Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Sneaking in a little culture

Tonight I went to my first poetry reading - and it was an enjoyable experience. Billy Collins, who was Poet Laureate of the US for several years, was at our local community college for a writer's seminar, and he did an open reading at a good-sized meeting room that was quite full (probably a few hundred people).

The only reason I'd even heard of him was because he's been on A Prairie Home Companion several times and we found him witty and entertaining. His reading this evening of a number of his poems was in a similar vein; none were boring and many were very thoughtful or hilarious.

He's apparently been criticized for his poems being too popular, or perhaps not highbrow enough. This is fine with me; as someone that's never been interested in poetry, more intricate styles probably wouldn't appeal to me.

My 14-year old son, who was dragged to this by his mother, hated every second of it and kept bugging us with excuses to try and leave - even though there were a large number of young people all around him, just a few years older than him greatly enjoying it. Oh well, incomplete human beings.

Here's a haiku of his I saved from the evening, because it so succinctly describes the business traveler. I've been in this exact situation.

Midwinter evening

Alone at the sushi bar.

Just me

And this eel.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Like the bow of a ship



Rainier@18k feet

This is a photo of Mt. Rainer, poking up through the clouds. I took this outbound from Seattle with my camera phone (AT&T Tilt 3MP, not bad!). Note the broken up clouds eastward behind the mountain; this is its "rain shadow". At 14K feet, Rainier disrupts the weather around it so that weather coming in from the west drops its moisture on the mountain. The Paradise Inn on the western slope has received up to 90 feet of snow in a winter!

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Saturday, February 16, 2008

San Antonio, with links to Seattle

I zipped down to San Antonio Friday afternoon to hear my son's middle school orchestra perform for the Texas Music Educator's Association annual conference. Apparently it's enormous. His orchestra was selected to perform as essentially the top middle school (in Texas that means grades 6,7, & 8) orchestra in Texas.

I had a meeting in the morning, so I dashed out right afterward. Though the flight was delayed, and of course there was the rental car / airport construction / directions / looking for parking downtown / finding remote parking at the Alamodome / throwing myself in front of a shuttle bus to keep things interesting, I amazingly trotted into the performance no more than two minutes before the first announcements! <whew>

On the flight down there, I sat next to a little old lady who was telling me about her niece, a flute player that had spent time in Ireland and managed to stay there a few months longer by busking on the streets of Dublin. (NO, busking is the perfectly honorable profession of playing the street for money given by passers-by. Downtown Dublin, especially on Grafton Street between Trinity College on the north end, and the lovely St. Stephen's park on the south.) "Very nice, very nice," I said as I tried to fall asleep.

"Then she went off to the west coast to perform, and met and married Dale Chihuly."

"Excuse me?? She married who???"

"Dale Chihuly."

"Not just a Dale Chihuly, the Dale Chihuly?"

She proceed to regale the now-fully-awake me with stories of the couple going to the Clinton White House for dinner with the Russian Ambassador, and Dale wearing sneakers. Not just any sneakers, apparently, but sneakers that he paints and customizes!

The kid's performance was terrific. I say that objectively; there were music teachers in the audience during the performance shaking their heads in wonder at the violin and cello solos in Capriccio Espagnol, and the violins (especially the firsts) had a very polished sound for the Faure' Pavane. Audience members were very enthusiastic in their praise of the students as they passed by on their way out.

I had enough time to walk a couple blocks over to the Alamo (there's an NPR StoryCorp trailer there), and have a Lone Star beer at the history Menger Hotel bar literally next door. A quick dinner at a pricey restaurant on the Riverwalk, and I was off back to the airport!

I did have one other interesting episode. P.S. - I did a little research, and it wasn't the Russian ambassador, it was Boris Yeltsin himself, in 1994. Apparently Leslie can speak Russian, so she was in heaven. And yes, the New York Times specifically mentioned his sneakers.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

I Hate Purehost Webhosting

For the last 24 hours I haven't done much other than try to fix the damage Purehost has done to my email service and website.

My (and about 12 other people's) email stopped working yesterday afternoon. Thinking it was one of Purehost's email servers I didn't worry about it at first. Then, I tried checking mail from the web and was denied, and logging into the admin account it said I didn't have an account. Whaaaa?

I sat en-queue for about 30 minutes, waiting for a "live chat" tech support person. They explained to me (with about five minutes between every exchange, he must have been talking with 10 other people) that my account had been deleted that afternoon due to non-payment. Non payment? How can I pay for something I never received an invoice for??

After several more exchanges (i.e. 15 minutes) the rep gave me the contact email address. It was a bogus combination of two existing email addresses and some extra characters - nothing I'd ever created or supplied. So, the billing requests went to that account. No response was received. In fact, ever message should have hard bounced. Yet Purehost never tried to look beyond that address. Can't they look at addresses that are being used for the account or something? Have they ever heard of a phone number? Instead, they wiped the account, about 20 email addresses, the mail that may have been queued for deuby.com in its email server, and my entire website.

Is that how you treat a customer that has been with you for four years??? The only way they could put me back together again was to sign up fresh, and pay for them to restore my data from backups. At that point I decided that walking over hot coals was a little more desirable than signing up with them again.

The day has been spending finding a new provider (WEBster Computer Services, so far so good), signing up, spending 45 minutes on hold with Purehost to get a live technician to repoint the nameservers for deuby.com to webcs.com's DNS servers, recreating all the email addresses, mailboxes and passwords, aliases, and forwarders, and then coaching email users through the reconfiguration necessary to make the new email config work.

The website was out of date, but it's a total writeoff. I'd rather lose it and rebuild it than pay Purehost another dime.

An entire day wasted of the one week I took off between 10 years of work - due to sloppy account procedures and no flexibility in customer service. I hope that this company sinks to where it belongs.

Friday, February 01, 2008

Time To Change

"Nothing endures but change." Heraclitus

After ten years, today's my last day with Intel. It's only the second company I've ever worked for as a grown-up. I wouldn't have left, but management edicts forced my hand, and it looks like it's going to be a very positive move. I've accepted a position as an enterprise solutions strategist with Advaiya, who provides high-level strategic consulting to Microsoft. I get to work with Microsoft on some strategies, develop white papers and presentations on its new technology, and deliver this content in a variety of situations both in the States and internationally.

If you haven't done much of this sort of thing, leaving a big company is pulling out by degrees. When you're ready, you take a deep breath and make the plunge to tell your manager. That gets the ball rolling, and you're now really committed (even if you've kidded yourself that you could back out of your offer acceptance from the new company). Then you start telling individuals, and send out the big "goodbye letter". Then responding to all the well wishes. Then working on the handoff of all your duties. I'm proud of the fact I made all my meetings (and even contributed to them :) ) right to the end.

I was spared the daily "So you're really leaving, eh?" conversations around the water cooler because I'm 1400 miles from my nearest co-workers. As cliche' as it sounds, it really is true that your employer isn't nearly as wrapped up in you the employee, as you the employee have your head wrapped around the job: the Intel termination process is a matter of processing a little paperwork and bang, you're done.

Two weeks' notice doesn't seem like much after ten years and the depth of the big program - the Numonyx NOR Flash divestiture - I was working on. But with a well-thought out transition and some advance notice to my successor Derek Weigel, it was pretty well done with a few day's to spare. And you don't want to be a lame duck in the office for too long.

It's a good time to make little resolutions, change things. I've been hitting yoga class more regularly - in fact just before my LDO (last day office) meeting. I don't enjoy it as much as other forms of exercise, but conversely I notice the results of practicing regularly more than almost any other form. We're having house work done after seven years in the place - tile, fence, carpet - so that will be good. And I'm throwing out or shredding a lot of old papers :). I have a new bike that needs some riding (see below).

As I settle into a new job and routine, I'll certainly be posting here on whatever I find to be interesting - technical, personal, or otherwise.