Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

Today was a very busy day at work. Several strong storms passed through the area, knocking power out to thousands of customers. Of course, when the power goes out, technology-based stuff goes out as well, so it keeps it all interesting.

The Network Operations Center I work in provides support for a wide variety of products. We provide support to big corporations with hundreds of telephone lines, customers that are building websites that feature nothing but recipes and the grandma and grandpa that live up in the hills that are exploring the internet with their brand new DSL connection. When a storm is blowing through we get requests from business customers that need their phone lines forwarded to a cell phone as we try to determine what the cause of their outage is: is it power related? Did a crossbox get struck by lightning? Has a house fallen on a Verizon building? It goes on and on. And it can be a little tense, especially with the recent cutbacks at work.

What keeps it more interesting is that we still get the home DSL support requests in the midst of these mini-crises. Now I understand that they may have no idea of what is swirling around them, but if I am to be completely honest here, I sometimes dislike support the home DSL users, especially when they are particularly vague as to what’s going on with their computer or connection. Trouble tickets that read “please help Ruth find her e-mail icon” kind of raises my blood pressure. Nevertheless, I do what I need to do to get the job done, though I usually mutter under my breath a little bit. Okay, maybe out loud too.

What makes troubleshooting computer problems a little challenging is when the user that is having the issue apparently thinks that what the computer does for them is some sort of voodoo or magic and they obviously have absolutely no idea what is going on with the device that they’re typing their credit card numbers into. For example:

1. A woman called on Sunday because she was afraid that “they” were going to get her through her internet connection again. Apparently she had received an e-mail from the King of Idiocia (country name fictious) declaring that she was to receive $15 million dollars if she provided her checking account number. Said user provided this information and found herself quickly relieved of her identity. She has rebuilt her life and is afraid it’s going to happen again. I told her that no one wants to give her money.

2. Another woman with a computer science degree called after what sounded like a very tragic auto accident that resulted in a head injury. She wanted to know what Outlook Express did and if it was important to her. She kept losing her train of thought and asking where I worked.

3. A third customer called because she was trying to play PoGo and a message box kept popping up. She had no idea what the message box said, she didn’t think it was important but what was important was why PoGo wasn’t working.

4. And lastly, a man called at 11:00 p.m. after being without DSL for 1 1/2 days and needed his connection repaired IMMEDIATELY. I’m thinking the wife and kids were in bed and there was pr0n to be had.

Many larger companies opt to outsource their technical support overseas, and aside from some cultural and language barriers, this isn’t an entirely bad thing, however, most breathe a sigh of relief when they realise that I live and work relatively close to them. That being said, I’d like to ask a favour of anyone calling in for technical support and request that you have an idea of the following when you’re calling for a little help from the (hopefully) friendly geek:

1. Please give us some way of identifying you. Your name, mailing address or e-mail address will suffice. Sometimes your name doesn’t appear on the Caller ID and unfortunately my ESP doesn’t work so well over a dead DSL line.

2. Error message pop ups are trying to tell you something important. Don’t click OK, CANCEL or NEXT without knowing what the computer is trying to tell you. I have a hard time when you scream in a hysterical voice “There’s an exclamation point!” and then you click OK before you read the rest of it.

3. Have a general idea of what kind of computer you have. “Windows” doesn’t cut it these days with the various flavours out there. I feel kind of silly asking if there is a “start” button or a “little orb” in the corner. The same goes for your description of the issue: “the ‘puter went broke” sounds like you call your mommy to get your blanky and quite frankly I’m not going to take the matter seriously.

4. Never ask me to read your e-mail to you just because you can’t access your e-mail. I’m not interested in your love affair with the postman. (true story)

5. Turning off the monitor does not equal “shut down your computer”. I have finally stopped telling customers to shut down their computer and tell them now to just yank the plug out of the wall. And this is the honest truth: your computer will not work if the power is off.

6. When I have to tell you that a colon is a “capital semi-colon” or that lowercase letters are the “small capital letters” we have a problem.

7. Ditto when I have to spell out “mail” as “m-a-i-l” when you keep typing “m-a-l-e” to get your e-mail.

These are just a few of the pointers I wish to share with my gentle readers. I could come up with dozens more, but for now I’ll leave it at that.

Happy computing.

I just got back from Albany where I met up with Earl (who is working at the other office this week) to see the new Star Trek movie in glorious IMAX. Not only was my date quite spectacular but the movie was well worth the three hour round-trip I just completed.

I’ll write more later, but as a die-hard Trekker I can say that I LOVED the movie. There was enough references to the existing Star Trek to keep the geek in me happy and the way they handled the “reboot” of the franchise is quite nice. The only thing that made me nervous was the new transporter effect; while quite impressive visually it looked a little too violent for my tastes.

I enjoyed the movie very much to the point where I want to see it again very soon. If you haven’t seen it, go see it. It’s well worth it.

Live long and prosper.

During on-call week I pick a television series to watch off of YouTube whilst I’m working in the middle of the night or waiting on hold with Verizon. This week’s choice is “Bewitched”.

It’s no secret that “Bewitched” is my favourite show of all time. I was always fascinated with the series as a child and I guess that fascination just kind of stuck around. I still find a great delight in watching any of the shows. Back in the 1980s, local independent stations would only show the third through eighth season (the colour episodes); it wasn’t until 1989 that Nick at Nite brought the first two seasons back to television, eventually restoring the prints to today’s expected quality. The first two seasons were colourized in 2000 (along with “I Dream of Jeannie”) when they were re-syndicated. The colourized episodes look colourized but not overly so, though I know from collecting photos and such that the colourization is often wrong, particularly on clothing and makeup shades.

As I grow older I tend to gravitate to the early episodes of the series and I prefer to watch them in black and white, simply because that’s the way they were originally filmed. The early episodes have a more “adult” vibe to them, especially the first 15 episodes or so. I’m in the minority of the fans that populate the various sites around the internet, but I like the show best before Tabatha was born and I especially enjoy all the original actors for the various roles that had replacements over the run of the series. (I even like the first Louise Tate, Irene Vernon, better).

There are a couple of elements from the first couple of episodes that didn’t carry through the series, for example, in the third episode the “Welcome Wagon” comes to visit Samantha in her new house. The doorbell rings and Endora “senses” who it is, remarking “Some of the girls making a call…” in a snide voice. The “mind-reading” element was played down after that, as some felt it was a little too dark for a comedy.

Watching “Bewitched” here and there during the week has made on-call a little easier to deal with. I’m looking forward to digging out the DVDs and picking up the eighth (and final) season when it’s available in July.

Quick aside: a Russian version of “Bewitched” has currently hit the airwaves over there and I have watched a couple of episodes. While I haven’t a clue as to what they’re saying, it appears they are following the original scripts from the first season of the U.S. version. It’s updated, of course but still quite fun to watch. It’s available on YouTube.

And here’s a commercial for the Russian version.

So I have been running Windows 7 Ultimate RC (release candidate) on my MacBook Pro since yesterday evening. I have received a couple of e-mails accusing me of being a blasphemous Mac boy. Where hath the “i” in “iMachias” gone?

Never fear, I can reboot into Mac OS X whenever I want. The problem is, I don’t really want to right now. And to tell you the truth, I find this a little surprising, but to be honest the computer geek in me is really liking this Release Candidate of Windows 7.

Here are a couple of observations from the past 24 hours:

1. Windows 7 is running faster than Mac OS X does.
2. My battery is lasting longer under Windows 7 than it does under Mac OS X.
3. I miss the ability to “print to PDF” for sharing documents electronically. Is there a way to do it in Windows that I’m missing? In OS X I can just “print to PDF”. I use this feature a lot, how do I do it Windows?
4. I like the theory behind “HomeGroup”. I simply type in a code on the computers in the house I want to be part of my network and I am instantly able to share Documents, Pictures, Movies, Music and more between each computer in my “HomeGroup”. Rumour has it that I can stream music from my home computer to my laptop at a remote location using “HomeGroup”, but I haven’t had a chance to try that yet.
5. I really like the changes to the Windows interface that was introduced in Windows Vista. The Aero-Glass look is excellent and to me, more polished looking than OS X. I also like the fact that I can change the theme of my desktop easily, including the sound and colour scheme. I am a sound guy at heart, so the ability to tweak it to my liking is very important to me. (Quick aside: the BEST computer startup sound EVER was never officially released. It was found on the release candidate of Windows Vista and sounds like this: click here to download. I use it whenever I can).

I am only just scratching the surface in my adventure with Windows 7 Release Candidate. After watching several videos from CNET and other sources (and easily able to do so in Windows, surprisingly), I have to say that I am enjoying this little adventure. I look forward to continuing to exploration.