Category: life

where everything else happens

“What can brown do for you?” Apparently little.

As many of you know, my son Christopher is leaving for a semester abroad in Chile, literally within hours. As you can imagine, things around here are a bit… stressed. His mother was just in here literally crying on my shoulder… at the thought of her son being gone for the next six months.

My emotions, well let’s just say I’m too distracted to really be emotional about Christopher. Why? Because I am really angry at the shipper UPS right now to be worried about my son. In fact, until UPS finds their ass with either hand Christopher won’t be going anywhere.

Let me start at the beginning. For some reason we did not receive notification of WHERE Chris was going until very late. Right before Christmas in fact. Usually exchange students are notified several months in advance… maybe Chris was slow to get picked because he’s a boy (I noted in the orientation that the female/male ratio of exchange students was literally 20/1!) Who knows.

The process for getting a Student Visa usually takes a few months. In our case we had weeks, and those weeks started with the Holidays, so we were already behind. The hoops we had to jump through were numerous; A new US passport, criminal background checks from the State Police and FBI, immunizations, blood tests for various diseases such as HIV, letters from Chile, letters from AFS in NYC, fingerprints, etc. All these bureaucracies had to get their paperwork in order (and take their fee) BEFORE we could submit his passport to the Chilean Consulate for a visa.

I tried, when I was down in San Francisco in early January to sweet-talk the Chilean Consulate out of a visa, with incomplete paperwork, with zero luck. My previous experience with obtaining visas (when we moved to the UK) was much simpler, though almost as stressful, and BEING THERE counted for more than paperwork back then. I left SF empty-handed, but with a clearer picture of what we had to get done.

As of two weeks ago, we still had not received ALL our paperwork, but all we were missing (I think) was the FBI CHC. Sue went to the UPS store in Colorado where we were visiting my parents and overnight-shipped everything that we had to the Chilean Consulate in San Francisco, with a pre-paid envelope addressed to our house for return. I spent all last week calling and emailing the consulate to help push the process through. FINALLY on Thursday I was able to speak to the lady there (who sent me away in January) and convinced her that time was running out and we needed to get things wrapped up ASAP. She agreed and with some calling and faxing back and forth we got the visa arranged, approved, and returned in record time. There was still some paperwork we had to fill out when it arrived and get back to her prior to his departure so it was up to UPS to deliver. I specifically asked her, and confirmed that we had checked off the package for Saturday delivery. I knew we were cutting it close, but with the wonders of overnight shipping, I was confident it was well in hand.

I watched in satisfaction as the package tracking website followed it towards us…. but then…

¡Whisky Tango Foxtrot?!

What do they mean “remote area”?? I see the UPS trucks here in Arlington Heights all the time. Other than the fact that they deliver packages to our house destined for a family one block to the east all the time, they’ve never had any trouble finding OUR HOUSE. Even on Saturdays!

At 9:00 AM PST I made my first call to 1-800-PICK-UPS to try and resolve the situation.

Try calling that number (1-800-742-5877) and see what happens. They have one of those ULTRA annoying automated attendants that tries to do everything in its power to stop you from talking to an actual human being. Go ahead and call and say my tracking number: J192 1504 928 It will tell you there isn’t a damn thing new about it and they can’t deliver it. Sorry.

I keep hitting “0” until the automated attendant gives up and transfers me to a human. At first it seems like we’re going to make some progress. I explain to the human that this package contains a passport, for a family member who will be travelling internationally very soon and that we specifically requested, and paid for ($23.32) Saturday delivery. They tell me that they will call the package center and that they will message the driver, and finally, that a Supervisor will call me back within an hour. They get all my contact details, and I hang up, happy.

One hour and fifteen minutes go by.

I call again. This time, the automated annoyer won’t let me get past “her” and basically says “There is no new information about your shipment, please call back later” and hangs up on me!! Grrr.

I call back, press “0” enough times to get to a human. The human apologizes that I haven’t received my promised call, and informs me that he will follow through and see that I get a call, within an hour. Like an idiot, I take his word and hang up.

Another hour+ goes by.

I call again. Once again, I enter the fray with the Automated Annoyer. She speaks to me in a condescending tone, but I finally manage to get past her and to an actual human. Well, I suspect they are actual humans, I really can’t know. The hum of the call center is in the background and this human tells me that at the moment, there is nothing that she can do to help… I’ll just have to wait for the Package Center Supervisor to call me back, as promised. I explain to her the critical nature of this delivery, and she assures me that somebody WILL call me back. I just need to be patient.

Well, I’m nothing, if not patient, so I hang up the phone and stare at it for the next 120+ minutes while it sits there … and does nothing. No ring. No call. More promises broken. It is now afternoon, and my patience is wearing thin. I call once again. My entanglement with the super-sticky automated attendant finally passed, I end up with a human being. I relate the whole story once again. I offer to drive anywhere they need me to go, Arlington, Everett, even Seattle, so I can get this package into my hands. Nada, nothing. All I get is an excuse that this truck was not reachable and that the delivery would be rescheduled for Monday. I explained to them the nature of the situation, and how that would be unacceptable. I paid for Saturday Delivery, the lady at the Consulate specified Saturday Delivery, and here it was Saturday, and where was my delivery? Then the human being, whose title I can only assume has the words ‘Customer Service’ somewhere in it said something that finally made me, the one of the world’s most calm and patient people, go completely bonkers:

“Can you call the Consulate?”

I paused for a second to consider the completely illogical statement that I just heard.

(pardon the all caps, but in this case it is really required…)

“WHY SHOULD I NEED TO CALL THE CONSULATE? THEY DON’T HAVE THIS PACKAGE. I DON’T HAVE THE PACKAGE. YOU HAVE THIS PACKAGE!! I AM TALKING TO YOU BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE PACKAGE THAT I PAID TO HAVE DELIVERED TODAY! YOU NEED TO FIND THE PACKAGE AND DELIVER IT TO ME. OR TELL ME WHAT I NEED TO DO TO COME GET THE PACKAGE. THIS IS NOT THAT DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND.”

The moron kept blubbering excuses and apologies while I frankly… lost it.

“I RUN A 24/7 OPERATION, I KNOW WHAT IT TAKES TO GET STUFF DONE, EVEN ON A WEEKEND. IF I RECEIVED A CALL FROM A CUSTOMER, COMPLAINING OF A FAILURE OF MY STAFF, I WOULD BE DOING WHAT I COULD TO FIX THE PROBLEM… NOT TELL THEM EXCUSES… SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO TO FIX THIS??

My family, who has never seen me act like this, all ran to the basement and cowered in fear.

“WHY WOULD I EVER TRUST UPS WITH MY BUSINESS, EVER AGAIN?? WHY CAN’T YOU CALL SOME MANAGER AND GET THIS PROBLEM SOLVED RIGHT NOW? WHY HASN’T ANYONE THERE CALLED ME BACK, DESPITE REPEATED PROMISES TO DO SO? WHY IS THIS SO DIFFICULT??”

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Finally, I asked to speak with a supervisor. She asked me if I would hold on, I said “gladly.”

….Several minutes of hold music later…

The same human being comes back on the line and says “There isn’t a supervisor available right now, but let me get your details and I’ll have one call you right back.”

I reminded her that I’ve heard that same promise many times so far this day and nobody has yet to call me back.

She PROMISES. So I give both my home number, AND my cell phone, saying that if I’m not at one, I’ll be at the other.

Boy, was that stupid. I can picture it now, all the UPS “customer torture service” people all snickering behind the castle wall, as they prepared to launch a cow off their catapult at me.

Meanwhile, the entire Goolsbee family climbed into Sue’s car and went to Everett on an errand. Silly me expected to hear from a UPS representative and maybe we’d be able to swing by Arlington, or maybe Everett and pick up our package. I figured that these people would actually live up to their promises. Do what they said they would do. Perform the task I had paid them to do. Make good their errors, fix their mistakes, heal the wound they had inflicted. Obviously, I was delusional.

No call ever came. We returned home, and no call had come there either. I made one last try while the calendar still said “Saturday.”

This last call was pretty much a repeat of the previous one, except that I didn’t yell (as much) until the stupid thing that this ‘Customer Service’ person said: “It is too late now. If you had called earlier…”

“I DID CALL EARLIER… I’VE BEEN CALLING SINCE 9 AM! I’VE BEEN PROMISED CALL BACKS SINCE…. Etc, etc, etc.”

I did manage to get this guy’s name though: Nathan Magilow. I asked Nathan to transfer me to a supervisor, and he basically refused. He said there was nothing anyone could do. All the facilities were closed. The package was still inside a truck at the Arlington UPS facility, but that nobody was there and it would just have to wait until Monday morning. I explained to him the issues that caused me, with the possibility of having to re-book international flights, etc, and it was obvious that it just. didn’t. matter. At least not to him.

It was obvious to me that nobody at UPS really gave a damn. They honestly could care less about doing their job. Serving their customers. No matter how critical the contents of their shipment may be. It seems to me that some driver didn’t want to drive the 4 miles it would have been to deliver that package to our house. Instead he chose to quit work early that day or something similar, and just put it off until Monday. Here you can see, via the wonders of modern technology, the route that this package flew, from San Francisco, to Ontario, CA, to Seattle, WA, to literally within 5 miles of my house… only to fail:

It travelled over 1385 miles in less than 15 hours… OVERNIGHT, but will take SEVERAL DAYS to make it those last few miles. I could walk that distance many times over in those days. Sad really.

Update:
I called UPS this morning, in the vain hope that somebody with a clue would be able to make something happen, or at least would direct me to some executive I could write to and get a whole pack of people fired. As you can imagine, based on my prior experience… I got nowhere.

sigh.

Update:
The envelope arrived Monday morning, and I missed work to spend the day filling out forms and sending faxes to various places around the globe… something I had planned to have done a day and half ago… hopefully the red tape will untangle before he leaves tomorrow! Click the link above to read more info.

Head out on the highway, Looking for adventure…

While it is still winter, the hint of Spring is in the air, and I find myself drawn to the Road Atlas… with dreams of long sweepers, tight curves, long high-speed runs. My eldest son is heading off on his big adventure, spending a semester in Chile as an Exchange student. He’s leaving Tuesday(!)… Which leaves me with just one son for the next half year. Nicholas is a wonderful travelling companion. So I’m dreaming up an early-summer drive that he and I could do… maybe down to California.

I’m thinking the southbound journey down the east side of the Cascades/Sierra, and then up the coast for the return.

As the scheme develops, I’ll let you know, but if you have any “must drive” roads suggest them in the comments!

Gone Skiing.

Many of you have noticed I haven’t updated the site in several days… that is because I’m on vacation. Once a year I visit my parents, who have had the remarkable foresight to retire to a ski resort. Yeah… tough life but I gotta admire their smarts for that! So we bring the grandkids and test the limits of my long-gone lateral meniscus on the slopes.

It seems that 4 straight days of fixed-heel skiing is all my knee can take anymore. I left the telemark skis at home this year to lighten our luggage load, and I’m paying for it now. The on/off alpine/telemark shift helps me last the whole week, but relentless fixed-heel skiing wears me down. I realize to many people this is completely counter-intuitive, but Telemark turns are much easier on my bad knee than fixed heel alpine skiing is. In alpine boots, every shock is transmitted into my knee as bone-to-bone contact. On tele’s impacts are transmitted through a bent knee… so it is far less stressful.

Of course, my toes are happier, as my tectonic shift from leather (Asolo Snowpines!) to plastic tele boots a few years ago leads to a yearly loss of a toenail or two. The suffering we do for fun! I still haven’t fallen for the overly Alpine, up to the knee Tele boots… and have a barely-over-the-ankle Garmont “touring boot” for my freeheeling pinhead ski style. I also have tele skis that are 200cm long… some Wolf Cold Smokes. I guess I’m a throwback to my 80’s tele retro beginnings. I still have my snowpines and 205cm Karhu XCDextremes in the garage at home.

The week started on old snow and sunshine and I was happy to not have the teles, and pin-skiing on hard snow is no fun really. But the powder arrived yesterday and I stare longingly at the free-heelers and banged my knee up so bad I had to take today off.

Back on the slopes tomorrow and I suspect you won’t see another word here until sometime next week.

Tough life, but somebody has to live it.

(oh, and I had to fix my parent’s wireless network… ugh.)

A footnote: I skiied a few days ago for half a day without poles. I found it a liberating experience! I tend to be a lazy, hip/foot focussed skier anyway due to my bad knee, and as such the poles become sort of useless. Telemarking for 20-some years has given me great balance and edge control (all alpine skiers should spend time on teles, or even snowboards, to truly learn edges and balance. I snowboarded for a few years back in the 80s.) so I can shift edge to edge without much upper-body fuss. I don’t do much serious mogul skiing anymore as the loss of all shock-absorption properties in my right knee make it excruciating. I can do it, I just can’t function for days afterwards! As such, I have found poles to be sort of plastic and metal appendixes… useless extra stuff hanging off the end of useful bits.

It was great fun to ski without them. I may continue to do so.

VW hopes to find oldest-running VW diesel in U.S. – Autoblog

Officially Official: VW unveils Jetta TDI in D.C. and hopes to find oldest-running VW diesel in U.S.

Volkswagen is searching for the oldest running Diesel VW in America. My very first car was a 1980 VW Rabbit Diesel. I loved that car. It carried me all over the American West during my college years (’81-’85)… many climbing and skiing roadtrips. I went to college in Lubbock, Texas and spent virtually every 3-day or longer weekend or holiday break in Colorado (Estes Park and Boulder being the favored locales), or New Mexico (Taos mostly… staying at the Abominable Snowmansion Hostel in Arroyo Seca!)

It was never a very fast car. I got a speeding ticket once (a federal offence… long story, some other time, I promise) where I was clocked at 74 MPH on flat ground and was astonished it could go that fast. 0-60 was clocked in minutes, not seconds. But these were the 55 days, so we couldn’t go 60 anyway. Patience was the virtue the car taught me. Passing required plenty of forethought and a lot of good timing. I learned aerodynamics too as I frequently drafted off of big 18-wheelers, both for passing assistance and just dealing with headwinds. Truckers seemed OK with it so long as I let them know I was back there.

It taught me frugality as well, since it faithfully carried me from Lubbock to Boulder (575 miles) for under $10.

My only mechanical issue with the car was an alternator bolt that slipped out while I was underway in a remote New Mexico highway. I walked up and down that road for hours looking for the bolt, and never could find it. I rigged up a climbing chock to wedge the alternator housing off the engine and keep the belt under tension and limped the 70 or so miles into the next town to a NAPA. This was a very small town, in a very remote place, and even though my car was built in Pennsylvania (yes, VW was the first “import” to have a factory in the USA) they didn’t carry any metric fasteners and I had to make do with an SAE bolt and a shim. The shim rattled out at some point later down the road and the bolt wobbled just enough to enlarge the softer metal of the “bracket”… which on a VW Diesel of that vintage was cast into the block of the engine. Needless to say it became a persistent issue as I kept having to put larger and larger bolts in. I eventually found a machine shop (somewhere in rural Montana IIRC) with a guy willing to drill both the alternator and the block to a metric size and properly fit a bolt in there. I doubt that car is still running on the original engine.

I traded it in on a Mk2 Golf GTI in early ’87. The old rabbit had well over 120,000 miles on it. I should dig up my old photos of it and post a Roger Los style obituary for it.

Muscle Car Madness

Russian roulette with a semi-auto and a full clip.

I have to agree with this. In fact I read it in the “dead tree” version of SCM… AS I was watching the opening night of the Barrett-Jackson Arizona auctions last night. The muscle car market baffles me completely. I do not understand how two essentially identical cars, can be valued so differently. I can not fathom how one, optioned just a bit different from another can somehow raise its value from $12,000 to $250,000.

That. Is. Insane.

The temptation to create a fakey-do is so high, and the ability to pull it off is SO easy. Hell, most of the parts are available at your local NAPA! In fact people even SELL them AS fakey-dos… calling them “recreations”, “continuations”, or “tributes”. It makes no sense.

I can fully understand six or seven digit values of machines that were made in Maranello in numbers fewer than 100… but six figures for machines that were mamde in Detroit by the hundreds of thousands??? It does not compute.

I can understand six figure values for cars that have a rich history on the famous circuits of the world… but six figures for cars that were used as commuters??? I don’t get it.

I’ll tune into the Speed Channel again this week and see how far the insanity goes, but it would not surprise me in the least to see this market bubble pop on live TV either.

San Francisco to Seattle in under 10 minutes

I picked this still above not for any scenic value, beyond that of the sunlight illuminating the speedometer at a few ticks below “the Ton.”

I drove back from San Francisco on Saturday, having spent the week at Macworld Expo. I love long-distance driving and try to drive rather than fly down to SF once every few years. My record door to door was made back in 2002 with Chris Kilbourn when we made the southbound run just under 11 hours. I was not so lucky this time as southbound I was plagued by a 40+ MPH headwind on the first half and way too much traffic and speed control patrols during the second half.

My northbound run started well.

I left SF around 4pm, and headed for the East Bay. I stoped in Emeryville first to pick up a load of network equipment stored at a friends place. Craig worked for me at The Bon Marché years ago, and now lives down there. He graciously assisted me by picking up some equipment of ours from a decommissioned network site in San Rafael last year. I stopped, chatted for a while. He is also running his vehicle (an old Ford Diesel pickup) on a veggie oil blend. We loaded my Jetta TDI with the DSLAM, routers, UPS, etc and I headed off to Berkeley. There I stopped at Bill Woodcock’s house. It was interesting to finally see the famous “basement NOC in Berkeley.” I got the tour, picked up a server that Woody is dropping in our datacenter, chatted for a bit, and got directions over the Berkeley Hills over to my next destination, Lafayette. It has become tradition now to spend the Friday night after Expo at Michael Swan’s house, eating takeout BBQ with his wife Sharon Doi and my co-presenter at Expo, Shaun Redmond. The BBQ was awesome, and afterwards I dropped Shaun off at the BART station and accepted Michael’s hospitality and offer of a bed for the night. I had imagined I’d drive a few hundred miles Friday night, but realized how tired I was, and decided some sleep would be better. I left Lafayette before dawn, and blazed north.

I managed to fly along in the early morning hours. From 7:30 to 8:30 AM I travelled ninety miles. Yes, that is an average speed of 90 MPH. I stopped in Corning CA at 9 am, and filled my tank (more on that later), bought some local Olives and Olive oil stuff, and some cheap low-tax California liquor for Sue. My next few hourly average speeds were: 77, 83, and 68. The last being through the Siskyou mountains. So I basically flew along for the first 450 miles, and ended up crawling for the last 450.

In Corning I grabbed the wrong can of home-brewed Diesel from the trunk. It was the 100% veggie oil can instead of the 40% VO one. All these gas cans nowadays have these stupid air inlets in the nozzle and pour so damn slow that I didn’t note the appreciably thicker fuel. I spent the rest of the trip fighting dropping temps and gelling fuel. You can read the details here.

Oh well, so much for setting a record. It was fun though… really.

You can click the image above to watch the video, or click here Be patient while it loads, and don’t click unless you have a nice wide Internet pipe… it is 50 megabytes in size.

Note about the video: I wanted the music to fade in better, and have re-rendered it a couple of times with the correct fade-in, but each time it comes out HUGE (well over 100 megs)… I can’t figure out how to get the magic encoder to give me the same output as before (480px wide h.264, AAC audio, ~50 megs size)… oh well. I’m definitely NOT a video pro.

I used iStopMotion software from Boinx to capture the timelapse, with my G4 powerbook and my iSight camera.

Back in Seattle again…

I just had to share this. Dawn over the digital.forest offices.

Mt. Rainier is in the background, the waning crescent moon hangs over digital.forest world headquarters. The chillers for the 1st floor datacenter have transformed the driveway into a frozen lake. I meant to take the train into work today, but missed it at Everett by about 1 minute. Good thing though as I would have missed this sunrise. Traffic was very light due to the holiday, so I breezed in. I arrived about 30 minutes before the van from the train station. I stood outside in the cold taking photos. I fully expected Rainier to (pardon the pun) erupt into full golden alpinelgow, but due to the geometry of sunrise at this latitude in January it stayed cold and blue through the dawn. Oh well. I’ll have to capture the same come springtime. It will be cloudy tomorrow… and likely for the next few months.

I even grabbed the laptop out and made a timelapse.