Random thoughts, organized and categorized for your consumption.
Rants
If I have a problem with something, here it will be.
SBC DSL Woes
Jun 18th
Is it too much to ask that I just get what I paid for?
After more than 30 days, I still have slower DSL speed, over charged pricing, and no resolution to my series of phone calls to SBC. No one department seems to care about the customer experience, only their little portion of it. There is ordering, provisioning, tech support, and billing. And goodness, if they don’t all happen to be in different buildings and in some cases different time zones.
This leaves me with a very bad taste in my mouth for SBC. If I had a real alternative to More >
Schedule Slips
Jun 17th
Another week goes by with me in Taiwan and I ponder the following thought as I sit here looking out at the Taipei 101 building: do project schedules ever work out?
It seems to be that whenever I leave the office for any period of time, one of my products has a schedule slip or it gets put on hiatus. I’m not sure how much this has to do with me leaving, but it certainly seems more visible from the road. Because I’m away I feel like it is out of my control, or the decision was made because I wasn’t More >
Hosting Issues
Jun 14th
I just spent the better part of an hour running down a bug with my new web host. The PHP function mail() is great if it works. It sucks when it doesn’t because I can find very little information on how to troubleshoot it. By luck, I happened to Google my host’s name along with “mail() not working” and found an answer.
Sometimes it pays to search closer to home rather than all over the web, I learned. At least now I know why it didn’t work. Next time I’ll be more careful, I suppose.
WiFi Media Devices
Jun 6th
I’ve spent enough time in my new place to realize that I need a way to get at music from any floor, at any time, without dragging a laptop around. So this morning I started out on a fruitless search for the “perfect” WiFi based media adapter. Needless to say, I failed.
All of these devices use 802.11b (there is one g model), support MP3, maybe support WMA or AAC (non-secure). A few support streaming. Most of them required MusicMatch, making them non-starters for me (who needs yet another crappy music player on the PC?) Since I’m a paying Napster subscriber More >
Bad Scripting
May 30th
If you read my previous post, you know I’m bent about picture taking. That’s nothing compared to installing PHP scripts on a server with old PHP and MySQL. The scripts just don’t work and working around the problem is rather difficult.
I think I’ll go lay down and walk away from the PC for a while. Grrr.
Picture Madness
May 30th
I spent the better part of today out shooting pictures of aircraft at a local air show. Problem is I get home and review the pictuers and more than half of them are blurry. Just unusable, blurred pictures. What’s worse, the camera was at its highest speed settings.
So, it comes down to this: is the lens crud or is my auto mode shooting crappy? I’ll post the pictures soon so you can be the judge.
Hectic Schedules
May 27th
I would love to say that I am enjoying the new place (more on that subject later) but these days it always seems to be about work when I get home. In fact, just taking the time to do this update is tough. It makes me wonder how homeowners and people with families do it every day. Maybe they are less busy or more willing to space out all the “to do’s” than I am.
In any case I am ramping up for another few months of travel. The kickoff will be Taiwan again, followed by a whole lot of state More >
Travel Gone Crazy
May 1st
I’m back in town for a few days between the many trips I’ve been elected to attend. It certainly seems like more time is spent in hotels, airports, and meeting rooms than at home these days. In a way it is nice to be out of the office from time to time. But, when you are out for weeks at a time it can become a bit tiresome. And right now I’m exhausted.
More challenging still is trying to close on a house purchase while traveling. It isn’t easy and in this case it is my first purchase. So I am More >
The Great Cleanup
Apr 22nd
It seems as though work never ends these days. I have just had a full day of clean up at work where every possible box, board, and spare part that went unused for the past several months went into the scrap heap. Fine, you say.
I come home and then start to the task of doing exactly the same thing with books, hardware, clothing and anything else I own in preparation for the inevitable move ahead (more on that later). Also fine, you say.
On top of all that I am going through the slogging process of de-HTML-izing another web site I More >
Crazy Travel
Apr 6th
I just found out today that for the next 3 weeks I’ll be going all over the middle and eastern US on various visits. Each trip will consume at least 3 days out of the week and each day I’ll be in a different city and different state.
I’ll have to take the camera with me because I can’t imagine that I’ll have anyone believe all the places I have to visit. Just you wait and see.