originally posted april 27, 2003

everything sucks, everything rules

It's no fun being one-sided in these updates. For everything good in the universe, there's something bad to counteract it.

work

The weeks are not too long, although that can change at any time.

project work is good

It has been several weeks since I have been bored at work. I am now consistently occupied with project work. We're always getting new clients, new work from existing clients, and more engineers to handle the workload. When I started in January, I was the 39th employee at CombineNet. Now there are more than 50, a growth of some 25% in the first month alone. This growth won't continue at such an aggressive pace forever, but I've been very impressed with the way our company has been coming along.

Yesterday, I bumped into a classmate of mine who has signed on to work with a certain large software company. I told him that I work for a start-up, and explained what the company does, and received a response of "oh, bullshit." Some people will never respect start-ups.

nagging sucks

I hate micromanagement. The major difference between school projects and work projects is that school projects are almost always set in stone. Very few school projects are adjusted after they are assigned, and an adjustment often triggers enough whining to effect an extension. It's more annoying to deal with clients on short-duration projects, since requirements are much more likely to change. It's difficult for an engineer to explain how some changes are much more difficult to implement: some changes require massive data reorganization while others require only a few lines of code to be added. To be on the safe side, we try to pad our schedules to allow for changes to be properly integrated, but sometimes it really bugs me to be asked to change a report for the umpteenth time. Sometimes I just want to say "no," but I don't have the authority to make it stick.

travel

In April, I travelled to TRASHionals 2003, a trivia tournament that will likely be my last as a representative of Carnegie Mellon University College Bowl. While the tournament was fun, the 600-mile drive was not.

There were only a few pockets of traffic during our trip. The trip spanned five interstate highways (376, 76, 81, 78, and 95) and six states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts). It's the longest drive that I've ever done, and I'm not sure if I want to do it again. I drove all 600 miles up to Boston, including long traffic-laden stretches during rush hour in Connecticut, and 400 of the 600 miles back. One of my teammates drove 200 miles on the return trip, showing remarkably aggressive maneuvering through Connecticut and New York traffic.

The tournament itself was a lot of fun. As usual, Carnegie Mellon finished in the middle of the pack. The final once again pitted two veteran teams of 20- and 30-something players against each other, frightening and amusing the crowd with deep knowledge of all things pop culture. Among the highlights: a Dance Dance Revolution bonus that whipped the whole crowd into a frenzy despite the fact that the player chose an extremely easy song to play. Maybe 10% of the crowd could have earned a 30 or an extremely rare 40 points on the bonus, but it was still a welcome surprise.

better living through DDR

Like most well-meaning plans, "Better Living Through DDR" is not shaping up to be as great as once planned.

I bought a PlayStation 2 for the express purpose of playing Dance Dance Revolution, an aerobics workout masquerading as a video game. DDR takes the tried-and-true formula of "keep playing until you get a high score" and adds an element of physical exertion. One of my co-workers claims to do 20 songs a night; at about two minutes pers ong, that can be a very strenuous workout. I started out doing about 13 songs in the morning starting at about 7:00 AM, but that only lasted for a couple of weeks before reality set in and I started to awaken later in the morning. Last week, for example, I put in 50 hours at work despite arriving at work no earlier than 10:00 AM. A flexible schedule can be a dangerous thing.

RedOctane sucks

I close this month's update with a mini-rant against RedOctane.

As part of my DDR setup, I decided to buy two RedOctane Dance Pads. At the time, they were on sale for $40 each, and I had heard good things about RedOctane as a company. However, they have the most awful customer service that I have dealt with in quite some time.

One of my pads worked fine, although it seemed a bit sensitive: the "up" arrow would register intermittently even when I didn't press on it. That was fixed by fiddling around in the DDR options screen. The other pad registered an endless stream of START button presses if the PS2 were turned on with the pad plugged in. Removing and reinserting the pad's plug solved the problem, but it was a reproducible error. I contacted RedOctane's support and received a form-letter response to use their web form for inquiries. I did. RedOctane is on the west coast, so it took a few days for me to get in touch with customer service. After unsuccessful troubleshooting, RedOctane shipped me a replacement pad. The replacement pad demonstrated the exact same problem as the pad it was supposed to replace.

Furious, I sent another e-mail to RedOctane support outlining the problems and demanding my money back. I got the same form-letter response and rephrased my problem to RedOctane via their web site. After a few days without a response (and receiving more form letter responses from e-mail) I decided to call their toll-free support line. Bad idea. Partial transcript:

"Thank you for calling RedOctane, the leader in game rentals and Dance Dance Revolution accessories. For questions about our game rental program, press 1. To request a return for a defective product, press 2."

I press 2.

"Requesting a return is easy! Just go to w-w-w dot redoctane dot com slash returns dot h-t-m-l. Fill out the form there. If you are experiencing difficulties in sending this form, send an e-mail to returns at redoctane dot com. To speak with a customer service agent, press 1."

I press 1. I hear one ring, then a recording which sounds slightly more muddled than the first one.

"Thank you for calling RedOctane, the leader ... (original message continues) ... To request a return for a defective product, press 2."

I press 2 again.

"Requesting a return is easy! Just --"

Click. I hang up.

On April 3, RedOctane gave me a return authorization number and told me that they would send me an Airborne Express shipping label to return my defective pad for a refund. I have three pads, and I've been waiting for three weeks for the label to return one of them. One of the pads will still be defective after all is said and done, but I would rather just live with it than deal with RedOctane again. They've lost me as a customer.

Back to April 2003, or to the year 2003.