William Reardon’s Blog

After a very, very long hiatus I not only have an Internet connection once again, but cable as well! In other words, full communication with the outside world has been re-established.

I have to say, I forgot about how much moving sucks. For most folks, I imagine it’s the physical labor portion of moving. However, for me, it was pretty painless, taking just under 2 hours to load, drive from A to B, and unload. (eXtreme moving saves the day again!) What sucks is getting all your utilities setup.

I don’t mean things like gas & electric. They usually just take a fairly short phone call & off you go. What really sucks is getting cable & dsl up & running. First off, the initial phone to setup each service took over an hour! (I know, because like most phones at work, it tells you how long your call is when you hang up.) Ugh.

I somewhat suspected DSL & the phone would be like that, so when I saw SBC’s online sign-up, I gave it a try. Big mistake. After spending probably a half-hour filling out the 20-30 non-back-button-working screens, I got to the last page – the confirmation page – only to get a 404 error! ARGH. Maybe it’s some weird firefox incompatibility or something weird happened. Fire up IE. Spend 30 minutes. SAME THING. ARGH! Of course, I started shortly after 4, and now it’s shortly after 5, so I have to wait for the next day to call and setup service! ARGH.

Okay, so onto to calling cable. A bit of time to figure out the cable company in my area is Charter, find there website, spend some frustrating minutes trying to find pricing of various packages so I can call & say exactly what I want. Give up. Find sign-up online form, but realize it’s just a form to have them call me. (That’s what I heavily promote on my site as online sign-up!) Find number to call. Deal with annoying lady who takes 15 minutes to find my new apartment, all the while telling me about how they “got a new database”, that “new databases are always slow”, and they “take a while to warm-up.” Meanwhile, pitch me a million and one different packages, all the while ignoring my simple request for the cheapest package that gets me Discovery (for American Chopper) and HBO (for anything shown on Sunday night).

So this past Friday roles around, and I show up at 2:50 for my 3-5 appointment. (I do give the cable company for narrowing those windows.) They guy shows right up at 3 to boot. I figure it’ll be done in like 15 minutes & I’ll be able to head over to Home Depot & get a fridge. 15 minutes goes by & there’s a problem with the cable box. Then 30 minutes… then 60… then 2 hours. By now, the supervisor has shown up, they’ve replaced all the cable box twice & the cable wiring, including the cable under the house & out in the street. A frustrating experience, but both the original installer & supervisor where really great about it. In the end, they figured the CO-side was “slow”, and eventually the cable should start working, probably in the next two hours. To back it up, the supervisor gives me his business card w/ his cell & says to call him tomorrow (Saturday) if it’s not working tomorrow. They leave and *boom* 2 minutes latter, it does start to work.

There’s knock at the door right now, and I figure they most have just done something & come back to check to see if it worked, but instead it’s a tech from SBC to test the line for DSL. Odd, because I didn’t even know anyone would be coming out.

Apparently my line had to be checked because remote tests indicated an “MTU” (whatever that is) might be on my line. The tech first asks for access to my neighbors locked garage, but after trying to figure out how to get him access (with my landlord on vacation & neighbors not home), he figures out he doesn’t need it. But he needs access to the box in the back, which would require climbing a 7′ fence or breaking a pad-lock to get at. After contemplating the best way to break the pad-lock, he figures out, no he doesn’t need access to that either. But something is still on the line.

We go inside, and it’s confirmed that my DSL modem is blinking an orange connection light instead of green. After about an hour of fussing with the internal wiring of the house, he’s able to get “sync” (whatever that is) on two jacks. So the modem should work. But of course it doesn’t. However there’s not much he can do if it’s a bad modem, so off he goes.

Now on to calling SBC about the DSL setup. The first guy seems to know what my problem is & has me by-pass the SBC CD & connect directly to the modem. It’s clear he doesn’t know much beyond the written steps given to him, but that gets the light green! However, I still can’t connect to anything. He says, I need the visit of another tech and gives another number. I call the number. The lady I speak with explains, no, no other guy needs to come, I’m a self-install. Back to the first number. I get someone who seems to know a little more this time, and once again by-passes the SBC CD & takes me directly to the account setup. The second guy, in a round about way, explains that not much works with the new hardware & the setup CD sent out. I.e., my problems aren’t that uncommon. But anyway, he’s get me online! HO-AH!

I have to say, I’m glad it all worked out well. And most folks where pretty nice & helpful – more so than I remember in the past. However, dealing with this shit just sucks.

I’m never moving again.

From http://www.worldofends.com/:

Some mistakes we learn from. For example: Thinking that selling toys for pets on the Web is a great way to get rich. We’re not going to do that again.

These guys are fucking idiots. Fine, we should have known it from their mindless new-economy braying in Cluetrain Manifesto. (Hey, it was cool — they got it. Remember “ “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors“) And sure, going after online pet stores is an easy mark. Remember the sock puppet?! Bwhahahahahaha!

Except that Pets.com was only one site. They didn’t fail because they sold pet toys. The failed because they followed the (in-hindsight) poor advice of “get big fast” at all costs. Never mind losses — profits will follow latter. And with that, they WAY overpaid Chiat Day for the infamous puppet, bought million dollar Superbowl ads, and sold products at a big loss.

Not that they were the only ones.

When I worked at Petsmart.com we pretty much did the same thing. Eventually we figured out that selling 40 pound bags of for half-off with free shipping across the country was a Bad Idea. Eventually Pets.com figured that out as well. It was always suspect that losing money per order wasn’t a good thing. In fact, the running joke was we should have changed our fulfillment backend to route those high-loss orders (e.g., the fore-mentioned bags of dog food) to simply place an order on Pets.com and drive them out of business that way.

One of the differences between Pets.com and Petsmart.com was that we passed on the stupid sock puppet. Hard to say if that was they key difference, but you can last a longer with an extra $25 million in your pocket. Again, hard to say, but that may be why one site resolves to the other, and not the other way round.

But back to selling pet toys. You’d be surprised. It’s actually a very good idea. Notice that after the days of 40 pound bags of dog food (with free shipping) — which you can’t even order online anymore — the focus was switched to things like toys. Heck, do a search and look how many sites out there want to sell you a doggie toy. Pet toys are ridiculously high margin. And they’re not heavy. Basically, they’re ideal for selling online.

(The only thing with thicker margins is pet medication (but then you run into some odd issues, if you’re, say, associated with Vetsmart).)

So maybe it’s weird that after moving and starting a new job, the thing that gets my panties all in bunch to blog about it was an off-hand comment about online pet stores. But how can you trust these idiots to have a clue, let alone a cluetrain, if they can’t even do a modicum of research on their opening statement. Sometimes people should just learn when to shut up.

I have arrived!

Hoy, estoy un Los Angelino.

I don’t start work for another hour, as having feared Monday morning traffic, I left way early & have quite a bit of time to kill, now having arrived in Pasadena. I found a Starbucks with wireless, so I’m caffeinating up while surfing the web.

All in all, moving down wasn’t so bad. A small hick-up getting the rental truck, was about the only problem we faced. It took about an hour to load, thanks to help from Khayman, Brandon, Ben & Lisa. Khayman & Brandon drove the truck down, not a simple feat when the winds are gusting along the 5. Unloading wasn’t so bad either — managed to go from truck to storage locker in a little under an hour, all the while racing against a rapidly setting sun.

Now I just need to find an apartment or hope the original-apartment-with-tenants-slow-in-leaving to at least commit to a day by which they’ll be gone.

The night after the move, I discovered a slight variant of eXtreme Moving (XM). Brandon espouses more of an Agile Moving (AM) philosophy. While a lot of the under-lying characters are the same, there are some subtle differences (much like eXtreme programming & agile development). In particular, wherein XM sees pacing as important part of a move (you’re running a marathon), AM sees running back & forth as vital (you’re running a sprint). We’re both in agreement that dawdling & truging through a move is the total wrong way to go, but I’m not sure about running back & forth.

I don’t think it saves that much time, and only serves to tire you out quicker. Being tired, the latter parts of the move will go longer, negating any time-savings from earlier. Worse, you could go much slower, making the move take longer. Something to keep the eye on, but in the mean-time, I’ll stick with no-breaks mid-move.

Anyway, time to get work.