e-commerce

The challenges of Google Stickiness

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The biggest challenge I have seen with getting rid of my Google Account is that I don’t really want to get rid of it 100%.  I plan on getting rid of the account I have been using because it is the only way to delete some things.  For example i moved out my Google Voice number but all my call records and voice mail cannot be removed unless i manually delete them or if i delete the entire account.  With thousands of log entries and voice mail i won’t be doing any manual deletions so nuking my entire account is the only option.

Since i want to delete everything i will lose anything i cannot backup or move.  For example any purchased Android app’s and media I won’t be able to keep.  There is no way to transfer purchases.  I was smart and only bought one ebook from Google and never bought any music.  I continue to do that with Amazon MP3 just because the MP3 has no DRM and allows for me to keep using it even if i ever get rid of Amazon.  Google and Amazon for that matter tie your ebooks to the account you bought it with.  The one ebook isn’t an issue since i had already bought it on my amazon account due to issues with the google reader.  

My biggest challenge is all the Android app’s I have purchased. Over the years I may have spent $100 or so on apps. Many of them I do not even use anymore but on principle i am not pleased with having to give them all up because they are tied to other services that I don’t want. In the end I think I am going to bite the bullet and live without the apps, but I am not happy. I already setup a new Google ID just for registering Android devices and any App purchases. Going forward that will be my approach, dedicated accounts for specific services that I need/want to use. Right now all i think i need is something for Android and Youtube.

Amazon MP3 Store

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Since the iTunes store opened, I have been a customer. I have bought a bunch of music from the store over the years. I have still bought regular CD’s but recently that has been happening less and less. Out of all the online buying options I liked that Apple’s AAC format’s DRM would allow me to burn regular CD’s. But recently I have ran into issues with that option. I have wanted to play music bought from iTunes on my Nokia phone. In order for me to that I have to burn the music to a CD and then rip it back to iTunes as an MP3. By doing this I would lose quality. I knew this when I bought the music in the first place, but I didn’t think I would need to do the conversion ever so I figured what the heck. Well fast forward a few years and if I bought all my music as CD’s and just ripped them as MP3’s I wouldn’t be in this situation.

I know that the iTunes store does offer some MP3’s without any DRM, but the issue is the store only offers SOME MP3’s. I haven’t found a song I want to buy from iTunes that was in MP3 format. About a week ago I checked out the Amazon MP3 store. I have heard about the store since it came out, but the ease of use of the iTunes store kept me lazy and I never checked it out. Last week I picked up 1 single to try out. Amazon made it really easy to buy and import my completely DRM free MP3 into iTunes. I was very impressed, but how about the stores selection?

Yesterday I did some browsing for music. I searched the iTunes store and then searched the same music on the Amazon MP3 store. What I found was that most of the music I wanted was in both stores. I ended up buying the latest Stoke 9 album on the Amazon MP3 site. I actually was going to buy that album about a month ago but I held off because I wanted a DRM free version. Now I have it. I will say I am not a huge fan of the DRM in Amazon’s ebooks, but I buy them. That being said I am impressed with the DRM free music they offer. For now I am switching to the amazon store vs the itunes store for my music. I will wait for more music to be DRM free on the itunes store, but I am not holding my breath.

For the future, I don’t see myself buying any DRM enabled music. I will get it from amazon or another store that offer’s DRM free music, or I will buy the CD’s like I used to and just rip the music. This is a time where I will not let laziness win out anymore. Now I wait for a more open ebook reader like the Kindle, but until then I will be still buying DRM’d books.

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The Busiest Day of The Year

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Today was the busiest day of the year for me at work. As it turns out this statement is true on several levels. My current company has a bi-annual event that generates the highest volume of web traffic on one of our sites. We literally began planning for today back in June during our last event. Because of the work shifts we ended up doing, and problems creeping up throughout the day today was also probably the hardest work day I have had since I started working at this job last February.

The odd thing is I kind of liked it regardless of the craziness. There is something about being in the thick of issues with the pressure mounting and you having to make split second decisions that has an odd attraction. I guess I am still sometimes an adrenaline junkie from my days volunteering as an EMT in College. The other alluring aspect of today is you see six months of work put to good use (hopefully), and for me all my skills as an engineer and a manager put to the test. The result is exhausting physical and emotionally, but in the end very rewarding. During our last event in June I commented afterward that if you are in an operations group and you don’t secretly enjoy such days you are in the wrong profession or lying to yourself. I still think that to be true.

The day did have its high and low points. In the end I know now that I have to handle a few personnel issues, and our systems performed better than anticipated. All in all a mixed ending for a roller coaster ride of a day.

Problem Resolution

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We had a demo of some really cool problem resolution software today. It can watch what goes on throughout all the servers and clients and correlates a problem for you. It does way more than that, but it is a difficult concept to write about. I am sold, but we need to evaluate it a bit more before we can make a decision.

Work was normal otherwise. Well normal except for the circuit failure we had in our call center computer room Thursday and again this morning. I don’t know who is stupid enough to close the door on a computer room that feels like it is 110 degrees inside while a fan is at the door blowing hot air out of it? Long story. We had some HVAC issues that caused other power related issues. The power issues caused some problems on thursday with our IPCC system. It was resolved by a reboot, but it was fun for a bit while we troubleshooted the issue. Otherwise I have been able to catch up on the backlog of issues this week since my boss was out sick.

Performance Issues Resolved

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After like 4 passes at the configuration of our network (switches, firewall’s, load balancers, etc) Danny found an abonormality that we wanted to correct and see what happened. On our core switch side we had the port where our Pix went set to full duplex 100meg, but on our Pix (configured years earlier than our core) it was set to auto. Turns out the Pix does not auto sense the 100meg full, but does not error out in the situation. You don’t even get lost packets, but you do get some collisions. Well some is an understatement.

Later in the day we set the port on the pix to be full duplex 100meg and within a few hours our metrics back to normal. This little change took us weeks to find. This is not the first time I have been burned by a port mismatch. Knowing that we even took steps to prevent this, or we thought we did.

It is frustrating to find such a little issue that does not show with errors causes so much problems..

Rough Days At Work

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I have had a few rough weeks at work. Hopefully a fix that went into place today will make things better. I know I am getting worn down, and I think others around me are also. We just don’t talk about it. Not much I can really talk about on this blog. I have written more extensively on my Work blog (password protected for my protection).

Because of the extra work, not much else to report on the social front.

Site Issues & Network Disasters

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I took yesterday off to catch up on some sleep. I ended up by the office in the late afternoon to go with Jayson backpack shopping. Our website performance (or alleged) issues continued on. All of our research boils down to we don’t think there is anything wrong, or shall I say anything new wrong. We know our application needs to be improved. That is why the development team has spent over a year designing and building a next generation application. I think certain business people are missing there numbers and blaming the issue on a site problem. They got one bad metric and they stomp all over it. It has been a long week.

On another note I was just sitting down to figure out what I wanted to eat for dinner last night when I got a call from Jayson that an internal website was offline and someone called about it. Turns out several several servers where down. They where all plugged into the same switch module. I ended up having to go to our data center and meet Jayson to fix the issue. It was as simple as re-seating the module and it started working again. To be safe we moved all critical systems off that module onto another switch module. I didn’t get home until after 1AM today. So for a day off, I worked almost a full day’s work. Nice!!!

Clean Up

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I got a bunch of misc. items done today and yesterday in anticipation of my week in Vegas next week. I will be out at the Cisco Networkers conference. Unfortunately they hold it in Las Vegas:) So I will have to suffer.

I sat with Bob yesterday and discussed the project plan for our major new site redesign. It sounds super interesting. It will be just stressful for me and my team. I keep telling myself I will be bored if we were not as busy as we are. It is still hard having a queue of stuff to get to, and some of it won’t get worked on for months.

Kai and I are both out next week. he is on vacation and totally unavailable. I will be reachable, so that is good, but the team will be short handed by 2 next week.

James was off today so I ended up doing some grunt phone configuratin work. That meant besides working on the Definity I had to go under desks doing some wireing. Not fun, but I got everything that needed to be done taken care of. I have to repeat what I have said before, working on the Call Manager is so much easier and straight forward than working on the Avaya Definity or any other Avaya switch I have worked on.

Late Night Postponed

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The late night I had scheduled tonight has been delayed. I am not sorry about it. I hate staying up till 1am only to start working. Our DB staff needed more time to ensure that our swap of servers we were planning went off without any problems.

With this late night on hold, I can possibly move up my other late night I had scheduled for Thursday/Friday. I am checking with Kai to make sure he can do the work early. We need to upgrade a switch in Kingston and also we want to do some rewiring. that requires us to work at night.

Also by doing the work tomorrow night, I can be in the office friday. Gus is going on vacation Friday so he would rather me be around. Schedule juggling is abound today…

Documentation

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I try to keep good documentation on what goes on in the office. Gus says it is good. I always think it can be better. The problem with documentation is that it gets stale quick if you are in a very dynamic environment like I work in.

We have a document we aptly call what runs where? It is a list of all tasks and jobs that run in our production environment. The problem I keep having is that no one updates the dam thing. We tell everyone, update the file. No one does. Today will be a day to bust heads and get the doc updated. I hope it will work. I need certain information out of this document to be complete so I can work on a new notification project I am planning.

After that I really should update our network visio map’s. Then our standards documents, and disaster recovery, etc. You get the picture. All these documents are really detailed, but after a few weeks the details tend to change. And if you haven’t ever done documentation before, it is really boring. Except Visio. I find working in Visio to be therapeutic. Not sure why, but I do. Call me crazy…