Jeremey's Weblog

I Still Haven't Found...

Wow. We went to the U2 concert Wednesday night, and they did not disappoint. This is a band I've loved for more than 20 years, who have continued to produce new music throughout that time, and who have deeply impacted the world, far beyond music. I last saw them live 17 years ago, and seeing them again felt like seeing history. When they were finally done, after a surprisingly long (and wonderful) set, they walked off, together, on the long public walkway off the stage, not via the hidden walk underneath it, taking their time to enjoy and respect the fans.

The show was fantastic. I thought the sound was quite good, especially given the venue (Reliant Stadium), and of course, the stage was amazing and ridiculous and incredibly fun to watch.

The stage, before the show (shot with Pano on the iPhone):

The high point for me came fairly early in the show, when they played "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". It's a beautiful song, and the crowd was singing, and the sound was perfect, but there was something more; it was one of those moments infused with truth and history and beauty and community and love and worship.

I think my second favorite moment was "With Or Without You", near the end of the show. The lighting was incredible and the song sounded SO good. It's such a simple song in many ways, and Edge's guitar was just beautiful.

The articulated cylinder of LED screens was pretty amazing, and I would have loved to have seen those spotlights from outside the stadium:

They made good use of the stage an interacted with fans in 360 degrees. Here's Edge playing at the "back" of the stage:

It was all pretty awesome.

Technorati Tags:
houston, u2, concert

Software Development Meme (8 Months Late)

@BrentO posted this over 8 months ago, and I just now saw it, while googling myself in the hopes of finding one of my old resumes laying around on the Internet!

Anyway, here goes... this is a very deep topic for me, so bear with me. :)

How old were you when you first started programming?

I think my first programming experience was in grade school, on TRS-80 machines ("trash-80s"), in BASIC. This was a mischievous child's dream, because although most people could bang out the programs the teacher wrote on the board, almost none of them knew what to do when their screen filled with the same lines of text over and over, ad infinitum. DoS (Denial of Service) at its best! (10 PRINT "YOUR MOMMA WEARS COMBAT BOOTS". 20 GOTO 10.) I vaguely recall building some incredibly simple game at the time, but it's been so long I may be making it up.

How did you get started in programming?

Not long after starting high school, our family got our first personal computer, a Leading Edge 8088 machine. It was awesome with its 640K of RAM. All we'll ever need, right Bill? :) Not long after, I produced a DOS manual for my parents, explaining the intricacies of things like "dir". Probably a year later (sophomore year?) I tried to teach myself Pascal. I had started working at a bicycle shop, so I had a little money, and I bought the Borland Pascal compiler which must have come with some introductory book, or something.

In any case, Pascal was a disaster. It was a very frustrating experience, mostly because the language felt so artificially limited. I did manage to program a little space game on our 4-color CGA display that would go into hyperspace and shoot laser beams, but I got tired of Pascal and let the whole thing sit dormant.

But, in the beginning of my senior year of high school, my mom began taking an intensive career-retraining course at DePaul University. It was a 9-ish month program designed to launch your career in IT software development (COBOL, JCL, etc.). I didn't pay much attention until she began taking a C programming class, got stuck, and asked me for help.

Let me tell you, to a born hacker not yet aware of his calling, who had only worked in BASIC and Pascal, programming in C was like injecting some kind of super-drug. THIS was freedom, this was power, this was programming. Pointers were what I'd been looking for. Raw, type-unsafe power, baby.

What was your first language?

Although I dabbled in BASIC and Pascal, I consider C my first language. It's the one I really learned, the one that clicked, the one that I didn't need to read books about or study. I just got it.

What was the first real program you wrote?

I would probably say the Oberon compiler I wrote in college was my first real program (I was taking Compiler Design). It was limited, and only worked on a subset of the language, but it was real. And it really compiled code. The assignment was to target a virtual machine platform with your basic operations, but my friend and I decided to target the real SPARC processor instead. This actually turned out to be fortuitous because the SPARC architecture included overlapping register windows, so I was able to implement all of the required functionality (we had to be able to compile a certain set of algorithms) without implementing a stack.

Very few things make you feel more like master of the universe than writing your own compiler and having it actually generate machine code for a real machine.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Yikes. This is a long list, but here goes, in rough order of appearance:

• C
• C++
• ML
• SQL
• Visual Basic
• COBOL
• shell (bourne and c)
• lex and yacc
• Tcl
• HTML
• Lisp
• Python
• Java
• Javascript
• Perl
• PHP
• CSS
• Haskell
• Ruby
• Objective-C
• Smalltalk
• Erlang

What was your first professional programming gig?

In college I began working for some friends who formed a consulting company. They were working on a couple contracts with a pharmaceutical company and a bank. This was where I had the unfortunate experience of being subjected to Visual Basic. There was also some C work, but all of it was tedium. I quit not too long after joining, ostensibly to start my own company with another friend, doing more interesting stuff.

The first gig I enjoyed, and stayed at, was with a tiny startup in Silicon Valley. My professor at DePaul recommended me to a friend of his, we had one phone interview, and I left Chicago bound for Palo Alto, 2 days after my last class finished, sight unseen, etc. We were building tools to put scientific journals and magazines like Science on the web (yes, the web, in 1994, pre-Netscape).

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Certainly. It's in my blood. I would start with different languages if I had it to do over again (well, I would still do C first, but Smalltalk would be soon after).

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

One? Are you kidding? :) Here's a few things:

• When the C++ and Java programmers tell you how the world works, don't believe them. Their world is too small.
• Learn Smalltalk, Erlang, and Python.
• Study EJB 3.0+ and recent JBoss. They represent an enormous amount of mature thought on deploying real applications. There is much there to learn, whether used in that environment or not.
• Do something meaningful.
• You won't really be any good for ten years, at least.
• If you don't get it, find something you do get, and do that instead.

What's the most fun you've ever had ... programming?

Usually, whatever I'm doing right now, for any value of now. I've been very fortunate to work on interesting projects that continue to stretch me.

Though, if I had to pick one, handing a live phone call from VoIP to GSM and back with no break in audio was pretty sweet.

Who are you calling out?

I dunno, I'll figure that out later. :)

Sugar Land Parks and Rec... FAIL

...or "How NOT To Do Customer Service".

UPDATED! See below.

Last week was an insane week on any number of fronts, but the most persistent and infuriating experience continues unabated: dealing with the Sugar Land, Texas Parks and Recreation department. I haven't ever encountered people ostensibly in the business of serving their community who are so completely unwilling to admit a mistake and deal with it (not to mention the obvious incompetence of one of their staff, which resulted in said mistake).

So here's the story... our air conditioning was out last week, so we could not have our 4-year-old's birthday party at the house on Sat as we had planned to. So we decided to rent the room at the Lost Creek Center... it's at a nice park and close to our house. We called the Parks and Rec office and they put a courtesy hold on the room for us. We had intended to get to the office before leaving town on Thursday to pick up the key, but we forgot in the rush to get on the road.

My wife's mom is also a local resident (and lives very close to Lost Creek Park), so we asked her to go sign the contract and get the key and all in her name, since we wouldn't be back in town until Friday evening after the office would be closed. No problem.

On Friday, my mother-in-law goes to the Parks and Rec office to sign the contract and pick up the key. After waiting for them to find someone to help her, Pat (executive secretary? We can't quite tell from her signature) arrives on the scene. She tells mom (FYI "mom" hereafter refers to my mother-in-law) that you can't put a hold on a room, so she's wrong. Mom insists that no, in fact, they did put a hold on it on the phone. Pat says no, you can't do that, we don't do that. Pat says/implies that Mom is both stupid and speaking the wrong words.

Mom is upset, but asks if Pat can check to see if the room is reserved. Pat checks, says no, it isn't. Mom asks to reserve it then. Pat seems to know how to do this, so things move forward. Pat produces contract to sign. Mom notices time is wrong, asks Pat to correct it. Pat says (quote) "but it'll cost you more money". Mom says that's ok, we want the room from 1:30 to 4:30 as we reserved. Pat says "but it'll cost you more money". Lather, rinse, repeat.

Pat never does fix the contract, Mom finally gives up trying. Pat never goes over the contract in detail with Mom. Mom cuts her losses, signs the contract, and leaves.

But wait, there's more! A LOT more.

We get key from Mom, we show up at 1:30 on Saturday. The key doesn't work. It's the wrong key. We call Parks and Rec, they send a gentleman out to open the room for us (thankfully), so finally at 2 we're in the room (the party starts at... yes, 2). Oh, but wait, the closet is locked and all the tables that come with the room are inside. We call Parks and Rec, they send the same guy back, who unlocks closet. It's now 2:15 at least, we finally have the tables necessary to set up for the party that guests are now at that was to start 15 minutes prior, that we needed to set up for 45 minutes prior.

We have the party, disjointed though it was (instead of spending time with guests, we're still setting up). The party is good. Fast forward to my wife's trip to the Parks and Rec dept to return the wrong key...

My wife explains what happened. The staff are shocked and apologetic. But then they look it up and say that no, in fact, your mom requested the wrong place. My wife calls her mom, who details the whole incident at length. My wife tells Parks staff that no, in fact, she did request Lost Creek Center, and that the mistake is obviously the fault of the Parks dept because they had someone so incompetent in the office that they didn't even know about the whole courtesy hold process, and couldn't find it even when she looked. Not to mention that Mom has a detailed account of requesting Lost Creek Center.

Someone else (not Pat) at Parks looks up the hold/reservation... sure enough, there it is. Where was Pat looking when she looked it up? Who knows, but clearly in the WRONG place.

Parks staff member is mystified as to how it could still be on the computer, but declares that clearly Mom requested the wrong place when she reserved it, and it isn't their fault.

Narrator's interlude: this is where they COULD have diffused the entire thing and assumed THEY were at fault, out of simple common CUSTOMER SERVICE interest. But no, they don't.

So here it stands:

• We put a courtesy hold on the room, which they do in fact do, unbeknownst to their own staff (or at least to Pat)
  
• We sent Mom to finish the reservation, with full knowledge of which location it was and what its name is, in part because she lives across the *&$*%# street(!!)
  
• Mom arrived and was helped by someone who had absolutely no clue what she was doing (Pat)
  
• Pat said "you can't put a hold on a room" (clearly demonstrating incompetence)
  
• Pat belittles Mom (clearly demonstrating unsuitability to her position of serving a community, incompetence, and foolish pride)
  
• Pat can't find the hold even when asked to look against Pat's wishes (wait, she does work for Sugar Land, right? CLEARLY demonstrating incompetence)
  
• Pat wrote up the contract for the wrong place AND the wrong time (clearly demonstrating incompetence)
  
• Pat refuses to change the contract despite repeated protests from Mom (clearly demonstrating incompetence and aforementioned unsuitability to serve a community)
  
• Pat implies that we should be dishonest in our dealings because it will save us money (or maybe just because she's lazy)
  
• Pat fails to explain the contract in detail to Mom
  
• Mom didn't notice the wrong place because of the lengthy and absurd discussion over the wrong time (which Pat REFUSED to fix, recall)
  
• We nearly didn't have a birthday party for our 4-year-old, which has gotten completely lost in this whole discussion... imagine explaining that one to him
  
• Upon returning the wrong key and attempting to resolve the issue, Parks has refused to acknowledge any errors on their part and blame Mom
  

Now let me see if I can figure out who is at fault here. I dunno, it's pretty difficult... gross incompetence, rudeness, and dishonesty on one side vs. failing to notice one of Pat's many errors during a ridiculous discussion of one of her other many errors on the other side. Hrmmm... I bet even Pat could figure this one out. Oh wait, I guess not.

OR MAYBE IT DOESN'T F-ING MATTER BECAUSE YOU PEOPLE ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF SERVING A COMMUNITY AND YOU SHOULD BE HORROR-STRICKEN THAT YOU ALMOST RUINED A 4-YEAR-OLD'S BIRTHDAY!!!!!! HELLO?!

(to be continued, Mom is going to talk to them in person today, and if necessary I will be calling more senior city officials... I don't even care about the money, though we'd like one of our rental hours back, now it's a matter of principle)

UPDATE: Mom went to speak to them, and ended up speaking to Pat (Patty?) again. She made up a completely new story that she told Mom that Lost Creek was unavailable (!!). Obviously this is a flat-out lie, since she a) couldn't find any hold on Lost Creek Center and b) said no such thing could be done in the first place (!!!!). So Mom and Patty go round and round and finally Mom says "I don't like being called a liar", to which Patty says "oh, no, I'm not saying that..." to which Mom says "well you say that everything I'm saying is totally wrong, that would make me a liar".

So Patty goes to speak with her manager, and I would LOVE to know what that conversation entailed, because she comes back very conciliatory and sweet, and offers to refund us for one hour plus the extra cost because she booked the wrong room. Mom says thank you and leaves.

I'm dying to know what was said between Patty and the manager (who never appeared). But oh well, at least the issue is resolved, though now I'm tempted to want an apology in writing... but I guess I'll leave it be.

Technorati Tags:
sugar land, customer service, fail

Delicious

My latte this morning at the fabulous Catalina. Just wanted to share.

Technorati Tags:
coffee, espresso, latte art

Airline Experiences

So I bought an airline ticket for a friend today, for him to fly today. I found a fare on cheaptickets for $295 on Delta, but cheaptickets couldn't book it because it was same day (I dunno)... they indicated that I needed to call Delta. I'd also found a Southwest flight for a bit more ($349).

So I call Delta. After wading through the voice-recognition interrogation, I ended up with an agent. The agent sounded as if she was reciting some phrases, but OK, whatever.

So she says the best fare is $481. HA. I say I'm not paying that much, and give her the details on the fare I found, which she fails to find... but while she is failing to find it, she offers me several "deals" that I would certainly be interested in, such as a credit card and a vacation getaway. After it's clear this is going nowhere, I tell her thanks but I'm not interested. I had to hang up on her as she was still going on about the deals.

Then I call Southwest. No voice-recognition, just a queue, and a person answers after maybe 20 seconds. Very friendly, immediately understood what I wanted and had the flights up. She suggested another flight that left later, but would arrive sooner due to delays on the other itenerary. I booked that flight, and that was it.

WHAT a contrast. Customer service people, are you listening? Employ people that are friendly and well-spoken and genuinely interested in customer service. It goes a long way.

Technorati Tags:
customer service, airlines