It's News to Me

In what felt a bit like an unexpected call in the middle of the night, back in October, the 21st to be specific, I received an email from a former client of mine with whom I have consulted off and on since around 1988 asking whether I'd be willing to consider «an assignment for a year or so in New Mexico.» Having already retired and, I'll admit, having begun to resign myself to the inevitable decline that leads to the end of life, I was surprised and invigorated by his suggestion so I followed up with him just to learn what the possibilities were. That conversation and subsequent events have now led to a new opportunity for me, a new role. And just this last week, I received a formal offer to become the Call Center Manager for the Vertex Outsourcing call center in Las Vegas, NM -- not Nevada mind you, but New Mexico.

Las Vegas, NM, is a relatively small but historic town nestled in the northeastern quadrant of the state at an elevation of 6,424 feet, higher even than the Mile High City of Denver. This site was chosen as the location for the call center because of its lack of disruptions due to weather (316 days of sunshine a year) and because of the work ethic and skills of its bilingual local population. However, this small, historic (which also implies old) town became something of an obstacle in locating a qualified individual to move there and manage the operation. And that, it turns out, was what caused my friend to think of me. Because I am 66, unattached and don't have small children who would have to attend the Las Vegas school system, my maturity and prior experiences made him think of me as a desirable candidate who might be open to moving there.

«A year or so,» as originally suggested by my friend, has actually turned out to be two years when we got down to specifying the details of the agreement. I will move to New Mexico, maintain my house here in Knoxville, and return here after the two year contract is up. My objectives are to develop and sustain a culture in the center that causes the employees to feel valued and respected and that results in their conveying those same things to the customers in the calls they take from them. Although there are of course performance metrics that must be met as well, the primary objective for me is to nurture the kind of environment that is rarely sustained in a call center, so that customers are treated as valued assets rather than interruptions in the representatives' busy, stressful and sometimes monotonous day. That's an interesting challenge that I have often tried in my consulting assignments to help other managers achieve with, I will acknowledge, varying degrees of success. Now for the first time in my career I'll have the authority and accountability to do just that myself. I welcome the challenge, and I believe I'll find it both educational and interesting.

The other major goal I'll have while there is to identify and train my replacement. Through modeling the behaviors needed to run a call center in this way and by coaching this potential replacement in his or her use of those same behaviors, I'll seek to create an environment that can keep going without interruption when my time on site is up.

I haven't yet decided what this move will mean to my blogging. Since beginning to discuss the possible move, I've chosen not to update my blog because I didn't want to discuss these events online until they were firm enough to be revealed. And once I do assume the new role, I'm not sure how much I want to blog about what will surely occupy most of my thinking throughout the day, nor do I know how much time I might have for an activity like blogging. I suppose I could keep writing about technology as I've done through much of the last couple of years, but there are other blogs that already do a better job of that than I do. So my blogging may be a casualty of my new role, but that hasn't yet been decided and remains to be seen.

At least now you know what has been going on with me for the last several months and why I've not been posting here as frequently as I used to. I'm about to embark on «Perry's Excellent Adventure» in New Mexico, so if you happen to be traveling through the southwest feel free to look me up. I'm sure I'd welcome seeing a face «from home.»

This morning Justin left a comment on the previous post in which he requested that I post the results of issuing the lspci command on my current computer on the theory that perhaps something about the IDE controller might be causing my system not to see the Windows XP installation.  So now that I know to add the all_generic_ide switch to the boot command on the Live CD (thanks to Tomcat--TC) and I can get into Gutsy without my previous problems, I booted up under that this afternoon and took a screen shot of the results of issuing that command.  Though I don't know if this will give Justin what he thought it would, I'm going to post that screen shot below for his and anyone else's scrutiny.

As you can see the IDE interface is the SiS 5513 from VIA Technologies, Inc., so it does not appear to be the ICH7 or ICH5 IDE controller that Justin was anticipating.  I don't know where that leaves us, Justin, but there you have it.

While I was in the Live CD, I went again to the install program and to the manual install section of the partitioner since I didn't want to use the guided installation to use the full HD.  Here is the screen shot of the point I got to when I decided to bail out because the installation wasn't seeing my Windows XP installation, though it does recognize that the partition on which it is installed is formatted as NTFS.  Here's what the partitioner shows:

The two HDs are shown and the type of file system is accurate for both of them.  The 137 GB partition (/dev/sda1) is my C:/ drive and has Windows XP on it, and the 26.5 GB partition (/dev/sda5) is partitioned as my F:/ drive.  I've gotten to this same point before but haven't had the courage to monkey around with /dev/sda1 because I don't want to risk losing my Windows XP partition.  Any advice, encouragement, reassurance or other mojo-enhancing words anyone would like to share in the comments will be welcome.

On October 21st I posted here about the fact that I couldn't boot from the recently released Live CD version 7.10 of Ubuntu, the so-called Gutsy Gibbon.  That post attracted more comment than any other ever has on this blog as others reported that they too had encountered the same problem.  One of those who responded was Tomcat--TC since he too was having the problem.  Earlier today, Tomcat--TC reported back that he had found a solution that worked for him, and as the screen shot at the right demonstrates, I have just proven to myself that it works for me too.  For the first time, I was able to boot from the Gutsy Gibbon Live CD on this, my Sony machine.

Previously I had encountered the error message with the Live CD after I selected the default option to load or install Ubuntu.  However, on that initial screen one of the options, evoked by pressing F6, is to modify the command line before executing the boot up command.  Tomcat--TC suggested that I simply add the following parameter all_generic_ide to the boot command line after the words quiet splash and just before the two final dashes.  When you press F6 the cursor is at the end of that line and you can use the arrow keys to move it so that it is positioned after the words quiet splash and make the additional entry.  After doing that, I simply pressed enter and eventually the CD booted up into the Ubuntu environment. 

As you can see if you click on the screen shot above and view a larger version of it, there is an icon on the desktop to install the operating system if you choose.  I decided to do that, but there I encountered another problem.  There are seven steps in that installation before you actually commit to begin the installation.  The first few are designed to identify the language, the time zone and the type of keyboard you are using.  Thereafter, the partitioner is initiated to find the hard drives on the system and provide you the option of specifying where to install the operating system.  All of that went well, except that during the process of examining the installed hard drives it found no existing file system.  Since I didn't want to kill my Windows XP installation by installing over it, I canceled the installation and will go back to the drawing board. 

I have no idea why this CD doesn't see the existing file system.  Maybe someone who reads and responds to this post will be able to suggest how I might get it to see my Windows installation.  However, even if they don't, encountering that problem doesn't dampen my enthusiasm for having learned the solution to the mystery of how to get the newly released Gutsy Gibbon Live CD to boot on my system nor does it lessen my appreciation to Tomcat--TC for his reporting back the results of his investigation and the resolution to the problem.  

If you are viewing this entry in an RSS reader, come on over to my blog and take a look at the new theme I installed today.  It is called 1BlogTheme and it was created by Javier Garcia.  It has a rich feature set that can be configured from the admin panel in the WordPress installation without having to delve into the mysteries of PHP.  Explore any of those new features that may interest you by clicking on some of the links that surround the post.  You won't hurt anything by doing so.  If you find you have displayed something (for instance, the list of Bookmark Services) and you can't get rid of it, just click on the link to Home above and everything will be restored to normal.  If anything seems to be broken for you as you surf around the site, let me know in the comments. 

One feature that attracted me to this theme was the dual sidebar which, as it turns out, can be displayed either at the right or the left, just by changing a setting on the setup page.  I've set it to display at the right because a number of my previous blog entries refer to something in the sidebar at the right.  The dual sidebar is, in fact, a triple pane because the main pane of the sidebar extends across the top of the other two columns (panes) of information.  At the moment that main pane displays the information contained in the About section, but any of the panes in the sidebar can be populated with any of the widgets that I might want to display there.

This theme looks more professional to me than my previous theme did.  And anyway I think it was time for me to make a change, if for no other reason than to make it more interesting for me to look at.  I have viewed this theme in IE7, in Firefox, and in Flock 1.0, and all of them seem to display everything about the same way.  Again, I would appreciate a comment from any of you who may use a different browser and see any idiosyncrasies in the new theme.   I can't guarantee that I can eliminate every unique quirk introduced by different browsers, but I will try to make it as inoffensive as possible.

Happy Birthday Dad

Originally uploaded by Dr Reelgood & Co..

On November 7th, Mike and Cheryl and their kids helped me celebrate my 66th birthday with a dinner at their home. Mike captured this official portrait of me posed before an assortment of cheeses and fruit that he had purchased for the occasion. It was a delicious and enjoyable way to celebrate my birthday. He suggested that the caption for the picture should be Dad cuts the cheese on his birthday, but in the end, he labeled it a bit more soberly.

On October 18, 2007, the newest distribution of Ubuntu (Version 7.10, code named «Gutsy Gibbon») was released, and I downloaded the ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso image and, after checking the MD5 checksum, burned it to CD.  I was able to use this Live CD to boot into the new version and install it on the Dell 4100 system I have here at home.  Because the checksum of the downloaded image verified and the Live CD works on my Dell system, I know there is nothing wrong with the CD itself.  I took the screen shot at the right showing the desktop with the included program, Tomboy, on the screen.  (If you click on the image above, a larger version will open and you can read the two open windows to learn what a neat little utility Tomboy is.) 

So having succeeded in installing this new version on the Dell, I decided that I'd boot the Live CD on my Sony system where I have my Windows XP installation to consider adding a Linux partition alongside my XP partition on the Sony machine, but that's where I ran into a brick wall.

On my Sony machine when I try to boot from the Live CD, I get a screen where I can choose to boot into the Live CD and then briefly there is an Ubuntu splash screen, after which the screen goes black and I get some text from BusyBox that says:

initramfs) [ 53.053436]  ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
ata1.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 cdb 0x0 daa 4096 in

This same exception keeps repeating and then the same command is reissued and I supposed it would go on indefinitely.  I have tried this multiple times, always with the same result.  I must power off the machine to stop it, remove the CD and then reboot into Windows.  The Live CD just won't seem to load on my Sony machine.

There are, of course, many differences between the two machines, and I suppose any one of them could account for what is causing the problem.  If you happen to have an idea about what my problem may be, I would appreciate your leaving a comment and pointing me to a resource on the Ubuntu forums or elsewhere that might direct me to a solution. 

Thanks for your help and advice.

This time Professor Wesch calls it Information R/evolution.

I've decided the embedded video is unacceptably slow here on my site, so click here to go to YouTube and watch it there. Like his previous video, it will be worth the effort because it illuminates and educates as it entertains. Here is what he says about it at the YouTube site:

This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.

The phrase «television worth watching» is almost an oxymoron nowadays, but this week PBS is airing «The War,» a documentary about World War II co-produced by the team of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.  Last night, I saw the first of the seven installments and that was enough to convince me that it is worth my time to watch this documentary.  If you'll visit this link you can click on «PBS Previews: The War» to see a 26:49 minute overview of the series, giving a glimpse of its goals and some insights about the making of the documentary, and if you bother to watch that 26+ minutes worth of introduction, I'm confident you too will be inspired to watch the series.  The next installment is presented here in the Eastern Daylight Saving Time Zone tonight at 8 PM on the local Public Broadcasting Station.  For more information about the series, you can check this PBS web site.

I've already given this idea to the on-duty manager of the grocery store where I shop but she probably filed it under looney ideas gleaned from talkative old men in the checkout line and did little or nothing else with it, so I'm offering it to any of my programmer friends who might want to make a name for themselves and in the process create a useful tool for crazies like me who look for innovative ways to use our Internet connection.  I, like most everybody else and maybe even you, dutifully hand the cashier my «value card» as he or she is about to ring up my purchases so that I can get the discounts that accrue from having given them my name and address and having allowed them to tag me with a unique Customer ID.  They use it, among other things, to print out a listing of the items I have purchased that day, neatly categorized into sections like Produce, Package Meat, Grocery, Frozen Food, Dairy, Candy/Gum, etc., and at the conclusion of that listing they announce that Your Savings Today was $7.48 on my most recent (9/16/07) expenditure of $56.66.  I walk away, informed and satisfied that it could have been at least $7.48 worse.

Now I'm reasonably sure that's not all they do with the information gathered from scanning the bar codes of my purchases and pairing them with my unique Customer ID.  Quite likely, they use the information to update their records that I made off with one bottle of Tide laundry detergent, thus depleting their supply, and conclude they should replenish that item at that particular store.  And throughout their supply chain they use my data to inform their business partners of my shopping behavior.  But as far as I am concerned, my data is lost forever in the supply chain.  It's not available for me to use any more.

So here's my idea.  Let me see the accumulated information the store collects on me.  Many of my purchases are cyclical.  For instance, I buy deodorant, shampoo, shaving cream, milk, and laundry detergent on some regular interval.  How often?  I don't know, but I'll bet the store knows, if they wanted to look.  They have a web site, and I'm pleased to report they do offer a way for me to look up weekly specials on that web site and create a shopping list from them.  But if I were able to log into their web site with my unique Customer ID (and a password I chose), I could discover it was about time for me to buy more shampoo or deodorant, and creating a shopping list on their web site would be enhanced by becoming a simple matter of checking off items and specific brands that I normally buy. 

To me, it seems there must be a database that contains all that information and it can't be all that difficult to make access to the data available on the web to the customer who helped to create it.  Or said in another way in the hypothetical words of Moses Schwartz, my local mythical grocer, «Let my data go.»  Make it easier for me to spend my money with you! And if you build it on the web, I promise you I will come.