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Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! or My Lame Attempt at Turbo
Ok, so I have been without cable for three weeks. Something happened in the Cablevision hub down below. They should be able to fix the damn thing without me being there, right? Nope. I must be there. My sysadmin neighbor had the same problem. He made an appointment, which was promptly missed by the cable guy. On the second try his service was restored, but the technician did not do anything about my connection, even though he was told about it.
So I decided to find out the following: is it possible to have Cablevision fix my cable without me being there? Come on, cable is not important enough to take a day off from work, right? What if I can’t take a day off? What? What?
So I decided to “Turbo” (definitely click the link). That’s what a real pro of getting things out of customer service calls his art.
Well, I suck at it. I summoned level 2 support. Bampf + cloud of blue stinky smoke. No dice. I summoned a director of customer service (a director is located below VP in the corporate food chain. My boss is a director). Ca-bampfff + a cloud of stinky red smoke. No dice. I decided to give up and make an appointment. I guess I could work from home one day.
You see, with this amount of energy expended, I could get a satellite dish which would provide me with a better selection of channels, better picture quality and cheaper price. But I can’t. Dishes are banned from my apartment building.
Interestingly, the Cablevision director said that in the future Cablevision will have more channels than any dish network. I wanted to inquire about how they were gonna cram all of that bandwidth into coax, but I decided that it was enough smart assing for the day.
What worries me, is that I am starting to become more and more vocal about getting good customer service. I sympathize more with corporations that are loosing business because of idiocy of all levels of management in designing the customer experience, than with CRs. clerks and managers who have to endure my smart arse requests, arguments and refusal to take crap from them without even a half-hearted fight.
What is it? Am I becoming “just like the Americans” as that sleazeball realtor said?
Rubor, Dolor, Tumor, Color!
Found new LiveJournal community, med-school.livejournal.com. Oh, man! What was I missing!
“I was poking around in my cadaver today just kind of checking out the pelvis”
“I did a history and physical on a patient today with one of those “weird” problems”
“They flush out all the blood in our cadavers”
And most importantly:
Take me out container / Take me out with the crowd
Here is something that I wanted to get for a long time. Hinged foam take-out containers.
They are easy to open, portable, don’t spoil the taste of the food like aluminum containers, don’t take up much room in the fridge.
This way I can cook enough food for a few days, put it in these containers and pop them into the fridge.
They are also good for storing fish filets :)
Blackfish
Went fishing on Pastime Princess today. Caught 4 very nice keeper blackfish. The term “keeper” refers to the fact that blackfish can only be kept if they are over 14 inches. Had an interesting “double header” (a baseball derived term meaning two fish at a time). A blackfish took the hook and ran into it’s burrow in the shipwreck. I let the line hang for a minute or two and then lifted. At that moment a smaller blackfish took the second hook and probably helped be force the first one out of it’s hole. Had another doubleheader, but without a snag. Caught and released many “short” blackfish. Nice.
Now for the general randomness. I was napping in the hold of the ship. When I woke up, people near me were talking about “King’s” biography. For a moment there I naturally assumed that they were talking boxing. Well, it wasn’t Don King they were talking about. It was Stephen King. Hmm, a literary discussion in a hold of a fishing ship. How refreshing. I joined in and told them about Stephen King’s prodigy stepbrother, David King. One of the guys even read H.P. Lovecraft. And they were usual gruff, seasoned Brooklyn fishermen. Weird.
The catch filleted. Can you name my three favorite kitchen appliances on the counter?
Mmmm. Blackfish + butter + Keto brand low carb “breadcrumbs” + sea salt + “Pride of SZEGED” brand fish rub + my favorite Le Cruset pan = Mmm mm m
This came out great, but I am thinking about taking a fish cooking glass from a culinary school. I learn from books pretty well, but it would be cooler to get some instruction.
Oh yeah. Remember I wrote about natural lighting? Kitchen is the only place in my apartment still lit by crappy fluorescent lighting. That’s why the first picture looks so crappy. The range in illuminated by a GE Reveal bulb.
Et tu, Hasselblad
Guess what. Hasselblad is switching to making autofocus cameras.
“The price of the H1 has been announced at about U.S. $6,000 with 80mm lens, one film back and metering prism. Add a digital Kodak DCS Pro back and the tab comes to about $18,000”
Wow, that Kodak back is pretty sweet. Check out the detail. Drooool.
But it’s Ok. In a few years Powershot G8 will do the same.
Meanwhile, in the Butter Dimention 3
I truly believe in parallel dimensions. Come on, how else can we explain the great missing sock mystery? Subjected to about 100 G in your washing machine, socks, being one of the smallest articles of clothing, simply disappear from our dimension and drift into another.
Jerry Seinfeld has an alternative theory involving a dryer: “The dryer is their only chance to escape and they all know it. They plan it in the hamper the night before. “Tomorrow, the dryer. I’m going”” I don’t buy that , because it implies that socks are sentient.
Socks may be the most common interdimentional travelers, but other objects can disappear and reappear under normal conditions.
Interdimentional police is looking for the following items on my request.
* A book “Barbarians Led By Gates”. I’ve read half of it, and then it disappeared into the Ether. Damn, it’s a good book. I’ll have to order another one.
* My titanium wedding band. I am not sure about interdimentional travel here because a) I’ve lost a lot of weight and it could have slipped of my now thinner finger on a fishing trip or b) the cat could have eaten it.
* A book of Russian translations of Japanese science fiction writers. Disappeared years ago. I was in the middle of an interesting story.
* A book about fishing in the Black Sea (also in Russian)
* “Harvey Wang’s New York”. Black and white photo book purchased in Strand bookstore.
I think that books and rings possess a special shape, which encounters the least resistance slipping into interdimentional space. Donuts probably too. I’ve seen three dozen Krispy Kremes disappear in under a minute.
plug
Microsoft Tabula Rasa.
Chairman Bill is launching Tablet PC right now.
He got fatter since the last time I have seen him.
Looks like they’ve learned everything the could from the failures of Grid, Pen Windows, Newton, Palm, Softbook and Nuvomedia. Maybe this is it, the tablet is here.. I am getting one.
WML: Ligh My life
You know what I hate? Well, many things. But I especially hate bad lighting. Office lighting. Even in the best furnished, expensive offices with Aeron chairs in cubes and espresso machine in the kitchen, lighting is provided by the same crappy cheap fluorescent fixtures of horror.
You know them. There is probably one hanging above your cube right now. Grating on your eyes, throwing glare onto your monitor. Giving you headaches and depressing the hell out of you. Well, of course, it’s not like that everywhere. For instance, a long time ago, in a galaxy called the dot com, I interviewed at a company called Betelgeuse. It was named after an extremely bright red supergiant in the Orion Nebula, which name English speakers pronounce “beatlejuuuze” OR “beatlejuice”, and Russians pronounce “betelgeyze”. It’s a dying star, about to explode (or go supernova if you want to put a positive spin on it).
In any case, this company had the coolest lighting scheme. They turned off all the lights except a few small spotlights, and lit the corridors with decorative candles. The offices were lit with individual lamps.
But what can a cube monkey like me (and probably you) do about the lighting situation? Well, for one, you can kill the horrible hell beacon above your cube. Since there is no light switch, here is what you need to do.
Get onto a chair and get close to the lighting fixture. Your task is to unplug the fluorescent tube from it’s socket. It can be usually accomplished by rocking the tube slightly left-right and away from the socket. Make sure to let your friendly maintenance person and your boss know you are doing this. You don’t want someone trying to open the fixture and get hit on a head with a fluorescent tube. Also, don’t burn or electrocute yourself. This trick only works with fluorescent tubes.
But Michael, you ask, what else can I do? You can light everything with full spectrum natural lights. A cheapo solution is to use GE reveal bulbs. They cost about as much as regular incandescent bulbs but have a spectrum that is less yellow. Everything looks a bit better. I use Reveal bulbs at home.
There is also a more expensive option – full spectrum fluorescent fixtures. Remember, in previous WML I mentioned aquarium limps? Well, besides aquarium lights they make full spectrum tubes for regular lighting.