Archive for category Ranting & Ravings
Phone Support
Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Actual Events, Geekiness, Ranting & Ravings on July 6, 2006
Just contacted Comcast trying to troubleshoot a problem with their service. Somehow our account has been disabled or in some way turned off. We can see the “Comcast Account” page but it won’t let us through. Basically, we’re hitting their service but they’re blocking our account from accessing the Internet. Calling Comcast resulted in some dumb solutions with the end result that it doesn’t work. I mentioned that we had it working for a week since we moved into our house. “A new house? A transfer! Ha! that’s your problem — it didn’t transfer”. “But it’s been working smoothly for the first week since we’ve been in here even though I’ve reset the modem several times”, I say. The woman insists that it’s a transfer issue. I keep asking how that makes any sense if we’ve had it working for a week already. I start getting really frustrated and then the woman on the phone gets frustrated but tries to remain calm. She tells me she has no reason to lie to me, (now the punchline!) “I’m very ethical!” she tells me.
Life is amazingly funny. 🙂
P.S. In case you’re ever wondering, routers and cable modems cause interference if they’re plugged together. I learned this today from the cable woman. Don’t laugh! It’s very serious!
House Hunting
Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Ranting & Ravings, Somewhat Random on April 16, 2006
My family has been in the house hunting process for a bit now. It’s an annoying market in the South Sound area and we’re definitely not getting a “deal” on anything we’ve considered (but at least it’s better than the D.C. market). What’s been amazing is how much guidance we’ve received from God on this. I’m normally much more of the type of guy who considers a decision, weighs the pro’s and con’s, prays that the right decision is made, and plunges in. However, with houses it’s been a lot more nerve-wracking. It’s a huge amount of money, it’s very hard to determine what you’re getting and what it’s really worth, and it’s also very hard to tell if you like a place.
So far, we’ve successfully avoided getting two different houses. The first was very nice in many ways but they didn’t take our initial offer (which was barely shaving anything off of what they were asking — about 2% of the total cost). I liked the place but was concerned that the price was too high. We sort of “let the fleece out” and determined that if they took our first offer, we would go with it. They didn’t and we backed out. The second house was just this weekend. I didn’t like it quite as much but the price seemed good (certainly relative to others on the market). It was also an ideal place to start with a new family and it really was quite beautiful. Just prior to putting an offer down (our agent was literally driving over to our place) the listing agent called to notify us that the sellers had decided to not sell their home at this time (some sort of family crisis). That doesn’t happen very often…
I guess people could look at these events as just coincidences (even unfortunate coincidences since we didn’t get “what we wanted”!) but I very strongly disagree. It’s obvious to me that we’re being Guided and I’m confident that we’re going to get what God wants us to get.
Relationships
Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Ranting & Ravings on March 29, 2006
It seems fairly obvious that trust is a pretty foundational aspect of any relationship. I don’t think many people disagree with me on that. It’s interesting though how few people are willing to accept what trust entails.
For example, the more you trust someone, the more their comments or suggestions are meaningful to you. A random stranger has little impact if they let you know how they feel about you. However, if it’s coming from a good friend it means so much more. Because a friends advice is more meaningful it can necessarily be more harsh or blunt. “You’ve got to do something with that shirt!” is a comment that you will take very differently depending on whether a good friend says it or some clerk at a store says it. Why does a friend say something that could possibly be taken as an offense? Because they care about you and they have enough “relationship capital” invested in you that they realize that they can say things without terminating their relationship. Once you think about it, you might likely agree with their “blunt” statement.
This is really the only way to grow and develop outside of introspection (which tends to justify your current condition whatever it is).
But so many people don’t seem to understand this. People cloud the idea of honesty (which is really what I’m talking about) with the idea of giving no offense. “It’s better if I don’t say anything” is a common line that people of this breed will say to avoid being honest. Obviously there’s a time and place for everything and there are certainly inopportune times to be honest. However, I think that in any good relationship (that of friends or family) that one should be honest. A friend is a worthless one who can’t build you up. Even worse, a friend who can’t approach you with what they perceive as a fault or problem will likely grow apart from you since they feel disconnected. They have to “watch what they say” around you. Eventually there develops a list of what can be said and what can’t. Conversations denegrate to a point of dancing around these issues without stepping on them. If you slip, you’ve just triggered a landmine and the relationship will likely terminate.
Sadly, being dishonest is largely what manners are about. You don’t tell fat people they’re fat. You don’t tell someone that they’re dressed in a style befitting a 1970’s disco star. Manners are not what keeps friendships together though — they are merely a social construct to avoid conflict (and they work well for that). You may not like your boss, but you are stuck working for him or her so you likely desire to avoid conflict at the expense of having a friendship. Friendships are all about conflict though and without conflict you again are stuck with never growing or expanding or improving.
I think the general rule should be:
With those that aren’t friends but with whom you must spend time or engage in activities with, you should be polite. Telling your boss that he’s a fatty might be true, [NB: My boss is NOT a fatty. He’s a wonderful human being] but it serves no purpose to try to create a conflict when you have no real personal relationship with him.
With those that are family or friends (and I use that term to refer to close friends) you should be honest! A friend who cannot take suggestions or comments regarding their personal life must not trust you or perhaps is too short-sighted to see your motivation. Such a person is probably not (or not yet) in your group of friends.
There’s obviously a point at which people transition from group 1 to group 2 and during this time an ill-advised word can ruin a perfectly good start at a relationship. Trust must be established before you can seek to actually improve (and be improved by) your friends. Trust is shown by care and compassion and obvious evidence that the other party is interested not merely in themselves but in your best interest.
Some people seem incapable of trust and I really do think that for the most part, these people are doomed to walk the world without any real friends. If someone is not interested in growing (even if it hurts) they can avoid it quite successfully by never allowing those around them to make a difference in their lives.
How time flies…
Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Geekiness, Ranting & Ravings on March 10, 2006
It seems like I just posted to this site and it’s actually been an entire week.
Lots to do — I’ve been playing around with some new geospatial software (ESRI’s GIS suite). I’ll be writing some add-on functionality to it over the next year for work. Fun stuff but a lot of material.
I’ve been struggling to get printing to work at home. I was trying to use CUPS to share a printer on my Mac. In theory I should have been able to connect to the printer from my Windows XP laptop but it doesn’t quite work. When I was troubleshooting the issue I found a number of people who had exactly the same problem with no clear-cut solution. It’s a feature. I just wonder whether it’s Apple’s or Microsoft’s fault. My guess is Microsoft.
I’ve puttered around a little bit with touching up some webpages as well as correcting some mistakes (I had DNS misconfigured for every single domain on my virtual dedicated server). I added Scuttle to my server so that I can have my own list of bookmarks that are easily retrievable and centrally stored. It’s very much like Del.icio.us but you’re not subject to their ridiculous downtimes and slow connections. I like. You can see it here.
I also got my calendar server up and running again. It’s using PHPICalendar to display iCal files (that I can edit using either my Mac or Mozilla Sunbird). Also pretty neat. I had been running it before but I’ve upgraded to the new version. I also hope to actually use the darn thing this time. You can see it in action here. I need to add my stuff to it — for now it’s just U.S. Holidays. The important thing is that I’ve confirmed it works! You expected me to actually post my boring schedule?
I’m looking into Mac-on-Linux. I just got a new hard drive for my Mac in order to support mirroring the primary drive and I was planning on blowing away the original installation in order to try this out and also to get some annoying issues fixed (from when I dorked around a little too much and messed some things up in OS X). At the very least, I want the ability to dual-boot on my Mac.
All for now,
Busy busy…
Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Geekiness, Ranting & Ravings on February 26, 2006
Things have been busy, busy, busy in the Pacific Northwest. Work has been keeping me running. Lots of neat stuff getting done but it’s wearing me down a little bit. Not much new on the tech front. I’ve been trying to get password maintenance issues resolved. I’d really like a crossplatform method of encrypting a password database. The best I’ve found so far is KeePass. It works on Windows quite well. There’s a linux port that supposedly will compile on Mac if you have the patience to compile Qt. I don’t. Well maybe, but I haven’t gotten around to it. I also spent some time trying to keep my Dad’s network up and running. There were Exchange Server 2003 problems that led to more and more problems which led to several hours staying up late troubleshooting a remote East Coast server. Not easy, but I ended up getting it working sometime around 4:30 just as I was leaving for work. We really need to either give in to the Evil Empire and install Windows 2003 (which will work better) or just embrace our destiny and install Linux. It’s frustrating how even small companies get into such a locked mindset regarding certain features (which are specific to Exchange Server 2003). Ah well…
I just registered a new website at andrewflanagan.info. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it up and running ASAP. The concept is to use it as a CV site per the recommendation of my friend Bill. Even though I’m currently not really looking for new employment, it can never hurt to publish your CV. We’ll see how that goes.
On other fronts, I’ve been keeping up my study of German with Saturday morning classes most weeks. I’ve been getting into the grammar a bit and feel comfortable reading short children’s stories but still have a hard time speaking the language.
I’ve also been trying to work on slogging through the MCSE and MCSD books. My hope is to get my certification in both areas by the year’s end. We’ll see how that goes.
More later… I gotta hit the sack…
Microsoft PDC
Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Geekiness, Ranting & Ravings on September 22, 2005
Last week I attended the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles. Definitely a neat opportunity to learn about some new interesting Microsoft technologies. Overall, I’m not terribly impressed with how far Microsoft has come. The biggest improvements I think are in the area of the .NET languages (specifically C#). With regards to their operating system (specifically the new Windows Vista and Windows “Longhorn” Server) and some of their new concepts for OS integrated 3D graphical user interfaces I’m more worried than impressed. Almost everything that I saw I’ve seen before. The only thing “new” about is that Microsoft has put all the pieces together. Some of it looks neat, but I don’t feel that overall it’s that great. The demos that they ran during the presentations were SLOW. I have a funny feeling that Microsoft will bring a nice slick new desktop environment (that rivals the look of Mac OS X) and before long people will hate it because of how slow it is and because it crashes half the time. The stability and security of the operating system still seems attrocious. There was some neat stuff in reference to the new Communication Foundation (called “Indigo”) but I’m not sure how revolutionary it really is. It seems like Web Services are easier than before to run but I still have a hard time trusting a 24/7 Web Service to run well on any Windows platform.
All in all — a fun time — I came in 12th out of 400+ gamers in a Farcry tournament that was held one evening. I didn’t win anything, but I came close!
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