My Trip to the Zoo

There's a storm raging outside and the weather alert box behind me claims that there is quarter sized hail and 60 mph winds possibly converging overhead. Yay! But earlier today, while overcast, was perfect Zoo weather.
I got to try out my new Zoom Lens and Camera Backpack thingy. Both performed splendidly and I couldn't be happier with my presents!
That sentence was punctuated by a thunder-clap.
For the people playing at home: the lens is a Canon EF 28-135mm 3.5-5.6 IS USM, and the backpack thingy is a Lowepro Slingshot 100 AW. At this point I would comfortably recommend both products to anyone interested in that sort of thing.

Here are some of the results (cropped and/or resized to 600x800 to be used as backgrounds and screensavers on my portable devices):

This first entry is part of the long-standing 'Human Caveman' exhibit. Note the unshaven face, the scruffy hair, that 'devil-may-care' smirk. Be thankful for evolution!
And here was see a more advanced form of life. No brand-labeled marketing materials on this chap! This shot was taken through inches-thick plexi-glass. Be amazed!
A duck. I'm pretty sure it's a duck. The Aviary is never really labeled properly. This one has a house made of straw. The storks had the nest of sticks on top of one of the pagodas, but I never spotted the one made of bricks. Maybe the wolf never gets past the one of sticks. It's a pretty steep climb!
This duck(?) was making neat waves. I may not know species from a hand-cart, but I know pretty neat visuals when I see them!
Here I was trying to prove to myself that a fancy lens in manual mode can be made to focus through a chain-link fence and mesh webbing. Luckily this guy was pretty patient and let me take a few shots until I found the magic settings. I'm pretty sure it's a bird.
This guy is a polar bear. Yup. He seems pretty happy to be a polar bear. Beats being the sacrificial duck in a straw house!
This fellow was just hanging out on a guard-rail. He let me get pretty close before getting nervous, and I got quite a few lovely shots of his plumage. Since he has plumage I'm again pretty certain that this is a bird.
Maybe this was an exhibit, maybe it wasn't. But there was a meadow with a bunch of these little guys hanging out. No fences, but a few park-benches and grills... so... Uhm, Iowa Short-tailed Land Beaver?
I know this one! Hold on... I never forget a face. Uhm....
Unicorn. I shall call him Sprinkles! Sprinkles the happy Unicorn! (The name gets funnier if you've ever seen them pee.)
Giraffe.
Zebra. Serious Zebra. Serious Zebra will get Sprinkles to maul you if you try make a joke about him or his friend Long-neck. So consider yourself warned, Buddy!
I love digital photography! In the few hours we were at the Zoo I took over 500 pictures. I couldn't even imagine doing something like that with a regular film camera. The backpack kept my new toy safe and secure, and was very happy to know that if the heavens HAD broken loose in the torrent that is currently bashing against my window, that the backpack has an integrated water-proof pouch that can be deployed and secured in seconds. :D
All in all... a good day!

Speaking of excuses...

It's consumer whore time!
Like I needed an excuse, but I've decided on my gift to myself this year: A few months ago I jumped on a used camera deal. An old Canon EOS digital camera body with enough megapixels to be useful and not too many megapixels to be annoying. (seriously... who needs 10 megapixel images? The space program. That's who! heh At least that's how I rationalized spending money an a camera that doesn't do 10 megapixels.)
Attached to the camera was a sweet fixed focal length lens that takes awesome low-light images, but since the camera is not a full-image sensor (few older digital cameras are) the lens takes a pretty narrow perspective image and on closer shots it's hard to fit everything into the frame.
So a few weeks ago I tried buying a decent casual level lens used. It was listed in Very Good condition and came at a decent price for the feature list. New lenses of that type are hard to find and come at a great premium. (one of the downsides of going used is that the camera bodies and lens technology has been adapted to the fact that most digital cameras aren't full frame... making newer camera lenses cheaper since they can be made smaller than full-frame lenses.)
Longer story shorter: The seller was EXTREMELY generous listing that lens as Very Good condition. Okay or barely adequate would have been more honest. The pictures came out okay (after I spent a good half-hour cleaning the lens) but the auto-focus mechanism squeaked and squealed incessantly. So I returned it.
After some introspection and contemplation I've decided to try again. But this time I'm buying new, and adding some bells and whistles. I've just received the tracking number of my lens which includes integrated image stabilization (which should VASTLY improve low-light pictures), super-silent auto-focus motor, and a decent zoom range to add some versatility to my shots. And I'm paying almost twice as much as I paid for the camera kit in the first place. :D

Keeping my fingers crossed that this will be worth it!

Out of Excuses...

So now I need a reason.
Escapism. As I get older I sometimes wonder why I spend so much time in pretend worlds, reading and playing video-games. Then I watch the news, read some political commentary, check on the latest polls, pay my bills, and dig right back into my post-apocalyptic training simulators and fantasy novels.
I'm not sure I could express my frustrations with the way things are without swearing. Heavily. Nonstop. Punctuated with rude gestures at key intervals. Spittle would be involved. And that's just about the general status-quo. Specific topics would probably involve a punch to the neck.
It sounds like I will have a job past July. That is the good news. The bad news is that no one has been able to tell me what my job will be. I may have mentioned the merger in previous posts. We are now in the layoff phase of the process and things are looking grim. Between the two agencies we have lost about two million dollars in funding due to the state-wide budget cuts. I do not know what will come out of this mess. A merger is a messy business at the best of times, sorting out redundancies and readjusting management structures. The political back-and-forth about 'whose side' will need to be cut makes for a vicious drama to begin with, but to have utter uncertainty about the future of the agency in any form makes all of this a little disheartening.
Supposedly all the cuts in staff that were going to be made have been decided by now. So maybe we'll begin hearing from the powers that be about the vision that they had when making the decisions about who to cut from where. It probably will not be satisfying, because from most accounts the cuts may as well have been random. Seniority, performance, workload, experience... none of these seemed to be an indicator as to the stability of your position.
We'll see. Again, it looks like I'll be offered a contract, but at this point I don't know how I would be able to perform the duties I've had for the last 7 years when looking at the rough outline of the new agency. The expectations of my current position fall well within my abilities, but it wouldn't take much to make my job physically impossible. Our service area will double in July. Our department has had staff-cuts, with no comparable department in the agency that we will be merging with. Workload divided by workforce is giving me a fairly daunting result at this point, so I really hope that someone soon can give me some idea of what the workload side will entail.
And for bonus points... My girlfriend will find out sometime tomorrow if she will be laid off due to outsourcing. HAPPY FUN TIMES! :P

Despite all this I'm actually pretty happy. I've finally worked my way back through all the Terry Pratchett Discworld books sequentially to get to the newest one. I'm playing a neat FPS/RPG game set in a fantasy wasteland/Russia/militarized zone thingy. Mutants, radiation storms, odd anomalies, warring factions, a mystery, and a world just open and dangerous enough to be interesting: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat. The third entry in the STALKER series. I've played the first one a bit, but ran into major technical issues with my old computer. I've played the second one for about an hour but ran into major distractions with other shiny games. I've played the third one for almost 40 hours so far... this one has the magic sauce. At first it plays almost like Nethack (gamers with roots will know what I mean). Pop into the world. Run around doing stuff. Meet an enemy. Do something stupid. Die. Rinse, repeat. Slowly you learn about the world and its dangers and live longer.
It has been a long time since I've been this engrossed in a game. The unforgiving way it drops you at the edge of the swamp with the tools but none of the knowledge to survive.

But enough rambling praise.
This was composed while at work, so I apologize in advance if the narrative seems a bit broken and disjointed. As you can imagine things are bit chaotic at the moment.

2 Hour late start

Thanks to the horrendous weather outside I have a little time to compose another pile of compost for this compilation. Maybe about... computers!
I <3 Video Game Sales! Ever since I've adopted my 'Wait for it!' purchasing strategy I have been enjoying a nifty little meta-game: browsing the sale sites, looking for neat games. Luckily, my shift in buying habits coincides nicely with several online retailers recognizing the huge market of 'budget' gamers. Amazon has daily and hourly lightning deals in their video-games section. Steam has offered several amazing weekend and mid-week deals for the past few months. Impulse has just started a trial program where they will offer 24 hour coupon codes through their system-tray application... add all that to just the regular run of the mill sales and discounts that are offered and it is no longer a question of 'if,' but 'when' a popular game goes on sale.
There may have been a different catalyst to this movement, but for me personally the leader seemed to be Steam. As a digital distribution platform, Steam is in a unique position to track buying patters, and after a few early experiments they were able to conclusively show that dropping the price moved product. And not just a little. A lot. One of their first big sales for one of their recent games resulted in a 3000% spike in sales. They sold more copies of the game during that sale than during launch.
So now I shop for deals, and it turns out that I'm buying MORE games than before. Thanks to this new attitude about price-point I'm spending much much less. The normal price for a video-game these days ranges from $40 - 60 dollars at launch. A month after launch it is not unusual to see them dropping by 25 -75% for a day or two. It's a great time to be a gamer!

Is it really this difficult?

At one minute shy of an hour and a half I hung up the phone.
I had spoken with a nice lady that mumbled her name, Shane at the 15 minute mark, Eddy at the 45 minute mark, a rep that didn't introduce himself and transferred me to Rachim at the 54 minute mark, and finally Alphy who carried me to 1 hour 29 minutes.

All I wanted to know was what would happen with the invoice for $844.73 listed under my profile since the parts where never actually delivered to me.

And in the end I was told to not worry about it.

We will see...

Back from the Dead

I now understand why a lot of people are frustrated with tech support. Specifically with Dell's Indian flavor of tech support.
Last weekend my computer suffered a crash. I am a technician by training and trade, so I was able to troubleshoot enough to know that this was definitely a hardware failure. Great! Having purchased a comprehensive warranty policy this means that it isn't really MY problem, but Dell's. Software would have been my problem and quite a headache, but this SHOULD be fixable with a simple swap of the broken parts... now, if only we could isolate the parts!

Little did I know...

I enjoy working on computers. I invariably learn something new and surprising. For instance: did you know that a dead memory-bank can cause your video-card to stop sending signals to your monitor? I didn't know that. It is counter-intuitive. There are processes that run every time your computer starts that are supposed to tell you if any of the critical hardware has failed... not being able to see the error messages seems like a pretty critical oversight of this process. Normally the visual warning would be accompanied with an audio cue: a series of beeps, to indicate the nature of the failure. My system gave no such indications. Just a blank screen.

Guess number 1: A dead video-card. Great! My system has two of those running in parallel mode. Unlinking them and swapping between the two should quickly identify the faulty card so that it can be replaced.

No change.

Ok, at this point I've done some testing. It is possible that both cards were affected by this crash, or perhaps even the graphics port on the motherboard. But we've traced the failure to the first step, so it's time to call in the people whose job it is to resolve these issues: Indian tech support.

In previous years there was a separate support number for XPS customers. XPS is Dell's hardcore line of computers. Intended for gamers and hobbyists, and the technicians were highly trained, proficient, and had impeccable English. I still have my own support number, but nine times out of then it apparently feeds into the same technician pool as all the other numbers as I soon found out. My first call actually started out positive. Within 7 minutes I was talking to a technician. Passable English, some strange phrasing, but competent. To his credit, he did warn me that they were updating their systems. Every few sentences he would ask to put me on hold "for 2-3 minutes." 5 - 10 minutes later he would be back. We went through my previous steps, swapping cards, running in single mode. Verifying the monitor works, and he agreed that it was unlikely, but possible that both cards fried. So that's where he wanted to start. So he asked me to hold while he processed the dispatch. Twenty minutes later a heavily accented Indian voice came on the line, informed me that it was "Glenn's" manager. He was very much willing to be taking ownership of my problem and would be happy to be giving me my dispatch number and if I would please be submitting to a survey about performance of technician it would be a quickly process of only a few moments thank you. Sigh.

My warranty provides next business day support. Normally Dell sends an e-mail with tracking numbers as soon as a dispatch is processed. I never received this e-mail so I called Dell again the following day. I didn't have the express code for my system, so I used the case number from my previous support call. And this is where I encountered my first taste of what 'normal' people must go through when they call for help.

The rep was bored, half-asleep, or drunk. All I wanted was confirmation that my replacement parts had shipped and their tracking numbers so that I could proceed to the next steps.
The rep said: Yes sir, I have the dispatch for the hard-drive here...
Me: Video-cards.
Rep: ... Yes, there are also Video-cards. And a hard drive.
Me: Oooohkay? What's the tracking number?
Rep: The tracking number has not been issued yet.
Me: -Incredulous Silence-
Rep: Uhm...The tracking number is .... -etc-

Not off to a great start. But at least I had a tracking number. FedEx claimed the package was already out for delivery, so I crossed my fingers and hoped that my gut feeling about the motherboard being the cause of my problems was wrong.
The package waiting for me at home was small. Too small. My video-cards are long, heavy beasts with giant cooling fans and copper heatsinks. This box weighed less than a pound and contained two bridge connectors used to link the cards together, a DVI-VGA adapter, a DVI-HDMI adapter, and a return waybill.

Back to the phone. After a couple of disconnects I get back into the queue. After thirty minutes we confirm that there is supposed to be a second package, but the tracking number doesn't match the FedEx format. The Dell order summary page lists it as in-transit.
Call to FedEx: Not a valid tracking number, and searching their system for my destination address shows only the package in front of me.
Call to Dell: After one hour we confirm that Yes, their system shows a second package in transit, but FedEx denies that it exists. This technician is also several percent more competent than previous ones and we run through some more troubleshooting steps and there will be another dispatch for the video-cards AND a motherboard. Swapping out a motherboard is a little more touchy than Dell will trust to even tech savvy customers, so they will be sending the parts to a local contractor who will contact me for scheduling the service.

I have developed a theory. I believe that the tech support centers in India have less computer stations than employees. Mr. Vladimir would ask me to hold, put the headset down, and disappear for 7-10 minutes while confirming details of my package which I was able to pull up on their website in seconds. I can only assume that he was waiting his turn on the single working computer in the building. I do want to thank him for sparing me the horrendous synth glockenspiel funk session stuck in constant loop for their hold music.

While on their website I pulled up the invoice for the original dispatch and discovered that the 2 video-cards, plus kit, is being billed at $844 and change. Over $370 per card! They didn't cost that much new! Luckily, the invoice only gets billed if I don't return the defective parts in a timely manner. Which is not going to happen unless I actually receive the replacement parts... So now the mystery tracking number and missing package has a more ominous quality.

Let two days pass. No update on the mystery package, FedEx still has no information, and Dell had updated the estimated delivery date from the 17th to the 18th... on the 19th. Sigh...
While having lunch the technician calls and basically tells me that I'm SoL on getting any reasonable times scheduled in the near future, and that early next week is looking sketchy too. And no, he doesn't do weekends. Fair enough. I tell him that I work fairly close to home and that my work is flexible enough that if he can give me a little warning I can meet him whenever he has an opening during the day, except for Friday at 12:30 where I have to be at another office in another city without fail. He'll call me in the morning to let me know what he can arrange.

Friday morning. I e-mail my boss and inform him that I may need to take an hour of personal time to meet with a technician. Two hours later he e-mails me and asks around what time I was expecting the call. "Before now," was my reply... with an eye on the clock. Two minutes later my phone rings.
"I can meet you there at 11:30." I reminded him of my need to be on the road, without fail, at 12:00 to make my appointment. ...
"Uhmmmm... let me make one call, I'll meet you there at 11:10."

Excellent luck! An early lunch, plus maybe a half-hour of personal time, and on the road to make my meeting!

I was at my apartment at 11:05. At 11:15 I ate my microwave burritos. At 11:20 I sat down on the couch and tried hard not to curse. At 11:25 there was a knock on my door. Apparently the technician had been speeding on his way to my place and got tagged by the cops. He was apologetic and went straight to work. Luckily my computer case is rather large and the motherboard is easy to extract. 10 minutes later we are trying to boot. No go. No change. Nothing. He starts trying some things, swapping cards in and out, but nothing is working. Time is ticking away. I call my office and apologize that I will most likely be later than planned. I luck out, no other meetings were butting up to mine and they were having a bit of an office party anyway. At 12:10 he starts packing up and tells me that he'll contact Dell for the next steps this afternoon. At 12:15 I race towards the Interstate. I make it to the office by 12:45. Disappointed in myself and unable to clearly voice my frustrations. It seemed like everything was out of my control at that point.

Fast forward to that evening. The technician calls me and tells me that Dell wants me to recontact their tech support and start over. He seems pretty upset by that approach and asks me to keep him in the loop.

So I call Dell. The first call disconnects after 5 minutes. There is a new wrinkle. The Dell system no longer recognizes my system's code and fails to forward me to the XPS department automatically. I now have to go through an extra 'data gathering' step where a standard rep assesses my system, needs, and forwards my call to a random department. Finally I get put in touch with Chris. Chris sounds like the technicians I USED to get and we start chatting about the situation. At this point I'm willing to try anything so we start working through all the troubleshooting steps again. Suddenly my system boots up normally, but crashes halfway through. My heart jumps! The catalyst had been the RAM chips! We started rotating chips in and out, with gradually increasing rates of success. Finally, my system started booting as if nothing had gone wrong.

My best guess now is that the memory slots on my old motherboard had failed. Apparently with this particular system configuration instead of causing a beep-code it just quietly causes the video bus to stop responding. Then the new motherboard had some machining oil or something in the memory slots, preventing the RAM from making adequate contact, causing the same symptoms as the old motherboard. Repeated removal and reseating of the RAM cleared the residue from the slots and allowed the system to work normally.

I have now tested and retested my RAM and everything is normal.

Buuut I've just received an e-mail reminder that I still need to return the defective parts!
That mystery shipment is still somewhere in FedEx hell, and Dell tells me that the department I have to talk to to get that straightened out doesn't open till Monday.

Let's hope they don't screw this up.

Thanks for letting me rant!

Time to kill...

Good Morning!
Life seems to be oscillating between too little and too much free time. At first, my lack of posting was due to a lack of compelling subjects, or maybe introspection. Now I have more thoughts rattling around my little universe than I have time to express, or even follow to meaningful completion.
But today... today I purposefully woke up an hour before my usual time. I have a pretty relaxed morning routine, but this morning I have to be at work a little earlier than usual, and I'll be damned if I'll cut my coffee + webcomics/forums time short! But now I have enough time to author at least a placeholder. Rejoice!
Aaaaand I've just spent the last few minutes just staring at the blinking cursor, arguing with myself about where and how to start.
I'll start with work. Watching the minutes tick by I realize that opening this particular can of worms could leave this post, yet again, unfinished... we'll see what happens.

The only constant is change.
Big changes are coming at my workplace. While afloat on a sea of economic uncertainty and instability the state of Iowa has mandated a merger between two agencies. My reason for waking early is to meet up with some of my coworkers and carpool to a meeting to discuss the shape of the merged Tech Department. The result of this meeting will be a proposal to take before the Board of Directors and will spell out what my job will be in this new agency. IF I have a job. Our merger of two, already somewhat struggling, agencies coincides with budget cuts from the state of Iowa. 10% right off the top of our budget. While I am fairly confident that there will be a me-shaped spot in the new agency, nothing is certain. So I am employing my tried-and-true tactic of realistic optimism: Be aware of all the ways these changes could make my up-till-now comfortable job unpalatable, consider in depth the annoyances and frustrations that will arise enfolding multiple districts that have completely different approaches to tech and support, so that (and this is where the optimism part comes in ;) ) I can be pleasantly surprised when everything works out better than I had feared!
This approach seems to work for me. Then again I'm pretty sure that I have a lot of the 'crazy.' Over-analyzing is like a hobby for me. So I take a self-destructive trait, embrace it, take it one step further, and now I've got a semi-beneficial coping mechanism! Yay me!
Ok. Time's up.
I'll probably need to vent after this meeting, so feel free to expect something new here soonish!

Good Luck!