It’s been a while…

Well I guess that’s all dependant upon what you consider a while.

Been somewhat crazy busy getting ready to move on with my life and out of Michigan, I will miss some of the things about state but not all like the hemorrhaging unemployment rate, the apathy of the government and the attitude of some of the employed.

The offer was reconsidered and changed which changed my mind also, the house is on the market and I plan on moving when it sells.

I will miss my friends, especially Sked and DonaldJ; they are great exploring buddies and I would explore anywhere with them, they are some of the best people I have ever met and they will always be welcome in my home wherever it may be.

The boat is gone, it sold for about 1k under the blue book value but it had to be done, it will be missed.

I’m not looking to moving in the physical aspect, moving sucks, plain and simple. Living out of boxes for months is just a deplorable experience, however necessary.

I sit here in Detroit Metro waiting for a flight to Philadelphia and then on to the home office for a sales meeting, or lack of sales meeting depending on what side of the business you are….

I am looking forward to the new position and the challenges it will present, I have become weary of all the travel and am looking forward to being near home more often than not.

More soon, I promise not to let the blog be as silent as of late.

Peace

An Epic Journey

 Well it was really more like Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes “Journey to the Center of the Mind” or mindless depending on what side of the internet you were on.

 

 A few days ago my work email account went south, like Antarctica south, Penguins and all. Well, ok, there weren’t any Penguins but I sure was honking like one.

 

 I prefer Outlook express over the full blown version of Outlook simply because, well, it’s simple, do the email and move on, no stupid calendars with 600 inane meetings you will never make or even care to attend etc. I have found the more complicated software is to use the less efficient it really is.

 

 Anyway, my company has a website and all the employee email addresses are BlahBlahBlah@BlahBlah.com so it’s quite professional and all but, domain names are cheap and so are web server / email services, my company just had to seek out the cheapest, it is their way. I have had problems with them in the past but this one was new and obscure. The name, you ask? Well Epix of course!

 

 I could receive the first email in the queue but then nothing, Outlook express just sat there acting stupid, daring me to check settings I knew had not been changed and knew better than to change. It took about 2 days with tech support just to set up the stupid system, I knew better. I can look at the pending emails via web-mail and did that, I had 11 emails to download to Outlook express but only the first would come through. Common sense told me that the system was working if it would receive the first, but, the rest not downloading had me entirely baffled. Reluctantly, I sought out the “chat”  Tech support for the email provider.

 

 First and foremost, the person I worked with was polite and professional, but, would not have me being logical, no, no, no. “It has to be your settings”, (although they worked for 16 months), “they are wrong, let me take control of your PC and I will fix them”. Now, I am NOT a computer guru or anything even close, but I know enough to make me extremely dangerous (to my own PCs health) and I know you don’t mess with success, if it ain’t broke don’t try fixing it. But, he was the expert right? So after changing my incoming POP and my outgoing SMTP and my email address, pinging the temples in China and renewing everything but my drivers license he came to the conclusion it had to be my wireless router. “You should put your settings back as they were before we started. Is there anything else I can help you out with?” HUH? What? Um ok, have a nice IT Career…

 

  So after fighting with windows system restore for about an hour, I was able to get the original settings back and even though I knew it was not the problem I bypassed the router and found it was not the problem, go figure. On a whim I went back to the web-mail and moved the second message which had a 2Mb attachment to a “saved” folder and then went back to Outlook express and tried it again, the emails came flooding in and I am now plotting to thrash the sender of the email with the 2Mb attachment, (which I downloaded manually from the web-mail in about 20 seconds), while a thrashing may be kind of extreme, it does beat the alternative, I could send him a 4Mb attachment with some do-hickey that hangs up his email, but that would just be downright cruel.

 

Now just to be fair, (and to satisfy my own curiosity) I used my other email account to send the same attachment to my work email account (I know what you’re thinking, but seriously, I am not a glutton for punishment) and it came through just fine, so the attachment really was not the problem and a thrashing is not in order. What the real problem was, I will probably never know.

Only in Detroit

So yesterday I was on a freeway in Detroit, nothing special right? Wrong! The car in front of me runs over something, I made the corrections in order to straddle it and avoid getting a flat from some debris that had obviously fallen from someone’s un-inspected POS they drive here in Michigan. Imagine my surprise when I realized the object I was trying to avoid was a semi-automatic handgun! I exclaimed in my mind “ No Friggin WAY, It couldn’t have been”, but it was and I knew it. Now the good citizen in me said “pull over, kick it to the curb and call the police” but the common sense side of me said “if you call the police you will be delayed half a day and who knows, they may even try to connect you to the gun and whatever it had been involved in.” Thank god for common sense…

Social Vibe

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Together we can make a difference

CUTBACKS

 Last week I was asked to choose which day of the week I wanted off, my first thought was “all of them” but I chose Friday. The company I work for is going through hard times as are a lot of smaller companies these days, my heart goes out to all of them, this economy sucks and apparently there is nothing any of us can do about it, including our government.

 

At any rate I was cut back to 32 hours a week, not that it means much as I am on a salary, now it does mean that I will be paid 20% less a week and in my opinion I will need to adjust my attitude and give only 80% effort. Typically I work about 50 to 60 hours a week without complaint and without asking for 25% to 50% compensation, somehow I feel I have been given the short end of the stick, but what do I know? I am just a clueless subordinate….. I cannot wait to hear all of the complaints when I walk off a job at the 32 hour mark when the customer’s machine is still down, but hey, you get what you pay for!

Shuffling off to…

Wherever with the Ipod Shuffle© I just got… isn’t it cute?

I stay at a lot of hotels and when I have a choice, I stay at Holiday Inn for a few different reasons; I know what to expect, the price is usually reasonable and last but not least, I earn points. I cashed in about 25,000 points and got this nifty 4G toy.

 I did some research and decided damn the nay-sayers and got it anyway. Most of the complaints were about the controls being poorly placed / confusing and the buds being uncomfortable, neither of which I find annoying, at least yet.

 I’m an Ipod Virgin so it will take a little getting used to but so far I have synced some music to it and played a few of them, I have to say looks are deceiving, this little puppy performs well and I’m pretty happy I got it. I would be more apt to complain about the I-tunes software than the Shuffle, it wanted to grab every Mp3 bit and stuff it into the Shuffle without even asking, how rude! I do find Eric Cartman singing about Kyle’s mom being a Biotch quite humorous but not enough to have it on the Shuffle’s playlist…

Getting away with Murder

According to the latest reports, Detroit is the place to do it. 70% of murders in Detroit are unsolved, how nice. Makes me so enthusiastic about going there tomorrow, I can hardly wait. But as the great Whackmaster Ted Nugent said “It’s the murder capital of the world” Motor city Madhouse indeed.

 I really don’t know what disturbs me more; the statistic or the fact that they plastered it all over the 11:00pm news for all of the ‘Gangstas to see so they can feel even more confident they will not be caught…

 Just in case that wasn’t depressing enough you can check stats on other wonderful places to visit (not) here:

 http://www.neatorama.com/2009/01/23/the-most-dangerous-places-in-the-united-states/

Commercials on flights

How wonderful, for a credit card nonetheless. I don’t know about other people but I’ll go out on a limb here and guess most do not want to be bombarded by the 95 decibel in flight address system with a credit card promotion for the hosting airline to whom they just paid tons of money to be crammed into a ridiculously tiny space a rat would feel claustrophobic in. 

 

And while we’re on the subject of riding on airplanes, I would like to make an open comment for those who lack a sense of common courtesy:

You bought one seat, please contain yourself and your possessions within its confines, I mean really, is it that hard to comprehend the armrest between your seat and mine is the dividing line and you really only own half of it for the flight? Keep your conversation to a dull roar please; I really don’t want to hear about Bob’s sales projections for the next quarter. Finally; where did you get that cologne or perfume you’re swimming in, the dollar store? I think they put it in the wrong aisle; it should have been with the battleship paint stripper, Good Lawrd!

Something’s missing

Ten days ago I embarked on a mission to install new tooling on a new machine for a new customer; this is nothing new to me…. The first week resulted in scheduling a return visit to further modify programming for the “new” tooling just to make it work. The latter being no small feat which I likened to juggling bowls of soup while balancing Jell-O on my nose. After about 8 hours of “creative programming” I made it work but doing so drove the technology back 30 years. More design modifications will be needed to bring the machine back to the current century. This is getting old….

Communication Breakdown

A good friend told me blogging is a full time job, my reply was; “if that’s true there are going to be some very disappointed people out there”… I’ll try to keep this blog up to date as much as possible but life dictates my free time…enough said.

 

Far too often in my line of business “Machine Tool Supplier” there is miscommunication or even worse, none at all, the latter defines the reason for my journey this week, my end of it all is service but it branches all the way out to “Goodwill Ambassador”. A few months back I was scheduled to install a new machine for a new customer, a sudden turn of events diverted me in other directions and instead a colleague went to install the machine, although the machine was working as designed the customer had problems with parts that were complete at the process after, apparently my colleague couldn’t determine the cause or simply didn’t care. I would like to think this guy cares but my gut feeling is that he doesn’t. A month later I ended up at the customer’s plant and after only an hour of evaluating the customer’s complaint I had arrived at the root cause of the problem IE: miscommunication. The customer didn’t process parts that my company processed in testing prior to the machine being quoted and designed and my company didn’t inquire deeply enough about the process after our machine was done processing the customer part. It became more than obvious to me that the machine needed some major changes to fit the customer needs and meet their expectations. After this discovery the communication lines opened and the road to recovery began. Nine weeks later the parts to change the machine were complete and I flew to Massachusetts today to begin installing them. Wish me luck; I’m going to need it… it’s going to be a long week.

 

It isn’t much of a surprise my employer offered me a promotion to help keep miscommunication like this to a minimum, but that’s a whole different blog…