Category Archives: Issues

Hyundai – Never Again

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This tale of woe begins in October of 2015. I take my 2007 Hyundai Santa Fe into Maple Hill Hyundai for an oil change, and I learn about a service campaign, there is a recall on the Valve Cover Gasket for all Santa Fe’s like mine. Maple Hill performs the operation; I get a new gasket and a new alternator and the oil change. I drive away happy; everything is back to normal.

At the end of 2017, I start noticing some odd lights in my car, and generally odd behavior starting to crop up. I’ve got 130000 miles on the vehicle, so I figure that it’s cold weather and old age. The gas tank needle gets daffy, not registering full tanks of gas, so I use the trip-o-meter to measure out 200 miles and then fill up from there. I can adapt. Then on really cold mornings, I notice the battery light flickers for a little bit, alternating with the seatbelt light, but after a few minutes both go out. I drive it around, and everything is normal.

Then we went to Chicago, Illinois to C2E2. The Santa Fe loaded with suitcases and comic books, I drive it into the parking structure, and that’s that. We have a wonderful time in Chicago, and then we pull it out of the parking structure. I notice that the battery light and seatbelt light have started to blink, but then it goes away and I figure that it’s business as usual. I drop off my niece and her boyfriend at their car and then drive off. As I approach the highway, the battery light and seatbelt light continue to flicker. We get on I-94, headed back to Michigan, and right after we cross from Illinois to Indiana, the battery light is on. Then TPMS, BRAKE, ABS, AIRBAG, all the lights turn on and Check Engine comes on. Then the lights get dimmer and dimmer, and we roll into a Walmart parking lot.

I’m panicking. My car is dying, I’m 125 miles from home, and it’s late Sunday night. After I chill out in the Walmart, we get back to the car, and I turn it on. Check Engine is still on, but everything else is off, and the car is behaving like everything is fine. So we tool around the parking lot a few times, and everything remains fine. So I get on the highway again. We get 25 miles down the road, and then the battery light starts to blink. Then again, everything goes downhill. The car gradually slows down, until I’m pretty much just crawling along on idle speed, the gas pedal is hilariously worthless. We turn a few times and get right up to the parking lot of an Econolodge. All that is left is one tiny little lamp in the instrument cluster, and it’s half-lit anyhow. The car is fully dead. Transmission is stuck in everything but park, and so I get out, and with Scott’s help, we try to push the Santa Fe up the little incline to the parking lot of the Econolodge Hotel. A stranger appears out of nowhere and runs over and asks if he can help, and all three of us push the Santa Fe to the middle of the empty parking lot. I turn the car off, but the panic sets in again because I can’t put the transmission in park. I wait a few minutes and try to turn the car on, I get accessories to come on, and the transmission goes to park. I turn everything off and get a room at that Econolodge.

Now, here is where we place a mental pin in the tale, keep this spot in mind because what happens next is full of consequence.

I wake up the next morning, I don’t know what is wrong with my car, and my first idea is to see if I can find a repair shop. There are lots of auto dealers around, there’s a Kia, there is a Chevy, and a Toyota, but no Hyundai. So I figure I need some sort of shop, so I search Yelp for “auto repair,” and I find Adam’s Towing and Service of Porter, Indiana. I call them, reach Adam, and tell him what happened to my car. He suggests that it’s the alternator and I ask for a tow so he can work on it. The tow guy comes, super amazing fellow, and they get my Santa Fe on the skid and tow it away. I follow after in a rental car I picked up from an Enterprise location in Burns Harbor. We get to Adam’s shop, and they start working on it. I take the rental back to Kalamazoo and drop off everything; we get a call from Adam, my car is ready. He replaced the Serpentine Belt, and the Alternator and everything is back to normal. We get back, drop the rental car and pick up the Santa Fe and drive it back to Kalamazoo. Everything is back to normal. While talking to Adam, he asks if there was anything about motor oil with my car, because the alternator was soaked with oil and that’s why it died. I remember back to the service campaign that Hyundai performed and immediately do a Google Search, and many other people have had the gasket go out on them and struggle with Hyundai about repairs. So I’m thinking that’s what is going on with my Santa Fe. I go to Maple Hill Hyundai, and I learn that the job cannot be cleared because the leak is coming from the Timing Cover Gasket and that repairing that is a $1200 to $1600 process. For me, that totals the Santa Fe.

So then I start talking with Hyundai Corporate, talk to many people about my problem, and I believe that the problem is still the valve cover gasket. That motor oil that was inside my engine got outside and killed the alternator. I’d like my money back from the repair job, and I’d like someone to fix the gasket, just like Hyundai did in October 2015. Just like all those other Santa Fe owners who had this EXACT SAME PROBLEM.

So then, after being told that it wasn’t covered by Maple Hill, I reached out to another shop where I had my brakes done previously and brought it to them. The owner said “How do they know where the leak is, did they clean the side of the engine and run a dye test?” and the answer is no. While we had the hood open, he also pointed out that the plastic cowl that covers the engine was missing nuts, and one was cross-threaded and abused badly by a torque driver. But I don’t know who did it, so who is to blame? Haven’t a clue, but there are only three shops in this tale, Maple Hill, Adam’s, and the place where it sits now.

So then this morning I call Hyundai and I relate the tale to the rep, updating with my misgivings about which gasket really is the problem, and that I want proof that it is either the valve cover gasket or the timing cover gasket, and that I don’t want my money back from the alternator fix, but I really want to prevent this from happening again because I want my car to work for me for a while longer if I can manage it. I relate the tale, and then when I mention Adam’s Towing and Service and the shop that will wash the engine block and run the dye test, the Hyundai rep stops me and tells me that I can stop right there. Hyundai refuses to honor any warranty, expressly or implicitly formed because I took my vehicle to an Independent Repair Facility. So, go back to the pin I mentioned about the momentous choice I made. I was stranded on the highway, no warranty from Hyundai, no clue it was the gasket, and so because I didn’t push the vehicle to a Hyundai dealership, I’m quite shit out of luck.

So that’s the end of it. Hyundai walks away, from a service campaign that they botched, maybe, how can anyone tell? Nobody but the IRF even mentioned cleaning the engine and running a dye test! And what burns the most is that while I was regaling the Hyundai Corporate Rep with my tale of suffering, she searches for a Hyundai dealer in Chesterton, Indiana. Norris Hyundai. She then proceeds to waggle this Hyundai dealers location in my face, over the phone. If only I had pushed my dead 2000 pound Santa Fe to Norris Hyundai, then maybe Hyundai would talk to me. But because I was in the middle of the dark, with a dead car, work on Monday, and all the other stress, that I didn’t search for Norris and I didn’t PUSH MY CAR THERE, that there is nothing left to talk about and that I should have a nice day.

So I am done with Hyundai. I am done with the brand; I’m done with Maple Hill. There is no point in calling Fox Hyundai or Norris Hyundai, or anyone else. Hyundai only has one thought, and that is to hide in their fine print and treat me with such disrespect that it takes my breath away. They have no interest in their customers, no interest in repairing what is their fault. So I’m going to find out since it doesn’t matter now, I’m throwing in all the way with my new repair shop. This fellow will wash the side of the engine block, add the dye, and give me an authoritative answer as to which gasket is leaking. And then I’ll face the question of what to do from that point forward. It will answer the question, is it the timing cover gasket or the valve cover gasket? And if it is the valve cover, I might pay to have this new fellow do the work.

It is clear to me that Hyundai is uninterested in being human to me. They want to be a company, and that is their prerogative. It is my choice to associate with humans or companies, and I make my choices based on what I perceive to be the humanity of whom I am dealing with. Hyundai hides behind their fine print and their rules. That’s perfectly fine. I don’t want anything to do with a company like that. And if that means that I burn all the bridges to all the automakers in my life, then so be it. I have to make a stand, and I will live with the consequences. I will fucking walk if I have to. This deep violation of the Golden Rule is so upsetting to me that I cannot even see straight, so that’s fine Hyundai, hide behind your fine print and your rules and utterly fail to treat others as you would have them treat you.

There is a place in hell for you, and the punishment for a company is expressed regarding karma. You deserve what you get.

Cisco SmartInstall Vulnerability Mitigation

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At work, I use Cisco gear everywhere. Recently the SmartInstall Hack has become a security concern. There is a vulnerability in the SmartInstall system that allows bad actors to send arbitrary commands to your network infrastructure.

So I started out knowing how my network is shaped, that I customarily keep the 10-net IP space organized by state, then by city, and then finally by kind of equipment. Out of the four octets, the first one has to be 10, the second one is the state, and the next is the city in that state, and finally, I prefer to keep all my infrastructure gear between 250 and 254.

I started with nmap because I wanted a memory refresher so that I wouldn’t miss a device.

nmap 10.1-10.1-10.250-254

This command provides me a handy report of all the places on the inside of my network where ssh or telnet (depending on the age of the gear) reside. I print off the list, and it becomes an authoritative checklist for all my infrastructure gear.

Then one at a time, either ssh or telnet into the infrastructure devices and issue these commands in one paste command:

conf t
no vstack
end
wr mem

I don’t care if the command fails, it’ll write NVRAM to Flash either way which suits me fine. Once I was sure I got all the equipment that could be affected, I know that at least for this vulnerability, we’re all done. There won’t be anything, at least for this, at work for me to worry over.

Now if you use vstack or SmartInstall, your mileage may vary, but I certainly don’t use it. The default is to leave it on, so the smart money is in forcing it off. Why leave it open as a vulnerability if you don’t have any chance of bad actors on your LAN? Because it is one less thing to worry over.

Dreamscapes of Chicago

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While I’ve been enjoying Chicago, and we’ve been pretty much carless the entire time with the Santa Fe parked in the hotels parking structure and taking Uber rides everywhere it has done nothing to reduce the nightmares that I suffer every night sleeping in this place.

Car Theft.

These nightmares are riffs on a theme, different thieves, different cars, different lives, different settings. Cars without wheels, somehow rolling away, cars without any internal parts whatsoever operating as if they had them. Thieves that are anonymous or thieves that are caught but chatty occupy the dreamscape.

I’ve had three cycles of sleep here, and in each cycle, the same exact thing. My vehicle is stolen. When I try to stop the thieves, they explain to me that it has to be this way, that it always has to be this way.

And while I’ve had a delightful time at C2E2, I am going to welcome my exit from this place. I can’t stay in Chicago much longer, if nothing more that I can’t endure many more of these nightmares every single night, like clockwork.

Kalamazoo #NeverAgain March

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Today we drove up to Western Michigan University and joined the community in the anti-NRA #NeverAgain March from the flagpoles on campus to Bronson Park.

It was surreal to park on that campus again. We walked up to the flagpoles and the crowd was quite well organized and burgeoning. Several schoolkids were there with the event organizers to speak to the crowd and offer their viewpoints and context to what we were about to accomplish. Here’s a sample of what we saw:

IMG_0027.JPG

The group was peaceful and orderly, there was no violence and no exclamations. As we walked away from the flagpoles, and down past the entry to Sangren Hall on Western’s campus, that was the only point that I noticed any counter-protestors. There was supposedly going to be counter-protestors from the local Open Carry group, but Western’s Public Service does not allow open carry on University grounds, so the only counter-protestors we saw were some people with signs. There were very many of us and maybe a handful of the counter protestors.

The event organizers helped a lot by telling all of us that counter-protestors were expected and that the best way to interact with them is to not interact at all. This was an exercise of First Amendment Rights on both sides, the teeming horde of us in the #NeverAgain march, and the handful of counter-protestors. Nobody that I saw made contact, there were some glances, but nothing overt that I witnessed. The march downtown was met with lots of honking horns from the rerouted traffic. The police were kind, principally silent, and really to keep watch around the edges and to handle traffic. We came into contact with one police officer who was attempting a charm offensive, he thanked us for our orderly civic display and we thanked him for traffic control and keeping watch over us all.

The march itself was very pleasant. There wasn’t anything remotely provocative about any of the progression down to the central park downtown. There were no accidents that I saw, no foolishness from anyone, and we all demonstrated our political viewpoints in a very calm, exceptionally orderly manner.

Afterwards, when the words were said and the kids had their moment to shine, the march broke up and everyone drifted away. We ended up going to Kelvin & Company for a snack because we really wanted a break from the chilly wind and all that walking. After our little stop, we dropped by another new store on the Kalamazoo Walking Mall, RocketFizz. We enjoyed some Special Dark Hersheys Chocolate Bars and I bought a bottle of butterscotch root beer from a bottler in Washington State, Oh-So brand, I think. The walk back was long, and upon reflection if we had stashed the Juke somewhere downtown we probably would have had a faster way to get back to campus. Political marches aren’t very common, so that we missed out on a logistical tip wasn’t so awful. We got in a lot of walking steps on our Fitbits, at least.

Crocodile Apologies

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The media is starting to process the Cambridge Analytica misuse of Facebook data, and the story is only just getting some legs underneath it now. I see this as a reflective surface of the panic that we all felt back in November 2016, digging all that psychic turbulence back up again.

I want to focus more on Facebook itself. There have been several instances where Facebook has declared innocence publicly up until proof found, usually by journalists or investigators, and then when the truth comes out, Facebook stops, pauses, and issues an apology for their transgressions or mistakes. This reactivity is for me what lies at the core of my misgivings about the Facebook platform, and Facebook as a company.

In my opinion, it appears that Facebook is only chastened and contrite when caught red-handed doing something improper. I cannot trust a platform or a company that behaves this way. I honestly admit that I never really expected Facebook even to want to try to be upright and wholesome, I wanted them to, but all of this is similar to the feeling that I had when Google walked away from its mission statement “Do No Evil.” Facebook cannot be trusted.

There is no shock or surprise that Facebook has no tapeworm function available, only two options exist, leave everything alone or blow it all to kingdom come. I know there is a third path, the manual deletion of everything in the Activity Stream, but over ten years and quite a regular amount of use that is utterly impractical. Plus, I expect Facebook to be both capable and invested in retaining my data even if I think I’ve deleted it. Just because it no longer exists on the interface to me doesn’t mean that it is gone. I doubt thoroughly that even deleted accounts get deleted. I would bet money that they get hidden from view. It would not be in Facebook’s self-interest to lose any data they can get their hands on. I would also not put it past Facebook to also log every keystroke that goes into the text boxes on their site, so even if you don’t post anything, I would bet that Facebook has a record of what you did type and that you abandoned it. That they could record and store your unshared thoughts, indexing, and selling them even if you didn’t share. Logging into the Facebook site itself is a personal hazard to privacy. I have no proof of this last part, but I would fully expect a company like Facebook to do this very thing.

There is little that quitting Facebook will accomplish, since human personalities are quite fixed and constant constructs. We maintain that iron grip of control and Facebook has monetized it, and now, since Cambridge Analytica, they have lost it. Pandoras Box is open.

So why stop using Facebook then? Facebook must be caught being evil, which means that the intent is a stain that runs right to the core. I’ve abandoned Facebook itself because continued use is tacit approval of their offensive behavior, and if it makes them money through advertising revenue, and I’m a part of that? That’s personally unacceptable.

Percentile Taxation and Citizenship

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The media is awash in talk about socialized healthcare, taxation, and immigration. I do not claim to be an expert in any of this, and probably something like this would not work out, but on a lark, I started to cast about in a kind of brainstorming session about how I might solve the taxation problem and the issues surrounding citizenship.

The opening gambit is socialized healthcare, also known as Single Payer. Let’s just call it healthcare moving forward as a shortcut for what we’re really talking about. The next series of moves are crafted as a kind of chess game, with different pieces being different cliched arguments:

  • We don’t want the poorest to suffer and die, it doesn’t conform to the moral standard of the three faiths, so we must act.
  • It is very expensive for some, and thoughtlessly free for others. The old are expensive, the young are not, and there are outliers everywhere.
  • The government is already up to its neck in debt, how can we saddle ourselves with more?
  • Nobody can escape any of the above points. Otherwise, they will appear to be a hypocrite.

The challenge of healthcare is how to pay for it. Healthcare is rather expensive at the start, but in the long-term, it is actually cheaper than what we have right now. How can we afford such a thing as a society and also keep many of the other services that we have come to expect from our government? The best answer, the most common one is to reformulate taxation.

Taxation

It seems as the tax code is the most complicated subject in all of government. We keep on making attempts to address what is fair and just and depending on the political winds, it changes from generation to generation. I am not going to make any claims for practicality, this is brainstorming, not policy.

There have been many plans over the years. Flat taxes, graduated taxes, and many economic theories such as trickle-down economics that has been featured while I’ve been alive, since 1975. This plan is just another possibility, and I don’t know if it would actually work out, but it was the first thing I thought of, which launched this blog post.

How about a taxation plan based on percentiles? You take all citizens that are not disabled, you list out all their incomes, something for which already exists in the IRS. Then you order everyone from smallest income to highest income. We will dispense with all the tax loopholes, and resolve to simplify everything down to raw income. For businesses, we will do the same, their profits ranked from smallest to largest. Then from there, we calculate the percentile rank across the entire gamut for both classes of entity, people, and corporations. Those at the bottom pay next to no tax, while those at the very top pay almost all tax. The percentile rank makes calculating where you sit rather easy. The IRS can calculate this value and send out a postcard letting you know. Since there are no more loopholes, there is no more need for complicated forms and instructions. The withholding is done by employers, the IRS settles all accounts, and every April 15th you either get a bill or a check.

Everything with taxation is wrapped up with politics. Because of this, and because of politics, there are counter-arguments for and against any sort of change to taxation. The most common retort to a change in taxation like this, where the rich would have to pay an exceptionally high tax, is the argument that they would just leave the country to avoid the tax. So then we come to the next section…

Citizenship

We are all citizens of the United States of America. Many of us acquired that citizenship by nativity. We didn’t do anything to earn or deserve it other than have the luck to be born in the right place at the right time. Currently, citizenship and immigration is a hot-button issue. Many people want to come to the United States, and so over time, we have started to reduce and control immigration to our country. Very recently, I have noticed a rather unpleasant nationalistic nativism which is adding new discrimination to this process. We aren’t holding the lamp by the golden door, as much as we want to search a line-up and cherry pick the very best to join our country.

Citizenship provides rights, privileges, and abilities that people without US Citizenship may not have. We have started to covet this citizenship both economically and culturally. It is something we have, and something we want to keep to ourselves. What lies at the heart of citizenship? We are all part of a greater whole, the dream of America, and we get immense benefits from that, and so we must meet the cost by paying taxes. Taxes pay for citizenship and civilization. If you want to play, you have to pay. Also, if you want to pay, you can play.

Those that wish to immigrate to the United States should be willing to agree to our taxation. Those that do not agree with our taxation should be excluded from citizenship. They are unwilling to pay for it, so why should they take advantage of it? So, when it comes to the Dreamers, they are all paying taxes so they can be citizens. If someone who is exceptionally rich doesn’t want to pay taxes, they can abdicate their responsibilities to society at the cost of their citizenship. They can, of course, re-acquire the citizenship as easily as anyone else, by agreeing to pay taxes based on their income.

Final Thoughts

I don’t really suppose any of this would be actually practical, but amidst all the arguments currently being discussed, why not at least touch on these ideas? In the current political climate, there is an exceptional number of interested parties, and the quality of discourse is more varied than it has ever been before. I’m sure if anyone reads this post, they will have strong responses, and I welcome the commentary, but I reserve the right not to respond if there is no point to it. As I said before, this is not policy, this is brainstorming. Please keep that in mind if you are upset.

Assert The Win

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Sometimes it’s the best thing to assert you win and walk away from a toxic problem. So far today I’ve done that quite a bit. What have I abandoned?

I’ve walked away from Facebook. It’s been four days since I even logged into Facebook and since then I haven’t missed it. I’ve been catching up on my news; the Spiceworks Community board consumes a lot of time. Then after that, I turned my attention to my Pocket list. There just isn’t enough time anymore to deal with Facebook. When I logged into it, I had eighteen notifications, and I frowned and realized that I didn’t care that much. I’m writing a lot of my thoughts into my journal after coming to the realization that sharing with others isn’t going to be a positive experience. Now nearly everything on Facebook is an unpleasant experience. So, abandoning toxic things seems to be a good thing for me.

Another toxic system is Office365. Microsoft and I go back for a long while, right along with my almost palpable hate for that company and their products. Going into just how Office365 lets me down is very dull. Nearly every interaction has me wishing I could just close my laptop, put it in my backpack and run away from my life. Everything that has some Microsoft technology associated with it has me frowning in deep disappointment. Alas, there is no way to escape the Great Beast of Redmond, so we gnash our teeth and endure the horrors.

The final horror is WordPress itself. I use a stock theme, Twenty-Twelve. It’s not a custom theme. It’s not slick or responsive. It’s just a dumb theme. So while reading my blog, I realized just how much I wanted to change the line-spacing for my post entries. This is where my expectations fork, there is an Apple fork and an “Everything Else” fork. The Apple fork has been proven time and time again, that the answer is simple and shallow and easy to get to, understand what the change will do, and make it work. Then there is everything else. Here we have WordPress itself. I wanted to change the line-spacing on my theme. So I go to the Dashboard, and I spend ten minutes blindly stabbing at possible places where this option might be hiding to no effect. Then I do a Google search, which is the first and last place that most possible solutions are born and die. A good Google search almost always results in the answer you are after. So, “WordPress vertical line spacing” led to a place that eventually had the solution in it, but the theme didn’t match what I was expecting. This is the core of frustration, so I modified the search to include the themes name itself, and that helped. I found the setting, and it was in a CSS stylesheet file. I left the WWW when it was still HTML only. CSS irritates me. But anyways, hack CSS, that’s the answer. It’s a dumb answer, but that’s it. So I find about 130 places where line-height is an option. I laugh bitterly at the number. Which section to edit? Are you sure? So I gave it a shot. I set the line-height to 2.0 and then looked at my site. I can’t tell if it improved or not. But the most adaptive solution is to assert it did what I wanted. Mark the win as a notch and move on. Do I care? Well, I wanted to do something. I did something. Did it work? Probably not.

But then we get back to that first fork. That’s why I love Apple so much. Nearly everything they touch MAKES SENSE. I don’t have to struggle with some labyrinthine mystery. Maybe my edits will work, maybe they will break whatever it is, maybe it won’t matter. Maybe any setting I change will be overridden somewhere else, by something that was never documented. That’s the core design principle of both WordPress and Microsoft. I suppose we should just be happy that the most basic functions work. Much like the Internet itself, the fact that any of this works is a daily miracle.

So instead of writing a huge rant, one that nobody wants to read and nobody cares about I will assert that I won, psychologically move forward and be able to forget the conditions that led me to those particular experiences. The blog doesn’t work like you want? Don’t go there. Facebook a cesspool of ugly humanity? Skip it. Microsoft? Ah, if only it would burn to the ground. But we can’t have what we wish, even if we’d do anything for our dreams to come true.

So! Hooray! A Win! Facebook, WordPress, Office365! Just stop worrying about the bomb. It’s “Someone Else’s Problem®”

Google Schmoogle

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Today is a day for Google to let me down. Generally, a lot of technology companies end up in the same dustbin. They always promise some glittering awesomeness, but when you start to engage with them, you discover that the awesome is rather half-baked. In this particular case, the first two Google technologies were their Music Play property and Android.

Google Music, or Google Play, whatever it’s called, has a lot of the music that I uploaded from my iTunes when I still had music files that I used to play on my iPod. My musical use has migrated to streaming technology, specifically Spotify for which I am very pleased with. I often times miss my old iPod with my music loaded on it. There was something about the shuffle feature on my old iPod Nano that fascinated me. The old shuffler felt almost psychic or at least sensitive to my environment and conditions. I think it is because the device had its RNG on-device and it was a wearable device. There is something still there I think, and I think back on it fondly. A lot of my music is on Google Music, and today I thought I might uncork some of it. I opened my Safari browser and discovered that Google Music doesn’t work without Adobe Flash. As a general rule of thumb, I don’t use Adobe products at all if I can help it, and that is especially true of Adobe Flash. There was a point in the past where you could have installed HTML 5 on the Google Music site, but Google has since eliminated that option as far as I can tell. So, strike one for Google.

The next strike came when I tried to use my Samsung Galaxy Nook device. This device is loaded with Google’s Android operating system, and I’ve railed against this before. In this particular case, it is related somewhat to the dead horse I keep on beating in regards to Google Android. I had my Nook open, and I was trying to use it. The interface is sluggish as hell, but I have grown to accept that. There is an app I have on my Nook, it’s called “Clean Master” and it’s designed to be a system maintainer for Android. From my experience, paired up with what I’ve seen claimed by “Clean Master” application is that Android is a wet hot mess. Every time I use the app, it finds 350MB or more of “Junk files”, and does scans for “Obsolete APKs.” This scan takes an exceptionally long time. So I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole with the device, trying to get it “cleaned up” because it’s “dirty”. This application is dutifully chugging away, apparently just circling around the same batch of directories for about ten minutes accomplishing nothing. I tap the big button at the bottom. “STOP”. Nothing happens. I then tap it a few more times. “STOP”. “STOP”. “STOP”. In the end it was a comedy, and I started to mumble “STAHP” to the device. At the top of the application is another control that says “Advanced Settings” thinking maybe I could turn the scan for “Obsolete APKs” off. Nope. Tap, nothing, tap, nothing. Tap tap tap tap tap tap. The device stops working altogether and then boop, new screen and it’s back to working! But the options there are useless. So then I try to use the “Home” button, and the Nook just dwells there, thinking. about. it. Then the Home switcher screen appears, and I make the throwaway gesture to get rid of “Clean Master” app. There is “nothing” running on the device, but it’s mostly just sluggish as hell.

So that is what informs my opinions about these companies. Google, Samsung, and Apple. I include Apple because I have a lot of Apple devices, and they don’t behave like this. Even with two giant corporations working together, Google and Samsung, they can’t even touch on what Apple does. My iPhone 6 behaves for me, mostly, and in comparison, it is far better than what Samsung and Google bring to the table. My chief issue is the disconnect between the hardware stats, the Samsung is supposed to have more resources than the Apple products, so it comes down to the OS? It may simply be a fight between iOS and Android in the end. To really focus on my issue, it is all about user interrupt. On my iPhone, the user interrupt, which is to say the events that the user wishes take top priority. The interface is “snappy” and “gets my wishes” and “performs”. Whereas in Android, the user input seems to be treated like a queued wishlist that the user inputs and waits for the device to act on if it wants to, or not. I know it’s not designed to behave this way, or at least it shouldn’t. But the behavior is what informs my opinions. I’ve got an Apple device that is snappy and responsive to me versus a Samsung/Android Nook that seems to want to do its own thing. There is another company represented, and that’s B&N. Mostly at this point I think of B&N as a bystander. They aren’t really involved anymore with Samsung or Android, they’re just marketing books through a channel, and they happened to choose this channel. For what the Samsung Galaxy tablet is, it’s core function that I use it for, which is an eBook reader, it is satisfactory. For a general use tablet or a mobile device capable of more than just eBooks, though? No. And I can’t understand why people who use Android accept this behavior so blindly. Perhaps that’s what being a fan is all about. If you are fond of the underdog, the scrappy alley fighter, then I suppose Android has some romance to it. You want the sad, somewhat over-concussed street-fighter who sometimes pisses himself and forgets his name to come out on top in the end and win the day.

So with these two starting experiences today, the answer is to lower your expectations. I expected too much of Google and of Samsung. The device is just a simple eBook reader, it really can’t be anything else. I will never willfully purchase another Android device, so there isn’t any reason to declare that Android is dead to me, it was dead on arrival after all. The only thing that I can say is that other people seem to enjoy it, and in the end that’s all that matters. After seeing what this Samsung Galaxy can do, I don’t understand the why behind Android’s success, but they are successful and in that, well, that’s good. It’s just not for me.

As for the music, I again lower my expectations. Instead of searching for some way to access my Google Music without Adobe Flash, I’m instead going to try an application that can help me migrate my music collection off to a Spotify playlist, maybe. In that, I have very little faith, and I’ll probably just give up and stop thinking about it altogether. I find myself not really fighting about technology anymore. I find that I’m more apt just to turn it off, put it in a drawer and forget about it for a few decades. If I were a technology company, I would really love to find out what kind of technologies people have put in their drawers and forgotten about, and find out why. That would create a great laundry list of things “not to do” when devising new technologies.

Incommunicado

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Here at work, I’ve got peculiar sort of failure with my Cisco phones. In the mornings, sometimes, all the phones connected to two Cisco Catalyst 3560-X 48-port POE switches all fail around 7:35 am and then all un-fail, all by themselves around 7:50 am.

I’ve tried to engage with Cisco TAC over this issue. I started a ticket when we first started noticing it, in November 2015. Yesterday I got in touch with the first Cisco TAC Engineer and was told that it was a CallManager fault, not a switching fault and that the ticket on the switches would close.

So I opened a new ticket for CallManager. Once I was able to prove my Cisco entitlements I was underway with a new Cisco TAC Engineer. So we shall see how this goes. What concerns me is that Cisco told me that obviously it wasn’t the Catalyst switches. I am a little at odds with this determination because as part of the early diagnosis of this problem we had a small group of users who couldn’t endure phone failures at all, so I moved their connections from the Catalyst 3560 to the other switch, a Catalyst 3850. For the phones that failed on the 3560, they stopped failing when attached to the other switch. That shows me that the issue isn’t with the phones, or the CallManager, but rather the switches themselves. But now that TAC has ruled out the switches, we’re looking at phones and CallManager.

My experience with Cisco so far is checkered. Their hardware is very handsome and works generally. That’s as far as I can go under the auspices of “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” because the rest of what I have to say is unpleasant to hear. Alas, they have a name and public credibility, and one checkered customer isn’t going to alter the path of a machine as large and determined as Cisco.

We’ll see what TAC has for me next. I am eagerly in suspense, and I’ll update this blog if we find the answer. Holding the breath is probably inadvisable.