And got to listen to a canned ad for the newly added “Wing Street” offerings.  We’ve called them enough times now for me to feel confident in saying that while you are listening to the initial ad, the phone in the store hasn’t even rung yet. The initial ad is always the same and it is never interrupted by the phone being answered. They’ve got you captive and are going to milk the moment for all it’s worth.  Eventually the ad ends, and then the hold music/advertising starts.  The hold loop is almost always interrupted immediately by the takeout order taker, adding to my belief that the phone call isn’t put through to the store until after you’ve had your commercial.

Most of the DVD movies we own have some kind of preview, and quite a few have a commercial at the beginning.  The most egregious have an anti-piracy commercial.  I just paid for the DVD and now you are forcing me to watch a anti-piracy video?  Hitting the menu button or fast forwarding to the next chapter are blocked, so you have to endure their self-righteousness in order to watch the movie.

In both these instances I am already a paying customer.  Well, in the pizza case I want to be a customer. Does upper management at Pizza Hut feel they will increase revenue by forcing me to listen to a commercial extolling the virtues of their new expanded menu?  And does the movie industry think that insulting customers who’ve already paid money with an obnoxious commercial will increase their goodwill?

I will continue to endure the force-to-listen to commercials at Pizza Hut because once in a while I want their product.  And I will continue to endure force-to-watch anti-piracy ads on DVD because I want to watch the movie I’ve purchased.  But I will not have sympathy for organizations that take advantage of their customer’s goodwill and then cry foul with people find ways around the system.

The night before camp was to end it was decided that the pool director needed to be tossed in the pool.  When he tried to escape, and was caught, everyone ran out of the dinning hall to watch the fun.  I tripped and fell in front of several hundred people and was trampled in the stampede.  To this day I can remember seeing all these boots and shoes come at me and running over me.

At the time I was fine.  One of my assistant scoutmasters managed to wade into the tail end of the crowd and scoop me up from the floor.  I was seemingly okay.  Several hours later I came out of my tent, turning blue in the face and collapse on the ground.  I remember coming to in the local emergency room.  ”Delay stress reaction” was the diagnoses.  Other than a couple of bruises, I was physically okay.

To this day I have a lingering hesitation, almost a fear, of large groups of agitated people.  I would not enjoy a European soccer game at all.  

Managing a crowd is a difficult thing.  Masses of people do funny things and once they are headed in a direction it is nearly impossible to stop them. To read today that a Walmart employee was trampled to death while trying to unlock the doors for “Black Friday” shoppers sickens me.  

Are we so desperate to save a dollar or two that we are willing to trample a fellow human being to death?  I am outraged and saddened.  Somewhere a child is going to get a toy or gift that was purchased over the dead body of another human being.  All because their parent had to buy it at 5 am instead of 9 am.

Only in America.

What struck me most about the two day session was the utter lack of consequence presented with most of the features.  The focus was on what the tool could do for you, but there was an utter lack of discussion about the merits of the technique at hand, or the costs (hidden and otherwise) of using it.  For example, Dreamweaver allows you to point-and-click your way to embedding some dynamic controls on a web page. The controls are JavaScript based and rely upon proprietary, copyrighted code that Dreamweaver inserts into your site.  As long as you continue to use Dreamweaver you can modify those controls as needed.

However, if you should stop using Dreamweaver, you would lose the ability to modify or maintain those controls.  In our case, the page or site developed in Dreamweaver will be used as a guide for development, with the actual code being written outside of the Adobe product.  It will be impossible therefore to do any kind of roundtrip engineering; once the site is developed and placed in to production, the proprietary code will be long gone.  The Business Analyst will be forced to start over fresh, or try and build upon the non-Dreamweaver code to design the enhancement.

Simply because a tool or process gives one the ability to create a thing, doesn’t mean they understand that thing.  Yes, Dreamweaver is a powerful tool, and it allows people with relatively little, or even no, web design experience to create a feature rich site.  However that doesn’t mean they can support it, not does it mean that the output of their efforts can be integrated into a larger workflow.  Tools which detour around the understanding and skill that comes from an apprenticeship have a hidden cost.  Knowledge doesn’t equal skill or understanding.  I’m not saying that Dreamweaver is bad, or that sites generated and maintained with it are bad either.  I am saying that relying of the software to be your experience base, rather than having some experience of your own, is potentially dangerous.

We were all taught how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide in our heads using nothing but pencil and paper.  Most of us use calculators today to perform these functions but we all have experience and skill doing it ourselves.  Without having gone to the trouble of learning how to “do it by hand” we would fully appreciate simple mathematics nor would we really understand how it works.  Building a web site is the same way.  Without at least a cursory apprenticeship, using a point-and-click tool to generate a site for us may cripple our ability to fully appreciate its true potential or its real cost.

Apprenticeships, indeed, artisanship, is a lost and dying art.

1:45 brought the start of eight solid minutes of commercials, including one overly patriotic National Guard recruitment piece.  Commercials.  After I’ve paid $6.50 for matinee.  

From 1:53 until 2:12 we had previews.  Obviously the previews are geared to the feature, so they are usually of interest to me.  But 19 minutes of previews?  The one for The Spirit, a graphic novel coming to the big screen, probably contained the entire story line in the several minutes it ran.

Finally at 2:12 or so we go to see the theaters self-promotion clip, filled with people happily consuming overpriced soda and popcorn. 

The movie itself began around 2:16.  A full 31 minutes after the advertised starting time.  Unbelievable. 

Oh.  As Bond movies go this one was fair.  I haven’t seen the previous one (or ones?) with Daniel Craig in the title role, so I didn’t have the back story for what is apparently a sequel.  The new actor is cold-blooded and almost robotic.  This is not your father’s sexy, double-entendre Sean Connery Bond by any stretch of the imagination.

Next time I think I’ll wait for the DVD and watch it at home.

The Idiot Squad are all driving 4x4s or SUVs. (NB: Not all owners of urban Panzers are members of the Idiot Squad, and there are a few dunderheads in regular cars too.) What the pilots of these behemoth vehicles seems to have forgotten is that no matter how fancy their anti-skid, variable-assist-traction-controlled, anti-lock brake systems are, there is a finite limit to their adhesion on the road.

Sure, four-wheel drive gets you going faster than two. And being higher than most vehicles gets you about the spray of semi-frozen slush being tossed out from under neighboring cars tires. So you drive faster, slaloming through traffic with imagined impunity.

Until you need to stop, that is.

Then you discover, too late, that once you exceed the amount of traction you vehicle has, nothing in the world will stop you. Except other cars, the cement barrier in between you and on coming traffic, or the ditch off to the side of the road.

The only accident I saw on my commute home today was a large 4×4 pickup that lost traction and t-boned the center divider.

Do the rest of us a favor and slow down.

There are some problems with the process at LongHorn, however. The call into the restaurant is answered by the hostess station. She doesn’t take phone-in orders, so she passes you off to one of the bartenders. The bar is easily the noisiest place in the restaurant, so it is very had for the bartender to hear you, and vice-versa. Once you get to the restaurant, the problems continue.

Again the hostess can’t help you. You have to go fight through the crowd of people sandwiched up against the bar, and attract the attention of the two over-worked people behind it to get your food. I watched my food sit on the counter for several minutes last night before the bartender had a free moment to gather it up and collect my payment.

Some restaurants recognize some people want to get take out and have adapted their processes. Outback Steakhouse, for example, has “curbside takeaway.” When you place your order, they inquire about the type of car that will be used to pick up the food. When you arrive, and pull into one of the designated takeaway parking spaces, they come out to collect your payment and deliver your food.

Increasingly I am aware of businesses that are more responsive to the changing landscape of customer service. That the brand new, just finished construction a month ago, LongHorn doesn’t have a dedicated takeout process tells me that they either don’t experience much takeout business, or they don’t care to attend to that segment of their customer base. Interesting.

We like their food offerings and will continue to patronize them, but I would be very curious to know why their business model doesn’t address carry out customers.

• Making the inaugural pot of chili for the 2007-2008 season.
• Learning the ins and outs of WordPress templates and themes.
• Playing around with Ubuntu.
• Drawing house plans on graph paper.
• Demolishing the leftover bread stuffing.

planning

A move from my current hosting provider to Blue Host, and a conversion from MT 2.661 to WordPress. I’ve been at Pair forever and I have no complaints other than the price. Recently Sibylle was researching hosting providers for the new MAMTA site and through her I discovered that I am paying quite a bit more for my site on a monthly basis than I need. I also discovered that the latest release of WordPress has a vastly improved MT import facility, so now I just need to take the plunge and convert already.

wanting

A new hard drive for my ThinkPad laptop. The current drive, the original equipment 80 GB drive is nearly full, so there’s no easy way to add a new partition for Ubuntu on it. A new drive (perhaps bigger) not only creates the space for a Linux install, it keeps the XP setup untouched just in case.

seriously considering

Making chili this weekend. The weather has been cold for a couple of weeks now, and I haven’t had a pot of spicy hot chili in too long.

researching

Eye exams. While my laser adjusted eyes are okay for 90 percent of the things I do, there are times and situations where I strain to be able to see. My frustration level is almost to the point of obsession, so it’s time to get some professional advice. I’ll be scheduling a complete exam as soon as possible so I’ll know for certain what my vision is or isn’t.

NB: I got the idea for this catch-all category, “up to,” from a posting over at notmyself.com.

1. Make sure to leave your name out of the description of the event. This way it will appear to all who accept it that they are going to the dentist for root canal work.

2. Always mark the event as Busy, so that everyone has that time blocked out on their calendar too. After all, if you aren’t going to be here, no one should be getting any thing done? Right?

3. Send your event announcement to the widest possible audience. Use departmental mailing lists rather then just the names of people you work with on a daily basis.

4. Be sure to require everyone on your event. If you mark them as optional then they won’t have to send you a response.

5. Don’t proofread your event. Software is tested in production, so why shouldn’t everyone on the company-wide distribution list have to accept or decline multiple iterations of your outage as you correct the date, the time, the location, and the description six times.