Marcy Kellar has been trying to convince SharePoint folks to jump for joy – or just because they’re intoxicated. So when Andrew Connell came up to do the SharePoint Users Group of Indiana (SPIN) she convinced a few of us to have our pictures taken. Despite not having anything alcoholic to drink, I decided to be a good sport and jump.
I did an interview with Beth Schultz that appears on TechTarget. In the interview I talk about the book, governance, and a bit about my video project.
So twice in the space of a day I’ve been confronted by some dodgy information about DPI – Dots Per Inch – and about how it applies to the world. Let me first say, that I think that thinking about DPI is about the dumbest thing the desktop publishing industry has inflicted upon us. I say that because it’s a useless number on its own. Let’s say, for instance, that I scan something at 300 DPI. Can you tell me if it will fill a modern screen? No – you can’t. You can’t do that until I tell you how large the original scan was. If it was more than about 3 inches by 2.5 inches, it will fill a 1024×768 monitor.
The real answer when dealing with graphics is knowing how many pixels (individual dots) you need in order to fill the area you want to fill. DPI is the measure of the maximum resolution of the output in a given space. i.e. 300DPI means that you can fit 90,000 pixels in a 1″ square (300×300 = 90,000) If I want to be able to output at full resolution I need a file with a resolution of at least the number of inches times the DPI.
The good news is that people rarely talk about DPI when talking about digital photos … until someone with a desktop publishing background steps in the room. Digital cameras are measured in megapixels (or resolution not pixels per inch.) Occasionally you’ll hear folks talk about 72 DPI screen images – however, this is a misnomer on the PC since the resolution and screen size are not tightly coupled. My 15.4″ Lenovo laptops 1920×1200 screen has a different number of DPI than the 26″ external monitor I connect it to – but both have the same resolution.
Typically when you hear DPI, You heard about it from people talking about a setting for scanning. The interesting thing is that oversampling (scanning at a higher DPI than the output device could produce) can cause some real ugly scans – and some problems for trying to get an image to look right. If you know the resolution of the output device you should match that in order to get the best results. Having a bigger file with a higher resolution generally doesn’t do much harm – but it generally doesn’t do much good either.
So … PLEASE don’t talk about DPI. Talk about the resolution you need.
For the last few days I’ve been riding ATVs with my friend Paul Thomas. I’ve been posting a smattering of photos on Facebook. The scenery has been beautiful but the trip hasn’t been just about the photos or the riding, it has been a chance for me to recharge and to reflect. During the riding I’ve noticed a few things that apply to my day-to-day in the grind professional world as much as they do to the riding.
Things look different on the way down. I don’t mean that from the perspective of falling from grace, but rather looking at things from the top just isn’t the same as looking at them on the way up. You just don’t see the same things. You sometimes see more and you sometimes see less. However, fundamentally, you’ll see something different. I can’t tell you the number of times over the last few days that I’ve completely missed something going up the trail and saw it plain as day on the way back down. You come around a corner that you had your back to and have to say “Wow!”
Here’s an extreme example of a different view on the way up vs. on the way down. Here’s the photo on the way up:
Here’s the same location from the top:
There’s a dramatic difference. From the top you can’t really tell what’s going on down there. The building looks like it is leaning but it looks like it is leaning back not forward and ready to roll down the mountain.
I bring this up because too many people believe that it’s impossible for the folks at the top to not see the problem. The problems of the organization seem so obvious for those who are there – how could anyone miss it. Well, hopefully as these photos have shown, it’s not that they don’t see the problem; it’s just that they see the problem differently.
So what do you do about it? Communicate. Help your manager understand what you’re seeing and accept that what they’re seeing is very different. You may not be able to see the situation from their perspective, but hopefully you can appreciate that they do have a different perspective.
This difference in perspective isn’t constrained to just management – different parts of the organization will see things from a different point of view and therefore have different concerns. Hopefully you’ll be able to see that they have different perspectives too.
Recently I posted The Top Four Most Common Corporate Delusions. I then got on a plane with a buddy of mine to go ATV riding in Colorado and he added two more to the list. (Email me if you have your own to add to the list.)
His addition for fifth place is: “We have good people.” Ouch. This one seems to me like it’s personal. Unfortunately, he’s right. There’s this general disconnect between sagging stock prices, tumbling profits, and the realization that there can really only be one explanation within an organization – it’s people. Ask someone if they’ve ever worked with someone that they felt didn’t deserve their job and you’re sure to get a yes if they’ve had a job. (Be careful about asking this in state and local government, you may get hit as they instinctively raise both hands and then start hopping up and down like a jack Russell terrier.)
More importantly folks can either blame the organization as a whole (including its systems and people) or directly blame people for the relative success. The seemingly obvious escape clause to blame the organization doesn’t really work – because the organization has been created by its people and thus they’re ultimately responsible.
In the successful organizations I’ve seen a lot of emphasis placed on hiring the right people. One successful organization was interviewing me for a director level position and we spent about 6 weeks before I decided it wasn’t for me. (This was back when I was considering working for an organization.)
The addition for sixth place is: “We’re Competitive.” This one is a little bit harder to address because being competitive in the market means being well suited for competition and it’s hard to determine what might make you well suited for competition. For instance, Indiana, where I live, is located in the center of the country. Today it’s a transportation hub with good interstates and plenty of logistics companies. However in the late 1800’s there was still some development needed. Indiana didn’t have a canal system like some of the neighboring states so we were missing out on the canal traffic. Unfortunately by the time that Indiana got around to building the canal the railroad had been invented and all but killed the use of canal shipping – invalidating a huge amount of capital the state had spent to develop the system and as a result bankrupt the state. (Ouch.)
Canal shipping was quite competitive in the pre-railroad days. However, in the post railroad days it just simply wasn’t the most effective way to get goods from one place to another. Most organizations don’t face this sort of radical transformation in the industry all that often – but they do happen. So what’s competitive today may not be competitive tomorrow. (How’s that for a happy thought?)
We sometimes delude ourselves that the number of sales is the only metric that matters. That if someone buys our product or service – we must be competitive. However, that’s not necessarily true. Everyone gets lucky. Every buyer ends up buying something that isn’t the best deal at some point. (Don’t think used car salesman – please.) When transformations hit an industry they can be quick or slow – but it’s likely that you won’t see the change until much later than you want.
The only way to keep competitive is to behave like you’re never competitive enough – constant, relentless improvement won’t guarantee that your product won’t become uncompetitive (the best canal system in the world wasn’t going to compete with the railroad), however, it makes it more likely you’ll see the change, redefine yourself as a transportation company, and start building railroad lines.
Delusion is a strong word. It’s a word used in psychology for “a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact.” It is a word associated with disorder. I use that word here to describe the beliefs of some organizations because I see these things as so wrong, so completely incompatible with reality that I wonder how it’s possible that anyone in an organization can possibly believe them.
I should say that not all corporations share these delusions and I should also say that the larger the corporation is the higher the probability is that they have them. I’ve been doing consulting for a long time so I’ve had the good fortune to work with many different organizations. In that time I’ve run into all sorts of structures, people, and delusions.
Here are the four most common corporate delusions from my observations:
I’m going to dive into each one of these delusions and expose why they are so insidious.
Having been a consultant full time or part time for the better part of 20 years, I’ve got to say to everyone: You are unique. You are special. You just as unique or special as you believe you are. I’m sure you’ve run into challenges that no one else has. However, that’s the exception. It’s not the rule. You don’t pave every path. If you did you’d never get anything done. (See item #2.)
Here’s the problem. Because you believe that you’re unique you don’t listen to experience. You hire experts to come in and help you with your problems. They produce beautiful full color reports, graphs, and presentations. You applaud the research. Your marvel at the insight. However, in the end when it comes to implementing what the consultants have recommended someone stands up and says “that may work for the industry, but it doesn’t work for us” and the plans get put on hold until someone can quell the objection – but no one can. The problem is that everyone wants to believe their organization is unique. They want to believe that their organization is special. How can you prove – without implementing – that the recommendation isn’t right?
In the end, the nay sayers freeze progress. So if you’re smart you’ll actually implement the expensive advice that you’ve paid for.
We want to believe that we get things done. Each of us processes our mail. We attend the company meetings. We do the required training on sexual harassment. (We should be REALLY good at it by now.) We go to the implementation meetings for the strategy (or insight) in the last book the CEO read. However, if you take a step back you’ve got to wonder. What actually gets done?
Do you deliver the projects that you’re working on “on time”? What about “on budget”? Do you walk into meetings where people around the table whine about the number of meetings and the lack of time to get things done – in order to support the fact that they didn’t get their action items for the team done? Does anyone ever wonder why you need so many meetings? Could it be because you have to have the same meeting over-and-over again because team members don’t get their action items done? Could it be that we don’t do what we know we should do – document decisions, issues, action items, and risks?
We are busy. That’s easy. The question is whether we’re getting things done. In most large organizations, I can say that things don’t get done. Projects just slowly take longer than planned. They release with half the features. In the end everyone has a party and drinks enough to not remember what they had originally planned. (I believe this is why many project charters end up missing.)
Some organizations have implemented Six Sigma, Project Management Offices, Project Dashboards, and other techniques to keep projects from falling off into oblivion. These organizations have made it much harder to avoid accountability – good for them. However, somewhere along the way they’ve sanitized the sanity right out of the process. Some of my clients won’t accept invoices via email. Why? That’s a great question – and one that no one can really explain. Some claim it is compliance. (Yet, SOX doesn’t have a requirement to kill trees – although admittedly it’s good at that.) Others claim “we just don’t do things that way” – with echoes of “We’re unique and special.”
In the end, the organization ends up making copies of documents, mailing them across the country to be signed and returned. Checklists are created to manage the documents that are out for review. Reminder mails are sent to indicate that the required approvals haven’t been provided yet – and the machine churns on and on and on. We know that these processes aren’t efficient but no one is willing to stick their neck out to fix them. The delusion that the organization is effective remains.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t executive retreats where some high priced consultant comes in to draw arrows and blindfolds the whole team and ask them to grope around the room. (Now you know why there are so many sexual harassment training sessions.) That isn’t to say that there isn’t some super-secret lofty strategy of how the organization is going to dominate the world by building a better mouse trap. However, implementing any of the important stuff that would really drive the business forward tends to get stalled. The transmission between the strategy and the tactics break down and at some level the same things are discussed at a new resort with a new consultant the next year.
The organization should be constantly evaluating its processes to identify which ones are helping it to be effective and which ones are creating work for people who don’t need it. Remember we’re all too busy. We need to make it clear how to implement the strategies that will drive the organization forward by converting them to specific tactics and assigning those tactics to specific people.
Somehow when I entered the business world I developed this mistaken impression that corporations actually knew what they did. I couldn’t have been more wrong. When the ISO9000 craze hit manufacturing I was blown away. When I got into it I realized that really all ISO9000 said was … “say what you do and do what you say.” I thought this was plainly obvious. (I’m glad they didn’t have to tell us to breathe.) In my work with clients I get to work on workflows. I get to ask them to describe their processes so that I can automate them. If would frighten you to know how many corporate “processes” aren’t processes at all. Instead they’re a loose collection of steps that most people “sort of” understand.
I’ve walked into meetings and watched spectacular fights erupt as different business users argued vehemently about how a process worked – or didn’t. I’ve seen just short of literal fist fights as people had been working a process for years and fundamentally didn’t agree on how it worked – let alone why it was being done. I often ask questions and get answers of “I don’t know” – when I’m asking simple things like what happens when something doesn’t fit the process. There’s no standard procedure for handling exceptions – or even recognizing that an exception has happened. (That’s why you should be prepared to follow up on anything important.)
At a high level most organizations understand their large processes. However, the devil really is in the details. They can’t tell you what happens when they receive an invoice that doesn’t have a valid PO# or contact person on it. (Actually, I believe they are routed into special micro black holes that the accounting department has.) Ask what happens when a shipment arrives that no one authorized. Ask what happens to a customer order when the order was accepted but the customer is over their credit limit.
Organizations need to understand their processes – enough that they can figure out what things are falling out, what things are taking too much time, and where they can optimize.
These delusions aren’t actually that hard to resolve – they’re all solvable by holding people accountable for improvement. You see. You can’t hire high priced consultants in to produce reports and then not do anything about them if you’re accountable for those funds. You can’t fail to be productive and effective and not create improvement. You can’t improve until you know what you’re doing.
Startlingly, few managers are willing to deal with the backlash that will come when people are actually held accountable for what they do or don’t get done – that is until the board has to hire a turnaround specialist to bail the organizations out before it goes out of business for good. (When faced with job loss most people will do what it takes to be successful – even if it means being held accountable.)
To be clear, I’m not attacking specific organizations. I’m not saying everyone has these problems. I’m saying I’ve seen these things more than I should have in my experience. I’m also not saying that small businesses have a lock on the world of doing things right. I make plenty of my own mistakes. I have plenty of my own delusions – however, hopefully I’ll listen as my friends, partners, customers, and vendors point them out to me.
Astute observers of this blog may have noticed that I not too long ago posted a note that I’m using a Lenovo T61p. (Coincidentally nearly one year ago.) However, I’ve got another notebook that I use now, a Lenovo X200 Tablet. The reason for the ADDITIONAL (not replacement) notebook takes a moment to explain. Obviously, I’m preparing for the SharePoint 2010 release. SharePoint 2010 is 64 bit only. Running a virtual machine as a 64 bit guest requires HyperV or VMWare. HyperV requires Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2. That means many of the client applications that I run on a day-to-day basis won’t install cleanly. Add to that issue the fact that once the HyperV role is installed your notebook will no longer hibernate or go into standby and you can see how things might be a bit difficult to use. Of course, at this point I’m likely settled on VMWare Workstation for my T61p for the reasons listed above – however, I need to keep my options open for running HyperV machines. That means I need to plan on something different for my day-to-day computing.
I looked at some NetBook type computers like the Asus eee PC, however, I felt like this was just too small and not powerful enough for my day-to-day computing. I realize that Word, Internet Explorer, PowerPoint, etc, aren’t necessarily all that demanding from the perspective of computational power. However, I also wanted to be able to do light development on the system – just stuff to play with not real projects. This means that a NetBook just didn’t seem right.
The idea of a tablet computer to me has always seemed sort of silly. They’re typically underpowered compared to their notebook cousins and are a little more expensive. As I dug into this some more I realized that while both of these statements are true, they’re not *as* true as they used to be. The X200 I have seems quite snappy. The Core2Duo it runs is nearly as fast as the one in my T61p. The X200 was definitely more expensive than a Netbook but no more expensive than most of my other laptops have been. The funny thing is, however, that I’ve used the machine as a tablet much more than I would have thought.
I’ve used Microsoft OneNote as a tool for taking notes for a while. Back in 2006 I wrote an article about it for requirements gathering. I knew that it had direct support for inking on a tablet – but I didn’t think it would be that valuable. (Anyone who’s seen my handwriting can explain why.) What I found, however, is that where it’s perfectly acceptable to everyone to take notes on a tablet (PC or paper) it’s less acceptable to type notes into a laptop. There’s that natural barrier of the screen between you and the person you’re talking to – so it’s not the best for getting folks to open up. With all of that all being said, I’ve been really pleased with the experience of inking on the X200. It’s smooth – and it even recognizes some of my handwriting. I’ve also been using it just for sketching out ideas for myself. It’s been really handy as I’ve wanted to send notes off to folks to get their ideas. Even the process of requirements gathering has been good because I can sketch out screens and send them to clients.
I admit I do have one problem with the unit. I bought a multi-touch screen which by definition should mean pressure sensitive. Tablet’s primary method of determining the location of a pen is electro-magnetic resonance (EMR) which means a special pen. However, the multi-touch screens are supposed to support touch as well because EMR doesn’t make the most sense with multiple points of contact. Of course, I’m running Windows 7 and the drivers aren’t quite caught up yet. Where does this really matter? When I am reading PDFs as I’ll explain in a moment. It would be really cool to be able to gesture on the screen in PDF reader view.
All in all I’ve carried this notebook by itself … no power cord… no mice… no extras of any kind … to client meetings with confidence. Confidence I’d have the battery power to continue working and confidence that I’d have what I need. It’s a bit heavier than the Tree of Life Leather Writing Journal that I normally carry for notes. (which is in and of itself beautiful), however, being able to just carry the notebook vs. the whole backpack of stuff is a great leap forward. I should say that I do still take notes in my journal from time to time – but I find that I don’t go back into the journal like I go back into one note—and I’ve got stacks of old notebooks with notes and lists that I’ll never look at again.
One of the challenges with having multiple machines is keeping your files in sync across them. That’s where Microsoft’s Live Mesh comes in. It transparently synchronizes files between all of your machines and a data center in the cloud so that you don’t even have to think about whether you have the right files on your machine or not. It takes a few minutes after saving your file before it’s visible on another computer and slightly less to be accessible via the web interface – but it’s fast enough for most situations.
Live Mesh only allows 5GB of storage right now – but I’m expecting that once it’s out of beta it will allow you to purchase more storage. Not only does it solve my synchronization need it solves a disaster recovery backup need. (If I do something stupid and delete a file it will delete it from all – so it’s not a complete solution.)
Another thing that’s cool is that it will allow you to invite others to your folders. I invite my assistant to some of the folders so that she can proofread my documents.
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about is how the Tablet PC (with appropriate price reductions) might be a Kindle killer. Why? Well, there are a handful of things that make the Kindle interesting. Not the least of which is the ability to read on screen. The tablet PC supports screen rotation so you can get a portrait view rather than a landscape one. That’s a good starting point. The second piece of the puzzle is the reader view in Acrobat. It allows you to tap on the screen to advance to the next page. It would be great if this could just take gestures on the screen w/ touch instead of the pen to advance and turn back pages. A 12.1″ screen on a tablet is larger than that of a Kindle (6″) or the Kindle DX (9.7″) and oh yea, it’s in color.
The other ideas of a Kindle are the ability to wirelessly download new content. That Tablet PC is on par here – except for the software.
The final area where the Kindle does still hold a slight advantage is battery life. I’m getting between 4-5 hours of battery life from my tablet where the reported battery life is much longer.
All in all, my decision to purchase the tablet pretty much negates any chance of getting a Kindle unless it’s given to me.
So my input is … give the tablet a try. It might just be it’s time. It might be the next step past a NetBook.
[Update: I just stumbled across an old article I wrote for TechRepublic on the Tablet PC. It’s worth a read. ]
In this four part series on performance we’ve reviewed the fundamentals of assessing performance including using the tools built into Windows to make these assessments. We’ve covered the considerations for session state, and we’ve walked through the benefits and problems with caching. However, we’ve not covered in detail what to do once you’ve assessed performance or how to leverage what you’ve learned about session state and caching to solve real world problems. In this article we’ll be focused on isolating problems into solvable units and what to do when you believe that things just can’t fixed.
If you’ve found out that you have a performance problem and have managed to isolate it as a CPU problem on the web front end servers, then what? The answer — no matter what you’ve isolated the problem to — is to continue to isolate it further until you no longer can. In most cases, the process of improving performance is about 90% finding the problem and 10% fixing the problem. So the most coarse metrics — those we talked about in the first part of this article series — are the first step on looking at the problem to determine what it may be. By implementing these metrics at each server in a system it is usually, but not always, possible to determine the key bottleneck for a system.
Read More at http://www.developer.com/design/article.php/3832961
For this to make sense you’ll have to realize that I started building a video studio in mid-December of 2008 — over six months ago. Since that time I’ve covered a lot of logistical challenges in an attempt to get the first video offering, The SharePoint Shepherd’s Video Academy for Planning and Governance together. Since I’ve started I’ve dealt with issues in getting a good quality product by working through issues with Sony Vegas and how you can import text from PowerPoint. I’ve even gone over the top to have a teleprompter custom built to allow me to read from directly in front of the camera so my eyes don’t shift.
One of the problems that I never expected was to have problems with the desktop PCs that I am using to repack and process the video. I started trying to do the video processing on my Lenovo T61p ThinkPad. Although it’s a great notebook the idea that you would process video on it is a bit ill advised (which is why I think I tried it.) So I found a deal at eCost.com on a refurbished HP Pavilion m9350f machine. It is a quad core machine with 6GB of RAM running Vista x64. The deal was around $660 delivered. Certainly the machine wasn’t the latest and greatest, fastest machine on the planet but for the price , there’s just no way to beat the deal. And for my purposes I rationalized that I could buy a second one and get better than the performance of the best desktop systems today for less cost than buying one “monster” system today.
Things went well for about the first month. I had managed to get Vista upgraded from Home Premium (which the system shipped with) to Vista Ultimate. (Here’s a hint, uninstall the XPS viewer before trying to do the upgrade.) I had installed all of the software I needed from Office 2007, Adobe CS4 Standard, Sony Vegas, etc. I had started processing the video on it and then one morning in early February the performance of the system copying from the camera dropped from 20MB/second to 2MB/second. Houston we’ve got a problem.
I won’t bore you with the details of the four hours of troubleshooting I went through via chat to get the problem resolved. I can say that when diagnostics pass and yet things aren’t right — well, it’s hard to explain that. I got to the end and was told that it would take 7-8 business days to repair the system from the day that I shipped it out — and that they had to ship me a box so I could ship the computer to their repair facility.
Ouch. That means I’d effectively be without the computer for two weeks. However, it gets worse than that. When they went to check the warranty status (on a computer I had owned for about 30 days) they told me the warranty was expired. It was an issue with the machine because it was refurbished. I was told that I needed to send an email to the proof of purchase team with my invoice and within 4-6 hours I’d have to call back in to process the warranty repair.
I called in 6 hours later (by navigating through a byzantine automated operator) and was told that no proof of purchase didn’t take 4-6 hours, it took 24-72 hours but they would call me each day to check in with me on the status. (Hey, there’s a novel customer service concept, don’t make your users keep checking with you for status.) I agreed and subsequently received calls the first two days. The first day I got the call and was busy so I quickly dismissed the call figuring that it didn’t matter that much. Why?
Because at this point I had ordered a second computer from eCost. Two weeks was too long for a project I was trying to have done in two weeks. (Which is somewhat laughable now because several months later I still don’t have the project done and I don’t even have a good feel for the timeline.)
On day two of their call backs, I missed the call. OK, I was ready to charge a windmill. It was 2.5 days and I still couldn’t get them to ship me a box so I could ship the computer to them. I called back in and told them I was done, that we needed to solve the problem now. I was of course told that they couldn’t do that. I was told that they couldn’t transfer me to the proof of purchase team. At this point I’m thinking, “Hey the economy is bad but surely you can afford phones for these people.”
I explained that I felt like they weren’t honoring their warranty. I even went and filled out a Federal Trade Commission consumer complaint and told them I was about to hit submit. (You can understand how much time I’m spending talking to folks by the fact I was able to fill out a government form while speaking with them.) I ended up hitting submit and asking for a manager when I was told for like the 12th time that they couldn’t help me.
The manager proceeded to tell me the same thing — that they couldn’t get me to the proof of purchase team and that he couldn’t help me. Before disconnecting he asked if I was “satisfied” — which is laughable since he was saying that he couldn’t help me — How could I have possibly been satisfied?
At this point, I cheated. I went to the HP web site and got to the press relations person and sent her an email explaining that I was preparing to write a blog post titled “HP Doesn’t Honor It’s Warranties” and asked if she had a comment.
I got three responses the next day. One from the proof of purchase team — who apparently was confused because no one had ever tried to send them a PDF of their invoice before they expected it on the fax machine. I got a call from HP’s PR firm to tell me that normally HP does a great job at service but they’re always trying to learn and improve. (Really, that’s surprising from a PR firm.) Finally, I got a call from a guy who offered to “do what it takes” to get the warranty repair setup.
A few days later I got the box, shipped out the first unit, and was happily setting up the second computer that I had purchased. That was until it started having random lockup issues. Back to technical support only to be told that upgrading to Vista Ultimate wasn’t supported (the box remember shipped with Home Premium.) I was told the drivers wouldn’t be installed right — I explained it was an in place upgrade. After many hours of chatting I finally was able to determine that there was no way to do a burn-in test with the diagnostics they provided. I could run things through once and they figured if that passed then the system must be good. (Wrong.)
With some help from some of my buddies at Internet.com I found Sandra diagnostics. Although this wouldn’t run from a Linux boot (like I had hoped) it does do burn in tests. So I restored the system to factory condition and installed Sandra. Of course, a short time after starting the test the system locked up.
Another call to Jeff from HP (the guy who said he’d “do what it takes”) and I ended up sending this computer off. I’ll spare you some of the communications gaffs that took days to resolve.
So now, I’m in this project and I’ve got two computers both of which are at HP at the same time for repair. This was mid-February. My goal was the first of March for the MVP summit in Redmond.
Eventually the machines returned and I was back in town. I started working on the first machine and didn’t really notice any issues. (Aside from upgrading Vista again.) The second machine arrived and it had the same random lockup issues that it had when it left. As a point of fact it wouldn’t even complete the out-of-box setup. That prompted me to look at the first machine more closely and when I did I realized that they had mis-partitioned the hard drive so that I didn’t have access to 120GB of storage. I asked for a new hard drive for it and for another box for the second machine.
Instead of a hard drive for the first machine I got a box to send it back. Not what I wanted but whatever. The second system’s box to ship it back came as well. I sent them both off. The second machine had a very large note about running burn in diagnostics. It wasn’t bordering on obnoxious at this point I was all over being obnoxious to get what I needed.
Both machines have arrived again. The first system was finally correct. The second system has the same random lockup issues. I’ve been promised a replacement system but I’ve not seen it yet and Jeff, the escalation engineer, who had once committed to making things right has not yet figured out how to get the replacement processed. He’s been late on all of his commitments except for the first one. To the point where I’ve recopied the PR firm more than once about responsiveness issues.
So, he’s my perspective on what went wrong in the process and what HP needs to do to resolve what I see as some major customer service problems:
Interestingly the end of the story has a happy ending. Even though the first machine ended up having the same hard drive performance issues. Even thought it took me over a month. HP eventually bought both systems back and I built my own system from parts. The machine I built has a few quirks (mostly related to energy management — which given the machine is only powered up to do heavy lifting with video, I don’t care about.) The machine was much more expensive but also much more powerful.
Where am I with HP? Well, on the one hand I struggle with the quality problems that plagued the hardware I had. I’m disturbed that the repair process was completely ineffective. I’m shocked that even the escalated status of my case still meant weeks and weeks of waiting. (It was 14 calendar days of waiting since the second repair was ineffective when we finally processed the buy-back instead of looking for replacement systems.) On the other hand, with a few months of reflection (and sitting on this blog post) I am troubled that there’s an organization that is trying to do the right thing but is so caught up in the market and what the market is trying to do to step outside and see the really bad service that they’re giving their customers and the impact that it will have on their long term viability. (Just ask Packard Bell, Gateway, Acer, etc.) I want them to be successful — on the server side of the business they make good stuff. Hopefully they’ll figure out the issues with their desktop PC business and grow.
A few weeks back I was doing a recording for a buddy of mine and unplugged my Edirol R-09HR sound recorder… and for whatever reason it powered off immediately. Yes there were batteries in it but it decided that it just wanted shut off immediately. The problem is that it was still recording a file. Making things a tad bit more annoying, it corrupted the WAV file it was writing. None of the tools that I had wanted to read the wave file because the sizes that are supposed to be written into the header never got written.
I ended up doing some research on the WAV file format and wrote a utility that sets the two lengths that are required in the header based on the file length. If anyone else needs this send me an email and I’ll send you a copy (to use at your own risk.) The utility does at least verify that the file is a WAV file — but it could still be pretty destructive. It would be really nice if the audio editing software would just allow you to fix this on the fly when you open it since it has to be a fairly common problem when the recording is interrupted. Of course, the tools don’t do that. The fix that I’m doing in this program is painfully simple. I’m comparing the length of the file and using that to write out the header values. Every one of the tools that I tried to use, including my preferred audio editor Sound Forge, refused to fix the file. There were tons of tools that claimed to fix WAV files but the “obvious fix” for the header wasn’t one of the supported fixes.
For me this was an annoyance. It was something that took me a few hours to fix. (I had to remember my binary file reading skills and find an accurate format for the WAV file.) However, it occurred to me that someone who wasn’t a developer — and a developer with a background in reading binary files — would have been completely stuck. Something that is relatively easy would be a seemingly insurmountable challenge. The good news is that the invention of the Internet is making it easier to address these issues (with a bit of luck someone with a corrupt WAV file will be able to email me and I can send them the fix tool.)
In a strikingly similar situation I wrote a tool a few weeks ago for a good friend of mine. He had been using Windows Media Player to index his music files. He plays the part of a DJ occasionally and needed a print out that he could hand party goers in an attempt to help them pick a song that he had. Strangely, Media Player doesn’t have a way to print out a list of the songs that it has in its index. This was painful enough for him that he was willing to pay my hourly rate to build him a tool to get the data out — and he knows what my hourly rate is. So I needed a distraction from some of the other stuff I was doing so I picked up the Windows Media Player 9 Series SDK. 45 minutes later I had a working tool that would create a CSV file from all of the data in the Windows Media Player Library. To be clear, it’s not what I would call commercial grade software. It requires that you run as an administrator. It doesn’t filter out the library for you — the library contains stuff other than music like photos. It also dumps literally every field of data in the library — including a lot of duplicate data. However, 45 minutes of work removed the essential barrier that he was having to being able to have a listing to take to his gigs. (If you want this tool email me and I’ll get it to you — the same thing applies here. Use at your own risk and there is no support.)
My point is to say that a few hours of development can make the insurmountable seem possible. There are things that just simply can’t be done without writing a little bit of code — and neither of these utilities would be considered good from a software development perspective. They’re hacks. They’re not elegant — however, they get the job done. Sometimes developers get caught up in creating the big solutions — the massive architectures — and we forget that any solution is sufficient. I’m going to be thinking about that “less is more” thing for a while…