Category Archives: Life

The day to day

Maximum drainage technology

I’m hoping this is the lamest thing that happens today:

Motorola DROID RAZR, 2.4, 4.6mm, 0.001 sec, ISO 100
Motorola DROID RAZR, 2.4, 4.6mm, 0.02 sec, ISO 107
Motorola DROID RAZR, 2.4, 4.6mm, 0.001 sec, ISO 100
 
Motorola DROID RAZR, 2.4, 4.6mm, 0.001 sec, ISO 100
Motorola DROID RAZR, 2.4, 4.6mm, 0.001 sec, ISO 100
Motorola DROID RAZR, 2.4, 4.6mm, 0.001 sec, ISO 100
 
Motorola DROID RAZR, 2.4, 4.6mm, 0.002 sec, ISO 100
Motorola DROID RAZR, 2.4, 4.6mm, 0.04 sec, ISO 107
Motorola DROID RAZR, 2.4, 4.6mm, 0.001 sec, ISO 100
 

The contents is fine, I just need to decide if it’s worth fixing or if I should burn it and/or turn it into an unenclosed trailer. The barn doors still swing open and shut perfectly fine. I wish they didn’t, it would make my decision a lot easier.

I think this is the kind of lesson a guy only has to learn 1 time.

ACS Network Status Update – Sucks

If I spent 10 minutes writing about every poor experience I’ve had with Alaska Communications I’d be busy writing for over 24 hours. The number of people I’ve interacted with at that company that were actually pleasant to work with could easily be counted on 1 hand, and most of them worked in customer service in Anchorage. Today I’m going to just complain about one interaction with this company, my least favorite organization on the planet (no exaggeration).

The red circle was last Friday, ACS rolled a truck to *upgrade* the speed of my client’s Internet. The blue line is a continuous stream of data between my client and my servers in MN. It’s not obvious from the image above, but the speed *upgrade* took my client off the Internet for a total of 4 hours and 18 minutes during normal business hours. I suppose in the 1990s it was acceptable to have such a large outage for such a modest *upgrade*, but it’s 2014. I suggest that the upgrade was a modest one because they were attempting to go from a 3Mpbs business class service to a 7Mbps business class service. Not long ago I upgraded my low-cost and low-priority home Internet from 6Mbps to 50Mbps. There was no outage and the total amount of invested time on my part was about 15 minutes. In my mind this is how upgrades should happen in 2014.

The Friday outage was split into 2 parts. The first was a lengthy 3 hours and 3 minutes, during which time it was blackout for me. I had no knowledge of what was happening. I was E-mailed prior to the commencement of the upgrade asking if I had any advice. I replied with a basic structure of what my client’s router expects to see in order to reinitiate the connection to the ISP and the disclaimer that if he or she didn’t understand my E-mail then they should postpone the upgrade until we could work together on it. They proceeded so I assumed he knew what he was doing. I was eventually contacted by an individual back at the Alaska Communications call center, they needed my assistance (and understandably so) getting the office back online. I told them to reboot the router, at which point the PPPoE connection came up and all was fine, it seemed the technician did his job OKĀ  just my ddial PPP connection wasn’t coming online. A reboot is simple enough and something that Alaska Communications themselves wouldn’t hesitate to do with most customers, it just so happens my router is slightly more intimidating looking:

After the line came up I asked the technician to not touch anything further and leave the room. Although my client still wasn’t on the Internet, the remaining portion was up to me. I did my business then it was my time to leave work so I started my commute home. The connection stayed up for all of 15 minutes and 10 seconds. About 1 mile into my commute I got a text message saying it was down again. Normally I’d turn around to put myself back at a terminal, but this particular Friday I had a meeting after work that I didn’t want to miss. I continued on my way and did phone troubleshooting with staff at my client’s office.

After probably 45 minutes of great help from one of my client’s employees, we found the inability to connect even just using a laptop and Windows 7’s Internet Connection Wizard. I turned the problem back to Alaska Communications with a phone call back to the individual who had called me earlier. That ACS employee contacted my client’s staff, had them plug the router back in and it miraculously came online. I’m aggravated as I’m sure the ACS employee played it off like nothing was wrong the entire time when there is no doubt in my mind he did something on his end. There is no other explanation since we couldn’t even connect with a generic Windows 7 box. The 2nd outage while only a mere hour was big enough to make 3 9s system when measured over a year.

This brings us past the red circle above and into the orange circle. The Internet was online all of Friday evening, all of Saturday even though speeds dropped in the early morning as you can see, but the connection did stay up. The blue circle encompasses the Sunday outage, one which started about 30 minutes prior to the end of AK Daylight Savings Time. The outage lasted through the day, meaning for an entire day and then some my client could not send nor receive E-mails. Their servers were unreachable so no doubt some correspondence was bounced. ACS doesn’t have a 24 hour business unit, or at least not one with a listed phone number, so I had to wait until they opened at 8:00AM. The good news is even after they opened the technical support I was able to contact was utterly useless. “I can see you’re not online, but we can’t do anything about it without someone onsite.” Certainly I agree it would be nice to have someone onsite, but unfortunately it wasn’t in the cards. The people that would normally be there on a Sunday were out of town this particular weekend. The annoying part was that he didn’t even bother to look at connection logs or any such, they just gave up at “you’re not online.”

About 30 hours past, the connection was brought back to life Monday morning at 8:09AM AK time. This is what availability looked like for the week – Tuesday morning through today, note that the point when the *upgrade* started is clearly visible:

Since their Internet presence returned yesterday morning, my client hasn’t fallen back offline. Their bandwidth remains pretty random. At the end of the day, my only prayer is that I don’t have to work with ACS Personnel, ever again, in my life. They’re one thing I’ve been unable to leave behind by leaving AK, and I wish more than anything that I could change that.

Alaska to Minnesota January 2014

The justification was mostly for dad to come down and get his boat. Nice lake boats really don’t exist in Alaska, so dad bought one in Wisconsin to be transported back to the frozen North.

I flew up on Tuesday afternoon January 14. I took care of a little bit of business around town then we left in the morning Thursday January 16. The trailer looked like this:

 

The drive took us down the Alaska Highway, through Edmonton and then down into the US via North Dakota’s entry on Highway 52. We arrived in Minneapolis at my house in Lino Lakes around 2:30 PM on Sunday the 19th of January. This is how things looked when we arrived:

 

Nothing really to report about the journey. To prove this I recorded a time lapse of the journey on the GoPro and posted it on YouTube. Enjoy our 3+ day journey compressed into less than 8 minutes of video.

How to turn your GoPro time lapse photos into a video uploadable to YouTube coming in the next post.

As for the return trip, Dad is on his own and en’ route as I type this. This is after day 1:

IMG950440

What’s a hot link?

If you’ve never lived in Alaska pretty much all of your life and then relocated to a Midwestern state you may not be able to relate to this. Being a near-native Alaskan one of my standard breakfast selections for years has been hot links with eggs, or maybe a hot link and cheddar omelette, or a meat-lovers scramble which of course has hot links in it. In Alaska hot links are nearly as ubiquitous as sausage or bacon when it comes to breakfast meat.

I was eager to try hot links here in Minnesota. In Alaska you’ll find that no 2 eateries have the same hot links. My personal favorite (in this world) came from Sourdough Sam’s Cafe in Fairbanks. Nobody had bad ones, theirs were the best though. Now that I’d relocated to MN I was eager to try to find the breakfast joint that could top them, I now live in “the real world” afterall.

Honestly, at this point I don’t even remember where my first shot was. I believe it was a popular place in Blaine called Ole Piper Inn in Blaine. Guess what I didn’t find on the menu. I tried a number of different places in the upcoming months, never did I find them. At some point after I’d been to a place a few times and even generated rapport with the wait staff I went out on a limb and asked for them. I may as well have been speaking in a foreign language. The common answer when you ask someone around here about hot links is “do you mean Italian Sausage?” Italian Sausage is good but far from the same thing.

On Wednesday I talked with my culinary genius of a boss about it, and while he didn’t know what a hot link was he did have a few suggestions about where I could go that might be able to help. One of the places I’d even heard of, so yesterday I went.

The folks at Von Hanson’s Meat were just as clueless about hot links as everyone else around here, but they did know their meat. I described what I had in mind to them and the gentlemen behind the counter had 2 suggestions. One they described as a bit of a Cajun sausage which I knew wasn’t the answer. While I’m a huge Cajun food fan, hot links aren’t Cajun. So I just default-tried the other alternative, Andouille smoked sausage.

Andouille sausages are sometimes referred to in the US as “hot link” sausages. –Wikipedia

SCORE! I cooked some up and had them this morning. Not only were these definitely something I’d happily refer to as a hot link, these are easily some of the best I’ve had in my life. I’d put them right up there with Sourdough Sam’s.

I still have the problem of not being able to get them at a restaurant for Sunday breakfast, but the truth is in my new life I should be eating out less anyway; It works out. If you’re a Midwesterner though that has yet to try Andouille sausages, I encourage you to frequent your local butcher and change that as soon as you can.