Alde’s Stuff

In Japan, 11/11 is also known as Pocky Day (Due to the 11/11’s looking like pocky sticks).

For your entertainment:

Full Disclosure: I am a former employee of Wayport and own Wayport stock.

Seems like AT&T finally was able to convince the board of directors to boot Dave Vucina by buying the company out.

I’m pretty sure this was probably attempt number 3+ to buy the company.

It’ll be interesting to see what AT&T does with Wayport’s technologies and patents. I’m pretty sure that Logan International Airport and any municipal Wi-Fi deployment is in violation of at least one, if not two of Wayport’s patents.

Dlink 8 Port 10/100/1000 Gigabit switch

Amazon has the Dlink 8 port 10/100/1000 Gigabit switch on sale for $46.19 with a $10 rebate and free shipping. It’s a non-blocking switch (16 gigs of throughput), and runs a whopping 8 watts at full load. My friend put it on his Watt’s Up Pro and verified with 4 devices connected it ran at 5 watts. Get one of these and throw about that old Netgear 8 port 10/100 switch that’s eating 30 watts, and you’ll pay for the Dlink in power consumption savings in about a year.

Just as a heads up, with that entire melamine scare in China, stay away (for now) from all Chinese Milk candies, like the ones I’ve listed in the pocky pages.

The candy company that manufactures White Rabbit candy, Guan Sheng Yuan Group have suspended manufacturing of their milk candies.

I didn’t review specifically the White Rabbit candies, but with the sickening of almost 100,000 children in China, I’d stay away from all milk candies from China.

You can see the milk candies I had reviewed on the hard & soft candies page on the Pocky Pages.

I’m contemplating getting a new camera. The stout Minolta Dimage Z1 that I got in 2002 is a bit old and not really up to snuff anymore. With a planned trip to Germany and Austria for just after Thanksgiving, I plan to have a nice DSLR purchased and some experience in using before leaving for the trip.

The marching order from my wife (she whom holds the purse strings) is that I can spend decent money here, and to get something that may not be top of the line, but is going to last for a while and still be worthwhile 5 years down the road.

I had thought of getting a nice full frame DSLR, like the Canon EOS 5D or the Nikon D700. The Canon is a bit old and long in the tooth, while the Nikon is fresh out of the box new. But the price for a full frame DSLR does not seem to be worth the price both companies want to charge for them. I know that Sony is releasing a new A-900 full frame DSLR (24.6 Megapixels!), but I don’t think I want to plunk down $3k+ for a camera, because I’d like to be able to get some accessories and perhaps a zoom lens as well.

So it comes down to the Canon EOS 50D, the Sony Alpha A700, and the Nikon D90.

I’m edging toward the D90 at the moment. I’ll be watching the deal sites to see if some decent pricing comes down the pike. I think I need to go try out my friend’s 5D though to see how the Canon way goes.

More scratch links:

Lowepro Rover AW II Ebags $140
Tenba Shootout Medium - $190
Naneu Pro U120 - $147
Naneu Pro Alpha - $99
Tamrac Adventure 9 - $140
Lowepro Primus - $200
Lowepro Fastpack - $113
Kata 3N1 30 - $125

Meiji is a competitor to Glico in the Japanese snack market. Their product Lucky is their version of Pocky. So the Meiji Lucky Mini Almond Chocolate is half sticks of Lucky, with almonds.

It comes in a slide out tray, sectioned into the two suggested serving sizes (about 10 pieces), though weight-wise it’s just more than a Snickers bar.

The chocolate seemed a bit dry and old, as if it had been sitting on the shelf too long. But the almonds were of a decent size.

As my wife is loathe to do, she let me into the local asian grocery store after we had Sunday Dim Sum. And, of course, I had to get, oh, about $20 worth of new Pocky and Pretz to bring home.

Tonight, since I was coming home late, it was catch-as-catch-can for dinner, so I decided on the ever popular chocolate peanut butter and honey sandwich and the new Bakery Flat Style Pretz.

The bakery Pretz is a little different that the normal pretz, in that it’s a “flat style,” which means that instead of nice round-ish pretz, they’re flattened to more resemble a bread loaf. In essence, one bakery pretz stick is about the size of two normal sticks, laid side to side.

The top of the pretz is coated with a light glaze of sweetener to make this pretz a little sweeter than normal.

The box comes with 4 packs of pretz with approximately 10-15 pretz within.

(Also added to the original Pretz Page)

A sales droid that managed the account at a past company gave my friends and I the EZStream media player as kinds of “spiffs” for doing business with them. Not that it did provide them any extra business, and the device was the 802.11b version, not the G.

So I finally have a use for the device; my wife likes to listen to country music to go to sleep to, yet the #1 radio format nation-wide has no stations in the New York City area. Hey, I’ll use the EZStream.

I hook it up to my clock radio with MP3 input (The Timex T307S) and power it up. After setting it up to use my DSL wireless with WEP (so old there’s no WPA-PSK), I try out the internet radio stations… There’s a whole whopping 50 stations. And the one country station doesn’t actually work.

I then ponder how to replace this damn thing. 802.11b is bad, 50 stations is worse…

I could buy a Roku SoundBridge M1000 System, but that’s 200 bucks…
Or I could get a Silm Devices Squeezebox, but since they sold out to Logitech, their prices are still wack.

Nope, I’m going to have to see what I need to do to get this thing to play the stations I want.

The mediaserver software that came with the device has an iRadio tab. So I put in some stations, turned on the server, however, all the stations get rejected by the device. It can’t play any of them.

What to do what to do….
So here’s what I did…

In the device’s network config, one can set a “Proxy”… So I set that to my Squid server. I then went to the Internet Radio config, and had that manually update, and I tcpdump’d the tcp stream.

The device calls home, to www.radiosmc.com. The URL has some other information in it, such as your device’s MAC address, software version, and the hardware version. So I went to radiosmc… It seems that for the luxury of programming your own preset stations, you have to pay a monthly fee. Joy of joys.

However, the file that returns to the device is of such simplicity, the key to it is redirecting the device’s get to a file of your own.

File Format:

It’s a simple XML file. There’s an XML Header:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”iso-8859-1″ standalone=”yes”?>

Followed by the main container, the station_db:

<station_db version=”2007-01-14T15:03:48Z” format_version=”2.0″ station_count=”48″>

The key things here are to always incrememnt the version number (kinda like DNS) and to make sure the station count is correct.

The next lines pertain to the database info:

<database_info>
<format_version>2.0</format_version>
<name>vTuner</name>

I’d keep this all the same.
Next is the URL the device goes to update it’s list:

<server_url>http://www.radiosmc.com/setupapp/smc1/asp/rsdb/update.asp</server_url>

Eventually you’ll want to change this so you no longer have to redirect in Squid (covered later).
Then the service level:

<service>BASIC</service>.</database_info>

I left this the same too. Don’t want to hurt it, just change the stations.

Now we get to the meat of the file, the station list:

<station_list>

Stations are 6 points of data:

1. The Station ID (Unique Identifier)
2. Station Name
   - What the short name listed in the chooser of the device
3. Description
   - The Long name if you get info on the station (i.e. the Info button on the remote)
4. Bandwidth of the station (kbps)
5. URL of the station
6. Mime_Type of the station

So, a standard station looks like this:

<station>
<id>4392</id>
<station_name>WBHM</station_name>
<description>classical music streaming to the Internet from Birmingham, Alabama with a touch of NPR here and there.</description>
<bw>56</bw>
<url>http://www.wbhm.org:8000/live</url>
<mime_type>m3u</mime_type>
</station>

So repeat this until you have the number of stations you want (Make sure to put the right number up in the station_db tag). When you’re done with stations, you close out the station_list tag and open a directory list tag:

</station_list>
<directory_list>

The Directory list is very important; it is how the stations are organized in the player. The format is based upon directories. For example, the first line:

<dir name=”Internet Radio” subdir_count=”3″ station_count=”0″ >

states that the name to display is “Internet Radio”, that there are 3 Subdirectories under this directory, and that there are 0 stations under this directory. The next tag is a “Genres” subdirectory, and under that is “Adult Contemporary”… Under that is “All stations”, of which there are two AC stations:

<dir name=”Genres” subdir_count=”28″ station_count=”0″ >
<dir name=”Adult Contemporary” subdir_count=”3″ station_count=”0″ >
<dir name=”All Stations” subdir_count=”0″ station_count=”2″ >
<station>8512</station>
<station>12049</station>
</dir>

Use the station tag to link back to the unique id in the ID tag for the station, and then close the directory.

The most annoying thing was the Country part, so with my file I just left all that out. Who cares if you’re listening to an AC station from Canada or Germany?

When you’re done with all your directories close the directory list, and the station db, and you’re done:

</dir>
</dir>
</dir>
</directory_list>
</station_db>

So, now you’ve got your xml file, how to get the device to fetch it? Its your friendly neighborhood Squid proxy to the rescue!

Squid (http://www.squid-cache.org/) has a nice feature called URL Redirection:

# TAG: redirect_program
# Specify the location of the executable for the URL redirector.
# Since they can perform almost any function there isn’t one included.
# See the FAQ (section 15) for information on how to write one.
# By default, a redirector is not used.
#
#Default:
# none

In your squid.conf file, you can use a simple program to redirect all URLs. What I did here was add a line of code to the conf:

# TAG: redirect_program
# Specify the location of the executable for the URL redirector.
# Since they can perform almost any function there isn’t one included.
# See the FAQ (section 15) for information on how to write one.
# By default, a redirector is not used.
#
#Default:
# none
redirect_program /usr/lib/squid/redir.pl

and then created a simple perl script to redirect the URL to my xml file:

redir.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
$|=1;
while (<>) {
s@http://www.radiosmc.com/.*@http://example.com/mystations.xml@;
print;
}

Reload the config, and manually update the Internet Radio list, and boom, I’ve got all the stations you want.
Now, is this stealing? Well, ethically I look at it this way: I was given a device that had I bought it, would have been like buying an FM radio, but one without a tuner. Then I had to pay someone to program my preset buttons.
SMC does not provide any content; it’s not like XM or Sirius. They are not providing the network connection, they are not providing the Audio content, nor are they paying the streamers for that content. I’m sure there’s some sort of monetary exchange between staiton and RadioSMC, but I’m not sure in what direction. The device retails for about $110, and the service they sell on top of that is a $30 one time fee. Why not charge $140 for the device and allow the enhanced service for free? Poor customer service>

My Stationlist can be found at http://www.alde.com/mystations.xml

After spending 20 minutes trying to wade through the compartmentalized and siloed nature that is Verizon billing, I eventually talked to a Mr. Mukerjee (guessing he was in Mumbai) to dispute the erroneous charges on my bill. Then I talked to a Mrs Smith (the indignant agent would not give me her first name) to ensure that my account was canceled. This was on the 18th of August. Now I get the following voicemail in my inbox:

“This is Verizon with an urgent message regarding a letter that was sent to you recently and the potential interruption of internet access on your account. Think for your internet access can be as easy as using your charge card. Verizon offers convenient self-serve payment options including the ability to pay your bill using the recurring charge card payment method. To take advantage of this payment options, visit us on the web at www.verizon.net/myaccount or call us online 1-877-432-9409. If payment is not received. Your verizon online service maybe suspended and any outstanding debt will be referred for collection. Verizon thanks you for your prompt attention. Goodbye.”

So, I’m wondering why an automated call would come to me on the 27th of August, days after I canceled my account and was told my Mr Mukerjee that my account balance was $0.

I call that number; it’s a payment service, that charges you, get this, a $3.50 convenience fee. Whose convenience? I why do I need to pay to save you the time and processing of a check? For a bill I’ve been told I owe nothing. See, the email that Verizon Sent to me:

Thank you for allowing us to serve as your Internet service provider. We received your cancellation order effective 2008-08-20 00:00:00.0. We’re sorry to see you go and hope you reconsider. If you change your mind and would like to re-start your Verizon High Speed Internet service, simply call 1-800-567-6789.
…
Sincerely,

Verizon Online
Customer Care Team

Then I call into Verizon’s Payment Information and Payment arrangements line: 800-281-8584. Since I had a dry loop DSL, this completely FLUMMOXES their Voice Actuated IVR system, so much so I eventually just get an “Ok” from it, and a transfer…. To Residential Voice Line collections. Hey! Collections department… No, Lisa doesn’t want to talk to me, so she transfers me over to DSL collections… Where Monica Miller tells me, oh, Dry Loop DSL is another department… To which I get a “Please enter your 10 digit account number…” um, my account number is 13 numbers. I try the first 10, no go. I enter the last 10, no go. Eventually I get the “We can’t help you, please call again.”

So much for having the Network by your side.

Verizon, your customer service is horrible. I’d dare say it’s more horrible than my company’s, and JD Power doesn’t like us at all.

So, I work for a large company with a rather big call center, including off-shore partners, as honestly, people won’t pay the money to get 100% on-shore support, especially for the idiots we are able to hire at the exhorbanent prices due to our location.

Last month, after being told by a technician dispatched to my house that I was lucky my DSL modem got sync as how far I was from the Central Office, and that most likely it was a wet pair, i.e. every time it rains it gets wet and causes the modem to lose sync.

Bundled that with Verizon billing me $5 more a month ($40 a month) for 1.5meg DSL, and my contract being up, I was ditching Verizon for a cable modem. I hate the cable companies, but at least for my $43, I’d get more than 1.5megs.

So, on the 14th of July, I cancelled my account with Verizon. Told the retention agent, no, I’m not interested in a free month, I am no longer need DSL. I might come back when you have FIOS, but you suck, I’m firing you.

I was told by the retention agent that my account was canceled, and my account would be updated and I’d get a pro-rated charge for the 7 days of the month I still had service.

‘lo and behold, when my August bill showed up, I got the free month and my account was not cancelled. Hooray call center agent!

Now that I work with 1000+ call center agents, with another 300-500 off-shored agents, I know excatly what the agent did, and why.

See, call center agent is a suck ass job. First line tech support sucks so bad as a job, every company (basically) off-shores this part. Why? No one will work for that wage and deal with the idiots that call in. So, at my work, tier 2 tech, advanced tech support, some sales, and retention are all housed in the US.

So, the retention agent job sucks as well. At least with the other tech support jobs, you get a satisfaction in troubleshooting a problem and generally delighting the customer. However, for these jobs, you need some computer saavyness, and the ability to troubleshoot advanced issues dealing with problems you will not have a script for.

The retention agent job sucks in that every person you talk to is on the phone to fire you as a company. It’s almost as bad as cold-call sales. So to get people into the job, they provide probably the highest per-hour wage (other than the advanced/tier3 tech support jobs), with a bonus based upon your “save” rate, or the rate at which you are able to convince customers to not cancel their service.

So, the unscrupulous agent (i.e. the agent that for the most part will not have a job soon) to boost their numbers, will tell the customer that they’re cancelled, but “save” them in the system, so it’s put off onto another agent next month. The “Retention Shuffle”.

I had once thought Verizon to be a company of impecable technical support and service, I realize that they are just like every crappy company out there and therefore, I no longer put them in that class of “enlightened” customer service companies.

Sorry for you, Verizon. You’ve been fired, even if you’ve tried a corrupt way to keep my account, I’m going to get the (unfortunate) pleasure of firing you again…After 47 minutes on hold, to talk to an agent who may (or may not) cancel my account… Again.