I'd just run into Steny Hoyer, the Democratic Majority Leader, on the street the day before. Stealing a few extra creative minutes on my commute to work, I had pulled out my Moleskin to pen a few notes about the encounter before my stop. Along the way a man in his twenties entered the subway car, cell phone attached to his ear. He sat down in the empty seat next to me. Geez, you sound like you're having a friggin heart attack. I'm just calling you back to say "I love you." Yeah, you too. Bye. Without missing a beat I turned to...
News Outta My Control / 28.02.2007
Running into Politics
Hey wait can I borrow your cape The leader is nowhere to be found, And if you wake up his fans You will not hear a sound. Bobby Bare, Jr.Borrow Your Cape House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer Guess who I ran into yesterday --literally? Steny Hoyer, Democratic Majority Leader of the House. Well, he actually ran into me. He was walking down 9th Street just as I was on my way back to my office after lunch. Synchronously, a nice bio article had just appeared that morning on Hoyer in the Washington Post. I had been moved by the piece's portrayal of his life and slow...
Artistic Tendencies, Fairly Odd Parents-Present / 25.02.2007
The Restorative Effects of an Accomplishment, Any Accomplishment
One of the photos I found that really made my day.
It's Saturday at 5:15 am and I'm awake, anticipating my cat alarm clock will go off at any moment to say "feed me." She does this every morning sometimes starting at 4, meowing and gently touching me on the forehead with her paw to rouse me. She wants to eat. But she doesn't seem to understand on Saturdays I can sleep in, as long as I can fend off thinking of all the things I have to do today.
I get up cautiously so as not to re-injure my lower back. I've been moving very slowly the last few months, like an old man I see hunched over near work. I don't want to end up like him but it's getting close: too close for comfort. I have a lot to do today. Is my tooth hurting again? I can only take one physical malady at a time before I start the day ruminating.
I'm waiting for an important phone call. I want to write another blog post. I'm collaborating on an art project. I need to get a friend some info for a grant proposal. I'm trying to find a live photo printer who can reprint some of my photographs for a library that's decided to buy my work. (Years of no sales end exactly two weeks after I dismantled my darkroom. The irony isn't lost on me.) I'm trying to find images that will make my PowerPoint presentation shine at the conference I will be speaking at in April. And, of course, Mercury is in retrograde again.
My days always start out with a lot of promise, the promise that by the end of the day I will have accomplished an assortment of glorious things. Hope is always on the horizon as the sun rises. As the sun sets, ending with a full list of these achievements is how I evaluate the success of each day. Doesn't everybody?
All of a sudden I can no longer send email to my friend Jim at his Earthlink address. Their server is bouncing everything back to me. When I looked closely at the header of the returned communication the problem was clear: "reason: 550 550 Dynamic/zombied/spam IPs blocked." Well, okay, it was clear to me. Translated, Earthlink had decided the outgoing mail server I was using had either been hijacked by another server or was directly the source of spam.
The solution was really simple: get the owner of my mail server to talk with Earthlink to get them taken off of their spam blacklist. I was so mistaken. The solution was simple, but actually get someone to help me was not.
First I called Verizon. Over the course of the evening I spoke with three of their tech support staff, kindly recounting the issue only to be disconnected each time. All I wanted was someone to say: "Mr. Gates, I'm sorry you are having a problem. I will make sure the proper people take care of it." Instead, I was often told it wasn't their problem, but mine. It was a frustrating experience I've grown to expect with Verizon and other companies I rely on for my technical wellbeing.
Jonathan Grubb, Chief Product Officer of a new company called Satisfaction has just written an article called 8 Types of Customer Service. Verizon comes under his fifth category called Understanding but Inflexible Customer Service. Jonathan describes the type:
This is sometimes a hard one to spot. The customer service person listens to you, tries to understand your problem, acknowledges how frustrating it is, then tells you that the company is prepared to do absolutely nothing to remedy the situation... Online example: Verizon, where they will never ever stray from the rules but they will talk with you as long as you like.
Yes, Jonathan, that was exactly my experience. Each listened quietly while I concisely described my problem after which each expressed his regret that I was experiencing such pain. Then nothing. Which leads me to suggest to tech companies a few steps towards better customer support:
Fairly Odd Parents-Present / 05.02.2007
Reducing Your Cable Bill in Less Than a Minute
Reducing Your Cable Bill in Less Than a Minute
Competition: It’s the American Way
Monopoly: A situation in which a single company owns all or nearly all of the market for a given type of product or service. This would happen in the case that there is a barrier to entry into the industry that allows the single company to operate without competition (for example, vast economies of scale, barriers to entry, or governmental regulation). Investorwords.com Comcast verses Verizon. Comcast won --this time. When the letter from Verizon informed me that fiber-optic television was now available in our area, I knew exactly what that meant. Competition had finally arrived for our TV viewing dollars. Like most parts...
Fairly Odd Parents-Present, Mechanical Aversions / 14.01.2007
Spicing Up Your Marriage the High Tech Way
No, not those implants! Spicing up a marriage with these silicon implants: Apple's Airport Express Sometimes it takes a bit of modern technology to spice up a marriage. A few well-placed silicon implants can do wonders. Last week I decided to upgrade our home wireless network. I had hacked an old DSL wireless modem to act as a router, broadcasting a wireless signal throughout our house. It had worked well for the last couple of years but we wanted more. Well, I wanted more. The signal dropped off right at the entrance to the two back bedrooms, ours and our eldest...
News Outta My Control / 31.12.2006
Washington, DC: a Tropical Paradise
Palm trees will soon grace the South Lawn of the White House and life in the capital city will become serene and laid-back. Of course, a global warming rise of seven meters in the sea level would actually flood this part of the White House real estate. A big chunk of the Arctic iceshelf breaks off near the North Pole. A beloved blogger is perplexed about the cold Southern California weather. And DC officially moves south into a more temperate climate. Is the end near? Our copy of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth just arrived from Netflix so I'll let you...
Child's Play, Fairly Odd Parents-Present / 23.12.2006
Of Teeth and Claus
Notice: Seasonal and youthful spoilers below. If you are under 13, ask your parents to read this first.
My daughter's tooth- and toothbrush-shaped note to the Tooth Fairy. Is this the work of a true believer?
Parents are constantly assessing their children's progress towards independence. It starts early: are they eating too little, too much? Getting too little sleep, too much? Pooping too little or too much? Some times maturity can't come fast enough (ask my wife at the end of a hard day) and sometimes we want childhood to last forever. Our expectations, based on facts, figures and the less empirical parental feeling, are constantly being adjusted.
And so this time of the year parents all over the world conduct the Annual Fictitious Character Assessment: do they or don't they still believe in Santa Claus (and by extension, the Tooth Fairy). The AFCA metric is the first wink towards adulthood. And this week we had to test for both characters.
Unlike other measurements we must work in stealth. Different from charting our children's height and weight, we cannot use a wall or a scale to mark their progress towards the truth about Claus and the Fairy. And unlike, um, talking about the facts of life, we cannot just blurt out those facts. This must be handled with finesse and sensitivity for this is their first jolt of real world reality.
The Three Wise Men by three wise women (from left to right): Older Daughter, 10; Younger Daughter, 8; and Wife, Not Telling. It is "Draw Dad Week" at Chez Gates. My youngest has been drawing portraits of Mom on her bedroom whiteboard so, to be fair, she decided it was time for a portait of Dad (ok, with a little pleading from dear old dad). Her older sister and Mom decided to do one too. So I ended up with three wonderful images of me. I particularly like the attention to detail my eldest paid to my hair and beard (although,...
Professional Auteurism / 24.11.2006
Bad Kitty!
You might remember last year I discovered that someone was "hotlinking" to one of my images. Hotlinking is where someone links directly to your image file and places it on his or her own site. This violates a couple key netizen rules: Don't steal someone else's bandwidth. Every time the image appears on their site your Web host charges you for the use of bandwidth. Always ask. When coming upon a hotlink transgressor there are effective strategies of dealing with him/her. Using some coding to my site's .htaccess file I can ban them from linking to any images on my...