I just finished reading this really cool book by Christopher McDougall:
I found out about it from this post on Barefoot Ted’s blog. It confirmed something I had intuitively begun to feel for quite some time. That is, pretty much everything we’ve been taught about running is wrong.
Running isn’t supposed to hurt. It’s not supposed to mess-up your knees. We, as humans, were designed to run. This book goes into all that and much more. Highly recommended.
I just receive my most recent American Express bill. Anytime I receive a credit card bill I go over every line and make sure that I can account for every charge. I found two unexpected items: a late fee and an interest charge. This was really odd because I make it a policy to never carry over a balance on a credit card and I schedule all of my payments electronically via Bank of America and they are extremely reliable.
I did some further investigation and found that the problem was that I had never received last months bill (and so didn’t send them a payment for it).
They probably did issue the statement. I’m sure AMEX is very good about that. And the likely scenario is that the post office just failed to deliver it. No big surprise there (although our local postman is pretty good normally). What bothers me is that AMEX never bothered to let me know that they were expecting money from me. They have my email address. They have my phone number. Instead they just start slapping on charges. And this is to a customer who has never made a late payment, ever!
So I sent in a lengthy complaint via the AMEX web site. And then I went over the last several statements and found every company that billed services to me via American Express. I logged into my account for every one of those companies and changed the billing method to my Amazon Visa card. And after next month’s AMEX bill clears and I pay it, I shall cancel my American Express card and never do business with this company again.
We had a complete outage at our office today of Internet connectivity and business phone service (8 lines). The outage lasted for about 3 hours and 40 minutes.
We are with Comast Business Services. Way to go guys. Hey, it’s Comcastic!.
Zogmo, the folks that used to own our data center, were aquired by the Lakota Data Center. I just got a call from someone there named Chris. Bad news – they are jacking up our monthly rental from $799 to $1099. That’s about a 38% price increase… yikes!
This is definitely an incentive to pursue the idea of putting the new version of our application on Amazon’s cloud.
Zogmo’s URL used to be http://www.zogmo.com. As of the date of this post, it still works, but I don’t know for how much longer it will continue to be a valid URL.
Lakota’s URL is supposed to be http://www.lakotadata.com/. When I tried it yesterday, I got a shell of a site with a lot not yet complete. Today, it didn’t load at all. Hmmm…is that a bad sign for a data center?
15:10 Update – I did get Lakota’s web site to load:
My wife surprised me yesterday with a brand new Amazon Kindle. Check out the link to get an overview. This is a great device that does a lot more than I initially realized.
There is a tremendous amount of content available for the Kindle. Unlimited really. As of the time of this post there are 135,583 books, 20 newspapers, 16 magazines, and a slew of blogs available from Amazon’s web site. All of these are delivered to your Kindle via Whispernet, which is Amazon’s name for the EVDO wireless network supplied by Sprint.
You can also access the Internet (for free). The built-in web browser is not as full-featured as Safari or Firefox, but is adequate. I’ve pulled up things on Google Maps. I’ve sent and received email via Gmail. I’ve read dozens of articles on Wikipedia. You get the point.
You can convert your own reading material and put it on your Kindle. You can do this yourself or you can email it to Amazon and they will convert it for you. It’s extraordinarily easy to use.
You can also play music and view pictures on the Kindle, but that is really not it’s strong point and I recommend you use your iPod for those tasks. In fact, I think of the Kindle as the iPod for books.
The gray-scale electronic ink display is beautiful. It is not a lighted display — you need ambient light. But it’s sharp and clear and looks great, even in very bright sunlight. If you encounter any unknown word while you are reading you can scroll the cursor to that line and press a button. The Kindle will display definitions for every work on that line.
You can flip around from one book or another and the Kindle remembers exactly where you left off in each book. You can highlight arbitrary line ranges and the Kindle will remember them. You can tag lines with your own notes.
If you get the impression that I’m impressed with the Amazon Kindle, you are correct.
I hate monopolies, especially when they rip you off so blatantly. Ever since those assholes at Comcast bought out Time-Warner in the Houston market, my monthly cable bill has gone up for the exact same services. Here is a breakdown:
Performance Bicycle is a large retail chain that sells bicycles, components, etc. Their web site is http://www.performancebike.com/. You can be a member of their “Team Performance” club if you like. The cost is $25.00 / year.
On May 18, 2008 at 14:54 CDT I received an email from customerservice@performanceinc.com informing me that my American Express credit card had been charged $25.00 to renew my Team Performance membership.
I was a bit concerned because I did not receive any warning that my credit card was going to be charged on a certain date, etc., so I sent the following email in to their customer support:
I received this response back from Amber:
So I went to the page that she referenced and found this:
In that block of stuff I see that “In advance of enacting such charge, we will send notification of the membership fee to the email or mailing address you are providing in connection with this transaction, and absent your notification to us that the charge should not be imposed, we will attempt to charge your credit card.”
Well, I did not receive this advance warning or notification. I replied to Amber with the following:
One of our very favorite restaurants is Shade Cafe in the historic Heights area of Houston, Texas.
Every time we eat at Shade, we are delighted by the delicious food, the beautiful presentation, the excellent wine selection, and the gracious and helpful staff.
Here are a couple of pictures I took with my cell phone when we dined there on Sunday. Please keep in mind that the two food pictures really do not do justice to what we were served!
First of all, we ordered a bottle of a light and crisp Portuguese white wine:
Mikie had a lamb dish:
And I had salmon:
A side note…
You may or may not know that a part of the Heights is “dry”; i.e., no alcohol may normally be sold there. Shade is able to get around this restriction by requiring patrons who which to purchase alcohol join their private club. There is not cost to do this, nor are you spammed or hassled in any way.
We use the Zogmo datacenter in downtown Houston for our companies 8 application servers. At about 11:45 the datacenter went down. I was finally able to get Jose in support on the line at about 12:05. He said that their “core router went down,” and that Lynn Boyd (the president) was working on it. Things should be up in 5 or 10 minutes.
I really want to know why this happened and why there is not some sort of redundancy for this component. This is a datacenter.
I got a call yesterday evening while I was at the gym from Sgt. Hamilton at Fort Benning. He told me that Gordy Jr. should be arriving back in the states at about 21:30. I was thrilled. I immediately called Sprint’s customer service to have his mobile phone taken off military suspension so he would be able to use it as soon as he gets off the plane.
The first person I spoke with told me her name was “Iris”. I tried to explain to her what I wanted:
Well it turns out that was too much English for poor Iris, who sounded more like Apu’s wife Manjula. I apologized for bothering her and disconnected the call.
So I tried again about 15 minutes later. This time I spoke with “Michael” (who sounded more like Apu).
Apu (Michael) assured me that he could do what I asked. After about 10 minutes of waiting in silence, I asked if it would be OK if I hung up the phone and would he please just call me back when Jr.’s phone was reactivated. “Yes Mr. Gordon, that is fine.”
Great.
Well Michael did call me back about 45 minutes later to tell me that all was taken care of. I thanked him and went on with my evening.
About 00:30 this morning, Gordy Jr. called from a buddy’s phone to let me know he was back in the states. I noticed he wasn’t calling from his phone and when I asked him about it he said he had tried to use it but it wasn’t working.
I called Sprint customer service again. Keep in mind that now it’s almost one in the morning. This time Freddy took the call. I asked Freddy where he was. He told me he was in Texas. Freddy had Jr.’s phone working in a couple minutes…and tested it before I got off the line with him.
He also told me that if you call Sprint customer service in the wee hours of the morning you are more likely to get someone in Central support (i.e., the United States).
Lesson learned.
Sprint: You need to clean up your act. You’ve got some great technology but you are losing customers and losing money. Why? Go ask Iris and Michael. Oh wait … they probably won’t understand the question…