November 2005 Archives

I do most of my work on the keyboard, rather than the mouse, which usually works just fine, and saves me a lot of repetitive stress stimuli.

However, I also have two monitors, and “focus follows eyeballs” technology isn’t commonplace yet, so I’m often looking at one window and unexpectedly typing in another.

This just happened again, but something useful came of it — I discovered a new way of sorting messages in Thunderbird (instead of going to a particular URL in Firefox) that I didn’t know existed. “View” … “Sort By” … “Grouped By Sort” looks like it might be handy for helping me figure out which messages are current and which are embarrassingly old.

I’m having a look at Dell’s web site to see if the $2,000 laptop I want to get is still about $1,800 more than I can afford, and came across this little bit of confusion.

Dell currently offers small businesses four types of warranty programs. The most basic is pretty clear — you mail them your computer, do without it for some unstated period of time, and they’ll mail it back to you, hopefully in a fixed condition. If not, you can mail it back to them again.

I really can’t tell the difference between the next two options, except that one costs $150 more than the other:

• get enhanced protection for your new notebook, including Next-Business-Day On-Site Service(*), for more convenient service resolution should the unexpected occur.

• get a cost-effective On-Site Service(*) plan that frees you from worry about damage from most accidental drops, breaks and spills.

Now, for the challenge: which of these is the more expensive plan? Can you guess? Isn’t it strange that you have to guess? (Not to mention that there’s a reasonably good chance that you guessed wrong, since the description of the more expensive one implies less service than the cheaper one.)

For an extra $100, the fourth plan gives you the same asterisk and offers speedier issue resolution than the next-day service offered in option 2 (but not 3). Living where I do, I’d like to see that.

If you scroll down, they give you some more useful information. The fourth option doesn’t actually mean faster than next-day service, it just means that you won’t be on hold for as long (average of 2 minutes, instead of whatever the others get) and are less likely to get someone reading a script in India. In fact, they guarantee that you’ll actually get someone who’s trained (yes, they wrote that), and even better, that they’ll “bypass basic troubleshooting questions and connect directly to high-level technicians to address your specific questions” (direct quote).

Why not offer that to everyone? Offer two warranty options — the mail-in one with script-readers for the people who want the cheapest thing possible without having no warranty at all, and the more expensive one which actually offers good service. The other two are just going to frustrate your customers, which seems like a bad (if common) business practice to me.

Oh, and for reference, I have three problems with customer support being in India, China, etc., none of which have to do with the people

1) they’re usually just reading scripts, and are not actually knowledgeable about the area in which they’re working, nor do they have any authority to do anything outside of the script, in my experience

2) this is improving, but for a while it was comical just trying to be understood and to understand — admittedly, this is a problem for me even in the US or Canada, but far worse when dealing with two foreign accents instead of just one, usually with a bad phone connection just to make things interesting.

3) the jobs are being outsourced purely to save money. I’ve never heard of customer service, programming, etc., being outsourced because there are better programmers or customer service representatives elsewhere, though that may be true. I have heard of outsourcing programming to save time, but in my very scant experience, that doesn’t work in the long run. Sacrificing quality, customer satisfaction, or whatever, to save money isn’t a good long-term strategy, even if it makes the investors happy who are looking purely at today’s results compared to yesterday’s.

This vivid analogy came in one of my letters today:

Once bought, the contents [of popular magazines] prove as ridiculous and fading as the glory days of spandex.

I was going to rake the leaves today, but it started pouring just as I was about to go out, so I decided to swap out the screen windows in the living room, build a fire (I need to get the successful fire to unsuccessful fire ratio up, plus it’s cold out), and play some recorder.

Most of that went pretty well, except for the recorder playing, for two reasons:

1) The cat finally realized that a fire is a source of warmth, and she needn’t be in the other end of the house hiding out (yes, that was valid the first time, but the other two have been much better). Of course, being a cat, she was rolling and purring in pleasure in front of the fire, and of course, being a cat, she was doing so right on top of my sheet music.

2) Apparently, a soprano recorder sounds an awful lot like a bird. So every time I got a phrase out of the thing, she would pounce on the recorder, trying to figure out where I’d hidden the bird so she could play with it, too. It probably didn’t improve matters when I decided to start mimicking bird calls (since the only way I was getting to play anything was to lay out two sheets of music such that she could only lie on one at a time, I eventually just decided to make stuff up).

This was never a problem in college… It made for a good laugh, though.

I’ve noticed that I tend to get restless at times when programming. I’ve been pondering this over the past few days, and think it’s usually (always?) because of one of a small number of root causes:

1. General exhaustion. It happens. Sometimes I just need to do something else for a while. Normally, this takes care of itself, because I have enough variety in my work to keep any one thing from getting monotonous most of the time. If I haven’t gotten much sleep the night before, that’s often the problem.

2. Feeling overwhelmed. This is usually a result of not understanding the problem well enough to be able to partition it into smaller chunks. For example: build a web site generator for personal ministry web sites for staff by such and such a date. I know what I want the end product to look like (at least by a particular timeframe), and it’s quite possible to get there, but the problem is that I haven’t mapped out how to get there well enough, and therefore feel overwhelmed by a task that needn’t take very long.

3. Facing repetition. It’s not very enjoyable to have to redo work, especially in programming. I tend to get especially restless when I’m faced with the prospect of copying and pasting a lot of code because a new module doesn’t fit very well into the existing framework.

I want to flesh this out. There’s not much I can do about #1 except get some sleep or do something unrelated to programming, but I’ve definitely attributed feelings of restlessness to #1 when they were actually due to #2 or #3.

If I can stop for a moment when I’m feeling restless and try to pinpoint which of these three reasons is the underlying cause, I think I can do a better job of addressing it.

This worked well a few days ago, when I was hit with the familiar symptoms. Exhaustion would have been a reasonable excuse (I had just gotten back from a weekend conference, and sleep is never ranked very high on weekend conferences), but it turned out not to be the case. Instead, it was because I was facing the prospect of having to program something very similar (but not identical) to something I’ve already done. By taking a little time out to write a new abstraction for these two tasks, I was back to my normal energetic programming self.

For any programmers who are reading this, do you face similar problems?

I apparently never posted this. A few days after the less than ideal fire that was our first attempt to build a real fire in the fireplace (firelogs from Shaw’s not counting), we made a second attempt. Much better, and we had a successful romantic evening for two, which didn’t involve opening all the windows and doors to get the smoke out of the house.

It warmed up after that, so we haven’t needed the heat as much, though it’s getting colder again now, so maybe we’ll do another one soon.

Or at least at things I say. This evening, I made a comment that I didn’t intend to be funny (just a statement of fact), and everyone cracked up. I even said it as intended, so it didn’t involve people laughing because it was a goof.

The most unexpected case of this recently was near the beginning of the term, at a dinner. One of the freshmen is from British Columbia (part of Canada, for the geographically-deprived). Someone made the comment “Oh, did you know that Steve’s from Canada, too? He’s from Newfoundland.”

When you say that to an American, the response is predictably either “Where?” (as in, “I have no idea where that is”, not “Where in Newfoundland”) or “Oh, I have an aunt who lives in Montreal.” (This is roughly equivalent to responding “Oh, I have an aunt in Texas” upon hearing that someone is from California.)

Not the girl from British Columbia. She just burst into uncontrolled laughter. She eventually apologized, but it was through giggles. I think it was a moment of insight (or perhaps just confusion) for the Americans who were there.

This is probably why Newfoundlanders have a reputation for being funny — it’s a coping mechanism. The alternative is to get really offended whenever someone makes a derogatory or discriminatory remark against your people.

(Aside: Part of the reason I don’t post all that much is because I often get sidetracked when writing. For instance, last night when writing about recorders, I ended up reading about recorders on various sites for a couple of hours. For this post, I read a few web site articles on Newfoundland and Newfoundland English.)

Christine commented that I haven’t posted anything in a while, and told me to write something. :-) Most of the things I’ve wanted to post lately have been rants, so I’ve been holding back (though I’m going to have things to say about Audible.com pretty shortly, I think).

So, here are some thoughts that are more random than usual:

• the blue LED that was in the scroll wheel of my mouse seems to have gone dead. It’s a sad day — the glow was rather pretty.

• I want to get a recorder group going (the early music kind). Anyone interested? I have some recorders (2 soprano, 2 alto, and 1 tenor — the basses are expensive, but I’ll get one if this gets going) and some small ensemble music. Some previous experience with any wind instrument would be all that you’d really need.