December 2007 - Posts
To each person who happens to read my blog (thanks to both of you), I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas.
A while back I posted about my surprisingly positive experience with Comcast's customer service -- today I had the more expected experience of a total lack of 'service' from a customer service representative.
I ordered a bunch of gifts from Amazon a while back (December 12th) and opted for 'Super Saver Shipping' since it was 'guaranteed' to arrive before Christmas. I had the packages shipped to my office since some of the gifts were for Jodi. Fast forward to this past week when the packages finally shipped and I got to agonizingly watch the snails pace with which they moved closer to me using the USPS tracking system. Yesterday morning before 5:30 AM, both packages left their respective Detroit offices (one Allen Park, one Detroit) for presumably, Ann Arbor. Neither package was delivered yesterday, and moreover, neither apparently has even arrived at the Ann Arbor post office yet. I tried calling the USPS phone number to talk to someone and the person on the line told me that all they could tell me was the ship date and that they hadn't arrived -- they apparently didn't even know how to look up the tracking information. I asked if I could alter the instructions for delivery of the package to have them hold at the post office and I would pick it up Monday (since the office is closed, they won't deliver). She said, sir, the carrier has to attempt to deliver the package and fail to deliver it before you can pick it up.
So in other words, there is no way I can get my package until they attempt to deliver it, which won't even happen until Wednesday. So much for guaranteed delivery.
UPDATE:
I am not good at taking 'no' for an answer on stuff like this, so I talked to our neighborhood mail carrier and she said to call the Post Office in Ann Arbor and talk to someone there -- they'll help. So I did. And they did. The lady I talked to at the Liberty Post Office was kind, helpful and is going to do what she can to help me track down the packages and if we can find them I can pick them up Monday (before 4 PM, since they'll close early -- she was pretty happy about that 
). So, although I am still a little miffed about the whole ordeal, I can honestly say that when I finally got a real person at the PO that mattered, I was treated well and I believe things might work out in my favor at this point. We'll see...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071222/bs_nm/goldmansachs_blankfein_dc_1
67.9 million dollar bonus. Now that's a nice payback for a job well done...
Recently I switched my home ISP to AT&T from Comcast, and as a result, my free subscription to McAfee products was revoked and I was granted a subscription to Norton/Symantec instead. Generally speaking, I am the kind of user who watches my process list closely and monitor CPU and memory usage. The Symantec/Norton products are absolute garbage. I am sure that they provided protection from threats, but they used so much memory and CPU that my computer was rendered fairly unusable. Now, my machine isn't the newest box around (2.6GHz P4, 1GB RAM, GeForce 6600, lots 'o' disk) but it is generally pretty reasonable, and certainly shouldn't struggle to start IE or Outlook Express. I uninstalled the entire suite and put the free packages from AVG on instead. It is like I have a new computer.
I wonder how it is possible that the folks at Symantec aren't aware of this or at least don't do something about it. Perhaps the assumption that everyone has newer machines is ruling the land, but I can't imagine I am the only person running on hardware that is more than 2 years old.
Get your mind out of the gutter -- I am referring to the brain. It should be your favorite body part, too, since all the other parts are a LOT less fun/interesting/useful without the brain.
Check out this little blurb (I came to find it though boing boing).
Nothing earth-shattering there, but it was interesting that people are making money off telling other people what I think is blatantly obvious (ie. think for yourself, you drone!)
Take it or leave it -- I just found it amusing...
The family spent the weekend in GR to see and fawn over the newest member of the extended family -- SuperDave and his wife have welcomed their first son into the world. Everyone is healthy and doing well, and the little fella seemed to get along with everyone just fine. Congrats to Dave and Jo on adding another wonderful little monster to their family...
It seems so obvious now, but in searching around for help with some video editing stuff I am working with tonight, I came across something that made me slap my forehead like John L Smith during a press conference. You can do a binary concatenation of files in windows with the following command:
C:\Temp>copy /b VTS_03_1.vob + VTS_03_2.vob + VTS_03_3.vob + VTS_03_4.vob "my big file.mpg"
In particular, the line above will take the raw files from a DVD and concat them into a long (not very compressed) video file (with embedded audio). I was searching all around trying to find something to do this without transcoding to some lossy format, and all I needed to do was copy!
Good to know for all the future, as I have wasted WAY too much time screwing around with this stuff already, and if I finally get a video camera that can do more than a minute at a time, I have a feeling I'll be spending more time making (and then ripping back apart) DVDs of the various 'important' moments in the kids lives...