The Bank of America chat help line is in fact, incredibly helpful. They managed to transfer my chat window between two departments without losing me, and then they answered my questions patiently and solved my problem.
The survey I was given at the end made me laugh though. What kind of meaningful suggestion fits in this tiny space?
[See update at bottom for Enterprise Rent-A-Car's response.]
Be warned.
If you ever have to return a car to Enterprise Rent-A-Car "at the JFK airport", here's a few things to note:
Consider the fact that when I trekked my way in Pakistan to the Afghan border and went to the black market arms bazaar, I actually found that place on Google Earth afterwards. Stunning that a rental car facility in one of the most populated cities in the US could be this hard to locate, yes?
I just got off the phone with the New York City regional manager for Enterprise. I had sent the link to the PR people and he said he wanted to respond. He apologized about the incident. He said they haven't been able to get signage up at the airport, but have been asking for over a year, and may be close, but that didn't help me and he understood that.
He also said that he agreed, Jamaica's laid out pretty tough for a non-native. He specifically said he wasn't happy with the way I wasn't given clear instructions and would work on changing that. He offered to do whatever it took to make me happy with the experience.
Except for the AC, I was pretty happy with the car, and said I thought that dropping the $175 one way dropoff fee was fair, since that was the part that really made my life difficult. I suspect he thought I would ask for the entire thing for free, but frankly, I don't think that's equitable.
He seemed concerned that I wouldn't ever rent from Enterprise again. I frankly don't think that way. Having been there once, on the rare chance I had to rent a one way from Newark NJ to JFK, I know now exactly where to go, and would do it again. Enterprise doesn't have a brand problem, or a company values problem, they just have a facility findability problem.
Unless I don't get a chargeback, I think everyone should be pretty happy with the outcome.
Yay for Enterprise customer service!
About one minute ago, I turned 42 on Facebook. Not really, I use a "fake birthday" with all online services, since many parts of the financial world use your birthday as an identifier, but my birthday is in May, so close enough. Thank you.
I wrote a long post about how the world has turned to shit and how it's actually also great at the same time, but I won't bore you with it. I deleted it. Instead, on my birthday, I have a request for you. Please do the following things:
And finally, if you just have to give me a gift, I would request that you give a little money to the nursing scholarship in the name of my stepmother, Linda Anderson. If there were any proof in the world that love in fact exists, it's the way in which my stepfather Darryl and my stepmother Linda loved a giant passel of children, over their lifetime, that didn't come from their bloodstream.
To this day, my son identifies with my stepfather Darryl as "Grandpa Darryl", because of his and my stepmother's love and kindness. He has actual relatives, but with small children, you do get A's for effort. Linda made sure I didn't die or go to jail in my last years of high school, and when she met Darryl, taught me what love meant. Darryl taught me what a gentleman is, and how to treat a lady. After years of watching my male role models sleep around on their wives, I distinctly remember the day I saw Darryl hold a door open and then a chair out for my stepmother, and it opened my eyes.
I miss my mom, and I treasure Darryl and think of him several times a week.
Honor me on this day by loving someone close to you.
Have a good day and thank you for your attention.
Traditional journalism has a business model problem. As these institutions die in some form, so does the style of reporting that we have long lauded as "journalism" and what fills it does not even approach fair or balance reporting.
There's no sense wringing your hands over it, it's done.
But maybe it's good in the long run. Wildly slanted journalism is more effective when its snuck into a media ecology where the reader has been trained to expect that publishers are attempting to balance their coverage. When they don't, they fool their readers. The result of so many generations of well-done investigative journalism attempting to eliminate bias in coverage is several generations of Americans that aren't media savvy.
They don't understand that "balance" doesn't mean interviewing the white supremicist to "get the other point of view". They don't understand that every person interviewed has an agenda, and that what they say has to be taken in that context.
Maybe future generations will be more media savvy as a result of learning to trust no type of media.
I joined this meme over on Facebook by posting this list, and thought it was worth repeating it here.
FEBRUARY 5, 2009 (SAN FRANCISCO) - Last week saw the arrival of Rivaleah Linda Imber Safdar. Born in her parents' bed with mother, father, brother, two midwives and three friends in attendance, she has brought her family great joy.
At 7 pounds 4 ounces delivered in a posterior position, her mother was heard to say, "Ow, that hurt a lot more than the first one." Her brother was unavailable for comment. Sources placed him onsite playing with a Lego crane, a present from his new sister.
Rivaleah's father was heard to say, "Of course sweetie, daddy will buy you a car."
More information about midwife Nancy Myrick is available on Yelp.
God knows I'm a complete punter when it comes to building anything in my workshop, but I'm even worse at growing things, so when there's work to be done on the house or in the yard, I'm the guy that uses the power tool to build things or (intentionally) kill things. Given that our yard is in a state of flux right now (and by "flux" I mean "a muddy mess") I'm mostly involved in the building infrastructure phase.
I've built a compost bin, about 4 foot square, which was quite a trick since I'm mostly dangerous to myself with power tools, and slightly dangerous to wood with them. I also built Sarah some raised beds for Sarah's tiny industrial farm out back. She's growing spinach, kale, broccoli, enormous leeks, peas, and garlic right now. Our haul is pretty impressive, and since she's also an incredibly good cook, any effort I put into helping her with her garden is paid back tenfold.
So she described to me a tiny greenhouse like box called a "cold frame" that she would use to protect seedlings from the elements while they were sprouting. The cold frame is key to growing plants from seed, and she said you can save a lot of money by just buying the seeds and starting them. She added a couple of caveats for my hack construction of the box:
I thought about this for a while and stumbled across some Lexan at Home Depot. I chose the thick Lexan. Though it adds to the overall weight of the box, it will provide maximum insulation from the cold with minimal loss of incoming light.
To build the cold frame, I started with some long redwood square pieces cut roughly 2 feet long. They're eight feet long, and 1 3/4 inches square. I used redwood for the coldframe because it will weather well outside without needing to be treated. I made a square, cutting precisely by measuring twice and cutting once with a mitre box saw. I find that when I need precision, like I needed on the cold frame, cutting with the mitre box saw eliminates most of the errors I usually induce just using my hand saw. When you're making something where the edges have to be square, getting it right by 1/8th of an inch is a requirement.
I build the square frame top and the bottom with L-brackets on the inside edges. Then I cut four 7 inch pieces and used them for the supports in between, making the cold frame 2 feet by 2 feet by 10.5 inches.
Having previously obtained the Lexan for the side and top windows of the coldframe, I cut it to size using my Dremel with a diamond cutting wheel. When you use the Dremel to cut something like this, you have to be careful and wear safety glasses. The speed of the Dremel generates heat, which melts the plastic as it cuts. The result is flying bits of molten plastic, and let me tell you, it's not good to get that in your eye. Even with lab glasses on and my own glasses underneath, I still felt somethiing get in through the air vents. It wasn't until I managed to learn the trick of running the Dremel away from me as I cut, instead of towards me, that I stopped getting a face full of molten polycarbonate.
So once you have these cut you need to attach them to the sides of the cold frame. I used, wait for it.... L BRACKETS! Seriously, I'm a one technique sort of guy. It wasn't difficult and I used longer than normal screws to put them through the Lexan all the way into the wood. If I'd done a little more research I might have chosen to use deck screws that won't rust, since the cold frame will be sitting outdoors most of the time. Live and learn.
The top was a little more challenging. I had some hinges chosen, but I worried that if I attached them to the Lexan it would just cause the Lexan to break, so I had to come up with something else. I ended up building a wood frame for the top, using non-redwood 1"x1 3/4" pine. Since I didn't have redwood laying around, I went ahead and primed it, which was a project Moishe helped with. Nothing like a painting project to thrill a three year old.
After making 45 degree cuts on the edges and assembling it with L BRACKETS (hahaha) I just attached
the Lexan to the top with screws and washers. I hinged the top to the frame and added a couple of handles to the sides and voila, I was done.
You can see the cold frame in the attached Flickr set the cold frame from a couple of different angles. If you're going to attempt this yourself, you'll need the following materials for the cold frame:
The tools for building your cold frame (and I recommend for your workshop):
My first day in the office of the new year is also the day I hung up my favorite art: a woodblock print of turbulent sea. It's very much in the tradition of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai. In fact, it may be by Hokusai [Amazon link to book of his work], but I can't read Japanese, so I don't know the artist's identity.
The ocean as a metaphor for change is nothing new. I would be pompous blogger to even waste your time expanding upon the world's volume of literature that does it better (and worse) than I would. This print, a gift from Sarah, has hung in every office I've worked in for almost 8 years now. Personally it embodies the way I approach technology. Nothing is fixed, it's constantly changing. You cannot become attached, as the change happens to you whether you are ready to change technology or not. Your only choice is how you prepare or react to it.
It's a good attitude for Texas Hold'em poker as well. You can start out with the best hand but subsequent cards could improve others and not you. Your attachment to your previously best hand will end up costing you greatly if you choose to remain committed to it.
2009 will be lots of change: new baby, new skills, and possibly a new job for Sarah if she finds something that fits well. Here's to steady sailing.
Eight years ago today I spoke these words in front of a few friends and family in St. Louis.
Happy anniversary Sarah, you are the woman of my dreams.
As we watched the tragedy in Mumbai unfold through the Web (web tv coverage from India was better than CNN or MSNBC on cable), the horror of it all really sank in.
When the first accounts came out that guests at the Taj hotel were being herded into rooms, locked in and then ignored, I said, "How odd, why would you take hostages and then not pay attention to them? Why wouldn't you make any demands?"
Sarah said "They're going to blow the hotel up. That's why they don't care about the hostages. They're going to kill them in the explosion."
Turns out she was right.
"Mercifully, the group, armed with plastic explosives, underestimated the strength of the
105-year-old building’s solid foundations."
David Carr: The Night of the Gun
A journalist investigates himself, and discovers that even our most powerful and intense memories cannot be trusted.
