Posted by barb on Feb 23, 2004 in
Random Thoughts There was an interesting article on Salon today about tech support, or lack thereof: We Don’t Support That.
Our two-week “intensive training” course was helmed by a 19-year-old named Chad. Chad had great difficulty making it to class within three hours of the stated meeting time. As for how to actually troubleshoot and fix computers, we were largely on our own. Beyond a cursory overview of the computers we were in charge of healing, the closest thing to a troubleshooting tool we were taught was The Mantra. . When class ended, which varied wildly depending on Chad’s interest and mental status, we were all encouraged to say The Mantra out loud. The Mantra is simply, “We don’t support that.”
The article is written by a guy who used to work in the tech support office of one of the three major computer sellers in the US. The tech support people are actually outsourced, and earn money for each call completed, whether or not the customer was actually helped. Needless to say, the outsourcing company wanted the tech support phone calls to be kept to a minimum — 12 minutes was the goal, with shorter being better. This produced one of four types of employees: the punter who basically tells the customer that they’ll have to call someone else (such as the software company, phone company, etc.), the giver who sends hardware to callers just to get them to shut-up, the helper who actually helps people though this person usually gets talked to by management because their calls are invariably more than 12 minutes, and the quitters (the majority).
This article makes me very happy that I’ve never had to call tech support. This is for one of two reasons:
1) I’m generally very stubborn and will either poke around the computer enough to figure out the problem or poke around the internet until I find someone else who has saved the same problem, or 2) I get so frustrated that I sick Andrew on the problem.
To those of you without an Andrew, I wish good luck.
Posted by barb on Feb 22, 2004 in
Movies 1/5 stars
I want my 2 hours back.
I’m not sure what this movie was supposed to be. It had moments that were fun, moments that were funny, moments that were touching. However, these moments didn’t seem to come together in any meaningful way. I’m shocked that this movie was nominated for any awards. I definitely can’t recommend it.
Posted by barb on Feb 21, 2004 in
Books by Amir D. Aczel
Aczel traces the history of Einstein’s theory of relativity and the formulation (and subsequent use) of his field equation. I found that for me, the most interesting parts of the book were the tales from Einstein’s time.
For example, after Einstein developed the general relativistic equation, he wanted to test it, naturally. On possible way would be to measure the bending of light (or lack of bending) around the Sun during an eclipse. He collaborated with Freundlich, an observational astronomer, and an expedition to Crimea was set for August 1914. Unfortunately, Germany declared war on Russia in early August. Freundlich was already on his way to the observation site when these events escalated, and was arrested for being a German in Russian territory with suspicious-looking equipment (the telescope). So much for that attempt to test the theory.
The modern stories about the vindication of Einstein’s addition of the cosmological constant to the equation were less interesting for me. However, that might just be because I’ve heard countless colloquia and read countless abstracts on this topic.
Posted by barb on Feb 14, 2004 in Uncategorized
After interviewing our first photographer for the wedding, Andrew and I decided that since we were already south of town that we would just drive to Pentagon City to check out the Wizards of the Coast store there, and to have a Valentine’s Day Dinner.
Hee hee hee. That was our first mistake.
Getting from the photographer’s house to the mall seemed like an easy enough thing, especially armed with driving directions from Yahoo. We got to within a mile or so, and missed the turn-off that the directions told us to take.
Okay. No problem. We’ll just turn around.
Except that we were on 395, where there was no exit for 3 miles. When we finally did get off, I had Andrew look at the map. But, of course, we didn’t know where we were. By the time we figured out where we were, I had already passed another exit marked “Pentagon City”. Oops. We decided to make one more pass at it, and if that failed, we’d head back to more familiar territory.
Fortunately, we made it on the next pass. We went directly to lunch/dinner (it was nearly 3 PM at that time, but we had not had lunch yet) at Chevy’s, complete with dessert (as any good Valentine’s Day dinner should have).
Posted by barb on Feb 13, 2004 in
Saxophone The last couple months I’ve felt like I haven’t really made any progress. Last week after my lesson I decided that no matter what, I was going to come into this week’s lesson with a good attitude and be ready to play a duet or two. That’s exactly what I did. I actually felt fairly confident with both duets we played, even though I messed up in a couple spots (though in one case I recovered pretty quickly, and in the other case Fred compensated by dropping a note).
The bad news is that I’m starting to find that my old horn is getting in the way. We fixed some of the problems with the new mouthpiece, and I’ve been able to get some of the notes to play in tune just by the pressure on the reed. However, the upper register is just plain out of tune, and it’s making the duets sound kind of crappy. I’m going to look into getting a new sax with my tax return, even though it was all supposed to go into the wedding fund.
Posted by barb on Feb 12, 2004 in
Games Since the Wizards of the Coast stores, and Gamekeeper stores, are closing, Andrew and I decided to head to the nearest one to get some good deals on games we’ve been eyeing. They were down to 30% off of everything, and 50% off of select items when we went tonight. We saw a bunch of games that we’ve been considering, like City Scape, Carcassone, and Settlers of Katan. However, we only walked out with a 2-player Lord of the Rings game and a couple games for kids to have at our wedding reception. Andrew wanted to research the games a bit more before we decided which ones to get, so we’ll return this weekend and get a couple.
Posted by barb on Feb 10, 2004 in
Books,
Wedding by Lara Webb Carrigan
This is another in the pile of wedding books that I’ve been reading. This one is fun and easy to read, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s sprinkled with cute, romantic wedding tales along with a few horror stories. There are some lists of questions for various vendors, but I found these to be less complete than those in other books. However, at the end of each chapter on the various vendors, Carrigan includes a list of things that should be present in the contract with the vendor. This is unique to this book (at least, of the books I’ve looked at so far), and could prove to be quite useful.
Posted by barb on Feb 10, 2004 in Uncategorized
It seems that shortly after someone I know dies, I have a dream with them in it. Usually, they are telling me in some way that they are okay. Last night’s dream was no different, though the details are already fading.
I was together with two of my best friends, Suzanne and Sweetie, on a vacation. Somehow we ended up in Wisconsin trying to decide how to spend our afternoon. We stopped at my Grandmother’s house in Maiden Rock to sit down and discuss where to go. Gram was sitting in her easy chair, Suzanne and Sweetie were in other comfy chairs in the living room, and I was on the couch. Next to me on the couch was Wayne. While we talked about where to go (“Pepin has cute shops…”), Wayne interjected comments about our plans. I thought he had some interesting things to say, but no one else seemed to listen. I started to repeat what he said, and everyone thought it was a great idea. I then realized that I was the only one who could see and hear Wayne, and I remembered that he had passed away. I cried a bit, but Wayne put his hand on me, and I felt a bit better.
Posted by barb on Feb 8, 2004 in
Movies 4/5 stars
Will Bloom only knows his father through one tall tale after another. As a child, he enjoyed his father’s tales, but over the years he finds them tiresome and longs to know his “real” father. When his father becomes very ill, Will returns to work out their differences.
Big Fish was a fun movie with the tall tales weaved through the story of Will and his father. I kept finding that I wanted to believe the tall tales, and I could almost believe them.
Posted by barb on Feb 6, 2004 in
Thesis/Grad Life I met with Kim and Chris today, finally. Unfortunately MCG -6-30-15 was not quite done (273 out of 290 spectra were fit), but I could still show them the majority of my results. MCG -6 continues to be an enigma, though that’s nothing new. It’s been well studied over the years, and it has been shown to display unusual behavior.
The good news is that we are starting to be confident in the results from my pipeline, so I am going to go ahead and fit more sources over the next month. I’m also continuing a bit more with MCG -6, including doing some hardness ratios and color-color plots. I also need to write scripts to do flux-resolved spectra to compare our results from time-resolved spectra. We suspect that the results will be different, since flux-resolved spectra may smear out any short time scale changes (i.e. changes on the order of a day to a week).