Robert's Blog

The Evils of Paperless Billing

2010-03-26T10:59:00.000-07:00

Being someone who spends a lot of time on a computer and is concerned about our environment, I have paperless billing set up on all of my accounts. I recently have had the worst experience of my life in trying to get a copy of my most recent statement to file an expense report.

I am a Verizon FIOS Internet only customer. That sounds like a lot of extra information but it is important to this story as you will come to discover. Yesterday, I went to http://www.verizon.net to log in and get a copy of my billing statement to submit with my expense report. I was able to log in just fine, I can even see the list of statements with the nice little "View as PDF" and "View as Text" links. Unfortunately, when I click on "View as PDF", the web site responds with a very informative "The tool is currently unavailable!!" message, and "View as Text" responds with an even more informative "Request Unsuccessful" message. So, I decided to try to actually call Verizon Customer Service to get help, and so my saga begins.

For those of you who have never dealt with Verizon, they try very hard to prevent you from talking to an actual person by forcing you through a complex set of voice menus. Yesterday afternoon, I spent 90 minutes or so of my time talking to half a dozen different people and I was no closer to resolution.

Today, I decided to document my saga and so begins the journey. I called the Customer Support number and after going through the series of voice prompts, ended up at Customer Service. I explained to the person what my problem was and they told me that I needed to speak with online tech support, so they transferred me and thanked me for choosing Verizon. When the online tech support person came on the line, they told me that they only supported verizon.com and not verizon.net (where FIOS Internet only customers must go to get their bill) and that I needed to speak with FIOS technical support. Of course, FIOS technical support wanted to troubleshoot my Internet connectivity and when I explained the problem, they told me that they couldn't help me.

By this time, I was getting pretty frustrated, as you can imagine, so I asked to speak with a supervisor. The rep told me that the supervisor could call me back or that he could transfer me to an escalation specialist. I opted for the escalation specialist. When I spoke to the escalation specialist, he told me there was nothing he could do and that I needed to speak to billing. I reluctantly agreed to allow him to transfer me to "billing". The person that picked up the phone was a switchboard operator who asked me where she could direct my call (maybe I should have said the CEO???) and I explained to her that I wanted to speak to the billing department. Once the "billing department" picked up, the lady on the phone explained to me that I was back at the general Customer Service department where I started.

I calmly asked to speak with a supervisor and asked to hold rather than waiting for a return call. The customer service rep warned me while I was waiting that since the account was an online account it was managed online and if the web site was down, there was nothing even the supervisor would be able to do. So foolishly, I continued to wait. By this point, it was more about the principle of trying to get someone to take some sort of responsibility than it was about me actually expecting anyone to resolve my problem. So I waited...

20 minutes later, the lady who had been helping me comes on the line and informs me that she is being told that she has to have someone call me back and that I don't have an option to wait any more. I hung up in disgust. The next call will be to American Express to dispute the charges until Verizon is able to produce a billing statement. So much for the great convenience of paperless billing and online account access...

LG: Life's Good...until you need service

2009-12-27T16:08:00.000-08:00

About 18 months ago, my old Maytag washer went out after 10 years of service so I decided to buy a new washer and dryer. After looking around, reading reviews, etc., we settled on a high-end LG front loader steam washer and dryer. The machines themselves have been great but about 2 months ago, we started noticing a squeaking noise when the washer was running so I promptly called the LG Customer Service number that is stamped on a sticker on the unit.

The lady who helped me was very polite and informed me that my unit was out of the 1 year full warranty period so I would need to pay for the service unless it turned out to be a problem with the motor (which is covered for 7 years). She proceeded to collect my information and finally gave me the phone number of two authorized service centers in my area.

I called the first one about a week or so before Thanksgiving. The answering machine that picked up informed me that they were completely booked until after Thanksgiving and would return calls after Thanksgiving so I left a message asking them to call me back to schedule service. I called the second number and the lady that answered the phone at that service center informed me that they did not cover my area. So, it seemed that I would just have to wait for the first place (Miles Appliances in Lake Dallas, TX) to call me back--they never did.

I tried calling them back in the middle of December but the answering machine picked up with the same "before Thanksgiving" message. I left another message but that one, like the first, has yet to be returned. Frustrated, I called a reputable appliance service center that I have used for 10+ years for all my other major appliances (their ad in the Yellow Pages says that they service "all major brands") only to be told that they do not service LG appliances.

It seems that "Life's Good" with LG only as long as you don't need anything from them...

Au Pairs and the System

2009-10-07T11:39:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, my wife and I chose to get an au pair to help us with our son after my wife's mother returned to Thailand two years ago. The au pair experience is wonderful but finding the right au pair proved to be trickier than we thought and dealing the company that we went through, one of a few that are approved by the US Department of State for this purpose, to find the au pair turned out to be a completely negative experience. I thought I would share some of our frustration with you in case you decide to go down this path. In the end, it is worth it if you find the right au pair but you should prepare yourself for how these companies operate.

There are only a few companies that are approved by the US Department of State to participate in the Au Pair program. I am sure that the US Department of State has very strict rules and lots of red tape that they have to go through. However, I still find it hard to swallow the way in which they do business. For our purposes, we chose Au Pair Care. From talking to other host families, I am not sure that they are any worse than the other companies.

The first thing you should understand is that these companies only want to act as the middleman. They take very little responsibility for the quality. character, experience, and work of the au pair. While the Department of State has regulations about the experience of the au pair, Au Pair Care deals with companies in foreign countries who provide the infromation they use to prove the experience. When dealing with third-world countries (Thailand in our case), you should realize that US rules and regulations mean little to the foreign companies and documents certifying experience are easily obtainable by anyone. Basically, you pay the au pair company for an introduction and paperwork to get the au pair admitted to the US and very little else. The au pair companies to provide "emergency travel insurance" to the au pair and does check in with you once a month to make sure everything is going okay but they do very little else--even when you have a problem and ask for their help.

During the interview process, you are provided a list of names, contact info, some information that the au pair has provided about themselves, and little else. You must contact the au pairs, speak with them about who you are, what you are looking for, and basically try to get to know them over the phone. Depending on the au pair's English skills (which seem to be less than what you would want--at least for thoise coming from Thailand), this itself can prove difficult. The other big problem is that you don't really know the motivation of these people for wanting to be an au pair. It may be a honest desire to expereince the culture of another country and learn, or it may be just a way for them to get into the country to find a spouse so that they can escape their country. Unfortunately, you have no way of knowing this upfront.

During one of our last au pair searches, we found a girl from Rayong, Thailand who my wife thought was perfect. They hit it off well, spoke virtually every day on the phone for a month, and even called us when she had finally passed her visa interview process in Bangkok about 1 week before her flight to the US. the Thursday before she was supposed to arrive in the US the following Monday, we got a call from Au Pair Care to inform us that the girl had dropped out of the program and would not be coming to live with us. When I asked what they planned to do to help us in this situation, their response was that they would provide us a list of au pair that were currently in the US and looking for new homes. While that might have been all that you could expect, it certainly wasn't very comforting given the fact that we were now forced to scramble to make last minute childcare arrangements with less than a week's notice.

After a few weeks, we found another au pair that was currently in San Francisco so we matched with her and paid for her ticket to Dallas. After a few weeks, it became clear that she was just not going to work out. After much discussion with my wife, we opted to let her go and leave the au pair program. When I contacted the Area Director to let her know, she was cordial and concerned with finding the au pair a new family (which was good). When I asked her about processing a refund of the excess fees we had paid (you have to pay for a year at a time--upfront), she said she didn't know how that worked and would get back to me. She never did. When I emailed her a few weeks alter, she never even bothered replying to my email.

Finally, I called Au Pair Care's main office in San Francisco to enquire about the refund. When I finally got the right person on the phone, she told me I needed to speak with the Area Director, who initiated the refund process. When I explained to her the situation, she started challenging me if I had p[rovided written notice to the Area Director of my intention to terminate and explicitly asked her for a refund (as if I was just going to let them keep the extra money???). After forwarding her email proving that these communication had in fact happened, she proceeded to tell me that the contract I had signed only allows for refunding $275 per remaining month (the fee they charged were $600 per month)--and only if we are in the first 6 months of a new contract (fortunately, we were). The thing that really frustrates me is that it doesn't matter that the au pair they provided was completely negligent in their duties, beats your kid, whatever--they keep the money if you decide to withdraw from the program for any reason.

Windows has Gone Too Far

2009-08-23T23:36:00.000-07:00

Today, I am in Hong Kong and decided to leave my laptop at the hotel since I didn't really need it for my customer meeting. Because I have been trying to finish up my new book, I left the chapter I am proof-reading open along with my email and several other applications without thinking anything about it (do it practically every day for the past...er, well way too many years).

Today, when I got back to the hotel, I unlocked the screen saver by logging in. I wasn't really paying attention, even though it was taking longer than normal to get into the computer, until I saw a little balloon dialog from the Windows Update icon in the system tray. The message was informing me that Windows had not only automatically downloaded and installed a security update (unfortunately, Oracle has set it up where I cannot disable this) but that the security updated required an "automatic restart" of my machine--what??? Yes, that's right. Windows just decided that it was okay to reboot my PC, regardless of what state my applications were in, because I wasn't there to object.

I'm sorry Microsoft but that is unacceptable. What gives you the right to force the reboot of my machine without my permission and lose all my unsaved work? Since I have never, ever seen this behavior before, I must assume that this is something new that the big brains in Redmond thought up. I have to tell you, it is a terrible idea and from now on, I will make sure to unplug my laptop from the network before leaving it idle...or better yet, maybe I will finally just make that switch to Linux or MacOS. Microsoft, get a clue...

Paying for the Privilege of Repairing a Defective Product

2009-03-08T13:43:00.000-07:00

It is no wonder that our economy is in the state that it is in. Businesses no longer seem to care about providing quality products and services to their customers. I recently purchased a new BFG Technologies video card for my computer from Best Buy for approximately $250. The card worked great for the first week or so and then I accidentally unplugged my computer while it was running. When I restarted the system, the card no longer displayed the color white correctly -- it showed it as bright yellow and everything had a yellowish tint.

Since I had thrown out the original box, I called BFG Tech Support directly. After waiting on hold for 15 minutes or so, I was finally connected to a live person who spent 30 seconds or so taking my basic information and problem description before coming to the conclusion that I needed a replacement card. They offered an advanced replacement option whereby in exchange for my credit card number, they would ship me a new one and supposedly a return shipping label. The new card arrived and it resolved my issue but then I went to figure out how to return the old card so that I wouldn't be charged for the new one.

The box that the new card arrived in was empty. Finally, I found one of the emails that was sent to me right after I called BFG Tech Support with a link to the return process. I went to the web site, printed out the return shipping label and such and started reading the instructions. Come to find out, I was responsible for paying for the return shipping for this card. To add insult to injury, they have very prominent warnings that I should purchase additional insurance in case the card was damaged during the return (wasn't it already damaged?).

I just don't get it. How do companies feel that it is the customer's fiscal responsibility to pay for shipping back their crappy products that don't last 2 weeks and therefore need to be replaced under their own warranty?

Next, I go to the UPS Store (owned by UPS, right?) to ship the card back. The replacement card came in a standard UPS shipping box so I asked the UPS Store for a new UPS box to use to return the package. Guess what they told me? Oh, we don't order UPS boxes so that we can sell boxes instead. What??? As if the shipping costs aren't enough, they need to charge me for the box too?

Finally, the return instructions told me to inform the UPS Store that I was retuning this card under the BFG Corporate Account program. Having no idea what this meant, I went ahead and told them. Apparently, UPS allows corporate customers to specify their own requirements and guidance for people shipping under these corporate programs. Some of the features of the BFG program were to remind me to purchase additional insurance to cover the cost of their already broken card and to charge me $25 for packaging the card for return shipping. Fortunately, the UPS Store person understood my frustration and simply exited the BFG Corporate Account program and shipped it normally at the lowest possible cost.

So, for the privilege of buying a defective product from BFG Technologies for $250 plus tax, I was granted to privilege of wasting an hour or so of my time, paying for the gas to drive from my house to the UPS Store and back, and paying approximately $10 for shipping and the box. How likely do you think I will be to buy another BFG Technologies card the next time I am in the market for a video card?

Companies these days seem to be run based solely on statistics. If there are , for example, 100 million computer users in the world and if 2% of them use a BFG video card and if 2% of them have a defective card and get poor customer service, that means BFG risks losing 40,000 potential future customers out of their 2 million customers to save themselves approximately $400,000. If the average profit they make on all video cards they sell is $50 per card (probably on the high side), that means that they can afford to lose up to 8000 customers that actually would buy another video card and still break even. For businesses, this is an acceptable way to do business but it isn't fun to be a customer in this sort of environment...

The Land of Opportunity -- but only for some

2008-11-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

I usually try to avoid posts that are political in nature but I have been pushed over my personal limit. My political views are mixed, replublican in some ways, democratic in many others, and more liberal than either in a few. So many Americans have never spent any real time outside the US (other than a vacation in Mexico or Western Europe) so it is easy to see how this sort of thing happens...it still doesn't make it right.

As many of you know, my wife is not originally from the US. As such, her command of the English language is not that great, having lived here for only 2 years. Growing up in a country where the alphabet bears no resemblance to what we know as the alphabet, she is still struggling to learn to read English. Even so, she is trying very hard to learn to drive in the US (she already has a Thai and International driver's license).

Today's saga started in June of this year when I found out that Texas actually would allow her to use a translator to help her take the written portion of the Texas Driver's test. We signed her up, found a friend that could be her translator, and she went in to take the test. She got like 18 out of 30 questions right, she needed 21 right to pass. We thought this was great so she went back to study for a few weeks so that we could make sure she passed the next time.

Three weeks later, we go back to the Texas Driver's License office to take the test again. It turns out that the week before, the Agency in Austin had issued a memo that said translators could no longer be used and everyone must take the test in English or Spanish. I was livid but at the end of the day, there really isn't much an ordinary person can do to fight the government in such situations. Fortunately, the test is given by computer in Texas and the computer speaks the questions so we thought that with enough study, she still might be able to pass.

She tried 2 more times with the computer but failed because of the language issue. So we regrouped, she spent several months studying with Thai friends helping her and she was ready to go. Today, we went to the Driver's License office to refile the application (in Texas, you get 3 chances to pass the test then you have to refile the application) so she could take the test. When we got there, we were informed that due to a recent policy change, she was no longer able to apply (for anything) because her greencard only has 5 months left on it.

Just a quick sidebar for those that have never dealt with US immigration, when you are granted permanent residence to the US because of a family connection (e.g., married to a US citizen), they look at how long you have been married at the time the card is to be issued. If it is less than 2 years, they issue you a temporary greencard good for 2 years that is conditional upon you being married. If at the end of those 2 years, you are still married, you can apply for a permanent greencard and remove the conditional aspect of it. When applying to renew your greencard, the US goverment will not allow you to apply until 3 months before the expiration date.

The real kicker here is that this is the State of Texas making policy that goes against the US government policy. From a legal standpoint, she can leave and re-enter the US until the card expires, she can work, she must continue to pay taxes, etc. -- but she isn't able to apply for a learner's permit to learn to drive. Texas says that a driver's license is a privilege not a right -- but they are unable to explain to me what gives them the right to deny her a privilege that according to US law she should be eligible for.

US Airlines - The State of the Industry

2008-03-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

Travel today isn't what it used to be. Long lines, antiquated security procedures (have you seen the new X-Ray machines where you no longer need to remove your laptop/camcorder from your bag?), packed flights, and aging airplanes are just the start of the problems facing US passengers trying to get from point A to point B. Given that I fly a lot, I have gotten used to a level of service that people who don't fly a lot haven't seen in a long time and even those of us who do seems to be quickly losing it too.

I recently had the privilege of flying from Dallas to San Francisco for meetings at our company headquarters. My saga began on the return flight. I showed up at the airport around 5:00 AM for my 6:00 AM return flight to Dallas. Not realizing that not only was it Easter weekend but it also was the start of Spring Break for many schools and weather delays the previous day in Dallas and snow in Chicago had made a mess of the airport. Even the First Class and Automated check-in lines were very long so I ended up not making that magic "40 minutes before departure" checkin window. Given that I was sitting in First Class and my top tier status, I just assumed that I would either be able to stand by or get another flight to Dallas later in the day so I proceeded to stand-by on the 6:55 AM flight using the automated check-in machine and gave up my bag to the lady behind the check-in counter.

After going through Security, I proceeded to the Admiral's Club to try to assess my situation. It seems that all the weather delays had clogged the already jam packed system (remember, US carriers have cut back the number of flights so much that virtually every flight these days is completely full under normal conditions). I found out that my chances of making the stand-by flight were not good even though I was number 2 on the list (and the list was 30 people long) because the flight was already oversold. When I asked to find another flight, even routing through one or more other cities, I was told after half an hour or more that there simply were no seats available anywhere that would get me to Dallas that day. So, I decided to try the standby anyway.

Suffice it to say that I didn't make the stand-by flight (they were asking for 8 volunteers to take a later flight so I knew I was in trouble) so I decided that rather than wasting the entire day at the airport, I would just book a flight the following morning and go get some work done. I went back to the Admiral's club to get them to send my bag back up to the front counter. Come to find out, my bag had successfully stood by on the 6:55 flight even though I hadn't. Now, I realize that airlines sometimes violate the TSA policies by sending bags on different flights than the owners but I couldn't believe it. They had no idea when/if I would ever be able to get to Dallas yet they felt like it was okay to just send my bag anyway.

Have you ever seen how they collect these bags? Basically, they wait until everyone has grabbed the bags and then they pick up any that are left and stick them in storage -- there is absolutely no security to make sure that someone doesn't just pick up your bag and walk off with it. Fortunately, I was able to call my wife and have her go to the airport to claim my bag when the flight landed. However, it just amazes me the level of apathy in the US airlines and their employees these days.

I was half tempted to go up to the baggage office when I got back to Dallas the following day and ask them where my luggage was just to see what would happen and what, if anything, they would be willing to do to compensate me for losing my bag...but I decided not to if for no other reason than to avoid the frustration.

Many of you may be unaware but apparently, the US has just eliminated some of the restrictions on our airspace so that it is easier for foreign air carriers to compete with the US carriers for the lucrative international routes (direct flight from Dallas to Bangkok, anyone?). My sense is that this will be the tipping point that will finally either force the US carriers to either change their ways or go out of business. If you have never flown one of these foreign air carriers, I strongly urge you to try them. In general, their planes are newer and their service is better (especially the Asian carriers like Cathay, Singapore, and Thai).

Will there come a day when I have the choice to book my flight from Dallas to Chicago on either Cathay Pacific, British Air or Lufthansa? One can only hope...

United Airlines - How to travel without a ticket

2008-01-13T13:39:00.000-08:00

In November, my wife and I decided that she and my son would go with me on a business trip to Asia so that they could go visit my wife's family while I was traveling around Asia on business. This was a great opportunity for her family to meet our son and spend time with him plus it gave me a way to spend my weekends, plus an opportunity to grab a few days off in Thailand after my business was concluded.

I was traveling to Asia from San Francisco at the end of Oracle Open World. We decided at the last minute that she and my son would fly to San Francisco and then we would travel together to Bangkok, before I continued onto Bangalore. I called United Airlines Mileage Plus Premier Executive Desk to make my wife's and my son's reservations. The agent explained that my son needed a paper ticket to fly internationally so she would set it up and pay for it using my credit card but that my wife would need to pick up the ticket at the Dallas airport on the morning of the flight.

Since I was already aware of this restriction, having traveled with them to Germany in October, I asked hom much my son's ticket would be. I forget the exact price she quoted but it was between $160 and $170. I was happy to hear that since his ticket to Germany (when we were flying in business class) was over $1100 and told her I wanted to go ahead and purchase the ticket using the same credit card I used for my wife's fare. She said she would take care of it so I thought nothing more about it.

Come the day of travel, my wife (who is still learning English) arrived at the check-in counter and was told that my son needed a ticket to travel. In a panic, she calls me and I get on the phone with the agent. The agent tells me again that my son needs a ticket to fly. I explained to the agent that I was well aware of the fact he needed a ticket and that the Premier Executive desk had told me that they not only set up the reservation but had paid for the ticket. I continued by telling the agent that if they had not already done so, to please set up the roundtrip ticket and have my wife pay for it with her credit card. The agent said she would take care of it so I thought nothing more about it.

When my wife arrived in San Francisco, she handed me the boarding passes for the three flights needed to get her and my son to Bangkok, along with a airline ticket jacket. Since we were in a hurry, I didn't bother looking for the ticket or receipt for the ticket even though my wife told me that she didn't pay for anything at the airport.

We checked in for our flight to Tokyo and off we went toward Thailand. The transfer in Tokyo was also smooth and we finally arrived in Bangkok, worn out but safe and sound in Bangkok. I though nothing more about the ticketing situation since my son obviously must have had a ticket or they would never have issued boarding passes from Dallas to Bangkok, right?

Wrong! When we went to check in at 5:00 AM at the new Bangkok airport to fly home, the agent was asking me for the paper ticket for my son because she was unable to find anything in the computer about his reservation/ticket. After a 5 week business trip, I had tons of receipts, airline boarding pass stubs, etc. to sort through but I finally found the ticket jacket that my wife had handed me a month earlier in the San Francisco airport. It had no ticket!

I promptly produced my son's boarding passes from Dallas to Bangkok and asked the agent how on earth we couldn't have a ticket but yet were able to travel from Dallas to Bangkok with my infant son. The agent was at a loss but said that we would have to purchase a one-way ticket from Bangkok to Dallas or we would be unable to board the flight. After arguing with her and her supervisor, I relented to buy the ticket and sort it out later. The one way ticket price was $7340 Baht, roughly a little more than $220. That made even more angry since the original round-trip fare was over $50 less but it was clear that the United Ailines employees in Bangkok were just not equipped to deal with such a situation so I paid the fare and we flew home.

Once we got back, I promptly contacted United's Customer Service to explain what had happened and ask for at least a refund of the fare difference that I had ended up paying because of their employees' multiple mistakes in handling our travel. To make a long story short, the customer service agent basically told me that there was nothing they could.

In this era of supposedly super tight airport security, how is it that we were able to get United Airlines to issue boarding passes for my infant son and take him all the way to Bangkok without a ticket? It makes you realize that the security process has holes in it big enough to drive a truck through...

United Healthcare and the state of US healthcare industry

2007-10-31T06:43:00.000-07:00

Recently, I found out that I needed to travel yet again to Europe and Asia for business pursposes. Because of scheduling, I needed to be away from home for a little over 3 weeks. Since my wife has a cousin that lives in Germany that she had not seen in several years, I decided that I would take her and my son with me and let them stay with my wife's cousin. All that was standing in the way was a VISA for my wife (who is a Thai citizen and therefore needs a VISA to most countries).

The first issue was that Germany now requires all VISA applicants to apply in person. The nearest emabssy to us is in Houston. No problem there, a nice 4 hour drive and a chance for a quick weekend getaway to the beach (in Corpus Christi -- not Houston!).

The next issue was that the German VISA requirements require proof of health insurance coverage for at least $37,500 while traveling in Germany. No problem, we have great insurance through my employeer so I set out to contact United Healthcare (UHC) to ask for a letter for coverage verification for obtaining the VISA...and this is where our saga begins.

On the first call to UHC back in July, I explained what I needed and the person on the other end of the phone said that this was no problem and something that they did every day and the letter would be sent out within 15 working days. This was a little longer than I expected but still within a workable timeframe for us.

Five weeks later, I still hadn't received the letter so I called up UHC to find out what happened. The person on the other end of the phone said that they didn't know what happened but connected me with the "Rapid Response Unit" (RRU) to help me get the problem resolved quickly. The person at the RRU took my information and agreed to get the latter faxed over to me within the next day or so.

A day (or so) later, I received a fax with a generic letter stating that we did indeed have emergency coverage when traveling outside the US but it did not have any dollar amount limits on the coverage. Worried that this was going to be insufficient for the German consulate, I called the UHC RRU back and asked to speak to a manager. The manager was pleasant enough and explained that this was a standard letter that people used everyday to obtain VISAs and reassured me that this letter would be sufficient for the German consulate to issue the VISA. While I was still a little skeptical, I decided that this person must have more experience than me regarding this so I let to go and prepared our VISA application.

On a Friday morning in early September, we arrived at the German consulate to apply for the VISA. The application process went relatively smoothly until we got to the insurance coverage letter. The woman working at the consulate basically said that the letter was insufficient because it did not contain any information about coverage limits. I tried explaining to her what the UHC RRU manager had told me and her reply was that "people applied for VISAs every day with letters from all sorts of insurance companies that contained these coverage limits specified in dollar amounts". So, she accepted our application but told us that we needed to provide additional information regarding insurance coverage before the VISA would be approved.

Once I got back to the car, I called the UHC RRU back. I explained my situation and how we were being caught between UHC and the German governement. The man on the phone was very sympathetic and suggested that they could reissue the letter with the maximum lifetime coverage limits. He promised to escalate this to his manager to try to get it out to us that day, or at the latest by Monday. Excellent, or so I thought, so now we can go onto Corpus for a relaxing weekend at the beach!

On Monday afternoon, I still had not received the new letter so I decided to call them up (being a little anxious since we were scheduled to leave that Friday afternoon for Germany). Once again, I got connected to the UHC RRU and I calmly explained the entire situation to the lady who answered the phone. Her first comment was that there was no record of my call on the previous Friday and that even if there was, the man could not promise to send the letter that same day because it takes a minimum of 48 hours even in emergency situations. I explained to her how I had been trying to get this letter for 2 months (or so) and that I was running into a deadline (flight leaving in 4 days). She was completely unsympathetic but agreed to escalate this to her manager to try to get it resolved.

At this point, I had pretty much given up on getting resolution from UHC so I called American Express Platinum Travel Service to see about getting travel insurance to satisfy the medical insurance requirement for getting the VISA. They conntected me with a thrid-party comapny who, for a fee of $80, signed us up for travel insurance over the phone and faxed the proof letter both to me and the German consulate within an hour.

I felt relieved but was still nervous about whether we would get my wife's passport back in time to catch our flight on Friday afternoon. I went to the German embassy's web site to get the number to call them after not receiving the passport on Tuesday. I found the number, the hours they accepted calls (in the afternoons), and another very disturbing piece of information -- the embassy was closed on Wednesday for a German holiday!

So, I started thinking of the various scenarios for resolving this within our deadlines (including another trip to Houston to pick up the passport on Friday morning and a very fast drive back to the DFW airport to catch the plane) since I would not be able to talk to anyone until Thursday afternoon. I decided to try a longshot and sent them email asking for the status. Fortunately, Thursday morning I got a reply saying that the passport had been sent out on Wednesday and was scheduled to arrive Thursday afternoon. It did and my wife and son had a great time in Germany visiting her cousin.

On our return, we found a rather disturbing letter from UHC stating:

Dear Mrs. Patrick

RE: Foreign Coverage Benefits

Medical services rendered outside the United States are covered at Out of Network Benefits.. All foreign claims should be submitted to P.O. Box 740817 Atlanta, GA 30374

Sincerely,

Transaction Resolution Specialist

What a fitting end to the saga. UHC didn't even try to address our need. It is clear that the person I spoke to last didn't care about solving our problem, only about getting rid of us and marking my case as "resolved" (presumably because her job assessment is tied to resolving cases rapidly).

If I step back away from this situation to look at it objectively, it is clear that the reason UHC does not put dollar amounts of coverage on these VISA letters is for fear of being sued by people looking to make a quick buck and/or exploit the system. It is a sad state of affairs when our country has come to a point where honest people cannot get (very simple) service that they have paid for through our medical insurance industry.

Insurance companies, like every other publicly owned company, are being pushed by unreasonable market expectations to continually increase revenue at unsustainable rates. The only way that most companies can even have a chance at meeting these unattainable goals is to cut services, raise rates, and cut their own costs to the bone. In the long run, it is the consumers that bear the brunt of these changes by paying more and more money for less and less service until we get to the point where we are paying for services that companies never intend to honor.

Where will it all end?

Dell Technical Support - The Downfall of Dell Computer (historical transfer from Yahoo 360 Blog - August 20, 2007)

2007-10-31T06:40:00.000-07:00

Last weekend while rebooting my home computer, my 4 year old Dell Dimension XPS machine decided to stop working. Even though the computer is out of warranty and I would rather just go buy a new computer, I decided to call Dell Technical Support to try to determine what the problem might be. After half an hour or more on the phone with the Dell support person, we decided that the problem was the RAID controller had failed and needed to be replaced.

My computer was purchased from Dell when the state of the art for Dell was to use RAID controllers from Promise Technologies, Inc (http://www.promise.com/). Unfortunately, the particular controller I had (FastTrak S150 TX2plus) is no longer being manufactured. The Dell support person tells me that they can replace the controller but that the data on the hard drives is already lost unless I wanted to take them to a "specialist". Now, this wouldn't be the end of the world since I have a backup that is only about a month (or so) old but it certainly is inconvenient and I didn't like the way the Dell support person made it out like it was no big deal. I asked to speak to a manager and the manager was very snotty to me saying "well you do have a backup of your data on an external device, right?". I hung up swearing never to buy another product from Dell again in my life...

This morning, I called Dell Parts department to try to order the controller to replace it myself and see if I could get my data back. After an equally frustrating call with the Part department, it turns out that Dell no longer sells Promise Technology RAID controllers and instead sells only Dell-branded ones. This was my first clue to something being amiss.
I searched the Internet looking for any stores that might happen to still have this model of controller still in stock, no luck.

As a last shot, I sent email to Promise Technologies' Technical Support describing my problem and asking if they had any suggestions. The answer I got back from them floored me. Here it is:

Since the Fasttrak S150 TX2 Plus controller has been discontinues from manufacture. You will need to upgrade your Fasttrak S150 TX2 Plus to either a Fasttrak TX2300 or Fasttrak TX4310 controller but in order to access the data you will need to find a way to install the driver for the new controller. The array information is stored on reserve sector of the drive so with the new SATA RAID controller it should be able to detect the disk array without you needed to be re-created.

So, it appears that Dell was wrong in saying that there was no way to recover the data even when I have a new controller. Apparently, what they should have said is that "Dell doesn't provide a mechanism for you to fix your computer without losing your data because we no longer do business with Promise Technologies and our new RAID controllers cannot understand the Promise RAID controller's array information stored on the drives+ -- too bad for you and we don't care about you or your data. Come on Dell, you are so difficult and demanding to do business with when you are the customer but your customer service has degraded so much in the past few years I know why HP is now the #1 PC vendor. Michael Dell, are you listening?

I quickly ordered a new Promise controller from Amazon.com and hope to complete the restoration of my PC -- data intact -- this weekend.

The State of Home Automation - Not Quite There Yet (historical transfer from Yahoo 360 Blog - June 20, 2007)

2007-10-31T06:35:00.000-07:00

Back in January, I started exploring options of upgrading my house audio system to a more cutting-edge home automation system. After doing my research and talking with several dealers, I finally settled on a system configuration that is based on Crestron equipment (http://www.crestron.com). The promise of one touch, error-free access to music, TV, and movies from any room in the house was compelling. Especially since my current system was too complex for my wife and mother to use.

I also decided to go for the Escient Fireball music, movie, and internet radio server, passing on the Kaleidescape (http://www.kaleidescape.com) primarily because I think it is just too expensive right now. Don't get me wrong, I think that the Kaleidescape guys are spot on with the future of movie/music servers and I will buy one at some point down the line once the price point becomes more reasonable (I didn't rush out and pay $20,000 for the first Plasma TV I saw either). I have been a little underwhelmed by the Escient user interface quality but it does provide the general function needed and for much less than a Kaleidescape system.

The Crestron equipment itself seems well made, though a little overpriced in my opinion. The real problem is that Crestron has chosen to prevent end users from getting access to their programming software and training classes, presumably to incent dealers to sell their equipment (so they can charge outrageous sums for access to a Crestron programmer) and to try to ensure that customers get a working, trouble-free system. Crestron programmers apparently spend most of their time taking software modules written by Crestron and other equipment manufacturers and integrating them into a complete system based on the customer's equipment and needs. Where this breaks down is when either the modules are not written for a specific device and/or the module functionality is sub-standard.

Via an evolutionary process that I won't bore you with, I ended up with a variety of remote control devices. For each room, I went with my dealer's recommendation to get their Crestron APADs -- a device that tries to emulate the iPod interface -- rather than their more expensive wall-mounted touchpanels. As I found out later, the problem is that these devices appear to have been designed primarily for use with Crestron's (more) out-of-the-box home automation system, the Adagio line. Because the Adagio system was not flexible enough to accomodate my needs (not enough inputs), I had to upgrade to the higher-end Crestron audio distribution system.

As luck would have it, it turns out that there were no Crestron modules for the APAD to control their higher-end audio distribution system (yet?) so my Crestron programmer was off on his own to try to map out his own user interface for my system onto this device. So, I am paying $120/hour for a guy to build me a custom UI from scratch for my home automation system that I paid a relatively large amount of money for in the first place. While the guy is a decent guy and pretty smart, he doesn't seem to have a lot of UI design sense and what I was ended up with was a relatively lousy interface into my extremely powerful (and expensive) home automation system that I probably paid on the order of $10,000 for -- something that is probably the result of questionable behavior by my dealer since I could have upgraded to higher-end touchpanels that already had modules written for half that price.

I have started trying to investigate how to get Crestron to allow me to get access to their software that the programmer uses to build these UIs. So far, it seems that the only way to do so is to either change careers and go to work for a dealer or start my own business and become a Crestron-authorized programmer. I have sent several emails to different contacts within Crestron about getting access to their training so that I can do the latter, but so far those emails have gone unanswered. I guess the next step is to start lobbing calls into them and press them for what is possible.

All this leads me to the conclusion that the state of the home automation business is ripe for the picking. I can envision a solution that takes Crestron-like devices and opens them up to standards like 802.11 b/g/n (which Crestron has started doing) and makes it possible to have a more "open-source" style community around both the programming modules for particular source and target devices as well as giving the end user the ability to program their own devices.

Start-up anyone?

Is BMW losing its customer focus? (historical transfer from Yahoo 360 Blog - January 27, 2007)

2007-10-31T06:32:00.000-07:00

Just before Christmas, I was looking for a new car. Being a loyal BMW enthusiast, I immediately started looking at the new BMW 5 Series cars. Since my last 2 car purchases were BMWs, I decided that I would go have a look at some of the other higher-end luxury brands to see just what they were all about. First I drove the Lexus ES350 and then the comparable Mecerdes E class (don't remember the engine size). Both cars were really nice but they just didn't have that BMW handling that I have grown addicted to so off I went to my local BMW dealership to look at the 530i. I took it for a test drive and while I found it to be a great car with sufficient power and that great BMW handling, I ended up going for the new M5 (hey, who doesn't need a 500 hp car?). I only had to wait less than 3 weeks to get the car -- a huge change since I bought my last one and had to wait on the waiting list for 16 months or so before I could even order it. The dealer actually had 2 new M6's sitting on the showroom floor -- I guess times are getting hard for these high-end sports car dealers.

BMW has some really cool features on their new 550i like heads-up display, night vision, active cruise control, high definition radio, bluetooth integration with cellphones, and iPod integration. Unfortunately, night vision and active cruise control are not only not standard on the M5 -- they aren't even available! High Definition radio is available but, not without losing real-time traffic information with the navigation system. It seems that the BMW engineers decided to use the same antenna for both so you can only have one or the other, but not both. You would think in an $85K+ car (before options and taxes), they could figure out how to add the extra antenna but...anyway, I decided that real-time traffic info fed into the navigation system was probably more important in the DFW metroplex, given the traffic and congestion.

After passing on the cell phone integration with my first M5 (it cost $1100 and you had to use one of their phones), I was happy to see that the new cars were able to integrate the cell phone via Bluetooth. Especially now that Texas has passed the only handsfree cellphone usage in cars law. As you would expect, the level of integration varies with the model of phone you have. I was very excited when I got in the car and was able to see listings from my Treo 650 displayed in the car's output even though the salesperson said he didn't expect it to work. It got even better when I was able to use the car's voice dialing capabilities to call people by speaking to the car with a push of a button strategically located on the steering wheel. Unfortunately, I later found out the car only integrates with the Treo 650's favorites list rather than the primary phone book in the Contacts list. Even so, I was able to create a favorites list long enough to get my most frequently called numbers located in such a way that they are accessbile through hands-free in the car.

I was really psyched by the thought of the iPod integration -- even though I wasn't thrilled about paying an extra $600 for this. I own a 60GB photo iPod with all of my 800+ CDs loaded onto it so I was really looking forward to being able to listen to any song or artist in my collection by navigating through the iPod using the BMW's audio controls (I always hated trying to pick out the CDs for the car because I always wanted to listen to one I didn't have after I was driving). So, I pretended like the extra $600 was just part of the price of the car and went for it. Everything looked great when I took delivery of the car, the iPod integration was smooth and easy to use (because it comes up by default on CD1 which lists your playlists -- of which I only had a dozen or so).

After having the car a few days and going out on a longer drive, I started exploring the other options for viewing the artists, albums, etc. on the iPod. The first experience was that when I switched to CD2 (to view the list of artists), it took a full 3 minutes or more to pull up the list even though through the interface only about 6 or 8 (or so) are visible at any time. Next, I started trying to scroll through the list using the iDrive. While the iDrive has gotten a much worse reputation than it deserves, scrolling is not one of its strong suits. If you are not careful about how you interact with it, you can scroll through the list for a while and then end up back at the top of the list without meaning to do so. This fact further delayed what I had yet to discover.

Anyway, I decided that I wanted to listen to a song by Traffic so I carefully started scrolling through the list of artists to locate Traffic. Imagine my surprise when I got to a point in the list, somewhere in the J's, and the scrolling stopped and the scroll bar indicators showed there was no more artists on the list. I couldn't believe it -- to the point where I thought I must have done something wrong. I tried the same thing in the list of albums -- same result. I broke out the manual that comes with the iPod integration -- sure enough I was doing everything right and there was no mention of any limitations in the manual. I did a Google search and found nothing that mentioned anything about this problem.

I called the dealer's service department -- they knew nothing but referred me to my salesperson, as he had been at my dealership for many years. I spoke with my salesperson -- he had never heard of any such problem and recommended that I bring it in for service. However, he also mentioned that he suspected it would be difficult for his service technicians to troubleshoot/fix the issue. Not wanting to give up my car for essentially exploratory surgery without being as well informed as possible, I contacted BMW directly via email. They responded promptly and said that they suspected there was a limit in the length of the list that could be accessed but would have to check and get back to me. Several weeks later, I finally got an email back from BMW saying that there is a 250 item limit to the lists that can be displayed/accessed through their iPod integration with their audio system (I suspect this is more a limitation with the audio system than the iPod integration). So, I bought a $100K+ car (after options and taxes), paid BMW an extra $600 for this iPod integration kit, and I can only access artists and albums whose names begin with A though J (and not all the J's) and yet BMW nowhere mentions this limitation.

This crossed the line for me. Why would a company with the reputation and customer loyalty of BMW charge customers (especially in one of their most expensive cars) an extra $600 for an item with such a severe limitation and not disclose this limitation?

To add insult to injury, the finance department at my local dealership sold me on an extended maintenance package for my M5 that extended BMW's terrific 4 year, 50K mile free maintenance program to 6 years and 100K miles. They then convinced me to buy their Basic Package that included this, the Appearance package, and the Tires and Wheels package (this last one I learned through experience is worth every penny given than one replacement tire costs as much as or more than the package). When I brought the car back a couple of weeks later to have the permaplate coating put on for the Appearance package, the finance guy stops me on my way out and says he needs to talk to me. Now, I am thinking why would the finance guy want to talk with me? Maybe the bank changed their mind about financing my car? No. Basically, we wanted to tell me that he sold me an option -- the Extended Maintenance package -- that BMW doesn't offer on their new M5's or M6's (presumably because they don't know how much the maintenance is going to cost them with this new V10, 5oo hp engine). Anyway, I ended up having to redo my paperwork and loan papers to reflect the removal of the Extended Maintenance package. He apologized profusely and admitted that the dealership only sold 5 M5 all last year (I still find that hard to believe) and with two other finance people, he only had processed one other M5 purchase last year.

Don't get me wrong, I really love my new M5 but I am very unimpressed with BMW's policies and service. I will really have to think twice when my next car purchase comes around...that Lexus wasn't looking so bad after all of this.

Another Reason Not to Buy a Palm Treo 650 (historical transfer from Yahoo 360 Blog - October 24, 2006)

2007-10-31T05:49:00.000-07:00

In my latest saga with my Palm Treo 650, I found myself back in Bangkok and needing to change the network selection settings on my phone from the default of autmatic network/band selection to manual. I needed to do this because Thailand has several GSM network providers and for some reason, my phone kept switching my network provider from AIS to Orange -- the only provider not supporting GPRS -- when I left it in automatic mode.

Well, as luck would have it, I forgot to switch the setting back to automatic before getting on the plane to come back to the US. So when I get back to Dallas and turn on my phone, the phone finds no network and displays that it has "No Service," since it is still set to manually select the 900/1800 GSM bands and the US carriers, in their quest to be different, uses the 850/1900 bands (don't get me started with why the US can never adopt technology "Not Invented Here" and incompatible with the rest of the world). Anyhow, I set off to change the network band selection mode back to automatic.

For those of you not familiar with the Treo, the Treo phone menu has an Options menu that allows you to change the phone settings and preferences. The "Select Network" menu item in the Options menu takes you to a screen where you can change how the phone finds the network band to use (auto/manual), select the band of in manual mode, and then select from all of the available network providers. However, (I assume that) Palm decided to improve the usability of the menus by copying Apple, Microsoft, and others by making the menu item list change depending on the context. Unfortunately, the person designing this Options menu behavior must have never travelled between regions of the world where the network bands available change. Yes, you guessed it, the Network Selection menu option is only available when the phone is able to see a network -- and there is no other way to change the network band selection mode. So, while cursing how the usability and stability of phones has really gone downhill since they started putting more and more features into software (and thus making the software much more complex), I put in a call to my friendly Cingular business support center.

Suffice it to say, after 30+ minutes talking to 3 or 4 people at Cingular, including asking to speak with a manager, I was finally able to get them to put me on the phone directly with Palm support. Sure enough, my worst nightmare had come true. The Palm support person tells me "sure, we can help you switch the network band selection mode back and get your phone working, all you need to do is do a Hard Reset on the phone," which deletes all of the data, settings, preferences on the phone. After ranting to the guy on the phone about the really horrible quality of the Palm software, I hung up on him and set off to go through the procedure I had been through many times before just to switch the network band my phone was trying to use.

As one last twist of fate, after following all the procedures to do the hard reset (which made my phone work but lost all of my data, settings, and preferences), I did the HotSync using the recommended settings to recover my data and settings. Sure enough, they decided to store the network band selection mode somewhere on my laptop so that when I reloaded my data, the phone stopped working again. Another round with Palm support clued me in to which file I needed to delete (Saved_Preferences in the Backup folder of my profile) so I got to repeat the whole process again. Guess what? Yep, even deleting the Saved_Preferences file doesn't fix the problem. It also appears that Palm, in collusion with Cingular, has also decided to hide the Select Network option when connected to the Cingular network so I cannot even verify the network band selection mode after the hard reset while the phone is actually connected to the Cingular network.

Suffice it to say that, my recommendation is not to buy a Palm phone if you plan to actually go between parts of the world that use different GSM network bands. And based on my other experiences previously documented in this blog, my recommendation is not to buy any phone (or anything else for that matter) from Palm.

Seafood Palace International restaurant - Bangkok (historical transfer from Yahoo 360 Blog - August 30, 2006)

2007-10-31T05:44:00.000-07:00

Tonight while we were walking from our apartment on Sukhumvit Soi 8 toward Soi Asok to visit a friend, we decided to try the Seafood Palace International restaurant at 348 Sukhumvit Road, Asok Road (caddy-corner from Soi Cowboy). The first impressions of the place were good. They have a seafood market outside the restaurant where you can select your fresh seafood that they will weigh and prepare for you.

Since we skipped the market on the way in, we ordered a fish for 1 person (I wasn't really hungry). They brought a live fish in a bag that was probably larger than necessary (my fault for not going to pick out a smaller one myself, I guess) and were quoted a price of 752 Baht (roughly about 20 USD at the current exchange rate). Although I thought it was overpriced, we went ahead and ordered the fish, one order of steamed rice, a bottle of water, and a Heineken.

While we were waiting, I took note of the interior atmosphere (that I was obviously going to pay for -- though I didn't realize just how much at the time). The place was well air-conditioned -- something typical only with the really high-end Thai restaurants in Bangkok targeted at "farangs" (what Thais call westerners). There is a decent size elevated stage in the middle of the restaurant where the have live tradional Thai music and dance performances during dinner. Be careful when you are seated if you actually want to see the performance (or even just be able to see anything). There are numerous large columns in the restaurant and it is easy to get seated behind one. To make things worse, they have several large plastic trees that are supposed to add to the atmosphere. I suppose that they do but they also make for a great obstruction when trying to see through them. Worst of all is the aircraft landing-style halogen lighting on the ceiling around the two-long sides of the stage. As luck would have it, we were seated in the front corner of the stage behind a large column, with a plastic tree beside it, and with the stage lights shining right in my face the entire time.

They brought the fish to the table in the typical fish-shaped warming dish with a fire underneath. We ordered the fish prepared in a traditional Thai style with lemon sauce. The fish was well prepared and cooked perfectly -- nothing special in Thailand but I have to mention that the food was good. While we only ordered one bottle of water (I was drinking beer), the waiter was careful to pour two glasses of water and like most good waiters kept the glasses full. However, unlike in most restaurants where you are paying for a drink, they did not inform us when the bottle we ordered was empty and ask our permission to open another. Not a big deal overall, but a little sleazy when we learned that we were paying 45 Baht per bottle (this is a small bottle of water, probably about 1/3 of a liter). When compared to Western prices, paying a $1.25 for a glass of bottled water is not unheard of but in Thailand, it is absurd. Most reasonable Thai restaurants in Bangkok charge 10 Baht for these bottles of water.

Anyway when the bill came, we discovered that we were also paying an automatic service charge of 10 percent (not sure what they did to deserve this) plus 7 percent VAT (many restaurants in Thaland do not have service charges or charge you for VAT explicitly) so the total bill came to 1130 Baht (about 30 USD) for a one person dinner of fish and rice plus a beer and a water. By western standards, this is a reasonable price but I guess I am jaded after spending so much time in Thailand and just felt ripped off. A person can eat good Thai food for a week in Thailand on this much money.

The same meal with equal (and probably a little better quality) can be had at places like La'Mer on Sukhumvit Soi 7 for 1/3 of the price. But then, you have to sit out in the Bangkok heat and the only entertainment is watching the working girls walk by with men old enough to be their grandfathers and dealing with the street vendors who walk right up to your table while you are eating trying to sell you a "Real Rolex Copy" for 2000 Baht (don't pay more than 500 Baht since they probably will stop working before you get on the plane to go home) or a Zippo-style lighter the size of a large textbook. If you would prefer a more remote location (i.e., no table-side street vendors and fewer working girls with their customers), try Lek Seafood, which is right below the Chong Nonsi BTS (Skytrain) station, but has equally good food and reasonable prices.

Blackberry vs. Treo 650 (historical transfer from Yahoo 360 Blog - August 22, 2006)

2007-10-31T05:40:00.000-07:00

As one of the necessary evils of switching jobs, I had to change phones last Spring when I changed jobs. In my previous job, I was using a Blackberry 7780 device (with TMobile as the carrier) for the last couple of years. While the device was mediocre at best as a phone, the integration with the company Exchange server was stellar. Blackberry still makes, in my humble opinion, the best email device on the market.

My new company, which doesn't use Exchange, doesn't have a Blackberry Enterprise Server so using a Blackberry really makes no sense. As such, I looked around at what others were using, asked around, and finally selected the Palm Treo 650 (with Cingular as the carrier). I have to say that the phone in the Treo is so much better than my previous device. I am not sure if it is the device alone or a combination of the device and the new carrier. I used to have real challenges getting a signal at my home, which is sort of out on the edge of the 'burbs. Not with the new device though!

The first challenge was trying to figure out how to get email sent to my device. Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that my current company's support for pushing email to mobile devices is sporadic at best. After figuring out how to pull email from the server, I simply configured the device to poll the server every so often to retrieve new email. Not great but tolerable.

After the first month or so using the device, I started experiencing some of the drawback to the Treo.

1.) The OS is single-threaded so you cannot receive email while using the phone. Again, not the end of the world but pretty 1980s technology if you want my opinion.

2.) The device periodically locks up when checking email.

3.) The device, for no apparent reason, started rebooting itself. Unfortunately, it got so bad after a few months that I ended up having to replace the device because it was rebooting like 20 times a day -- even when I left the device sitting idle. The new device is better, though it does still occasionally reboots itself. I have been through all the web sites and followed all the recommendations but nothing seems to prevent it from rebooting at that inopportune moment.

4.) I started experiencing sporadic problems with getting my laptop to recognize my Treo via the cradle attached to a USB port on my docking station. After an hour or so on the phone with Palm support, it appears that the problem is somehow related to Dell's USB power issues with some of their laptops and docking stations. I was able to find some instructions on Dell's web sites that allowed me to disable the power management features for the USB ports. While that seems to have helped somewhat, I still end up having to stop and restart the HotSync Manager (and hold my head just right) to get it to work. Now, maybe this is a Dell problem but I find it funny that none of my other USB devices that I have connected to my laptop's docking station have EVER had any problems -- including my old Blackberry, Nokia, and Samsung phones.

All in all, I am not real impressed with Palm's Treo 650. It is certainly not a Blackberry killer in my opinion.

Connecting Tuxedo to the J2EE/SOA world (historical transfer from Yahoo 360 Blog - Aug 12, 2006)

2007-10-24T03:06:00.000-07:00

I recently had the pleasure to work on a PoC where Tuxedo integration with the application server was a big requirement. Fortunately, several vendors have J2EE CA adapters that provide this type of functionality. Unfortunately, all of the J2EE CA adapter vendors are constrained because of the limitations of Tuxedo's publicly accessible communication mechanisms.

/WS, Jolt, and IIOP are really intended to support client-server style interaction with Tuxedo, where Tuxedo is always the server. True, you can theorectically use IIOP as more of a server-to-server style integration but of course this means that you have to write nasty CORBA C++ "pass-by-value" code to connect to Java RMI objects to achieve the integration, something that the average Tuxedo programmer would be extremely challenged to do (who wants to write C++ CORBA code in this day and age anyway?).

Tuxedo also has a "server-to-server" gateway mechanism called /Domains. Unfortunately, it seems that only BEA has access to the wire protocol being used so it is not really possible for anyone besides BEA to write a true "server-to-server" adapter (i.e., one that supports true bidirectional interaction through the standard Tuxedo mechanisms) that talks directly to Tuxedo.

BEA has written the WebLogic Tuxedo Connector (WTC) that comes with WebLogic Server to get true server-to-server integration with Tuxedo. Unfortunately, WTC is completely dependent on WebLogic Server and is not available separately as a J2EE CA 1.5 adapter so that you could run it in other containers like WebSphere, Oracle, or JBoss. It is obvious, of course, why they haven't done this -- they want to lock their Tuxedo customers into BEA-based integration solutions for Tuxedo as much as they possibly can. BEA says that it is committed to open standards but it seems that this commitment is selective.

iWay and NetManage both offer J2EE CA 1.5 adapters that provide this bi-directional capabilities by wrapping WTC. Of course, that means both companies' adapters require WebLogic Server to be installed, which makes this a fairly pricey solution. It is nice that we have adapters that truly support the standards but it is too bad that BEA has designed things in such a way that every Tuxedo customer that wants bi-directional integration has to buy WebLogic Server (and possibly a 3rd party adapter if the customer doesn't want to use the WebLogic/AquaLogic platforms as their deployment environments) or build a custom solution themselves.

I really hope that Tuxedo customers wake up to this fact and start asking BEA why they claim to support standards but have not bothered to do the work to allow Tuxedo customers to seamlessly integrate with Tuxedo without requiring WebLogic Server. I am sure that BEA will claim that making WTC a J2EE CA 1.5 adapter is not possible for some reasons that they are unable to articulate with any technical clarity. I suppose if BEA continues to try to lock people into Tuxedo (and WebLogic Server to get bidirectional integration) that people will eventually get fed up with it and do something. Maybe I should start an open-source bi-directional Tuxedo adapter project to help all of those BEA customers break free of the bondage...

dev2dev comments censored? (historical transfer from Yahoo 360 blog - Aug 3, 2006)

2007-10-24T03:03:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was intrigued by a blurb in one of the typical BEA blast emails I received:

Creating Custom Load-Balancing Schemes using MBeans by Francesco Marchioni (see http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2006/07/custom-load-balancing.html) -- Tired of using a round-robin approach? Learn how to write your own load-balancing router classes and integrate them with your stateless EJBs in this article by Francesco Marchioni.

Since this has been an age-old complaint by customers that really has no good solution, I went to dev2dev.bea.com to read the article. In this article, the author basically suggests writing your own CallRouter class that makes calls to the Admin server using JMX to get "real-time" statistics on the managed servers to make routing decisions. Of course, the problems with this approach outweigh any potential benefit it might give since:

1.) the load generated on the Admin server will be larger than the load on the actual EJB cluster servers trying to be load balanced;

2.) the Admin server is not clusterable or even highly available without a lot of work on the customer's part so the approach is not scalable or fault-tolerance so it sacrifices the benefits that the cluster gives the application in the first place; and

3.) the Admin server's real-time JMX data about server availability is relatively stale (could take up to a minute or more to find out that a server has crashed) and the custom CallRouter does not have access to the cluster-list that BEA-provided cluster-aware RMI-stubs maintain to get more up-to-date server availability data.

There are other minor issues with the article like the fact that it makes simplifying assumptions in the example code without pointing them out. For example, it assumes all managed servers in the domain have deployed the EJB in question so the example will break as soon as an administrator, that likely knows nothing about the customer CallRouter's assumptions, decides to use the Admin server to manage a different set of servers for another application. Anyway, I digress...

I decided that I would post a comment to the article mentioning some of the major limitations with this approach. To my surprise, the comments did not show up after I posted them. I must assume that these comments are going to some BEA marketing person to filter. Of course, the BEA marketing person probably has no clue as to whether what I said was correct or not. Wanna take bets on whether or not my comments ever show up on BEA's web site?

EVA Airways customer service - Chinese style (historical transfer from Yahoo 360 Blog - July 7, 2006)

2007-10-24T03:00:00.000-07:00

I made the mistake of booking tickets on EVA Airways a few months ago. The cost of business class tickets were just a little more than the cost of coach tickets for all of my normal OneWorld airlines. I was trying to save money and thought, how bad can it be? Well, for reasons I won't go into, I ended up needing to cancel the tickets. They were electronic business class tickets and fully refundable so it shouldn't be a problem, right?

First thing I did was call the local reservation/ticketing office (in Dallas) on the phone. The person with the heavy Chinese accent that answered the phone told me that since I had booked the tickets on-line, he could not cancel them or help me refund my money and that I needed to call the Los Angeles office. Needless to say, I wasn't thrilled about this but figured they were just a little behind the times so I called the L.A. office. I was informed the equally poor english-speaking chinese person that the only way that I could get a refund for my tickets was to apply on-line using their "Refund Application". After arguing with the lady for a minute or so, I realized that she just wasn't programmed for customer service/satisfaction so I hung up and went out in search of the illusive Refund Application.

When I got to the web site, I was able to find the refund application fairly easily and started filling out the form to process my refund. Since I had purchased two tickets (under the same booking), I entered the information for the first ticket and it submitted properly and I got a nice little message back saying that my refund application had been accepted and that I would receive my refund after two months. WHAT? I have to wait two months to get credit for tickets that I bought and refunded electronically? You've got to be kidding...

After I got over my initial disgust, I went about trying to use the infamous refund application to fill out the information for my second ticket. Well, the wonderful IT people that built the application apparently didn't have the foresight to anticipate that there might be more than one ticket per booking reference number so when I input the information for the second ticket, it failed saying that the booking reference number was invalid. I wasn't sure what to do at this point, since I knew I would get absolutely nowhere by trying to call them again. So I decided to hope that applying for a refund for one ticket under the booking reference number would cause both tickets to get refunded.

Last week, I see a credit for the first ticket on my American Express card. So, having forgot how horrible their customer service agents were, I called them back to ask about the refund for the second ticket. Guess what they told me? Yep, I need to go back to the infamous Refund Application and apply for a refund for the other ticket. When I asked the lady how I was supposed to do that when the booking reference number was no longer valid for the second ticket number, she said I need to use the new booking reference number for the second ticket. Of course, being a glutton for punishment, I had to ask why there was a new booking reference number. Apparently, the system automatically separates the tickets under a single booking reference number when one ticket is cancelled and creates a new booking reference number for the other tickets but it does not bother to send notification to anyone that it has done this. Great system, I would like to see the use cases for this application...

Anyway, I have now successfully applied for the refund for my second ticket. So hopefully in another two months, I will get back my other $2000 that EVA Airways has already been holding for two months now. Yes, I have learned my lesson - NEVER, EVER use no name airlines for international flights (for that matter, never use no name airlines, period).

BEA vs. Oracle (historical transfer from Yahoo 360 Blog - July 3, 2006)

2007-10-24T02:55:00.000-07:00

As someone who poured their heart and soul into making BEA Systems successful, it was a difficult decision for me to leave a company that had a great technology vision and some great products (as well as some not so great ones). BEA Tuxedo and WebLogic Server are still great products, in spite of BEA's current focus on and massive R&D funding diversions to the AquaLogic platform products. Unfortunately, many of the great technologists that defined BEA's success and even defined the vision against which BEA is currently executing have left for greener pastures. BEA has certainly changed into a very different company than was its heritage. Earlier this year after almost 7-1/2 years with BEA, I decided that it was time to move on and look for the "next big thing" in my career.

After taking some time off, I decided to join Oracle's Fusion Middleware development organization. While Oracle has admittedly had a few false starts in the middleware space, it is refreshing to once again be a part of an organization whose software vision is impressive and whose ability to execute against that vision is equally impressive (double digit year over year license growth with Fusion Middleware). Like any organization, Oracle has its challenges but overall I am very happy with my choice so far.

It really pains me to see BEA employees, some of whom I have had a long and successful working relationship with, targeting Oracle with flimsy arguments about why BEA is better and/or why Oracle is not successful or credible in the middleware space rather than just focusing on why BEA's products are good and letting the customers decide which product(s) is(are) best for their particular needs. In one such article, an old friend of mine (who shall remain nameless) essentially complains that Oracle's Fusion Middleware includes functionality/products that BEA doesn't have so the fact that Oracle's Fusion Middleware license business is experiencing double-digit growth isn't a fair comparison with BEA's license business which has been struggling for the past few years to prevent a decline in license revenues. So, I thought I would give my perspective on this topic, not as an ex-BEA or Oracle employee but as a technologist who has experience in both companies working with both sets of technologies.

The fact is that BEA and Oracle share a lot of their vision to create a comprehensive, mainly horizontal, tightly integrated suite of application infrastructure (i.e., middleware) products. In working with BEA's technology to build business solutions, it is almost always necessary to either rely on multiple third-party products or build a lot of custom software to complete the solution (for things like collaboration, business intelligence/BAM, rules, caching, identity and access management, etc.). What Oracle is doing that BEA is not able to, not necessarily because they wouldn't like to, is offer many of these other types of capabilities that BEA doesn't currently have as part of the Fusion Middleware platform suite. Oracle is doing this because they believe (as does BEA) that offering pre-integrated infrastructure products that customers need to build/assemble complete solutions is valuable to customers in reducing the overall expense of building and maintaining a business' IT applications.

BEA has long touted its standards compliance story over the years. The fact is that over the past few years, BEA's standards leadership has declined (except where they needed to try to drive the standards to protect themselves against huge rewrites of existing proprietary functionality) while Oracle's leadership has quietly increased to dominate BEA in an area where BEA used to be one of the industry leaders (along with IBM). One has to wonder how much importance BEA really places on standards given this trend. Oracle is not only helping to define the standards but is also using them to help protect its customers.

Oracle's marketing phrase (which personally I think is horrible) of "hot pluggable" is reality at Oracle. Not only does Oracle implement standards to allow customers to swap out pieces of the Fusion Middleware platform for other vendors' products, Oracle also does the testing to make sure that some of the more popular products from other vendors actually work with its products (and offers support for those configurations). Ask BEA if they can run WLI, WLP, or even AquaLogic Enterprise Service Bus on another J2EE application server and see what they say.

One of the other complaints by my friend was that Oracle's revenues included some legacy products that BEA didn't. The fact is that Oracle, like most enterprise software companies, must live with the technologies it has created and sold to its customers by providing support, migration paths to newer versions/products, etc. I am not saying that Oracle is perfect (no company is) but BEA has a history of stranding customers on technology that they decide they cannot support going forward. Just look at the experience of any customers who wanted to move from WLI/WLP 7.0 to WLI/WLP 8.1. BEA's answer was that it required the customer to rewrite their applications because the changes were too significant to provide migration support for. This wasn't the first time BEA did this and, looking at the differences between their 8.1 workshop runtime framework and beehive (the open source version of the workshop runtime framework) as well as their recent aquisitions in the Portal and BPM space, it is likely not going to be the last.

No vendor's software is free from hype and my experience with Oracle's Fusion Middleware is still much less than my experience with BEA's products. However, I still have to wonder who is going to emerge as the technology visionary at BEA to drive their vision and whether or not BEA will be able to focus its investments enough to produce the type and quality of products their customers have come to expect over the years from the vendor of Tuxedo and WebLogic Server...