christopher murray

I recently stayed at a Red Roof Inn up in Nashua, New Hampshire. My preference would have been to stay at the Radisson up the road, but because we were there only one night and coming in late and leaving very early, we decided to save the cash and go bare bones. We won’t do that again.

We had left my daughters with my brother and his family for the weekend but had brought with us a laptop so that we could Skype with them at night, say our prayers together and all that. We got to the room late and I immediately fired up the laptop because I knew they were waiting for us. No internet. I rebooted and tried again. No internet. I called the front desk after fiddling a while longer, and their suggestion was that I call Verizon. Well, it’s 9:30PM and my daughters are waiting; I’m not going to start talking with Verizon. We have to give up, and we eventually speak with the girls using the speaker on my cell. Very disappointing.

Done with the call, my wife goes in to use the restroom, which promptly overflows from the top of the tank when flushed. It does the same after I go in, and continues this throughout our stay.

So, early the next morning after cleaning up and leaving towels on the bathroom floor, we go and check out. The front desk guy asks how our stay was. I tell him I plan to stay elsewhere next time and tell him why. He wishes me a good day anyway.

I get a survey from Red Roof in my email this morning and decide to take the time to fill it out. It didn’t ask for my name or email, just my answers to questions. I was honest, explained what the issues were, and hit submit. End of story. I felt a little better about having had my little say.

But then this afternoon I get a very friendly and apologetic email from Ted, the manager of that franchise. He tells me he is concerned about my stay, assures me it is not the norm for them, and credits my account back the entire cost of our stay. I was pleased, obviously, about being comped, but I was mostly impressed that he bothered to find out who I was (again, no name or email on the survey) and that he would write back and then also to refund my rate.

I wrote Ted an email back thanking him for being a good person ahead of being an efficient manager. Because that’s all it takes to stand out above the crowd. And you don’t get too many opportunities to make things right once you’ve screwed them up.

This is big news (if you’re a geek like me). “Dropbox is the easiest way to store, sync, and, share files online. There’s no complicated interface to learn. Dropbox works seamlessly with your operating system and automatically makes sure your files are up-to-date. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.”

It really is that simple. Dropbox places a folder on your desktop. Anytime you drag another folder or file into the Dropbox folder it is instantly synchronized and available to your other machines running Dropbox. In addition, you can also right-click on any file or folder and create a private URL to that resource. Sending that URL to someone gives them instant access to that resource. In addition, and by default, if a folder contains images, they are displayed in a very cool gallery format.

Signing up for an account gives you 2GB storage. If you recommend friends and they sign up, you get additional free storage. Larger storage options are available for a reasonable fee.

I now have Dropbox running on my workstation, my Windows laptop, my Mac laptop, and now my iPhone. Brilliant.

This is going to be of interest to only a very small, select crowd.

Here’s the deal. I do all of my design and development work on my local PC. Once I have finished a piece of work, I upload it to a staging server where it can be reviewed by the client. Once the client approves of the new work, it is uploaded to the live, production server.

The problem is my local machine, which runs WinXP and Apache, is painfully slow. Not because the machine itself is slow (it’s souped up with lots of speed, CPU, and Memory), but something else. When I load a page locally, it seems to take forever; the same page on either of the external servers loads within seconds. I should note also that this slowness appears primarily on Firefox.

I’d been Googling for this for a while until I came across this (http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2007/06/17/fixing-firefox-slowness-with-localhost-on-vista.aspx):

It turns out that the slowness is caused by an IPv6 issue with DNS and can easily be resolved by turning IPv6 support off in Firefox while doing localhost testing.  To make the change, type about:config in the address bar, locate the network.dns.disableIPv6 setting and double-click on it to set it to true.  This does the trick for the Firefox localhost issue on Vista and everything is running fast again.

Kudos to the guy who figured this out. My pages load beautifully now. I went the extra step and disabled IPv6 on the whole machine.

Oy, when I read this I realize how truly geeky I am.

Enjoy!

Late last night, I got within three feet of a spraying skunk. Got between it and my little dog, who had trapped it up against a corner of the house. I kept yelling at the dog to come closer to me as I opened the door just a crack to try and pull her in, while not letting the skunk get any closer to me or her, or worse, into the house. Finally, the skunk backed off enough for me to reach out and grab the dog’s collar and drag her into the house. Luckily, neither of us was sprayed directly. But damn, I’ve never in my life smelled anything so foul. Sure you’ve smelled skunk and it’s bad, but from a couple feet away, it’s truly noxious.

Out in the hot tub with the girls, we hear a sound not unlike a dragon approaching from somewhere in the woods behind the house.  It comes closer and closer. All of the sudden we see this looming from behind the trees. Right up and directly over us.  The people on board were friendly, shouting and waving to us.

This is really sad. Pages Bookstore in Toronto is closing because of unmanageable rent increases. Here’s some more information about it: http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=170346

The story isn’t over. The owner and the landlord are working together to try and save the place (perhaps a relocation) and the owner is also hoping for a white horse to save the day. Keep your fingers crossed.

I used to tend bar and play in a club just down the street from here while living in Toronto years ago. It is truly one of the best bookstores ever. I have a lot of fond memories of Queen Street (East and West). Very hip and funky part of town: lots of clubs, record stores, clothes stores, cafes and restaurants, full of students. It would be fun to go back and visit and see what has changed since I was there last back in ’87.

Last night my oldest daughter, Mia, did what I think took a lot of courage. She got up in front of  about 100 people (parents, kids, grandparents) and sang the song Hey There Delilah. If you know the song, you know there’s lots of words that go by pretty fast and the melody itself requires a fairly wide vocal range. While slightly more timid than usual, she sang with her usual grace and sweetness. She is my favorite singer.

Mia is no stranger to the stage. This summer, she’ll be attending another season of her theater camp and will be performing in her tenth play. Last night was a less formal setting (part of a 70s themed  end-of-the-year celebration at her after school program), but she still brought her game. I’m very, very proud of her. It was such a delight to have parents tell me after the fact how wonderfully she sang and how brave she was to do it.

The glow of yesterday’s customer support triumph with Samsung has worn off. I sit here in the “business office” of my local Honda dealership awaiting the completion of my 2007 Odyssey Touring minivan’s 60,000-mile checkup. The cost for the basic service was going to be roughly $400.

But the attendant has just visited and informed me that I need new tires. My vehicle will not pass inspection because the tires are worn from poor alignment. But that’s just the beginning of the story.

This car has what are known as PAX tires. Some people know them as run-flat tires. Their claim is that even without air, these tires maintain their shape and their ability to be driven on for many miles. It’s the special frames that allow this. The vehicle also has an impressive monitoring system for these tires. As you might imagine, these tires are very expensive.

But here’s where the fun starts. There’s a class action suit against Honda and Michelin because of these tires. People buying cars with them have been misinformed about their life expectancy. The tires themselves, while excessively priced, are also very hard to replace because there are very few dealerships with the equipment to do so. I got a notice in the mail a few weeks back from a law firm in the Midwest offering me to join in the suit. I have to fill out some paperwork and send it back to them. I imagine, like most lawsuits, I may get fifty cents or so while the lawyers themselves take in millions.

So, my $400 service call now is $1300 (tires and parts, installation, rotation, balancing, blah blah blah). There’s no lawyer here helping me to bargain or talk the dealers down. I will likely have to do this again in 20,000 miles or so (not the advertised 35,000 miles).

I’ve been a very loyal customer of Honda cars for years. In fact, since the junky Subaru I drove after college, all my cars have been Hondas. But this is the end of the road. I’m done with them. I’ll need another car next year when my other Honda finally times out. But it’ll be something else. Something without proprietary equipment that hoses me for years to come.

I apologize for the screaming headline to this post, but I use all caps to emphasize the most amazing thing that happened to me.

I have three monitors on my computer. I do lots of design and testing on browsers, I write a lot, I work with imaging. So all this extra real estate works for me. I use all Samsung monitors because I have always loved their clarity, crispness, and reliability. The two to the sides are widescreen and the center one is more standard. They all are flat-screen at extremely high resolutions.

All this said, the center one has been giving me trouble lately. When booting up, it flashes on, then just as quickly goes black. By hitting the On/Off switch (or the Source button) repeatedly it eventually comes back to a working state. But this situation has degraded and it now takes many more times to get the thing working each day. I tried everything I could think of: installing new drivers, attaching new cables, checking and testing the graphics card. Nothing. So, I finally decide to call Samsung directly for advice (advice, because I’ve had the monitor for two years and my expectation is that that is about all I’ll get).

I call Samsung and within seconds am talking to a monitor expert. Right there, you got me excited. No long hold times, no uninformed “technician.” I describe my situation in detail, tell him all the solutions I tried. He then asks me, would I prefer a service call or an exchange? I am silent. I tell him I don’t understand the question. He repeats it. I say that, sure, I’d love an exchange. He takes down my address, phone number, and email. He then tells me that in about seven days a new monitor will arrive at the UPS store just a mile or so from here. Bring my old monitor there, they will give me the new monitor, repack the old one, and ship it back. Free.

Let that roll around in your head for a moment. Two year-old monitor, exchanged and replaced for free. Within in days. Transaction complete within five minutes. I don’t know, if you’ve had a better customer support experience, I’d like to hear it. You only hear the horror stories about flight check crews and mobile phone vendors. I don’t care what happens over the next 14 hours, I’m having a damn good day.

Oh, and Sprint, Overstock.com, ATI, Charter, First Data: Please call Samsung and beg them to let you know how they do it.

Update: Monitor arrived yesterday, but couldn’t pick it up until today. That’s three days from when Samsung promised to send it. It is a newer model and the picture is remarkably crisp and clear, definitely an upgrade.