And a place in his mind was a wrestling-ring
Where the crownless form of an outlawed king
Fought with a shadow too like his own,
And, late or early, was overthrown.
It is not lucky to dream such stuff –
Dreaming men are haunted men.

– John Brown’s Body, Stephen Vincent Benét

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

– I Have a Dream Speech, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I have said several times in different places that I live in intersections. Intersections are marvelous places: they reveal connections, context, that might not previously have existed. To borrow yet more words, they are “intertwingled”; as one tugs at the strings or weaves them, the concepts become inseparable from one another until the very meaning is changed because two things have been brought together.

I would like to think that the human race, innately, is a race of explorers, an inquisitive one at that; our explorations are necessarily stubborn, for if we stop exploring, we lose some piece of ourselves. We find ourselves creating our own battlegrounds where our wars of exploration are fought, where we try, as the great Dr. King states, to lay the hills low, to make the crooked places straight.

We fight in our rings with our crownless forms, our ideas, our unknowns, and we find ourselves haunted. These ideas, these unknowns, imprint themselves; even when resolved, when the idea is revealed so clearly that its utility is revealed at long last as a fog lifting off a riverbank, they stay with us.

Intersections haunt me. They tug at me, they dart through shadows, and though they are very clearly rough terrain, mountainsides as yet untamed, they are there, beckoning. Every once in a while, I explore them: government and user experience, environmental sustainability and information management, the practice and art of tutoring with information management. Indeed, my very life is an intersection; I have pulled threads of knowledge out of the ethers and woven them into my personal and professional interests. We all do this, though I find some more adept than others.

Should we ever reach the end, where we cease to be haunted and we all share the same visions, that will be a day indeed, for it shall mean we no longer dream; the world, as we know it, shall cease to exist, for we shall no longer find ourselves interested in it. We shall be shells, discarded and useless.

“…careful the morning lest it wake from slumber the city half-encumbered by the morning mist…”

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here, though it has not been a while since I have blogged; my silence here was by choice. I felt, for a while, that I had little to share. Of course, this was never true. It merely represented the same funk all writers – or, at least, all those who claim to be writers – go through. Not writer’s block, merely disinterest. I did not take the time to distill the vapor of my thoughts into something more coherent.

In short, the mists shrouded this space; the city – if literary license will grant me a brief nod and a blog can be called a city of works – slumbered. Indeed, it is still half-encumbered by these morning mists, not entirely vibrant, not entirely self-aware. It will require some effort and investment on the part of its ownership – me – to decide that it will again awaken, bustling with promise.

In the silence, many things changed. I have grown and moved again, from the Tri-Cities of Washington to my undergraduate stomping grounds of Olympia, Washington. I now work for the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts as a Systems Integrator, basically a fancy way of saying that I try to make systems that work (less integration, really, and more function). The more proper term would be “Software Developer” or “Web Developer”.

Somehow I haven’t quite gotten away from government, though my governmental involvement has varied. I have served public education institutions in Washington State, serving out my masters’ degree internship at what was then the Washington State Department of Information Services (since split into the Washington State Department of Enterprise Services and Washington State Consolidated Technology Services). I then moved to the federal level as an employee of a contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy, Battelle, which manages Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I have now returned to Olympia to work with the judiciary branch.

I cannot promise you, reader, that this awakening will last; indeed, this may be nothing more than the equivalent of one getting up from bed long enough to get a drink of water. I would hope, though, that this stretches out longer: that we walk downstairs together, get a cup of coffee, and discuss the events of the day over breakfast.

I stretch the metaphor, but metaphors are nothing if they cannot brush off the wisps of meaning and metamorphose into something else, as the fog will lift to reveal new days.

The subtitling system works well – it does not blow my socks off (nor does the player itself, which has severe issues with switching between episodes within a series).  But Netflix managed to screw up in other ways:

1. Subtitle everything in the series if you’re going to bother. It’s really irritating to watch one subtitled episode only to find that the next episode has no subtitles whatsoever for reasons that cannot easily be explained.  I was bouncing between Hulu (which consistently subtitles each episode) and Netflix quite a bit (why? I don’t like ads any more than the next person).
2. Make subtitles a saved preference rather than having to select it every time. Hulu finally got this right when they released their new player into the wild, making it a saved preference.

But the most egregious violation by Netflix is this: there is no way to tell whether something is subtitled or not without first opening it within the player. From a user experience and an information architecture perspective, this is an absolute nightmare.  It’s the equivalent of forcing your users to stumble around with a blindfold, and does very little to improve the user’s opinion of your site in general.

I would also point out that the only part of Watch Instantly currently allowed to use subtitles is the web-based player; none of the media devices capable of picking up Netflix Watch Instantly streams can pick up subtitles (yet).  So, in short, while Netflix did at least finally manage to do good on their promise to bring subtitles, it is a fairly hollow victory – with no way to find these subtitled titles, they might as well have just not bothered.  They give no timeframe for future releases of subtitles on things that aren’t the Lost television series, either, which kicks it down another notch.

An extension of the body that allows one to translate one’s thoughts from mere wisps in the mind to concrete, tangible information, pens serve a very important purpose in our society.  This purpose has not been at all diminished by the advent of technology; I argue it has, in fact, increased its importance.  I use my own pen fairly frequently; whether that’s signing paperwork, writing notes, poetry, song, short stories, or even novels, more often than not, I revert to good old-fashioned pen and paper.

I have always prided myself on having a pen at the ready, which is why I’ve been a bit lost the last day or two – the red Cross Morph I have had since my undergraduate years has disappeared, and no amount of searching has revealed its whereabouts.  Admittedly, the Morph is not the creme de la creme of pens, not by a long shot, but as my everyday pen, it has worked wonders, and obviously, I grew quite attached to it.

So of course, I’m ordering a new one, but since so many years have passed since I initially got my first Morph, I figured a color change was in order – I’ve ordered a new Electric Blue Cross Morph via eBay.

It is my personal belief, however backwards it may seem, that the pen reflects the person – someone who has a pen readily available shows that they are prepared for the unexpected moment where the need for a writing instrument might arise.  If the pen is properly selected, it also says something about who that person is.  My father, for instance, is something of a pen collector and has several quite beautiful fountain pens; I have always found him to be quite eloquent, as suggested by the style of a fountain pen, though of course, the relationship between eloquence and fountain pens is tenuous at best.

I have one fountain pen, but have never found myself able to adapt to the way fountain pens interact with the paper.  Whether this is due to lack of patience or some other factor, I do not know.  I always tend towards ballpoints, and I would like to believe that my everyday workhorse Cross Morph pen reflects something of who I am.  I would prefer that it be the side of me that is always, to some extent, prepared, or perhaps my wordsmith nature.  At the least, though, having a pen on me gives me a feeling of some self confidence, which, I believe, is sufficient reason to harp upon the subject.

First, place the Streamer into Bluetooth pairing mode by pressing and holding the Bluetooth button for seven seconds – you will hear one beep two seconds in and another once the pairing mode is activated.

Next, we have to pair the device with the laptop (note that this assumes said laptop has Bluetooth capacity and has the WIDCOMM drivers loaded – if it doesn’t, this sequence may not work).  Note that Dell’s Bluetooth devices are automatically installed on the machine using the correct WIDCOMM drivers, so they’re available as a download from them if needed via support.dell.com.  If the Bluetooth icon is showing in the system taskbar, then you can simply right click and select “Add Devices”.  If not, you have to go to the “Start” menu, open the “Control Panel”, and select “Bluetooth Devices”, then click “Add Wireless Device” button along the top bar.

You are then prompted to select the device that you wish to pair (I turned off all other Bluetooth devices I had floating around to make sure the streamer didn’t get confused and try to do the wrong thing):

Click the “Next” button with the Streamer selected.  Next, you will be prompted to select an option for pairing the device.  You want to select the middle option, “Enter the device’s pairing code”:

On the next screen, enter the pairing code for the Streamer (0000 – all zeroes) and click “Next”:

The next screen you see prompts to select the type of hands-free device being connected – take the default option:

Next, open the “Bluetooth Devices” option screen in the Control Panel if it hasn’t already opened for you and right click on the “Streamer” entry, then click on “Properties”:

When the Properties pane opens, select the “Services” tab and check all of the available checkboxes except for the “Remote Control” checkbox:

Click “OK” to close the Properties pane.  Along the top of the “Bluetooth Devices” window, select “Bluetooth Settings” from the toolbar:

On the “Bluetooth Radio Properties” pane, select the “Audio” tab.  If any of these devices list as connected, click on them and then click the “Disconnect” button. Select the “Bluetooth Stereo Audio” option and click the “Connect” button:

Open your Control Panel again and then click on “Sound”:

On the “Playback” tab, right click the entry that reads “Bluetooth Stereo Audio” and select “Set as Default Device”.  You may have to show disabled or disconnected devices (done via the right-click menu) to see the “Bluetooth Stereo Audio” option – if done correctly, that option should be there without having to do anything further.

Now open your favorite audio program and play away!

Note that I have not been able to resolve issues where iTunes (my music player of choice) may randomly decide to crash under this arrangement.  I also have noticed that the device itself sometimes will simply disconnect for no clear reason, which means trying to force it to reconnect using the “Bluetooth Radio Properties” dialog box above.

So, of course, when it was time to upgrade my laptop again, it was a fairly obvious choice for me: Dell was automatically in the running. I ended up choosing a Dell XPS M1330, which I got for Christmas in 2007. The laptop worked incredibly well for several months — long enough that I was fairly convinced that I had made another good selection. In April of 2008, however, I started experiencing issues with the laptop’s power — the battery would take an abnormally long time to charge, losing a full charge faster than it would charge to begin with, abruptly slowing down significantly on random occasions when it was plugged into the wall, and spontaneously shutting down randomly. I, of course, opened a ticket with Dell fairly quickly when I identified this as a systemic problem — taking over 6 hours to charge from around 10% battery charge to a full charge seemed bad, somehow.

Little did I know what I was walking in to at the time.

As the initial back-and-forth with Dell’s technicians ensued, I provided them with the following:

Some additional information: my laptop just froze again when I plugged it in – I physically removed the battery from the system, which corrected the problem immediately. I suspect this is a problem with the motherboard’s power connections, since that’s what all this tends to point towards.

The technician replied:

Peter, it cannot be the port on the motherboard because your computer works just fine when connected only with the AC adapter. I would go ahead and replace the battery for you which is causing this issue.

Okay, I’m willing to admit when I’m potentially wrong. They dispatched a new battery and power cord to me, and I tried that out, since there wasn’t any symptom to indicate that there might be something else wrong. However, that didn’t correct the issue, since the problem recurred rather quickly with additional symptoms related to video display. Contacting Dell again, I got a reply that stated that I had to contact their Live Hardware Warranty Support in order to further troubleshoot the issue – no problem! I signed on to their online chat and had a fairly lengthy conversation with the technician, who spent several hours walking me through troubleshooting steps, which strongly indicated issues with the integrated graphics card (in fact, the card practically failed as I was online chatting with them).

Technician dispatch time! At this point, it’s June 2008. A technician was dispatched to my apartment in Seattle and happily replaced my motherboard, and was quite social while she did it — the turnaround time was also excellent.

The problems began again in late August: I was once again encountering battery issues with the laptop. I once again signed in to Live Chat, after my excellent experience the first time, and the technician very quickly identified this as a recurring issue and dispatched a new power plug, battery, and a technician to replace the motherboard. I had moved down to Olympia as part of my summer internship for the MSIM program, so the part and technician were dispatched there instead of my usual Seattle address.

The technician called when I couldn’t answer the phone and didn’t call back again for an entire week despite my repeated attempts to return his call. After a week, I logged back in to Support Chat to report the issue to the agent – while I was doing so, I inquired as to whether depot service would be an option rather than waiting for a technician, and was told it wasn’t. Because I knew I wouldn’t be able to be home for a technician, I also changed the address of the dispatch with the consent of a friend of mine who was also in Olympia and was willing to let me leave the laptop with him while waiting for repair.

Another call from the technician — or, at least, the same number that the first call to me came from — went to my friend’s phone, but no voice mail was left. Attempts to call the number back resulted in no answer. The service call turned into a cat-and-mouse game of the technician calling my friend and not leaving voice mails or not being able to get in contact with them and vice versa. Getting a little desperate after several days of this, I started grumbling about the issue on Twitter and caught the attention of one of Dell’s Social Media Liaisons, Chris Byrd, who promptly verified that the dispatch details were correct and monitored the case. I once again had an agent (not Chris) recreate the dispatch to be sure that the details were correct, but the problem continued. By mid-September, I had moved back to Seattle to continue my work in the MSIM program and had a dispatch created for my Seattle address – the technician was very quick and corrected the problem within two or three days of the dispatch being created.

It literally took a month and a half for the issue to be corrected this time around. My complaint to Chris insisted that my feedback about the problems I had with the technician in Olympia be moved up the chain:

The biggest part of the problem is that the techs never left voice mail with contact information with him, but always with me. I had this same issue with the first dispatch – they called, but never left accurate contact information where someone would pick up. Your technicians need to leave voice mail with EVERY CALL they make, otherwise it’s useless. Having a technician assigned to it is useless if that technician refuses to respond to calls or refuses to leave voice mails so that the person that needs to schedule it can do so.

Please do pass that along – if nothing else out of all this, I’d like there to be some sort of process improvement on your end. [My friend] indicated that he consistently got calls from a particular number, but that they never left voice mails after calling and went straight to calling me.

Not to be outdone, the video card once again started failing again on February 28th of this year. I knew it was exactly the same problem, because it was exhibiting the same slowing down behavior that it had the last two times the failure occurred. Instead of going straight to Dell Support, this time I went straight to Chris Byrd, who had at least been somewhat helpful the last time this happened. A coworker had pointed out to me that there were known problems with the graphics card the 700M shipped with, something that I was unaware of in my past dealings with Dell, and something that Chris reassured me was likely corrected by now. He also pointed me at Dell’s Resolution Expert Center to reopen my past case if the problem got worse. Since it was indeed getting worse, I reopened the case on April 1st (the failures were intermittent up until the point where the case was reopened and didn’t warrant grumbling about it until it was clear and obvious that there was a reproducible issue).

Thank you for contacting Dell XPS hardware Support. I would be glad to assist you with your Dell XPS 1330 with Windows Vista on it.

It is very unfortunate that you had to undergo so many problems with the computer. It is very rare situation that the motherboard has been replaced 3 times and that you still have issues with the computer. I assure you that I will help you fix this issue.

I have checked the previous case history and decided to pull this computer to our repair center so that we can have a thorough check of the system and see to it that the issue is fixed. The reason me suggesting you to send this computer to depot is because a technician will just replace the part and see if the computer is up and running but at the repair center we can keep the computer in observation and once we feel the issue is fixed then will send the computer back. This complete process, I mean by the time you get your computer back it would take 7-10 days.

My reply, which copied my father, who originally purchased the system, and Chris, since he was still monitoring the case:

I’m a student, so I can’t afford to be without this laptop that long (at least, not at this point in time – once the academic year ends in June, maybe, but it may have completely failed by then). Are there any other options, such as a potential replacement of the machine?

Dell’s reply:

Peter, the only resolution insight at the moment is to pull the computer to the depot location where it can be serviced. So I suggest you to let me know when I can set up a depot dispatch. Sending a replacement computer is not an option.

As you can imagine, this was a little irritating, so I shot back the following e-mail:

I would like to know what your procedure is if the depot return turns up no problems and the failure continues after the laptop is returned. I am reluctant to submit this machine to depot service and make my classwork harder while also having to deal with this issue continuously. I understand the need to monitor the machine and attempt to reproduce the issue, but this issue has surfaced a sufficient number of times that I believe further action is warranted than "we will return it within 7-10 days". I recognize that you’re trying to help, but the case history on this laptop makes me uncomfortable enough that I need to know what the plan is if the depot checks turn up nothing.

Somewhat unexpectedly, my dad chimed in with his own far more acidic assessment of the situation — I would reprint the e-mail in its entirety, but suffice it to say that it was strongly worded and highly critical of Dell’s practices. He wrote what I would have written if I had gotten another canned e-mail back in reply to my message above. I forwarded the message to Chris — it couldn’t make the situation any worse, could it?

Chris –

Please see below.

I hate to say it, but Dad is absolutely right. This case has already lost me as a Dell customer, and I cannot recommend Dell purchases based on this experience. It’s really a shame, because Dell support used to be incredibly responsive. If you have customer experience people to route this to in upper management, please do so. If you ever need a case reference for redesigning Dell’s customer support experience, this one needs to be at or near the top of the list.

Since I’m looking for a job upon graduation, I almost added "if you would like to hire me as a process redesigner…."

At this point, I have to give Chris Byrd a lot of credit – what he did next was thoroughly surprising and unexpected:

I agree, this issue has not been handled in the way that we like to provide support here at Dell.

I’ve contacted the agent handling this case and they have agreed to set you up with a system exchange. The system exchange will be of like or better hardware, to include all software originally configured for your computer. The agent will be responding to the email referenced below, with dispatching information shortly.

Chris is an excellent example of what customer service is all about. He recognized a systemic problem that was drastically affecting the satisfaction of not one but two current Dell customers and moved to rectify the situation by simply completely replacing the machine in question. His intervention is the entire reason why I’m not still completely stuck in the mire of Dell support, attempting to get a resolution to something that wouldn’t go away. My new Studio XPS 1340, which I got three days ago, is a fairly significant upgrade from my old XPS M1330, with upgrades across the board (including a 64-bit processor!).

It’s not quite over yet, however – Dell didn’t ship a return label for the defective system, and didn’t ship my new Studio XPS with Bluetooth. While the return label is now on its way, the Bluetooth module they sent seems to be for my old machine. Whether this is an error on my part in not being explicit about which machine I was requesting the part for or an error on their part in not looking at their records and figuring out that it’s probably for the system sent as a replacement to the defective one doesn’t really matter. They were at least prompt at recognizing that they had erred in not shipping the system with the correct parts and working to rectify the problem.

Dell’s customer support isn’t perfect, and perhaps it took the original purchaser of my M1330 getting a little irate and taking it out on Dell to get them to react appropriately, but Chris’s intervention gives me a little ray of hope that maybe customer support doesn’t have to always be bad and hopeless. This post is, in a way, my nod to him for a job well done, but it is also a warning. In this age of increased digital interaction, where globalization creates situations where cultural boundaries collide and where companies are doing their best to save the most money possible, it is the kiss of death to treat your customers badly. If Chris had not intervened, I can assure you: I would have made sure that no company I worked with ever bought Dell products, and when I work in IT, that’s not as insignificant an action as one might think. Twitter quite literally saved Dell in this case from two very dissatisfied customers. Listen. It might just make the difference between life and death.

I didn’t ride much more than five minutes on a flat trail, partly because I was using this as an initial assessment, and partly because it was a cold wind (and I can’t say I was that well layered, though I did, at least, have my favorite polar fleece jacket on, plus helmet, but no gloves).  I ended up on a 53cm frame, since apparently every site I looked at that recommended a 54-56cm frame for my inseam size and height was patently nuts.  The ride went quite well – accessible gear shifting, good braking, and with the drop bars, I felt like I had a fairly comfortable position.  I felt a lot of bumps/vibration through the saddle, but since the saddle wasn’t perfectly tuned in to my riding style, both the tech and I wrote that off as potentially fixable with saddle adjustment (it was also a fairly hard saddle to boot).  The gearing was responsive to shifting, though since I’m not adjusted to the gearshift style, it was somewhat hard to remember which lever did what (easily correctable).

I didn’t try any hill riding or normal street riding due to the wind, but the trail was close enough quality to some of the not-so-well maintained roads so as to make it a fairly good indicator of what to expect.  The gearing range was wide enough just on the flat portion to make it rather clear that hills should be no problem for a properly trained rider (though there is this one rather large hill on 35th NE between 95th and 110th that I’d be interested in trying this out on).

A couple interesting things the tech pointed out: one was to pay close attention to the quality of the wheel on the bike, as well as the overall component quality.  Weight is not that big of a concern for me for this, so the steel frame of the Aurora wouldn’t present a problem.  The tech did point out that the Aurora Elite would have higher-quality components and thus (theoretically) longer durability, if it were in my price range.  He certainly didn’t seem to think that the Aurora was a bad fit – there wasn’t any particular indication of “um, maybe you should go more for this one”, but that might be because I was specifically requesting that exact bike.  Amanda suggests that perhaps part of the reason we didn’t hear any push-back from the tech is due to the economy and the price of the bike, but I would hope that someone concerned with making the sale would be more concerned with the satisfaction of the buyer (thus garnering repeat business), even if that means going against what the buyer thinks they want.  Perhaps this makes me nuts.

Most of my time on whatever bike I get would be commuting back and forth from work to school with some other destinations as required, probably with some recreational riding thrown in.  The major concern health-wise will be making sure that my wrists and back stay fairly well supported so as to not throw those any further out of whack than they already are.

My end goal is to make it so that the XML data drives all presentations of my résumé, including HTML, PDF, Word 2007, and plain text.  While the XML version will always be a complete reflection of my work history, accomplishments, etc. (so things will never be removed, only added), the Word, PDF, and plain text versions will be specifically targeted and abbreviated versions of the information on the site.  The HTML version, on the other hand, is likely to remain a complete transform of the XML (assuming that I don’t end up with so much data as to make this impractical to display properly).

There’s still quite a bit I need to do, though, in order to make this happen:

1. Create a plain text transform.
2. Figure out how to write a transform that allows me to create Word documents that have the same layout as my current Word document.
3. Ditto for PDF.
4. Modify the original schema (the formalized structural definition of the data) to include targeting parameters so that I can specify which information makes it into which transform.
5. Add the ability to specify skills/objectives.

Numbers two and three are not insignificant tasks (the last two aren’t either, but require far less effort).  I’m hoping to get this done fairly quickly, since currently, I’m maintaining two copies of the same data in different formats (one in XML and one in Word 2007 format).

My user interface tweaks below include a new mapping category done by our in-house web developer Lucian DiPeso so that the full name of the course could also be used locally.  The new section, relabelled “Data Mapping”, has eight text fields instead of the original six for precisely this reason.

The only issue with this layout change is that the help text on the right-hand side of the new table isn’t in line with the rest of the help text on the screen, which I expect to correct soon.

There is one other change that we will be implementing on this screen, but that won’t generate as substantial a user interface change as our need to re-envision the data mapping portion did.

We do intend to commit these changes back to the Moodle core, but we’ll see whether they are accepted or not (this won’t be done until we’re absolutely sure the code changes required across several Moodle files are completed).

Originally from this facebook status update commentary.