tech ramblings

We have a litter of fox kits in the back field at our house.  Today we managed to catch them on film.  Please enjoy our very own foxkehs. 

Edited to add: Some people apparently don’t know Foxkeh…for comparison:

You can view the whole set here:
http://flickr.com/photos/lauraxthomson/sets/72157605003262452/

Recently I have been the recipient of a number of incidents of abysmal customer service and I really need to vent.

The worst of all is Bank of America.  They are as extraordinarily polite as they are incompetent.

On a number of occasions they have stopped my card.  Reasons for this have included:
  - You were spending a lot of money (it was Christmas Eve)
  - Someone used your card in another state (I live in Maryland, 20 minutes drive from Virginia malls).
  - You spent money in another country.

The last seems reasonable in some sense, so I have now taken to calling them before travel and advising of travel.   I have also on several occasions asked them to cease this practice as I travel a lot.  They always agree that this is fine and that they have made a note on my record, but it has never had any noticeable effect.  On my last trip home to Australia in September they stopped my card again.  After calling them - at least half an hour on the phone, at international rates - they assured me it had been unblocked.  I went out shopping and found it still blocked.  I repeated this process AGAIN and it was still blocked.  It was not until the third call that I managed to get the card unblocked.  On each occasion they assured me the problem was solved.  Overall I spent about three hours on the phone at international rates. 

I wrote an email to complain and was told they would send a physical letter to explain what had happened.  Such a letter never arrived.

Last Monday, 11/26, while en route to California, I misplaced my card.  Believing I had lost it in the airport, I rang to report it lost.   I spent 25 minutes on the phone and spoke to three different individuals.  The final one told me she could not suspend the card for some reason that she didn’t mention and that I would have to call back some other time.

I did not call back, hoping the card would turn up.  It did, on Friday 11/30, and then they promptly suspended it.  I emailed them to ask if it could be unsuspended, and was told that a new card had been issued and that I would receive it by mail 12/3.  Today 12/5 it had still not turned up, so I emailed again and they told me it was *mailed* 12/3.

On some level it is my own fault for continuing to bank with them, a problem which I will shortly remedy.

However, I am particularly grumpy with customer service assistants this week.

Number 2 was the gate agent at United in SJC on Friday afternoon.  After she twice stopped serving me to help someone else - and gave us each the wrong boarding passes - I politely asked if she could finish serving me before moving on.  She threw the boarding pass at me and it hit me in the face.  Charming.  I said nothing but took my pass and walked away.

Number 3, today I was on the phone to a doctor’s secretary.  She could not find me in the computer and then gave me a lecture on the fact that I was mispronouncing my own name.  If I would only pronounce it the way she did, instead of the way my entire family does, then people would be better able to assist me!

Vent over.  Will resume normal programming shortly.

Despite the universe’s best efforts!  News:

1.  On Saturday, yes, I did break a rib, and yes, I did get to go to trauma via helicopter.  It’s really not that serious, I just have impressive bruises and am walking kind of slow.  (I was out of the hospital within about 2 hours, so really not that serious.)

2.  On Monday I started my new job, working for Mozilla Corporation.  It’s a great deal of fun so far and everyone has been really nice.  I’m excited to take up a whole bunch of new challenges.

3.  I’ll be speaking at the Zend Conference on Wednesday October 10th on the topic of "Premium PHP".

This was pointed out to me.  I’m happy to note my husband, co-author, and partner in crime Luke Welling is apparently one of the top 8 "sexilicious bloggers"  on the Internet.  (I also note my friend and former colleague Chris Shiflett and another contact from the web 2.0 world, Aaron Brazell, made the list.)  Congrats fellas, enjoy your notoriety.

He was born 17th October 1984, like all future racehorses with hopes and dreams riding on his back.    He came to race named Safari Boy, by Chamozzle out of Chantana.    He raced six times, winning the second, at Albury, in 1988.  He never did so well again, and retired to become a dressage horse, when he was renamed Chamozzled, or RJ to his friends, after the brand on his left shoulder.  He had two dressage homes, and when we came to see him had been in one place for nine years.  His owner had a baby and no time.

I knew as soon as Luke got on that we would take this horse home.  I remember their first show.  Luke said, "I don’t think I’m going to like showing" and after RJ carried him to three championships and a reserve that first day changed his mind.  They learned to jump together and we went to many dressage days, jumping days, shows, and on long trail rides in the rain.  When my horse hurt his leg I rode RJ for a while, sharing him with Luke, and he always took good care of me and tried hard.  Oddly, some of the things I remember best are the times when he wasn’t well - I always seem to end up playing nursemaid to them then.  He had azoturia once and I remember the freezing night where we walked slowly round his field for four hours until the vet rang back to say he couldn’t come.  RJ kept leaning his head upon my shoulder.

He had almost three years to the day of retirement.  We first realized he wasn’t quite right at Barastoc Horse of the Year show, and soon after he headed down to Julie’s farm, turned out in the middle of dairy country, in ten acres of lush grass with a couple of girlfriends for company.

This is another drought year, after all the other drought years, and on Saturday he could barely move, brought to this by Australian stringhalt.  He ended his life there in the paddock.  Good night old fella.  Rest in peace, it’s well deserved.

May the road rise up to meet
you,
may the wind be ever at your back.
may the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall softly on your fields.
and until we meet
again, May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.

First, the pragmatic: today I was interested to read Paul M. Jones’ framework benchmarks.  So often benchmarks are biased - and Paul would have every reason to be biased, considering he’s the author of Solar.  But he clearly goes through his methodology, and points out what he thinks might be the flaws in it.  An excellent read from a clear mind.  I’ll be interested to see the way the comments go, although I see from that and other blog entries I’ve been reading lately that RoR appears to have a number of comment spam bots (tongue firmly in cheek here).

Second, the profound: I was pleased to find online the complete text of C.S. Lewis’ essay The Inner Ring.  When I first read it (a few years ago now) it had a deep impact on me.  It was interesting to re-read this essay as my older, perhaps wiser, perhaps more bitter self.  If you’re not planning on clicking though, you may be swayed by the fact that the subtitle is "On Making Good Men Do Bad Things".  It’s about the desire to be accepted and how this turns men into scoundrels.  Sixty years old and as true as the day it was written.

In part:

To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still- just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig- the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which "we"- and at the word "we" you try not to blush for mere pleasure- something "we always  do."

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face- that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face- turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

You may remember I stuffed up my knee eight weeks ago.  I finally had surgery yesterday and now I can walk, yay!  I had:
-
Completely shredded the meniscus (inside of leg, I think that’s
medial), which they have mostly removed as there wasn’t enough of it
left to repair.
- They thought I hadn’t hurt my ACL but when they
opened up my leg they discovered it wasn’t attached to anything. The
surgeon thinks I may have been walking around with no ACL since I hurt
my knee skiing (and didn’t go to the doctor) 9 years ago. He says I can
get away without it for riding, running, and skiing. If I want to take
up basketball or tennis they’ll try and fix it. Ha.
- They also
sanded over my patella, which had lots of damage to it from one if not
all of the knee injuries I’ve done over the years (dancing, skiing, and
this most recent incident).
I can walk, yay. Without the
meniscus I will probably need a knee replacement down the track. I was
worried about this until I talked to a few people one of whom is now
back to riding 12 horses a day post-replacement.
I feel good
and will have the stitches out Wednesday. I am encouraged to walk (walked out
of hospital an hour after surgery) and can drive later today.
Thanks everybody for all the well wishes and help I have received.

Last time I was homesick, I was working in New Zealand.  Took about three days after I arrived.

This time, I seem to have managed to get through two months before it hit.  This time, it was stumbling across this photo that triggered it off.  My life is so completely different now from everything in that picture.  It was Australia Day this year (26 January), about 100 degrees (38 or so), and that’s me with my best mate River.   After this, Luke and I sat in the shade, drank some beers and talked nonsense with good friends Stacey and Peter. Now,  all those people are thousands of miles away and I feel like a different person.  Everything is different here.  I know now how my mother felt.  She immigrated from England to Australia, and she used to talk about how the colors were different, the color of the sky and the color of the grass.  She missed the green of England.  I miss the Australian summer sky, so hot and blue it’s almost yellow.  I miss the hot northerlies sandblasting my face.  I miss sitting in the shade after a horse show, hot, sweaty, and dirty and drinking an ice cold beer with my closest mates.  I miss the golden quality of the light and squinting into it on the long drive home.

I don’t usually put personal stuff in this blog, but today is just different for some reason.