.
So, this morning was busy - I'm still waking up, I've got my mp3 player going full blast and I'm reaching for it to turn it off. I see a Starbucks employee talk to a woman, then she casually wanders off to the pickup area (in the opposite direction from the registers).
I thought to myself "did she just do what I thought she just did?" Meaning, did she just ask for her drink, then walk to pick it up without paying for it? She was really attractive and very well dressed - she didn't look like she couldn't afford a cup of coffee. I really wanted to yell at her and make a scene, but I just wasn't _completely_ sure that she had just done what I thought she had done. She picked up her coffee drink and walked off like nothing was the matter.
I suppose that some people would have made a scene anyway - after all, I'm pretty sure, just not 100% sure. Maybe I would have under different circumstances, but two times in recent memory, someone has made a scene about my doing something that I didn't do (and I'm not counting the American Airlines horror story). A few months ago at the gym a woman misinterpreted the timer on my cardio machine and told me I had to get off - I told her I'd get off when my time was up and then her boyfriend started yelling at me. I quickly told him my time was up and ignored him afterwardf - he kept yelling until the woman next to me started screaming at him about she had only been there twenty minutes and I started after her, and eventually the guy shut up.
Recently at the Oakland airport, I was in line for the security check - at some point the line forked into two lines (to show boarding pass and ID, not for the X-ray machine), with one line having about 10 people in it and the other one empty. I opted for the empty line, and later on a woman tapped me and started yelling about how rude I was to cut in front of people. Her husband (or whatever he was) spent the entire time apologizing for her. Boy, did I feel for that guy, but I don't know how he hasn't learned the important lesson by now: when your S.O. makes a scene, you always have her back, even when she's wrong.
But I digress - the point being that I won't make a scene unless I'm 100% sure that the person has done wrong, and I wasn't 100% sure. But you can bet that if I see that woman at Starbuck's again I'll be watching her like a hawk.

So, news in our lives - I've been working like crazy but the light is there at the end of the tunnel. Clau's been traveling for her job a lot, and unfortunately her travel started right after mine finished, so we haven't been able to spend much time together. She just got back from Memphis last Thursday and had her impacted wisdom tooth taken out on Friday, so we spent the entire weekend being painfully bored in the apartment. Last weekend also happened to be the first really beautiful weekend weather-wise in a long time, and we were shuttered in the apartment. Hopefully she'll be up and running by next weekend and we can have some fun.

In work news, I've been poking at a whole bunch of things - my bosses recently put me on a task to take a tab-delimited text file, a csv, and a series of XML files and do some tasks with the information therein. Obviously this is a job for Perl, and it pains me how much my skills have deteriorated. I was never a l33t Perl hacker but my current lack of ability makes me sad. Hopefully this task will sharpen me up a bit.
Also, the new company I've been helping out will soon have a name - I can't say I'm crazy about it, but in the words of the folks who gave me the name "it grows on you". It has yet to grow on me but time will tell. Soon enough I'll be able to talk about what I'm working on, which will also be nice...

--Nate

Books

It's been a good week for books - read the last Harry Potter book, and I have pretty much the same opinion as everyone else - I really liked it but I thought the ending was a cop-out.
Just finished a book called the Kite Runner last night. That is one fucked-up story, but it's beautifully written; I'm really looking forward to reading his next one.
Work is, as usual, very busy, but I can see the light at the far end of the tunnel...

The vi editor

Matt's getting into using the vi editor and it got me reminiscing. Honestly it's my unix editor of choice. Back in the good old days of QAD I had to work on every mainstream Unix flavor, and vi was the one editor that would be installed on all of them. Even now that I only tend to work on Linux it remains my editor of choice. And I have confidence that if I ever have to dig into an ancient HP-UX system I'll know exactly how to edit stuff. It's also handy if you have to work on a very strange keyboard, since you can do everything with only the a-z keys (plus escape).
Besides being ubiuitous, vi is so feature-packed that I doubt that any single person knows every single feature. I'm still learning stuff by watching colleagues - they'll do something cool and then I'll ask "whoa - how did you do that?'. A couple of fun examples:
1) substitution - just like sed - something like ':s/foo/bar' will replace the first instance of 'foo' on the current line with 'bar'. ':/foo/bar/g' will replace all instances on the current line, and ':%s/foo/bar/g' will replace within the whole file.
2) You can break into a shell w/ vi and do cool stuff with it - so for example if you are writing a message and want to give your network info, just do ':r !ifconfig' or ':r !ipconfig' if you're in windows. Voila, the output appears. Awesome. Note: the shell ability is just one reason why vi should _not_ be a sudo command - it's far too powerful in the wrong hands.
3) The period - repeats the last thing you did. Handy if I'm commenting two or three lines.
4) All kinds of little features - for example, the tilde will change the case of the highlighted character from upper to lower and vice-versa. Handy if you realize you mistyped the variable or were typing head-down with the caps lock on.

I've been using the vi editor for about 10 years now (wow!) and I'm still basically using the same functionality it's had the whole time - I'm not even getting into anything fancy yet, and at this rate I never will.

--Nate

Huzzah! (almost)

The new CEO of Company_C (the child company of my employer and a similar company) made some major org changes - the good news is that:
1) My scope of official responsibility has shrunk dramatically, and
2) I get to go back to NYC!

I had already made plans to visit my folks this weekend so I'm going to carry through with it, plus I'd like to see the data center project done before I go. But, as soon as the D.C. is finished, I'm getting on the next plane home. Clau and I are very happy.

Building the D.C. has been incredibly hard, stressful, confusing, and awesome. Yesterday was about the most fun I've had since I joined Company_B; it was an absolute nuthouse and I felt like a general (well, maybe a colonel) giving orders and making the whole thing go smoothly. I wouldn't necessarily want to do it again but it's been a blast - if I hadn't had all kinds of other stuff bogging me down then I probably would have loved it.
However, it's like a lot of other things - doing it once was a fantastic experience, but I wouldn't want to make a career out of it. Fortunately the guy who was heading up the D.C. part is about the best hardware / D.C. guy I've ever seen - if I was a colonel, then he was the general. Furthermore, even he was impressed with what we've accomplished in a very short time.

So, overall that's good news - got the D.C. hoisted, and I get to go home when it's done (and catch up on the work for my new role in the project). However, since my workload will probably shrink to a more manageable level, I might actually get to enjoy the rest of the summer. Callooh! Callay!

No time!

Wow life is busy right now. In LA last week, spent the weekend in NYC, back in LA today, off to Oakland to visit the family next weekend, then back to LA, then back to NYC, then maybe back to LA - but hopefully not.
The snowball is definitely picking up speed - I shudder to think of what life will be like in a month...

--Nate

The hammer has dropped

Oh my sweet lord am I busy. I'm so wiped out that I can't even focus anymore. There's an endless stream of crap that's gotta get done, a hard immovable launch date, and bosses all the way to the top with no sympathy for my wanting to have a life (at least not for the next few months). Ill probably end up spending 50% of the next few months in L.A. until it's done, and the amount of crap to crank out is just getting ridiculous. Thankfully everyone's really sharp and assiduous, so at least I'm definitely not carrying all the weight - if anything I'm pulling everyone else down - definitely a different feeling for me.
I heard that one of my old coworkers from Company_A is leaving. I'm happy for him that he's moving along in the world, but I feel bad for Company_A. In retrospect they weren't all _that_ bad, and the only thing that was really reprehensible was making me pick up and finish the search project while my little brother was in town.
So, unless I win the lottery, I'm going to be a slave for the next couple of months. After we launch in late Sept I'll be able to have a life again.
Incidentally, it's all JetBlue from now on. Although theoretically with the amount of cross-country flying I'll be doing, I could end up with an impressive number of American miles...but it's not worth it.

Cozumel write-up and my new old addiction

I was doing so good - I was on the wagon for about 4 years, but I saw the Starcraft 2 demo and something inside me just snapped. I've now commandeered my wife's laptop and I've been playing SC in bed until the wee hours after she goes to sleep. I have to go to a party for work tonight and I'm trying to think of ways to tastefully blow it off so I can have more Starcraft time. I need help.
That's why I never even installed W.O.W. I know my weakness and I'd rather have a life.
Incidentally, the Cozumel trip was awesome - we went diving most days and one night. I can really see the appeal. We saw corals, tons of cool tropical fish, big sea turtles, eels, giant lobsters and crabs (the crabs gave me the heebie-jeebies - man they were big!), and photoplankton that lights up when you agitate it (so cool!). I thought I would have problems w/ my sinuses but everything was hunky-dory the whole time. We found some good spots for fresh fish and consumed a ton of alcohol. On the day of our night dive we rented scooters and drove around the island. Claudia's determined to move there and open a tequila bar. As my dad said, "I can't image a more fun way to go broke than opening a tequila bar in Mexico."
We also had a great time w/ Sam and Matt. They're a pleasure to travel with - when they're sick of us or want time by themselves, they just say so - Clau and I are happy to go it alone as well, so nobody's feelings get hurt and we don't get too sick of each other. There was a lot of pool and beach time with booze - I complained way too much about the AA experience (it's out of my system now, especially after reading this), but overall I think we all had a great time. Plus Claudia speaks Spanish so we didn't get too lost or screwed.
Work is very busy - I'll give details when I can. Suffice it to say, however, that things went from a standstill to full throttle very quickly, so don't be offended if I'm not corresponding much.

AA final reply

Got the final reply from American Airlines - another form letter. However, to their credit, this time I got the "we're so sorry that you were unhappy with our customer service and we'll try to do better next time" form letter as opposed to the "bad weather is a damn shame and you're SOL" form letter. I'll spare everyone the posting of it.
Apparantly, there's no form letter for "we're sorry our system / personnel screwed up your reservation", so that has still yet to be mentioned, even in passing. My guess is that they think I'm lying. Oh well, fuck 'em.
I've officially given up. American is no longer my preferred airline, it's now just another option when JetBlue isn't available. Now I just need to figure out how to reduce my need to fly around and I'll be set.

--Nate

Cute + funny

I find lolcats to be a guilty pleasure. What creeps me out a little is how it seems to be popular among the geeks, even going so far as to inspire the lolcode and various interpreters.

This image amused me much, found it at icanhascheezburger.com. Again, the high number of ratings on it surprised me, since the joke's pretty geeky...



--Nate

Giving it one last shot

I discussed this ad nauseum with Matt and Sam in Cozumel (more about that later!), Matt suggested I take a slightly different tactic for my next reply, if I chose to do so. I'm giving it one more shot, really just because I want to see if a human is going to read it.
Incidentally, we flew AA to Cozumel, and to be honest it wasn't that great. They're kinda going the same direction as everyone else (i.e. downward), and since JetBlue has recently added JFK to Burbank flights, I'll probably go that direction until JB burns me, too. After which I will probably refuse to fly until the anger wears off.
Anyway, here's the final installment. Incidentally, my dad said he would bet me $100 that my reply will in fact include the phrase "bad weather". Since I am not a fool, I did not take the bet.

I've already filed a complaint about this, which was assigned file number I2007/06-02104-00008-001. The response I received indicated a bit of a misunderstanding. I will write this one clarification and then I will leave this issue alone:
My complaint was unrelated to my flight being canceled on account of bad weather. I understand that you do not control the weather, nor is it your responsibility to "make it up" to customers inconvenienced by bad weather. In the event of bad weather, I agree with the decision to delay or cancel flights in the interest of safety, inconvenient though it may be for everyone. My complaint is with my receiving a confirmation on another flight, then, due to a glitch or human error (by the phone representative's own admission), losing my booking on that flight. My complaint is also with the poor treatment I received from your ticketing agent and particularly the supervisor, Stephanie Mateus, at the SFO check-in counter. I also wished to praise the AA phone reservation agents with whom I spoke. Assuming that your system has any log of my calls to them, please pass my gratitude on to them.
If you do deign to reply to this, please do not include the phrase "bad weather"; we are all in agreement as to AA's responsibilities WRT bad weather.
Again, you can read the whole, unadulterated story at http://staunchtech.blogspot.com/2007/06/customer-relations-letter-to-american.html if anything is unclear.

Sincerely,
Nate XXXXXXX

AA responds!

Can you feel the love? More importantly, can you tell what's wrong with the response?

June 8, 2007

Dear Mr. XXXXXXX:

Thank you for contacting American Airlines Customer Relations.

You trusted us with your valuable time on June 1 and you were understandably
disappointed when we didn't get you to New York as planned. There's clearly nothing
more frustrating for everyone -- customers and employees alike -- than having to
endure the difficulties associated with air travel when bad weather impacts our
flights. From the details you provided, it certainly sounds as if the circumstances
surrounding your flight were made even more frustrating by the lack of assistance you
received.

When bad weather happens, in the interest of safety, we don't have too many options to
get you to where you are going as planned. What we can do, however, is display a
friendly attitude to help make the situation a little less trying and I'm sorry we
didn't do so on this occasion. At the same time, we are glad that you took the time
to share the details of your experience. Your comments enable us to see things from
our customers' perspective and help us to improve.

Bad weather is not something we can overcome and the direct impact on our flight
schedules is unavoidable. Accordingly, it is not our policy to reimburse our
customers' out-of-pocket expenses, make up for lost time, or offer compensation when
we don't operate our flights as planned. I am sorry. Nevertheless, you have my
assurance that we will continue to focus on the on time departure of our flights and
our customer service standards.

Mr. Aiman Smith, we are eager for another chance to serve you -- we will do our very
best to get you to your destination as scheduled and provide you with the kind of
service you deserve.

This is an "outgoing only" email address. If you 'reply' to this message by simply
selecting the reply button, we will not receive your additional comments. Please
assist us in providing you with a timely response to any feedback you have for us by
always sending us your email messages via AA.com at
http://www.aa.com/customerrelations.

Sincerely,

Robin M. Smith
Customer Relations
American Airlines

Customer relations letter to American Airlines

Since the AA customer relations form only accepts a limited number of characters, I figured I'd put the whole complaint here. Spread the word.

Dear sir or madam,
First off, let me apologize if this narrative is overly detailed. I want to make sure I don't miss anything. I wrote the bulk of this letter in the Atlanta airport while the incident was still fresh in my mind.
I live in New York, and I had to go to a California on business during the week of May 28-June 1. Unfortunately, June 1 is my fifth wedding anniversary, and my presence was required in San Francisco to present at a conference. My wife was understandably unhappy about it, but I promised her that I would be there when she woke up the next morning, and we could celebrate the day after our anniversary. I booked flight AA 18 for May 31. My flights into and within California were fine, and I worked like crazy for that week with almost no sleep.
On the night of May 31, I received a telephone call from an AA rep informing me that due to a weather warning in New York, my flight had been cancelled. She offered to book me on the 8am flight from SFO. I explained the anniversary situation and begged her to find me a way to get home the next morning, and after a lot of searching around (she was very helpful) she booked me on flight AA 150 to Boston (it was already delayed and scheduled to depart at midnight), and then another flight from Boston to LaGuardia. I wasn’t happy, but there was nothing I could do, and at least American had taken the initiative to have a real live agent call me, rather than letting me discover for myself at the airport that the flight had been cancelled. I went out for a final dinner and drinks with some coworkers to celebrate a job well done. The service in the restaurant was so poor that after an hour in the restaurant we still had no food, so my dinner ended up being two cocktails. Lack of food, lack of sleep, and two drinks made for a very tired customer stumbling into SFO. I arrived at about 10pm (we planned for traffic and there was none), and figured that since I had two hours and no checked baggage, I could at least eat something in the airport.
Now, here’s where the tale goes downhill. I checked in at the self-service kiosk, and as I was leaving to meet a coworker for a quick bite at the Delta terminal, I noticed that my boarding pass was for AA 16 the next day, arriving at about 8pm. Uh-oh.
I called the AA reservations number and gave the agent my AAdvantage number. She looked it up and told me that I was in fact confirmed for AA 150 to Boston that night, and was just as confused as I was. After some more checking, she found an anomaly in which my name in the reservation was appearing as a completely different name (but with my AAdvantage number). She told me that, sadly, I would have to wait in the line to talk to an AA agent, and she advised me that if the agent at the counter was unable to help, I should request to speak with the manager on duty. Unfortunately, she said, there was nothing that she could do, but since it was obviously an error on AA’s part, the agent at the counter would be extra motivated to help me out.
The line was quite long and it took about 30-40 minutes to finally speak with an agent. I started explaining my dilemma, and he told me that I was booked on flight AA16 (the direct flight the next day), and that there was no record of any calls, conversations, or reservations made after my original flight had been cancelled. Per the very nice phone agent’s instructions, I asked to speak with the manager on duty.
The acting manager came over (her name was Stephanie Mateus) and confirmed the agent’s story. I asked if there was another place where she might find records of my confirmation on flight AA 150, and she said that there was no indication in the system that I had ever called or that any reservations had been made, although she said she believed my story. She said that there were a lot of people who were displaced by the cancellation, there were only three flights of any destination left that night out of SFO, and I could try to go standby on any of them, but my odds were pretty low given the situation. I begged, I pleaded, she said that every seat was taken on every flight and then some. She said I simply had no other options and there was nothing she could do. Remembering that my coworker’s flight was still active, I asked if she could get me on the Delta flight to New York. The ticket agent called Delta and the New York flight was full, but Delta still had ample room on an upcoming flight to Atlanta. The agent got me on the flight to Atlanta and then a seat on flight AA 2370. It was almost three hours in Atlanta, but it was certainly better than the previously offered alternatives.
I thanked the agent and the manager and the agent printed my receipt to show at the Delta counter, along with a boarding pass for flight AA 2370. Considering how tired I was, I didn’t even want to imagine how I was going to feel when I finally arrived in New York. It occurred to me to ask Stephanie for an upgrade on flight AA 2370, in hopes that I might be able to actually get an hour or two of sleep (I’m a relatively tall guy, and sleeping in economy class is near-impossible). She said that the cancellation of the flight was due to weather, and AA’s policy was to not give upgrades for weather-related incidents. I pointed out the extra trouble I had with my disappearing confirmation for flight AA 150, and she repeated that there was no record of that (translation: as far as she’s concerned, it didn’t happen). At this point I got exasperated and said “just so we’re clear, by ‘it’s not our policy’, do you mean that you cannot do it, or that you – Stephanie – are refusing to do it?’? After a lot of “it’s the policy”, she said “yes, I could upgrade you, but I’m not going to, because then we would have to do it for everyone”. I said “fine”, not in a nice tone, and the agent (who up to that point had been pretty nice, considering) said in a raised voice (so everyone could hear) “a flight was canceled! There are more than a hundred people in the same boat as you! If we gave you an upgrade, we’d have to give one to everyone! We’ve done all we can for you!”
Personally, I disagree with that statement, since I doubt that all passengers rescheduled and confirmed seats on flight AA 150 to Boston, only to have the confirmation disappear. However, it wasn’t worth arguing for the upgrade.
Truthfully, it wasn’t about the upgrade. I wanted to feel like somebody cared. I know that bad weather happens, but the whole situation with my disappearing flight confirmation (coupled with the implication by Stephanie that I was either lying or crazy) was, in my opinion, a very unfortunate incident that was either the result of a computer malfunction or human error on AA’s part. In light of this, I was willing to accept an upgrade on flight AA2370, in hopes that I might actually be able to get an hour or two of sleep before finally coming home to my patient and understanding wife, who will most definitely not still be sleeping when I arrive. I personally think that an upgrade would have been a convenient solution: it would have been of little or no cost to the airline, and would have at least done something to reduce my inconvenience and discomfort that was a result of AA’s error. Stephanie, however, stuck to the weather “policy”, and the agent saw fit to loudly make an example of me for anyone else in the line who might be looking to get a free upgrade.

So, to summarize my experience:

GOOD:
--Called me (twice! I actually had a voicemail from another AA agent who had called before – my phone didn’t ring for whatever reason) to let me know that the flight was canceled. Agent on the phone was very patient, especially considering that she probably had a big list of similar calls that she had to make.
--Got me onto a flight on another carrier when there were no viable AA options. Admittedly, this only happened after I thought of it and specifically requested it – Stephanie had already said there was simply nothing more she could do. But, in the end, AA did come through with a flight that was heading east and would get me to New York before the next evening.

BAD:
--Canceled the flight. Incidentally, there was no weather trouble in New York. According to my wife, not a single drop of rain fell on the city. Also, as anyone who lives in New York can tell you, weather prediction in NY beyond a window of about 30 minutes is extremely unreliable. However, I’m going to give AA the benefit of the doubt here, since I’m sure that canceling a flight is quite expensive and inconvenient for AA, and therefore not something that you do lightly. Also to AA’s credit it’s the first AA flight that I’ve ever had canceled on me.
--Lost my confirmation. Even more frustrating was the implication by Stephanie and the ticket agent that I was somehow at fault or lying.
--Wouldn’t give upgrade, based on “policy”, indicating that bad weather (and not AA’s mistake) was at fault for my situation.
--Yelled (well, that’s too strong a word – let’s say he used his “announcement voice”) at me that I was not better than anyone else who had their flight canceled, and it was unreasonable for me to ask for an upgrade (I thought that my situation was particularly unfortunate and unusual – I wasn’t asking for an upgrade on the basis that my flight had been canceled, but of course the “audience” didn’t know that). Needless to say, that was pretty embarrassing, and I recognized the look in everyone’s eyes (since I so often giving it to “squeaky wheel” customers myself). You know the look – the “what makes you think you’re better than me and you can waste the agent’s time by asking for special treatment?” look. This was, as my wife often says, “the cherry on the cake”. I want to reiterate that it was the ticket agent who added this final flourish to my horrible experience. I wish I could remember his name, but my exhausted brain only had room for one, and I decided that Stephanie’s name might be more helpful, since she’s probably the one who is supposed to instill and enforce customer service in the first place.

I really don’t know what to do about this. The only other time I’ve had a similar experience was once with Continental three years ago, and I have not flown on Continental since that happened. I haven’t missed it much, since I never really liked Continental, but I do like American. It’s the one airline that hasn’t crammed in so many rows that my knees are squished the entire flight (the Delta flight to Atlanta served as a great reminder of that). Basically, due to my height, my most comfortable options are usually American and Jetblue, and Jetblue doesn’t go to all the places I need to go. I want to remain a customer, but I want to feel like somebody cares. I want to be a customer of an airline for whom incidents like mine are unacceptable, and when there’s a genuine error on the airline’s part, that airline makes it up to the customer. I’m not a millionaire or a million-mile customer; I’m just a normal guy – I fly about 10-15 times per year to various destinations, mostly in the U.S. Where possible, I have tried to steer those 10-15 flights toward American Airlines – as an example, my wife and I are going a vacation to Cozumel this coming week in celebration of our anniversary, and we’re flying American.
I’m hoping you can find a way to make this up to me.

Sincerely,
Nate XXXXXXXXX

Starcraft 2!

I was such a Starcraft junkie back in the day - the folks at QAD were a bit Half-Life obsessed for a while, but we always came back to SC. Ah, the epic battles that were waged! I must have burned through a cumulative few months of time devoted just to playing Starcraft, and now finally after almost 10 years, Starcraft 2 is coming! Behold the developer demo and feel the first pangs of anticipation! I am so ready for this, I'm even thinking about dusting off my old SC CDs and installing it for my trip to CA, just to get back into the mood.

Subway stuff

My allergies have been killing me lately (honestly I had almost forgotten I had them, since it had been so long since I had weather-realted allergies), so I'm in a bit of a fog. Also, my commuting subway lines (the L and the 6) have been having random problems lately, which has caused me to take some routes I normally wouldn't take. Two things I've seen in the subway in the last 24 hours that struck me:
Yesterday afternoon I got sick of waiting for the L train at Union Square, so I figured I'd walk home from there. On my way out I saw this dude singing Ombra mai fu in the original range! I swear to God that guy sounded like a castrato - I've heard plenty of counter-tenors in my life, but that was something entirely different. I was absolutely blown away and disturbed - I wish that I had stayed longer (in my allergy-muddled mind I had the idea in my head that I had somewhere important to go). At least I should have recorded some of it on my phone, because it was absolutely ridiculous (and I mean that in the "awe-inspiring beyond conveyance" sense).

This morning, I walked down to the 14th St subway entrance (which I do if the weather's OK, it beats walking underground), then as soon as I walked in I completely got turned around and started walking back up underground. I walked past four police officers looking at a backpack that had been left on the ground. The backpack looked nice (i.e. almost new, not abused), it was pretty large and obviously full of something, and it was sitting in an area that, honestly, didn't look like a spot where someone would accidentally lose a backpack - it was just sort of in a random spot on the floor of the middle level (between the ground and the rails) of the subway station. So, if I were a cop, all of those things would be red flags for me. If it was, for example, a purse sitting on the bench at the actual subway level where people wait for the train, I wouldn't be as concerned. If it was a beat-to-hell backpack, I might have thought that someone just got tired of their backpack and threw it right there on the floor (and yes, New York is the kind of town where people just randomly decide "I don't want this anymore" and throw it on the ground, as if to commemorate the spot where they made the decision to finally get rid of the thing). However, if we're supposedly at a level of alertness where we randomly search people entering the subway (and yes, this is still going on, although not as often as before), then I would think that a like-new backpack in a random location in the subway would be considered a pretty significant threat. So, what did the police do? The same thing they would have done before all this terror business began - they cautiously opened it up and took a look inside. I noticed, however, that the cop was careful to put on his gloves before he opened the backpack.
I can't say I watched this for a long time, because 1) I didn't want to be noticed by the cops - if I were one of them, I would have been pretty on-edge at that point, and 2) I hate to admit this, but if there was a nasty surprise in the backpack, I didn't want to be too close to it. However, when I reached the end of the station, I realized that I had been going the wrong way and I had to go back. When I passed by the location again, two of the cops had wandered off, and the other two were walking to the exit with the backpack, so I guess there was nothing scary in it.

I find myself wondering if the NYPD's reaction is a good thing or a bad thing - in fact, I've been thinking about it all morning. What does this mean? I can only think of a few possibities:

1. These cops were just dumb and didn't realize that "new backpack, obviously relatively full, in a place where it's unlikely it was just misplaced there" should be some kind of red flag.
   
2. Some precautions were already taken before I happened by the scene - perhaps a dog had been brought in to sniff it, or something like that, although I doubt it (since whatever or whoever had checked it before would probably still be around when they decided to open it).
3. This one scares me - maybe the higher-ups in NYC law enforcement realize that this whole subway thing is no more than security theater, but it keeps people feeling that essential combination of scared and protected that's been so beneficial for everyone. Plus, I'm guessing that the NYPD is really using the subway searches to look for illegal immigrants and folks who just look "suspicious" in general, so maybe it's working for them, as opposed to actually checking for terrorists. Of course, I haven't seen any news or stats about the fruits of the subway searches, so maybe it's not really working out for them.

I dunno - all I know is that it seemed really weird.
Back to the first thing (the guy singing yesterday afternoon) - I'm going to start filming the really cool subway buskers, maybe I'll catch that guy again and get some footage.

Bruce Schneier is my hero

This guy is so cool - I've always been interested in cryptography and security, and he's one of the biggest guys in the field. Check out his essays and op-eds here - anything you click on will be absolutely worth reading. He recently did an interview on Sirius with RU Sirius and he's just awesome. You can listen here (click on the mp3 link - Bruce's interview starts at about 10 minutes in) or read the transcript here. The guy's just frigging awesome - I feel about him like a neocon feels about Bill or Rush - everything he says is gospel, and if what he says is wrong, I don't wanna be right.
And if you want to know what to get me for my next occasion, consider this T-shirt.

Mama visit and service organizations

My mom came and visited us last weekend, it was great to see her again (I saw her a couple of weeks ago for a few hours, but before that it had been quite a while). She and Larry stayed over the weekend and we went and did lots of stuff, mostly walking around and checking out various institutions. Clau tried to get us to go to a gospel service on Sunday morning, but unfortunately I was a big buzzkill and didn't want to leave the apartment so early.
We ended up checking out the Tribeca film festival - we watched a documentary short collection called "Family Legacy" (you can find it here), which was really good. That night we watched Planet B-Boy at the "Tribeca Drive-in", which was also very, very cool. I probably would have rated both of them 4 stars out of 5 on Netflix. We also tried to get into the comedy panel, but since that was about the hottest ticket in the festival, we didn't really stand a chance. But, we tried.
Mama and I talked about part of her work, which is improving service processes. Of course, one thing I'm constantly lamenting about (although not in this particular venue) is how the standard of customer service in the U.S. has gone completely downhill in the name of efficiency and the bottom line. My mother is trying to educate companies on ways that they can improve this and still make money - theoretically, they could actually increase their bottom line, although I'm sure it's a tough sell. Let me just outline a few anecdotes about customer service.

1) Whenever you have a forum or other thread regarding the customer service hell for Dell / HP / whatever, you invariably have an Apple fanboy pop up about how great Apple's service is. I haven't tested this myself (since I haven't had any problems with my Macbook, which is perhaps the best testimony of all), but apparently you can call for support with either a hardware or OS X problem, and the phone is actually answered within 5 minutes by a native English speaker. If you don't live near an Apple store (by virtue of living in Manhattan I happen to live near a 24-hour Apple store, with another on the way in my own neighborhood), they will send you a postage-paid box to send them the item for repair. What's a little sad is that this makes Apple absolutely head-and-shoulders above the rest; IMHO, this ought to be the norm (or at least not quite so far ahead of the norm).

2) About 8 years or so ago, I had a problem with a bill that I had paid online. If memory serves, the receiving party had inadvertently moved the decimal point, so that a $20 payment was registered as a $2 payment. IIRC the payee was AT&T, but don't quote me on that. I checked my bank records and the payee had indeed received $20 from my bank account. So, the first thing I did was call AT&T to see if they had discovered the mistake and corrected it. I must have spent 45 minutes in voicemail, on hold, talking to the AT&T CSR, on hold some more, finally talking to a supervisor, with the end result being that they would look into it after receiving by certified mail a copy of the canceled check. I explained that it was an electronic payment and there likely was no physical check, and they basically told me I was SOL. Worst of all, they made it very clear that they had no intention of investigating the matter further until I came up with some proof. I hung up in disgust, took some deep breaths, and prepared to go through the same thing with Wells Fargo. I talked to the rep, explained what had happened, and gave him the confirmation number for the electronic payment. He immediately responded with "Well, it looks like you paid them $20, so AT&T probably made a mistake." My heart sank for a moment, and then he said "we'll take care of it". He gave me a case number and told me to call back if it wasn't resolved in 5 days. The whole thing took less than 5 minutes. The best part? They actually took care of it - I never had to call them again about the case. And, I'll tell you, even though I don't live anywhere near a Wells Fargo bank anymore, that's still my primary bank account, all because of that one incident. Of course, usually when I tell this story to people, I add the footnote "You know, it's sad that the Wells Fargo story is so exceptional - this sort of experience ought to be the norm."

3) My wife works for a large food company who has outsourced their IT department, and she is constantly lamenting the poor service. The contractor company routinely pulls really, really nasty tricks, most notably closing tickets without actually solving the problem, then opening a fresh ticket when the customer complains. For those of you who can't understand why they do this, the reason is twofold:

• Companies typically have SLA (Service Level Agreements) with the customer, such as "we will fix 90% of your issues within 3 business days and 95% within 10 business days". Since most calls are of the "I forgot my password" variety, this is actually a pretty easy metric to meet. However, if you realize you've screwed up, you can always cheat by closing the ticket prematurely, then opening a new ticket, thus reseting the clock.
• Service companies are paid based on the number of incidents you're logging. It's usually on a "we expect X incidents per month - if that number goes up or down, then we'll adjust the accounting next month", but it could even be on a "you will pay $x per incident" basis. Obviously, having two tickets is better than only having one.

There are many ways to avoid these problems, the most obvious of which is a "pending customer approval" feature in closing the ticket: after the tech closes the ticket, the clock stops pending an approval / rejection from the customer. If the customer rejects the ticket closure, the clock starts up again. This is far from revolutionary; most modern ticketing systems have this feature. At the very least, you should have a customer feedback option for a ticket - this allows the customer to both praise and complain. This is at least an opportunity for the customer to say "you shouldn't have closed this ticket, since you didn't actually do the thing you were supposed to do." It's also an opportunity for excellent CSRs and techies to get their due praise. When I worked for QAD, they had a pretty simple system where three positive comments (or perhaps just one particularly gushing comment) would earn you a "blue dot", complete with a cheesy certificate. Three "blue dot" certificates could be cashed in for a day off, anytime, no questions asked. Most of us actually ended up saving our blue dots and decorating our walls with them, or stacking them somewhere. I think that, deep down, everyone was really proud of their blue dot collection, even if we all acted like they were stupid.
Anyway, to get back to my wife's outsourced IT contractor, they don't even have a way for the customer to enter feedback. So, they basically have license to create their own metrics. And the best part is that whoever signed these jokers up is probably being praised for trimming the cost of IT so efficiently. In the meantime, my wife's issues (most of which are of the "I need this piece of software installed on person X's workstation" or "I need person X added to domain group Y" variety) are usually completed after more than a week, and far too often involve multiple tickets.

Just like everyone else, I can probably rattle at least 3 or 4 hellish customer service experiences that I've had in the last few years. Since I'm pretty handy with most tech things, I'm guessing that I'm on the low end of the spectrum. I can only imagine what life is like for folks who don't know computers / software / whatever very well - it would probably turn me off of ever learning how to use a computer in the first place. Unless, of course, I bought an Apple.

How geeks think

So, the elevator in the building where I work sucks - when you get in on the ground floor and hit the button for your floor, it takes about 30 seconds before the elevator doors shut. I know that's not a long time, but it feels like an eternity when you're standing there waiting for the doors to close.
So, I noticed that when one elevator car is in this process, and another elevator car brings people to the ground floor, the second elevator car will close its doors almost immediately after the folks get out. So, I figured, the programming for the elevator designates the first car as "waiting for folks to get on", and the other cars as "free to roam". This situation actually comes up quite often.
So, after noticing that, the next time the opportunity pops up I jump into the second elevator car right after everyone gets out. Someone else jumps in with me. We both hit our buttons as the doors are closing, and the elevator immediately resets - the doors open, all the lit buttons become un-lit, and then 30 seconds later we're off. Definitely not an improvement.
So, the next time it comes up and I'm alone, I jump in at the last second, wait until the doors close and the elevator starts to move, then hit my button. Success!

I know it sounds stupid to be going through all this trouble just to figure out how to save 30 seconds once in a while, but it's more the challenge of it and the idea of "is there a way to make this experience better / faster / more efficient?". That's how I think all the time, about everything. My wife, thankfully, finds it quirky and charming, but give her a few more years with me and she may change her mind about that.
For you non-geeky people, this is how geeks think about everything - I don't know if it's on account of my work or if this trait makes me suited for tech work, but it seems to be a trait common to most techies. If you can't stand someone like that, don't get involved with a techie...

Tech things everyone should know

OK, so the other day I'm talking with someone at work about a problem w/ some systems. Basically we have a couple of PCs with very large Dell monitors, which for some reason aren't hooked up. I talked more multiple people and the response I kept getting was that the computers didn't have enough power for the monitors, to which my response was always "huh?"
After finally taking a look at the systems themselves, I realized that they only had VGA ports, and the monitors only had DVI inputs. You would not believe how long it took to explain to people about what a video card is, and how we just needed another type of video card to connect to the monitors. The simple concept of a video card seemed to be too much for most of the people I talked to.
In my extensive time working in tech, I've discovered that there's a lot of things that people don't seem to know, and that I have to keep reminding myself is not common knowledge. So, here's a quick list of things that you ought to know if you work with computers in any capacity (not "If you fix computers for a living" - just "if you work with a computer in the course of your regular job, particularly if you work for a tech company").

1) What is an IP address. I'm shocked at how often I'm trying to explain something to somebody and the whole concept is so foreign. An IP address is a unique number that identifies your computer on a network, like a phone number identifies your phone. Is that so hard to memorize or understand?
Extra credit 1: The concept of private vs. public IP addresses, even more credit for knowing the private subnets (at least the popular two).
Extra credit 2: How to determine your IP address on your computer

2) The concept of network storage. Again, if I had a nickel for every time someone told me they put something on their "M drive" with no idea whatsoever of what that means...well, I'd have a lot of nickels. I could understand it back in the mid-90's, but c'mon! The concept has not changed at all since it was introduced a loooong time ago.

3) Viruses and spyware are bad, even if they're not messing up your life too badly. Again, in the "if I had a nickel" department, folks who's computers are just completely infested with crap, so badly that I'm scared to plug my laptop into their network. When I ask them "how long have these porn pop-ups been appearing?" the answer is usually in terms of weeks or months. The fact that you didn't seek help until your system was unusable indicates an underestimation on your part of the seriousness of the infections. Funny how people don't do this with anything else: "Well, the car has been getting slower and slower, now it won't go more than 25mph, but since I can get anywhere I need to by city streets, I'm not really concerned about what might be wrong. Maybe I'll contact a mechanic when it starts topping out at 10mph". And most of this experience is from when I was the I.T. guy at work (i.e. it didn't even cost them anything).

4) You don't have to double-click everything. Yeah, maybe it's obvious to you, but you would be amazed at how often I see people still double-clicking everything, be it a folder, a link in a web browser, or whatever. Lots of times this can really screw things up (for example double-clicking the Submit button in a web form will make it run twice).

5) Know what to look for in a new computer. This one comes up a lot - someone calls me up, since I supposedly know a lot about "computers" and tells me they're thinking about buying a new one - there's an ad in the paper for a computer for $499, and it has a 100GB hard drive - that's a good deal, right? Of course, there are a lot of nuances regarding pricing, but the main things you should be concerned with are CPU type/speed and RAM. Of course, the rankings of "adequate / better / more than you need" are constantly changing, but everyone's got someone they can call and ask about that. And, the most important thing to know is that HARD DRIVES ARE CHEAP! A computer with a 200GB HD is not worth twice as much as one with a 100GB HD. Seems obvious to you? Believe me, it's not to most people. Oh yeah, and one other thing people don't seem to get: in terms of bang for your buck, laptops are a hell of a lot more expensive to buy, prone to break, and expensive to fix, so don't get one unless you really need the mobility.

6) Applications cannot be transfered by copying files. This one doesn't necessarily qualify, since you need to have some basic understanding of files etc. to make this mistake, but a lot of people mistakenly believe that when they buy a new computer, they should be able to just copy their applications from the old computer onto the new one. Unfortunately this almost never works - I don't expect people to understand the registry (least of all because then they'll probably also discover the regedit command and that's game over), but people really ought to know that you can't just copy an application from one machine to another. I do have a lot of forgiveness for this one, though, since the assumption seems pretty logical on the surface, and I don't expect the layman to know about the registry.

I have, of course, left out a lot of other stuff that seems basic to me but I understand is foreign to people who don't work with this stuff on a regular basis. I mean, I get that most people don't want to know any more about their computer than they need to in order to get the job done, but seriously - these are just really basic things that everyone ought to know.

Netflix reviews

You know, I really rather like Netflix - they had a really great and revolutionary (for the time) idea, they pulled together the (very large) amount of money required to get it off the ground, and the whole thing really took off. Most companies would have rested on their laurels, raked in the money while putting forth minimal effort, and ultimately suffered the demise of all the dial-up ISPs. Netflix, however, has been trying to continually improve the experience, and so far I have to say I like all of their features - the way you can interact with friends or search for other folks who have the same tastes as you, the recommendation system (admittedly not great, but they did put up that famous $1M bounty for anyone who can come up with a better one - and turn it over to Netflix). They've created an "online viewing" credit system where you can watch movies streaming over your broadband connection (Windows-only, DRM up the wazoo, but hey at least they're trying).
My only issue, I suppose, is that there doesn't seem to be any way to request a movie. I've got three movies in my "Saved" list (i.e. movies that Netflix doesn't have but you would like to rent): My Dinner with Andre, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and Thesis. I don't think that any of these are too esoteric (except maybe Thesis) to warrant having at least one copy around somewhere, right?

Finally, I was surfing Netflix and looking for films I can rent while Clau is out. I saw a preview for The Protector and I figured I would check it out while Clau's out. The review by Stephen Richards sold me on it:

"If you see this film, a lot of your problems will be solved, this I promise you. You will know, after viewing this feature: 1. What your favorite action film is. 2. How to break a person's leg in three places using only the area behind your knee and 3. How to dispatch of four or five wrestlers on steriods using only the bones of an elephant. This film saved my life. Will it do the same for you? The short answer is 'yes'. The long answer is ALSO 'yes'."

Yeah, that guy really liked it.

TV Shows that should have survived

I wrote a post a while ago about TV shows that should have survived longer - I just read a post about the same thing, looks like we were all on the same wavelength (except for Kingpin, but I stand by that one).

My gym injuries finally healed (around Saturday) - Clau has left for Venezuela, I'm trying to not stress about her safety. She'll be gone until next Wednesday so I'm trying to diet and exercise in the meantime!

Work is...work. Some interesting stuff coming down the line but at the moment it's generally drudgery. Just gotta hang on until the exciting stuff happens.

Diet + gym = misery

OK, so the wife and I have been on a joint-venture diet for a couple of months now, and we're actually doing pretty well, although I feel like we've been slipping a bit over the last week or so. Last week was especially rough for me since I ended up going to a lot of after-hours work functions at which I was offered free beer - and let's face it, I can't turn down free beer. A friend of our was leaving NY and had a party at the Spotted Pig (they have a fantastic burger smothered in Roquefort), Clau had two midterm exams last week and needed some beers to chill out, Sam cooked and invited us over to eat the food (Sam's a really good cook so you can't turn that down), etc etc. You know how it goes - when it rains, it pours.
So, to make myself feel somewhat less guilty, I've gone to the gym slightly more than usual lately (well, going at all is really slightly more than usual for me). Normally I just chug on the elliptical treadmill for 30 minutes or so, since every other type of cardio is a bit hard on my knees (they really started to give me trouble in my mid-20's - all that basketball in my youth probably messed them up good). I decided yesterday that I should try the 30-minute abdominals group class, figuring I'd maybe speed up the shrinking of my beer gut, and I could get about 20 minutes of cardio afterward.
Oh man, was that ever a bad judgement call. After the ab class I basically stumbled home, with only the thought of not passing out or puking on the sidewalk, and I just wanted to make it into (and out of) the shower before every muscle in my midsection and back locked up and prevented me from moving again. I actually felt better after the shower and was able to function, but today I have aches in places where I wasn't even aware I had muscles. I don't know how I'll convince myself to ever do that again.
The funny thing about exercise, diet, etc is that it's all so damn hard in the beginning. I'm sure that if I stick with the ab classes (although just the thought makes everything hurt even more), I'll end up getting through it and even enjoying it, and I'll wonder what I thought was so hard about it in the first place. Dieting is the same way; you feel so damn hungry all the time, but after a couple of weeks it just feels normal, and eating something you used to have no problem with (like a big-ass burger and fries) makes you feel sort of queasy. So, I think I'm going to try to tough it out, maybe I can have a nice flat stomach for swimsuit season (truthfully, I'd be content to just not be embarrassed on the beach). Today, however, I'll be proud of myself if I can just get back on that elliptical machine for 20 minutes and not spend the evening playing video games instead.
Overall, the diet's been a really positive experience. Both Clau and I have lost somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of our original body weight, and we're both feeling a lot better in general. She's going to be on a business trip for the next couple of weeks, hopefully she'll be able to stick to it (although I certainly won't blame her if she can't), and I'm going to try to work out every day, since I won't be sacrificing any time spent with her. Hopefully she can come home to a man who's in considerably better shape than I am now. But more likely is that I'll just end up hanging around and watching TV. Hey, at least I know myself.