December 2008 Archives

As Christmas approaches, we've had a steady feed of packages arriving at the hacienda. This is normal around this time of year; with Mom, Tim, us, and Julie all in different states there's a fair amount of interstate commerce goin' on. This afternoon, though, I was surprised to find a large white box outside my door.

The return address said "Seattle Fish Co." That was my first clue. The second clue was the overpowering odor of fish that filled the kitchen when I opened the inner styrofoam cooler. Wrapped in paper was a plastic bag containing (wait for it)… a whole fish, head included. I immediately moved it out to the garage (which is cold enough, luckily, to store fish), then called the sender to figure out where this fish came from.

"Hi. Someone sent me a whole fish," I said. "I think it's a salmon."

"Well, we don't ship whole salmon," said the lady on the other end. "Does it have a head?"

"Yes, it does, with an eye and everything."

"Oh, that makes sense then. Someone just called me about this-- there was a shipping mistake. You got a rock cod."

After a bit of research, they called me back. A business associate had ordered some smoked salmon to be sent to us. Somehow, this order was transmuted into an order for a whole rock cod, which they promptly shipped. We thus received a fresh, yet unexpected, Christmas surprise. The good news: I'm going to take it to the market tomorrow and have it filleted and cleaned, then we can have some Boxing Day cod fillets. (Better news: the salmon is on the way and will arrive on New Years' Eve!)

From Peter Shankman's HARO newsletter:

So, the General Post Office at 34th St. and 8th Avenue is the one that gets all the letters addressed to "Santa - North Pole, Earth" every year. Well, did you know you can go and pick up as many as you want? I did! Meagan's job this morning was to go to Toys R Us and buy a "Baby Alive," a "My Little Pony," a giant Teddy Bear, Play-Doh, Batman Indoor RC Racers, a Remote Control Helicopter, and right now, she's struggling to figure out how to wrap all this stuff when NASA is constantly jumping in the wrapping. It's a pretty decent feeling today here at HARO Central.

This is a great idea-- I wonder if there's a Toledo (or Seattle?) equivalent. Kudos to Peter for thinking of it!

Update: looks like the USPS has stopped Operation Santa for the time being. That stinks.

Congratulations to my brother Tim on the publication of his first book work: the Linux chapter in Next Generation SSH2 Implementation. Devin has a chapter in there too-- it's like old home week. (Personal to our sister: it's your turn now!)

StackSafe just sent me a request; they're doing a survey of Exchange administrators (hosted by SurveyMonkey). The first 50 respondents get a Starbucks' gift card, and they'll draw someone at random to win an iPod Touch. It's not a sales survey, and they've promised not to spam anyone. They've also promised to make the survey data available to me, and I'll post it here once I get it. Take the survey here if you're interested.

So, I've had U-Verse for all of five days so far. Herewith a few first impressions after having used it a bit.

First, my installer gets an A+++++. He did a great job of setting everything up, putting wires where I wanted them, and cleaning up after himself. I am very well pleased with how the install went; I don't know if he's typical of AT&T's field installer force but if he is that bodes well for them.

Second, Internet speed has generally been excellent, with speeds far closer to the rated limit. As an example, I got a measured 9.3Mbps the other day, which is pretty darn good. Jitter has overall been low, but I am still having occasional burps on my Mitel phone (haven't tested the Tanjay yet). I had some difficulties getting all 3 of my wireless access points to work together; I ended up turning off two of them, because AT&T's box integrates 802.11g and has enough range to cover the entire first floor. Problem solved.

TV: channel selection is OK. We don't get the Toledo CW affiliate, or any other, nor do we get the digital subchannels for local broadcasters, both of which I miss. I'm glad to get BYU-TV again, and there are a few HD channels like Smithsonian that Buckeye doesn't have. U-Verse HD picture quality is fair-to-good; I'd say it's on a par with DirecTV but not as good (at least for the local channels) as Buckeye. I like getting STARZ and the other low-end movie channels as part of the bundle, but they only have about five different movies between them.

DVR: this is kind of a sore point with me right now. U-Verse touts its "Total Home DVR", which puts a single disk-based DVR in one room and satellite units that can stream video from the "real" DVR in others. Great idea, and perfect for our house. There are some drawbacks, though. The satellite units cannot pause live TV, nor can they schedule recordings. That's one strike. The second strike is that, for some reason, the unit in our bedroom keeps telling us that there are no DVRs on the network, so we can't watch anything. (An AT&T tech is on his way over right now to see if he can fix it, though.) So, I'll call that a foul ball… strike two. This morning, after rebooting both DVR units to try to fix that problem, all of the recorded programs were gone. That's definitely a strike. (Arlene told me that the programs actually disappeared sometime yesterday, because they were already gone at 1630 when she and the boys tried to watch something.)

As long as I'm talking about the DVR functionality: I miss wishlists and suggestions, neither of which the U-Verse boxes implement. Search-by-name works well, and seems quite a bit faster than the TiVo. Series recording works well, as evidenced by the episodes of stuff I recorded before they got wiped out.

Interactive features: AT&T touts their U-Bar interface, which puts your TV picture in a frame that displays weather, sports, or other information. Unfortunately, all we get for weather is the name of our city, the forecast high/low for the next 24 hours, and a little weather icon-- that's it. This is pretty useless, especially compared to getting "weather on the 8s" with the local Weather Channel broadcast on Buckeye. Local weather is an oft-requested feature on the U-Verse support forums so maybe we'll get it some day.

Miscellaneous grace notes: the TiVo allows you to see what happened to each show that was recorded or removed, which would have come in very handy in tracing where all my programs went.

My installer just left after verifying that the interior cable run is OK. We'll see if things improve, but for now it's back to the Alabama-Georgia game.

This one's for you, Jim. Air & Space has a great article on ground resonance in helicopters. Basically, if you get the blade system to vibrate at just the right frequency, the helicopter tears itself apart. A couple of related videos: here's one of a US Army Chinook from the rear, and another from the side.

Suppose you want to buy an additional license for your existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online subscription. This sounds like it should be easy, and it is-- once you know the trick.

Don't make the mistake of thinking you can just do a web search for "buy dynamics CRM license". That way lies madness, not to mention a big steaming pile of fail.

In related news, don't think that because the Microsoft Online Services page says you can buy a Dynamics CRM Online subscription there that you can buy licenses for an existing subscription. You can't.

You might think that the sales chat window that opens on several of the Dynamics CRM pages would help. The sales chat person suggested calling 877-276-2464, option 2. I did, and the phone rang and rang and rang without answering for about 90 seconds. Tom then answered and gave me the magic solution, which I include here so you won't have to go through this same process:

1. Log in to your existing CRM page.
2. Click "Settings" in the lower-left corner of the page.
3. Click "Organization Notifications and Status".
4. In the right-hand section of that page, click "Buy Licenses".

Now for a brief editorial: this is a great case of an application that makes it needlessly hard to do something simple. Why not have a "buy licenses" link on the page where you add new users? Does "Organization Notifications and Status" sound like the solution to "I want to add a license"? Not to me it doesn't. This is an area where the Business Productivity Online team at MS has far outdone the Dynamics crew. I sure hope that as these two services are unified that the BPO approach and design win out.

I've been having frustrating problems with my Buckeye Express Internet service. Overall, Buckeye has done a good job. Their service has been pretty reliable (except that outages often kill phone and Internet service at the same time), and I like buying from a locally-owned company. Unfortunately, the Internet connection's quality has been pretty variable. I'm supposed to get 12Mbps down and 1 Mbps down; in practice, I rarely see more than 7Mbps down and about 900Kbps up. The bigger problem is illustrated here:

Notice that one peak around the 5000ms mark-- that's where something is inserting arbitrary TCP pauses. These pauses don't follow any pattern that I can tell, but they wreak havoc both on my Mitel 5340/Teleworker and my Communicator Phone Experience devices. Every time one of these pauses hits, I get a noise on my phone like someone dropping 5lbs of lead shot into a galvanized trash can; it happens often enough to render that connection unusable.

The upstream jitter graph shows a similarly sad tale. It's bad enough that I have 142ms of jitter, but it's worse that it's so variable. Most VoIP systems can compensate for jitter, but only if it remains predictable.

I called Buckeye to come out and fix it, but I don't think the problem is something that can be resolved with a truck roll (although my local pedestal is out of spec, so they're fixing it.) When AT&T announced that they were coming to Toledo, I eagerly hit their web site to find out if they offer service in Perrysburg… and they do. Their offering doesn't yet include voice, but they have 10Mbps down/1.5Mbps up Internet service and a really slick-looking DVR setup that provides centralized DVR service for the whole house. I got in touch with Amanda Harris, the general manager for U-Verse in Ohio, and asked her some questions about the service; I'll blog more about her answers later.

Perhaps more importantly, they offer free installation and a money-back service guarantee, so I scheduled them for an install. The installer came by this morning, did a quick walkthrough of the house to see what connections need to go where, and is now hooking our signal up at the VDSL pedestal. By day's end, I should be in a position to do a back-to-back shootout of U-Verse vs Buckeye on the Internet front.

On the TV front, things are a little more complicated. The living room TiVo HD won't work with U-Verse, so we'll have to mothball it for the time being. However, the bedroom doesn't have a DVR at all, so it will gain one. U-Verse in Ohio supports two simultaneous HD streams, so you can record two HD programs and watch up to 5 different HD or SD programs on 5 different TVs (not that we'll ever have that many). We'll also get some channels, like BYU-TV, that we don't now get-- at the cost of the familiar and easy-to-use TiVo interface. We'll have to see how that plays off.

I'd write more, but the AT&T truck just pulled up again...