by | December 16, 2013 · 6:22 pm

Charge it!

The recent cold snap has put a steady drain people, places, and things. People expended energy staying warm and removing snow. Snow removal budgets took a moderate hit with the ice and snow events last week. Vehicles bore the brunt of collisions and dead batteries. Dead batteries and car repairs added to the season’s financial drain. The longer nights make many people sluggish.

Cold weather also seems to put a charge in combs and doorknobs. Removing a sweater in a dark room results in a brief fireworks show. Sliding headlong into a solid object creates another fireworks display. Shaking hands can almost knock both people across the room. I remember one time I kissed Lucy without touching a metal object first. Her yelp of pain ensured I dissipated the static charge before touching her after that.

Car batteries come in a multitude of sizes and capacities. Cold weather reduces the effective capacity of a battery along with thickening up lubricants. I am trying to replace the battery in my car and am having difficulty finding a replacement, which no doubt adds to replacement cost. Even though the car is only five years old with very low mileage, it has a puny factory battery with a three-year lifetime. Another round of sub-zero weather may head my way for the holidays and I’d rather not hook up jumper cables in “can’t feel my face after ten seconds” weather.

Like a car battery, people also need recharging. Many of us build our lives on a “three-legged stool” of career, finances, and family (which can mean close friends in the case of a single person). If any one of these three areas is missing or out of balance, we experience heightened stress. Stress is physically and mentally draining. Careers are fickle especially in an impaired economy and are usually well outside our control. Finances are easier to manage but are subject to unforeseen events. Some families are dysfunctional or are emotionally distant. In a balanced life, we can recharge from each of the three areas although not at equal percentages. Some people have more stability in their careers and will draw most of their recharge from that. Others are financial wizards that can squeeze the optimal value from a dollar. Most of us have strong and supportive families.

How to recharge may change with age. For example, I was more career driven in my early 20’s, finance driven in my late 20’s, and family driven starting in my 30’s after I married Lucy. The important thing is figuring out how and when to recharge.

The holiday season is usually filled with hustle and bustle. Holidays affect work deadlines with increased workloads, decreased numbers of people in the office, or both. Work can also affect family gatherings if someone cannot get time off to make a trip. Shopping affects finances and free time. Planning family gatherings and outings sometimes seems like herding amphetamine abusing cats.  We try to make the most of our situations and get the maximum amount of happiness we can get.

Take time to recharge and enjoy some time with people who care about you. It will help to recharge you. Don’t use a credit card if it is whimpering, skulking, or smoldering from the last shopping excursion. Remember your priorities and from where you draw your strength. Give your special someone a meaningful hug, but please touch a metal object first!

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Filed under rebuilding, weather

by | December 3, 2013 · 8:06 pm

“You can fool all of the people some of the time…”

Relax, this isn’t a political rant, even though I am borrowing a line from Abraham Lincoln. It isn’t a complaint about Comcast’s lack of a Service Level Agreement for household Internet users since that was my last posting. It does sum up the frustration in the Twin Cities area about the rapidly changing weather forecasts for the next several days. Local urgent care centers are seeing an increase in whiplash injuries from people doing double-takes at the uncertainty of the snow line.

Between 5:00 am and 5:00 pm today (December 3), the forecast for my area went from less than an inch of snow to somewhere around five inches. There is now a Winter Storm Warning in effect because the snow line has moved about 100 miles farther south than originally estimated. Winter weather is more complex than summer weather when it comes to estimating precipitation amounts. In the summer, the primary precipitation is rain, with hail distantly (and thankfully) in second place. A 1°F temperature shift in the summer rarely affects precipitation quantity or type. In winter, that 1°F swing means the difference between plain old rain, freezing rain, or heavy and wet snow. Barometric pressure also subtly affects the freezing point of water.

Coping with impending lousy weather is stressful. Some people rely on television shows to help relax, but the broadcast networks are all in reruns already. Others hope to get out-of-town and head to a warm beach. Frozen precipitation causes delay problems and cancellations. Judging by the number of recipe and food picture postings on Facebook, others are coping by calorie loading. The old saying “Life is uncertain, eat dessert first” certainly applies.

I have not heard from my usual partners-in-crime what the “over/under” is for the difference between actual snowfall and forecast snowfall. My football forecast went into the tank when the Vikings won on Sunday, and I do no better than the weather wonks on the local TV stations at predicting the weather. My guess is there will be more freezing rain than snow and tomorrow’s commute will be miserable, at least for my end of the metro area. I hope those of you who must commute tomorrow depart from and arrive at home safely.

Our snowfall ending is also the end of average temperatures for at least a week. We could have four days of below zero lows (-18°C) Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Monday nights. By next Wednesday, the high temperature may stay below zero for the day. Homemade chili sounds like a good way to battle the cold weather. A little habañero sauce rather than chili powder and substituting ground turkey for ground beef should help with the calorie count. I know it will help with sweating off the calories. So will using the snow blower and shovel.

My Internet service is stable again. The new cable modem was defective. That still does not explain why I was having service problems for three days before the new cable modem arrived. It certainly appears a software update sent by Comcast caused the issue.

Give your loved ones a meaningful hug, stay warm, and stay safe. Faithful readers are hard to come by!

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Filed under rebuilding, weather

by | November 27, 2013 · 6:04 pm

“We are experiencing technical difficulties…”

Those of us “of a certain age” or older (born before Apollo 17, the final NASA manned moon landing) remember when a television network feed was interrupted by weather, solar flares, mechanical issues, or occasional human error. A “Please Stand By” graphic appeared on the TV screen and an announcer would intone in a deep, serious, ceremonial voice “We are experiencing technical difficulties…please stand by”. The announcement repeated every few minutes until the station either regained the feed or switched over to alternate programming. They acknowledged the problem, worked on a resolution, and used the announcement to let us know they had not forgotten about us.

Technology improvements through the decades have nearly rendered technical difficulties obsolete, at least for “Over The Air” (OTA) broadcasting. The same is not true for cable TV transmissions or streaming video. Once signal drop happens, there is no warning, no acknowledgement of a problem or a resolution; it just stops working. Compounding the matter is many cable subscribers have Internet, television, and telephone bundled together. When it works, it works well, but when it fails, it fails completely.

Business class Internet provider service level agreements (SLA) usually stipulate 99.9% availability. I was an IT manager for almost ten years and signed several of these agreements. Simple arithmetic shows that the 0.1% allowed downtime per day is 86.4 seconds (60 seconds per minute × 60 seconds per hour × 24 hours per day = 86,400 seconds; 0.1% = 0.001, so 0.001 × 86,400 = 86.4). During a standard contractual year of 365¼ days, the allowed downtime is 8 hours, 45 minutes, 57.6 seconds (86,400 seconds per day × 365.25 days per year = 31,557,600 seconds; 0.001 downtime is = 31,557.6 seconds; 31,557.6 ÷ 3600 seconds per hour = 8.766 hours).

Consumer class Internet service does NOT have SLAs. I have Comcast for my cable, Internet, and telephone services, and there is no uptime guarantee. If I need an uptime guarantee, I could upgrade to their Business Class services for considerably more money per month. I could not find consumer SLAs for Dish Network, Charter, Century Link, Frontier, or Knology, though it is possible SLAs exist. The providers assume “it just works” and that people can call in and navigate several minutes of automated phone before being queued to a human in a call center 10,000 miles away. After all, everyone has a smart phone and a smart phone provides voice service in the “unlikely” event something is amiss. This is not a rant against Comcast, for until last Friday they provided reliable service, and the replacement cable telephony modem appears to have solved my issues. However, I was surprised at the dearth of consumer SLAs for these services even though a consumer is locked into a contract for a prescribed time frame.

Service level agreements are based on trust. The service provider trusts the service they are providing meets or exceeds the SLA parameters. They trust outages rarely occur, but are quickly resolved, oftentimes with no noticeable interruption to the customer. The customer trusts the service provider to honor the SLA. Because of this trust, the business customer is allowing the service provider to handle a critical piece of the business’s communications infrastructure. It is puzzling why Comcast et al. do not seemingly trust their consumer services enough to back them with an SLA. Perhaps they know something that we do not know.

Trust is very important to us. We trust our family to nurture us and love us unconditionally, and I am fortunate that mine does. We trust health care providers to care for us when we are vulnerable because of illness or injury. We trust public safety to protect us when we are in peril. We trust a particular product brand because of reputation. We trust a service provider to provide the best possible service. Trust is difficult to earn and easy to destroy.

Finally, we trust our friends. Trust in our family may have its origins in preservation of the species, but we choose our friends, and we hope we choose them wisely. We trust our friends with critical pieces of our internal infrastructure: our hopes and dreams, our worries and fears, our strengths and weaknesses, our secrets. We trust our friends to cheer us up when we are feeling down, to celebrate our victories, to help us see things from a different perspective, to listen when we need to talk, and to be good company when we are lonely. There is no formal signed contract needed because our friends provide these services willingly. Any unresolved violation of our perceived terms of service result in the friendship terminating. This is why ending a friendship is almost as devastating as a loved one’s death. Our friends become part of us.

Thanksgiving is tomorrow in the United States. My post from last Thanksgiving is still timely. We should take time and be thankful for the people we chose as our friends, and for those people who trust us to be their friends. That trust helps us get through our life journeys.

Give your loved ones a meaningful hug, try to stay away from retailers open on Thanksgiving Day, stay warm, don’t eat too much, and celebrate your thankfulness for being together! If you have a friend or loved one who cannot be with family tomorrow, try to give that person a call or better yet, try to include that person in your celebration. Those people make your life better by being part of it, and that is definitely something to celebrate. You can trust me on that.

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Filed under family, friends, philosophy, rebuilding

by | November 20, 2013 · 9:33 pm

Oh, deer.

The month before Thanksgiving in the United States is usually the beginning of harvest season. Large tracts of former prairie land now filled with corn, soybeans, oats, or wheat also make ideal feeding grounds for deer. Deer hunting season and large, heavy harvesting equipment rumbling through tall corn leaving no cover, combine to pressure deer to move somewhere safer. Most of the crop harvesting along Interstate 90 in southern Minnesota is complete. It is not the most scientific surveying method, but the number of deer carcasses along the roadway shows the deer population is rebounding nicely. The live deer are harder to see because they are much farther from the freeway now, but they are out there, though I think many hunters may disagree.

Despite the size of their eyeballs, deer have terrible eyesight and their eyes are better suited for low light environments. Bright lights such as headlights temporarily blind a deer causing it to momentarily freeze while it tries to figure out how to see again. A vehicle moving at 70 mph covers 103 feet per second, and the average passenger car weighs ten times as much as an average deer meaning a collision results in major damage to the vehicle and serious or fatal injuries to the deer. Like deer, people freeze up when facing very bright lights, but we can use our arms or hands to shield our eyes. “Deer in the headlights” is a phrase used to describe someone freezing up in a critical situation.

We all have “deer in the headlights” moments: public speaking gaffes, first dates, forgetting one’s lines when acting in a play, the first day on a new job, a traumatic experience. Our moments usually end with maybe some embarrassment, or some ego bruising and loss of dignity, or laughs, or life lessons, but we are usually able to walk away intact, unlike the deer along the freeway. We have loved ones and friends to help us get through those moments, help with damage control, and help with getting us back on track. If not for those people, “deer in the headlight” moments are permanently damaging. Having those people in our lives gives us one more thing to be thankful for this holiday season.

Give your loved ones a meaningful hug and think of the times they helped during a “deer in the headlights” moment. Stay warm, and don’t stare directly into bright lights.

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Filed under family, friends, nature, philosophy, rebuilding

by | November 13, 2013 · 9:36 pm

The holidays are encroaching

Yes, the holidays are approaching. They are also encroaching, especially Christmas because of the shorter buying season this year. Home Depot already had a Christmas display by October 20th. You really are seeing Christmas promotions coming earlier every year. It is encroaching even more into autumn (in this hemisphere).

Thanksgiving in the United States is the fourth Thursday of November. Many companies also close the day after Thanksgiving, so people can enjoy a four-day weekend. Retailers realized that people enjoying a day off might have reason to go shopping with proper incentives. Wikipedia has a detailed definition and explanation of “Black Friday” for those of you living outside the United States or want more detail.

The latest date for the fourth Thursday, the 28th, occurs when the 1st is on a Friday, like November 1, 2013. The earliest date for the fourth Thursday, the 22nd, occurs when the 1st falls upon a Thursday, like November 1, 2012. Those extra six days of shopping season are very welcomed by retailers. Fast food and casual food restaurants also see a noticeable increase in sales during that period.

Stores opening on Thanksgiving Day is a recent development. There are businesses that traditionally have been open on Thanksgiving: gas stations, convenience stores, pharmacies, and restaurants. But retail stores like Target, Best Buy, Gap, and Wal-Mart would close. Unfortunately, the shortened shopping season is resulting in more retail chains opening on Thanksgiving Day itself, with some opening as early as 6:00 p.m. They believe if they are open, people will come.  My hope is that their Thanksgiving Day sales volume will not justify opening on Thanksgiving Day next year.

I had the misfortune of working for two small companies that did not close the day after Thanksgiving. I was lucky because Lucy and I would have a quiet Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, then we traveled an hour to my brother’s house on Friday evening to be with my family, but it was still a nuisance not getting that Friday off. Some of my co-workers had family out-of-state or out-of-country. Traveling to Asia is much easier with four days off rather than a weekend. This year it directly affects a close friend who will be unable to travel back to Illinois to be with family. I know it will also affect a niece and a sister-in-law.

As long as people are willing to stand in lines waiting for a chance at acquiring a loss leader item in extremely limited supply, the retailers will keep pushing “Black Friday” open times earlier into Thanksgiving Day. People should choose to be with family on Thanksgiving rather than wade through a sea of crazed shoppers only to go home empty-handed.

While the big-box retailers are participating in their “social experiment”, a different social experiment started in 2010. Small businesses are at a disadvantage to the big-box stores.The idea behind “Small Business Saturday” was to level the playing field a bit. It is ironic that American Express championed the idea. American Express usually has the highest per transaction “swipe” fee and charges the highest merchant fee of the major credit card brands. This years’ Small Business Saturday is the Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 30th. Even if you are not an American Express card member, please take the time to shop at a small business. Check out the Shop Small map to find participating businesses. I hope to visit Carver Country Flowers, Gifts & Formal Wear and say hi to Annette.

I have my outdoor Christmas lights installed. It doesn’t take very long, and I try to do it the first weekend in November. Putting lights up in 50 degree weather is better than putting up lights in 20 degree weather and standing in snow. Lucy would insist the lights stay off until the day after Thanksgiving. That is when I will plug in the outdoor light timer. The Christmas tree gets installed the Saturday or Sunday after Thanksgiving. Perhaps I’ll try making piirakkas and red velvet cakes again this year. Julie and Suzy survived my last batch of baking with no ill effects, and they’re still talking to me.

Give your special someone an extra hug tonight. I know some of you have a loved one away from home, so surprise him or her with a phone call, text message, or email. Stay warm and thank you for your time!

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Filed under family, friends, philosophy, rebuilding