Planet MichaelAndKrissy

Tim Ottinger: Danelectro Chicken Salad on its Way

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:52:45 +0000

Ordered a new effect, now just waiting for its delivery next week.

Signe

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:04:46 +0000

The Chunky Dunk was "rained out" due to thunder. We were in the pool for about 15-20 minutes before the life guards called it. (It's an outdoor pool.)

Went to Roxanne and Zach's for a little bit, and on our way home the thunder turned into lightning... all the strikes are really close. Just up the hill from us. Lots and lots of rolling thunder. It's awesome.

Helen - Abroad: Jerusalem, Israel

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:30:06 +0000

There is a distinct difference between faith and religion, a line that is often blurred in one's day to day life. Mostly people do not give lots of thought to the difference, or the meaning of the two...

Tim Ottinger: P90 Pickups and some Chicken Salad

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:42:45 +0000

Guitar gear salivation continues.

Helen - Abroad: Megiddo, Israel

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:07:42 +0000

Okay, so let me begin by saying, damn it is f***ing hot in Israel. Not that this is a surprise or anything, but I am just saying. Anytime my skin is in contact with anything it sticks to it, and as...

Signe

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:09:24 +0000

The Supreme Court released a momentous, historical decision today. They weighed in on the second (I said fourth - bad hands) amendment for the first time in over two hundred years, striking down the Washington DC law that prevented people from owning handguns, and required long guns to be kept either locked or completely disassembled.

Chicago is the only other city in the US that has a similar law, and it will surely be found unconstitutional in the wake of this decision.

For once they've actually done something that I can stand behind.

Tim Ottinger: Slow builds & copy operations

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:23:10 +0000

MS Build in 2005 and the amazing 8-minute non-build

JMullan: Happy Birthday, Noah

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:10:56 +0000

Noah is currently taking karate -- presumably so he can fight zombies hand to hand. The other day he made the following request:

Mom, can we drive through the cemetery? I want to see if there are any zombies.

For his birthday Lisa and Stan laid out some cash for a party at Pump It Up in Plymouth. Pump It Up is the bouncy castle headquarters, with two rooms full of inflatable jumpy time fun. They also had a party room with tiled walls and a drain in the floor. After the kids smeared cake and Cheez-its everywhere they just turned on the firehose to clean up.

H0bbel: Weezer Creep (Radiohead) Cover

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:42:06 +0000

Weezer cover Radiohead's Creep, live in Portland from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

Simply amazing!

JMullan: Doomtree at Grand Old Day

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:52:38 +0000

If you know me, you know that I love sweaty outdoor fairs, where mini donuts and cold beer flow like water. I went to Rock the Garden with Sarah, but that is not what this post is about -- no, this post is about me conning Paul into going to Grand Old Day with me to see Doomtree.

“About” implies not pictures but words, and yet I shall hold back on the words, since mostly it was just a sweaty mash of hip hop kids with the occasional old guy photographing the band. Oh, that was me! I was the old guy!

All I can say is that is was a great show. Plenty of great beats and rhymes and stuff. If you want to rifle through all of the pictures, they’re here:
http://gallery2.jpmullan.com/v/scans/2008/06/20080601_Doomtree_Grand_Old_Day/

Helen - Abroad: Jerusalem, Israel

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:37:19 +0000

A nice layer of dust has settled on my skin since the first day digging and I think it will stay there until well after I leave Israel. If I were to bottle this trip it would be a combination of dirt...

Tim Ottinger: P90 pickup, Humbucker form factor

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 05:06:41 +0000

Tim decides his p90 dream doesn't have to come with a new guitar wrapped around it.

Signe

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:58:11 +0000

Our XBox finally bit the big one. "Your XBox requires customer support" screen in like 10 languages.

H0bbel: Xbox death and replacement media center?

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:15:31 +0000

My Xbox has died. To be fair, it's not quite dead yet but it's clearly pining for the fjords. Last night greeted me with a Red Ring of Death, and an error message that seems to translate to "9 - kernel - HDD parameters (PIO/DMA/or size {debug}, certain size minimum is required for debug)". It also makes the classing "Your hard drive has died a horrible death" clicking sounds, so I think it's pretty fair to guess that the HDD has now turned into a brick whos metabolic processes are a matter of interest only to historians.

My immediate response was to try and replace the HDD myself, given that I have a few older ones I've kept lying around but it seems that the error persists. I'll try again tomorrow with another driver, but I doubt that it'll help. The Xbox behaves the exact way if I try to boot it without the hard drive as well.

I'm not all that worried that the Xbox itself seems to have ceased to be (although I'm pretty sure my son will strongly disagree). My worry is that I'm left without any kind of media center setup in my living room. My primary use of the Xbox was XBMC, playing media files over the local home network.

In the unlikely event that I get the Xbox working again, I'll continue to use it, but I think I need some kind of contingency plan. Ideally I would purchase a completely new HTPC setup and start from scratch with that, but given that I'm on a pretty strict budget here, purchasing new hardware is pretty much out of the question at this point.

So what should I do? I have access to a couple of decent IBM ThinkPad laptops I could use as a simple media center solution. But then the question is what software should I run on it? Windows? Linux? XBMC for Linux/Windows? LinuxMCE? MediaPortal? MythTV? Something completely different?

What I need is a solution that can play my media files over the network from the shared resources I have. XBMC has served me very well on the Xbox, so perhaps just running it on Windows would be the best option I have (besides getting the Xbox working again)?

All suggestions are welcome, both for resolving the Xbox issue or advice on what solution I should be looking for as a replacement media center.

Helen - Abroad: Megiddo, Israel

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:41:45 +0000

While hitting the snooze button for the fifth time this morning at 4 AM I came to the startling and slightly amusing realization that we are a lot like the 7 dwarves in Snow White here at Megiddo. We...

Tim Ottinger: Gas Price Components

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:25:05 +0000

A recent article took the research and drew a graph of the components of gas prices over time. I found it interesting. I hope you do too.

Tim Ottinger: cmd script for fitnesse

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:57:24 +0000

My fitnesse cmd script

JMullan: The Longest Day

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:39:48 +0000

It's 11:59 on Radio Free America; this is Uncle Sam, with music, and the truth until dawn. Right now I've got a few words for some of our brothers and sisters in the occupied zone: "the chair is against the wall, the chair is against the wall", "john has a long mustache, john has a long mustache". It's twelve o'clock, American, another day closer to victory. And for all of you out there, on, or behind the line, this is your song.

Things are going well, and I think that I am going to have beer with some friends. End of message.

Signe

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:41:35 +0000

This guy does some pretty amazing street-performance dancing.

Signe

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:33:15 +0000

http://www.cowstastegood.com/

Helen - Abroad: Megiddo, Israel

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:39:40 +0000

Two words: Longest day EVER...f*** thats three words. So, waking up at 4 in the morning is not as bad as it sounds when you are jet lagged, but thinking about tomorrow, when I am already tired from a...

JMullan: FLying Out To View My New Zombie Defense Wall

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:46:50 +0000

I got an email from Southwest Airlines confirming my flight from Denver to Las Vegas and back. Since I don't remember booking that flight, I changed it to get me from Minneapolis to Denver to check out the zombie wall that I had installed there. Okay, instead I looked up the phone number for the person whose email I had received, called them, and asked if I had gotten their email by mistake. Yes, I had. I then asked if they had recently gotten a new retaining wall. Sarah peed the bed laughing, especially since his answer was yes.

Helen - Abroad: Megiddo, Israel

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:54:42 +0000

Well, let me just tell you, Israel is a beautiful country. Aside from seeing guards with a couple of AKs there has not been much else to startle me. The people I have met so far are more than nice a...

Signe

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 03:38:01 +0000

I bought a charcoal chimney today to make grilling a bit quicker. I also bought some lump charcoal to use.

Let me tell you, that was a bad idea. Nothing bad happened, but the lump charcoal puts out so much sparkage that I was standing a couple feet from it with a large pitcher of water, ready to run for the fire extinguisher. That would be fine if we weren't on the second floor with a wood deck. I'll take the lump stuff with when we go camping, but other than that I'm going to stick to briquettes.

Helen - Abroad: Tel Aviv, Israel

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 02:10:20 +0000

Okay, so finally, after about 20 hours of traveling, I AM IN ISRAEL! It is absolutely amazing how much has happened in the past three days, though I imagine it is really only two. One thing I have to...

Helen - Abroad: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:19:50 +0000

Hello from the beautiful country of Holland. The ten hour lay over so far is going quite well as me and another girl who is going to Israel met up and decided to go out and explore the central city of...

Helen - Abroad: Boston, Massachusetts

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:43:14 +0000

So here it is...the beginning of my hopefully epic trip... I am in the Logan airport awaiting my plane to Amersterdam where all of the fun begins. As much as I wanted to pull my computer out and star...

Signe

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:28:39 +0000

Went to the store to get stamps and some chips for tonight's dinner. On the way home, ~10 blocks from home, the car in front of me swerved around a stopped car making a left turn (Two lane street, no turn lane). I was looking at mirror/over shoulder and when I re-focused I attempted to swerve around as well. From the word "attempted", you can gather that I failed. I nailed the right-most 6-8" of the car. Crushed their tail lights and did a bit of damage to the quarter-panel, but in general he wasn't damaged.

My car's fucked up good. Even though I was swerving right, the impact caught the tire and turned it 90° to the left. Snapped the axle right out of the engine. Dented the quarter-panel enough that I had to force the door open, broken light, etc. Low-enough speed that no airbags deployed or anything like that. I was alone in the car, he had three kids but they were just startled.

Joy for a $500 deductible that really strains our budget. Rental car is covered by insurance... pick that up tomorrow morning.

Signe

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 19:26:05 +0000

H0bbel: Sourceforge 2008 Community Choice Awards

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:09:16 +0000

Sourceforge has just opened their 2008 Community Choice Awards nomination process. I've nominated both of the Open Source projects I'm involved with, and I would love it if my kind readers would help out with the nomination process.

Gallery:

Nomination Category: Best Project

Habari:

Nomination Category: Best New Project
Go forth and nominate!

Tim Ottinger: Reverend Double Agent

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 03:29:48 +0000

How cool would it be for a church musician to have a guitar with the brand “Reverend”? I think it would be cool, especially if it has a P90 in the neck position and a nice fat humbucker in the bridge, like this: It’s a little crazy looking, because it has a kind [...]

Signe

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:32:22 +0000

Here's some absolutely awesome graffiti art to brighten your day.

Signe

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:58:15 +0000

I haven't really posted a whole lot since Noah was born. Things have obviously been busy, both with work, with the baby, and with spending our spare time with Jess before she left.

He's seven weeks old today. Until just a minute ago he had been laying on the couch in the livingroom watching TV/staring around the room, all the while making happy squeals, and I think I even got to see his first little giggle. Not a full fledged laugh, but one good "heh".

I'm really grateful that I have the job that I do and get to spend as much time at home as I do. I don't want to miss anything, and I'm well aware of how most dads lose out on a lot of "firsts" because they have to be at work. He makes us so happy, and so tired.

CINLUG: July 1, 2008 - General Meeting

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:59:53 +0000

Start: 2008-07-01 18:30

End: 2008-07-01 20:30

Timezone: UTC/GMT-4

Start: 2008-07-01 18:30

End: 2008-07-01 20:30

Timezone: UTC/GMT-4

**Note the date change! Due to unavailability of the meeting room on the normal meeting date, the July meeting is being held on the first Tuesday of July.**

Topic: Advanced Filesystems

Presenter: Tom Lapp

Location: Glendale Branch, IMCPL

Directions to the Glendale IMCPL Branch

CINLUG meetings are typically held on the first Wednesday of each month at 6:30pm. They are FREE and OPEN to the public. Annual membership dues are $30 and payment of dues is encouraged to help with funding events and expenses. Just show up and find out more to see if you want to become a member.

Helen - Abroad: Acton, Massachusetts

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 03:51:46 +0000

Well, well, well, it seems I have not gone anywhere... but I am bored out of my skull so I guess you could count me going upstairs to my room as a journey. Now, instead of just thinking about all the...

Tim Ottinger: What Im Doing

Sat, 31 May 2008 19:08:12 +0000

Time to catch up the casual observer

H0bbel: Bluetooth and Windows Server 2008

Fri, 30 May 2008 21:59:43 +0000

One of the things that my laptop was unable to do after installing Windows Server 2008 on it, was being able to get Bluetooth working. Several people have, in comments on my previous post, asked for a solution. Thankfully Gil Kirkpatrick has published a great howto explaining how to hack the Bluetooth stack drivers to get them installed and running on Windows Server 2008.

In his Installing the Microsoft Bluetooth Stack on Windows Server 2008 post, he gives a detailed explanation on how you should be able to make certain changes to several .inf files to enable their installation in a Windows Server 2008 environment. The trick is to to go through the various files, and basically replace the amd64...1 string in them with amd64...3 this making them installable on a server operating system.

I can vouch for the accuracy of his post, and method. I just spent 10 minutes going through the experience, and yes, I do now have a working Bluetooth stack on my ThinkPad T60 running Windows Server 2008.

Thanks a lot Gil, you made my day!

JMullan: San Francisco Saturday

Wed, 28 May 2008 00:19:17 +0000

It's been a while since my last post about my long-ago vacation with Sarah. It seems like it has been a whole month since I was happy and frolicking on the mean streets of SF. Let's examine our memories and take a trip back to those halcyon days of yore, when men were men, and women were also men, and -- wait -- no -- uh... We awoke on the Saturday of our vacation possessed of a ravenous hunger, to be satisfied only by a delightful hole in the wall taco joint not a block's walk from our hotel.

I should really make it a point to visit more taquerias here in Minneapolis. I think that we may have preferred this joint to the “Mexican” place we had visited a night or two before, where a karaoke machine fired up mid-meal and we were regaled by a variety of folks singing highly improbable hits from the 80s.

At one point in the day, Sarah took a nap with our Lo-Pan pillow.

This was the day that we visited SF MOMA, but seeing Lee Friedlander’s photos made it hard to take photos of our own. To add insult to injury, we also visited the Fraenkel Gallery, which had not only dozens of Friedlander’s works, but Diane Arbus, Garry Winograd, Nan Goldin, Richard Avedon, and a host of other photographers whose work I could barely afford if I devoted months and months of salary. Seeing their silver gelatin prints was humbling to say the least.

We did, however, stroll over to Chinatown, where we couldn’t resist photographing Mao and a huge wooden cock.

On the way back, we saw a really truly massage parlor.

We closed out the day by eating at a downtown restaurant.

The day ended with gentle sleep amidst Saturday night clamor in the alley several floors down outside our room. Sarah slept her usual dead-to-the-world slumber and I tossed restlessly, knowing that the next day would put a convertible into my itchy palms and spirit us away northward to highways that twisted along the coast and amid tumbling hills.

Helen - Abroad: Acton, Massachusetts

Tue, 27 May 2008 00:23:39 +0000

Okay, so I haven't really started yet, but I thought this journal should start where I start, and that is Acton, MA. Unfortunatly, there is no stock picture of it on this site, so that is why DC is di...

JMullan: Up and Atom

Mon, 26 May 2008 15:37:35 +0000

Thanks to the miracles of modern chemistry, my knee has gotten almost completely better: there is no constant, stabbing pain -- just soreness when I use it and a general weakness when I try to use it while carrying things. I'm throwing out my ibuprofen in favor of naproxen and acetaminophen. Hooray!

JMullan: New Frontiers in Swearing

Fri, 23 May 2008 23:38:58 +0000

At the advice of my mother, I called the nurse line. At the advice of the nurse line, I had Sarah take me to urgent care, where the ibuprofen wore off just in time for the doctor to torture me. I was flat on my back on the exam table with a white cloth draped over my special purpose.

“Does this hurt?” she asked while picking my leg up at the ankle.

“Yes! That hurts!”

This went on for some time.

“How about this?” she asked while folding my leg behind my head.

“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”

“It’s just tendonitis. You’re fine,” she said.

I sat up and shook on the table.

I’m finally home with naproxen and acetaminophen. For those people who worry about such things, I asked both the doctor and the pharmacist about their interactions and amounts. For those of you who would take joy in it, I’m still in a largish amount of pain.

I no longer feel like someone is prying my knee apart with a Buick.

JMullan: MF Grape

Fri, 23 May 2008 18:28:38 +0000

My knee is getting worse. Soon I will need a cane, then crutches, then a scamp, then Sarah will catheterize me and strap me into a wheelchair.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01UIB2X-WK0

Tim Ottinger: Please More Women! Guaranteed!

Fri, 23 May 2008 01:54:34 +0000

How to please more women in one week than ever before.

H0bbel: Are developers aliens?

Wed, 21 May 2008 06:55:54 +0000

Being directly involved with two open source projects, Gallery and Habari, I sometimes get to witness some rather esoteric problem solving. I would never call myself a great developer,
probably not a developer at all, but sometimes people present code that just leaves me wondering if some people come from other planets.

Most of the time this involves some rather heavy regexp trickery like the one below:

/(translate|i18n)\(\s*(((\s*\.\s*)?
('((\\')?[^']*)*[^\\]'|"((\\")?[^"]*)*[^\\]"))*)\s*\)/s

Thats from some kind of language related code in Gallery 2, at least it was in 2004 when the quote is from, that Alan Harder created an insane Regular Expression statement for.

I can't even begin to try and understand what it matches and I'm pretty sure my head would
explode if I did. For some reason regexp seems to constantly elude me.

My other example is more current and from the #habari irc channel. A recent code commit in the svn trunk caused this site to bail out with a sql related issue.
Thanks to Jay Pipes it was a fairly easy fix, involving some simple SQL statements:

CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE dup_slugs SELECT tag_slug, COUNT(*) 
FROM habari__tags GROUP BY tag_slug HAVING COUNT(*) > 1;
SET @row_count:= 1;

UPDATE habari__tags INNER JOIN dup_slugs ON habari__tags.tag_slug = 
dup_slugs.tag_slug SET habari__tags.tag_slug = CONCAT(habari__tags.tag_slug, 
(@row_count:= @row_count + 1));

I still can't read that properly, but it did indeed fix the problem I had with a recent change to the tags table in Habari resulting in duplicate tags. Or something similar.
My only conclusion is, good developers are in fact aliens. No doubt about it.

Signe

Tue, 20 May 2008 10:30:29 +0000

Fucking cat pissed on the fucking couch.

Signe

Tue, 20 May 2008 02:28:47 +0000

The CSI:Miami drinking game ... prepare to get completely gourded.

JMullan: Killa Kneez

Mon, 19 May 2008 11:06:07 +0000

I woke up this morning with the same sort of knee pain from two years ago. Then, I woke up in the middle of the night with the pain at a level of eight or nine on a one to ten scale. This morning I woke up with it at a two or three, but since arriving at work it has escalated to a glorious five or six.

Wu Tang, Wu Tang, Wu Tang.

Signe

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:59:14 +0000

Today is going to be miserable. Slated for 97 today. It's already 85, and the office is probably 90+ because of the computers. Going to have to close this room off, I think, even though it's going to make it even hotter.

Then I have to be downtown at 2pm to meet with some colo people.

Got our comcast business set up yesterday, after an hour or two on the phone with them. The IP they tried to assign me was already in use.

H0bbel: Private Social Bookmarking

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:37:31 +0000

Does private social bookmarking make any sense? I've been, albeit not a very active, user of del.icio.us for years but recently decided to use it to keep track of things that I should either read later, for work or even post something about later. This seems straight forward enough, if you just decide on a standard set of tags to use when tagging bookmarks. After all del.icio.us provides feeds based on tags, right?

The idea was to add a couple of feeds to my feedreader, one for each of my "magic" tags, to keep track of it all. So far so good, until I figured I wanted to keep these bookmarks private. Turns out, if I make a bookmark "not shared" it also doesn't show up in my feeds. I have no problem understanding why they don't show up, that would defeat the purpose of marking things as not shared, but why isn't there a way for me to authenticate with the site and get my feeds? If there is, I sure haven't been able to find a way to do it.

This prompted me to start looking around for a service that might provide me with the features I was looking for. I tried Ma.gnolia and Diigo, neither of which seem to make this possible. Am I missing something, or am I just trying to something thats beyond what social bookmark sites want to provide?

JMullan: I Am Feeling Fairly Smug

Wed, 14 May 2008 18:38:21 +0000

Today we had the sort of weather for which Minnesota is not famous: sunny, breezy and warm-yet-not-too-warm. I took advantage of it by slipping into my new stripy cardigan and strolling across campus to Onestop. On the way I saw university police officers rolling past on their bicycles and thought to myself that maybe I would just be arrested once I set foot in Frasier Hall.

I called my mom to arrange backup. I went so far as to tell her the room number in the building and where she could park. If I had to call in an airstrike I might be too upset to coordinate those details. She understood her assignment.

I had receipts and paperwork in my bag alongside my laptop so I could get on the internet in case of last minute research needs, but I entered Frasier Hall as though operating my body by remote control. I fell to my new visualization strategy: Ocean Beach, with the cold waves rolling up in endless succession. My mind’s eye wobbled and the whooshing seemed distant, but I could still feel the warm sun on my core.

“I’m here to see Randy,” I said to the first person whose attention I caught. The long counter was lightly staffed and no one was waiting. A few people sat filling out paperwork in random chairs, but they made no sound. I imagined which ones would hear raised voices if such an outcome were to arise. I remembered that I had all the correct paperwork and then pictured the deep blue of water thousands of miles from where my feet were walking.

“He’s in there,” the man replied, gesturing towards a cluster of high-walled, free-standing cubicles. The sign said “Veterans,” but I ignored that. Public servants (including myself) work wherever they are dumped. I entered the labyrinth, unwinding twine as I went, but it took only two turns before I encountered the Minotaur.

“MMMMmrmrrMRRRRRRGHHHGGGGHHHHHAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!” he bellowed, stamping his foot and tossing his horns. He gripped his halberd and narrowed his eyes.

“Hi, I’m here to see Randy,” I said. He recognized me immediately — probably from my photo on the University directory. We shook hands and he seated me across his slightly scrambled desk.

“If you want your money, you have to beat me in the game of my choice,” he said. He pulled an ancient chess set out of a drawer and began setting up strange pieces carved from ebony and ivory into the shapes of unspeakable monsters and demons. “We play for your VERY SOUL!

Actually, he told me that the paperwork that I had brought was not necessary, and that everything had been miraculously worked out without further intervention from me.

Wait.

What?

How did that happen? Suddenly, a week and a half later, they figure out that they can take care of me as though I were valuable. I would more readily believe the minotaur thing, except that I have new paperwork in my bag signing me up for more of something. Relief, I guess, and none too soon, because my final was only yesterday. Oh! It was yesterday. I think that I did all right, but again, it would have been nice to have had this whole aid thing settled last week.

“We’re all college graduates here,” said Randy at one point, which led me to believe that he was trying to defend himself and his coworkers from my blogged accusation that they are either incompetents or conspiring against me. If we take his word to overturn the former, I’m afraid that we are left with the latter, and I’d hate to think that of anyone. I’d rather assume that they failed to understand that when an error occurs that affects three students out of the student body, those three students deserve careful, specific attention. I asked about the other two students — apparently they’re both fine, so really it was just me.

As I was walked out, I told Randy that today he had exceeded my expectations. We already had a partial solution and plan of action (which we only came to on Tuesday, right before my final), but he tracked people down and found a different answer that should keep me out of danger altogether.

“Every day until today, you had not met my expectations,” I continued. “…but that’s water under the bridge now.”

I didn’t shake his hand when we parted. He finally did the job of his department.

What would I like to see in the future? If you are a front line staffer for Onestop and you just don’t know, please escalate the issue to someone who does know. If you encounter a question or problem that you haven’t seen before, check your work, either while performing it or afterwards. That first person would have said “that very late adjustment is quite unusual, and I do not know why they would be adjusting your Fall awards nine months after you received them — let me find the right people to answer your question, or maybe you should come in. Can you come in?”

The person with whom I discussed the penalties for late payment and when the deadline was for paying back the new amount of money, did not clearly explain the problem, saying that I would be “dropped from my classes” when the bill became overdue. She then gave me the wrong due date (June 4th), because that was the next billing cycle. I received a physical letter a day or two later saying that my account was already overdue and that I had to pay immediately or face unspoken consequences. The person who sent me that letter did not return my phone call (placed minutes after I received the letter).

If you’re going to demand my attention, I want yours, too, collections department. If you’re going to tell me that I can be dropped from my classes, you’d better be right, Onestop.

After that letter I was trying very hard not to panic, but I was a mess for days. At this point I was really despairing, and the nonchalant attitude of Onestop wasn’t helping. Sarcasm buffered my stress tolerance, but I was nearly shaking after talking to Randy the first time. I told him that it was an emergency and stressed that I was stressed.

I already berated him for not calling back sooner than he did, and I stand by that. It doesn’t matter if you can give accurate estimates or not — if you don’t have the information, give me a new estimate before the old one is past. That’s customer service.

Yes, everything is sorted out now, and for that I am grateful, but up to that point my case was consistently mishandled, and for that everyone associated should be ashamed of themselves. What I really want is an apology from a provost on paper.

“Dear Jesse Mullan,

We are deeply saddened that your account was mishandled and you received misinformation. Please accept our apologies. We value your attendance at the University of Minnesota and hope that you continue to do business with us.

Sincerely Yours,

Rubber Stamped Signature Person”

I would frame that and hang it over my toilet.

JMullan: These Teeth Are Clean

Wed, 14 May 2008 18:24:40 +0000

I left the dental office with another scheduled appointment in three months, another new toothbrush, more dental floss, and a second, specialized, supplementary toothbrush. "You have a very strong tongue," I was told. Whoa. "It's pushing your toothbrush so that you aren't brushing well enough on the insides of your lower teeth. I'm only telling you this to save you from future dental surgery." Good to know. Wait -- future dental surgery?

JMullan: Hey Onestop!

Wed, 14 May 2008 15:01:09 +0000

You know, I think the best way to prepare for a visit to Onestop is a visit to the dentist, which is what I just did. Now that I'm used to pain, it's time for a sojourn across campus. The Onestop people prepared by looking me up and visiting my personal website, which is the blog that you are reading right now.

JMullan: Rob Ruinits

Tue, 13 May 2008 20:32:22 +0000

This is not my drawing:

This is the pseudonym that I picked:

Here’s what my drawing would have looked like if they would have cropped it down:

It’s almost like I considered that they might need to tone it down and planned for it. Their drawing is not any worse than mine (and I think their Bob looks slightly better), but whoever made that call is an idiot.

JMullan: Maybe Helping U

Tue, 13 May 2008 10:07:56 +0000

Today is, I believe, Tuesday, which makes yesterday Monday. I was supposed to get a call from the guy in Onestop [Not] Helping You on Friday by noon, but somehow that translated into "I'm sorry that I didn't call back, but I wanted to make sure that I knew bla bla bla..." If a customer is already irate and you don't follow through by the time that you say you will -- even if just to say "no news, but you're my top priority," then obviously said customer is not your top priority. I called two extra times on Friday but didn't get him on the phone.

Yesterday (Monday), he did get back to me, so I asked him about factoring my laptop purchase into my “estimated need,” and he replied that I should be able to do it no problem, which is one hundred eighty degrees opposite from what was said to me one week prior by one of the people who report to him. This is why I asked for a manager. He still seemed to forget that the adjustment to my eligibility was performed nine months after money was put into my checking account, and also conveniently forgot or ignored me telling him that I had explained my full circumstances last fall.

“I want to borrow $x, and I have the Regent’s Scholarship. I am signed up for seven credits this fall and will probably take six or seven in the spring.”

Randy said that based on that information he “or anyone” should have been able to do the math for me and tell me for what amounts I should be eligible. This did not happen — I was told that everything was copacetic. Was I, and am I, dealing with straight up incompetents, or am I the victim of some sort of malicious intent?

We ended the call by trying to go over the entries in my student account for the last two semesters. The student view is horrifyingly terrible — some random mixture of double-entry accounting and checkbook-style balance keeping — and to make matters worse, his view of the account did not have the same entries as mine. Am I Buttle or Tuttle? Come on, get that straightened out so I can sleep at night. I have a final today. Shouldn’t that be what I’m focused on?

Anyway, back to work.

Tim Ottinger: New Pepper Cream Soup

Tue, 13 May 2008 03:50:33 +0000

The Cream of Jalapeno Soup recipe evolves toward simplicity.

Signe

Mon, 12 May 2008 21:48:29 +0000

So. I've been listening to a very old (1993 - audio tape) version of David Edding's Elenium trilogy on audiobook. I finished, and quite enjoyed, the entire trilogy. Next, it came time to start listening to the second trilogy in the series, the Tamuli.

I was quite anticipating it. That is, until I heard the person who is narrating. Oh-Em-Gee. This guy can't narrate his way out of a wet paper bag. His pronunciations are awful (the guy who did the Elenium had a few words that irritated me, but in general he was good), and he intones every single sentence as if it was the last one in the paragraph.

Some of you may consciously understand what I mean when I say that, and some may not. Reading aloud has a specific meter and intonation to it. It informs the audience more about the material being read than some people (obviously) understand. Commas have a sound. Periods have a sound. The space between paragraphs has a sound. This guy has no concept of what he's doing, and the fact that I plodded through 15+ minutes of this before giving up makes my head hurt.

I guess I have to go to the bookstore and pick up actual copies of the books.

JMullan: A New Retaining Wall

Sun, 11 May 2008 20:59:37 +0000

I received an email today:

Hey John I have attached the sketch, If there is anything else I can do let me know. Thank you, Clint

To the best of my knowledge, I'm not in the market for retaining walls for my apartment, but I replied anyway, in my characteristic style. I await his response with baited breath.

Clint,

There is no way that those walls will keep out zombies. They must be
much taller and thicker, AND you completely left out the footings for
the gun emplacements. I know that your contention was that heavy
cannons in fixed firing points were less flexible than lighter and
more mobile weapons, but I think you’re forgetting about the
landscaping work that I had done to funnel shambling hordes of zombies
into narrow fire zones.

Oops, you were looking for John Mullan. That’s not me. I was
expecting a quote from a contractor and got yours by mistake. Would
you like to submit a competing quote for the work that I am to have
done to my home to guard against zombie attacks?

Thank you for your consideration,

Jesse Mullan

Signe

Fri, 09 May 2008 19:14:05 +0000

Fucking A. We have reservations to go out to our expensive dinner tonight, and I've got a toothache.

Signe

Fri, 09 May 2008 19:07:50 +0000

It's a vagina, lady, not a clown car.. 18 kids. All with J-names.

MY GOD.

JMullan: Financial Updates

Thu, 08 May 2008 22:02:33 +0000

I got a letter from the University telling me that my student account is now past due. Past due accounts lead to being dropped from your classes. Can they drop me five days before my final?