rebelpeon.com

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  • Services Companies

    I find it funny how a services based company, that is based on consumer satisfaction, can be so unhelpful to the consumer. Let’s take Comcast for example. It’s a $22.23 billion revenue ($14.2 billion profit [how can I create a company like that?!]) company. Why is it so hard to make customer service decent. Don’t get me wrong, I rarely use it as it is, and normally when I do it is quickly resolved, but today was different.

    On Friday we started having problems with the HD stations we get. Everything keeps going pixelated every few seconds or so, and the sound cuts in and out. Basically, the channels are useless. However, the SD channels are fine. Another little annoyance is if you happen to be on an HD channel, the remote seems to stop functioning at all. In all actuality it works, but there is so much latency that it takes a minute or more before your button presses on the remote show up. Hell, even using the buttons on the front of the cable box didn’t do anything.

    Needless to say, I finally got around to calling them about this. The first lady I spoke to said she would “send a signal” to the box and everything should be ok. For what ever reason I believed her, hung up and tested it out. Only to my surprise did it not work. So, I called back. This time I was given a guy that seemed very new, or just crazy slow (I’m not sure which yet). He had me do a few things, which completely locked the cable box up, and then said he’d have to schedule a technician to come out.

    “The first available time is 10-12 tomorrow. Are you available?” he inquires.

    “Do you have anything after 5?” I respond.

    “No, we don’t offer appointments after 5, but we do have slots available on the weekends.”

    What the hell?! So, I basically have to either take time out of my, already incredibly, busy schedule at work, or waste my free time on the weekend?! I think not. I let him know this seems pretty sleazy as this is a problem on Comcast’s side, but he tells me there’s not much he can do. I ask to speak to his manager, even though I too know there’s nothing this person can do either.

    All I can say is, this lady was pro. She’s either been there awhile or has taken a whole lot of classes. I dropped the “moving to satellite” line and she didn’t even flinch. She did mention that she could have someone come out between 4-6 on Friday. I said I’d be here at 5. She said it didn’t have to be me that was in my house. I was tempting to ask her if she would leave anyone in her house just waiting for the cable guy, but I refrained. Finally she conceded and the best she could do was between 4 and 6. I said that was fine, but I wouldn’t be there until 5.

    Now, actually, I could’ve been here from 10-12 tomorrow. I guess that’s not the point though, is it? Both support technicians reassured me that this was a problem on their end and that a technician needed to come out (they also dropped the “you won’t be charged for this visit” line, damn straight I won’t!). So why am I forced to bend my schedule or give up my free time just so that they can fix something wrong on their end? Why do the 21.4 million subscribers to Comcast think that it’s ok to play with their schedule for a service they, themselves, pay for? It just doesn’t seem right to me. What makes it even more absurd is that the technicians that come out (at least in Chicago) aren’t even Comcast employees. They’re hired out contractors.  You can not tell me that these people refuse to work after 5.  Give me a break.

    Oh, and don’t let this lead you down the path that it’s just Comcast either. This isn’t an excuse to move to satellite or whatever, all large services based companies are like this. I guess that’s why so many people my age are enjoying “internet-based” businesses so much. They feel more like mom and pop stores because of the people that run them, but have the global appeal and size potential because of the internet.

    I don’t even really watch TV that much anyways! Personally, I can’t wait till the technician shows up sometime between 4 and 5, while I’m not there, and then I get billed for not being there, even though I staunchly said I wasn’t going to be. Yet another battle because I’m difficult.  *Sigh*  All just to live and be hip in this, the 21st Century.

  • ISA 2006 Part 2

    I still haven’t found any decent solution to the compression, but I did find a solution to publishing NTLM websites.  Basically, ISA 2004 didn’t have any pre-authentication, where ISA 2006 does.  Why I wasn’t experiencing any of this on my websites was because the ISA machine is on the same domain.  In order to fix this, I had to use LDAP pre-authentication.  I used part of an article posted on isaserver.org.  It got me working to a certain extent, but then I had to play with it a little bit more.  No big deal, it’s all working now. 

    Now just to fix the compression part…

  • Vista and Photoshop

    I finally got around to ordering the hardware necissary to do what I want on my computer without having to wait and wait and wait. I finally bought 2 GB of RAM and a new video card. This will increase my system RAM 5 fold after I add it, and get me off the onboard video card with 8 MB of RAM.

    The reason I did this was for two reasons: Running Vista RC2 is painfully slow with only 512 MB of RAM and an onboard video card, and post processing images for aaron spruit (.com) is painful with the limited amount of RAM. Currently my Vista score is 1. This will hopefully bring me up to something that’s bearable. And all for ~$250, you can’t go wrong.

  • ISA 2006 Compression

    As I noted over at aaron spruit (.com), I had a few problems with the (new) ISA server.  Last weekend I finally got around to upgrading to ISA 2006.  I’ve had the bits for awhile, but I never actually took the time to install it.

    Anyways, there were problems right off the bat.  I successfully backed up all of the ISA 2004 configurations, however, going from ISA 2004 EE to ISA 2006 EE (single box setup) isn’t possible in a nice upgrade path.  The configuration store for ISA has to be completely uninstalled and then reinstalled, but the rest can be simply upgraded.  So a complete uninstall and reinstall was required.  No big deal, as I had the export.

    Install ISA 2006, not a problem, and then attempt to import the settings from ISA 2004, no luck.  Well, not a big deal, it’s not like the configuration is that complex.  I get everything setup minus Aaron’s OWA because it’s not cooperating, and then leave it at that.

    On Tuesday it appeared as if the internet had gone out at the compound as neither of us were able to access any hosted websites.  When I finally get home, I make sure that our IP address hadn’t changed or anything, and I was able to get out just fine.  It seemed odd, so I logged into the ISA box to find that it was denying people.  I attempt to stop the firewall service, but it hangs in the stopping state, so I just restart the machine.  It comes back online, and all is fine.  Later I look into the event logs and see the following two events repeated whenever someone hit a website starting at around 1PM CST.


    Event Type: Warning
    Event Source: Microsoft ISA Server Web Proxy
    Event Category: None
    Event ID: 23001
    Date: 11/7/2006
    Time: 8:27:02 PM
    User: N/A
    Computer: RBLPN-ISA
    Description:
    ISA Server was unable to compress a response body from https://www.rebelpeon.com because the following error occurred: Unspecified error
    . This error generally occurs because the available memory is insufficient for completing the compression process.

    For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.


    Event Type: Warning
    Event Source: Microsoft ISA Server Web Proxy
    Event Category: None
    Event ID: 23006
    Date: 11/7/2006
    Time: 8:27:02 PM
    User: N/A
    Computer: RBLPN-ISA
    Description:
    The Compression filter cannot handle a response because the allocated memory currently used for compression reached its limit. The memory allocated for compression is specified by the following registry values under the HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftRATStingrayDebugW3Filter key: COMPRESS_MEMORY_ALLOC_MBYTES (by default, 256) and COMPRESS_MEMORY_POOL_BLOCKS (by default, 200).

    For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

    Does anyone have any idea why this would be happening?  Obviously I could go in and change the default settings, but wouldn’t that just stand to reason it would extend the window that ISA serves website requests?  When creating a web publishing rule, the default is to have compression enabled.  Heck, I want it enabled, since it works with OWA now too.  But why isn’t it releasing any of this memory?  It’s not as though the four or five websites hosted here receive that much traffic.

    As of now, compression has been disabled, but there’s still one other problem that remains, Aaron’s OWA.  I can’t get ISA 2006 to function the same as 2004 with respect to his OWA site.  Before, I set up a simple web publishing rule that forwarded requests that hit his OWA external site to the internal one.  He uses Windows Auth on it, and 2004 handled this fine.  Now, with 2006, I can’t get it to do NTLM pass-through.  I can either get it to deny the website because it requires authentication, or I can get it to prompt you with the challenge, but the challenge is for credentials used on the ISA box, not on his OWA box (different domain).  All I want is for it to allow the authentication challenge to pass through.  How else are you supposed to have Windows Auth secured websites sit behind the ISA 2006 box when they’re on a different domain, or a standalone machine?

  • Busy

    You can definitely tell when I’m busy and when I’m not based on how often I update this site.  As you can image, from how infrequently I’ve been doing updates, that I’ve become incredibly busy.  I received a promotion, and now I’ve taken on about 10x more responsibility than I had before.  It’s definitely different than what I was used to, but it’s a good different (at least it still is right now).  Instead of just being a worker bee assigned to a project, I now, in so few words, manage all infrastructure aspects of projects that come into the department. 

    This has resulted in a lot more work on my plate.  And not just more work, but more work that I’ve never done before (at least not at this scale).  Things like quotes and estimations.  Plus, I’ve been traveling some and trying to get some training done through NetApp.  Oh, did I mention all this responsibility was done by a person that was twice my level before my promotion?  Well, I can’t say that exactly because everything that he did didn’t just jump onto my plate, there’s a project manager that’s actually doing some of the work.  However, regardless, everything needs to cross my plate because of my technical abilities and my knowledge of what my team is doing.

    We’re also getting a NetApp FAS3050C cabinet in on Tuesday.  This is why I’ve been doing some training on it, since I’ll be point-man on getting that all setup.  We’ll primarily be using that as an iSCSI target for virtual machine hosts and SQL machines.  I’m personally really stoked about that.  ~30 TB of raw data to play with.  I’m glad that I’ll be doing that though, as it helps to balance out the ever increasing management responsibilities.  Toys are good.

    In non-work related news, I’ve been taking another photography class: Portrait & Lighting I.  It was actually one that I wasn’t really going to take, but I’ve definitely learned a lot.  I was skeptical of taking it at first because I had heard that the teacher didn’t go into much of the technical aspects.  However, that’s what I really like.  I enjoy learning all the technical stuff and then be able to play with that knowledge for my own images.  Well, the normal teacher is actually taking a break, so the same guy who taught our Photo II class is teaching this one.  This is probably one of the reasons I decided to take the class, because I like the way he teaches.  Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of “good shots” from this class as we’re basically just learning how to correctly use lights and many of the pictures are of different types of lighting or of a dummy head.  It’s possible that something from this next shoot will show up on aaron spruit (.com) though.  We’ll just have to see.

    In other photography news, I’m looking at getting a new 105mm macro lens and flash.  I’ve also been contemplating getting a light meter, and I’ve actually bid on a few on eBay, but I just don’t think I’d use it all that much.

    I think that’s about it, and be sure to check out aaron spruit (.com), since it gets updated every weekday.  Oh, and there should be some pictures taken in the last month showing up now, as I finally got out last weekend to take some pics.  Out of 100ish pictures, I’m probably going to throw up 29 or so.  It was nice last weekend; I just put some newish music on my iPod, threw on the headphones and took the camera out with me.  It was actually quite relaxing, but still amazing how many strange looks people gave me.

  • Motivation

    It’s funny how easily motivation can be swayed one way or the other.

  • Six Flags

    Headed up to Six Flags yesterday for a corporate event.  The company I work for’s parent rented out the whole park for the day.  Normally I really have no desire to go to Six Flags.  It’s fun and all, but I’ve never been a fine of waiting in lines.  Especially for rollercoasters, which I’m not really the biggest fan of to begin with.  Plus you have to pay to park, pay for the tickets ($55), food, etc.  It really becomes expensive for what you get out of it.

    However, I’ll definitely go on a corporate event.  There were no lines, it only cost $25 per ticket, and parking was free.  Such a deal!  I rode every ‘coaster there at least once, and there were points where you didn’t even have to exit the ride, you could just ride it two times in a row.  There also weren’t that many people walking around.  It didn’t feel swamped and the weather was nice (despite a few minute showers).  There’s nothing like riding the American Eagle getting pelted with rain.

    Next time I go, though, I need to wear contacts.  There were a few times I felt a lil’ sick, but I think that had a lot to do with not being able to see.  Superman definitely made me feel that way, but as JoeJohn pointed out, it was probably because of the orientation of your body which made you feel as though you were hovering over the toilet.

    Best complete rides were definitely American Eagle which I rode 3 times or so and Raging Bull which I rode twice.  The best single drop though was definitely the first drop of Deja Vu.  It was the only ride with a long line, and it was closed for most of the day, but it was worth it.  Well, that is until we got stuck on it and it wouldn’t let us off.

    Rides we rode: Raging Bull, Superman, Batman (ugh, that one made me feel bad too), Deja Vu, Virtical Velocity (not really all the fun, but good on technical merit), Viper (snakes on a mf’in train!), American Eagle, Iron Wolf (painful for the ears), Demon, the bumpercars, and the Whizzer. 

  • links for 2006-09-19

    • Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go
      (tags: graph government taxes)

     

  • links for 2006-09-15

     

  • Photoblog

    Well, the other day, I finally decided to take my photoblog site, aaron spruit (.com), out from behind (semi) closed doors.  Hell, I’ve even got some pictures up there, along with enough other ones already in the queue to go until Friday of this week.

    However, there are still some large bugs with the site.  I’ve been trying to squash the most heinous ones, but there are definitely some others.  If you visit the archives page, I have an entry at the top that is sticky.  As I find things and fix things they’ll get added and removed from the list.  However, if you find something wrong that’s not on my list, please feel free to add a comment.