KnoBlog

A couple of years ago I bought a tiny Creative 1GB flash-based MP3 player so I could listen to tunes.  One of the features I liked that the iPod didn't have is a built-in digital-tuning FM radio.  So now that I have an LG phone that can play MP3s, I wondered why (besides the obvious reason that Verizon wants to sell us MP3s and videos over their VCast service) LG didn't build in a radio too.  Sometimes I just want to listen to NPR or C-SPAN radio, and the little Creative FM radio sometimes doesn't do a great job with picking up those stations.  It would have been cool if LG added a decent FM receiver to their Chocolate phone, then it would truly be multimedia.

Since we switched to Verizon and got new Bluetooth-enabled phones, my wife got interested in getting one of the Bluetooth headsets so she didn't have to use the wired headset that she hated.  I got her a Motorola H700, and managed to save about $60 by getting it on eBay instead of at the Verizon store.  Works great.  But now it means that she is going to be going around with it attached permanently to her ear, and it's blinking purple all the time in standby mode, looking like a Borg implant.  Sigh.

Well, it was good while it lasted. SunRocket, our VOIP phone company shut down yesterday without warning. The cool feature about SunRocket was that they provided a free virtual phone number in any of the area codes they served, so I got one that is local to my parents so they could call me any time with a local phone call. Nice. At least now that we have switched to Verizon for our cell service, my parents can always call me on their cell phones and it will be free since they have Verizon as well.

Now I'm just hoping that wherever we go next, (which could be to ViaTalk, which is currently offering up to six months free service to compensate SunRocket users for their loss) we can still keep our old phone number since everyone knows it. Having a free virtual number would be nice too, but no longer necessary. In any case I guess the SunRocket "gizmo"/VOIP router is now trash.

Yesterday my wife and I officially ended our love/hate relationship with Sprint, where we have been customers for six years.  It's not that most of our friends and family are Verizon Wireless customers, which they are.  It's not that we both needed new phones, which we did.  What finally pushed us over the edge was the constant harrassment by Sprint to upgrade our plans.  On one such occasion, a Sprint salesperson even "upgraded" my wife's plan and sent her a new phone despite her saying "no" half a dozen times during that conversation.  Although my wife and I were generally happy with Sprint service and coverage, the constant push to upgrade our plans was annoying at best.  They could easily tell from our usage patterns that we would not choose to upgrade, so instead of keeping loyal customers happy they pushed and pushed until they pushed too hard.

In the genuinely useful features department, we added VZ Navigator to my wife's phone.  For $9.95/month, this feature gives turn-by-turn directions, just like an expensive in-car navigation system.  Although it is slightly cumbersome to enter addresses, this allows my wife to easily get to where she needs to go without having to look down at printed directions.  I was doubtful at first, but this feature is very cool.

Just goes to show that there is no free lunch.  SunRocket, the very popular VOIP service, first offered service on the premise that there are no additional fees, taxes, etc.  They called themselves the "No Gotcha Phone Company."  (Someone in the marketing department must have gotten a raise the day they came up with that.)  There was supposed to be a flat monthly or annual fee, and all other fees are covered.

A couple months ago, SunRocket announced that they must now pay the federally-mandated Universal Service Fee to subsidize low-cost phone service and service in rural areas, and they are passing this cost on to their customers.  Today, they announced that Virginia residents must now pay the state communications tax.  Suddenly, VOIP service is a bit more expensive than it used to be.  Gotcha.

Now from a business perspective, of course it doesn't make sense for SunRocket to absorb all of the additional taxes imposed on it by government agencies due to the ever-changing tax landscape.  Of course you can't run a business that way.  But a lot of this was anticipated, and if SunRocket was surprised by this then they were hiding their heads in the sand.  When VOIP phone companies started becoming popular, it was only a matter of time until they started being treated like regular phone companies.  This is only the beginning.

I never go to the Cheesecake Factory.  On evenings and weekends the wait is just ridiculous, sometimes as much as two hours, so I generally avoid it.  However the other day we were on a family outing to the mall, and it was shortly after the lunch rush so there was actually no wait, and we decided that since we hadn't eaten there in years, we would give it another shot.

Immediately as I sat down I saw the size of the menu.  This was not a regular menu, it was a spiral-bound book.  I remember the Cheesecake Factory having a large selection of food, but I didn't think they expanded their menu quite that much.  As I turned the pages, I realized why the menu was so thick: every left page was a full-page advertisement.  It's nice to know that while I'm trying to pick my food, I can be bombarded by advertising for watches, cars, and other luxury items.  Mostly brand development ads, but advertising nonetheless.  I had to wonder: is selling food no longer enough for this restaraunt?  Are they making so little money that they have to supplement their income by selling advertising in their menus?  It's just business, but you have to wonder if it's really worth it.  It just left a bad taste in my mouth.

We finished our big bathroom remodel last month, but that is not the end of the story.

While the bathroom remodel was happening, our contractor happened to mention that he had a friend who worked for an HVAC company and would we like to get a quote on a new AC. Since our AC unit was from the 1970's, was not very efficient, and had broken down several times over the past few years, I figured that as long as we can afford it, now is as good a time as any. So we had a new Carrier AC unit installed. A week or so later, when it actually got warm enough outside that we needed the AC, I turned it on, and got a system malfunction. Hmmm...

Ok, we had a guy come out and take a look at it. Apparently one of the boards burned out in the outdoor unit. They will order a board and get back to us.

They come back a week or so later to finish up a couple other things upstairs, and start looking at our electrical panel, and suddenly everyone is like "whoa, your electrical panel is scary, we can't finish the hookup". Apparently our electrical panel, which was also probably from the 1970's, was kind of corroded, all the breakers were loose, and there were a couple other problems. Apparently while our contractor was hooking up the circuits for the bathroom, some of those loose breakers caused arcing and may be responsible for causing the AC problems. Ouch.

"Ummm, Ken, any chance you can come back and replace our electrical panel?" Yeah, Ken is awesome, because he made a hole in his schedule, and a couple days later he replaced our entire panel and all the breakers for a reasonable price. On the same day, the AC guys came back and finished hooking up the AC. Ok, so now we have an entirely new electrical panel and a new AC unit.

Of course at the same time, I was trying to get our heater fixed through another company. We actually have a hydronic heater, which works well when it works, and there is a boiler that heats the water which then circulates throughout the house. For the last few years, we have had the problem were our boiler would turn on and not turn off automatically. So in the winter, I would have to run up and down stairs multiple times per day flipping thermostats so that it would "un-stick" and turn off the boiler. So last year I decided to finally get this fixed once and for all.

This whole process with the boiler started back before Thanksgiving. The guy came out to take a look at and told me that I need to replace all of my analog thermostats with digital, because my old thermostats were not working right. So I spent some money on three new digital thermostats, and it didn't help the problem. Apparently my analog thermostats were working just fine. Ok, the guy came back and said that one of our zone valves was sticking. He tried to fix it, but we went away for Thanksgiving and came back to a sauna. Our shiny new digital thermostats were showing over 90 degrees F indoors! Ok, he came back and said he would order a replacement zone valve. Then we didn't hear back from him for a month.

Finally we heard back from the company, and they said that the guy no longer works there, and they would send someone else to look at our heater. They came out with the replacement part, and said that it was the wrong part, they would have to reorder the part and come back. This happened two more times, until finally their senior technician came out and I told him that I've been trying to say that actually two of our zones are having this problem, not just one. This time he spent the time to figure out what exactly was going on, and determined that indeed two of our zone valves were sticking, just in different ways. So finally, toward the end of March, we got two new zone valves installed. It's nice to have the house at a constant temperature and not have to worry about running up and down stairs all the time.

So it looks like our little bathroom remodel had somewhat of a cascade effect. New bathroom, new AC, new electrical panel, and a repaired boiler. Plus the fact that we had to consolidate our home offices and I spent three weeks renovating the basement so I could move my hobby stuff down there. Wow, it would be nice to take a break for a little while.

Liam Alexander Foley

Born March 17, 2007, 8:45PM via drug-free home birth.

8 lbs. 12 oz.

22 inches long

Big thanks to Alice, our midwife, and Audrey, our birth assistant, for spending an entire night and day to help bring our new boy into the world.

As it turns out, the medicine cabinet we installed in our new bathroom was missing a couple of hinge screws, so we could only get two of the three hinges attached to the door.  They are tiny little quarter-inch screws that I couldn't find at Home Depot, so I called the manufacturer and they were happy to send out some replacement screws at no charge.

Well, I received those today, but instead of just putting a few screws and the packing list into a regular envelope, they put them in a 4x4x4 cardboard box and stuffed it with the thick paper padding, I'm guessing so the screws wouldn't get damaged in transit.  I guess their facilities simply are not set up to efficiently ship something as small as a couple of screws, because it seems like a waste to send a whole bunch of cardboard and paper just to wrap a couple of screws.  I guess it's a good thing we recycle paper and cardboard.

A story about the wrong way to do software upgrades.

I recently upgraded my copy of Adobe Acrobat from version 7.0 to version 7.0.9. I let their automated update do the work, which was easy enough, but the problem is that to get from version 7.0 to version 7.0.9, it required downloading and installing each intermediate upgrade (7.0.5, 7.0.6, 7.0.7, 7.0.8, and 7.0.9) then rebooting after each point upgrade was installed. So not only did it take forever to download and install the upgraded software, I couldn't do any work while the upgrade was happening because I knew that as soon as one point upgrade was finished I would have to reboot. So I wasted almost two hours of my time downloading, installing, and rebooting my machine. I have half a mind to send Adobe an invoice for the billable hours I missed because of their silly upgrade process. For a company whose software generally works so well, this upgrade issue has definitely given me a new perspective on some of our own processes, and in the coming months I will be evaluating and trying to improve our customer experience so they don't get annoyed at us like I just got annoyed at Adobe. I think there is definitely a lesson there for many small ISVs.

We finally finished our bathroom renovation yesterday. Well, mostly. There are still a few minor touch-ups that I have to make, hang a towel bar and toilet roll holder, and install the door. But it's finished.

Unfortunately it took way too long; our contractor was not able to start until the last week of January, and we had a week of snow in the middle of February, so everything got annoyingly delayed.

Since we're working with the same contractor who did our kitchen last year, we still got good results. Even a couple extra small items got done at no additional charge. Plus the fact that his bid was half of the other bid that we got through a referral, and we're pretty happy. We used the savings to replace our A/C with a top-of-the-line Carrier unit, since the old was about 30 years old and so inefficient that it got rather uncomfortably warm around here in the middle of summer.

Hopefully we will hold off on any more major renovations for a while. Having people running around your house for five or six weeks when you are trying to get work done is just no fun. We're used to a certain kind of quiet energy in the house, and it's a whole different thing when there is a mess, all the rooms are taped off, and you're pretty much confined to a single room. But that's the cost of home improvements, and maybe once a year I am willing to put up with it for a little while.

Technology is great, isn't it? You install all these spam filters to protect you from unsolicited email, and then you never get the email you actually want to see. Over at my company, we get complaints from customers who never receive the email with their license information, or they never get our responses to their technical support questions. Well, this isn't because we're not sending them.

If you are going to put a spam filter on your email account, please learn how to use it properly. We do everything we can from our end to avoid getting blacklisted by ISPs so you can get our email, but it's really up to you to manage the filters so that our legitimate email doesn't hit your spambox instead of your inbox. It's really too bad that so many spam filters simply don't work that well and consistently misclassify emails. So if you don't take the time to check your spambox for legitimate email, don't blame us.

Even Amazon makes mistakes. Apparently they are having a "four-day weekend sale" on tools and hardware, but I just got the email this morning, on Monday, the last day of the sale. The sale started this past Friday. Oh, well.

I'm currently dealing with the compatibility nightmare caused by Microsoft Windows Vista.  Security popups all over the place, for many things you would do, except that it appears they missed a spot.  Apparently of all the silly things that require administrator privileges, shutting down the machine isn't one of them.  I was expecting it to ask for my administrator password again, but I was able to shut down my Vista box from a standard account without so much as a peep.

Some people talk about building the mythical $5 plane, as if you could buy a bundle of fan-fold foam for $35 and build a bunch of planes out of it and it doesn't require anything else to get it airborne. I like to be a bit more realistic, figuring the cost of the glue to glue all the foam together, the landing gear to land it safely, the carbon rods for the pushrods and landing gear, and the nearly $100 in electronics that will go into it (servos, receiver, speed controller, motor, battery). Heck, just buying a new prop is around $2, and that's just for a small park flyer. So unless you reuse your gear from a crashed plane and never have to buy new gear, there really is no such thing as a $5 plane.