I suspect I know 50 or so passwords of the truly random variety (I usually shoot for 8 – 10 characters across 3 classes). But, if you asked me for one of those passwords over the phone or in person I would be completely unable to remember beyond the first 2-3 characters without a keyboard to type on. With a full size keyboard in front of me I can effortlessly type out all of those passwords I have stored away. Sometimes if I concentrate and fake-type on a table or wall I can remember but not always especially when a large number of non-alphanumeric characters are involved.

Similarly with my iPhone SSH client (I use pTerm and it works pretty well) I have to setup keys otherwise I am unable to connect to anything as I cannot remember passwords using the 2-finger/thumb keyboards found on phones.

Pretty random post I know but was thinking about this lately. If other people work this way I would appreciate finding out otherwise it seems there is something strange happening on my end.

Georgia Tech was coming in with a new coach, a new system, and new (mostly) players. Polls had GT ranked as one of the worst teams in the country and some said they would only win 2 – 3 games.

The Falcons had a bunch of new players, a new coach (thanks to Bobby Petrino being a true douchebag), and no Vick. Many thought losing Vick was a bad thing. I personally was delighted and always viewed him as a poison on the franchise. He was always a thug and disrespected his team and his fans. Even with the benefit of getting rid of Vick the other factors made it look like a tough year for the Falcons.

Fast forward to today. GT should have been in the ACC championship game, beat FSU (broke a 12 game losing streak that started in 1992), beat UGA (broke a 7 game losing streak that started my sophomore year at Tech), is going to the Chick-fil-a Bowl, and is on track for 10 wins (and a 3-0 record against the SEC in 2008). Paul Johnson is a beast of a coach that talks straight, stays tough and aggressive, and knows how to win football games.

The Falcons for the first time since I can remember feel like a solid team that is well coached and has a foundation on which they can win games. No more quarterbacks made out of glass or thugs that sometimes have good games when not flipping off fans and killing animals. The Falcons are a good football team, headed to the playoffs, and I believe without a doubt going to snap the whole “never had consecutive winning seasons” statistic that hangs over the franchise.

Definitely a tangent, but just wanted to take a moment to reflect on the utterly pleasant surprise this past football season has been. Being a Tech graduate and fan living in Atlanta is a really nice combination for attending home games and if you aren’t a ticket holder now this would probably be a decent time to jump on board.

This week I have been a pretty surprised person as I have received exceptional service twice from two different companies.

CostaRicaProducts.com
I ordered some Shade Grown Organic Coffee from here after tasting it by chance during a company excursion a few weeks back. I am no coffee connoisseur by any stretch but this coffee is fantastic. It is incredibly smooth, almost no bitterness, and has a really nice after taste. In any case, I ordered it from this random website because they had better prices and lower shipping fees than the coffee grower’s own website.

A week after ordering the coffee (ordered it for the office) it had not shown up. I fired off a message to the support email that was easily found on the site and received a timely, friendly response from a real person that immediately said the order should not have taken so long and sent me another bag of coffee with faster shipping no questions asked. They even took the time to tell me a bit about how they do things, some new product they would be getting in from Costa Rica the following week, and wished me well. WTF is that all about? I expected an automated “please allow more time for the order to be received” or some such. I will be buying more coffee from here.

Shure
I use Shure earbuds at work. I wear them all day and they are awesome. A year or two ago Tejus and Hamed convinced me to buy them despite them being a bit pricey.

Recently the cords of the earbuds had started splitting up near the ear ends. It was a kind of spiraling separation that started as a tiny hole and grew to about a half inch total length wrapping around the cords. Given that these things just sit on my desk and are never moved or traveled with this seemed unusual even after 2ish years of heavy use. Once I got a mild pop from them when the exposed wiring hit my ear.

I went to the Shure website and filed a support question, not expecting much, just wondering if I could get them repaired somehow. The first response seemed like an automatic thing and said my question was being forwarded to the “VP of Quality Assurance.” I immediately thought “yeah right” and forgot about it. But, a few days later they actually called me, talked to me about the issue, and then offered to send me a brand new pair of the newer version. They also covered the shipping for me to send my pair with the tear in them back.

I was already a walking advertisement for Shure because the earbuds sound excellent and passively block almost all noise. They obviously stand behind their stuff given the above and whenever I do buy a new pair they will most certainly be Shure brand.

Conclusion

In both of the above cases I felt I had legitimate reasons to request assistance, the responses were just pleasantly unusual. It makes me wonder what my company is like to deal with as a customer. We essentially have two layers of customers – the organizations we sell the service to and their end users that interact with it and we support both layers. I feel that given our limited resources we do a pretty good job, in some cases hurting our overall efficiency a bit to take wide detours to service custom requests and address corner cases, but I wonder if we could do it better. It feels a little different given that both of the above involved physical product while our offering is all software but I am sure there are things we could do to both provide better service and be more efficient about it.

First, we had to provide our used license key. After several failed inputs with nothing useful in the validation error message, we figured out that both the case and the dashes mattered in the alphanumeric string. This is awfully stupid, they could have at least adjusted it in Javascript (writing key.replace(“-”,”").toLowerCase() is HARD).

Secondly, the interface was pretty rough and the site appeared to be running on a used toaster. Constant refreshing and retrying was required to get all page elements to load and all form posts to go through.

Finally, when the order is done, and you can’t undo it, you are told that a key will be sent in 2 business days. How in the world could it possibly take 2 business days to email a string of text? Dell can build and ship a 3U disk array in about the same time. It didn’t matter because at this point it was too late, I couldn’t undo the order, and I was about to leave for a weekend bachelor beach trip so I just didn’t care. This was on Thursday.

Monday rolls around, no key, so I send a message along the lines of:

I am curious as to the hold up on my order.

The order number is ABCXYZ4712 and the order was placed on the morning of last Thursday. When I login to check the status it says “Issue with Order” but does not tell me what the issue is or how to resolve it. I also was never sent any message letting me know there was an issue with the order.

Does it really take this long to purchase a string of alphanumeric characters?

An auto response arrives letting me know they will respond within 1 full business day. The next day, no sign of a key or a response to my email so I send another along the lines of:

It has been a business day and I have heard nothing. My order is still marked as “Issue with order” and still does not tell me what the issue is. I am beginning to believe no one is even on the other end of this process. Is a human reading these e-mails or taking these orders?

To restate what I sent about already, the order number is ABCXYZ4712. It is a vista license. There is nothing to ship, and I expected the order to take minutes. I placed the order on Thursday of last week and have not received or heard a thing.

I received another auto response letting me know it would be a full business day before they got back to me. As of now I haven’t received a key or a response to either e-mail.

Damn this is frustrating, I don’t even know how to cancel the order. That link just refers you to the same unmanned email account.

I’ll have to dispute the charge on the card tomorrow and be done with it. It is just disappointing that a potentially very helpful and clean process (being able to seamlessly purchase and use more activations when you run out) is such an utter disaster.

The pronunciation was actually on the 6-pack packaging, and the wikipedia page pronunciation backs it up. In short the “Hoe” portion is pronounced as “Who”.

In any case, the one thing I hate about Dell is every damn time you use support they follow up a week or so later with a phone call and email both asking you to complete different surveys. I don’t want to get a call every time a hard drive fails and needs replaced or every time a server power supply fails. These are relatively common, harmless events. Just ship or bring me the part depending on the warranty terms and leave it at that. The phone version of the survey is at least an english-speaking, generally pleasant person but they use that call-ahead garbage where you have to wait for them to take the call after they have called you and if you ignore them or hang up they will call back every day. My responses are rapidly growing more venomous.

• August 15 – India celebrates 50 years of independence from British rule.
• August 20 – Souhane massacre in Algeria; over 60 people killed, 15 kidnapped.
• August 25 – Egon Krenz, the former East German leader, is convicted of a shoot-to-kill Berlin Wall policy.
• August 26 – Beni-Ali massacre in Algeria; 60-100 people killed.
• August 26 – The Independent International Commission on Decommissioning is set up in Northern Ireland, as part of the peace process.
• August 29 – Rais massacre in Algeria; over 98 (and possibly up to 400) people killed.
• August 29 – Christopher Maier of Lexington, Kentucky is bludgeoned to death by serial killer Angel Maturino Resendiz. Angel also rapes and beats Christopher’s girlfriend, who survives. This is the first of a string of murders that Angel commits.
• September 3 – Arizona Governor Fife Symington is convicted for various crimes tied to his real estate business, effectively forcing him out of office.
• September 4 – In Lorain, Ohio, the last Ford Thunderbird for three years rolls off the assembly line.
• September 5 – Beni-Messous massacre in Algeria; over 87 killed.
• September 5 – The IOC picks Athens, Greece to be the host city for the 2004 Summer Olympics.
• September 5 – Mother Theresa of Calcutta dies of heart failure in Kolkata, India.
• September 6 – A Jean Michel Jarre Oxygene in Moscow concert, celebrating the city’s 850th anniversary, draws 3.5 million people.
• September 7 – First test flight of the F-22 Raptor.

My policy over the past week, and apparently today as well, is to remove any news source that runs more than 1 story about this event from RSS and/or iGoogle (which is a pretty lame name by the way).

I am using https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ for the host and would highly recommend them for hosting a wordpress blog. It only took about 30 minutes to get everything installed, active, and imported.

A real post about Zenoss Core should be showing up real soon. It is a pretty fantastic tool I recently setup to monitor our servers and devices and I want to share the experience and offer some tips and tricks.

One consistently true fact of trying different beers is that Belgian beers truly are a cut above the rest. I don’t know that I have ever tried a Belgian beer that I wouldn’t place in my top 20% of beers I enjoy most.

That said, here are a list of some Belgian brews that I enjoy enormously and that are easy to find in the US. In Atlanta all of these can be found at liquor stores and even at the grocery stores in the city.

• Chimay – all varieties
• Gulden Draak (favorite on this list, not in grocery stores but can find it at liquor stores)
• Hoegaarden
• Leffe Blonde
• Stella Artois
• Three Philosophers (technically brewed in the US but is really fantastic)

Costco sometimes sells a Belgian beer 18 pack with Hoegaarden, Leffe Blonde, and Stella. Check out this site for more information about specific breweries and styles. I am especially fond of the Abbey / Trappist ales both for the taste and for the coolness of the history behind them. Here is the brewery that produces Three Philosophers.

I once worked very briefly (couple dozen hours) on the website 80beers.com. Though it isn’t perfect, it does have some pretty extensive beer listings and might be worth browsing through. It would have been a neat site to help with for a more substantial period of time but my full-time job really started to heat up and I ended all existing contract work as quickly as my contracts permitted. The only work I was really able to do was development of an administration panel.

EDIT: I made my first trip to The Brick Store Pub last week. If you live in the Atlanta area you owe it to yourself to visit this fantastic place. Their Belgian beer list will put any other establishment to shame and they serve everything correctly.