Dell’s Blog is Pretty Darn Good

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Okay, I’ll admit that I jumped on the "Jeff Jarvis Dell Hell" bandwagon and I was fairly critical of the incentives package that Forsyth County (not to mention North Carolina) forked over to Dell to get them to build their plant here.  So I’ve watched their nascent efforts at blogging with interest and I have to say that I’m impressed.

They have multiple contributors to the blog and they are using it to deal with hot button issues  like exploding batteries and fairly mundane customer service issues like the accents of their customer service reps.  They’re also using video posts to good effect and from what I can tell they’re avoiding the trap of making it one big PR/marketing excercise.  To me the best sign that they have the right idea is that they accept both positive and negative comments, and in fact monitor them.  For instance the video post I pointed to has a comment from one user having problems loading the video and then another comment from a Dell person with a tip on how to download the video and a mention that they are trying to make the viewing process a little easier.  They even responded to comments that their original blog name, one2one, was also the name of a porn site and changed the name to Direct2Dell.

I’m liking what I’m seeing.

Money Pit or “I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This Before”

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The sentence that will forever define our experience in our first house in North Carolina is “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”  That’s the sentence used by every service technician that enters our home.  Today it is being used by the good folks at Duct Doctor who are here cleaning out our air ducts.

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The reason the good people at Duct Doctor used “the sentence” is that they’ve discovered radiant water heating coils in the ductwork of our basement.  As I may (or may not) have documented in the past the previous owner of this house had a large chimenia built in the back of our house (picture above), had water pipes run through it and then attached those pipes to some radiant heating coils throughout the basement.  Until now we had no idea that they also put radiant coils inside the ductwork.

Apparently the theory was that the coils would aid in heating the house by allowing the air handler to blow air around the warm coils, but unfortunately the coils are just resting on the bottom part of the ductwork so the air can’t really circulate around it.  Furthermore, it makes no damn sense when you consider that you have to worry about heat around here maybe 3 months out of the year.  And the fact that this was all hooked up to an outdoor, wood burning operation kind of totally defeats the purpose too by causing you to spend your entire day out in the cold stoking a fire.

Unfortunately for us the result of all this is that we have a higher propensity for mold in our HVAC system.  We already had the water source detached from the coil system when we had the plumber (John’s Plumbing, Heating & AC, whom I highly recommend) in to fix our water pressure after our new water heater started leaking, so that part of the equation is taken care of. But, we still need to get those metal coils out of there since condensation can build up on them when we run the AC. Oh, and by-the-by, we run our AC a LOT more than we run the heat.  Guess what I’ll be doing over the next few weeks?

So now we’ve had a general contractor, a plumber, an HVAC tech and a duct cleaner all walk in our house and say “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”  I suspect we’re becoming infamous among the service people in Winston-Salem.

Section 67, Grave 2711

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Img_04801986 was the first time that intimate death entered my life.  Until that point I had never had anyone close to me die and then in the span of a couple of months my Grandpa died and one of my closest friends from high school was killed.  I was reminded of this two weeks ago when I visited Arlington National Cemetery and found the headstone (Section 67, Grave 2711) of my friend Louis Robinson, Jr. (L CPL, US Marines), who was killed August 31, 1986, a week after his birthday and the same day his child was born.

We, my friends and I,  never really knew the circumstances of Louis’s death, but we were told that while stationed out west he was waiting for a transport flight to go to Tennessee to be with his wife for the birth of their child.  He went to a park with some buddies and was having some beers.  Another Marine was at the park with his family, and after being told by his wife that Louis had offered their young son a beer (according to the story his buddies said he was joking around) he went back to his car, got a gun out of the glove box and shot Louis in the chest.  Louis’s buddies threw him in a car and took off for the hospital, lost control of their car and ran over a sidewalk and into a storefront.  He never made it to the hospital alive.

I’m not sure how much of this story is true, but I can tell you that it wouldn’t surprise me too much if it was.  It has all the earmarks of the silly or stupid crap we did in high school.  We always seemed to get ourselves in little jams by acting like stupid kids while cruising the streets of DC and the suburbs.  Heck we’d even been caught in the vicinity of gunfire twice before.

We laughed off all our misadventures.  After all we were invincible, as yet untouched by the truly horrible punishment that life can mete out.  Sure we all had a little something we could point to as painful: divorced or alcoholic parents, bad break-ups with girlfriends, a car crash or two, but few of us really believed that true tragedy could, or would, touch us.

Louis’s death changed that.  I can’t speak for my other friends, but it rocked me to the core.  The invincibility that I’d felt disappeared and was replaced by hesistance for the first time that I can remember.  Not that I had never felt fear or uncertainty before, but I felt a truly visceral fear for the first time ever.  Events that I had previously looked at as a crazy kind of fun — can you believe we just did that? — I now viewed as events that I had miraculously survived — how the hell did I not die?

One of my closest friends died doing the kind of thing we’d done for years.  Silly, juvenile, stupid and totally within the norm for your average 19 or 20 year old American idiot.  It saddens me to no end that he died before he outgrew that stage of life, that he never had the opportunity to become a real man, to watch his kids grow up, to experience the pain and joy that it is to be a parent and an adult member of society.

And it shocks me that it has already been 20 years since he died.  To be honest I didn’t realize it had been that long until I saw Louis’s headstone, and it really knocked me for a loop.  I have no idea what became of his child or his wife; she was from Tennessee and none of us met her before the funeral or saw her after that day.  The fact that Louis was a black city kid from DC and she was a white country girl from Tennessee made the situation a little awkward, and I’m not sure if she stayed in touch with Louis’s family.  Unfortunately I know for a fact that I didn’t and that is something I regret to this day.

Now I’m thinking of my own kids.  They’re just now entering their teenage years and I’m wondering what kind of trouble they’ll get into.  What stupid, short-sighted, totally inane mischief will they perpetrate?  Should I share my own misadventures in hopes of making myself an object lesson, or do I risk giving them the wrong idea?  I have no idea and I guess Celeste and I will just have to do what parents have always done: play it by ear and do our best to minimize the damage. And hope to God that good luck is hereditary.

I really wish Louis had lived to face these hopes, fears and questions himself.  We could have talked and  laughed about it over a beer with all our other friends.

Off the Pole and the Pipe

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Whilst perusing youtube I found a clip of Chris Rock on The Daily Show.  Jon Stewart asked him about being a dad (he has a 9-month old daughter) and he said his only goal was to "keep her off the pole."  His overall parenting advice is to keep your daughter off the pole and your son off the pipe.

So if my kids don’t end up strippers or crack addicts then I can consider myself a success. When you look at it that way parenting doesn’t seem too hard.

Virginia Gentleman?

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I was in college the first time I encountered Virginia Gentleman and it knocked me on my butt.  My latest encounter with a different form of Virginia "gentleman" was yesterday when I saw the video below of Virginia Senator George Allen on his campaign tour.  It also knocked me on my butt because it introduced me to the term "macaca", which apparently is a racial epithet and it showed once again how quickly a political campaign can turn.

Allen called the cameraman, an American college student of Indian descent who was filming Allen on behalf of Allen’s opponent Jim Webb, "macaca" and at one point said "welcome to America and welcome to the real world."  Since this was a predominantly white, rural Virginia crowd a lot of people think Allen was making a racial remark and Webb’s campaign is playing it to the hilt.

Now this thing has gone national, and not in the positive way. There’s a great piece on the Daily Show about it and Allen’s comment was even the subject of a question at a White House press briefing. It has also provided a reason for people to bring up Senator Allen’s confederate flag wielding days, none of which is good for a political campaign in 2006.  Ouch.

As you can tell from this exchange at Ed Cone’s blog no one’s really sure if Allen even meant anything specific by using the term "macaca", but as always the Daily Show had it right when they said (I’m paraphrasing), "I don’t know what macaca means but it sure as sh– sounds racist and in Virginia that may or may not be a bad thing."  I love that show.
 

If POTUS Blogged

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Will wonders never cease?  The President of Iran has his own blog (found via Lex), and you can even read it in English if you click on the little AmeriBrit flag icon.  I tried to read it in his native language but all the little squiggly lines made my eyes hurt and I couldn’t figure out if I was supposed to read left to right or right to left, which, oddly enough, made me think of POTUS.

Supposedly POTUS is reading while on his abbreviated two-week vacation, but I was wondering if given the opportunity, and the ability to type, he would be up for blogging?  Of course he would face challenges, like:

  • Determining the proper way to spell "nucular."
  • Figuring out that "PC" is not necessarily a Republican epithet, and thus does need to be turned on to get to that hairy little internet thing.
  • Finding a way to carve out some time to spend with Ted Stevens so he can get tutored on that whole "internet is a series of tubes" thing.
  • Having someone explain that "QWERTY" has nothing to do with gays or the military.

Once he overcomes those obstacles he’d then have to think of what he’d name his blog.  Here are some possibilities:

  • Touched by Bush
  • Heckuva Job Bushie
  • The Bushmeister
  • Dick?
  • Tony’s Pimp
  • Bring ‘Em On
  • Git’r Done
  • Decider Boy
  • Fool Me Once…
  • Bushwhacked

And what tags would POTUS use?  Well, there’s:

  • Boo!
  • What mistakes?
  • Ask Dick
  • Toastmasters DC Chapter
  • WMD! WMD!
  • Osama who?
  • I got Saddam Daddy!
  • Heckuva Job Rummy!

Suggestions?

I Wish I Had 10% of This Woman’s Guts

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The Christian Science Monitor is publishing a series about the abduction, and eventual release, of freelance journalist Jill Carroll in Iraq earlier this year.  Mostly it’s a first-person account and it’s riveting.  After reading this first installment all I can say is that she has more guts than I could ever dream of having.

I can’t imagine having enough passion for a career that I would put my life on the line for it.  Of course this will give me a better perspective the next time I get a butt-chewing from a customer.  It could definitely be much worse.

Family Week

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I got to spend most of last week with my family.  Celeste had to be in DC for work on Wednesday and Thursday so we all accompanied her and stayed with my in-laws. We spent the day on Sunday at Celeste’s brother’s house for a party with all of her family, and then on Monday I visited one of my clients in Alexandria while Celeste took the kids to Orange, VA to visit her friend Lee.

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On Tuesday I drove Celeste, Erin, and my mother-in-law Patti Rogers to a tea and then took Justin for ribs at King Street Blues. After that we drove over to Arlington National Cemetery and saw the changing of the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown and then we found the grave of my high school buddy Louis Robinson (Lance Corporal, US Marines), who was killed exactly 20 years ago this month.

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On Wednesday I drove Celeste to her client’s office at McPherson Square, and then went back to get Erin and Justin.  We headed over to Occoquan and had lunch with my buddy Ted before going downtown to pick up Celeste. Having the kids along allowed us to utilize the HOV lanes and get back to the in-laws’ house in about 1/2 hour.

Jonmikeatwhitehouse_1 Yesterday my oldest son Mike (formerly Michael) and I took Celeste into the city (again utilizing HOV) for her meetings and then did the tourist thing. The photo of us was taken in front of the White House on the Lafayette Park side and was shot with ye old camera phone, thus the purple hue and enormous belly on moi.  For the record I’m actually an incredibly fit tri-athlete often mistaken for Pierce Brosnan…damn crappy phone.

Anyway we started out having breakfast at the Old Ebbitt Grill, then walked over to the White House and followed that with a walk to the Bureau of Engraving & Printing where we couldn’t get a tour pass, so we went next door to the Holocaust Museum. There I found out how little Mike’s been taught about the Holocaust so despite the fact that he found it kind of boring (he described it as "lots of words and pictures") I’m definitely glad we did it.  It’s incredibly powerful and I think he’ll appreciate it all the more in coming years.

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After lunch (excellent chicken salad sandwiches provided by my mother-in-law) we walked over to the World War II Memorial and then the Lincoln Memorial and Vietnam Memorial. After that we took a break and drove over to Union Station and walked around it and then visited the Postal Museum next door.  Once we were done there we drove over to McPherson Square and picked up Celeste.

After that we drove back to the in-laws via the HOV lanes, had a quick dinner with them and packed up the kids and headed home.  We were in our garage at the stroke of midnight.

It was a blur, but I had a blast.

Changing of the Guards

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Celeste and I took two of our kids and my mother-in-law to Arlington National Cemetery on Tuesday (Aug. 8) and watched the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown.  Here’s some video I shot. Forgive the shakiness…I had to film holding the camera over my head.

Don’t Buy Gas from the Bastards on Old Bridge Road

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GashikeSee that picture on the right?  You might have to click on it to see it at full size to see that I paid $3.39 for 87 octane unleaded gas. I took the picture with my camera phone right after filling up at a station on Old Bridge Road in Prince William County, VA earlier this week. It was the day after the BP announcement re. the pipeline in Alaska being shut down for a while and a miraculous $.40/gallon jump occured overnight.

I bought there because I was on fumes and didn’t have the opportunity to look elsewhere, but just down the road I found gas that was $.20/gallon cheaper and that trend stayed everywhere I drove.  I’ll take my hits for not looking for gas sooner and denying myself the chance to find a better price, but I can at least call them out on their gouging. 

On the way home last night I got a tank full in Petersburg, VA for $2.92. 

And for the record I don’t have anything against higher oil prices (that whole supply and demand thing), but I do have something against gougers.