Netflix comments

Obviously, I had to cancel my Netflix membership before leaving. At the end of cancelling your membership, they have a section of "please let us know your reason for leaving", which is all radio buttons. Oddly enough, there's no "I'm moving outside of the coverage area" button, nor is there a text box for "other". There's also no area to put in comments. I wanted to leave a parting remark saying "I absolutely love your service and I'll miss it", but there was no place to do that. Weird.

Apartments

So, today we go see our first set of apartments - Clau and I are looking toward the upper end of the price range for apartments, and theoretically that means that we won't be fighting the hordes for the space (if you're looking for a cheap studio or 1-bedroom, expect to be competing with a big crowd - 2-bedroom, not so much).
Yeah, that's right - 2 bedrooms! Count 'em - 1, 2. That means that guests (when we eventually have some) will not have to sleep in our living room. If we go really fancy we may even end up w/ two bathrooms, although this is supposedly kinda rare in Munich.

What else - the new office is sweet - I'm determined to take pictures but have no idea where I put the charger for the camera (stupid!). There's an espresso machine (not in my personal office, per se, but at least it's a quick skip from here to the kitchen) and Diet Coke on tap. Unfortunately that means I need to develop caffeine discipline, which is something I never had to worry much about before.

Went out drinking Saturday night - it didn't end particularly well - I ended up drinking way too much beer (still getting the hang of the German brew), and Clau and I ended up almost totally stranded - she was limping along really badly (her knee is still far from healed) and it was seriously freezing outside. So, you had a foreign couple, me leaning on her for stability, her leaning on me for support, hobbling along at about 1mph in the wind and snow - we ended up taking the tram and the subway, then a cab for the last leg home. Total travel time about 1 hour, total distance covered was about 4 miles. The general rule here is that if you're going to be out past 2am, be prepared to shovel out mucho dinero for a cab home (and I'm talking like 30 Euros for a 20-minute cab ride) - if you want to take the subway, better make 1:30 or so your last call. At least, if you're determined, you can still live it up in town after hours - it's not like California where you have to stop drinking because it's the law.

Well, I was close...

So, although nobody pointed it out to me, I found out in another context that the word for "quarter" is "Viertel" - which, to me, sounds exactly like "vittle" - or "victual" for you educated folks.

Things I am learning in Germany (in no particular order)

1) I _think_ the German word for "a quarter of a loaf of bread" is "vittel" - I learned it at the bakery, but unfortunately I have a terrible memory for words when I don't see them in writing - in fact the only way for me to really memorize them without seeing them in writing is to imagine the written word over and over in my head. Anyway, after learning this word I tried to verify it online, but cannot find a single instance of it. I shall have to verify it again, but I'm reticent to do so since the woman at the bakery terrifies me - she's large and menacing and has no patience for the local village idiot foreigner.
2) Just like it's not the heat, it's the humidity, it's not the cold - it's the humidity. It's been slightly above freezing here with about 90% humidity, and man is it cold - it's a horrible, pentrating cold that you can't seem to keep out.
3) IP phones ROCK! I have an IP phone that's tied into 30 Rock, so it's like I have a 30 Rock number - I can just dial extensions to talk to folks in 30 Rock, plus I can call the U.S., people can call my 212 number, and (most importantly) I can call 1-800 numbers, which comes up a lot more often than you might think (like, for example, conference calls). I'm going to see if it works in my office here, but I doubt it will, which means I'll have to find another solution for conference calling. You would think that GE would have international conference numbers, but whatever...
4) I missed Clau a lot - at one point she was offered a six-month assignment, and we even considered it, which seems foolish now.
5) Moving to a foreign country is a lot different from visiting it. For example, even though as a tourist you get the idea that everybody speaks English, you find out that it just isn't so when you move here (although thankfully everyone in my office speaks English). Also, things that go wrong in normal life can be a lot more exasperating than things that go wrong when on vacation; what might end up as a fun story from visiting a place ends up being an exasperating experience when you live there.

As an example of #5, Claudia tripped while walking up the stairs to the apartment last night and banged her knee up pretty bad. We thought it would be better by morning, but it was even worse and she was in a lot of pain. I went to the pharmacy in search of some Arnica or Ben-Gay, and it was a pretty frustrating experience. I ended up getting an ointment, but of course it didn't help right away, and she was in no shape to go to work. She called her boss, who told her she should go to the nearby clinic and get the knee checked out. We don't have insurance (yet), and we decided that even though we would have to pay for everything out of pocket, we should still go. Needless to say, going to the urgent care was an adventure, and everybody there was very nice (although there were a lot of folks who didn't speak English). She got X-rays and had an intern check out her leg, who thought it was OK, but wanted to have the chief of medicine look at it just to be sure. We waited for a good hour for the chief, but it was almost worth it; he had a giant flock of students around him watching his every move. I'm guessing that Claudia's condition was an interesting case for them, and they all wanted to see how the boss would determine if there was anything seriously wrong with her knee, or if it was just banged up. He poked at her, made her do a couple of things and kept asking "does that hurt?", to which most times the answer was "no, not especially". Finally, he finished it by saying to his interns (as best I could gather) "if she can do this, this and this, then she's OK and it's just a very bad hit, which will heal over time." He then grabbed her knee and pressed on it to emphasize his point - Claudia screamed "WOW! THAT HURTS!", to which he replied "Yes, I know." Afterwards, he left with his entourage minus the intern who had treated Clau, who then wrapped up her leg in a bandage to immobilize it and told her to keep it on for a day or two.
The point of this story is not to demostrate what a dick the chief was (because he actually was rather nice, although obviously busy), but really what good care Claudia received. And, for those who are curious, the total bill including the X-rays was about 100 Euros. And, to further emphasize the difference in culture, when we first got to the clinic we discovered that Claudia's boss had called the clinic ahead of time to describe what had happened and to let them know that a foreigner would be coming to see them. After we got back home, Claudia called her boss, who told her to take the day off tomorrow to ensure that the leg would heal. That's definitely different from New York!
I'll write about my new office in another post, but suffice it to say it's pretty neat - everyone there is generally a bit younger and relatively relaxed. I found out that I get meal vouchers for lunch (which apparantly is normal, either that or else places will have a subsidized cafeteria) and I actually got a real office, and it's very swanky (I'll post pictures when I get a chance). The office is temporary, though - I'll be moving soon enough, although hopefully I can convince them I'm important enough to warrant a similarly swanky location after we're all done moving around.

--Nate

Almost gone

Movers came and spent all day yesterday packing all our crap - I watched it go and realized that yes, this is in fact happening.

On another note - why are we not getting more freaked out about this? I mean, I think that if in NYC you started having severed feet just showing up, people might be a little concerned. Especially considering that they're all in shoes, so it's not like these are drowned swimmers. I'm sure there's a CSI episode in there somewhere...

--Nate

I admit it

I got a little teary last night. We were watching the results and the victory sort of came out of nowhere - I mean, we knew which way it was going, but on NBC news (come on, where else would I be watching it?) Obama went straight from 207 to a lock. I immediately shuffled down the street to NewsCorp HQ and confirmed the news (hey, if Fox News admits it, then it's done!), then went back to Channel 4 (local bar right by 30 Rock) to let them know.
I was so overcome by emotion, and I couldn't place it. After a few minutes, it hit me; I was actually proud of my country. I can't remember the last time I felt that way - it was certainly long enough ago that the emotion was completely foreign to me. It was, in fact, the antithesis of my emotions after the 2004 election, and judging by the (happy) pandemonium in the city, I wasn't the only one feeling that way.
I'm proud that we finally voted for the right guy. I'm proud that we've elected a black president, that we've elected an intelligent president, and that it wasn't even a close contest. When I move to Germany, I won't be ashamed to be American, because at long last it looks like we've seen the error of our ways and will at long last be on the right track.
I proceded to get absolutely smashed at the bar last night. The vibe was perfect, everyone was happy, some people were crying, overcome with the same emotion that I was feeling, and I just wanted it to last forever. I only wish my wife could have been there with me.
I woke up this morning about 10 minutes before my 8am conference call. I have a hell of a hangover, but it was absolutely worth it. If I could live that night over again, I wouldn't change a thing.

Liquid diet (or, fun with Eliana)

So, the stories of miscommunications and games with the cleaning lady are legendary. She was supposed to come by last Friday, so on Friday morning I did the pre-Eliana-visit routine of straightening up as best as I can, and (more importantly) hiding the essential items that I'll need for the next week; if I don't hide stuff, she will.
Now, one part of the German transition is that I can't take any food with me, so I decided it would be a good idea to start getting rid of stuff; I took stock of the kitchen and decided that, although the freezer and pantry still had a lot of stuff that looked viable and tasty, the refrigerator was about 40% condiments, 20% booze, 15% rotten food, and about 5% non-booze stuff that I actually wanted. I took the liberty of putting all of the stuff to be kept on the top shelf of the fridge, then wrote Eliana a note saying I wanted to start getting rid of my food, and could she please throw out all the food beneath the jar of water?
Later that day, Eliana called me and said she was sick, and would I mind if she came by on Monday? That coincided nicely with an impromptu get-together that I hosted on Saturday, so I thought it was optimal.
On Sunday, I had a particularly nasty (and, I thought, somewhat undeserved) hangover, and cooked myself a massive Mac & Cheese with everything from the pantry that looked like it might go well with Mac & Cheese. The resulting glop was delicious and huge - I ate about half of it, then put the other half in a tupperware, taking care to place it on the top shelf, above the jar of water.
So, you can guess where this is going: I came home today, opened the refrigerator in anticipation of my M&C glop (cuz you know that shit is even better when reheated the second day), and saw this. Horrors!
Now, of course I can point out the obvious - she somehow interpreted "can you please throw away all the food below the water jug in the refrigerator" as "please throw away all food in the apartment". Perhaps my Portuguese is worse than I thought - remind me to NEVER hire a Brazilian exterminator, lest I inadvertently have all the pets on our block executed.
What I find more curious, however, is what she opted to leave behind:

• All the booze (which was kind of her)
• The jar of water (which, remember, was meant to be used as a reference marker for what should be kept and what should be tossed). Note that the jar of water is in the same place I left it.
  
• Claudia's cold mask (in the freezer, useful for administering or relieving a headache)
• A half-eaten pint of Haagen-Dazs acai berry sorbet
• A box of durian popsicles. Words cannot describe the foulness that is durian. Many people have their own particularly colorful descriptions - the image it brings forth to my mind is a sweet Maui onion that has been forgotten in a gym locker, in a tropical place, surrounded by sweaty gym socks, and left there for a couple of months. There's definitely a sweetness and a hint that maybe there could have been something good here at one point, but it's overwhelmed by the funk. Anyway, continuing the list...
• A package of hot dog rolls. I'm actually unsure as to where these came from - I'm relatively sure it wasn't the refrigerator, but that's where they are now
• A small chunk of goiabada (a Brazilian sweet made from guava - it's kind of like a really, really think fruit roll-up). I should note that there was also an unopened package of goiabada in the side shelf of the fridge which is gone. That chunk of goiabada has been in the fridge since (I think) the last time Clau and I went to Brazil, which I believe was for Christmas last year. Apparantly it had been there for so long that Eliana thought it was part of the fridge, or perhaps a particularly colorful accessory.

So, the big question now: what do I order for dinner? I'm thinking burger.

Sooo tired

Haven't really slept much in the last five days or so - between flying to Oakland, the soon-to-be-legendary trip to Reno, Cora screaming through the night, and the redeye back to NYC, I'm working on an average of 4 hours or so per night. This is one of the things that makes me wonder if I'm cut out to be a parent - I can barely take care of myself with this little sleep, how could I possible take care of someone else?
For me, when I'm working on serious sleep deprivation it's very similar to being sick - my throat hurts, I feel crappy, and my head feels like it's full of syrup. Hopefully I'm just really tired, because I really don't have time to be sick.
To AA's credit, the flight from SFO to JFK was 100% sold out (oversold, in fact), so there was no way a pleb like me was getting an upgrade. All things considered, though, it wasn't that bad; we left on time, arrived on time, and I was so tired that I slept for almost 3 hours of the 5 1/2-hour flight, so to me it felt like a pretty short one. Combined with my PSP and Musicophilia, it was actually relatively painless. Getting through today, on the other hand, is another thing entirely...

Rockbox

So, I recently bought a new Sansa mp3 player - they're all over woot all the time. Overall not a very good portable - for example, I accidentally crushed my last one after sitting on it - but after seeing that the new version of Rockbox had come out, I just had to get a replacement - so, $40 on buy.com, a small amount of elbow grease, and now I have a cheapo 6GB media player that supports just about every media format I use (and that's good, because I have lots of AAC, OGG, WMA, and FLAC lying around). Seriously sweet.

My new other hero

Bruce Schneier will of course always have a special place in my geeky heart, but I think I've found another guy to worship: Brock (last name unknown).
Some of the stuff is relatively simple, but a lot of it is very, very elegant. I've already learned a couple of things just perusing this blog, and I know a LOT about bash.
For instance, I'm now terribly ashamed of my previous post about awk and sed, if for no other reason than it shows I was unaware of a lot of these methods.
Of course, in my defense, I've been doing shell scripting for a very long time and I tend not to use a lot of bash-specific features, just because I cut my teeth having to write portable (i.e. bash and ksh) scripts. Really, though, that's not a valid excuse anymore - you'd be hard-pressed to find a Unix distro from the last 3-4 years that doesn't include bash out of the box.
I am totally gonna study this guy's blog......

Frequent flier upgrade

So, I want to visit my family, I've still got a voucher from Virgin America for a flight we never took, along with a boatload of AA miles. So, I figure I'll use the voucher to get to SFO, then see if I can get a cheapo one-way red-eye on American back to NYC and upgrade it to business. I make the reservation on AA.com and call about an upgrade. Apparently there are no upgrades available until mid-November (when I'll be in Germany) because they are all taken. Just out of curiosity I look at the seating chart for the flight in question, and here's what it looks like:

Are miles even worth anything anymore?

Awk and sed

For those of you non GNU-junkies, awk and sed are an essential part of any admin's toolbox.  They are interpreted languages (meaning there's no compiling involved and your programs just run on the fly) and they've been around for a long long time.  It's pretty rare that I write a script of more than 20 lines and don't use at least one of them.

Awk and sed are pretty feature-heavy languages, and in fact there's an entire O'Reilly book just on those two alone.  However, I really only use them for one thing each; I use awk to extract a particular field from a string, and I use sed to do quick and dirty substitutions.   So, here's the Nate Aiman-Smith quick and dirty howto:

For awk, 99% of the time I use this line:

[command printing out stuff] | awk -F'[field separator]' '{print $[field number]}'

That's it!  So, for example, if I had $numbers (or %numbers% for you windows guys) set to  "one two three four" and I wanted to get the third word, I would just do:

echo %numbers% | awk '{print $3}'

which would print out "three".  Note that the field separator defaults to whitespace.  If my string was "one::two::three::four", I could do:

echo %numbers% | awk -F'::' '{print $3}'

For the same result.

For sed, the construction is:

sed 's/[search]/[replace]/' [file]

or 

[command printing out stuff] | sed 's/[search]/[replace]/'

That does the substitution once (the first time the search string is found).  You can add '/g' at the end to make it global.  So, for example, to change all instances of "Nathan" to "Naton" in my file "recommendation.txt", I could do:

cat (or "type" for you windows folks) recommendation.txt | sed 's/Nathan/Naton/g' > good_recommendation.txt

Which would create a new file, good_recommendation.txt with the substitutions.

Now of course, Perl can do all these things almost as easily, and it can do it a _lot_ faster, but when you're writing the quick and dirty script or one-liner, it's a lot easier just to use one of these.   If you're a Unix administrator, you need to know at least these basics of sed and awk, because you're going to see them a lot.  It saddens me how many Linux admins don't seem to know these basic tools, but on the other hand it makes me look like some kind of god when I'm able to do a search-and-replace on 1000 files in about 2 minutes with a one-liner.

There are actually precompiled windows binaries available for them if you want to start working on your own script-fu.  Or, even better, use Cygwin or a Linux distro (or open a terminal in Mac OS X) to really dig into it.

the 4th amendment

So, Clau and I were in Boston last weekend, we wanted to go to a particular Italian restaurant that's apparently the most popular Italian restaurant in Boston, on the most popular night for Italian food of the year. We were stuck in a majorly long line and got to conversing with the folks near us (somewhere in their early 50s by the look of them) - turned out they were major Republican types from Naples, FL. I started talking to the husband while Clau got into a conversation with the wife. Of course, us living in NYC, 9/11 comes up (I didn't bring it up!) and the guy starts talking about how quickly we've forgotten about it and started acting like the whole thing never happened, so I had two points for him:
1) Maybe you've forgotten, but in NYC the shadow of that day hangs over the city non-stop like a cloud
2) If by "forgetting" you mean picking ourselves up and getting on with our lives, then yeah, that's pretty much what NYC has done, and maybe the rest of the country should too. The whole point of terrorism isn't to kill a few thousand people; it's to put fear and chaos into the entire nation, and that's exactly what's happened. If you really want to defeat terrorism, refuse to be terrorized.
As an example of how bad it's gotten in NYC, I pointed out that we have random subway searches where I don't think the NYPD has any expectation of actually catching any terrorists (see my earlier post on this for an anecdote), but rather it's for security theater and to catch some other offenders. The way I see it, they're searching people who aren't really aware of their civil rights, and if they find, for example, a gram of cocaine in a woman's purse, they're not going to say "well, this is obviously not a weapon - here's your coke back, have a nice day".
To which the fellow from Florida responded "Well, what's wrong with that? A person shouldn't be walking around with cocaine in the first place - if the cops catch some druggies instead of terrorists, isn't that still a good thing?"
To which I responded: it's the principle of the thing - we have a fundamental right against that exact type of search, and people are giving it up.
To which he again responded: well, what's the point of that? If you have nothing to hide, what's the problem?
And I didn't really have an answer - I mean, I started to answer, but I ended up sounding more and more like a privacy nut. I ended up saying something like "well, it seems that there are two extremes: anarchy and totalitarianism. Most people's ideal falls somewhere between those two extremes, and I guess it's a matter of where you think the line should be drawn. For me, using terrorism as a reason to search people's bags on the subway is too far left of that line. If you don't agree, then I guess that's your prerogative, but you should decide where you would draw that line." Of course, I was flustered so I didn't put it quite that eloquently, but I think I got my point across.
Yet now I find myself wondering: why should reasonable people be opposed to these searches? I mean, I've been objecting on the pure basis that it seems a violation of a fundamental American right, but it seems that the whole point of the amendment was a response to overly generalized warrants, rather than police or government randomly stopping folks in the street and making them empty their pockets. Of course, it seems that the whole system of needing a warrant in the first place was a fundamental part of English law at the time, and the 4th amendment was something of a refinement of warrant requirements and applicability.
For the record, I'm still against NYPD subway search stations, but now I'm having a tougher time rationally explaining it to myself.  I guess it comes down to the ability of a government to oppress its citizens, with the underlying idea being that the government will use and abuse any power given to it, rather than using that power to serve the people.

This has been rolling around in the back of my head for a little while - I just wanted to get it down on paper.  I'll be sure to have a long talk with my dad about it the next time I see him.

Using a UPS as a transformer

So, as part of the Munich prep, I've been wondering how I can deal with my various American devices. We've been encouraged to leave behind our glorious TV (which I'm not sure I agree with, but then again our current unit is getting a little long in the tooth), but of course I will still have our wifi router, my Wii, and chargers for various devices.
Everyone seems to say that you need a step-down transformer in order to deal with the 220v power in Germany, but I've been wondering why I can't just use a UPS that can take 220v in and put 110v out. Theoretically, a UPS has two inverters - one leading into the battery and another leading out, so in theory (from my extremely limited knowledge of electronics) I should be able to use this in place of a transformer, with the side benefit of getting power redundancy and conditioning. So, I hit Google just to confirm, and I haven't been able to find one single account of anybody doing this. So now I have to face the choice of spending (and possible throwing away) $150-$200 on a decent dual-voltage UPS, or just dealing with it over there (which will undoubtedly cost more). But what really weirds me out is my inability to find a single account or testimonial of this on Google.

Viral marketing

I love it when folks come up with cool ideas - I've seen so many of these "unboxing" videos, but this took me by surprise. I totally want that phone now.

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