Walking Ernestina on a spring Sunday morning
Snapped this from my camera phone earlier this morning. I love the colors around here.
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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The service departments at Potamkin Jeep and Tamiami Jeep suck. Let’s just get that out there for the search engines.
I’ve taken my 2005 Wrangler Unlimited to both dealers and both have exhibited unbelievably bad customer service. I was ready to mark it up to Miami customer service in general until I had such a great experience at the Apple Store today.
Three weeks ago, I dropped off my Jeep at Potamkin to have them repair a broken part of the convertible top frame and investigate a growing vibration in the front end. I explained to Gabriel Casanova, the Assistant Service Manager, that I’d already taken it to Tamiami twice and they’d replaced parts but had been unable to figure out the problem. He assured me he’d figure it out.
Every few days, I kept calling for status reports, and I couldn’t get in touch with him, and the service department didn’t answer the phone and didn’t return voicemails. Finally, after two and a half weeks, I started sending faxes to the sales department, and that finally elicited a return call. Gabriel left a message on my voicemail saying they’d fixed the vibration, but they’d ordered the wrong parts twice to fix the top, and they were waiting on part number three.
Today, at the three week mark, I called again and finally got a manager. He checked the Jeep personally and found that nobody had done anything at all on it. That was the last straw: I drove over there with Erika and took the Jeep back. Tamiami’s service crew is insulting, rude and incompetent, but at least they don’t leave me hanging without a Jeep for 3 weeks.
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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Apple retail stores have a Genius Bar where you can get tech support. I walked over to the Apple Store on Lincoln Road (damn, I love living in Miami Beach) and bellied up to the bar. The bartender, wearing a black t-shirt with the label “Genius” on the front, helped out a couple of customers. While I waited, another Apple employee noticed me waiting, asked if I had a reservation, and then helped me make one with a nearby iMac. Wow.
I sat watching the Genius tend to his customers. He was helpful, patient, and fair. One of the laptops needed serious repair, and he explained the customer’s options as to how to back up their data before sending in the laptop for service. The customer was clearly in over his head, but the Genius helped him make the right decision without trying to fleece the guy for the $50 backup charge.
When my turn came up about ten minutes later, the Genius looked at my Macbook Pro for less than sixty seconds, agreed that the battery was hosed, and went into the back to fetch me a new battery – free under warranty. He installed it, made sure the system recognized the additional charge capacity, and then sent me on my merry way.
Damn. From here on out, I’m insisting that all of my relatives get Apples.
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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Yesterday was Take Your Sons and Daughters To Work Day, and I got roped into leading sessions. I ran a presentation on desktops & servers: we opened up desktops, explained what the parts did, showed off a couple of servers, and finished things off with a round of LAN games. We were a big hit with the kids as well as the parents because evidently ours was the least boring and most interactive session, and I took pride out of that.
I learned some lessons, though, and I’m passing those along here in case anybody else needs to run one of these sessions for kids:
10 kids is a great group, 16 kids is too many. The 16-kid groups quickly devolved into screamfests, and we couldn’t get everybody to stay quiet long enough to learn something. The 10-12-kid groups were more manageable – 2-3 kids per volunteer seemed about right. Remember, we’re not professional teachers – it’s harder for us to manage this number of kids.
Know how to get problem kids out fast. I had a kid try to slice his arm open with a stick of RAM, and then tried to jam a CPU into his skin to see if it would leave a mark. He was actively causing disruptions with other kids, trying to get them to do the same thing, and I had no idea what on earth to do. It was an unsafe situation for him as well as the other kids. Looking back, I wish I would have asked him to step into the back of the room and had the chaperone go drop him off with his dad, but since it all happened so fast, I didn’t know what to do. Thank God he didn’t break his skin, because I’d have freaked out.
The chaperones need to be trained, and then be actively involved. We had some chaperones that sat in the back quietly while the kids yelled and screamed, and we had other chaperones who actively helped to keep the kids under control. We had much better results with the latter.
Don’t let parents leave with the kids during breaks. During lunch and the snack break, the parents took kids off to various places, and they didn’t all come back at the start time. As a result, we had to manage 10 bored kids for 15-20 minutes. We couldn’t start the lessons because we had to wait for all of the kids. The kids got uncontrollable while they sat and waited for the latecomers. An alternative would be having the chaperones running some kind of activity until all of the kids got together again.
We need separate tracks for 8 year olds versus 12 year olds. 8’s are old enough to get something out of it, but the material has to be completely different than what you present to a 12 year old. My 11-12 year old folks wanted to know more and more and more, but the 8-10 year olds needed shorter, more visual lessons.
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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I scanned and uploaded our 2001 vacation pictures from Rome and from Mexico. Nothing amazing in there, just your typical vacation photos. I wanted to scan ‘em in before I upgraded my home computer to Vista because I’m not sure my scanner will work with that new OS.
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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Years ago, I used to put a different signature on my work email every day. I drew from a few books of quotations, and I would spice it up with amusing song lyrics now and then. My employer asked me to stop when I included a lyric from the Barenaked Ladies that went, “When she was three, her Barbies always did it on the first date…” Someone found that offensive (which I found even more amusing), so I had to call it quits on the signatures.
Every now and then, I run across a song that makes me wish I was still doing the daily sigs, like today’s upbeat shout of a chorus:
“C’mon baby, let’s separate
C’mon baby, let’s separate
I paid my dues, you’re makin’ plays
I’d do anything to get away…”
Gotta love that. Comes from The Blood Arm‘s song “P.S. I Love You But Don’t Miss You.” (No, that’s not a message to Erika in any way – the song is just hilarious.)
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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After we signed a Microsoft Premier Support agreement at work, one of the first things we did was a Microsoft Exchange Health Check. A Microsoft guru spends a few days onsite using advanced custom tools to gather all kinds of information. The first result is a thorough report on your successes and failures at system management, and the second result is a set of action plans to help get the problems corrected. The Microsoft person has all kinds of experience from other big companies, which makes it really easy to get a jump start on the fixes. They can assist with some of the tougher problems, and they can give advice on what they’d conquer first.
We decided to bring them in for a SQL Server Health Check due to some performance problems we’d been having with our data warehouse. I’d researched the problems several times and kept coming back to the same conclusions, but since there were some political problems involved with the team relationships, we figured it would be good to get a completely independent opinion from outside. After all, it’s in Microsoft’s best interest to make sure their products perform, regardless of who’s right or who’s wrong.
Microsoft sent Abraham Samuel, a guy with a lot of relevant experience on ETL work in data warehouses. I can’t say enough good stuff about his abilities: he asked all of the right questions, figured out all of the right answers to our questions, and presented it all well. We learned a lot, corrected a few simple problems already, and made plans to do our own examinations on the rest of our SQL Servers. This week, I’m embarking on a two week mini-project to knock those out.
Bottom line: I was right about my performance diagnosis, muhahaha. Gotta love that.
In a few months, we’ll probably get another SQL Health Check. We’ll check two servers – the data warehouse to make sure the fixes did the fixing, and our new sales force automation cluster to make sure I’ve carried those same recommendations over across more servers.
I would highly recommend that anyone with a Premier Support agreement get a SQL Health Check. Even if you’re not having problems with your database servers, you’ll walk away with a useful set of knowledge about how to verify that everything’s functioning as it should.
It’s much less overhead and expense than a visit to the Microsoft Technology Center.
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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That pretty well sums up what I’ve been doing the last few weeks – keeping the trains running on time, running errands, getting into a nice routine. That routine has not included blogging, and for that, I apologize, but the rest of my life thanks you for your patience.
My entire life now revolves around RememberTheMilk.com, a web-based task list that manages all of the things I gotta track. I’m wearing a lot of hats at work these days, and I can’t remember how I lived without it.
Well, that’s not entirely true – this month I remembered exactly how I lived without it. I forgot my own mother’s birthday until three days afterwards, at which point I placed a call and got her voicemail. Doh. Yeah, that’s what it’s like to live without a completely organized to-do system. I promptly entered the family birthdays to avoid future bouts of stupidity.
This weekend, I’ve gotten so far ahead that I finally got around to doing something I’d had on the back burner for two years: repairing the speakers Gene gave me. He’d replaced his Chapman T-7′s (see review) with a new set of Vandersteens, and he was so kind as to give me his old ones. The foam surrounds had crumbled over time, so I put in a replacement set. We’ll see how they sound after the adhesive sets, although I’m still not sure where I’m going to put them. They’re huge.
Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.
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