My big ol' head.

The Indiana Jones School of Management

Tue 31 Jan 2006

links for 2006-02-01

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 22:38

Life on the Road

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 07:34

Bankrate.com has an interesting piece about living on the road full-time, and this kind of thing tempts me pretty often. I like driving, and I actually like driving RVs. [Driving my parents' old Winnebago in the midst of 30+ mph winds through the Mississippi Delta several years ago was more like "tacking a sailboat" than "driving", but ... hey, it was fun, and my parents slept through it.]

If I suddenly won the lottery, I would buy a swank Class A and be gone, baby, gone before you’d be able to blink. Hell yeah.

Mon 30 Jan 2006

links for 2006-01-31

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 22:35

Ad Astra Per Aspera

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 20:04

NASA Supporters Fear Bush May Cut Space Plan (Washington Post): Just disheartening. This country does so much better when we spend taxpayer dollars wisely in pursuit of manned spaceflight—the direct and indirect economic benefits are great.

“Without risk, there’s no discovery, there’s no new knowledge, there’s no bold adventure. The greatest risk is to take no risk.”

– June Scobee Rodgers, wife of Dick Scobee, commander of STS 51-L, commenting on the 20th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.

Geof’s New Music: 29 Jan-4 Feb 2006

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 11:25

Well, after arguing with myself and giving in to temptation, I broke down and started listening to Sufjan Stevens’s Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State last week. I’m going to keep listening to it again this week, because it deserves that. As such, this’ll be a light week for new music:

Looking back to last week’s chock-full-of-Elliott Smith bootleg fun:

Misty accused me last Tuesday of listening to mellow music. Well, I don’t know that Elliott is all that mellow; I guess it sounds that way, but under the surface, there’s lots and lots of pain there. It just speaks to me for some reason—even though I’ve never battled some of the demons he talks about at all. I hate that I never came across his stuff—other than the bits on the Good Will Hunting soundtrack—until after his death.

Knology Customer Service Sucks

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 09:15

Scroll back one week to me, at my desk, preparing for a week that was soon to kick my ass …

[Cell phone rings.]

“This is Geof.”

“Hi, is this Goffrey Morris?”

“It’s Geoffrey, but … yes. With whom am I speaking?”

“This is [mindless CSR] from Knology. You had an install scheduled today, and the technician is at your house, but you’re not home.”

“I had no such thing scheduled.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, ma’am, I assure you that I did not. I recently downgraded my digital cable service back to extended basic. I’ve already taken the receivers into the office.”

“Well, Mr. Morris, the technician needs to install a high-pass filter on your connection. Is there anyone at home who can authorize the technician to enter, or can you go to your home to let him in?”

“No.”

[pause]

“Ma’am, this is horrible customer service.”

“Did you say, ‘horrible customer service’?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did. Now, it’s not your fault that your people can’t communicate, but I was told nothing about this, either when I made the original phone call to downgrade service or when I took the units back in to the local office. You’d think that if this was so all-fired important, someone would have told me in one of those two interactions—especially when I ended both of them asking if there was anything else to do.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Morris. Can I reschedule sometime later this week?”

“No, ma’am. My week is absolutely full, and honestly, you’re wasting my time right now.”

“Will next Monday morning work? We’ll have the technician out first thing.”

“That will be fine.”

I started writing this at 0900 with the intention of leaving as soon as I’d finished and dealing with the inevitable phone call later. Clearly, having the technician come out first thing didn’t really happen. In fact, I saw a Knology truck go by my house at 0812 and got a false hope. Ended up that this wasn’t my technician; the guy I had was competent, quick, and pleasant.

But here’s what really pisses me off: there was no need for the technician to even enter my house. The guy hadn’t even so much as rung my doorbell when I noticed that his truck was blocking my driveway; I went outside, and he was already swapping out the filters. What did they have me stay home for almost two hours of my workday this morning [it'll be close to 1000 by the time I get to the office]? To sign my name to the work order.

That’s it.

Suffice it to say that I’m done putting off installing the DSL modem [I've already paid for this month's service on the cable modem, and I've got a discount coming on the return of the cable boxes for that service, so I could keep the cable modem for over another month without charges]. It goes up tonight.

Fuck Knology.

Sun 29 Jan 2006

links for 2006-01-30

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 22:26

Long Line of Taskmakers

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 15:28
Tagged with:

I meant to write about when I passed 2500 tasks entered into Alex King’s Tasks, but I missed it. Similarly, I missed my opportunity to write about #5000—sometime about 10 days ago. But as I come to lean on Tasks more and more every day—and really, it’s indispensable for me at this point—I’ve gotta note that task #10000, entered sometime last night, was the parent for the tasks necessary for me to import Long Line of Leavers, my favorite Caedmon’s Call album, onto my Mac. There’s nice synergy there: favorite software platform, favorite album, favorite machine.

I imagine that I’ll be to 20,000 tasks created by the end of February at this rate.

Sat 28 Jan 2006

links for 2006-01-29

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 22:23

Challenger: Twenty Years Ago Right … Now

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 11:39

Godspeed, Challenger. Hard to believe that it’s been 20 years. Challenger is the reason I work in the space program today. That might be a story that you want to read, but … I don’t want to tell it today. Today, I just want to remember.

Scobee.
Smith.
Resnik.
Onizuka.
McNair.
Jarvis.
McAuliffe.

Fri 27 Jan 2006

links for 2006-01-28

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 22:26

Thu 26 Jan 2006

links for 2006-01-27

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 22:31

Why Are There No Good FOAF Tools?

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 14:40

After reading Tim Berners-Lee’s exortation to generate a FOAF profile so as to give myself a URI, I bit the bullet. This is something that I’ve meant to do for a while, and I needed an excuse to do it. [Given that I'm waiting on returned phone calls and am tied to my desk, I have the time this afternoon.] Then I ran into the fun of actually generating FOAF.

Why does the FOAF-toolspace suck? The best thing I’ve found is FOAF-a-matic, and it still stinks on ice. “Page describing what you do at work”? The fuck, sir? [I eventually figured out that they wanted a page on the site relating to my group at work. Still ... sucky!]

GMPG, you made XFN rock. One of your lead proponents rolled XFN generation right into his baby’s toolset. Y’all are smart, competent geeks who undoubtedly understand FOAF and creation of RDF. Why hasn’t one of you released a tool for this? [I know that you're interested in doing things in XMDP, but still ...]

If not y’all, then … save us, Mark Pilgrim! You’re our only hope!

[Histrionics aside: Yours truly, in RDF.]

Closing Loops

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 13:46

In an email from my friend Jeff Cotten: “It seems like I run into all sorts of people in this city that are somehow connected to you.” He’d gone to lunch with Rick and had no idea that we knew each other at all. :chuckle:

Somewhere, Stephen is slowly nodding [or maybe shaking] his head. Imagine if I took to heart Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone : And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time … I really might end up knowing everyone around here.

I think the funniest instance of this in the last six month, though, was when our choir performed “Indescribable”, which was written by Laura Story. Upon first look at the music—yes, I’m a choir nerd; I read the writers and arrangers before I start singing a piece—I said, “Huh. I know people who know her.” And I do.

Wed 25 Jan 2006

links for 2006-01-26

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 22:25

Reply and Forward

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 12:12

I use Thunderbird as a mail client at the office for my personal email—mainly because it’s free; I hate all email clients—and I just noticed that v1.5 shows a unique icon: if you have both forwarded and replied to an individual email, the icon has both a left-pointing green arrow for a reply and a right-pointing purple arrow for a forward. Every other mail client I’ve used—and I’ve used Outlook, Netscape, Eudora, Mulberry, Thunderbird, and Mail.app—overwrites the message icon with whatever the last action was, which is not good.

Awesome: knowledgeable metadata in one simple icon. Kudos.

Being a Part of the Conversation

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 11:59

Let me point all FeedLounge users, lovers, and haters to this: Alex King’s del.icio.us log of FeedLounge mentions. When Alex first announced that he was doing this, I was curious to see where it would go: I’m telling you now that I’m very happy with it.

Let’s examine some reasonable motivations for doing this:

  1. Finding FL praise. This has got to help you at 2245 when you know you’ve still got bugs to quash and energy to do it. I get the feeling that Alex and Scott do what they do because they love it even more than they love getting paid for it; knowing that people love the products of their work has to stoke their fires to do an even better job. [Pause for a moment and consider being married to either of these two. What wonderful women they must be to put up with their husband's slavish devotions to their creative work.]
  2. Finding FL criticism and bugs. Constructive criticism is good, and sometimes, it comes with bug reports. Sometimes, it’s design criticism that maybe they should address [and sometimes I address it for them if I know the answer]. Not everyone wants to file bug reports on a forum, either [although you can see on the update log that they quash bugs ruthlessly and also log it publicly, which I also think is awesome]. What I really love is that neither one of them seems eager or willing to jump on the hand grenades of the critics, and that FL lovers like me aren’t doing so, either. That said, linking to them is good—you want to present a full face of your product, and doing that means that you want to highlight the faults [even if people are misinformed or wrong].
  3. Increasing the ambient findability of FL users. I think that FL users are, in some way, looking for a community; with a willful choice of using PunBB, I don’t think Alex and Scott want a community to develop in their forums—and being focused is fine and great, and I support that!—but I think FL afficianados can use this to slowly find each other, much in the same way that Mac users do.

I wasn’t sure that I’d be all gushy about Alex’s log at first, but I really am enjoying it a lot. Thanks, buddy.

Getting Over the Hump

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 10:38

I really would like to know why Wednesdays have been bringing me skull-crushing sinus headaches for me this month. At least today’s version isn’t accompanied by a migraine. Little comfort, though…

Tue 24 Jan 2006

links for 2006-01-25

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 22:32

Conquest, Norman?

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 18:30

I love that room A1066 at work is a war room.