Painting, Again

For those of you that have visited me in the past six months, you're familiar with the 2'x2' patches of beige paint on the delightful lime sherbet-colored walls in my kitchen and powder room. This afternoon I took steps to turn the entire walls into the beige color. Yay me!

Step one was removing the trim. The upper trim on the kitchen wall broke as it came off, so replacing and upgrading is in store for that. Not a big deal. The baseboard trim gave me a little trouble but it's not fatal, either. When I redid the entry-way last Winter, I upgraded, so I have some pretty good lengths of spare trim which I can cannibalize.

The people that owned the house prior to me, in addition to having questionable taste in paint colors, had the original vinyl floor in the kitchen replaced with laminate at some point in their ownership and they didn't remove the baseboard trim. That means, in addition to a visible wall-to-floor joint, I had to wrestle with the small pieces of rim abutting the cupboard. The layout of the flooring and trim is not the way I would do it and I'm notorious for using shortcuts, so you know it's bad. It may accelerate my plans to put tile on the kitchen floor, or I could just get used to it. Even money on that bet.

There is a lot of surface prep to do before primer hits wall, so it will be next weekend at the earliest before I dig out the paint brushes. When this project is done, which I still hope will be in 2009, I will start the kitchen backsplash project. No guarantees though that the backsplash will be done, or even started, it 2009.

Curses! Foiled Again, for the First Time

President Obama is visiting the Twin Cities today. While I have no desire to go to the event, I live under the incoming flight paths for planes going to the Minneapolis-St Paul airport. Here in the wrong side of Fabulous Minnetonka, arriving planes fly low and slow enough to allow me to capture some good airborne photographs. I was hoping to get a few good snapshots as Air Force One flew over, but it was not to be. Incoming planes are coming in from the east today, so no flyovers in my neighborhood. I knew something was bading poorly for my photographs about 7:30 this morning, when I'd been up for 15 minutes and hadn't heard a single plane coming in.

I saw AF1 come in three times over the years when the pretender was in it. The plane flew so low each time I felt I could reach up and touch it. I couldn't have caught it, though, as it was moving maybe twice as fast as a regular 747 does on arrival. I guess you can fly as fast as you want when they clear the skies for you.

I'll try to get some pictures the next time President Obama is in town. Since my brother and sister-in-law live under the east side arrival patterns, I'll make arrangements to watch from their house if the skies are quiet on my side of town. Or maybe I can get CJ to take the pictures for me and I won't even have to get up. Hmm...

Pizza Tonight

My Domino's Pizza delivery guy tonight was named Olexander. He had a vaguely eastern European look to him and he grunted in what could have been Russian monosyllables. That got me thinking about some of the people I worked with at Domino's in my hometown. At times, good old American mutts like myself were outnumbered by the foreign-originated guys. The university in my hometown seemed to recruit international students and many of them liked to deliver pizzas.

There was Biplab, from India.

Saleem, from Jordan, I think.

Ali, from Iran. He came to Minnesota from Germany, so his Persian accent had a distinctly German tinge.

Mikhail, from Georgia. Soviet, not peach. Actually I don't think that's how he spelled his name. It sounded exactly like Michael, but wasn't spelled that way.

Jabran. I have no idea where he was from, could have been anywhere from Bangladesh to Cypress, but his English was very good.

Park, from South Korea.  Technically, Park was his last name, but he'd rather we call him that than mangle his given name.

I think we had a Kuwaiti or UAE native at one point but I can't recall his name. There were others too, no doubt but those are the ones that stand out.

In non-foreign names, we had a Kyra, pronounced Keer-ah but everyone, employees included, called her Kye-rah. Or maybe it was the other way around. It's been a long time.

We had an Ann, but I called her Annabel. After a few months, other people started to as well. One of several reasons she ended up disliking me. A lot.

Oh, and if anyone's wondering, yes, I brought Susan amaretto sours in that 32 oz sip container on slow nights when she was running the inside. She wasn't a driver, folks, and she was, well,  hot.  What's a guy to do?

This stroll down memory lane was brought to you by my forgetfulness. I have to wait 30 minutes after taking my evening pill before eating and I remembered to take it just as Olexander was pulling in the driveway. At least the pizza won't burn the roof of my mouth tonight. Done that more than a few times in my years in the trenches.

The Postal Service

People like to badmouth the US Postal Service. Well, how about this? I ordered a CD from an Amazon Marketplace seller on Friday. It was in my mailbox Monday. Two days to get a CD from Indiana to Minnesota in perfectly good shape.

Good job, mail people.

Fav-ree

I used to be a rabid Vikings fan. All my life until January 1999, when Gary Anderson missed a field goal and the Vikings missed out on going to the Super Bowl. It broke me. I became indifferent to the sport and to the Vikings in particular.

Today, the Minnesota Vikings signed Bret Farve to be their quarterback. I officially no longer give a crap at all about the Vikings. The logic of employing their greatest rival, a guy who smacked them down at will for 16 years is totally lost on me. I just don't give a crap anymore.

Why I'm in Favor of Health Care Reform

Want to know why I'm in favor of a public option for health care, preferably single-payer?

My employer selected United Health Care (UHC) as our medical insurance administrator. They've done a fine job for me so far, no complaints aside from a kludgy web site.

The CEO of UHC has cashed in over $127 million in stock options SO FAR in 2009.  He's eligible to exercise another $744 million.

I would rather have a government bureaucrat deciding my health care claims using rules set by Congress than a UHC bureaucrat deciding the claims based on a missive from a CEO trying to maximize shareholder value.

There are other reasons, no doubt, but that's the only reason I need.

24x7

Let's start using the familiar phrase "24x7" correctly. You usually hear it as "24x7x365."

The 24 refers to 24 hours in a day. No problem.

The 7 refers to the days in a week. No problem.

There are 365 days in a year. Huh? We've already gone from days to weeks, now we're back to days? That's stupid. It's also very common.

Logically, it should go from days to weeks to years - 24x7x52. It's even more logical and simpler to say 24x365.

Of course, it's even simpler to skip the cliche and just say "All the time," but people love to speak in gibberish (including me). So let's just think it through.

If you need to emphasive something that's always there, just say "24 hours."

If you want to emphasize a week, it's "24x7."

If you want to point out something that is present for an annual period, it's "24x7x52."

Let's take it to a comic extreme. Why stop at a year? Why start with an hour? 60x60x24x7x52x100x10. That's seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, centuries in a millenium.

Unless you're talking about dogs. A dog-year could be described as 24x7x365.

I'm not a dog person.

I Don't Know What I Did

But it worked. My internet service is back up.

I work in customer support, so I know firsthand that things that shouldn't break do, and things that have no business working work, but I didn't do anything to my computer that should have made a difference, yet here we are.

Since the built-in ethernet connection wasn't working, I slipped the ethernet card from my old computer into the new one. After an hour of tinkering with no success, I pulled out the card and rebooted. As soon as I enabled the on-board port, my internet connection was restored. That's right, all I did was put in a card that I really didn't think would help, then removed it. And it fixed the connection.

I'm so excited by this development that, after I post this on the blog, I'm not going to do anything that might make the connection break.

I didn't hear from the cycle shop today so I don't know how lucky I am overall, but at this moment, things are looking up.

Shhhh. Don't jinx it.

If It Weren't for Bad Luck...

I've had a string of bad luck the past couple of weeks. I still have my health, but somedays it feels like the world is out to get me.

The air conditioning in my car went out at the beginning of last summer. I've been putting off getting it repaired because of the expense, and because I usually don't use the car very much during the summer. I am using it more this summer because...

The starter went out on my Goldwing. It's in the shop right now. Hopefully, it won't be too major of a repair. It's under warranty so my pocketbook should be OK, but the Minnesota cycling season is short enough the way it is - don't want to miss too many beautiful July days.

When I built my new computer, I was never able to make it network with the old one, so I put off moving programs and data over to the new one. That's bad luck on top of the human failing of procrastination. That caused more bad luck.

The old computer died the other night. Diagnostics point to the mother board as the culprit. Fine, the hard drives survived, so I took them out and tried to make them work in the new computer. Not so easy - more bad luck. The new computer kept using an old hard drive as the boot drive. After three painful hours, I realized that the new computer's BIOS was automatically setting itself to use the most recently installed hard drive as the boot drive, even though I was setting the C: drive manually. Maddening.

I made it work and was able to copy files over after that, but...

My internet connection failed. Last night, I spent three hours diagnosing it, including 45 minutes on the phone with Comcast Tech Support. It turns out I had at least three issues at once, or maybe one issue that affected three components. The Comcast guy and I got the cable modem to connect again, then after another hour of tinkering, I was able to get the router back up, but the new computer is still not working. I can see that the computer is connected to the router but it's not connecting to the internet. Maddening.

So I've had a string of bad luck lately. Yet, it's not all bad. No one in the pre-industrial world had air conditioning in their house, like I do. No one had refrigerated food. No one had a device in their pocket that could contact another person anywhere in the world, like I do. No one had the ability to watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" at a time of their choosing, like I do. No one had a device in their other pocket that would play their 9000 favorite songs at any time, either.

I have a bunch of conveniences and I have my health. But it still sucks to not have the internet or a motorcycle.

(written and posted at work)

A Day at the Office

Having trouble picturing what I do at work all day? I get e-mails like this, chock full of jargon. I'll translate below. Names have been changed to protect the innocent and avoid lawsuits filed by the guilty.



From: Mr A
Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009
To: ~Reroute Group
Subject: XYZ reroute

I put a skip on XYZ today as a result of troubles we are having with them. We are getting 503 messages with delay of 4 or more seconds causing PDD on the reroute. We are also getting 504 messages indicating gateway timeout after 20 seconds. The 504 messages are dead air calls if they are reported. From the hammer it looked like 10% of the calls to XYZ are having this problem. We also have a number of trouble tickets on calls trying to route to XYZ.

Mr B/NOC is working with XYZ to resolve this problem. When they fix the problem we can increase the SIM’s on trunk group XXXX.

Mr A



Context:

My company provides long distance service to other companies at a wholesale level. We do this by connecting to several other networks, known as carriers. In this e-mail, XYZ is one of our underlying carriers.

Mr A is Translations Engineer for my employer. He decides where calls should route on our network.

Reroute group is a handful of people - like me - who need to know when we have network issues.

A skip is an override in our Lowest Cost Routing tables (LCR). The skip tells the network to treat XYZ as if it doesn't exist. The LCR is a database table that the network uses to determine the cheapest way to route a call.

A 503 message is an error code that you would see if you were logged into a Translations terminal. It means calls are talking too long to connect.

PDD is Post Dial Delay. When you dial a phone number, the amount of time after you enter the 10th digit until the destination switch sends a signal that it is ringing the call is known as the post dial interval. Ideally, the post dial interval should be measured in milliseconds. If you have to refer to the post dial interval as PDD, that's bad. PDD of four or more seconds is very bad. PDD that lasts until the timeout limit of 20 seconds is monstrously bad.

A 504 message is an error code indicating that a carrier has taken a call but hasn't connected it nor have they sent back any indication why the call isn't connecting. This is not a message you want to see. After 20 seconds, the network times out, or stops trying to connect the call.

The Hammer. I have no idea what that means.

10% means that XYZ is connecting most calls (90%) just fine but is trying to offload some of the calls to another carrier and not succeeding. The calls they are not connecting are probably ones that cost a lot to terminate. XYZ has their own LCR and it is busy trying to offload the calls to another carrier who doesn't know how much the calls cost to terminate, aka a sucker. In theory, XYZ should begin termination of all calls in a few milliseconds and do it on their network. In practice, they'll spend a few seconds trying to find another sucker to do it. That 504 error tells us they didn't find a sucker and they won't do it themselves.

A trouble ticket is a way to report and track troubles.

Mr B is the supervisor of the Network Operations Center. When stuff breaks on the network, the NOC fixes it.

SIM stands for simultaneous call. It's a measure of capacity - how many calls are being simulaneously fed into a trunk group.

A Trunk Group is a circuit going from point A to point B, in this case from our network to XYZ's.

The last paragraph can be summarized thusly: Mr Y will see if XYZ is aware of the problem or not. If it's intentional, we stop sending them calls for a while. It may be unintentional, which means that when they fix the problem on their network, Mr X will increase the number of calls we send them (remove the skip).

This is an ordinary message from an ordinary day for me. There's plenty more jargon where this came from.