Tuesday June 08, 2004

Treed

My wife got a picture of a bear the local dogs treed across the street from our house. ( Jun 08 2004, 10:07:00 PM PDT ) Permalink

Jam Bands I hadn't seen many bands in a while but within the last few months I've seen Blues Traveler, Younder Mountain String Band, moe., and Los Lobos as Caesar's Tahoe (promoted by renegade). I'd seen Blues Traveler before. For the first few songs I thought they were going to break down. The band just didn't seem to be communicating. But as the show progressed they jelled and put on a very good show. The other bands were all new experiences for me and real treats. Younder and moe. are excellent jam bands that turned out excellent second sets. In both cases I thought the first sets were a little weak. Los Lobos was just a party! What a great band. ( Jun 08 2004, 04:29:14 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Two O'Reilly books I recently read _Essential Blogging_ by Cory Doctorow, et. al. (ISBN 0-596-00388-9) and _Content Syndication with RSS_ by Ben Hammersley (ISBN 0-596-00383-8) both published by O'Reilly. Both books are roughly 200 pages and are fairly easy reads. The blogging book is a hands on manual to the various blogging packages that are available. Its does a reasonable job at helping somebody pick some software to use and then get up the blogging learning curve. As a blogging practitioners guide its a reasonable book. It contains some design tips, but that is definitely not its strength. The RSS book covers the RSS protocols as well as some of the software you might use. In covering the various branches of the RSS protocol the author is also forced into covering the history of RSS as well as some of the community issues. This makes for an interesting read. ( Jun 08 2004, 04:20:17 PM PDT ) Permalink

Customer Service

I've had 3 customer service nightmares lately. Its not clear to me if some companies understand how distasteful it is to work with them.

The first was with Handspring and Cingular. My Treo 180g died. I _wanted_ to buy a Treo 600. Here, take my money, please. I'll sign a contract. I've been month to month with Cingular for a while and they have been working me to sign a contract. There is a nice offer on the handspring website for a discount on a Treo 600 with new service activation. Talking to Cingular they think I should be able to get the discount but they can't sell me the phone. Handspring won't give me the discount unless I switch to Sprint or get a new line. So Cingular says I should sign for a new line, get the discount, and then get rid of the old line and transfer the old number over to the new phone. Sounds good. Phone ordered, comes early, all is fine. Until I call Cingular and they say there is not way I can transfer the number. How does the saying go? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Guess I won't be buying from either company next time.

The second was with buy.com. I order a Kingston 512MB SD for my Treo 600 (almost got the Sandisk 1GB but availability wasn't clear nor could I find anybody who had used one in a Treo 600). A day later I get an email stateing that since this was my first order (it wasn't) and my address didn't match my credit card (it does everywhere else) they needed special confirmation. The email stated I could call or send an "enote". I replied to the email giving the situation and given I didn't get a bounce went along my business. Later that day I called to check and found out that they ignored emails. On the positive side as soon as the customer service agent realized it was there mess he quickly said he would fix it and I went about my business. I received the product the next day.

The last was with Amazon. I ordered some books and noticed while tracking them that they had arrived in my home town via some previously unheard of courier and had been returned for a bad address. I get lots of books from Amazon and immediately send a request to them for an explanation. They came back and said I would have to fix the problem and then reorder. That once something like this happened it was up to the customer to reorder. I immediately ordered from another company. Almost 10 days later I got an automated email saying the same thing. Guess they didn't want my business. ( Jun 08 2004, 02:41:32 PM PDT ) Permalink

unrealized equity I played in a small (~200 people) tournament at the Reno Hilton this last weekend. I got to the last table with the biggest stack (~69K) by a small amount. I then was doubled through from a medium sized stack (~20K) when he came over the top of an earlier position opener with AA and I couldn't lay down QQ. I'd been playing with him most of the day and knew he could make psycho all-ins when he thought he could get the blinds and antes but probably should have laid down since he was raising an opener. Later he busted trying the same move with QJs. Oh well. The person two to my right (after the previous person mentioned busted) had been stealing fairly frequently. I restole once and picked up blinds, antes, and his steal. I had rebuilt my stack into the #2 spot. A short time later I was in the small blind when the stealer raised from the cutoff. I looked down to see AA and moved in. He called _immediately_. He had KK. I was a 4.5:1 favorite. Alas he caught a King on the river. I was left crippled and exited in 8th a short time later happy with my performance but not so happy with the result ;) ( Jun 08 2004, 01:58:28 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Intro

I'm a software engineer at Sun currently working in the Network area. My formal education is in Mathematics although by the time I received my undergraduate education I had already spent much of my life writing code.

You can check out my current personal project at puppies. ( Jun 08 2004, 12:08:45 PM PDT ) Permalink