Thursday, July 9th, 2009
This is one of my favorite views on the Mountain. It’s taken from just below the West Point Inn. Today, on my run, there was no fog and the ocean was in view. Often it is foggy, with billowing fog at sea level. I’m not sure which view I prefer. I guess both.
It is very hard to get a good picture of a redwood tree and capture its true majesty. This one doesn’t do the trick, but it gives you some understanding of how huge, and straight, they are. Oh yeah, and that arch is fire damage that must have been caused many, many years ago. This was taken on my run this evening on the Railroad Grade trail. It was a good run. Very relaxing, and well, hard too. Life is good.
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
Warning: This is a grumpy post. Don’t read it.
Okay, time for some whining. Three things:
1. Moving my blog to WordPress seems like a good idea. There are a lot of features available, and the interface is reasonably good. And with some effort, you can even customize your website “look and feel”, as the professionals say, without learning too much actual coding. This is good.
What is not so good, is that it is still software. And software is another word for bugs. Now, the particular bug I have been fighting this last week may be in an added feature (known as a plugin in WordPress terms), or it may be WordPress. Either way, it’s been a pain.
A couple of weeks ago I added a photo gallery to my site using Flickr Gallery. This plugin allows me to directly import thumbnails and a slide show of my Flickr photos. This is nice because it means that I can post photos on Flickr and they show up in my gallery here too. This plugin worked well until sometime in the past week. A new version of the plugin was issued, and my old version died — and the website bogged down too.
I updated the Flickr Gallery plugin to the latest version, but it still didn’t work. I updated the connection information to Flickr, and it still didn’t work — and my website was still bogged down. I disabled all the gallery stuff and it was fixed, but of course I didn’t have a gallery any more.
Today, I searched around for a solution. No problems were mentioned on the web that I could find. The author’s Flickr Gallery seemed to be working. I decided to try again. It works. The bug is back under the rug. I hope it is fixed and not just hiding.
2. My coffee roaster, the I-Roast 2, went on the blink last week. The unit started shutting down before finishing the roast. Then my beans would sit there and crackle and burn. Fortunately I heard the roaster shut down early and checked on it, so there was no fire. Still, not good; and it only got worse, taking multiple efforts to finish the batch.
I have had my unit for six months, and it has a one-year warranty. I called their customer service line on July 3 to find out what to do. Their system put me in the wait queue and then hung up on me. I emailed them with my problem, and they still have not responded. In my book, that is pretty poor service.
I called them again yesterday, and got through to a person. She took down my information and said they would send me a new power base to replace mine. Okay, that is good service. All I had to do was send them my proof of purchase information and pay for the shipping of the base. Once I had faxed that information over, they would call me to get shipping payment information and send out the base.
I couldn’t find my receipt so I emailed Sweet Maria’s (where I bought the unit) and asked them if they could send me a copy. They emailed the POP within 30 minutes. Now THAT is good service — and very consistent with their typical performance.
I faxed the information to Hearthware at 11:03 a.m. yesterday. No call back the rest of the day; so given their poor performance so far, I called them on the phone this morning. No record of my fax or call was available to the person I talked to on the phone. She put me on hold and walked around the office trying to find the person that had handled my call. No takers. She passed me off to someone named Holly.
As Holly took my call, someone handed her the faxed POP. So her comment was “Oh, here, we just received the information!” Er, what? “Oh, I mean the person who took your call yesterday is not here today. Someone else just handed me the fax. Now, tell me again what is wrong?” Anyway, we went through all that, I gave them my credit card information and the say I will receive my power base in 10-15 days. I guess we will see. I’m going to put a note on my calendar to call them in 10 days to confirm it has shipped, though they say they will send me an email when it does. Somehow I’m not very confident in them.
3. We have hired a web designer/creative director to update our shift work website. He had some good ideas and communicated well enough to convince us that he could do the work. The plan is to use WordPress (as I mentioned some time ago) and themes in the new site. All good, and he said we would be up and running by early July.
To me, early July is over. Since we hired this creative director, I have moved this blog to WordPress, tried four different themes, highly modified the theme I am using, and created (now) 14 posts. What do we have at Shiftwork Solutions? A header, some poorly designed buttons/menus, and not much else. Oh boy, what a pain.
Hey, we’re not paying this guy $20 an hour to do this work. We are talking thousands of dollars, and I’m starting to think I could have done better over a weekend. I hope I’m wrong and just being grumpy.
Okay, the grumpy warning is over…
