Monthly Archives: December 2006

Dishonesty in marketing

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There is little that I hate more than dishonesty. Especially when it’s a veil for incompetence.

Take the vendor we’ve been working with lately (please). We’ve been asking them for what I think is a fairly simple set of assets. Nothing fancy, just a copy of the files on a server, a correct database backup, and configuration files.

What we get are hums and hahs, deference, indifference, no answers to requests, near belligerency when we do get a response, incomplete information, missing information, or an outright disregarding of recommended instructions to make the path easier.

Ultimately, we will have to save the day. Like it or not, the inability for the vendor to support our needs doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. It still has to happen. We have no choice in that matter. I just hate always having to be on the end of doing the near-impossible. (Okay, I’m not doing the actual work, but people on my team are getting stuck with it. It’s the principle of the matter.)

It’s funny how often we run into this sort of thing in marketing. I suppose that’s part-and-parcel of the job, right? I’d like to think that I’m not dishonest, and that if put in the opposite situation, that as a vendor I’d be completely cooperative and helpful.

But maybe that’s just me…

Christmas shopping in Banff

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Alex and I started off the morning with omelettes and The Vinyl Cafe on CBC Radio 2.
We had decided to venture out to Banff for the day to do some Christmas shopping (well, mostly me — Alex is done and I simply haven’t had the time to start, and I’ve got family out east to contend with). The weather was a little chillier than we might prefer, but it was hardly a reason for us to stop.

As we were doing up our shoes to head out, the radio still playing Stuart McLean, we heard him speak of what people did during the Christmas season in various cities across Canada. In Vancouver, it was Van Dusen’s gardens. In Toronto it was to see the displays in the Bay department store. In Calgary … you go to Banff.

We just about died.

The headwind out ruined any chance at fuel efficiency. But this was more about the venture out of town than anything else. Although there was the decided goal to ensure that we walked away with gifts, I was just content to get my butt out of the city and get away from my computer for a day.

I felt rather guilty about this, I should add. I’ve got a team at the office breaking their necks to get us to a deadline for next Friday. I’ve done little actual work on the project thus far, as all of my input has been through guidance, adherence to standards, redirecting efforts, and coordinating items. Managerial crap, in other words. I feel bad because I’ve asked the world of the team, and they’ve delivered. The bane of no longer being a developer, I suppose…

But I needed a day off. I’ve worked all but one day in November. One day off. I needed time out of the city to relax, even it was to do one of the more high-pressure things: Christmas shop. But shopping is something I like doing anyway, so I didn’t mind too much.

After a quick bite at a cafe (a rather nice croquet of brie and ham), we ventured up and down Banff Ave. to find things for the family, near and far. Surprisingly enough, there wasn’t a tonne of people about, so it wasn’t really that bad a choice to drive out to Banff. Despite the 2.5 hour drive there and back, I think it was well worth the effort, since there were so few people about!

Even better, the sales in Banff were better than in Calgary. Roots, for example, had a sale on fleece that was hard to pass up on. I even happened to run into Bill, Eryn, Scott, and Scott’s wife who were out for the day. It was the last place I expected to run into Critical Mass folk.

Actually, not true — Ekaterinburg would be the last place. But then most of them have never heard of it anyway…

We didn’t stay as long as I would have liked, though. Alex and Erin are going out for a concert tonight, so we had to leave around 16:30 to get back in time for Alex to get ready.

We missed out on the hot springs (a near-tradition), and we didn’t get to laze around as much as we normally do. But it was good anyway. Something other than the house and the office was good for a change.

‘Cuz the week coming up is gonna be a tough one.

I still got it…

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For the last week or so, my computer hasn’t been cooperating completely. Internet Explorer would suddenly cause the hard drive to chew away as it tried to start a JavaScript method of some kind. Then it wouldn’t run at all, crashing almost as soon as I tried to start it. Even loading email was difficult.

Thankfully I know a few things about computers (especially the piece of garbage known as “Windows”) so was able to poke around and figure out what was going on. Well, try and figure out what was going on.

A low-level disk scan revealed a number of bad clusters. They happen from time to time, usually as a result of shutting down a computer in the middle of an I/O write. One or two is not unexpected. Ten or more is a problem. Which is exactly what I found — about 15 of them. That struck me as being “bad”.

It struck me as being more than just software at issue. It sounded like hardware. It sounded like a drive failure.

I dislike jumping to the worst-case scenario when it comes to strange things on computer. I know there are a million things that could potentially go wrong before things go really wrong. But I seem to have almost a sixth sense for stuff like this.

I first noticed it when I worked at Ark Computers back in high school. Back then, I was installing and supporting RLL and MFM hard drives. 30 megabytes. Big stuff for that time. Loud, too. Installing them meant using an obscure debug command to open the low-level formatter before you could even think about using fdisk to set up the drive. (I screwed up one of the original IDE drives because I low-level formatted it by accident.)

Customers would bring their computers in thinking they weren’t behaving correctly, and I could tell just by listening that something was wrong. Generally, I was right, too. I could hear sounds that just “didn’t sound right”. It freaked out Rob, my boss. He couldn’t figure out how I did it. But I was right every time. Backed up the hard drive. Turned the computer off. Boom. Dead drive.

I thought that years of not longer doing hardware support would dull and eventually kill the experience. Little did I know that it would remain. I was validated when just afternoon, I got the call: the hard drive needed to be replaced. It’s amazing how happy I was about the fact that my hard drive was dying. (Thankfully, not dead.)

The bad part: It took me almost four hours to restore my files and settings from the old hard drive to the new. I’m going to be configuring this lousy thing for weeks to come…