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July 2002 Archives

July 7, 2002

Honest people.

  • This Saturday, after gassing up at the gas station and going through the car wash, we headed to the Roots Outlet store about 15 minutes away. Within the first few minutes of shopping at Roots, my cell phone rang, and someone asked if I'd lost something. It wasn't until then that I actually remembered that back at the gas station I'd left my wallet, and Palm on top of the car. So it had fallen off, and someone else had found it. About 20 minutes later, when I met up with the family who'd found it, nothing was missing. They'd found my name in my wallet, and then looked it up in my Palm to get my cell phone number. As my dad said, "It's good to know that there are still honest people in the world".
  • I've come to the realization that housing prices in Richmond Hill/York Region must be among the highest around. A 1500+ square foot house easily sells for > $300,000 here. It's interesting to see that in "New Homes" magazine, they classify the area from Newmarket to central Toronto "central", with Richmond Hill being right in the middle.
  • The housing market is obviously a seller's market at the moment too, since while visiting most sales offices, the sales staff don't even bother to get up from their seats when prospective buyers walk through the front door. That, coupled with the fact that a 2000 square foot house lists for ~$330,000 and most sales offices have less than 5 units unsold.
  • I hear you can buy some pretty fancy trailers these days!

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on July 7, 2002 9:47 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    What's with customer service these days?

  • So the other day we're in Baskin Robbins. Three people are working, two younger girls and an older guy. There are three entrances to the store, and about 15 people in the store already. While standing in front of the cash, waiting to get served, more than a few people have to ask if and where the line for the cash starts. One worker at the store gestures that the line up starts at one end of the store, and goes away from the cash register... But as she finishes saying that, the other girl who works at the store asks who she can help next, looking at the next person at the cash register. When she finally gets to us, and we start placing our order, someone else rudely buds in, and she spends the next five minutes helping him.
  • Then she looks back at us and asks if we've been served yet.
  • At this point, Kelly and I were both so pissed off, that we decided we'd just leave. But prior to doing that, I decided I'd speak my mind. So I told the girl that she should take some initiative, put together a couple of signs, and instruct customers where to form a line. I said it was ridiculous, as it was the second time in three weeks that we've been in there, and the same thing has happened. So after asking for her name, the young man that worked in the store asked if I wanted his name too, as he laughed. As we left the store, he was still laughing. I turned around and said that it wasn't funny, and he insisted that he thought it was hilarious.
  • To add insult to injury, after calling and speaking to the store owner the next morning, she insisted that good help is too difficult to find, and that they don't do any business in the winter, and the summer is just too busy. The staff are young, can't properly speak english, and she asked me what they could about the line up problems in the store.
  • Common sense obviously isn't required to run a business these days, so I'm seriously contemplating what it is that allows people to be successful enough to be able to afford $400,000 homes in this area.
  • This afternoon, I called Rogers. I wanted to ask about the ticket I'd opened about a month ago about poor latency to my first hop. The first person I spoke to asked me to check my network settings, reconfigure my network card, and TCP/IP settings, and restart my computer. In his defence, his script probably told him to ask me those questions. So I hung up when he asked me to hold on.
  • After calling back again, I spoke to Eric. I asked Eric to check on the status of my ticket, which he started to do, and then asked me what the problem was. So I explained to him that I was experiencing terrible latency. He proceeded to lecture me on how 100ms to my gateway is "really good" and I shouldn't complain if it's under 800ms. He told me that since I'm getting about 80-100kB/s that I'm doing well. Then I asked again, what the status of my ticket was. He told me that the network team has checked the equipment at this end, and verified that everything looks fine. I asked to speak to his supervisor. He laughed. I asked again.
  • It seems now, that Rogers Technical Support supervisors are so busy, that first tier support has to actually act as a proxy for the customer. Eric came back a few minutes later from hold and told me that he'd spoken to his supervisor, and they were going to schedule someone to come out and swap my cable modem for a new DOCSIS compliant one that should fix my latency problems, and throttle my speeds down to Rogers Lite speeds (which they haven't been able to enforce for some reason with our older modem). I asked if it "should" fix my problem, or "will" fix my problem. He said everything's a "should". Boy, old Ted probably likes to hear that one. I wonder if Rogers management makes decisions based on hard fast "should"'s.
  • After scheduling an appointment to have our modem swapped next weekend, I asked to speak to Eric's supervisor again. He asked if I still wanted to speak to his supervisor at this point in the conversation, because the supervisors are very busy, and don't generally have time to speak to customers.
  • Kevin, his supervisor appeared on the line a few minutes later, and asked what he could do for me. After asking what his position was, and asking why first-tier tech support feels that they know more than anyone who calls in, he assured me that the DOCSIS compliant modem will solve my latency issues. He is 100% sure that the new modem will solve my latency problems.
  • I'm not holding my breath. Any money that next weekend, sometime between 8AM and 11AM on Saturday, a Rogers tech will show up at our place, swap our modem, and not only will we experience properly capped (and much slower speeds), but also the same latency issues as before.

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on July 7, 2002 10:13 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    July 10, 2002

    LPI certification press.

  • I spoke to Gary Hilson at Computing Canada a few weeks ago about my thoughts on LPI certification, and my perceived thoughts about Linux certification in general. Although I haven't seen the printed article, I did come across the article he wrote on the topic online.
  • It's always interesting to read things you said without the original context they were said in. :)

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on July 10, 2002 10:18 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    July 20, 2002

    Rogers, DOCSIS and better latency.

  • It has been almost a week, and I'm very impressed with the quality of service we're getting via the Rogers network. Since they replaced our old Motorola CyberSurfer modem last week with a new DOCSIS compliant Ericsson PipeRider, our latency and speeds have been much better.
  • These weekly and monthly graphs show the difference between the old and new modems. The graphs show latencies to our Rogers gateway, web server in Ottawa, and www.shore.net. Latency to our gateway has dropped from over 150+ ms average, to under 15 ms. That's a huge difference. After tonight, latency to our web server in Ottawa is also down substantially due to network maintenance on IStop.com's end.

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on July 20, 2002 1:07 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    Open source upgrade day.

  • Spent the better part of the day today upgrading production software.
  • I finally got around to upgrading Geeklog to 1.3.5sr2 which closes a few security holes. Waited so long that I missed the boat on 1.3.5sr1 which also fixed some holes. Functionally, there's not much difference.
  • Upgraded Gallery to 1.3, which adds some new features, including viewing all comments, slideshows, and a few other goodies.
  • Horde, IMP and Turba all got upgraded as part of the move to a release version of webmail, rather than RC3. There's not much difference there either, except that the configuration files all changed, just to make life difficult.
  • BIND was updated to close a denial-of-service hole, and I also added proper DNS firewalling rules, and configured BIND to use both processors, rather than one. Soon I'm going to have to bite the bullet and set djbdns up, like I've got here. I'm getting sick of upgrading software to fix security holes. :)
  • Upgraded mod_ssl to 2.8.10 to fix the off-by-one error that was reported a while back.
  • During the process, I also managed to reorganize and cleanup my web tree so that it's much more manageable now.

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on July 20, 2002 7:13 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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    About July 2002

    This page contains all entries posted to adrian's home in July 2002. They are listed from oldest to newest.

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