vanderwal.net

Graduation reflection

Last evening Joy and I were walking around our yard examining new buds on plants and examining the state of weeds versus what we believe are plants (difficult to discern at times). We stopped to talk to our neighbor who invited us as a guest to another neighbor's high school graduation party so to meet more neighbors (the last opportunity to meet neighbors was the snow storms). We have great neighbors who take pride in our street and the high school. It was a wonderful gathering and I was very impressed with those who are graduating high school.

Then it hit me, I had more in common with the parents of the high school graduates than the kids. Granted high school graduates are now less than half my age, but it was a shock to my internal self. Growing up I always got a long very well with the adults, part of growing up an only child I suppose. Now I am an adult, but I am lacking that connection to adults.

UPS gets worse

The UPS snafu gets better. Today I tried following up with UPS, twice. I called during lunch to check where UPS though my package was. When they said it was put on a truck in Texas to be shipped to me I complained. They said it was a ground package so it had to be shipped ground and maybe it really was not in Texas. I asked how it would not be in Texas if it scanned three times in Texas (once in Fort Worth, and twice in Mesquite). I asked to speak to the supervisor, but after a wait I got the same person back who said it seemed the package would be out for delivery that afternoon. (It was not and that was the second time I had been lied to by UPS representatives in this mess.) The person asked if I could give my zip code to get a better time estimate. The person appologized as they had to "say the numbers outloud as they typed because the numbers get confused from their brain to their fingers".

I got home after the promissed delivery time this evening and their was no package. I called customer service again. To check on the package (the UPS tracking system on-line provides the exact same information customer service gives you) I called "customer service" again. This time they confirmed that the package was actually in Texas and was put on a truck to get to Maryland. This would take six days to get to me as that was the shipping time from Texas to Maryland for a ground package. I asked if the package could travel the 1300 miles in 13 hours like it had on June 4th. Customer Service said that was not possible for a ground package. I was told repeatedly that six days is the travel time for a package going from Texas to Maryland. When I pointed out the package was in Maryland two days ago and less than 25 miles from the delivery point, the customer service person returned to their script and said the package must have been rerouted because of bad weather or an act of God. I wanted to know what bad weather would cause the package to go from 25 miles from deliver to 1300 miles from delivery and an act of God would have been reported in the paper. At no point did UPS take any responsibility for the package getting mis-routed. I did get told a few times UPS only has the information in their database and they do not know where the package actually is and do not have control over where the package goes. I was told that UPS customer service can not identify a misrouted package only the computer system can identify a misrouted package and the computer did not see anything wrong with the package going to Texas after being 25 miles from the delivery site on the promissed delivery date. I asked the person on the other end of the phone if she saw a problem with a package being 1300 miles after it had been 25 miles from delivery to her. She started reading from the script. I asked her to stop reading the script and asked if calling customer service could correct the missrouted package. She said no customer service could not do that as their system did not show a problem. I pointed out that I was a customer with a problem with UPS service and wanted assistance. The script reading ensued again. I asked her to stop again. She did, I asked if it was customer service that I called as I was not getting any help and I was a customer with a problem. There was a very long silence. She said yes it was customer service very quitely and she appologized that she could not help me. That was a first for UPS, an appology. I asked who I at UPS could help, she said their was no over riding their system and there was nobody in the company that could do anything to help.

Nobody at UPS that I have talked to seems to think there is any problem with a package being very close to the delivery point then 1300 miles away on the delivery day. Very odd and a very sad state for what was a decent company.

UPS deserves new dented logo

This is now the third time in one year that UPS has screwed up a package shipment. This one takes the cake (the last one was delivery attempts that were never made). I have been waiting patiently for my Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards and Kuniavsky 's Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research to arrive. I ordered from the wonderful Amazon and took free shipping. This lottery shot caused UPS (they have a dented package for a logo for a reason) to get involved.

It seems that the package was 20 miles or so from delivery to me last night at 11:10 pm. Since the package was in Maryland last night I though an attempt would have been made today. No! Last night the package took a magical trip to Texas. The package is still in Texas. I called UPS and they would not take responsibility for their mistake. They would not appologize until I pointed out that is usually the role of customer service. Not only did UPS' customer service fail horribly, UPS does not seem to have the ability to fix their mistakes. UPS said I had to wait 6 more days as it was a ground shipment. The package made it from Maryland to Texas in about 12 hours and there is no way to get it back (not even on a plane) in less than 6 days. UPS has no idea how the package made it from Maryland to Texas, nor how it made it there so quickly. I suggested a similar miracle should happen to fix their mistake, but UPS stated they do not have the capability to do that.

Why does anybody trust UPS with their packages? Why does anybody trust UPS with their money in the stock market? I bet Enron could even fix their mistakes.

By the way, Amazon bent over backwards appologizing and offering what they could to ensure I would be a repeat customer. Nearly the same thing happened with UPS and me with a Barnes and Noble shipment five years ago. Neither UPS nor B&N would accept responsibility and pointed their finger at the other. I cancelled my shipment. Then I pulled the company account (where I was working) from B&N and put it with Amazon and Fat Brain, until B&N bought Fat Brain. Amazon has yet to let me down with customer service, or anything else for that matter.

Reposted honeymoon photos

Our Honeymoon photos are back posted again. The coverage stops in Brugge and does not include Paris or Giverney. It will someday when we get a scanner again.

Back home with new pipes

Ah, home again. We have new pipes through out our house and running water again. We also have a floor to ceiling hole in the wall in our dining room and in the ceiling of the dining room. We have a hole in the kitchen walls too to give access to pipes. We have a new energy efficient water heater, which should also help the cause.

It is good to be back in the house, even though it was only a couple days, it was very disruptive as life (such as work) continues on as usual, as do visits to the pre-baby doctor. I learned a very good lesson on this adventure, when booking a hotel get verification what they mean by "wireless" Internet access. It could be, as it turns out the IR keyboard that is used to control the "Internet in the TV". Wireless to me was WiFi, which means broadband. I was able to get use of a meeting room at the hotel last night to pull e-mail and pull some files I needed. I was able to accomplish that on a broadband connection in 35 minutes, which would have been 2 hours on dial-up. I was able to get back to working on an overview presentation I had to give today.

The funny thing was I was able to pick-up a few wireless signals in the courtyard. Some were managed and locked down and others were open. The signals kept varying in and out so I did not persue much farther. Last night I realized that the WiFi signals were coming from the Microsoft Offices that look down into the same courtyard shopping area.

Oh, nothing new on the baby front as all things seem good and no more sonigrams are planned. Junior is kicking quite a bit during playtime, which is 5:30am and 10:30pm.

Shhhh

Things may be quiet here the next day or so, depending on broadband connection at the hotel, as we are on the run from a house being repiped. Yes, all the water and gas pipes in the house are being replaced. Hopefully we will be able to move back in Thursday night. We should have a new gas stove then too to cook (no more electric stove, yeah).

CMS goes over 1,001

This is post 1,001 in my homebuilt weblog CMS. Yes there have been other odometer parties on this site, but turning over 1,000 was one that really has pleased me. My tool is missing some elements that others now have, but I still have fun tinkering with mine and extending it. There are some plans for the summer to add functionality by embracing the categories and using them in conjuction with the links page as well as tying the links and entries together, sort of like a Web strawberry banana shake. I have a book review repository planned too, but it has not moved out of the ERD phase yet (uh, yes I plan, chart, and document my apps and changes for the site, it eases making changes in the future -- I just need to get all the docs on one machine and in one directory).

Lift you glass to 1,001 entries and no digi-barfing

The bells are ringing

Great news from the Carrie Bickner and Jeffrey Zeldman camps. These two are getting married. We wish them all the best and much much more.

Mac trains its user

A while back I turned on speech feature in OS X. I only have it speak system and application alert to me. I have chosen Victoria (the Uli's talking moose has always been a similar voice for me). A few weeks ago, when Joy was away the TiBook lid became ajar during the night waking the TiBook. It was not much longer before the TiBook began speaking, as our house has all hardwood floors the voice carried. This startled me from my sleep and had me quite startled, then I realized what it was and went to soothe the Mac and put it back to sleep.

This last week a similar incident happened, but with Joy home and I asked Joy what she said. In the middle of the night, out of a dead sleep, Joy said "it was your computer talking" and went right back to sleep. I got up to check and put it back to sleep.

I guess this is our baby preparation application. Somehow I don't think that is the intended purpose, or even any demi-intent for use. I guess our Mac nows understands our lives better than we thought and "just works".

E-mail outage again

E-mail was barfy again yesterday here at vanderwal.net. It seems mail was down for 5 or 6 hours. Everything seems to be back to normal again.

Quiet before the news

After five weeks of visitors or travelling out of town, things on the home front are finally somewhat quiet, other than another leak in the basement (this time at the valve from the street is dripping).

Okay quiet for folks who are expecting a baby in late-September or early October. As our niece says, "Joy is having baby. Joy have baby in her tummy."

We are back

We have been down for the past 36 hours or so, due to a hardware crash and recovery. Most everything is back, but recent e-mail. Please resend anything sent since Monday evening. E-mail seemed to be the first thing to go. One nice thing about a full entry in the RSS feed is being able to save the RSS feed and restoring the last two entries that did not make it onto the backup tape.

I did not realize how dependant I am on my links page until it is gone. Much of what I read at home is out of RSS feeds, but at work, many of the links I use and share as resources are on that page. The links page has been my bookmarks for well over seven years now as it began at some point in early 1996.

NoHo SoHo and other New York observations

The weekend also included some fun NYC adventures in our "spare" time. I tried to find some fun funky casual shoes, which seem to allude the DC area. I teased my sister-in-law by asking when Barney's was open until when Joy and I returned from the wedding. My sister-in-law loves to shop, so when I asked if she was interested in going along to shop for shoes, she said she thought I would never ask. We tried Barney's, but found nothing in my size and found help only slightly easier to find. We ducked into Bloomingdale's and found some things of some interest and in my size, but the fit was not good.

Joy and I went started today at the NoHo Star Diner and had a great brunch. I really enjoyed the Eggs Idaho (sunny side up eggs and potato pancakes), the fresh ginger ale, and Peet's coffee. We ventured just down to SoHo to check out stores. We stopped in the Apple store, which is a wonderful space, to look at the new iPod (very nice and impressed me with the non-moving parts keys that are really nice) and look around. We stopped and tried on shoes in a few places, but if I liked the shoes they were not in my size or were not comfortable on my foot. I was surprised how much SoHo has changed since the early 90s, which was the last time spent time there. SoHo is much like an American mall (up scale American mall) these days. Gone are the funky art galleries that filled the neighborhood and the many eclectic shops, bars, and restaurants. I liked SoHo, but not as much as I used to. New York used to be a very Cosmopolitan city as it did not feel like it could be anywhere in America, it was New York and had a funky flair. More and more it has the same large chain stores and restaurants as anywhere USA, which is sad. New York still has many many "only in New York" places and people, but it is slipping into the mediocrity that enwraps much of the US.

New York City also has become more dirty with trash than any time I can remember in the past 10 years. I was continually stepping on or over trash. New York City has been very proud of is transition into a clean inviting place to visit and live, but it has dropped from that place since even December. I was told my many that this can be attributed to the cuts in City services due to the shortfall of money. Sad.

Joy and I keep saying we need to take a trip to NYC to just see friends there, as we have many who we never really get to see as our trips are short or filled with other reasons for going, other than seeing friends. We hope maybe June could offer this trip before things are a little more restrictive for us travelling. Already our ability to get around is slower than normal, but I was able to get aut and about to run quick errands and shopping trips (and tracking down a Mr. Softee truck, which we did today to get a cherry dipped cone that was great as usual).

Trip to New York

This weekend's adventures took us to New York . [All other information for this post has been removed, you have the most important bits now (really)]

Hello Month

Yes, I know I need to fix the beginning of the month selection. I am off up the coast this weekend for a wedding. Entertain your self, maybe buy a new song or two from Apple, if you don't have a Mac, buy one of those, you will love it.