That's 91.8%
Seems like it's been way too long since I've had an update. And really it has been too long. Now sure it could be I've been doing lots of fantastically great stuff in the mean time, but not necessarily.
Actually I did do a little work, e.g. find some hick-ups, in the
Super VCR Mod. Mostly "shit don't fit" and it'll take slightly longer than I would have hoped. But so is the way it goes. Or something. Right? Soon I will post some photos up and update my progress, keep your eye on the site.
Otherwise I have been trying to do some
Mystery Short Story but haven't gotten all that far as of yet. More specifically I have written some portion of a post but not finished the post or published the post. At least for the last couple nights that is why there has been no updates.
Also of note, to weird people such as myself, I am slowly weaning myself off of MS IE and moving towards
Firefox. I'm really starting to dig the whole tabbed browsing thing. Now you may be wondering about me, the apple employee, not whole-heartedly endorsing Apple's in-house browser: Safari. Well lets just say using Safari in a production environment is something like corporate "AOLTimeWarner" making everybody use AOL for their mail instead of Outlook because MS was a competitor (e.g. not a good idea). It's great for casual browsing I'm sure, just not great for a production environment.
Also in news I have discovered the secret of one of my most annoying pet peaves in Macintosh OS 10 (not ex!): lack of an ability to use CTRL+arrow keys to jump from one word to the next in a line of text. Previously I didn't think it was possible, though jumping from the beginning to end and vice versa was possible. Now I know that it is possible: just hold down the option key and use the arrow keys. This can also be combined with shift to select a word at a time. Oh sure this doesn't much matter to anyone else but it was one feature I sorely missed! And now I know how to do it. Now if only the home/end key would move the cursor to the start/end of a line or at least the common method (apple key+arrows I believe) could be universal.
In some other news I have managed to get the average time of my tech calls down to around 17 minutes (very close to target) and the "first call resolution" up to 91.8%, the highest on my team although I was not recognized for this in the team meeting today (and I'm really bitter about it, ok not really).
Ok now I'll rant about the calls I've had to take. Actually they really havne't been that bad. I've had plenty of rather short ones as a matter of fact. However today I ended up with a rather interesting one: the user could not connect with his
Airport Express. Actually he could connect to the Internet, a cable connection, successfully but only his ISP's default "you need to register this computer" page would come up. This indicates his ISP needs the MAC address of the airport express in order for it to work. As it turns out he gave the ISP the "Airport ID" of his airport express as opposed to the "Ethernet ID". This all is just fancy talk for MAC addresses. So I just told him how to find the Ethernet ID of his airport and told him to talk to the friggin ISP again. Fine, end of call.
Then at the end of the day I get another call FROM THE SAME GUY who says he was just on the phone for HOURS with his ISP and he can only get to web pages via their IP address: obviously a DNS issue. So WHY IS THIS MY PROBLEM? Am I in charge of the DNS server for the ISP? No! So why am I even on this call? Fine I'm hit on the stupid "first call resolution" anyway so I may as well fix it for him. I told him go into the configuration utility for his airport (called "Airport Admin Utility" oddly enough) and look at his settings for the DNS server. There's an IP address in it. I tell him to erase the IP address entered, update the settings and restart the computer.
Actually the computer restart was a nice of way saying "shut up and wait for 30 seconds for the thing to update" but I digress.
Anyway when the computer came back up he tried the Internet and it worked. So it was the stupid ISP's DNS server that was messed up. So the ISP could have said something to the effect of "consult documentation that came with airport to do following: erase entered DNS server setting and update the router". That could have saved apple computer a phone call. BUT OH NO they had to have the poor guy call apple back. Stupid ISPs.
The only way I have been able to avoid this would have been to either show him or email him the article on how to perform a "factory default reset" of his airport and have him do that before re-contacting the ISP. Ok, so I learned something. Although such a thing hardly seemed necessary at the time I mean after all the airport seemed to be functioning alright so why would it need a reset? Why am I so annoyed by this? Damn! Don't take your work home with you, don't you know that?
