Call back Tomorrow

I can't believe it's been so long since my last post over here. I did have a holiday after all. Yes, even my work gives out some days off. And the days surrounding the holiday? Special "holiday" schedules: everybody comes in at 6:30am at the latest and stays until 3:30 at the latest. At least I did get to go home early for a change. It was a bit of shock having to wake up so early but some how I survived.

Thanks Giving, yesterday more specifically, I went down to see some relatives. Actually I drove down to see my sister on Wednesday night. I left work and drove all the way up to where I live (an hour drive) got some things together and then drove all the way down to my sister's place, 90+ minutes drive. I did this because the computer I just got through paying off ($300) as my sister's wedding gift had something wrong with the HDD and none of my fantabulous over-the-phone solutions seemed to be getting any where. So I packed up my slip-streamed copy of Windows 2000 upgrade and NT 4 (it's an upgrade after all) along with Bart's PE and headed down there.

Now you see my sister and her new husband wanted to take their computer with them on their wedding day because they thought they needed a computer. But I convinced them to let me have it a bit longer so I could make some backups, i.e. ghost disks, of the setup so they easily recover if they had some kind of HDD crash.

So what happens? Their HDD crashed. There's my $300 for me. I go through all kinds of gymnastics to get the damn thing back up. Finally it's more than obvious the HDD is simply gone. Unless I could have really formatted it at a "low level". They may have reset enough of it maybe it could be used. Even that's doubtful. So I did attempt the stupid ghost disks I made SPECIFICALLY for this purpose and what happens? The damn things didn't work. Ok had I brought a long a bootable DOS CD or the non-infamous "Live Win98 CD" I made when I was unemployed (see my blog archives) maybe I could have patched together so kind of a restore ghost image thing. Although he HDD seemed to be giving off enough errors I don't think it would have gone through. I could have used on the HDD I ended up using for her: the one from her old computer, a Packard bell she still had stored in the closet.

But I didn't have a DOS CD or any other way to use those stupid Ghost CDs I made just so I could avoid spending entirely too long re-installing Windows 2000 and applying al the updates. But guess what: I spent a large portion of time re-installing Windows 2000 and applying all the stupid updates. And I couldn't even make anew ghost CD. All around I really dropped the ball with the whole I.T. guy thing. My sister's computer is now running though. Albeit with firewall software setup she really doesn't know how to use but really needs with that direct cable connection.

I guess I'm done ranting for now. I need to get to bed.

  ¶ 9:34 PM 0 Comments  

 

"Fog Hat"

Today was ridiculously foggy on the way to work. Actually from where I left from work the weather was perfectly sunny (I even wore sun glasses for part of the commute) however after a minor decline in elevation into the valley the fog came on and came on thick. Seemed almost like as soon as I passed the county line there was the fog thick as anything. Almost like a hat of some sort, a fog hat you might say.

And what does matter you may ask? As if by omen my day at work didn't go so well. For you see call-center-centric corporations such as the one I work for like to concentrate on how long employees spend on average of the phone. This make sense of course: why wouldn't a business whose main income depends directly the amount time employees spend on the phone care about time spent on the phone, keeping track meticulously?

But today my today my "call duration" did not go so well. Seems I didn't get enough rest last night and this left my mind in a less-than-ideal-state. It was like my mind was in a haze, a fog hat if you will. This can be directly tied to my amount of sleep for you see yesterday I had extremely good call duration as matter of fact. Yesterday (Tuesday) was actually my Monday because I have Sunday/Mondays off. I did manage a lot of sleep that night and over the weekend.

And of course that was the day the expert came in to listen in on my phone calls to see where there could be any room for improvement. Yesterday, the best phone call time I have had since I started working for Apple. Which was also quite sunny all day even in the valley.

So what am I trying to say? Fog sucks. Sleep sucks. Work sucks. And I need to get bed.

Also I'm really writing this on the 18th because the original draft of this post was accidentally closed before it could be saved. Just pretend it's the 17th.

  ¶ 8:07 PM 0 Comments  

 

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?

  ¶ 8:06 PM 0 Comments  

 

"Would that it were"

Ok so I wanted to do an entry on Monday night to talk about the election. But I didn't get the time. Nor Tuesday since I was watching the election. Nor yesterday because I was working on the wireless network with my roommate in the condo here. But today I will make any entry.

And really I don't have a whole lot to say. I've been saying for about 6 months now Kerry has already lost, past tense. I did have the slightest bit of self-doubt the last week or so but I knew Bush would win. That he deserved it I couldn't say. I always new anybody-but-guys were under dogs. As are senators with less-then-spectacular records. Which isn't to say Kerry got so few votes, he really got quite a few. Just 3 million fewer then Bush.

The ironic thing to me is that the liberals seemed more than willing to accept the presidency had Kerry won Ohio, allowing a victory via Electoral College. The very thing these very same people were trying to get rid of 4 years ago after gore lost in electoral only. Upon pointing out such a minor, annoying details these liberals would of course see nothing inconsistent in their various views. So given Ohio Kerry would have won electoral college-wise but lost the popular vote by 3 million when obviously Gore was the real legit President with his extra 500,000 popular votes.

But I'm getting too distracted on fictional scenarios here. Truth is Kerry lost Ohio and lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. I didn't know by how much Kerry would lose but I did know Kerry would lose. I can only conclude it was because of the incredibly stupid way his campaign was run. But what do I know.

In other news I've only barely made progress in the novel-in-a-month project I've joined. I made an entry and saved it as a draft in other words. I should be working on it now but I'm entering in this blog instead.

I've actually been renting a lot of movies lately. Sometimes there's just nothing on TV and I just have to see something half-entertaining.

I just saw the new Dawn of the Dead, I believe is a remake of an older movie. Frankly I didn't find that fresh or new or at all scary what-so-ever. One aspect of the DVD I did like however was a couple features separate from the movie: a news report and a separate home video of a minor character each lasting about 25 minutes.

The newscast was actually on a TV in the background of a few scenes. On the DVD the entire newscast inter-cut from every few hours in a 24 hour (something like that) period.

The feature was of a character the main characters only talked via pen board and binoculars over the month the movie takes part over. In the movie the character is just a guy on another roof holding up a sign with very few lines and even then only over a radio. In the feature for the DVD that character keeps a chronicle of he plite via a home video camera, eventually ending the way it did in the movie but from his perspective. I thought this was quite creative and fit in perfectly with the rest of the movie.

Overall I still thought the movie was rather weak. Somehow I expected a further explanation of how the zombies came to life. Whether by military substance or some other freak happenstance, the circumstances are never explained. At least not so far as I can remember.

I also finally saw Van Helsing. I realize this is supposed to kind of like a cartoon or comic book or whatever but even given that some of the scenes are really out there and over-the-top. Not that bad of a movie overall I guess and I couldn't say specifically what could have been done differently that I would have liked it more, I just thought it was a little too fantastic even for the given scenario.

  ¶ 7:50 PM 0 Comments  

 

Ya know I really thought I might actually have a bit more to write about once I had a job, but as I can see now really I do not. All I can really do at this point is whine and complain about the callers I must baby sit on the every day.

For instance why is the concept of a "startup chime" so difficult. It's a chime at startup of your computer. Thus the name (say it with me) startup chime. It should be rather obvious this refers to the chime at startup thus if you're logged in right now restart the computer, thus giving you the startup chime. Enough sarcasm yet? Good : ).

I really do enjoy this blogger. I mean I don't contribute to it as much as I think I should but the actual web site and feature-set are quite nice and new features are constantly being added. On the opening page for the blogger account for instance are nice little pointers on new features and new ways of doing things.

A couple weeks ago (apparently) was this new feature/event called National Novel Writing Month. In that spirit a two-part article (part 1, part 2) was written to introduce the concept, along with a sample blog made to look like a book format.

And why mention all this? I'm half inspired to try to participate, that's why. Yes, starting up the old "Mystery short story" or "Mysterious Short Story" or whatever, that'd be fun. And of course the motivation of participating with other people and maybe I'll even have some kind of audience who provides feedback. Maybe.

I'm not sure I could do 50,000 words in a single month however. According to the article that works out to about 7 pages a day. I mean sure between this blog and all the notes I take for work I'm getting a writing fill but I'm not sure I could write that much.

So though I would expect I'll come up short of the 50,000-word goal I still think it would be a fun thing to do. Not mention perhaps all that activity on the blog will attract some attention of visitors.

This weekend I drove down to my little sister's place. She lives about 2 hours away (when there's traffic and speed limits). I went down there to set up her computer for her and just visit. Of course I missed the off-ramp at first so I had to back track. Wasn't too terribly bad though, I managed to find the place.

I was planning on starting on the novel and/or working on my VCR mod computer yesterday but hey delivering a wedding present to a sister works just as well. This morning I left around 11:00 and finally got home about 1:20, albeit with a few stops. So here I am with a whole rest-of-the-day in front of me and what I am doing? Super VCR Mod: no. Working on a novel-in-a-month: no. Writing in the other blog like I have something have-important to say or something.

I did rent a movie: Dawn of the Dead. I don't know if will be any good. I don't even know why I wanted to see it. And uhh...ya it all ties into politics. Democrats will register and vote with dead citizens in their attempt to win so it is like the Dawn of the Dead. Yes, that's the ticket. Ok enough of that. I'm ending this entry now.

  ¶ 7:59 PM 0 Comments