A tweet of mine from yesterday:

I was this close to doing a blog entry today. About how people could learn a thing or 2 about customer support in our daily interactions.

I received a small amount of grief that I didn’t write the entry so I decided this morning I would try to alleviate that guilt and give something back to the internet that I have been neglecting lately. (Beyond my short form contribution of tweets.)

The topic began in my own head as a result of a work interaction that has occurred over the previous few days. My apologies for the lack of details, but those omitted are not really relevant. I got pulled into a situation which is somewhat outside my specific expertise with regards to a contractual agreement. Sounds sexy, doesn’t it? But I do enjoy at a certain level the details of legalities and I had a few questions and concerns that I was worried about how to communicate them to a third party. I did not feel like I had the full details and when it comes down to the possibilities there might be a lawyer involved, I like having things nailed down.

Requesting the background info was my goal. I needed a copy of the original agreement so that I could make sure there were no gotchas contained inside. I shot off an email to the person who has the document (internal person) and waited for what I assumed would be the answer to a simple question.

Not so much. The answer I received was basically “Why do you need that?”

This is where we delve into customer support. I mean the term in a looser sense. While I spent many years doing “Technology Services, this is Jeremy, how can I help you” customer support, I define customer support more broadly. I will define it more broadly as:

Jeremy’s definition of customer: When anyone comes to you with a question, request, or request, they are, for the briefest of moments, your customer. Treat them accordingly.

So what is good customer support?

1. Answer the damn question! Ooops, that may have been harsh. Yes, I know as the support person you know more than the questioner. You may know, 100%, that they are asking a dumb, irrelevant question and that while they asked X, what they need is the answer to Y. It doesn’t matter! Always, always, always answer the question asked first. When you don’t, it pisses off the person asking the question.
2. Then (and this is critical too) answer the question the person should have asked. This can involve asking followup questions, offers to help them find the best solution, whatever.

Why is #1 so important? Because if you don’t, the person, your customer, will think you are either rude, didn’t listen to them, don’t care, are condescending, whatever. And all of these things are bad customer support.

So, back to my story, what should this person have done that would have simply made me happy? Simply said “Here is the document. It is huge and complicated. Why do you need it? Maybe I can answer the question for you.”

Be good at customer support in your daily life and people will think better of you and believe you are truly helpful.

While I know that this will not be the solution to everyone who is having problems between Snow Leopard and various CIFS (SMB) server implementations, I wanted to post my solution with as many keywords that google would pick it up and hopefully help a few other people.

The Symptoms: After upgrading my new Mac Mini to Snow Leopard a few weeks back, I started noticing some strange behaviors with applications that had to deal with my NAS (which is an OpenSolaris box with ZFS shares). I did not immediately make the connection to my NAS, all I saw was problems in apps. The first problem was with iTunes which stores all of its library on a NAS volume. iTunes stopped downloading Podcasts. This was not high priority to me, but two days ago, I went to purchase the 13th episode of Dollhouse, Epitaph One, and it would not download, giving an error -48.

My investigations: I checked the network connections and packets were getting out. I finally tried switching the library location back to the local hard drive and that fixed it, so I knew that there was something wrong with the storage on the NAS. However, when I tried to copy files to the NAS via the command line, everything worked fine, which stumped me for a while. I finally tried copying something from the Finder, and it also failed, this time with the error “The Finder could not complete the operation because some data in “” could not be read or written. Error code -36)”

AHA! It appears there is a problem with Cocoa apps communicating to the NAS. I looked in the system logs and started seeing the following error:

smb_maperr32: no direct map for 32 bit server error (0xc00000e5).

My Solution: Google brought up many people with this issue, but nothing that looked like a good solution. Here is where I would love to say that I had a brilliant flash of wisdom that solved the problem, but if that occurred, it was subconscious. Being stumped, I put the problem aside.

Yesterday, as I was putzing around the house, I got the idea to upgrade the OS of my OpenSolaris box from 2008.11 to 2009.06. To be clear, I in no way did this as a potential solution to my iTunes problem. I found a great set of instructions from Michael Sullivan on his Frame Dragging blog: A Smooth Upgrade - OpenSolaris 2009.06 snv_111b. Given how painful almost everything is with Solaris, I was impressed how smoothly this went (especially in light of my current procrastination of upgrading my Fedora 9 box).

After the upgrade, I thought, what the hell, let me see if this made any difference to my former problem. I dragged a file in the Finder to one of my NAS volumes, and bang! it copied. So, apparently there is some slight difference between the CIFS server in the 2008.11 version of OpenSolaris and the 2009.06 version that makes Snow Leopard happier. I don’t think the problem was with OpenSolaris, my feeling is that Snow Leopard just isn’t handling an odd situation right, the new version of OpenSolaris just happens to work more like Snow Leopard likes.

So, I hope this helps someone other than me.

Today class, we will learn about states! California to be exact. And, well, learn might be too strong a word to describe the benefits from reading this report I wrote. My guess is that I wrote this in 1985 or so, which would have made me 10 years old at the time, so 5th grade. That brings to mind one of those things we take for granted with computers today, they know what time it is. I unfortunately have to guess with these items as computers didn’t have clocks. Even later, they did, but no batteries; remember booting up a DOS box and having to enter the time on startup? Glad that is behind us.

So, here you go, my thoughts on California.

The name of the state I have picked is California. The capitol is Sacromento in the middle of the California Valley. California became a state on September 9, 1850. Its population has grown to 25,622,000 in 1984.

In California the climate varies FROM 104-88F in July. In January it is from 64-40F.

California has some mountains which is the Sierra Nevada range. The valleys are the California Valley and Death Valley .

California is located in the western part of the U.S.A.. The main rivers are the San Joaquin and the Sacramento R. which emty into the San Francisco Bay. The largest cities are Sacramento which is in the California Valley and San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and San Jose which are by the waterfront.

In 1848 John A. Sutter was building a mill and discovered gold. He didn´t want anyone to know, but news finally got out and started the gold rush.

In California there are many tourist attractions. One of the most popular is Disneyland. One of the largest zoos is the San Diego Zoo. People drive on the RedWood Highway to see the large Redwood Trees. In Death Valley there is a large castle called Scotty´s Castle.

I picked this state because it is not only one of the largest states but one of the warmest.

Ironically, while I wrote that report nearly 25 years ago, I did not get to California in person until 2007 (San Francisco, Macworld 2007, EFF 16th). I’m afraid my experience on that trip did not overlap very much with this report. Maybe next time, although I doubt it, since I really just want to go back and visit some of the wineries.

My first computer was an Apple ][+; it was a wonderful little machine. I got it when I was 5 or 6 years old and started me on what has been a successful life in technology. Part of the reason I started to use a computer was as a compensation to my abysmally bad and slow handwriting. It was thought at the time that if I could type my work, I would learn faster. Did it work? I have no idea, but it did get me coding and typing at a very young age and at a point in time (early ’80s) when very few people had computers. I graduated to an Apple //e and then a //c later on, but until right before college I still used those trusty machines.

An advantage of doing things on computers is that I still have some of the files from those days. Well, the disks at any rate. So a few years back I bought what seems like a Frankenstein of technology, an expansion card for my //e (yes, I still have it) that will let you plug in a CF Card and make it appear like a hard drive (CFFA for Apple //e). This allowed me to transfer disk images of my 5.25 inch floppy disks onto more persistent and accessible storage media. While I played around with the files then, I didn’t have a great way to get at the actual file contents as most of what I wrote was using Wordstar for CP/M which I could run via the Z80 expansion card I used to, but no longer, had. This morning however, I found a new emulator Virtual ][, that emulates that card as well as a printer that generates PDFs. So, I can now get easy access to all of my old files.

And to make this more interesting for all involved, I thought I would share some of the choice gems with you, my readers. The first installment comes from I think 6th or 7th grade, when I attended the Madison Middle School in Trumbull, CT. This was from my science class where we apparently had to “study” an animal. My group had a hamster, aptly named Teddy. This particular file was not written in Wordstar, but in Bank Street Writer, which, let me tell you, is quite the piece of software to play with now. But it runs in the emulator and I got the file out.

Enjoy.

Introduction

Our group chose a Teddy Bear hamster because it was small, cheap, and easy to care for. Our hamster, whose name is Teddy, is a male, 3 inches long, and light brown.

The Teddy Bear hamster is part of the rodent family. Rodents range in size from 2 inches to 4 feet in length. Some rodent fossils have been traced back 56 million years.

The hamster is a common name for 11 Old World species of rodents. The hamster originates from the desert in Africa. It has four legs and almost no tail. They are roughly 2-3 inches long. Behavior

The hamster is a very smart animal and is capable of learning tricks. When we put Teddy in our maze, we ran him through once to get him used to it. The second time he went through it fine, but the third time he broke out of the maze. So, we don`t have any evidence whatsoever that hamsters can learn.

Our hamster ignored the other hamster we put in the cage and laid down. We could not test Teddy with any female hamsters because there were not any available.

When we left him alone all he did was eat, run, and sleep.

While we had Teddy, we did not have any indications of what he did when he was in pain, hungry, thirsty, or content. When he was in danger of being taken out of his cage, he backed away from our hands.

One interesting aspect of the hamster`s behavior is that it uses its large cheek pouches to carry its food home.

Life Cycle

The life cycle of a hamster is between 2 and 3 years. A full grown hamster is 2.5 inches to 11 inches long, depending on species.

Rodents are able to reproduce at 60 days. The gestation period is 16-22 days, depending on species. A hamster has 4-18 babies per litter, again depending on species. The hamster is not hatched, it is born. When the young are born, they have no fur and their eyes are closed. At 2-3 days after birth, the animal starts growing fur. They open their eyes at 14 to 16 days and it takes 2-3 weeks to be able to leave their mother because they stop feeding on her milk.

A wild hamster will have litters 1-2 times a year, usually in the summer. But a hamster kept as a pet can have many more litters all year-round. If another person or animal touches the babies the mother will eat them or neglect them. The hamster is not hatched it is born.

Life Requirements

The main requirement of the hamster is its need for food. It eats grain and vegetable scraps. We fed our hamster a combination of rabbit pellets, barley, cracked corn, sunflower seeds, yellow corn, oats, and wheat. The hamster also needs water but because of its desert origin it does not need much.

A hamster lives in a burrow, usually in sandy steppe lands, cultivated fields, or river banks. It avoids cold climates because it becomes sluggish and hibernates at low temperatures. Its burrows are elaborate and have many entrances. It has special compartments for food and excreting waste. They also have special tunnels for the winter which are longer and deeper. The hamster is a nocturnal animal and prefers darkness. The hamster needs 1-2 square feet of living space at a temperature of 70 degrees F. and not much humidity.

The Ecological Niche

The hamster is remarkably free of parasites, but can catch many human diseases. The hamster may not have to worry about parasites but it does have to worry about snakes, hawks, and eagles.

Gerbils, mice, and squirrels eat the same thing as hamsters.

The hamster can damage farms by burrowing underground and eating the plant roots. It can also help farmers by eating certain pests.

In the wild, the hamster eats insects, frogs, nuts, grains, vegetables, and apples.

Relationship

Hamsters are somewhat afraid of people. The golden hamster is the most common to Humans It can be an extremely friendly pet.

The hamster is be dangerous if it bites you because it can transmit diseases.

Some people don`t like rodents, but you should act friendly to them - unless you see the 4 foot rodent, then run.

If you have a hamster or meet one, you should pet it lightly, not squash it. If you pick it up, you should support it underneath and not hold it too tight.

In the past, the guinea pig was used as a test animal, but, after the discovery of hamsters in 1927, the scientific community switched to hamsters because they were more prone to human diseases, and they reproduced faster.

Conclusion

I liked this unit very much because I like handling and playing with animals and observing them.

I didn`t the planning for the animal or feeding it, because the hamster scattered its food all over and I had to pick it up.

Our animal was very friendly and cute. He was a little boring and did not like tests very much, and it was nice he didn`t bite.

I hope that next year we can do another Animal Care Unit.

There you have it. The Teddy Bear hamster, as told by my 13 year old self.

As promised, I wanted to give some observations and thoughts on our trip to Latvia for Robert and Laura’s wedding. Giving a day by day account is not my thing, so for that, look at my previous entry which has links to Tiffany’s journal of our adventure. I tried to make some notes of things that struck me as unique and interesting as I was jostled around in the mini-bus (very, very mini) as we left Liepaja back to Riga.

As is probably logical when visiting a former Soviet block country, I really wondered what evidence of the former U.S.S.R would still be visible. Latvia gained independence in 1991, so there have been many years for the country to remove the traces. While traveling through Latvia, it is clear that the economy is still very agriculturally based. I think to me a perfect example of the difference in the economy and how the society operates was the food market in Liepaja.

In the US, “Farmer’s Markets” are places that generally get set up on weekends as destinations for the upper middle class to show up and shop with their little dogs in tow. It is a specialty type of place and it is considered socially responsible and earth friendly to shop locally grown foods. It is viewed as “progressive” to participate. There is a certain irony in this view when you look at a country like Latvia. In reality, there is nothing “progressive” about those kinds of markets (except maybe the extra costs in the US). They have existed for centuries. And until you see one in a country like Latvia, where it runs every day and is used as a primary source of food, that you can truly understand and appreciate what a market can be. The quality and variety of locally grown food was amazing; from great vegetables to more variety in meats and fish than you see in most any store or market in the US.

Another food observation. Fruit trees were everywhere! Mostly apple, you would see them in almost everyone’s yards, along the sides of roads, in the city. And as far as I could tell, these were not the nasty, inedible crab apple varieties you see used as ornamentation in the US; no, these were regular, pick off the tree and eat varieties. At one point I wondered where Gunta (one of Laura’s bridesmaids) kept getting an apple to eat until I realized she was just pulling them off a tress above us.

The cuisine was also unbelievable. Before we left, Tiffany and I did some quick research into Latvian cuisine. Unsurprisingly given the climate, we found that it was heavily based on root vegetables. We were a little concerned given the US mentality of how these are cooked; often resulting in relatively tasteless piles of mush. We could not have been more wrong; what these people could do with potatoes? oh my god. I think it is a lesson to learn for anyone traveling: No one likes to eat nasty food. If a country has a particular ingredient that dominates its cuisine, they will find the best, most tasty ways to cook it. The item that the articles we read failed to mention, was the wonders that the Latvian cooks can do with sauces. Yes, many of the meals that we had were pork and potato based, but, oh, the sauces. Rich, flavorful, mouthwatering; they added such variety to what would in the US be considered simple, not particularly sexy ingredients. Dill seems to be a favorite herb, one I was not overly used to cooking with, but they used it so expertly to add to the fresh ingredients they had at hand. I will never again scoff at the native ingredients when I travel.

It felt to me like Latvia was a country that was still firmly rooted in the 19th century but was either running or being pushed headlong into the 21st century. Wonderful, local food could be had for a fraction of the cost that we pay, however a piece of electronics that is cheap in the US would be exorbitantly expensive. This dichotomy showed itself when we visited Laura’s family at their farm; They had reasonably reliable internet access provided by what appeared to be a mesh network, but still had an outhouse.

It appears I meandered a bit from my topic of lookouts for Soviet influences. The simple observation is that I did not see many. From what little I understand of Latvian history, the local population was not overly fond of their place in the Soviet Union, so it is unsurprising that in 18 years they removed the overt signs of their dominion. However I did notice some things that I think are probably hints. While riding the train from Riga to Liepaja, we went past many train stations for small towns. After about 2 or 3 of them I realized that for the small towns, they were all identical in architecture and decoration; the only way to distinguish them from each other were the signs. I picture for myself a book given to architects that when a new train station was needed, they looked it up, indexed it by town size and built the appropriate one. I was also surprised that even given the abundance of forests, all of the power and communication poles were made of concrete, not wood. I have no idea why this may be; there are certainly durability reasons, but maybe there was also an imperative to use more concrete.

One last cultural note for anyone else traveling to Latvia. Prepare to give lots of flowers. Going to a wedding? Bring Flowers! Meeting someone for dinner? Bring Flowers! Going to a party? Bring Flowers! This we learned before we went on the trip, but there is another secret; how many? For positive, happy events (weddings, party, etc.) you should bring an odd number of flowers. For solemn events, bring an even number of flowers. There; now you know.

It was an amazing trip, I would love to go back and have more time to wander and visit the country (and eat more of their wonderful food).

What a trip! I could not have imagined the amazing sights and experiences I had in Latvia. It is unlike any country I have ever visited. I have a list of topics I want to touch on, but I think I will do that in subsequent posts. This post is a quick reference for all of you to the various pictures that I took from the trip. I will try to collect my thoughts on other topics later this week and do some writing.

For more information on the trip itself, I refer you to the great job that Tiffany did documenting the trip every night (and sometimes multiple times a day) on her blog TLB Entries: Days 0 and 1, Day 2 part 1 and part 2, Day 3, Day 4 part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5, and finally Days 5 and 6.

I stayed on after Latvia for a business meeting in Switzerland, so there are also pictures from there.

• Wedding Rehearsal Dinner
• Around Liepaja
• Robert and Laura’s Wedding
• Robert and Laura’s Wedding Journey
• Wedding Reception(s)
• Aarau, Switzerland

Enjoy the pictures and pass along any questions you want me to answer in subsequent posts.

Just a quick note for now. If you want to follow Tiffany and I’s adventures in Latvia, she is posting daily on her blog.

TLB Entries

It seemed like the day for Meghan and Jeff’s wedding was always 2 years away, but it kind of hit me two weeks ago as I packed for my whirlwind trip to Iowa and then the wedding that 2 years was now. It still seems like a blur from the time when I first got introduced to Jeff to the way that he just fit in with all of us so well to this past weekend, watching him and Meghan start the rest of their lives together.

I can definitely say that this was one of the most enjoyable weddings I have ever been to. Both Meghan and Jeff’s families were open and welcoming and basically adopted Tiffany (who was Maid of Honor) for the whole process. I played a far smaller role as general gopher for anything they needed help with and as unofficial, adjunct photographer but I still felt like I was a part of this new, wonderful family. Between the rehearsal dinner, the wedding, and the reception, I took over 1300 pictures and that was not a hard number to come to. I can’t imagine how many the official photographers have to wade through.

I don’t feel like I can do justice to the events in words here, so I will only share the pictures that I took. To me, looking at them, the happiness and pleasure that is on everyone’s faces is testament to this wonderful event.

• Rehearsal Dinner - Held at Reynold’s Tavern in Annapolis.
• Wedding and Reception - Held at the Chesapeake Bay Beach Club on Kent Island, MD.

Congratulations Meghan and Jeff! I couldn’t be happier for both of you.

I received a postcard in the mail yesterday with regards to a magazine I unexpectedly started receiving for free about a year ago:

Dear Subscriber,

Recently we sent you a notice letting you know that you would receive Magazine B in place of Magazine A, which suspended pulication as a stand-alone publication in late 2008. Regrettably, we have decided that we will no longer be publishing Magazine B.

In its place, we will be sending you magazine C…

If I had paid for Magazine A I would probably be annoyed, but I am just subtly amused.

If you had asked me 10 years ago my thoughts on project management, I would have lamented the overly restrictive activities, rules, and heaven forbid processes. I have leRner since not that I was necessarily wrong, but that I was biased from a viewpoint of a company that had that natural, instinctive operation. The addition of what I naively considered project management just made things worse. Due to smart people and good leadership, we already had found that sweet spot of operation.

In the majority of my subsequent jobs, I have been lucky to have similar situations. Recently, however, as I have moved up in my organization and talk with others in different companies, I have seen the risks of both too little and too much management.

On the too much side of things, I see organizations that are burdened with huge handbooks defining every aspect of how a project is supposed to proceed. These are generally written by well intentioned peole who have never actually worked on a project. They sound good in theory, but as I like say, in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they rarely are. What does this result in? It results in a process that is ignored or only partially followed. You end up with people frustrated that they cant count on the process to work because the cost of implementing it is far too great. Token compliance is the inevitable result of reality; frustration with the process but no benefits.

On the flip side, you have organizations with little or no project management. This has many causes; ignorance, small companies who are growing, companies that dont know how, or key people in the organization who think like I did when I started working in the tech sector. In this scenario, you end up with a group of people which rely only on the personalities of the group. Some people are better able to function in a completely free form (or anarchic) environment. But as projects get more complex and more people get involved, the costs of the lack of planning take a toll on everyone. Without a plan, people face the risk of being pulled in many directions simultaneously. It has been shown that the human brain is most efficient when it works on a single topic (being in the zone). But when you are interupted, it takes at least 30 minutes to get back to that same level of productivity. And with no plan, this happens more and more frequently, potentially dooming the project to failure, frustration, or cost overruns.

To me, that is the one and only goal of project management; to keep the team on focus, out of the weeds, and in the zone. Scrum, agile, waterfall, I really couldnt care less. Find what works for you and your team. Use it just enough to make things flow but no more. Find the right tools and embrace them. You will work better.