Kev

So last night was one of the more painful moments in sport I’ve witnessed. Not painful “owww!!!!”, but painful “feck. maybe I could have made a bit of a difference had I been playing”. Our team played Shiny last night, and it was a 180 degree turnaround from the previous outing. I wasn’t playing due to my leg (which still hurts), and we were a little short on men, so I felt even worse.

Everyone got off to a great start, and opened a 6-2 lead. Unfortunately, not one person on Shiny is over 30, and the age and (lack of) conditioning of our team really started to show after 20 minutes. It was 8-7 for the opposition at the half, and 15-11 at the end of the game for the bad guys. It was nice to see everyone show so much promise, and more importantly, so much smart playmaking. I little more oomph here and there and we would have had the game, it’s just that fatigue set in and killed us on transition.

It makes you wonder what a fresh set of (uninjured) legs that can go the whole game (usually) without sparing might have done. All in all, a really good effort, and the zone defense was working really well (man… welll… not so much in the second half). Everyone finsihed happy, and I think next week may be a little different. Louise was back as well, which added a lot.

Great effort, really close (more than the score shows), everyone was talking during the game and happy after, and next week is the return to form.

Today was spent in Montreal. One of my staff leaves for a new position next Wednesday, and we’re covering transition with a new addition to the team. Was a very good session, but I’m going to miss working with Cat and exchanging Anglais vs. French barbs.

Why is it that pizza is so much better in Montreal, anyways? It’s not really what I’d consider a delicacy in Québec, but for some reason I can’t remember ever having bad ‘za there.

For the first time in my train riding experience, VIA was on-time both legs of a trip. I bought a lottery ticket.

So it’s now five days until the race, and I’ve managed to damage myself. I don’t know whether it was playing ultimate last Wednesday, working out the following Thursday, or just some weird, random accident. I do know that walking home Thursday night was excruciating, and that it still hurts.

I seem to have torn some of the connective tissue on my right tibilais anterior, to the point where there’s deep bruising visible through the skin at the connecting point. It doesn’t look like much, but it’s preventing me from running, and it’s been a painful distraction for almost five days now. On top of that, my cleats gave me a silver-dollar sized blister on my heel on Wednesday, which is adding to the joy of movement. Thankfully, Dr. Scholl’s blister pads will take care of the latter, and are amazingly effective.

I’m so happy I’ve spent the last seven months getting to this point. I finally get close to the big day, and I feel broken. Sunday will no longer be about speed, it’ll just be about completing (if I race at all). What a downer. I’m going to skip the game tomorrow night in hopes that I’ll be able to heal in time. I’m not terribly optimistic.

The Illuminati Book Meme

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

My result:

“Like Vernon, a limp dick can be pretty useless.”

(Johnson, Sterling – English as a Second F*cking Language – St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995)

That actually was the closest book to me when I found Ian’s post with this task. I have a bunch of overflow books that won’t fit in my bookshelves on the shelf above my monitor. This one was lying on top of the others and was easiest to get at. It was given to me by my admin when I worked for Globix, and I think it was a commentary on my use of the English language at the time. It’s all about cussing effectively. Thanks for the great pocket reference, Yadira!

I would really, really, really like to go out and huck a disc around right now.

Perhaps the most asinine discussion/argument/soapbox session I’ve read yet on Slashdot is in the comments of this post about BS tech support answers. It’s a discussion about bits and bytes that descends into definitions of kilo and mega and nibbles and a bunch of other units, and everyone seems to think their viewpoint is right. You’d think it was a discussion of the merits of a Mac vs. the merits of the PC the way some people position their opinions.

I think it’s really simple – define the units for the conversation/context at hand, and away we go. I do this to eliminate confusion for my customers by defining a Megabyte as 1,000,000 bytes of information, and a Gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes of information. Mathematicians (hi Axe!) do this to define their systems so that other people can understand what the hell they’re talking about (NB: other people=other mathematicians. I’ve tried to understand, but get lost by the middle of the whiteboard). Measurements are simply a frame of reference, and if you define that frame of reference for a given situation I think things are ok. Most organisations use the definitions I do, so I’m not too worried. If I was trying to pitch a kilometre as 1024 metres, people might look at my funny. To almost everyone, kilo is a thousand, and mega is a million, so I’ll use that.

For me and my customers, it simplifies how we measure things and how we bill. All the reporting is done in bytes, and moving a decimal is much simpler than dividing by orders of 1024. Some people would argue that we do also do it this way to cheat customers out of the extra bytes if we calculated it “correctly”, but when you look at the quantities we include, it’s really immaterial for the overwhelming majority of our base (and you try explaining to someone not familiar with binary systems orders of 1024).

When you actually get to some of the tech BS sharing, it’s quite funny. As usual with /., it just takes a while to find the good stuff.

The best one I had was a NAS 6000 call. 1.4 TB of storage in a hot swapable RAID 5. The customer had filled it with data and deleted the original source. No backup (you can see where this is going). Luser decides to demonstrate hot swap drives by removing two drives and swapping them.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“remember that it’s lengthwise, not across when you slash your wrists. Across is just a cry for help.”

Amen, bruddah.

I don’t understand what some of my customers are thinking when they try to negotiate with me. They purchase hosting services, for which we have a fairly clearly defined series of limits. One of these limits is that you can only specify x number of recipients in the To:, CC:, and BCC: fields when using our MTA as a relay. This is done to prevent people from abusing the service by using it as a mass mailer, and to prevent the same from inbound mail servers trynig to dumb mail to a bajillion addresses in one connection attempt.

We had a sales rep call us in a panic because their customer was unhappy they could not send an e-mail with over 3,500 recipients in it. Said customer was threatening to escalate to a VP if we didn’t change our systems to meet their needs. Said customer also put in writing the fact that they “would hate to have to look elsewhere for hosting services”, but that they would if forced to. Our sales rep was demanding we change our system to make the customer happy.

The customer pays $19.95/month for the hosting service, which is (understandably) on a shared platform. I asked the rep what the ramifications of this customer leaving were, and they said “we may lose the revenue”. The revenue amounts to $240.00/yr, plus GST for the gummint. To put it in perspective, the weighted costs of the time spent by the four people who had touched this issue so far exceeded that annual amount. My reaction is, and will continue to be, “I’m sorry you feel that way, we understand there are other hosts out there, and we understand you may have to change providers. I have a responsibility to my customer base as a whole, and cannot accommodate your request because changing those limits for you has the potential to adversely affect the rest of the base.”.

I also suggested to the rep that they offer the customer the mailing list services that we have for just this kind of thing. Apparently, the customer had a couple expletive deleteds, and complained that going that route would cost more money. No duh.

Long story short, explained to the rep we could not accommodate the customer request in the interests of protecting the platform (it wasn’t a request, I just called it that). The rep escalated. I spent almost 4 hours of my time drafting responses to senior management who the customer complained to. They agreed with me, but it took some time. This happens a lot.

Am I being non-customer-focused when I think this customer is being a twit? Am I the only one that can do the math on this one? Should I point out that if you buy a package of gum that says you get 7 pieces for a fixed price, you’re only going to get those seven pieces? Should I explain to the customer that threatening to take their business elsewhere is not going to sway me a whole lot in this particular case? I just don’t get it.

We have a tonne of customers who pay for a service which presents pretty decent value. They chose the service because it’s cost-effective, and meets the needs of the large majority of folks. We’re very up front in saying we put limits on the system, and what those limits are, because several thousand people use those system every day, and we don’t want to get put on a blacklist or worse.

Don’t threaten me to get your way, it won’t go very far. If you were paying a big nut every month, or I could make the change without (potentially) compromising the service, I’d seriously consider it. Buying a low-end service and asking for features that are expensive to deliver, and then threatening to bring it to senior managment if we don’t meet your demands (because yopu understand how to play my company) does not set us off on the right foot.

I know there are other providers out there. I also know the difference between good business, and bad business. I’d wish this customer luck with their new provider, but I followed up on this complaint, which was lodged with us one month ago today, but they’re still with us. I’m not gloating, because I know this customer was just playing us, because normally we bend or throw money at them for their “inconvenience”.

I guess spelling out what you get for what you pay isn’t enough.

Feh.

You’re talking to who? This got me thinking, and I’m sad to say I’d probably be willing to pony up for a vanity Caller ID label.

err… “Yahoo”.

Go Flames, Go!

It’s nice to see a team who has filled, on average, 92% of the seats for every home game in the last eight years make the Stanley Cup. It’s even nicer when you take into account the fact that seven of those eight years they didn’t make the playoffs. I think they can do it, and I think they and their fans really deserve it.

I’d say sorry to the San Jose fans, but I wouldn’t mean it.

You know when you wait a considerable time for something, expecting for it to be amazing, and it turns out to completely suck ass? That happened tonight. After a six month wait, summer ultimate season started up tonight. We got destroyed. It wasn’t fun, at all.

Very few people showed up to play (we had a full complement of players), and everyone dragged their asses around the field all night. Ah well, it’s the first game, right? I’m covered with scrapes and bruises from laying out (mostly on D), but I don’t feel very good about my play. I also had a relatively embarassing tirade when I dropped a very catchable pass in the endzone for the second time (I was yelling at myself, but it still wasn’t very cool).

I will say, the most demoralizing event of the game was when the other team asked if we minded if they practiced their zone in the second half, because they were really bad at it. Mind? Hell no, you’ve only taken what was an agonizing ass-whupping and have turned it into something that you’ll use as a training exercise because you figure we’re that bad. At least you asked, and we did say “ok”.

We normally play zone D, and switched to man to man and actually played a little better in the second half. They only practiced zone for a couple points, and switched back after we picked it up a little. Still I think it was 15-3, or something awful like that. Team yellow, meet team orange.

We did practice for an hour after the game, and it went reasonably well. Hopefully this will be the only game of the season that plays out this poorly.

I went to Pierre and Carol’s afterwards, and they put a couple beers and an amazing shishkebob from the Glebe Meat Market in me, followed by some excellent (and hysterical) conversations with my running group (Carol, Pierre, Iz, and Kerry). After that, everything feels a little better.

Still – total pwnage sucks hairy monkey nuts.

Heh – r337 4ppL3 s4Uc3 4 s@L3. Thanks prii! If the auction is no longer there, try the screen capture.