New Universal Corporate Paradigm: Customer Dis-service

   

   This is a classic example of where customer assistance has gone in the last decade and a half, not just at AT&T but all of corporate America. It would surprise me if half of the AT&T individuals this customer talked with via phone on this matter were located in the USA and not some Asian telephone answering sweatshop. 

   There is always a maze of automated messages one cannot bypass in pursuit of a conversation with a knowledgeable live person. Then one is confronted by the fact that knowledgeable isn't an option on the other end of the phone line for at least the first 2 levels of live human responders. They are all totally ignorant of anything but the SCRIPT they all MUST follow! At the point of their contact with the customer, the customer is by far the more knowledgeable of the 2 of them on the phone.

My Parkway Elm's Future

  O.K. I know 2 independent arborists brought in by the village said it should come down, but being the stubborn cuss that I am, I came up with this plan to save it and eliminate up to ~90% + of the risk (0% risk being impossible for even the most ideal old trees)to passing motorists and pedestrians via storm winds. Note that the upper limb shown to be cut sort of twists around a more vertical one ~ same size at that crotch. The second picture is of the 3 generations of the von Rentzell boys around the tree on Mothers Day.

   I spent 2-3 hours studying (not to mention previous hours doing same) this morning, trying to figure the various loading factors and probable effects of actions of various limbs of the "problem" trunk branch of the tree in severe winds. I assumed torque to be the most important factor promoting failure per the "fault" involved and more horizontal limbs the likeliest to exert the torque.

  I just found out that the story about this tree loss is appearing in this week's issue of "The Doings", one of 2 prominent local papers.

AMERICA'S FUTURE, IN OURS OR CHINA'S OR MIDDLE EAST HANDS?

   We have a national choice to make. Either we allow ourselves to be the victims of change by taking no measures to wean ourselves from carbon fuel burning for our energy needs or we incentivize change away from carbon fuel use. There is a double whammy vs double benefit between these options. As a nation we depend on petroleum, coal and natural gas for the bulk of our energy use. These are GLOBALLY PRICED fuels. The US is becoming less and less influential on that global price! Biofuels are largely dependent on what we now use as food crops. If we use crop plant "waste" for the carbon fuels we deprive the soil we grow the crops on of much needed restorative organic matter, jeopardizing it's ability to sustain production of the crops. 
   Leaving carbon fuel use behind us will allow us to determine our own economic future instead of having it dictated to us by carbon fuel producing or consuming foreign economic powers.
   Then there's the environmental damage of contributing to "Global Warming". There are serious arguments about the human influence on global temperatures rising and falling, but the science is pretty definitive of the currently rising temperatures world-wide. It seems ridiculousness to me that humanity would have no influence on at least the speed of that process by release into the atmosphere of trillions of tons of carbon that was stored for eons in subterranean deposits!

    Here's a take on the consequences for our State of Illinois and opportunities for avoiding them, the "pay now or pay later" list.

E-readers onThe Stormy Sea of USB

       Our son Jon and I discussed getting his mom a reader/tablet for her birthday (St Patrick's Day no less). I had asked Jeanne if she'd like a reader/ tablet for her birthday. I'd seen a "Cruz",  7" Reader at Tigerdirect  for $120. She said she wanted to wait since the product type was too young and likely much more expensive than it would become. Jon called a couple of days later and said he had a Kindle someone just gave him that had no charger. He said he'd give it to me to give Jeanne. We figured "how difficult can it be to get a charger?". Yesterday he just sent it home with his mom who was at their place to see the light of all of our lives, our only grandson Liam. So I started investigating a charger for it. It is a thoroughly intact 2nd generation 6" Kindle. The current one is 3rd generation I believe. It works except it's battery is too far discharged to do any reading. It turns out it uses a USB charger/ interface port to charge. That means any 1 amp USB adapter should work, right? I mean USB is USB right? WRONG PILGRIM, here's where it gets interesting. There are a plethora of USB connections and standards. See the Wikipedia page which covers it in depth. Here's the standard connector end views.

      I bought Jeanne a Blue Microphone "EyeBall" web-cam for her PC for Christmas which had only a 3' cable for use with laptops. I ended up having to order a 6' USB A male -Mini-B male cable + a spare to make it work . I had forgotten which non ordinary type it was. I also have a D,C,AAA,AA battery charger with a USB charging port. I figured I was set for the Kindle charging. Yeah , sure, guess again. Wonder of wonders, the spare cable i had didn't fit the Kindle on the small end. It needs a Micro-B not a Mini-B like I already had. 

Then I remembered the Universal Samsung Cell Phone Car Chargers both Jeanne and I have. There is a micro USB connector adapter in the kit I was able to use to charge my Bluetooth headset with. It is a Micro-B male which fits the Kindle just fine.

I still have to get a USB A male to Micro-B male cable to use to charge the Kindle indoors but at least I've navigated the Stormy Sea of USB successfully.

Liam spent the night

    We had Liam overnight this Saturday to Sunday. He's getting bigger, wonder of wonders, but he's still a bobble head when you're holding him head up against you. He slept for over 8 hours, unfortunately it was starting at ~ 5:00 PM on Saturday. I missed most of the night with him due to singing the concert of The Lutheran Choir of Chicago that night. I should have captured the video of him sleeping in his bouncy chair. He's a very active dreamer with facial expressions changing and arms and head moving about. It's a riot to watch. Jeanne got up at 2:00AM to feed him.Of course I had to leave the following morning to sing at church before he was up for very long. We had some time before Joi left with him in early afternoon though.

Good Electrical Ground & TVSS: Modern Home ESSENTIALS

    Take a look at everything you have in your home that plugs into your wall power outlets. EACH AND EVERY item other than simple lamps has some sort of electronic circuit in it if it's 10 or fewer years old. Things like wall dimmers do also. Every one of those electronic circuits are subject to spikes, noise, etc that EVERY power grid in all the world throws at each power customer every day. The noise can disrupt them and the spikes and surges can damage them. Typically the damage starts long before any of them stop doing what you bought it to do. The damage just accumulates until the device just can't function any longer. You can think of it as each spike melting and blowing a bubble in the material that makes up the various microscopic devices that make up each electronic circuit. When enough bubbles form no current will pass through the device. Long before that it starts to "act funny". When you add up what it cost to buy all of those household items, totals in the thousands of dollars are typical.
    I look at those spikes, surges, and noise as the waste in the electrical system. To understand the role of grounding in an electrical system I look at my plumbing system. Look under your sink, in the basement or wherever you can see both water supply and waste plumbing. Notice how big the waste drains are in relation to the water supply lines. Electrically, your 3rd wire ground does exactly what that waste line is doing only with wire and cables dumping spikes, surges, leakage and noise. 
    Every known substance on earth RESISTS electrical current other than superconductors which we can so far only operate at ridiculously low temperatures. That includes your water pipes. They can be expected to be more resistive than a copper wire. There are even in-line electrical insulators involved in "couplings" where different types of metal pipe meet (copper to steel, etc). The longer the piping from where your water supply comes out of the ground to the electrical grounding connection the more resistance it adds to the flow of that electrical waste. 
    About 15 months ago I bought a whole house TVSS( Transient Voltage Surge Suppressor) from Sine Control Technology as they had proven themselves extremely effective in my last few years as a Biomedical Engineering Technician at Hines VA Hospital. We experienced dramatic fall off in failures of almost all equipment connected through them. Where they were less effective we usually discovered faulty grounding of the electrical systems they were connected to. Think of the TVSS as the toilet for your electrical system and their use on faulty grounds as trying to flush a toilet through a 1/4" drain line. 

    That being said, when I discovered that my house electrical system ground was connected to the water line way at the back of my house instead of the entry point of the water supply at the front of the house, I made sure that the electricians installing my TVSS (see photo above) ran a new fat, highly stranded ground wire line from the electrical service panel to the water service entry before installation.

My Baby Boomer Road bike

   I took a Veterans Day ride. it was probably the last one of the season, The weather is not likely  to accommodate it after tonight. It was about a 16 mile ride, 8 out and 8 back, to Grace Episcopal Church of Hinsdale. That's the ride I like to take most often. I go 3 blocks north and a couple of blocks west and get on the Salt Creek Bicycle path that meanders through the forest preserves to just north of Western Springs Il. From it's end I cross Ogden Ave into Western Springs and ride to the pedestrian bridge over the Tri-State Tollway into Hinsdale Il. A couple of turns and up and down a couple of hills and I'm there.
    The picture shows my Specialized Sequoia, my "good" bike, the one I took this time, sitting on our new patio and my helmet on our patio table (the threshing table form an earlier post) after that ride . That bike is, you might say, a product of a near death experience. 

    5 years ago last July 28, I was riding the 3 miles home from  work on my Giant Cypress comfort bike in a light rain wearing my neon yellow poncho. I decided to take the sidewalk on the east side of 17th Ave. south along the edge of the mall parking lot. I was approaching the traffic light for the mall lot exit just as it went green. I noticed a large SUV stopped to my left signaling a right turn out of the lot. I looked at the driver and her eyes appeared to stop on me so I proceeded. Unfortunately so did she. She broadsided me sending me flying unconscious ~ 15' into the intersection, my bike flying another direction 1/2 as far. As my body began to wrap onto her hood the thought "so this is how it ends"raced through my mind just before final impact. Hitting the  pavement woke me up. On awaking my first thought was"am I dead or alive?" Flexing a couple of limbs convinced me of the latter. There was no major trauma. My helmet though destroyed saved my cranium. 

    Besides paying for replacement of my damaged stuff, the ambulance, ER visit and  the physical therapy for the various traumatized muscle sets etc., the settlement allowed an amount for pain and suffering which pretty closely matched the cost of a new kind of bike then termed a comfort road bike. 
    I had been periodically drooling over one at "The Wheel Thing" a bike shop in  La Grange, the suburb adjacent to mine for ~ a year. So I came to own the Sequoia with  "wicked fast" (per my son Geoff's words) frame wheels and drive train of a full-on road bike with a carbon fiber fork with elastomer inserts to dampen road vibration, a suspension seatpost for road shock absorbtion, a higher rising handlebar stem and secondary brake levers. The last 4 features give the comfort road bike's owners a fast bike that accommodates the older less accommodating bodies some of us have. That's why I call it my baby boomer road bike.