mamamusings: curmudgeonly

richard dorschel responds

Last week I sent a letter to the owner of Dorschel Scion, Richard J. Dorschel. I enclosed a printout of my original blog entry, as well as printouts of the Google searches that showed my entry coming up in the top ten for “dorschel difference” and “dorschel scion” and in the top twenty for “dorschel.” (They’ve returned to the index after that brief and odd disappearance, and in fact my post is now in the top ten for “dorschel” as well.)

I received a letter in reply this week. It starts out well, with an apology for the missteps made and frustration we encountered. It goes on to explain why it’s so difficult to track the location of cars, as well explaining how the miscommunication about the options occurred. So far, so good. But the ending left a bit to be desired:

My company has a reputation for good service—which I can confirm with our strong Customer Satisfaction Scores and high levels of customer retention. However, we are far from perfect ad I personally am involved in most of our missteps. The language you use to describe my company and my employees suggests you came with a significant degree of mistrust and misconception of a dealer.

In conclusion, I am a long time advocate, financial supporter, and friend of my neighbor, RIT. I can’t tell you how much it stings and disappoints me to have a ranking member of the faculty publicly attack my company in language I feel diminishes the image of my company and RIT [emphasis added]. Elizabeth, you again have my apologies for our many miscues. I wish you the best of luck with your Scion and hope the remainder of your owndership experience far exceeds the start.

Sincerely,
R.J. Dorschel
President

This got me thinking about why some apologies work wonders in changing opinions, and others (like this one) fall flat. I did a quick search on “art of the apology” and found, much to my amusement, that a post I wrote three years ago is one of the first hits for that phrase.

I found some other great pieces in that search, however. There’s a piece from Oprah’s website that includes this passage:

3. Genuine expression of remorse. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of the comment “I’m sorry you feel that way” knows the difference between sincere regret and an attempt to avoid responsibility for bad behavior. Few things are less likely to evoke forgiveness than apology without remorse.

I was also reminded of situation we’d encountered with our local elementary school when Lane had a very bad experience with a teacher. I contacted our principal by email to let him know how unhappy we were, and then made an appointment to see him. I walked in, furious, ready to fight, and—if necessary—remove Lane from the school.

The first words out of the principal’s mouth were “What’s the best thing we can do for Lane right now?” That took every ounce of anger out of me. When I said that moving him to a different class was the best option he said “I agree. I’ve already laid the groundwork for that, and we’ll make it happen tomorrow.” He didn’t lay blame, he didn’t point fingers, he didn’t try to make me feel bad for being upset. He focused everything on how to improve the situation, and I left feeling 1000% better than when I’d walked in. (That principal, Mark Turner, retired this past year, and he’ll be sorely missed. He was a treasure.)

What Mr. Dorschel didn’t seem to recognize was that my anger was not primarily about the lateness of the car. As I said in my post, I recognize that they don’t have control over that. My frustration was with the manager who promised Gerald that he would be our only point of contact moving forward but then didn’t follow up on that promise (the original salesman called us two days later to confirm what options we’d ordered), with the salesman who told me that I must be confused when I confronted him with the inaccurate information he’d given us, and the attempt to pass the buck on responsibility away from the salesman who’d sat with us and taken the order to the salesman we knew personally who’d assisted on the deal. I’ll add to that list Mr. Dorschel’s claim that my post somehow diminishes RIT’s reputation. (Huh?!)

In fact, Mr. Dorschel is wrong about my preconceptions. We’d had excellent experiences in the past with John Holtz Honda, and went into the process of purchasing this car with high expectations, not low ones. And I’m not tarring all car dealerships with the same brush here. This was an experience specific to one dealership, but it was a pattern of behavior—in the salesman, the manager, and now the owner—that consistently showed a desire to combine an apology with a deflection of blame, and implications that I was at fault. That never works well.

The sad thing about all of this is that a well-crafted apology probably would have caused me to go back and update the original post with more positive information, thus greatly reducing the overall damage to the company’s “googlejuice”. What would that apology have included?

1) A genuine expression of remorse. [that was there, in the first paragraph]

2) An explanation of what had happened (which I wish had been given to us a lot earlier, as it would have reduced our sense of frustration and helplessness). [that was there as well]

3) A complete lack of blame-passing. [nope]

4) Accurate information about what had transpired with his staff [nope]

5) A gesture to make amends [nope]

He got two out of five, which was a start, but pretty much negated those by claiming that I was somehow damaging RIT’s image by publicly expressing my unhappiness. FAIL.

—

Update, 9/8: For the sake of completeness and context, for anyone who really cares, here are my original letter to Richard Dorschel, and Dorschel’s full response.

how (not?) to get paid by the government

My trip to Boston is to do some training on social media at Hanscom AFB. It’s been ten years since I last did any training for a base, and boy have things changed. Back then, when I completed a training job I’d mail them an invoice, and then I’d wait—often for a verrrry long time—for my check. It was frustrating from a length of time standpoint, but at least it wasn’t very labor intensive.

Fast forward a decade, to the wonderful world of web-enabled databases. That ought to improve the creaky, slow payment system, wouldn’t you think? No, of course you wouldn’t think that, not with the government involved.

When this training was arranged a couple of weeks ago, they asked me if I could accept a procurement card (credit card) for payment, and while I haven’t done that in the past, it sounded like it would be worth the cost of credit card processing if I could speed up the payment process. It would be particularly nice to get paid before the credit card bills for the airfare, shuttle, hotel, and rental car come due. But to do that, I had to apply for the not-free Paypal website payments pro account, which took several days (and involved updating my very neglected business website, since Paypal requires an active business website as proof that you’re not going to try to scam people…)

Over the past two weeks, I’ve spent more hours than you’d believe entering data about myself and my consulting business into first the Paypal site, then the government’s Centralized Contractor Registry (CCR), and then the government’s Online Representations & Certifications Application (ORCA). Those took days to process.

I thought I was finally done last Friday when I finished the ORCA registration, but yesterday while I was flying home from Seattle I got a frantic message (or two) from the contracting office saying they needed my tax ID # (which, of course, had already been entered into CCR and ORCA), so I called from the Atlanta airport and gave them that over the phone.

This afternoon the contracting office called me again to say that for some unnamed reason (I called back to ask but couldn’t get through) they could not pay me with a procurement card, and that I’d need to register in yet another online system—the Wide Area WorkFlow (WAWF)—in order to have my invoice processed. (I’d link to that one, but apparently their security certificate isn’t valid…inspires a lot of trust, no?) That system has a 25-page instructional guide, with twelve separate actions and registrations you have to complete.

I got as far as the fourth step, which involved enrolling in the Electronic Document Access system, and then I was informed that the system would take five days to process my application. Who knows how long the next eight steps will take?? Un-freaking-believable. I’m hoping against hope that once I get to the base tomorrow we’ll be able to get this sorted out, but I have a baaaaaaad feeling about how long it will take me to get paid.

The end result? At least a full workday’s worth of redundant data entry into poorly designed and disconnected databases, all to get me to the point where I can submit an invoice and wait to get paid. Again. Feh.

corporations bicker, and everybody loses

I got an iPod Touch for Christmas, which was really exciting, because I love watching TV shows on my iPod (especially when I travel). But then I went to the iTunes music store to download the TV shows I wanted—specifically Project Runway, Top Chef, and Battlestar Galactica. Much to my surprise, none of them were there. Since I’ve downloaded those shows in the past, I was confused…until I did a little research, and discovered that the spat between NBC and Apple had resulted not just in NBC network shows being pulled from the store, but also all of the Bravo and SciFi Channel shows being yanked as well.

That sucks.

My iPod Touch is still great for mobile web browsing (when there’s a wifi network around), and for music. But the thing I most wanted to use it for, watching TV shows, is no longer easily done.

The irony of all this is that I’ll probably start downloading those shows using BitTorrent, and getting them for free—when I was completely willing to pay a reasonable price for them. So everybody loses here. It’s ridiculous.

too many interests, not enough time

There’s too much I want to do in each day, and not enough time to do it in.

I’ve got a new crochet project, a complicated lacy afghan for the baby daughter of a friend.

I’ve got a new camera, and the ice storm is begging me to take pictures of it. I’d like to find an open space where I can get photos of these amazing crystallized trees without having to dodge parked cars and construction fences.

I’ve got the new World of Warcraft expansion installed, and my characters moved to a less stressful, non-PvP server…so I want to play and play for hours and hours, exploring the new content and environment.

And then there’s that pesky work thing, ever demanding my attention and engagement. You can’t teach well when you’re only partially there, so I have to disengage from the rest.

Not to mention the seemingly endless stream of illnesses.

<sigh>

not all suburbs are soulless

As I’ve read through the various discussions of pros and cons of living in Brooklyn (spurred by Doug Rushkoff’s initial post, and continued in posts by his wife and Steven Johnson), I keep noticing the dismissive way that people who live in city neighborhoods talk about the “soulless suburbs.”

It drives me crazy.

People who live in NYC would never assume that the experience of living in Harlem is the same as living in Park Slope, or that Soho is exactly like the Upper East Side. But they’re oh-so-ready to assume that every single suburb is exactly the same, all characterized by isolation and lack of community.

Guess what? They’re not. They vary as much as city neighborhoods do. Last year we lived in a suburb in Seattle where our neighbors never spoke to us, and we felt isolated in every way. It was a brand-new collection of mini-mansions, and most of the time it looked like a deserted movie set. If that had been my only experience with suburban life, I might have as lopsided a view of the suburbs as many non-city-dwellers have of urban life.

But here in Rochester, we live in a middle-class suburban neighborhood much like the one I grew up in, and I wouldn’t trade it for all the brownstones in Brooklyn. We know our neighbors (not all of whom are white), our kids can wander with their friends, and we’re not more than 20 minutes from anyplace in the city. (Ten minutes to work. Fifteen to the airport or my mother’s house. Twenty minutes to the Eastman Theatre.)

There’s no place where you’re 100% safe; risk is all around us. I know that. But in this neighborhood I feel completely comfortably letting my kids take off out the front door with no more information than “I’m going to the pond.” The worst crime we’ve experienced in the ten years we’ve lived here was having our cars egged. Even in winter, neighbors stop to talk while they’re shoveling snow, or getting mail from the mailbox—and we don’t need neighborhood watch signs posted to look out for each other.

I’ve lived in city neighborhoods, too. I spent five years on Capitol Hill, in quaint “English basement” apartments and brightly painted row houses. I walked to the local shops and farmer’s market, and took the metro to work in Bethesda. It was a great experience. I’ve lived in rural Alabama—more rural than most of my readers could even imagine. And I’ve spent some of the most idyllic years of my life in college towns—Ann Arbor and Tuscaloosa—which in many ways marry the advantages of big cities and small towns. There were upsides and downsides to both of those locations, and I have no regrets over having lived in either. Nor do I feel a need to criticize people who still choose to live in those areas even though they didn’t work for me (and, more importantly, my family) as a long-term option.

So I have to wonder what it is that makes many city-dwellers so quick to condemn anyone who chooses not to live an urban life—and to consistently paint “the suburbs” as both awful and undifferentiated. Why are they so defensive about their choice, so critical of other options? Why do so many people who choose to live in cities need to be so endlessly snarky about those of us who choose not to?

crazy week

It’s the first week of the quarter, I’m teaching a class I’ve never taught before and another that needed serious overhaul, I have class tonight until 10pm, and I’ve got a flight to Seattle tomorrow morning at 6:30am.

Stressed? Oh yeah.

Looking forward to the trip, but wishing I had a bit more space between teaching and traveling tonight.

summer resolutions (unresolved)

It happens every year. The dog days of summer roll around, and instead of lazing around enjoying the tail end of my vacation, I find myself lying awake at night and snapping at my family during the day. I begin to realize how little I’ve gotten done, despite my best intentions at the start of the season. And the start of the hectic fall quarter, which seemed so very far away just a month ago, is now bearing down on me like a runaway freight train.

I originally titled this post “end of summer panic attack,” but after a conversation with Gerald, I realized that his term—summer resolutions—was better. It’s just like New Year’s resolutions for most people, he pointed out. And it’s true. As an academic, my year works differently than most people’s do. For me, fall is like spring—new beginnings, fresh faces, a sense of promise and potential. And the beginning of summer is like New Year’s—a chance to prepare for the year ahead in a relaxed and productive way. Ha. Ha ha. Hahahahahahaha. [maniacal laughter fades away down padded hallway…]

As summer comes to an end, the list of unfinished tasks becomes more and more depressing. The larger the pile of incomplete tasks, the less able I am to face them, and the further I burrow into escapism. (This year’s location of choice to bury my head in the sand? Azeroth, natch.)

This year it’s made worse by the fact that I’ve been invited (for the first time) to Tim O’Reilly’s infamous Foo Camp gathering, where everyone is expected to give a talk or demo a project at some point during the weekend. I’d hoped to show off a prototype of PULP, but I’ve made diddly-squat progress this summer. I thought it would be easier to manage developers from afar, but it’s not. I’m just not cut out for the whole distributed team approach—I need people close enough that I can see them, drop in on them, create a sense of connectedness. Yes, yes, I know…iChat AV, cell phones, shared calendars, blah blah blah. Just doesn’t do it for me, at least not for building a team from scratch. So I’m stalled on this project, and am hoping to get somewhere with it this fall once the team is co-located here in Rochester.

My plan at the moment is to use some of the time on tomorrow’s early (too early) morning flight to start pulling together enough of a prototype/demo (or at least some mocked up screens) that I can talk about the project in a meaningful way. The good news is that I’ve got a clear mental vision of what it’s going to be, and how it’s going to work. The bad news is that going from my head to the screen is still a laborious process. That means, also, that I’ll be lugging my big-ass 17” MacBook Pro with me to Sebastopol, rather than the much lighter and easier to tote Vaio (which I bought specifically to make traveling easier, and which, unlike the MBP, has a PC Card slot to accommodate my Verizon broadband card). The Vaio is fine if I’m in information consumption mode, but if I’m going to be doing much creation, I really work much better in the familiar OS X environment.

I went out and bought some Zicam last night, because Lane has come down with a nasty cold, and I just know I’ll wake up tomorrow with the same cold. So I’m starting the Zicam today, in hopes of staving off the otherwise inevitable. I can only imagine how much fun a cross-country flight followed by two nights of camping out would be while nursing a bad cold. :(

Okay, enough whining. I’ve still got a chance to pull my head out of the sand and get something done this week.

Maybe.

sixapart's lousy timing

If TypeKey (and TypePad!) had to go down for several hours, it would have been nice if it was’t during the one block of time I’d set aside this week for downloading current versions of MovableType to upgrade my various course weblog servers.

The lack of information provided on the status site is frustrating, as are the inaccurate promises (at 3pm, there’s still a note from 1:30pm saying it should be up within the hour).

Come on, SixApart. If you want people to buy into your centralized authentication (and blogging) services, you can’t have outages of four or more hours at a time.

show me the way to go home

As a child, I had a luxury that many people don’t have…we moved into a house when I was four that I lived in until I went to college—and that my father still occupies. During the more tumultuous periods of my life, I found that having a stable place to call home made a huge difference. When my parents divorced, everyone else in my family changed houses at least once; my father moved out until my mother remarried, upon which she and my sister moved to Rochester and my father moved back in. My mom points out that not even the location of my furniture moved during that time.

Having a physical space that I can claim as my own has remained important to me. I don’t think I realized how important until this month, which we’re spending without any place to call our own. The boat would probably be great if this were simply a vacation from our usual home, but knowing there’s nowhere else to call home makes it feel less like a retreat and more like an exile. Things that don’t usually bother me when I’m traveling—living out of a suitcase, eating out a lot, not having a familiar space to sit and work—are making me miserable here. We’ve got several generous offers to stay with friends in Seattle, but that won’t really address the underlying discomfort with not being on familiar ground.

It’s not as bad when we’re out and about—visiting parks and exploring local towns. But when we’re sitting around the boat on a gray day like today (or yesterday, or tomorrow…it’s not shaping up to be a great week) I feel trapped and uncomfortable and unhappy.

I’d be sorely tempted to bail on the conference I’m speaking at next week and head straight back to Rochester immediately, but our tenants are in our house until August 1, so I’m stuck in this in-between state for another 3 weeks. In the meantime, I’m hoping the funk I’m in is temporary, and will lift when we’re back in our house again next month.

equal and opposite reaction

It seems that we’re not able to have a vacation free of stresses.

On the plus side, the weather has (mostly) been great…a little cool in the morning until the fog burns off (which isn’t ‘til after lunch if you try to go up to Port Townsend, as I did today), but lovely in the afternoons. And now that we’ve added a few more lights, the boat’s becoming quite homey. Each of the boys has a friend here now, imported from Seattle for a few days, and that’s been good for them. And something about lots of outdoor time seems to have reset their body clocks, so they’re voluntarily going to bed not long after it gets dark. The kids and I were all up at 7 this morning, and I baked cinnamon rolls for us and then drank my coffee out on the deck—even with the low clouds, it was peaceful and beautiful.

On the down side, I spent most of yesterday driving to and from Seattle, to fetch the boys’ friends and attend Scoble’s bbq (and drop off a key, and rent some movies, and buy a book, and stock up on groceries…). I started the trip off with the first speeding ticket I’ve had in about 20 years, which didn’t do much for my mood, and I didn’t get back ‘til after dinnertime, by which point I was completely worn out from the driving and from the sibling squabbles (which were doubled rather than reduced by the presence of a second set of siblings). When I got back, I discovered that Gerald’s upset stomach had gotten worse, not better. And by tonight, it still hadn’t improved much. So there’s a good chance we’ll start our 4th of July with a trip back to Port Townsend (45 minutes north), which is the closest place with a hospital. There’s a clinic in Quilcene, about 20 miles from here, but it’s unlikely to be open on a holiday.

Since both vehicles are heavily laden with household goods, there’s no way we can get all six of us into a car, so I’ve got to figure out what combination is most realistic for reducing risk to everyone. I think I’ll let the 12yos stay here on their own recognizance, and take the 9-10yos with us. Not a perfect solution, but probably the best we can manage. I don’t want Gerald to drive himself, and I don’t want to leave the younger boys here without us.

Maybe we’ll wake up tomorrow and Gerald will be feeling healthy again. I hope so.

—

I just did some online research, and am suddenly more concerned about Gerald than I was. On Saturday he ate raw oysters that he’d harvested himself at a beach down the road, but he assured me that if they’d been tainted that he would have been violently ill. After reading about vibrio vulnificus I’m not so sure. And I think we’ll definitely be making that hospital trip tomorrow if he’s not significantly better. :(

macbook pro delayed :(

I ordered a 17” MacBook Pro through RIT three weeks ago, and they gave us a ship date of 5/23. I hated that the wait was so long, but it coincided with my trip back to Rochester, so I figured it would work out. Today I got email from the RIT person who placed the order, telling me they’d pushed the ship date to June 5!!! Ugh! Ack! Oh, the humanity! :P

I’m not pleased. Not at all.

—

Update: A few days after I posted this, they pushed it out until June 13. So I cancelled the order. I’ll still be getting one, but not until after I get back to RIT in August. In the meantime, I’m getting a Sony Vaio SZ240, which looks like a much better option for traveling. (I wish Apple would come out with a fast, light notebook option…)

directv's malicious billing

This morning, I had to cancel my Amex card and order a new one with a different number. All because DirecTV has been billing us for six months for an account we don’t even have.

The first mysterious charges showed up in the fall, and we contacted them to explain that the charges were in errror. We don’t have DirecTV, or any services they provide. They told us that we needed an account number to complain, which was a problem because we don’t have an account. So they said to contact Amex, which couldn’t provide an account number, only a billing reference, but allowed us to dispute and therefore not pay the charge.

The following month the same thing happened. And the month after that it happened again. Gerald started getting increasingly frustrated with the calls to DirecTV. Apparently they got irritated with him, too, because the charges didn’t disappear—they started duplicating. Two charges (for different amounts) last month. And FIVE (yes, five) this month. That was the last straw—it’s hard not to interpret this as malicious on their part, since each attempt at resolution leads to increased inaccurate billing.

Apparently we’re not the only ones having problems with DirecTV. In fact, fraudulent billing to people without DirecTV accounts seems to be a common complaint.

Changing credit card numbers is a serious pain in the ass, because we have a number of things that are regularly billed to that card. I really didn’t want to have to do this. But we didn’t really have another option, since we couldn’t even get through to a supervisor at DirecTV’s billing office. (And now that I’ve read the stories linked above, I’m sure we did the right thing by changing my card number.)

So…be careful with DirecTV. Check your charges. Monitor your bill. And don’t count on any assistance from “customer service.” You can bet we’ll never do business with them in any way in the future.

funk

I can’t blame it on the gray skies, because we had a string of beautifully clear (but very cold) days last week. And I can’t blame it on work, which has been full of wonderful new challenges and opportunities of late. (No, I can’t blog about that. At least not yet. But soon, I hope.) I’m not sure what to blame it on, really, but I’ve been in an awfully crabby mood for the past few days.

Actually, I probably do know what to blame it on—I’ve just been loathe to admit it. Last week, right after I posted about “staying the course,” I veered off the track. I think all those carbs in my Valentine’s night meal set off a series of cravings, and the really cold weather caused me to avoid our garage-based weight bench for a couple of mornings in a row. So I ended up with three days of no exercise and an unbalanced diet. That, combined with normal hormonal swings, was a very bad thing.

Like Weez, I took a 4-weeks-later photo this week. Unlike her, I didn’t see a significant difference in the images. But, to quote one of my favorite movies from childhood, it’s often the case that “you see what you want to see.” And given where my head was at the time, it’s not surprising that I didn’t see positive change. Today I weighed myself at the gym, and discovered that I’ve lost 8 pounds since she left town in January. That’s just over a pound a week, which is pretty respectable. And I know I’m stronger, as well.

So yes, it appears undeniably true that not only is this approach to eating and activity having an effect on my physical appearance, it’s having an equally significant effect on my state of mind. That’s a good thing to remember when the ice cream looks tempting—is it really worth feeling this out of sorts for several days for that fleeting sensory treat?

So I’m climbing back out of the (carb-induced?) funk, and back into a positive mindset. I have so much to be happy about, and I’m working hard at shifting my focus back to that.

on being a corporate research blogger

I got an email this morning from a friend who was critical of my recent posts related to Microsoft and Google. The friend said that since starting my sabbatical I’ve seemed to be unfailingly critical of Google and positive about Microsoft in my posts, and that I needed to be more aware of my online voice. There was more, particularly on the issue of whether I was somehow damaging my objectivity as an academic by allowing myself to become so publicly supportive of a company.

Lovely way to start a weekend. But after I got over the hurt feelings, I started thinking about the larger issues underlying my new role as a corporate pawn. (Should my blog have a big caveat at the top that says “I’ve been pwnz0rzed!”?…) While I don’t agree completely with this friend, I can’t dismiss these criticisms out of hand, nor can I assume that view of me isn’t shared by others.

I started out by combing through my blog to find and point out the times when I’ve criticized Microsoft’s products and practices, and acknowledged the ability of companies like Google and Apple to delight consumers in a way that Microsoft consistently fails to do. (In fact, during my keynote speech at Internet Librarian I explicitly told the audience that I thought many—if not most—of Microsoft’s products sucked—and did so while proudly sporting my 17” powerbook.) But that’s not really the point, is it? It’s perception that’s at issue here, and perhaps I need to more be aware of that perception.

There are a lot of great researchers who work for research labs—Microsoft Research and Google Labs and Yahoo Research are full of them, as are the labs at HP and PARC and IBM. Very few of those researchers have blogs, though. Perhaps it’s because it’s so very hard to strike a balance between bias and objectivity when you’re in this in-between world, and talking too much about your day to day life in the belly of the beast exposes more of that tension?

Where I may be erring on the side of transparency, it’s been primarily an attempt to avoid erring on the side of opacity. Once you take a job working for a company—rather than doing grant-funded collaborative research—you change your relationship to that company. Perhaps I was wrong in thinking that I should be up front about my experiences and reactions to working here…but I’d like to think that there’s more good than bad to be gained from my transparency.

My critic felt that my blog posts here undermined my validity as an “objective” academic, but I’m not sure that I agree. If I were presenting my blog as unbiased research, that would be one thing. But research has to stand on its own in terms of methodology and conclusions—and besides that, is there really such thing as an “unbiased” researcher? For me, knowing the biases of the researchers makes the research more credible rather than less, because I don’t feel as though I need to look for hidden motives. Also, my identity as an academic has always been tied up far more in my teaching than in my research (a function of being a professor at a teaching-focused institution)—and I suspect that my students are far more influenced by the Powerbook I carry, my intense dislike for Microsoft products Powerpoint and Windows, and my use of GMail than they are by any blog posts describing how much I like the people I’m working with at Microsoft.

One of my goals for this sabbatical was to give people a sense of what it’s like to be inside a corporation that’s often thought of as “faceless,” and that’s what I’ve been trying to do. The alternative is to be more opaque, to only write about “big ideas,” but that’s never been the way I approached my personal blog.

In terms of my recent negativity about Google—there’s definitely a mix of things going on there. My basic concern about Google’s domination of the search market (particularly in the hearts and minds of kids) predates my employment with Microsoft, and is a concern shared by a number of people in the library profession (as I pointed out in my Internet Librarian notes). In many ways, Google is the new Microsoft—when you get to be the 10,000-pound-gorilla, people start to mistrust your motives. They’re not a scrappy startup anymore, and they shouldn’t continue to be thought of as such. (But even saying that is to acknowledge how negatively Microsoft is perceived, and for good reason—from its market practices to its often-awful products, MS has gotten its bad reputation the old-fashioned way—they’ve earned it.) Google’s not making the same mistakes as Microsoft, but it’s making plenty of its own. Their secrecy surrounding all of their work is to me antithetical to both academic and library approaches. And in the case of book digitization, I though Roy Tennant’s criticisms were spot-on. Microsoft may have made—and be making still—a lot of bad, ham-handed, bad-for-the-consumer moves…but joining the OCA was not one of those, and I would have praised that even if I hadn’t been an employee.

I don’t really want to work someplace that I can’t be passionate about. And I don’t want to pretend that I’m not engaged in and excited about an environment if I’m not. As a researcher, to what extent should the “rules” (oh, geez, i really hate blogging rules) be different for me than they are for a non-research corporate blogger? At the end of the day, however, I do have to wonder if perhaps I’ve been sucked a little too far into the “us against them” mentality that’s so common inside of corporations (universities, of course, suffer from none of that competitiveness [cough, cough]).

The problem for me right now is that I have only two perspectives on this—mine, and the friend who was brave enough to share a critical view with me. That’s not enough to really triangulate with. So…where do you think the balance lies? (I’m going to work really hard to keep from being defensive in the comments, so if you post something and I don’t respond, I assure you it doesn’t mean I didn’t read it; I just want to absorb right now rather than reacting.)

accidental reset

I was trying to get Bloglines to synch with NetNewsWire today, and somehow my Bloglines subscriptions all got marked as read—taking me from ~2000 unread items to zero. (And the sync didn’t work, either—only a fraction of my subscriptions actually seem to have properly updated in NNW. Feh.)

On the plus side, it was remarkably freeing to have all that unread stuff disappear. It’s not like I was ever really going to catch up.

And it helped to compensate for the misery of having spent 2+ hours going through email on my non-MS accounts, which I’ve neglected shamefully since starting my sabbatical. (If you want a fast response from me, you should use the MSFT address. If you don’t have it, you should call me. If you don’t have a phone number for me…well, that’s how I’m staying sane these days. Sorry.)

It’s amazing how much more angst and petty politics there is in the academic environment. It’s probably because as a temporary employee I’m spared many of the slings and arrows of MSFT politics. But that’s not all of it. Some of it is really that academics—who often spend their entire professional lifetimes working with the same small group of people—really do have an uncanny ability to drive each other crazy. It reminds me a great deal of the way my kids interact with each other. At the moment, I’m very very glad that I’m here and not there.

relocation blues

Moving is hard. Even when it’s temporary. Even when it’s well-subsidized. Even when it’s to someplace you want to go.

It’s hard to feel at home in corporate housing. But there’s no place to call home right now. Our house in Rochester has been emptied out, the house we’ll be living in here will never be “our house” and is still occupied by its owners. I feel displaced, disconnected, discomforted.

I’m also feeling a bit isolated. My son is wonderful company, and we’ve enjoyed exploring the area—today we took the express bus into Seattle and wandered around the public market and library for a while. But I haven’t had much adult company since we arrived, and I miss my friends back home. I’ll be glad when my husband and older son arrive next week. I’ve probably used more minutes on my cell phone over the past five days than over the previous two months (happily, I have Cingular, which means I’ve got a ton of rollover minutes built up on my plan).

I’m sure that it will get better. I start work next week, and will have more adult contact. We’ll start connecting with other families, and have some social interaction to help keep us all sane. But right now I still feel off-balance and out of place.

i'm getting boring

Nobody’s said that to me, but I know it’s true. Lately, my blog hasn’t been much more than a “here’s what I’m doing now” update. Useful to friends and family, but not particularly insightful.

Someone asked me at a presentation on Friday how much time I spend blogging, and the answer right now is less than an hour a week. It’s no wonder I’m not turning out much of substance—I’m not putting much mental energy into the process.

Today I’ve been packing boxes. Yes, again. Yes, still. And I’m reminded of how much I hate this process of packing up. The frustration of having things look messier and more cluttered with every box I pack. It never makes sense. Shouldn’t things look less cluttered as I pack them away? But there’s a level of chaos that the packing process engenders that seems uncontrollable. I don’t deal with that chaos well, so I end up cranky. And when mama’s not happy, ain’t nobody happy ‘round here, alas.

I’m eleven days away from departure, and the gulf between here and there seems insurmountable today. Outside it feels like Alabama—90s and humid. The soaking rain from earlier today increased the humidity rather than reducing it, and the only saving grace is that our air conditioning still works.

Perhaps when life at home is less chaotic, life on my blog will gain some energy and creativity again. I hope so. In the meantime, I’ll return to my sisyphean tasks, and will hope that at some point it will start to feel like we’re making progress.

spring suffering

Well, the not-so-bad cold I wrote about on Saturday has turned into a seriously nasty chest cough. So while the weather is breathtakingly beautiful today, I’m sacked out on the couch, surrounded by tissues and teacups. Blech.

Wednesday night I’m flying to LA, so I’m hoping for a quick recovery. And kicking myself for not starting a course of Zicam on Thursday when the earliest symptoms appeared.

i hate apartment hunting

I thought I was done with this forever…that once we bought our nice suburban house and I got tenure that we’d never have to do the apartment-hunting thing again. But I didn’t factor in sabbaticals.

So I’ve spent countless hours over the past few days bouncing between rent.com, apartments.com, and apartmentratings.com, trying to figure out where I should spend my time looking during the four days I have free in Seattle between the MSN Search Champs meeting and the MSR Social Computing Symposium this month.

All the pieces we need are out there—prices, floorplans, maps, feature guides, resident ratings. The problem is they’re not in one place, they’re not easily aggregated, and they’re nearly impossible to print in a reasonable way. That means that I had to:

1. Search in rent.com for places meeting our criteria (Lake Washington or Bellevue school districts, 3 bedrooms, reasonable floor plan, pool and playground for the kids)
2. Locate the floorplans—some were already in rent.com, others required me to go to apartments.com
3. Look up the places meeting our criteria on apartmentratings.com, in order to see how many people had taken the time to say “this place is awful”—one or two complaints is no big deal, but a bunch of them saying the same thing is bad news (like, for example, the place where five different comments said that when new management took over their water bills went up by ~$50/month!)
4. Print out the remaining options
5. Use scissors and a glue stick to literally cut and paste the floorplan pictures back together since they broke in the middle of the page

There’s really got to be a better way.

I realize this is in many ways better than it used to be—to be able to screen locations at all in advance of going out there is a great advantage, and when I get to Seattle I’ll have a good sense of what the price ranges and expectations are. But still, it’s a lengthy and tedious process, and it makes me glad we’ll be coming back home to our own house in a year.

aargh

Trying to work at Panera today. I’m behind in some critical work, which makes me miserable, which leads me to get further behind. So I’m trying to break the cycle.

But there are so many people here today. And they’re loud. And they’re driving me crazy. I have my Sony earbuds, but they’re not sufficiently noise-isolating.

I’m really hoping that I get either the Shure e2c or Etymotic er6i earphones for my birthday. Both are supposed to be very effective at blocking out this kind of background noise.

And, while I’m at it, I really need a way to be able to get at my Mac’s music library when I’m working on the PC laptop I do my data analysis on. Is it possible for me to set up a VPN to my home network and then find my Mac via iTunes?

delta blues

It’s getting easier and easier to see why major airlines are getting their butts kicked by companies like JetBlue and Southwest.

I’m sitting in the Rochester airport, where Gerald and the boys dropped me at 12:30—with plenty of time to catch my 1:55 flight to Atlanta. The Delta line was extremely, worrisomely long—long enough that I wondered if they’d had to cancel a flight since I left the house (I’d checked online). But the prominently placed display screens showed my flight with an on-time departure, so I patiently waited my turn. And waited. And waited. Because they kept calling Cincinnati passengers up to the front of the line—guess being there on time doesn’t pay.

When I finally did get to the desk agent, he informed me that my flight had, indeed, been cancelled due to weather. But they were “having problems with their computers,” which is why there was no public indication of that fact (which would have saved me the 45 minute wait in line, since I could have called Delta on my cell phone and made alternate arrangements).

The next flight out isn’t until 5:45pm, and it’s not fair to Gerald and the boys for me to ask them to come get me again and go through the goodbyes once more. So I’ve settled myself into the Frontier Business Center at the airport, in a passably comfortable chair, with free wifi and power. I’ve got a giant latté from Finger Lakes Coffee Roasters, and enough work (and neglected blogs) to keep me busy for a while.

This trip kicks off a busy month; I’ll be in Atlanta for the NVHA Innovations conference on Social Network Media (with some other great folks). I get back on the 2nd, then leave on the 5th for Dubai, where I’ll be speaking at the 7th Woibex Women in Business Conference. I return from Dubai on the 10th, and then leave again on the 12th for SXSW/Interactive, where I’ll be moderating a panel entitled “Spam, Trolls, Stalkers: The Pandora’s Box of Community” with panel members Jay Allen, Cam Barrett, Jason Kottke, and Steve Champeon.

The plus side of all of this for, you my online friends, is that I’ll be online and available to write and chat a whole lot more than usual. Expect to see me on AIM a good bit, and for blog posting to increase a bit.

sick and tired

Literally.

<sigh>

Lost my voice, and colleagues who had it happen to them warn that a nasty head/chest cold is likely to follow.

I have no energy.

I have too much work, and haven’t yet implemented a real GTD system to keep it under control. (I’m working on it. Really. But it’s slow going.)

There are over 3000 unread items in my aggregator.

I’m going to bed.

quit laughing!

One of Gerald’s favorite sayings used to be “Man makes plans, and God laughs.”

Tonight, after I finished my self-congratulatory post about my successful and productive day, I went down in the basement to get the last load of laundry before going to bed. As I was standing in front of the dryer, however, I noticed that the rug in the laundry area felt damp—damp enough to make my socks wet. Not good.

I peeked around the side of the laundry area, and found that there was nearly an inch of standing water stretching out for a good six feet into the storage side of the basement. The side where we put all the clutter that we don’t want to think about, most of which is in cardboard boxes. I’d been putting off the Herculean task of cleaning that side of the basement until other things were more under control, but I guess my plans are the kind that make God laugh…

I found the Shop-Vac, but couldn’t find a plug, so I called Gerald, who told me where only accessible plug was—on the ceiling above the washer. I climbed up there, but the Shop-Vac cord didn’t reach, so I had to go out into the freezing-cold garage (in wet, bare feet) to find an extension cord. Then it took me 30 minutes to vacuum up the water from the floor and the rug, and clear the soggy boxes out of the way.

It looks like the problem was a clogged drain in the sink that the washer drains into (and, possibly, a skewed hose that was spraying the excess over the edge). I stood down in the basement watching a test run of the washer so I could be sure I’d corrected the problem.

So much for my plan to go to bed early tonight.

Ah well. At least I didn’t melt down. And I managed to deal with the problem without making anything worse. Now it really is time for bed.

getting a deskjet printer to work with an airport express

The title doesn’t sound like it would be hard, does it? <sigh> But it was. And I want to document what I ended up doing here—both for others who have the same problem, and for myself the next time I have to set up a computer at home to print to the shared printer.

We bought an HP Deskjet 3740 a couple of weeks ago—the price was right ($39), and our old Lexmark was on its last legs. It worked fine connected directly to our powerbooks, and even when used as a shared printer. So when Gerald got me the Airport Express for Christmas, it seemed as though we ought to be able to just plug the printer into the USB port and go. But it didn’t work. The Airport Express could see the printer, and the powerbooks could tell that there was a printer, but there was no convincing the powerbooks that they had the right driver. Apparently HP uses a proprietary driver approach, rather than creating nice little PPD files.

There wasn’t much online to help with this. I finally found a site called iFelix, which had an excellent page entitled “HP Printers not on compatibility list and Airport Extreme Printing.” It had some useful instructions, but they involved having a PPD file again, which I didn’t have. But they also pointed me to the HPIJS for Mac OS X site, which provides a “Foomatic” interface for HP printers. (According to the website, “Foomatic is a database-driven system for integrating free software printer drivers with common spoolers under Unix.”). Unfortunately, after installing the two packages from that page (the Ghostscript package and the HPJIS package, both of which had nice package installers to make it easy, there was still no sign of a driver for the 3740.

I’d invested too much time at this point to give up, so I tried doing a Google search on “deskjet 3740 foomatic,” and found that the same site that had the Foomatic software (linuxprinting.org) also had a tool to let you generate a PPD for the 3740. I put the resulting file into my /Library/Printers/PPDs folder, and was finally able to use the instructions on the iFelix site to add the printer. I was also able to successfully print two test pages—one from BBEdit, and one from a browser.

It’s not perfect—the printer status doesn’t always reflect the current job properly—but we can print, and that’s the important part.

I do have to say that I’m very disappointed with Apple’s support site, which had no information whatsoever (that I could find, anyhow…) explaining the potential problems with printing over the Airport Express.

stupid mommy tricks

For those of you who are always so impressed by how well I manage all my various roles, here’s some evidence that I don’t always manage them all that well.

On Friday, Lane was diagnosed with a case of walking pneumonia, and the doctor prescribed a five-day course of antibiotics for him. He started them Friday, and today after brunch he needed to take his third dose. Gerald was out, the boys were fighting, and I’d just sent Lane upstairs after scolding him for whacking Alex with a plastic sword. I decided to take the pill upstairs rather than calling him back down, so I popped it out of the pack, grabbed a drink, and started to go up. But then Alex distracted me because he wanted ice for his foot, and somehow in the confusion I took the damn pill rather than carrying it upstairs. I realized mid-swallow what I was doing, but it was too late.

So now we’re one pill short, and I’m going to have an upset stomach all afternoon (my digestive system doesn’t take well to Zithromycin). And tomorrow I’m going to have to call the doctor’s office, admit to my stupidity, and see if it’s possible to get a prescription for just one pill (I have no idea if they even sell them singly, since this was a packaged set.)

I hope that makes those of you who envy my multitasking abilities feel a little better. :)

—

Update, Monday morning: I stopped by the pediatrician’s office on the way into work and told them my tale of woe. After they stopped giggling, they gave me this. Problem solved.

sometimes irony is not so sweet

Know what this is?

It’s an official Greek police report. For my stolen cell phone. Which was taken from my coat pocket while I was at the EasyInternet cafe on Syntagma Square on Wednesday night, writing about how much I loved Greece. <sigh>

It’s not a disaster—it had a prepaid Greek SIM in it with only €4 of credit left, and my mother cleverly purchased trip insurance before we left which will probably cover the cost of replacing it. My US (Cingular) SIM was locked up with my passport in the hotel safe, and is ready to be put into a new phone when I get home, so my phone number won’t change. It was not an ideal note on which to end an otherwise lovely trip…but it did provide fodder for a blog entry on what happens when someone steals something from you in Greece.

In order to file for reimbursement, one has to have an official police report. The phone was taken at about 8pm, but I didn’t discover it was missing until we returned to the hotel, around 9:30pm. If I’d been smart, I would have looked in our travel guides and discovered that Greece has a 24-hour telephone “tourist police” line that I could have called for assistance. As it was, the people at the front desk directed me to the closest Athens police station, and assured me that the four-block walk was quite safe at night. (It didn’t feel that way, walking down darkened narrow streets, just after having had something stolen, but nothing untoward happened en route.)

When I arrived at the police station, a uniformed officer posted outside who spoke no English finally understood my pantomime of a pickpocket and directed me to the fourth floor. Apparently they begin numbering at -1 in that building, because I had to climb five flights of stairs to get to the fourth floor, including two floors with jail cells full of boisterous young men.

Upon arriving at the correct floor, I found 7-8 young men dressed all in black, some with police jackets, all gathered in one office laughing and talking and smoking. They finally seemed to realize I wasn’t going away, and one who spoke limited English got the basic story from me. He spoke at length with the men in the room, who somewhat reluctantly cleared their gunbelts and jackets from one of the desks and found a chair for me to sit in. Then one of the officers (and not the one with good English) began to fill out the paperwork. He asked me for my name (first asking me to say and spell it, then asking for my passport), my parents’ names (you’d think at age 42 that would be irrelevant, but apparently not here), my date of birth, my current address, etc. He stopped after every few words to chat with his friends, take a few more drags on his cigarette, and occasionally re-read what he’d written, mumbling aloud to himself. While he did that, a few of the men passed around my passport, leafing through the visas to see where I’d been.

After taking about 30 minutes to fill out one sheet of paper, he then handed another sheet to me for me to fill out—which included all the same information! I stifled my irritation, filled it out, and handed it to him. Then he compared what I’d written, what he’d written, and my passport.

Finally, after all the paperwork was done, he told me I’d have to come back the next morning at 8am to get my copy of the report. I headed back to the hotel, arriving around 11:30pm, and went to sleep.

This morning, Alex and I set back out for the police station (I was hoping that having a beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde boy along with me might speed things up a bit). I was directed this time to the 3rd floor, which was four flights up, where a sullen young woman told me that the report wasn’t ready, and that I should come back tomorrow. “I can’t,” I told her, “I’m leaving in two hours for the US.” She sighed heavily and told us to wait in the hallway. Twenty minutes and two trips up the stairs later, she had an official “copy” (hand-written, as you can see, not a photocopy) of the report for me, which cost me €0.45.

As I said to Alex, however, we’re pretty lucky to have had a trip where that was the worst thing that happened. Nobody got hurt, nothing irreplaceable was lost, and it didn’t cause any significant disruption. Our trip home was relatively easy and uneventful—the planes left on time, we made our connections, there were no nosebleeds or additional run-ins with pickpockets. We’re home now, and tomorrow I’ll start uploading the photos to Flickr. Stay tuned!

i suppose i should be flattered...

…that somebody cares enough to want to google bomb me!

Many thanks to Rob Page for (a) catching it, and (b) letting me know.

Update, Saturday 11/13
For those of you who are coming to the site after having received a comment on your blog with my URL in it, here’s an explanation.

I did not post the comments. They were generated by a kind of spamming software which is usually used to promote commercial web sites. In this case, the software is being put to use by someone (I don’t know who) that’s upset with either me or my writing, and is trying to accomplish two things. First, they want to associate my blog with the unpleasant descriptive term that’s being placed in the ‘name’ field on the comment, so that when people search for that term my site will be the first result. (That’s called “Googlebombing.”) Second, they want unsuspecting site owners to see the comments, assume I’m just another spammer, and add my site’s URL to their blacklist.

There’s not much I can do about it, except for enjoy the surge in traffic to my site, and hope that people will take the time to check out my site before reflexively blacklisting it.

democratic codependency

Okay, I’ve gotten the pettiness out of my system now, I hope.

The irony is that at the end of the day, my life probably won’t be significantly disrupted by the results of this election. But many of the “heartland” people who voted for Bush—they’re the ones whose children will die in the war, whose health care will be stripped away, whose jobs will be at risk. And the people most likely to be drafted into this war didn’t care enough to vote—youth turnout was no higher this year than it was four years ago, it seems.

Yes, I know that many people who didn’t vote for Bush—whether here or abroad—will be affected, as well. I’m not trivializing that. Just noting the irony that here in the US, Bush’s “base” is likely to suffer more than many of his detractors.

Viewed through the filter of my recovery process, it feels as though the democrats are the co-dependents in this country, and the republicans are the addicts. We keep thinking if we just tell them they’re doing the wrong thing that they’ll see the error of their ways and change their behavior. But they won’t—at least not through our sheer forces of will or displays of rationality.

Hand-wringing will get us nowhere. Lessig is right…we need to let it go, and move forward. We need to fix ourselves before we try to repair those we see as misguided. We need to understand how we encourage and enable what looks to us like insanity. (One of the things that people in Al-Anon come to realize is that they often end up looking far more insane than the addict in their lives.)

So, what happens next? Me, I’m taking a break from political thought for a couple of weeks. And then I need to think hard about how I become a force for positive change, rather than simply a shrill critic of what I see that’s wrong.

america, the beautiful

The people have spoken.

Four more years.

(Video of Bush giving what he terms on the tape as “the one-fingered victory salute” via David Weinberger; his sources say it’s from a taping of an Austin tv show late in Bush’s term as governor of Texas.)

a suburbanite responds

<vent>Having just returned from a several-day stay in smog-shrouded, traffic-clogged LA, I have to admit to a bit of irritation reading about Molly’s upcoming presentation at Design Engaged: “All Hail the Vast, Conforming Suburb of the Soul.”

I happen to be one of the “commuting parents in minivans” she’s referring to, and I find her somewhat condescending tone quite troubling. It’s not just Molly—I see the same thinly-veiled contempt in the comments of many urbanites. (I was equally put off by danah’s post on the “wal-mart nation” some time ago.)

I live in a suburb, own a minivan, and don’t fit many of the stereotypes that city-dwellers want to ascribe to me. I love cities, but I have two small kids and a single income. In the suburbs of a small city, I get the following advantges:

• Beautiful 1800sf four-bedroom colonial house with large yard, two-car garage, swimming pool, full basement, sidewalks for bicycles and excellent public school district—for a whopping $114,000 (8 years ago; it hasn’t appreciated by more than about $20K, I’d guess)
• Streets and sidewalks with limited traffic and alert neighbors, so my kids can ride bikes and explore nearby creeks
• Friendly neighbors who help each other out in crises, wave to each other while mowing lawns, and keep an eye on each other’s homes
• A six mile, ten-minute ‘commute’ to work, which means I spend more time with family
• A neighborhood school with a mix of socio-economic levels where the principal knows us all by name, and where most of the parents are actively involved

It’s also the case that interesting culture isn’t limited to major urban areas. Rochester has a wealth of good music and art—from an excellent philharmonic orchestra to the Eastman House.

Reading posts like these from women I generally respect and enjoy makes it easier for me to understand why those awful “Back to Vermont” ads from the Republican Coalition for Change were so appealing to people in the “red states.” It played right into the backlash that urban contempt for suburbia creates.

I’ll tell you what…you stop labeling me and my lifestyle as boring and homogenous, and I’ll refrain from labeling you as effete and out-of-touch, mmkay?</vent>

rain, rain, go away

I’m so very tired of the rain.

Rochester average rainfall for July is 2.83”. This month we’ve had 6.13”.

Total number of “cooling degree days” (the day’s average temperature minus 65ºF) for this month was 109; normal for the month is 202.

This is the most unpleasant summer I can remember having in Rochester. It’s been so wet, so cool, so gray. I’m getting seasonal affective disorder in July! That’s ridiculous.

I can’t believe I’m actually looking forward to a trip to Alabama in August. With our luck, though, we’ll get hit with a hurricane while we’re there.