An Adventure with UHaul
We are taking a 14’ truck full of boxes, Select Comfort bed pieces, two bicycles, and a variety of other small items to Manhattan KS today.
We were blessed with near 70º temperatures Friday evening when we started loading, but had to contend with freezing temperatures and snow yesterday evening when we finished the process. Today the forecast is for sunny skies and 45º.
It’s going to be a good adventure.
The Morning Comics
I have been an avid reader of the comics “page” for as long as I can remember. Page is in quotes since I rarely, if ever, read the newspaper anymore, instead I use a wonderful piece of software called Comictastic. Comictastic, available only for the Mac operating system, is, according to Andy Ihnatko,
Unfortunately, some of the comic syndicates are determined to force you to view the product under their control, their way and only their way.
The worst example, from my point of view, are those comics syndicated by “Go Comics.” (I’m deliberately not linking to their site, as I don’t wish to support their practices.) Any comic available through Go Comics shows up as unavailable through Comictastic. Other syndicates substitute an ad for the strip when it is scrapped from the page by my viewer.
I understand that the syndicate has purchased the rights to publish the comic, and that they want to exercise their exclusive control of the product. However, I am not going to buy a daily newspaper just for the comics. I am also not going to visit site after site, each of which is burdened with ads, to view the comics. As much as it pains me to no longer read “The Buckets” or “Pearls Before Swine,” that is what is going to happen as a result of the ham-handed read-it-on-our-site-or-else approach of Go Comics and others.
Newspapers are increasingly facing rising operational costs and decreasing subscriber numbers. Our way or the highway tactics like the comics syndicates are employing will reap the same loss of viewer numbers.
Shedding Weight
Four and a half years ago, when Michele and I moved to Kansas City we went from a 2000 square foot house, with ample storage and a huge three-bay garage, to a comfortable apartment that had but a single garage stall, barely large enough for the car, and only a 1000 square feet of space. We ended up with two 5x10 foot storage lockers. I liked to tell people that the difference between a 2000 square foot house and a 1000 square foot apartment was 1000 cubic feet.
Since July 2004 I have made numerous trips to the lockers, sometimes to get things, sometimes to search for things, sometimes to add more the already cramped contents. It was easy, especially with an automatic payment setup, to forget about the lockers for months at a time. At least once a year, however, the monthly rent was raised, and, over time, the lockers became burden; a mental and financial weight.
One of the goals Sibylle and I had for our move to Manhattan was to eliminate the lockers. Living in the same town with them was one thing, maintaining them from 125 miles away was another thing entirely. Plus we could use the savings every month by not having to pay their rent.
My sense was that many of the items buried in the boxes were no longer meaningful to me and could be donated. We did clear a lot of old clothes, board games, and three CRT monitors, among other things, to donate. After just a couple of trips to the locker we managed to empty nearly half of it, and it felt like actually getting all of the stuff out ourselves would be possible.
Friday evening we rented a U-Haul truck and emptied both lockers. Emptied. Completely. The sense of weight was gone
Today (or tomorrow, weather depending) we will transport those items, and a good portion of the boxes we’ve packed at home, to the house we are renting in Manhattan. Initially the things we’ve kept from the locker will be stored in the garage. However, the goal is to unpack everything and either find it a home inside the house, or get rid of it through selling, throwing it away, or donations. Emptying the lockers makes our move with Allied next week less complicated. We will save weight charges on the move, as well as charges for an extra pickup point, and distance/elevator charges at the locker facility. That we are also able to move some things from the town house ourselves is an added bonus. Not bad for a couple hundred dollar U-Haul rental fee and some sweat equity.
In addition, we’ll save $180 a month on locker rental fees.
Best of all, the weight of the locker is gone now. Stuff that I’ve been mentally dragging around for over four years is now being dealt with. This is good. It feels wonderful.
Apollo 8
Forty years ago today, Apollo 8 was circling the Moon. This iconic picture was taken. The first Earthrise viewed by humans.
Here is the Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast.
Thoughts on Commuting
The first paid job I had, post college, was 50 miles away from where I was living at the time. I started in October, and didn’t find an apartment I liked until April the following year, so I spent two hours a day in the car for nearly six months. After moving my commute was on the order of 10 to 12 minutes.
I kept that 12 minute commute for most of the next fifteen years. At one point my daily drive was short enough that my muffler rusted out in only three years; apparently I wasn’t using the car enough to fully dry the exhaust system. Fortunately I discovered the issue before the 36-month bumper-to-bumper warranty expired.
After moving to Vancouver Washington, I still had a 10 minute commute. However, my luck changed living in South Carolina. There I spent nearly 50 minutes on I-26 every morning and every afternoon. At the end of my 15 months in the Palmetto State I discovered that the stretch of I-26 I had been driving all those months was considered one of the most dangerous roads in America.
Upon returning to central Illinois my commute time was cut down to 20 minutes or so, with a slightly longer option that avoided Interstate driving at all.
The last four and a half years, living in the Kansas City area, I’ve had commutes of roughly 30 minutes every morning and evening, with nearly all of that time spent on the highway. I currently live some 24 miles from work, and on a good day, can cover that distance in as many minutes.
After the first of the year we will be living in Manhattan Kansas and my commute will be a mere 10 minutes again. All of it on surface streets. The past week or so, Kansas City, like much of the northern United States, has had some wintery weather which has more than double some commutes. Three times I’ve crept home at barely 5 or 10 miles per hour, spending well over an hour getting there. Knowing that I will soon be enjoying a four mile, 10 minute commute has made the longer the usual travel times both more bearable and harder to stand.
Only four more days of I-35. Only four more days of the back log at the I-435 - I-35 interchange. Only four more days of driving 250 miles per week, just to work.
Business Continuity
In the movie business, continuity refers to the process of making sure that scenes shot out of sequence line up contextually in the finished movie. The best example I can think of is in Ocean’s Eleven, where Brad Pitt’s character is talking to Matt Damon’s character while eating a shrimp cocktail. In the middle of the scene his cocktail switches from a plate to a goblet. Whoever was in charge of continuity between the two or three takes that make up the final scene botched their job.
In business there are continuity plans, which are devoted to how the enterprise will continue in the face of some catastrophe, like a major storm, building fire, or other devastating event. Unfortunately, these continuity plans rarely extend down to the individual employee level. The team I am leaving does make good use of a “vacation plan” document, created by the person going on leave to provide guidance on projects and issues in their absence.
We don’t, however, have a good process for employee resignations. And certainly no process for multiple resignations and vacations at the same time.
Our business is calendar year driven, so next Thursday is a big day. Product revisions are going live, data changes are being made, and new customers are coming on board. Consequently, the weeks leading up to January 1 are hectic, stressful, and not nearly long enough.
The six-person team I am a part of had a resignation that saw one team member leave last week. My resignation is effective next Wednesday. Two additional team members are on vacation this week; and one of those has had to be hospitalized unexpectedly and may or may not return as planned on Friday. We are normally shorthanded, so the loss of one person plus the holiday time off schedule has crippled us this week.
Normally when you resign the amount of work you are assigned undergoes a dramatic reduction. You start handing off responsibilities to other people and begin transitioning out of the daily process so your departure isn’t an abrupt halt. Due to the circumstances described above, I am busier this week than I’ve been in two years here, with no time to think about transition, and no one present to transition to.
People outside of my immediate team are still unaware of my status, and the demands being placed on me through their ignorance are putting the continuity of this position’s responsibilities at risk. Indeed, a non-trivial portion of the new-for-2009 processing is at risk simply because I won’t be available the day it goes to production. Ideally a company would have a process for transitioning responsibilities away from a departing employee; one that didn’t rely upon 100% commitment from someone who has published their intent to leave the company. I’m willing to do the work, but their reliance upon my character and integrity ultimately hurts them, as the transition won’t happen until after I leave.
It’s funny when you find a continuity gaff in a movie, it could be financially harmful to not ensure continuity when employees resign and move on to other pursuits.
Using Commercials to Alienate Paying Customers
This evening we decided to treat ourselves to pizza rather than cook something at home. We both like the personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut on occasion, so I called their number to place my order.
And got to listen to a canned ad for the newly added “Wing Street” offerings. We’ve called them enough times now for me to feel confident in saying that while you are listening to the initial ad, the phone in the store hasn’t even rung yet. The initial ad is always the same and it is never interrupted by the phone being answered. They’ve got you captive and are going to milk the moment for all it’s worth. Eventually the ad ends, and then the hold music/advertising starts. The hold loop is almost always interrupted immediately by the takeout order taker, adding to my belief that the phone call isn’t put through to the store until after you’ve had your commercial.
Most of the DVD movies we own have some kind of preview, and quite a few have a commercial at the beginning. The most egregious have an anti-piracy commercial. I just paid for the DVD and now you are forcing me to watch a anti-piracy video? Hitting the menu button or fast forwarding to the next chapter are blocked, so you have to endure their self-righteousness in order to watch the movie.
In both these instances I am already a paying customer. Well, in the pizza case I want to be a customer. Does upper management at Pizza Hut feel they will increase revenue by forcing me to listen to a commercial extolling the virtues of their new expanded menu? And does the movie industry think that insulting customers who’ve already paid money with an obnoxious commercial will increase their goodwill?
I will continue to endure the force-to-listen to commercials at Pizza Hut because once in a while I want their product. And I will continue to endure force-to-watch anti-piracy ads on DVD because I want to watch the movie I’ve purchased. But I will not have sympathy for organizations that take advantage of their customer’s goodwill and then cry foul with people find ways around the system.
I'm Gonna Need New Business Cards
What better way to start off the new year than with a new job? I recently accepted a position as Software Architect with the Office of Mediated Education at Kansas State University. I’ll be working with several teams that develop and support web-based applications for use in online classrooms, student ratings, grade submission, and a university-wide authentication system among others.
I am very excited by this turn of events, and both Sibylle and I are looking forward to completing our move to Manhattan Kansas at the end of the month.
The Day My Mint Stats Died
Three years ago, on December 5th, I installed Mint for the first time. Since that time it has recorded 26,000 plus page views and almost 15,000 visits to my humble site. Along the way I have added and taken away various peppers, and I upgraded to version 2.0 this past year. Mint has worked flawlessly the entire time.
On December 5th this year, when I tried to view my Mint page all I got was the End User License Agreement (EULA) acceptance page. I was very reluctant to accept the license for fear it would truly install Mint again and somehow overlay all my statistics. I post a question to the Mint troubleshooting forum and waited for an answer.
Meanwhile my site itself was taking a very long time to load. I called Sibylle and asked her to try an view my Mint page thinking that the problem could somewhere in my browser cache or cookies. She also got the EULA screen, not the log in page that I was hoping for. I used phpMyAdmin on my site to back up the Mint database just in case. I had a back up from late November when I had last updated Wordpress on my site, but I was hoping to not lose the statistics collected since then.
By early evening I still hadn’t gotten any responses on the forum so I accepted the license and waited to see what happened. After a very long time loading I got the “Create new account” page. Fearing that my statistics were about to be lost I entered in the same id and password I’d used before and hit Enter again. After another very long wait I was back at the EULA page. Somehow the installation was caught in a loop.
Sibylle commented that my site was extremely slow to load on her computer as well. Wondering if there might be something wrong with my host, I called their technical support. As an aside let me say that Bluehost has phenomenal technical support. I pressed “2” for support and was speaking to Jason in 5 seconds. Wow.
Jason had me look at the error logs for my site, and he made several suggestions, but the one that caught my attention was to repair the database. Turns out phpMyAdmin has a table repair utility built-in. I selected all the tables in my Mint database and ran the repair option. Within seconds it was done (it’s a small database) and voilà!, my Mint statistic page was back again. Complete with all the statistics from the past 3 years. Even better, my site was running normally. Page loads were no longer taking several minutes to occur.
Apparently, around 3 am on the 5th, something happened on my site that caused one or more of the Mint tables to need repair. Since every page on my site calls into the Mint software, and hence touches the database, this “needs repair” state brought my site to its knees. And it caused Mint to think it was still being installed.
Tonight, more than a day after the repair was done, both my site and my statistics are working normally. I cannot imagine what caused the error with the database, but I am grateful that it was easily fixed.
Make Safari Open Links in New Tabs Instead of New Windows
From 456 Berea Street comes this tip on forcing Safari to open targeted links in a new tab rather than in a new browser window. (NB: I changed the order of the steps slightly to suit my way of thinking.)