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Hi… I’m in Delaware. I’ve always wanted to say that.

Maybe the headline is a bit harsh; I didn’t have a bad trip really, it was just “not my night”. The major disappointment of the evening was breaking my digital camera. Honestly, the camera was on its last legs anyway. I had even been looking into a digital camera for a while. I now own a non-functional Canon Powershot S50. For twenty-one months, that camera served me quite well.

When I purchased it in November of 2003, Sears was asking for $499.99. Through some finagling, I got the price down to $399.99. In retrospect, I wish I had purchased the maintenance agreement (now known as a protection agreement). I always associate Sears’ service plans with reliability. If you buy their extended warranty, they will gladly replace the broken item. Of course, they sell good products and don’t want you to have to use your extended warranty, and so they sell products they don’t think will easily break in the first place.

Just as an aside, in retail, the higher the cost of the protection agreement (or other extended warranty) is proportional to the likelihood that the device will fail within the warranty period. The companies that sell you the “insurance” against product failure set the price of the warranty in such a way that they can maintain profitability. Of course, remember that sometimes, you want to pay that small markup just to ensure that you’re not the one that is on the short end of the stick. If the insurer loses out, it’s a calculated risk. If your item breaks, however, you’re left with the burden of replacing it.

Anyway, the Powershot S50 was a great camera. It packed professional quality features in to a pocket size (albeit a large pocket size) package. I had put it through such a heavy duty cycle by carrying it everywhere I went for nearly two years that it’s amazing that the camera didn’t fail earlier. I specifically recall one time where I set up a tripod so that I could get up a sort of self-portrait with Allison and myself when I went with her on my road trip last year. We were just entering Michigan, and we pulled over to the side to get a horribly dangerous shot of ourselves at the border entering the state. The highway had incredibly heavy truck traffic and a ton of construction was also going on. Since the shoulder was so narrow, a truck that happened to be passing by created such a large gust of wind that the tripod, perched atop Allison’s grandfather’s car, blew right over. The camera sustained a good 6 foot fall. The fall last night was shorter, but I guess it just hit the precisely wrong way.

And so, my camera’s Achilles’ heel was struck. Honestly, I’m pretty disappointed that I broke my camera only because I’ve been through so much with it. Sure, I had been getting fed up with some of the unreliability and general problems associated with aging. I just guess I wasn’t quite ready to get a new camera. Now, I pretty much had to. And as such, I decided to go with what I already know works – the Canon Powershot S70. This particular model of camera has done something that not many products can do – it earned my brand loyalty. As is made clear by many of my other entries here, I often have negative things to say about the products or services offered in today’s marketplace. Occasionally, however, I go out on a limb and put my seal of approval on a product. The Canon Powershot series has earned that seal. To see the photos that I put together with the Powershot S50, may it rest in peace, check out the INeedAttention.com Photo Portfolio, which is maintained separately from the galleries.

And on that note, just imagine the cool shots I’ll be able to get with the newer model. For starters, those 2.1 extra mega-pixels can make quite a difference, as I’ve already seen from other people’s photos from the S70. The lens on the S70 is one of the things that excites me most about getting a new replacement camera. The new lens is capable of exceptional wide-angle shots, and can also focus in as closely as 4 cm away (the S50 can only zoom in as close as 10 cm). The range of available shutter speeds is about the same, although the 1/2000 sec exposure time will be new. The movie mode on the S70 is capable of 640×480 resolution video, which excites me greatly, also. But the best part in my mind is the new ability to use wide-angle and telephone lens adapters. It is not common that you find a consumer-grade, pocket sized digital camera that offers the extensibility of swappable lenses.

So, with the changing of the guard, I’m excited to see what the new camera can do. I’ll be receiving it on Tuesday, since I ordered the new one with next-day shipping. I’ll make sure to post a couple of shots to see what it’s capable of. Oh, and I’ll make sure to post some pictures and such from the party too.

Vinny Murphy is the winner, and will select the charity to which the proceeds are donated this week. About $238 was raised during this event, the first with an altruistic motive.

Of course, you don’t care about the textual details, you’re here because you want the photos. Click the photo below to see the rest of the gallery from this years highly successful Annual Gallon Challenge(tm)!

So, it’s been a while since my last update. The reason – my laptop died recently. Literally, within the blink of an eye, and without any prior warning, my laptop crashed and refused to boot. Occasionally, I’d see a boot screen, and other times, there would simple be no response. Once in a while it would even stop itself during its power on self test, emitting only a diagnostic beep code. The code was a long beep followed by two short beeps. So, according to the T40/T41/T42 POST Beep Code Chart, that meant that either my memory or my system board was fried.

First, I tried to replace the memory, figuring that if it was that simple, I’d just use the memory I bought as a loaner until IBM (er, Levono, er, Lenovo) sent my replacement memory. It turns out that it wasn’t that simple, because replacing the memory didn’t do the trick. I ended up keeping the memory that I had bought though, because I ended up getting a pretty good deal from Best Buy, rather surprisingly. A 512MB stick of RAM cost me $75 in the store, but I ended up getting an unexpected $20 mail-in-rebate, which delighted me greatly. Now that I’ve received my laptop again, I can say that adding the additional RAM, for a total of 1GB of memory, has definitely improved the computer’s performance, especially when performing intense operations.

But back to the story at hand – my laptop was reduced to a door stop, and it was a holiday weekend when the failure occurred. “First thing Tuesday morning,” I said, “I’m calling IBM!” I mean Lenovo. As a quick aside, I’m making reference to the fact that although I’m using an “IBM Thinkpad” it’s really a “Levono Thinkpad“, since IBM essentially sold its laptop manufacturing arm to Lenovo. When Tuesday morning rolled around, I did indeed call for assistance. My laptop is provided by and protected by the RPI laptop program. As the old saying goes, you break it, you buy it. With an RPI laptop, if you break it, you just get a brand new one with virtually no questions asked. I jokingly asked a technician once – if I shot my laptop out of frustration and it broke as a result of that, would my warranty replace it? “If it was an accident, sure,” he said.

Well, true to form, IBM took less than six days to replace my laptop. Those six days, mind you, includes a total of three overnight shipments and a holiday weekend. Here’s the timeline: I called IBM on Tuesday, initiating the warranty claim. By Wednesday, I’d received my laptop mailer so that I could send it back. On Thursday, DHL picked the laptop up from my house. By Friday, the laptop was repaired and mailed back, but because it happened in the evening, the parcel sat idle somewhere. Saturday and Sunday, DHL offers no service. But alas, this morning, delivery of my laptop was attempted this morning at 11:20AM. Literally, less than six full days later, I got my laptop back without ever having to do more than make a phone call.

As for the service they provided? The only parts on my laptop that were not replaced were my LCD and my hard drive, both of which required no repair anyway. Literally every other piece of my laptop was replaced – from the system board, to the CD-RW, to the keyboard & keyboard bezel. I’m even getting a new battery out of the deal, although that has to be handled through a separate warranty bureau because batteries are protected by a different warranty.

The moral of the story here is two-fold. First, if you have a chance to buy an RPI laptop, buy it – I’m an IT professional, and although I could easily get a laptop with similar specs for a lot cheaper, the service they provide at the times you need it most are absolutely superior. IBM not only met my expectations, they far exceeded them. Actually, what I meant was, Lenovo met and exceeded my expectations. Sure, I’ve never heard of them before, but damn, was I impressed. Second, DHL absolutely rules. When I used to work at RPI’s student mail center, we would always encourage customers to use DHL for all overnight shipping. This was because DHL had a bulk agreement with RPI that provided reduced prices on their services. Overnight shipping, however, was so cheap that it beat even the US Postal Service’s Express Mail prices. DHL also was able to schedule a same-day delivery re-attempt when the first attempt failed. Not even the nicest postmaster could arrange that.

The above article, in summary: IBM/Lenovo laptops and warranties rule. DHL rules. I’m back on the Internet.

It is now officially the summer. This explains yesterday’s horrid traffic on the Tappan Zee Bridge, causing my commute to last over 90 minutes, for example. This likely also explains why the superiors at the organization I work for believe that I am probably at most capable of taking in sun and enjoying the beach (for I am only a college student and thus have no qualifications or practical knowledge or experience whatsoever).

Yesterday, for example, I responded to an email that one of my superiors had sent me. It was a response to an email that I had sent her. She sent back her comments in red, as if we were in grade school and she was my teacher. Normally, this wouldn’t bother me, because red is an obvious color for making editing revisions. What bothered me was that on top of that, she used phrases like “be careful how you phrase things” as if I had actually done something wrong by pointing out the obvious – that things didn’t work properly (in some circumstances, obviously ‘mum’ is the word, but I’m a systems tester and so it’s my job to report things when they don’t work).

But today’s example of the complete lack of respect that I get was a result of the recent installation of a cable modem in our test facility. Although we have a corporate LAN in the building, we recently had Cablevision equip us with Optimum Online so that we could simulate a more realistic environment when testing software. There was, however, an obvious problem with this solution: Optimum Online allows its users to have only one IP address per cable modem. Users that want to share a connection need to use a router.

The ‘experts’ here seemed to fail to recognize one thing: a router is not a hub, nor is a router a switch, nor is a switch a hub.

So, when I came back from the training class I took this morning, I couldn’t help but notice – and get excited – that some networking device had been connected to the cable modem. It was quite frustrating having to reset the power to the cable modem each time we wanted to change the computer connected to it. Since it was lunch time, I just went with my coworkers to lunch without actually trying to use the connection. While at lunch, one of my peers remarked that it didn’t work because the ‘router’ was “too old”. Immediately, I knew that they were using a hub, and not a router. I went to see whether they were using a router or a hub after lunch, and I was right – they were using a hub.

I wrote a memo to my boss about this. I later heard back from a boss in a different department that I “had no idea what I was talking about”. They came in to tell me that they “use the same router at home and have four computers connected to the Optimum Online.” I pointed out that he said that he was using a router, and not a hub, to which he replied, “you know what I meant.” Except that really, I didn’t know what he meant. This is a good time to explain the difference between a router and a hub (and a switch). All three devices allow you to network computers together, but each has their own little differences.

Hub – A hub is like a party line. It lets you plug more than one device into the same line so that the devices share the physical connection. ‘Share’ is the operative word here, because with computers especially, multiple devices can share the same physical connection without ill effect (usually). This type of device doesn’t work with Optimum Online because it allows the devices to share the cable modem, and the cable modem effectively says, “no way, Jose”. The difference between a hub and a party line is that with a hub, the individual devices rely on something “higher up” in the network like a router to give them an IP address, so each computer could have its own unique IP. A party line, on the other hand, requires users to share a phone number. If two computers try to use the line at the same time, things start to slow down.

Router – A router is like a private phone system. You have extensions on that private phone system. I can call upstairs from downstairs, and I can call downstairs from upstairs. I can also call out to my Grandmother, though. If my Grandmother wants to call me, she calls one number, but would either need to know my extension or she wouldn’t be able to reach me (unless the phone system was set up to forward the call). Each extension doesn’t have its own public phone number though; they share the phone number of the main line.

Switch – A switch is like a combination of a router and a hub. A switch determines where communications need to go and routes them accordingly. It also lets devices have unique IP addresses (comparable to separate phone numbers). If my Grandmother called my upstairs line, it would make sure that the call rang only the upstairs extension, and vice versa. If two computers tried to use the line at the same time, the performance would stay fairly constant because the communications would go only where they need to go. A switch doesn’t assign IP addresses though; it just keeps things moving in the direction they’re supposed to move.

So, the ‘expert’ from my office called me his bitch and showed off his impressive knowledge of networking components, never even stopping to listen to a word I had to say. Go ahead, and call Optimum Online, and ask if you need a hub or a router. I dare you. Go ahead, and pick up a book on networking, and figure out how ‘layers’ work. For those that are interested, a hub works on the physical layer (I), a switch works on the data link layer (II), and a router works on the network layer (III). The terms ‘hub’, ‘switch’, and ‘router’ are not interchangeable.

So to the idiots at work that think you’re smarter than me because you’re older than me and have wasted more of your time with an organization that doesn’t respect you: congratulations on your experience, but if you’d like to have someone else do my job, you can get someone that’s older than me and just not as smart. That’s a line from Doogie Howser, right there.

I walked into work 30 minutes late today. Twenty of those minutes were spent writing and delivering a letter. The other ten minutes were spent as I cried in the parking lot outside my building, embarrassed to face my coworkers in the state I was in. I composed myself, exited my car, walked to the door of the building, limbered up the stairs, and opened the door to the test lab. The smiles on my coworkers’ faces were infectious to me, and as they greeted me I too greeted them. Despite my best efforts to move to my chair and start my terminal without having to talk to anyone, I was engaged by my peers. They were making conversation about my weekend and suddenly I felt a paralysis come over my tongue.

Unable to speak, feeling my nose start to congest, staring dead on at the computer screen in front of me, I felt tears run down my face again. As I write this alone in front of that same computer hours later, I still can’t hold myself back. Not for a second did I lead on to my coworkers that anything was wrong. I haven’t said a word to them all morning. I wonder if they even think that I seem quiet today. It’s killing me to look at people and talk to them today because for some reason, everyone has been nice to me today (except the one complete retard that filed a complaint against me on Amazon.com because they can’t receive my farking emails and blame me for poor communication; enjoy the spam you get when my site gets indexed by web crawlers, [email protected]).

Life comes full circle though, right? I only feel now the way I’ve made other people feel other times. And, despite how I feel now, I know that life goes on. I’ve had a great run in the last few months; I can’t thank you enough for that. I wish I was better; I know I’m trying. Surely that means something.

Here’s to the future.

Love always,
-Pete

“What’s there left to wait for?
Wait for?
I wait.”
–The Get Up Kids, “Action and Action”