Through her piano studio my wife purchased an educational license for Sibelius 5 several years ago. As a beginning cellist I have made use of one of the two active licenses her purchase included. I’ve reformatted Suzuki pieces to better see the repeated patterns and created sheet music of tunes I wanted to learn. I am by no means a Sibelius expert but I enjoy having a music notation tool at hand.
Recently I needed to reformat my computer’s hard drive and re-install the operating system and all the applications. Prior to doing this I tried to de-register the copy of Sibelius I had on my computer unsuccessfully. Every time I tried I got an error message saying the Sibelius server could not be reached. This morning I tried to install a fresh copy of Sibelius on my computer only to have it not work. The application installed and when started asked for the serial number but then said “your serial number appears to be corrupted”. The message also said to contact Sibelius support.
Some support calls are better than others. Some support calls are supremely frustrating. This support call was fantastic.
After navigating the usual maze of options I ended up talking to a representative called Larry. Larry listened to my situation and asked if I was using Max OS X 10.7, or Lion. When I said yes he said we could fix my situation in about 5 minutes.
First he had me create a Sibelius Software directory in the /Library/Application Support directory. Once the new Sibelius Software directory was in place he had me adjust its access permissions. This addressed the “corrupt serial number” issue. Next he walked me through the phone registration process to record the Sibelius generated computer number for my laptop with the serial number for our copy of the application. He also took care of removing the license registration for the previous incantation of my laptop - the one that disappeared when I formatted the hard drive. He then politely pointed out that the CD version of Sibelius would not be stable on Lion and strongly suggested that I download the latest version our license entitles us to own, version 5.4. With Sibelius 5.4 downloaded and installed everything is working perfectly again.
The call was over in about 5 minutes. Larry was responsive, helpful, and knowledgeable.
The icing on the cake however, was the follow-up email. Not only does it give me a case number and the option to contact Avid (Sibelius) for more help, it very succinctly and completely recapped the support call I’d just had. Complete with links to articles in their knowledge database for the two steps we’d taken to get me working again. Outstanding. In just a few minutes I went from being frustrated by a dialog message that said to call support to being completely satisfied and then astonished at the level of support.
Avid (Sibelius) has got customer support nailed.
Tomorrow marks the day that my employment at Kansas State University ties the third longest stretch I’ve had at a single employer in nearly 30 years of professional work. As a consultant in the late 1990s and early 2000s my engagements changed frequently at times, making for shorter tenures as an employee for any one company.
My longest stretch at one employer was from June 13, 1988 through December 31, 1996, or 3,078 days. Number two on the list clocks in at 1,673 from October 17, 1983 until June 10, 1988. Today my K-State employment reaches 1,231 days which ties the previous number three, my self employment from October 17, 2000 through March 18, 2004.
All told I’ve work 10,282 days. If I work until my 65th birthday I’ve got 5,036 days to go. Working until I’m 70 bumps that count up to 6,836 days.
It is worth noting for any date-math savants in the audience that these durations were calculated using the DAY360 function in Google Speadsheet, which means each month has 30 days. So the durations are accurate to within 5 days per year.
You should read this.
Made my head asplode.
(via: @cameronmoll)
On the eve when North Carolina amended their state constitution banning same gender unions or marriages it seems appropriate to link to this graphic.
For the past ten years or so I have posted a list with as many items as I was old on my birthday. This year I’m not going to do that. This year marks thirty (30!) years since I was first employed as a programmer.
My undergraduate degree is in Applied Computer Science. The “applied” has two meanings. First, we were all required to have at least a minor in another subject – something to apply computer science toward. Most of us choose business administration. Second, we had to work – either through an internship for one summer, of through a co-op program that had you in school your freshman year and then alternating school semesters with work semesters and summers until you graduated.
I opted for the internship and spent the summer of 1982 working for a corn wet miller in their data processing department. They were converting from Honeywell mainframes to IBM and, in spite of what we had been told about COBOL being portable between computers, there were some critical changes to be made to each program. For example, the Honeywell compiler would initialize working storage for you if you didn’t explicitly initialize it in your Procedure Division. The IBM compiler wasn’t as forgiving. We had to find and initialize all fields in working storage that hadn’t been explicitly initialized in the code.
Working with computers was vastly different 30 years ago. Working period was different. You wore a suit and tie to work every day. There was no casual dress. We didn’t have cubicles. I sat at a desk in a large room full of desks. Everyone could see everyone else. As the intern I had the worst position in the room – the desk in the front row closest to where the room entrance was located. No one had terminals on their desk. Instead there were 5 or 6 terminals in a cluster in the back of the room that you used when you needed to check the status of something. 5 or 6 terminals that were shared by perhaps 25 people.
I spent most of my time reading through hard-copy print outs of the programs I was responsible for migrating and filling out coding sheets with the changes I wanted to make. The coding sheets looked like graph paper. Once you had a set of changes written out you walked down the hall to the window into the keypunch room and handed your form(s) to the blue-haired lady in charge. After a while the mail cart came around and dropped off a stack of cards for you. With cards in hand you made a second trip down the hall to the card reader window and another blue-haired lady. The next day you got the results of your job.
Yes. The next day. We had 24 hour turn-around. If you made a dumb mistake that caused your job to not run (a missing period, for example) you just lost a day’s productivity. I worked on several programs at once, so I had plenty to do even with a 24-hour delay each time I ran something.
It was a tremendous experience for me. I learned that much of what I had been taught in school was right. I could actually program and get paid for it. I also learned that there were some things that worked differently – in school we complied, linked and ran all in one step. At work those were separate steps.
I had spent the three previous summers working at a summer camp, outdoors, with kids. It was a blast. Juxtaposing being a summer camp counselor with being a programmer gave me pause more than once. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted an indoor job that required wearing a suit and tie. However, after experiencing programming for real I was hooked. The pay was better too.
For my efforts I got $6 an hour. And I was paid every Friday at noon. I lined up with the other temporary employees at the pay window and collected my check. I have made my living in data processing, er, information technology, ever since.
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A ripping good tale of espionage in Denmark at the outbreak of the Second World War. Ken Follett never disappoints and Hornet Flight is no exception. A very satisfying read that is partly based on true events.
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Assassin is the second Alexander Hawke novel and picks up soon after Hawke ends. Like the other Ted Bell books I’ve read this one wastes no time and moves right along. The story isn’t deep, nor are the characters, but it is satisfying in a way to read. Good beach fare I suppose.
I was sure I had linked to this once before, but I don’t see it anywhere. Take 18 minutes and enjoy a group of musicians as they pay homage to The Beatles.
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After reading Tsar and discovering Ted Bell’s action series, I decided to go back and read all of the Alex Hawke books in order. This was obviously a first book, at least compared to Tsar. The characterizations were a bit overdone in places but on the whole it was a good read.