CNN.com - Royal Navy to allow devil worship - Oct 24, 2004

CNN.com - Royal Navy to allow devil worship - Oct 24, 2004

Peoples' ingenuity has never ceased to amaze me! I think the Conservatives (both in the US and UK) and the Christians should get over it. Who's better - God or Satan depends only on the viewpoint. The written history of humankind has quite a list of nasty stuff that God did to save our souls, without even asking us. So far my soul has been doing fine, so God and his worshiperes shoud be at least more tolerant to their key political opponent. In fact, the Devil seems more like a Democrat. I figured some people are already asking themselves and their pastor "Are John Kerry the Satan and John Edwards Nosferatu?"

Election Time

For the past several days the cover page of cnn.com hasn't changed much -- it's all about the Election. Either the webmaster took a couple of days off, or there just nothing else happening in the world that deserves at least as much attention than those two guys. At least tell us something that we don't already know -- the battle over the usual topics is getting old, the mantra of "war on terror" and WMD is wearing out and as much as we resent it, it's time for all of us to pick up the tab. And let's leave the gay marriages alone. If two people of same sex feel the need to have to pay $600/hour each to get divorced later, let them be. It's just bad judgement, and it is not illegal.

Honestly, I would have felt a little better if my tax dollars went to something more reasonable (like California schools), instead of sending people thousands of miles away to save a nation, that didn't do anything to us, from its own destiny. If we succeed it's going to be a first, but I can care less.

At least, let us all pray that someone will Build a Better Bush, so we can enjoy the Many Faces of Kerry. Happy Election!

Babies

my friend and co-worker Steve Broyles and his wife just had a baby:

"Hey guys, Emma is here. She arrived this morning at 9:17am. She weighted at 7lbs and 12 ounces. Mommy and baby are doing very good. ". Congratulations Stacey and Steve! Check out some photos here.

Radio

my friend Plamen (aka the Doctor) (see his blog) recommended me a great radio station - SomaFM. Really loved it, particularly the "Secret Agent" station. Have fun listening!

AT&T. Wireless? Maybe.Maybe not.

From the last couple of blogs it may come out that I'm a big whiner and really like to complain. Not exactly true, just ignorance and stupidity on large scale can drive me crazy.

Here's the scoop: for the past couple of days I've been trying to order a cell phone from AT&T (Wireless?). To start with, the online web site dead-ended with the option to select a state to find the nearest store. Guys, do you think if I wanted to go to the nearest store I was going to click on the "order online" button? Moreover, going to the "Wireless store" and suffering the service there puts (unnecessary) strain on my patience, but that's a completely different story. So, I went back to the beginning and tried a different route. First, I could not "find" the 1-year contract term plans. Don't believe it - check this out. After fiddling for about an hour with AT&T's web site I finally got to the page with a drop-down menu, where I could finally select what I wanted - "1 year GSM America National Plan". What a relief! Then - read the contract. Of course, small print, the important stuff is somewhere right in the middle, and (as an added benefit of the web), in a REALLY tiny text box - just a couple of lines. Who reads this legal crap anyways?

Finally I got the sense that we are getting somewhere. Enter your this, that, billing, shipping, credit, debit, check "I agree" and click on a big orange button "Continue". Next to it it reads "You will have the chance to review your order again". Click! Oops, went too far too fast -- "Your order has been received, would you like to order something else?". Shortly after that I received the infamous "you are in trouble" email - " Thank you for your recent purchase at attwireless.com , our biggest store. We're pleased that you have chosen AT&T Wireless as your service provider". Call customer support. Enter this, that, "hello, thank you for calling AT&T Wireless, my name is , how can I help you". At this point I just want to scream until I splat my lungs in bloody ecume all over the screen. Impulse control, move on. Asked the rep, "can you verify my order". After logging in for five minutes into her computer (why don't you keep the application open?), which seemed like an eternity, the rep found out that she cannot do anything for me. She gave me a number to call in the morning and wished me a good night. Almighty lord, if I really was concerned it wouldn't have been a good night. I decided to look around that web site for more information. There is a FAQ and it states "if you want to change your wen order, you will need to cancel it and order again". Good, but how do I cancel. Hmm, we ain't tellin... you that! After another five minutes of digging I found the phone number, hidden in a post on the Customer Care Forums.

Next day, 7am PST. With a smile on my face (I gotcha), I punched the secred code on my phone. This time, the spell was "the system is down, call back in one hour". After one hour, "call back in two". 11am PST, the system came back up. If they had kept some of the IT staff (including some of my friends), your system may have never gone down. The rep informs me that my order was placed "incorrectly" and I didn't order a phone. My heart started pumping blood, the adrenaline level skyrocketed. How is this possible? The web application wouldn't let you do that. Whatever, canceled the order. The rep tells me that I need to place another order on the web to get the "web deals". B/S BINGO! (see my previous post). Let's talk to another person ... "welcome to AT&T Wireless". This time, the person sounded like someone with some common sense. Took the order, booked it, made sure it's all correct. In retrospect, if you need to have a problem resolved and the rep that takes your call has a "funky" southern name and a nice drool (nothing against accents, I got one too), just hang up and call again. "How ya'll doing, this is Chaaris" is going to cause only hypertension.

Bottom line, I phone-ordered it anyways. Poorly developed web applications and business processes just do not work. Period. They need to be fixed and the customers are not supposed to suffer from someone's negligent desire to meet the project deadline for an action item he took pursuing a valuable spot in the fragile office ecosystem of the company. I am not sure what the customers have to do with this and why I had to invest about two hours of my life, one hour of customer service reps' time and several million bits transferred back and forth. Fellow executives and managers, wouldn't it be better if we all made responsible decisions and put out well-developed and tested (why bother, we got customers for it, huh) applications out there. If we hired and trained better (i.e. paid more than minimum wage) customer service representatives. There are people who care about this kind of stuff and do not mind paying for it. People who refuse to live a beta-version of their lives. Aren't we all following the footsteps of Wal-Mart? At least, their processes work. The customer service doesn't exist, but it's by design, not by accident. It's all about cheap there.

Fellas, if I may quote Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club" - "Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals. We haul your trash. We connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. (We also pay the bills -ib). Do not **** with us."

Bullshit Bingo

Just realized that I mentioned this phrase in my earlier post. It's a wonderful way to make meetings more exciting and refresh your "biz" jargon. It is also a great way to get fired with no severance. In any case, it's all worth it.

How to play:
Before each meeting, visit http://www.perkigoth.com/home/kermit/stuff/bullshitbingo/ and print one copy of this game card for each player, refreshing the page before each print, or have the players print their own game cards.

Check off each block when you hear these words during a meeting, seminar, or phone call. When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, stand up and shout BULLSHIT!!

Digital Diarrhea

If the technology workers are the digital janitors of the 21st century, this week the Internet seems to have had a digital diarrhea (yes, you got this right - di·ar·rhe·a or di·ar·rhoe·a (d-r)n. - Excessive and frequent evacuation of watery feces). The floodgates of hell opened, the dark forces prevailed in the eternal battle between good and evil. The Yin-Yang turned blood-red. For some unknown reason the hackers of the world decided to flex their muscles and the world what they are capable of - crashed some web sites, slowed down other. Consequently a lot of highly paid executives started playing the bullshit bingo. The executives kept some very smart and extremely skilled people up all night t deal with the situation and wipe this s**t. I am not sure what the perpetrators wanted to display - rebellion, anti-establishment sentiments, cry for recogniton, or just signs of bad childhood. Whatever it is, punk has been out of style for a while - "digital" or "analog", so just drop it and move on. If you can, something creative. If not - just lounge on the couch, watch TV, get fat and happy and RIP. If you cannot think of anything worse, go get a job. Whatever it is, get on with the times and use the WC. Run the water (twice if the diarrhea is really bad), clean up after yourself and don't forget to wash your hands (Lava Sus Manos). Punk ain't coming back in style anytime soon.

In the aftermath, after all the excitement subsided I had some time to think clearly for a while, I realized that there's something really wrong with people's expectations of the Internet. It costs somwhere between $0 and $20/month to host a web site and everybody expects everything to be up and working 24x7 99.99%. If the web site is down for 30 minutes they will spend more calling the provider than they paid for service to complain. Something is just wrong - we all pay way much more than that every year for the right to drive our cars but nobody complains if the I-5 is "not available" because someone "hacked" it by causing a 10-car pile-up. We just shrug shoulders and say "traffic in Los Angeles sucks", get on the cell phones and wait for CHP to clean up the mess. So, to all customers of Internet services -- have realistic expectations -- give us all, the digital janitors, a break and wait patiently behind the yellow line for us to clean up the mess. Otherwise, we all are going to apply for jobs at CHP and LAPD, and this is a scary thought.

The opening scene

Hi and thanks for visiting. I am not completely sure what finally pushed me over the edge to create a blog, it may just be that I am going to be the last one of my friends to do so. I made myself a promise -- to have fun, keep it real and resist the self-indulgence impulses. Respect!

-Ivan