Ain’t Misbehavin’

Music: Girl Talk: Feed the Animals. It’s fun and crazy, great road trip music. I tested this on my way to Omaha last weekend. Thanks to Bryant for introducing me to Girl Talk.

Food: Hummus and pita bread from Habashi House. The Middle Eastern restaurant in the City Market across the street has great food. I like to get the House Combo, but I could live on the pita bread and hummus.

Books: I have mostly been reading business/IT books lately. I read Getting Real by 37Signals and thought it was very practical. I came away somewhat inspired to make things simpler and get more done. I am now reading Mashup Corporations . Someone at work read it and had good things to say so I borrowed it.

Movies: The Dark Knight was good, of course. I also watched Charlie Bartlett last weekend on DVD and enjoyed it. I liked Anton Yelchin in the lead role, and Robert Downey Jr. always makes a good slightly crazy person.

This is probably old news to other people, but I just came across Microsoft’s SearchTogether. I read about it in the MIT Technology Review. I think the idea is very interesting. I can see specific instances where it would be useful, but I don’t see it becoming a frequently used tool in my life. I have downloaded it to give it a try.

On another topic, I have been learning about PeopleSoft Finance and HR modules at work. I know that every ERP system has its problems and its own philosophies that make it unique, but I can’t imagine why anyone would have intentionally designed some things in PeopleSoft to be the way they exist today. For instance, both the HR and Finance modules in PeopleSoft contain the organizational structure for the company. The HR uses are fairly obvious: payroll, headcount, management reporting, organizational overviews, etc. Finance uses it to manage expenses (payroll and other expenses). Despite the fact that these two structures should mirror each other (or else they would not be as useful), they are completely separate and are not linked together in the system and they are actually stored in different ways in each module. Currently, we have two people, 1 in Finance and 1 in HR, doing duplicate work to keep the systems in sync. This seemed stupid so we asked an independent consultant who used to work at PeopleSoft about it. She said that the modules were simply designed by two different groups who didn’t communicate with each other; it wasn’t an issue of poor implementation at our company but how PeopleSoft designed it to be. So despite the fact that the information is the same, there is no way to have just one tree of information without writing some crazy custom messaging code to push the tree over from one system to the other, which is still not ideal since it only messages one way and the two trees could still suffer from being out of synch depending on the use of effective dating. I don’t have experience with any other ERP system to be able to compare, but that seems like something that shouldn’t have happened.

I know lots of my friends’ parents are bad at the internet. But tonight was a bit ridiculous with mine. Read on for some “my parents don’t know how to use email” shenanigans.

My parents called me to ask me how to open an attachment. When they simply clicked to open it they got a blob of unintelligible text. I asked what the file was, and they told me it was a .htm file. I thought that was odd, but after asking more questions that seemed to be the only attachment. It was supposed to be a spreadsheet so I figured someone was doing something wrong. I had them open the file in two different web browsers and different Office applications, but it didn’t work. So I asked them to forward the email to me.

My mom had left the room at this point, and my dad informed me that he didn’t know how to forward an email. He went to get my mom and a few minutes later she was at the computer. She told me that whenever she tried to forward the email she was taken to google.com. After several more failed attempts at this, she gave up. I tried to get her to save the attachment to the desktop and then create a new email and attach it, but she couldn’t figure out how to do that.

About an hour later, my dad called me back and said he had forwarded the email. I opened my gmail account and saw a completely blank email from him with no attachments. I explained what happened to my dad and he tried again. I then received an email with a .htm file. When I opened it I found that my dad had just gone to File –> Save As in his browser, which saved the html of his email inbox. But from there I could see a bit of the original email (which contained a note about a password) and the attached Excel file. I told my dad to go look at the Excel file.

My dad clicked the link and was asked for a password. But the password that was given in the email didn’t work, assuming he was typing the password correctly. He tried a couple of times and got the same result.

It probably took 2 hours to get through all this and the file still isn’t open. I would have just logged into my dad’s email account, but he lost his email password (it’s saved in his browser), and it would have been an ordeal trying to show him how to retrieve or reset it.

My dad actually was very good with computers up through the late 90s, but he is rather lost in the internet age. I wonder how bad at technology I will be when I am older.

Edit: It turns out that the password was case sensitive and my uncle forgot to capitalize the password when he wrote it in the email. My parents called him the next day and he told them to capitalize the first letter, which finally gave them access to the spreadsheet.

I live in Old Townley Lofts in the River Market in KC. I like the location and the look of the building. I have a few issues with the craftsmanship in my apartment, as mentioned in a previous post, and there were leaks, but I think some of that just comes with living in an apartment. In general, I have been content with my apartment. But my experience these last few weeks has convinced me to move next summer.

I signed a new lease that went into effect July 1. It was not a convenient time to move, I wasn’t terribly unsatisfied with my apartment, and my rent didn’t go up much, so I decided to stay. With the new lease I began paying my rent through direct debit. I had just returned my lease a couple of weeks before so I wasn’t sure if that was enough time for the direct debit to be set up. I didn’t want to be late with my rent so I called the office to ask if I needed to drop off a check. The office assistant answered. At first he said he didn’t know and that I would have to ask the assistant manager, but then he came back with an answer that the direct debit would not be set up for July and I should leave a check. He said the direct debit would be taken out on the 1st if it had been set up, so if it didn’t come out then, I could be sure that I need to leave a check. There was no debit on my account by the 3rd so I wrote a check since rent is due by the 5th.

On the 7th I noticed an ACH hold on funds in my account from Old Townley for rent! I didn’t see that my check had been cashed so I called the office to see if I could catch them before they deposited it. The office assistant answered, I told him what was going on, and he said it was a question for the assistant manager but that she was unavailable. I called back a little later, but no one answered. The next day I called and left 2 messages about the issue. The next day I finally went over there. The leasing specialist told me the assistant manager was out on vacation for the rest of the week. She wrote a note and made a copy for me because this was her last week working there.

I patiently waited until Monday and called the office to talk to the assistant manager. She said she got the note, the district manager would be at the office that day, and she would talk to her and call me back. I called back Monday afternoon only to find out that the manager never made it out to the office that day and they were supposedly working by email. I was told they would call her on the phone and get this figured out. I explained that cashing the check had caused an overdraft fee on my account, and it would be great if they could pay for that as well since it was their screwup. On Tuesday they were still deciding what to do. I decided not to call on Wednesday because I didn’t want to be a pest. I didn’t hear anything on Thursday so I called that afternoon to check the status. The assistant manager then asked me to send them something to show the two rent withdrawals and the overdraft fee so she could explain the reimbursement. I complied.

On Friday I got a call from the assistant manager saying she was going to pick up a check for me. She didn’t know how much it would be for, but I would have a check. I told her I would come to the office to pick it up between 5 and 6pm. I showed up at 5:30. The only person in the office was an assistant, and he didn’t know where the check was. He said someone had mentioned it to him, but he would have to look for it. He searched through the assistant manager’s desk and eventually found my check. I opened it to find that they only reimbursed me for rent and not the fee. I just accepted that and deposited it.

I understand that stuff like this can happen. I don’t understand why nothing was done unless I called everyday, or why it took 2 weeks to clear things up. What if I had really needed that money? The part that pisses me off most is that throughout this experience I was made to feel that I was being a burden and that this was my fault. I never got a sincere apology from anyone except maybe the leasing specialist who no longer works there. It’s ok when bad stuff happens, but when it does it creates an opportunity for a company to make it up and actually increase client satisfaction. KC Loftspace fell far short of my expectations.

So that has been my fun experience over the last few weeks and the reason why my apartment building’s management sucks.

A few weeks ago, I went to the farmers market across the street here in the River Market to meet Pam. I needed to get some cash so I could purchase some fresh fruit so we went to the ATM inside the City Market, but it was out of order. A couple of blocks from there a Bank of America drive-thru ATM. There is no bank anywhere near, just a 3 lane drive thru that has/used to have 2 atms and 1 night deposit box. Recently, one of the ATMs was broken and then removed, so now there is just one ATM. It’s always funny to me to see how many people drive up to the night deposit box expecting it to be an ATM even though it is clearly marked up above the lane. Anyway, we got to the ATM and got in line behind a couple of people and cars. It was amusing to see people drive up and have to get in line behind pedestrians. I took a picture, but it didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked.

Jesse needs to update his blog

Due to my working night shift at the hospital in Seattle, I got sick. That was 2 weeks ago, and I’m still sick. I went to the doctor last week and he gave me cough medicine with codeine, a steroid pack, and benadryl to fight what I assumed was an upper respiratory infection. When my condition hadn’t improved a week later I went back. I had barely finished explaining my symptoms and he had already finished diagnosing me. He ran tests to confirm, but he was right: I have mono. Mono knocks you out of commission for several days. I’ve spent the last few days at home barely conscious taking vicodin and Mucinex. It was fine at first, but I started getting bored. Then just in time, my new TV arrived!
I got a 42 inch Vizio LCD HTDV. I struggled with whether to get 720p or 1080p. I decided to be cheap and get the 720p. I am not big into electronics, and anything is better than my old TV. My friends tell me there isn’t much content currently available in which 1080p would really make a difference. I was originally looking for something a little smaller, but I found this 42 inch and decided the price was good. And Tiger Direct has no taxes and great shipping rates.
It sucks to be sick and stuck at home, but at least I get to spend time with my new TV. And I think I’m starting to get a little better.

In March I went to Seattle for a week for work. I was working 12-hour night shifts in a hospital helping the end users during the go-live of some of our software. Because of my crazy work hours I really didn’t feel like doing many touristy things. But I did get to eat dinner with my friend Lincoln at a place called Earth & Ocean. I had the ahi tuna and it was pretty good. I also got to experience latte art - I got a leaf and Lincoln got a heart. Dinner and coffee happened the first night I was there. Then I worked all week. The morning after my last shift my coworkers and I went to Voula’s Offshore Cafe where we ate Hobos! A hobo is an egg scramble with hashbrowns and peppers and cheese and other stuff mixed in. It was pretty good, a ton of food! After breakfast we went back to the hotel, packed our stuff and went to the airport. I got home at 8 pm that night, not having slept in over 24 hours. Seattle was really pretty, but it was good to be home.

A marketing evolution: old bottle on the left, new bottle on the right. Apparently slanted writing makes it better.