Windemere

6/9/2007

        So today's topic isn't exactly home related, but this is my page and I get to choose what goes here. On Saturday my brother is getting married and I'm the best man. I'm not being cocky, that's just my role in this whole thing. The role of best man is fairly simple (which is why it was entrusted to me) and consists of the following. Plan and execute a bachelor party, show up at the church on time and in whatever monkey suit requested by the groom, tell him he's doing the right thing over and over, and finally the toast.

        I have obviously known Ryan for all of his life and Amy for virtually none of hers. From the very start Ryan has proved to be a rotten little brother and from what little time I've spent with Amy she is a very sweet and patient woman. I know some of you are shocked that I would out my brother this way, and the rest of you actually know Ryan and are nodding in agreement. When you're the oldest brother it is part of your job to teach and train your younger siblings in the true ways of the world. Teachers and parents all have ulterior motives in their teachings, making you a good citizen etc. And not all siblings are willing students which can make the older brother's job difficult indeed.

        The reason that Ryan was such a rotten little brother is that he was already good at all of the things that the older brother was supposed to be teaching. He was better at sports, better at math, smarter, etc. The only tool I had left in my arsenal was to beat him up. And then he ended up bigger than me too and even that failed to work.

        But all of these frustrating things that make him a lousy little brother and make my job as older brother all the more difficult are the very same things that make him a great friend, a good son, a loving boyfriend and now a devoted husband.

        Please raise your glasses and join me in wishing Amy and Ryan the best luck and success in their lives together. May you both live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live.

        So raise your glass and wish me luck in toasting Ryan & Amy at their wedding on Saturday.

6/9/2007

        So today's topic isn't exactly home related, but this is my page and I get to choose what goes here. On Saturday my brother is getting married and I'm the best man. I'm not being cocky, that's just my role in this whole thing. The role of best man is fairly simple (which is why it was entrusted to me) and consists of the following. Plan and execute a bachelor party, show up at the church on time and in whatever monkey suit requested by the groom, tell him he's doing the right thing over and over, and finally the toast.

        I have obviously known Ryan for all of his life and Amy for virtually none of hers. From the very start Ryan has proved to be a rotten little brother and from what little time I've spent with Amy she is a very sweet and patient woman. I know some of you are shocked that I would out my brother this way, and the rest of you actually know Ryan and are nodding in agreement. When you're the oldest brother it is part of your job to teach and train your younger siblings in the true ways of the world. Teachers and parents all have ulterior motives in their teachings, making you a good citizen etc. And not all siblings are willing students which can make the older brother's job difficult indeed.

        The reason that Ryan was such a rotten little brother is that he was already good at all of the things that the older brother was supposed to be teaching. He was better at sports, better at math, smarter, etc. The only tool I had left in my arsenal was to beat him up. And then he ended up bigger than me too and even that failed to work.

        But all of these frustrating things that make him a lousy little brother and make my job as older brother all the more difficult are the very same things that make him a great friend, a good son, a loving boyfriend and now a devoted husband.

        Please raise your glasses and join me in wishing Amy and Ryan the best luck and success in their lives together. May you both live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live.

        So raise your glass and wish me luck in toasting Ryan & Amy at their wedding on Saturday.

        For those that link directly into the blog and forgoe the wonderment that has been the rest of the website, just wanted to give a heads up that I've finally gotten around to posting some stuff up to the website. Mostly it consists of finally getting a photo gallery up. Check out www.kgmoore.com to see what I've been up to that isn't related to the drama of home ownership.

        And by the way. No one is allowed to give me grief for using iWeb to make the site. I'm sure that most people will have tons of issues with the layout of things and the fact the the site probably only works on a mac. I don't really care. This was easy and now it is done. If anyone wants to contribute to the "Buy Dreamweaver for Kevin Fund" then you can complain about the crappy bloated code behind the site.

        First a bit of back-story. Last year I started to "make the switch" by purchasing the MacBookPro. Even though the home PC was still a pretty quick machine I just really wanted/needed a laptop. Since I got the Mac I just really haven't used the PC much at all. It is just so much more convenient to have my digital life in my lap wherever I am rather than having to wait until I can get back home to plug in.

        So prior to getting the Mac and starting to live the good life I had purchased an upgrade copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2 for windows. Life was good. Photoshop is amazing and there were some great new features in CS2 that I had unknowingly been longing for. Now that the PC has been sitting and languishing and I'm always on the Mac I've been really missing Photoshop. I got the GIMP but it really just doesn't compare. It is awkward, kinda slow and just not the same thing. But it was free.

        I have been taking massive amounts of photos and I have some projects that I really need a better image editor for. So I did a bunch of online checking and figuring and researching and I even "chatted" with an adobe rep online today to check to see if I could cross upgrade from Windows Photoshop CS2 to Macintosh Photoshop CS3. I was very clear about this. Very Clear. And they very clearly told me. No problem.

        I checked online at CompUSA and they had the upgrade in stock at the store. Woot! So after work today I swing by CompUSA and 2 clerks and 20 minutes later they finally found the correct version. This is very complex because I need Photoshop Standard edition not extended edition. I need the upgrade not the full version. And I need the Mac upgrade version not the windows upgrade version. But they did eventually get it all sorted and I walked out of the store with a little bit more of a bounce in my step.

        So I arrive home and tear off the wrapper like a kid at Christmas. And I started off with pretty much a terrible install experience. I had previously had a demo copy of CS3 on the laptop and it took several tries before I was able to purge all the old CS3 demo stuff of the computer in order to get the new installer to start it's thing. No amount of running the un-installer etc was working and the new installer insisted that there was still some small crumb of CS3 left on the machine that prevented it from even considering starting to install it's precious copy of CS3. This was a very non Mac-like experience. Normally software installation and un-installation of things is a very cavalier sort of dragging icons in and out of the Applications folder without much care thought or consequence. You can drag most applications off to an external disk or drop them off at a friends house to visit and somehow the machine will run out go knock on your friends door and find the application and run it for you. Even Microsoft's office suite could just be dragged and dropped to install. EVEN a MICROSOFT product was easy. Photoshop on the other hand, had deep roots.

        So a quick stop up at the Adobe support site finally got me on the way to get CS3 installed. Next came product registration. Enter the new serial number. Enter the serial number from the old product. DENIED. Double checked it. DENIED. Ok, back online and find the hotline number for Adobe sales. After a little bit of phone menu jumping I got through to a live human being. They collected all of my information, updated my online profile, took a blood and urine sample. And then they were ready to ask me what I wanted. I told them about having purchased CS3 at the store and wanting to cross upgrade from Win CS2 to Mac CS3. At which point they asked if I had opened the box yet. OF FUCKING COURSE I'VE OPENED THE BOX. Who buys software from the store, DOESN'T open it and then calls Adobe to chat. "Well you probably won't be able to take that copy back to the store". FUCKING WHAT. "Yeah the version you purchased won't work, but we'll be able to take back the copy you have" FUCKING WHAT. "What's the serial number for your CS2 product" I told them. "Ok, that's an upgrade license we'll need to go back" WHAT "Yeah what we need to do is trace the lineage of every Adobe product you've ever purchased until we get back to the dawn of time when you purchased an original full version. Then we'll need you to pull everything together in a big pile in the middle of your living room floor and then you need to get a video camera out and burn the pile of old software and then send us a copy of the video so that you can prove to us that you won't use the old software on the PC anymore and then we'll send you a brand new full version of the mac software for the same price you paid for the upgrade." ARE YOU MOTHERFUCKING KIDDING ME.

        So I mentioned to my good sales buddy on the phone at Adobe that I have moved probably 3 times since buying the original Photoshop and I have no idea where it might be. So there was nothing he could do. So now I'm stuck.

        I mentioned to him that this was definitely the kind of FUCK TARD policies that drive people to pirate software. Which he did at least have the humanity to admit to. So now I have to go find the original copy of Photoshop. Get the serial number from that, and the serial number from CS2 Win and the serial number from CS3 Mac and then go download a PDF document from Adobe's support site and print it out ON PAPER, and then fill out the form WITH A PEN, and then FAX IT BACK. Really? Seriously? PAPER, PEN, FAX is the best you guys can do. I'm pretty sure there's some really cool web type software stuff that lets you do this kind of thing. Yeah I'm pretty sure. And you know what? ADOBE FUCKING MAKES THAT SOFTWARE!!!!

        So what punishment is fitting for someone who steals a package off of your front porch that has the Christmas gifts for your parents in it?

        I am at a loss for words to describe how frustrated and despondant I am over this. I have ordered dozens of things through Amazon over the past couple of weeks and the one box that has gone missing had my parents gifts in it.

        The holiday season means many different things to many people. For some the holidays are about gifts, for others it is about family joining together, others celebrate their religious faith, for others it is gorging upon an endless buffet of carbohydrate filled delights. To me, the holidays are (or should be) a time to think of others. I love the holidays and Christmas for the opportunity to shop for gifts for others. This is not to say that I don't very much enjoy getting gifts, but I truly do enjoy bringing some level of happiness to someone else through a thoughtful gift. It is not about what the particular gift is so much as the thought behind it. Taking enough time and paying enough attention to someone else in the world to think about them and their needs or wants for a bit. And perhaps more importantly taking some time to wrap the gift. I will not go into a detailed rant about wrapping gifts for now, except to say that giving an unwrapped or poorly wrapped gift is tantamount to "Here I bought you this thing" presenting a nicely wrapped gift is "I thought of you and I wanted to share this thing with you as a small token of appreciation" This may well be the topic for a rant in the future but my topic for the day is something different.

        I did most of my gift shopping this year online. And most of that at amazon. Amazon and it's network of merchants, gift and wish list management and amazingly easy checkout process is just truly inspiring. To be able to sit down at the computer and go to one website where I can pull up everyone's wish lists and my gift idea lists, drop everything in a shopping cart and then divy up the shopping cart to have everything wrapped, gift cards attached and sent to all the various destinations all at once is an absolute lifesaver.

        Each year Amazon has continued to improve their online shopping experience. In fact I think I got about 90% of my Christmas shopping done in a single evening sitting on my couch sipping hot chocolate and clicking away on amazon. Over the past couple of weeks I've been getting packages almost daily with the various items from my shopping list. Some items I did send directly to the gift recipient, but many of the gifts I wanted to get and wrap before sending out.

        My many items ended up being broken out as several different orders coming from several different amazon vendors and were destined for assorted addresses. All of this is horribly horribly complicated on the back end of things, but is made exquisitely simple during checkout.

        Of course there are no free rides in life, and with all things easy, simple and good there needs to be some balance to keep the karma folks happy. So there must be difficulty, complexity, and grief of some sort to balance out the ease of online shopping. This balancing was meted out this year in the form of one of the shipments disappearing.

        Amazon's tracking information indicated that the item had been delivered but I had no package. Now of course the missing package wasn't a discount six-pack of tube socks or some small stocking stuffer paperback book for a random cousin or something along those lines. No, the one package that went missing contained the gifts for my parents. I had gotten an National Geographic coffee table book for my dad and and iPod nano for my mom. Somehow these two items ended up in the same shipment and this one shipment disappeared. The most exasperating thing was that the package arrived a couple days earlier than they had projected on a day when I happened to have been home less than two hours after the delivery.

        After several days of fuming and worrying, contacting amazon etc I happened to be taking the trash out and noticed some discarded packaging in my open garage. It was an amazon box. It had been opened and pilfered but oddly enough there was something small still in the corner of the box. The iPod. Some stupid crackhead had stolen the package off of my porch, taken back into the alley and in the relative safety of the garage opened the amazon box and taken the coffee table book and left the iPod. I'm pretty sure they just overlooked it as the package the nano comes in is just a small non-descript white cube of plastic that may be confused with packaging material.

        I laughed out loud when I found the iPod. I had finally figured out what the appropriate punishment was for the stupid crackhead who had stolen my parent's Christmas gifts. Their punishment was to leave behind the expensive electronics and take the book. I guess Baltimore is the city the reads after all.

        Once again on a topic that has little to do with the trials of home ownership but that I wanted to share was my recent experience at the Apple store. Last night one of the fans in my trusty MacBookPro started making decidedly bad grinding kind of sounds and then suddenly stopped making noise altogether and the machine then started to get pretty warm. I was dismayed. For the past two years I have had this laptop with me nearly all the time and looking back I'm not sure how I ever functioned without it.

        With the machine overheating there was little I could do but weep softly, shut it down and hope that Apple would be able to do something to repair it. I brought it in to the Apple store this morning and made an appointment at the Genius desk. After handing over my laptop and giving them my best sad face with full on boo-boo lip. They took a look at the machine and quickly determined that the right side fan had indeed ceased to move air. They checked their computer system and determined that they had the part in stock. Then the orderlies came rushing out with a gurney and they got my machine hooked to an IV drip and they quickly whisked it back into the dark secret chambers within the apple store where they chant their incantations and perform their rituals of magic resuscitation.

        I was left to sign the paperwork and to confirm the allergies and medical history of my little guy. They weren't sure they were going to be able to do the repair that day but they indicated they would call as soon as they had completed the repair. I put renewed effort into the boo-boo lip as I asked "Really, today maybe you think?"

        I left the store with my empty laptop case and headed out to run errands. The errands were more to distract myself from the loss I felt at not having my entire digital world clutched beneath my arm more than any great desire or need to accomplish these tasks. After a haircut, carwash, grocery shopping and some other side trips I got a call from the Apple store. I'm sure the people in line at the grocery store assumed that a favorite uncle or close friend had just awoken from a long coma as I enthusiastically thanked them and promised that I would rush right over to pick it up.

        The laptop isn't under warranty anymore so I did have to pay for the repair. It came to just over $100 (exactly what they said it would be) which is pretty outrageous considering the fan is probably a $2 part but in the scheme of having my laptop back and working and in the scheme of computer repairs in general really wasn't a big deal at all. To be able to bring my computer in on a Sunday morning and talk to a real live human being who cares and understands and to have the machine back and good as new within a few hours is service and support so far above and beyond the status quo as to be nearly completely foreign.

        I had had a previous experience several years ago with a PC laptop needing diagnosis and repair and at CompUSA. At the time I think it was $175 for them just to open up the laptop and look at it and close it back up. If anything was actually broken that would cost more and they wouldn't tell me how much more until they'd opened it up. It took them nearly a week to get to it and I had to call them to get the information because they'd forgotten to actually call me back. I had to fill out all kinds of paperwork to get them to look at the thing in the first place and they were really insistent on pointing out all the places where I had to initial and sign away the fact that, given the ominous tone of the document, they were more than likely going to end up erasing everything on the machine in the process of their diagnosis.

        My experience with Apple couldn't have been more completely different and thus infinitely better. The moment you walk into the Apple store you are greeted as if you are a long lost friend. Just the layout of the store is open and clean and inviting. Everything is just sitting out on tables and there always seems to be plenty of staff in the store. And these people in the store don't really seem to be sales people so much as die hard Cult of Mac enthusiasts who really just want you to drink the Kool-Aid and love it, cause they love it. They do all of this in the most unassuming and non-invasive way too. Then there's the concierge. That's right they have a dedicated person in the store who's sole job is to take care of customers. And not take care of as in a sales kind of way either. I really think they are trained and taught to be there to take care of the people. Listen to their stories, laugh with them, sympathize with them, get them a bag for their purchases, and generally being a FUCKING HUMAN BEING.

        This humanity at the Apple store is probably what make the experience there feel so great and at the same time feel so completely different from so many other customer service and retail experiences. Far too many other places have forgotten the human element of the equation and are merely there to move the product out the door and move the cash in. The fact that the transaction involves a human customer really doesn't seem to be much of a factor.

        In summary, what could have been one of darker days in recent memory (the disabling of my much loved laptop) has turned into one of the happier experiences in recent memory. For those out there who have not yet drunk the Kool-Aid and joined the cult of Mac I hope that this pushes you one step closer to taking that first sip. Come on, you know you want to.... Everyone else is doing it... It'll make you feel good....

        Normally I try to keep entries here in the realm of things at least peripherally related to home ownership and my trials and tribulations there in. This post has pretty much nothing at all to do with anything related to the house but is something that I am so proud of and just had to share.

        When not dealing with phones, parking, auditorium rentals, and capital projects at the museum I dive into the phone booth and put on the cape and boots and head over to my other job as a partner in Fisher Theatrical Last summer we had an amazing opportunity to provide lighting design and engineering for the Chevy Icon billboard in Times Square. This was a huge project for us even though we were only one of many companies with teams of people bringing different elements together.

        I had the good fortune to be involved in some of the programming elements of the job and spent a week on the 42nd floor of a hotel in Times Square last fall getting all of the bugs worked out of the control system so that our design team could do their work to light up the chevy icon billboard.

        One of the many elements we had to coordinate for this project was establishing a wireless communication link to the billboard in order to control the lights. We used a great product from Wireless Solutions to make this happen. Today they released a case study of our project that features commentary from yours truly. There is also a link for the full text of the case study which includes all of my long ramblings and lots of techno mumbo jumbo. I'm fairly astonished that they included all of this in the full case study. I can be long winded and entirely too nerdy at the best of times. It seems I was in rare form for this one.

        I'm thrilled with how the piece turned out and couldn't be more proud of everything we did to make this project happen. It is awesome to be able to point to something that we've done that people can recognize and understand. All too often our hard work goes into something behind the scenes that helps make a show but when we do our job correctly the effect is often so transparent that the audience may not even realize what it is that we've done or how much grueling effort went into that 5 minutes on stage.

        This weekend will probably live on for quite a while as one of the best weekends ever. For once, instead of a solid dockett of work and responsibilities I had almost entirely fun activities planned for the weekend. The best part of which was the Joint Services Airshow at Andrews Air Force Base on Saturday.

        To say that I was excited to go see this was an understatement. I went with my friend and her two sons aged 3 & 5. They are my for all intents and purposes my "nephews" and are at amazing ages that make it so fun to do stuff like this with them. Truth be told though, I was probably way more excited than even the two of them combined. If you've ever seen the Disney vacations commerical where the family is going to sleep the night before their big vacation I'm the little boy who says "I'm too excited to sleeeep."

        The weather on Saturday was absolutely perfect. Very few clouds, nice breezes, and temps in the low 70s. You park at Fedex field and go through a pretty intense security checkpoint before getting onto busses that take everyone over to the base. The boys were very excited about the buses, perhaps moreso than for the planes. The security lines were a bit long but the rest of the day proved to be worth the wait. We played the game "If you sit down the line will move faster", which totally worked. Every time the guys sat down it seemed like 30 seconds later we'd move forward. We also played "What do the wheels on the bus do?" Duh - They go round and round. David was particularly excited by both the wheels on the bus song and in getting to the ride the bus who's wheels were going round and round.

        Once at the airfield we were all blown away at how many aircraft were on display and how huge the event was. The airfield is probably close to a mile long and was just covered with every conceivable plane from huge C-5 transport planes to the B2 Bomber to the Stunt Bi-planes to the Blue Angels, to the Amazing F-22 Raptor. Not to mention there were in excess of 100,000 bazillion people there too. They had a bunch of the larger aircraft opened up to walk through and they had others where you could sit in the cockpit with a pilot and get your picture or ask questions.

        The Navy had a dive tank with a Navy Seal diver playing tick-tack-toe with a dry-erase marker. I am proud to report that Jeffrey beat the diver despite his occasional confusion at whether he was playing as x's or o's.

        I knew this was going to be a great photo opportunity so I rented a special super zoom lens so that I could get some close up shots on the planes and paratroopers. You can check out the pics here.

       The kids had a total blast. I had a blast seeing everything and got a kick out of seeing things through their eyes too. There was a great atmosphere of American pride surrouding the whole event. Whatever your position or views on war or the military this show was a great reminder of the value, and the cost, of some of the freedoms we often take for granted. How many other places in the world allow the general public to come trooping onto a military base to see all of the cool military hardware and to speak to the pilots and troops and see this amazing stuff up close.

       Since I have been a bit stalled in making home improvements because of a fairly hectic work schedule I thought I'd at least take a few minutes to freshen up the blog a bit. My goal in starting the blog was to come up with the most simple and low maintenance way possible for me to share all the stories of my home experience. To that end I have done pretty much nothing to customize the blog in any way. What you saw was what came out of the box from wordpress. So let me know if you like the new look or not and if the spirit motivates me (and I finally stop working long enough to have the time) there may be some more changes to come.