How many times have you picked up your VoIP phone and not had a dialtone and said, “damnit, service is out again.” I can’t count the number of tech calls I have been a part of or heard about where a piece of equipment suddenly stopped working and the user declared, with passion generally reserved for Samuel L. Jackson and Al Paccino at the climax of a movie, that they were positive it was plugged in and it just stopped working. After a long line of troubleshooting, unplugging and replugging it in miraculously cures the ailment, clearly a function of some latent factory problem.

Since purchasing my 1994 car some three years ago, I have on three different occasions forgotten that it has a kill switch on the ignition. If it sits for some small period of time, the kill switch engages and the engine won’t turn over. Lights work, radio works, but trying to start it results in a non-response. If the ignition is not fully disengaged, for instance if it is slightly on and leaves the radio playing, pushing the unlock will not disengage the kill switch. After forty-five minutes of non-response from Verizon’s roadside assistance, I walked out to the car, pressed the unlock button, heard the familiar “BEEP BEEP”, started the car and drove to the office. Even the pros sometimes forget to follow the basic troubleshooting steps and end up falling into the assumption ravine.

Two minutes of stepping back, forgetting that I know everything, and following a basic checklist would have saved me a lot of time and embarrassment.

Skype’s login service is down.

Other than a brief post:

Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype – we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruption to your conversations

Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal – thanks for your continued patience

What are we doing to help? Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal. This may take a few hours, and we sincerely apologise for the disruption to your conversations.

TAM. UR Shrt hnd SMS wil mak it ezer 2 cmpt 4 jobz.

Lol.

-People Who Write in English.

P.S. It’s 2010, phones and computers both have full keyboards, and vowels are free. There is no excuse for writing like an idiot.

P.P.S. We are working to form the LOL Verification Network, where a random sample of LOL posts will be validated to ensure the poster is actually laughing out loud when posting. Those found to be claiming to have LOL’d while not actually laughing will be fined and could face punishment up to and including revocation of speaking privileges and other penalties by the cyber police.

"Put down the phone. Slowly walk away. Say hi to the person next to you. Yes, that's a human. Yes, they are real."

Too much technology consumes our daily lives.

Ironic topic for a blog post? Probably. Blasphemous for a guy whose entire livelihood depends on the fact that internet connections barely even dreamable ten years ago are available at his house? Sure. True? Absolutely.

Last week I took four plane rides (thanks Usairways* for $27 first class upgrades) and spent four days on a cruise. In the airport, my disappointment towards people engaged in asinine, pointless conversations simply to avoid feeling disconnected made me sad. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide* they talk of a planet where the inhabitants need to talk constantly in order to keep their brains from working— well friends… we are there. Today, planes offer cell and wi-fi service so you can stay connected on the go. As a DBA, server admin and technology leader in a small team handling high-transaction, high-availability systems, I understand that emergencies happen. I have solved many problems driving 70+ mph down I-75 on my Verizon aircard (Passenger seat). That said — in over ten years of “mission critical” system responsibility, I have never had a business need that I couldn’t defer or delegate for less than six hours to take a flight.

On the cruise, we left the technological world behind. When I wanted to meet up with my friends, we had to pre-arrange it or just *gasp* roam around and find one another. We couldn’t call or text or tweet or blog. For almost four entire days, we used nothing but direct, personal communication. It was glorious.

No conversations were interrupted by an “urgent” phone call. No one secluded themselves in a private world by clinging to someone on the other end of a mobile phone. People actually interacted with new people. People made new friends. People spent time with old friends. Relationships were formed. Some of them ended with departure from a foreign port, some when the boat docked, some will end next week, or next month, and a precious few will last a lifetime. This is the silent victim of the new media revolution.

Email, blogs, Facebook, geocities, etc. were a way for friends to network and keep up with one another across great distances. Even when I was young (and using BBS‘s), the virtual world was a gateway to making real-world relationships. Now it’s the replacement. We use instant messaging, text messaging, Facebooking, MySpacing and Youtubing to avoid real, meaningful human contact. We don’t make friends anymore, we make virtual acquaintances.

Technology becomes cheaper, faster, more accessible. The disease spreads. The art and beauty of human contact dies an unceremonious death. We won’t even notice till three weeks later, when the smell is finally enough to tip someone off. By then, it will be gone and there will be no bringing it back.

Is it too late? Am I overly dramatic?

I take comfort in the backlash…could this bring the next next step,  marketing of premium, anti-technology travel?

“For every market, a sub-market grows…” -Grave Robber

*Footnote: Apologies to Fred for shout-outs to two of his nemeses, Amazon and USAirways.

Sick of obtaining low numbers of useless visitors for your website?

This was the opening line of a spam comment on one of our posts today.

Who would be sick of not obtaining useless visitors? Is basic English grammar really in such short supply that none of the spammers can get a passable proofreader?

I am SUPER happy with the numbers of useless visitors to our website. I am also happy with the useful ones. I will sleep easier knowing someone else out there is caring about how many useless visitors we get.

Atlas heard about this venture and shrugged...(cause he had the whooooole world....)

I was introduced to a fun little “tool” today: Find the shortest route between two Wikipedia articles.

The first thing I tried was an analysis of the path from Death to VoIP, and I discovered Death to VoIP takes a direct path through my hometown of Chattanooga, TN. So then I became concerned with my own mortality, and found:

• Patrick’s path to death is via Christianity.

If I am going , I want to know about Fred:

• Fred’s path to death is via marriage.

From Patrick to Fred is just a simple set of name shuffles:

• Patrick -> Rick -> Fredrick -> Fred

Fred to Patrick is a little more complex, and involves Spongebob Squarepants.

For the wealth-minded:

• Rags to Riches requires a path through Boston, MA.

And the often inquired about connection betwen VoIP and Ben Affleck?

• VoIP -> Caribbean -> Turks and Caicos Islands -> Ben Affleck

Turns out anything can be connected via wikipedia…try it! Leave comments on the ones we might find funny!

Comcast...Cares?

I am leaving you this note on the fridge because I can’t bear to face you.  I can’t bear seeing the look in your eyes when I tell you that it’s over. This off again, on again blamefest has come to an end. I was always there to support you financially, but you never reciprocated with the kind of love, the kind of consistency I needed in my life.

This isn’t easy for me. As I close this chapter in the book that is yet to be finished, I know I will look back on our times together with some hints of fondness. I am sure we will cross paths again, someday. I hope that we can smile, exchange greetings, show each other a base level of respect and courtesy.

I have taken the liberty of leaving all of your things at your office, so, aside from this note, this is goodbye.

Or is it…

After ten years of intermittent service, five of which were served in exile between Ohio and Orlando, my often tumultuous relationship with Comcast has come to an end. I now enjoy EPB‘s fiber service with 30mb up/down, and I have yet to experience an outage in my first three months of service. It just works, and works well.

When I called today to cancel my Comcast service, I was informed of a vague and unwritten rule that I would have to continue paying for service for another seven days.

Tip of the day for anyone out there in the business world:

The goodbye is your last, great chance to have a happy customer.

This is it. If you don’t make this customer happy at the cancellation, you have failed. EVERY company has an opportunity when a customer requests termination of service to perform this last great act.

1. Always ask what you could have done better to retain the customer, expect to get some angry responses here.
2. Always be appreciative of the feedback you received, it is priceless.
3. Always close the interaction with an open invitation to return, if possible.

Especially in the VoIP world, where margins are thin and customers are picky, there is this urge to “tax” customer’s to death as they go out the door. There are subtle signs this is turning around, and it should. Much like Comcast insisting I keep and pay for an extra seven days of service, unreasonable and excessive termination fees are the last gasps of a dying machine. Losing a customer is free, if it’s producing enough revenue to help the company, your model is dead.

As with every practice in any business, if it doesn’t produce meaningful revenue and doesn’t improve the customer experience, what is the point?

UPDATE 2010/8/27: In fairness to Comcast, prior to this blog ever being posed. the @comcastcares folks from Twitter took care of the nightmare runaround my local person had given me, and they were also the only source of useful technical assistance in the last three years. Comcast’s entire hope for being around ten years from now lies in being able to scale that team, and that model.

Our Hero

Early humans found hollowed out rocks to turn into homes, originating the term “Cave men”. ¹ This constraint made community difficult, so humans advanced to creating homes from natural materials, such as wood. Primitive homes were modeled on the cave, with nothing but some closed walls and an uncovered opening. Thousands of years of evolution lead us to create doors that open, close, and lock, and windows that allow us to see out and in, then glass to keep what’s out out and what’s in in, then curtains to cover what’s both out and in. In the end, we have the same caves we had before, with our darkness and privacy.

In the 1600′s the Dutch East India company was like the Wal-Mart of the high seas. If you worked on a ship for the DEI, actually called VOC, but let’s not have an acromania tournament over it, you lived day in and day out with the other people on the ship. Everyone knew everyone’s business, and that’s just how it was. There would be no need to do a status update when you went to the head, because everyone watched you go.

With the onset of industrialization and assembly-style production in the 1900′s, factories became central to small towns and people began working together, but their was a similar environment of everyone knew everyone’s family and friends and kids and lifestyle. There just weren’t a lot of secrets. Only in the last 50 years have we moved to the cubiclised, white-collar, technically-oriented jobs where turnover is an expectation and no one really bothers to get to know everyone else. Cliques form, but on the whole there isn’t a sense of community.

In a relatively short span of time, we created a generation and a culture that has a “right to privacy.” We have seen this concept denied by courts who say employers can regulate lifestyle as a condition of employment, and that what an employee does outside of work can still be used against her at work. Drinking, drugs, cigarettes, and even functions allowed to be attended can all be used as conditions of employment in our “right to work” world.  Though it has been upheld time and time again, the belief in this right grows ever stronger.

The political buzzword of the last decade has been “transparency.” We the people should have an open window on the workings of our government, of our corporations, of our financial institutions. We should see how the cogs turn and the deals are made, we should have open access to it all. At the same time, a subculture of companies has grown around controlling the online image of individuals. Ex-boyfriend posted some risque pictures of you? They can fix that. You got fired from your old job for coming to work drunk, and some people decided to blog about it? They can fix that. From the benign to the outright slanderous, companies that specialize in online identity rehab are doing bang up business curing the internet of individuals’ indiscretions.

Should it matter? Should you want to work for a company that would use your facebook status update about hating filing against you in an interview? Does that tweet about being drunk at the Alice In Chains concert make you a bad person or in any way impact your job performance? Are companies better off pretending that their employees don’t have a personal life? Maybe this is the wake up call that companies need to start treating their employees like people. Maybe it’s time to open up the door to the cave and not worry about what others will see, because their cave door is wide open too.

^{1. This is rather vague and unresearched proposition, because this is a tech blog and not an anthropology blog. Please do not blame us when you crib this and fail your class.}

If you want to be judgmental of our thoughts, feel free to follow Fred and Patrick on twitter!

I R Eatz U R Dataz!

I love my netbook. I love my netbook so much, I have two of them (okay, one is the wife’s). Surprisingly, I managed to survive months on nothing but my netbook doing fairly intensive SQL / VoIP / Web work. The hard drive is a little slow, but the overall performance is outstanding.

When I travel, I can use Skype to video chat with the built in webcam and get great quality (both ways) for both picture and sound. It’s like a giant smart phone. It reminds me of the $1000+ “video phones” that were supposed to be the future of talking on the phone… then people realized they really didn’t want to “get pretty” to use the phone. Now, for around $250 a unit, you can have that and so much more.

Recently, my wife’s netbook gave an error on boot that had something to do with a missing windows file (system32\ntoskrnl.exe). Apparently, she’s not the only one with this issue… it seems to be quite common. Of course, as the techie/geek/nerd of the castle, it was my job to slay this dragon and I came across the only problem I have had with this magical mini machine. Not so much a problem… more like open questions to Acer.

1. To access the hard drive, you have to remove 17 screws (maybe more, I think I lost some extras), you have to remove the keyboard, you have to remove the top, you have to remove this little card on top of the mother board, this side circuit board, the motherboard. Then you slide the hard drive out, reverse. Why not put a panel on the bottom to access the hard drive directly?
2. Why can I find nothing in your documentation about Alt-F10? This is a handy mode that lets you recover the operating system to factory defaults, but I don’t see it in my Acer manual.
3. In line with question 2, Why is the only recovery option to completely reset to factory? Since this is basically a stripped version of the OS, why not offer an explorer window so I can copy files to an SD or USB drive before formatting, or just backup the user files to another partition?
4. What degree in sadism lead to the design of the three little clips that hold the keyboard in place?

All told, from error to recovered could have been done in < 30 minutes, and I HIGHLY recommend Acer products to everyone I know. From their higher-end Ferrari laptop to the humble netbook (go with XP home, Windows 7 netbook edition is crippleware garbage), I have never had a problem with their hardware or software that made me lose respect for the brand, which is saying a lot.

For More Information:

• Acer: Acer Aspire One Website
• Skype: Free PC to PC Video Calls