b.kocik's Old Timey Blog

I’ve been tagged. I’m supposed to tell you (in case there is a you) eight things you (probably) don’t know about me.

1. I first attended college at the ripe old age of 12. I thought I was 14, but last Christmas the topic came up and my parents convinced me I was 12 (and of course they’re right; it was 1987).
2. I can sing.
3. I used to be a locksmith.
4. I grew up in a house on a lake in Michigan. I’ve forgotten more about being cold than many of you will ever know, I believe that hockey is a religion, not a sport, and every once in a while you can still catch my accent (I’m told it sounds vaguely Canadian).
5. I am very mechanically inclined, and can fix all kinds of stuff.
6. I can do a killer Arlo Guthrie impression. I didn’t know this about myself until today.
7. I am staunchly opposed to capital punishment. If you want to know why, ask me.
8. I have been with my wife since we were teenagers. We both turned 32 this year (her 3.5 months more recently than I).

I’m supposed to tag 8 people, but I only know so many people with personal blogs, and some of them are already tagged. So I’m tagging Alan, Kevin, Jason, Randy, and Will. I have no idea how I’m supposed to alert them.

This is me trying to look like I know what I’m talking about at Barcamp in Washington, DC this past Saturday, August 11. This day was the most fun I’ve had in a long time, and I managed to learn a few things, too. I immediately went home and fixed some of my code based on things I learned there.

The event was very well run, which is due in no small part the outstanding efforts of Jason Garber, Justin Thorp, and Jackson Wilkinson. The space to hold the event was graciously provided by Fleishman-Hillard, and funding was provided by a number of generous sponsors, listed on the BarCampDC home page.

But by nature, the success of a BarCamp relies largely on its participants. I’m happy to say that the participants at this event were a great bunch. The presenters at all the sessions I attended knew their subject material exceptionally well, and they shared their knowledge willingly and eagerly. The audiences were great, too, asking lots of good questions and contributing their own knowledge to the sessions.

The after party was a blast, which you have to expect when you put that many cool people in that small an area. Even though I spent most of the day and evening with folks I know from work, I also met several people I otherwise might not have. Everyone was friendly and just all-around awesome (as Kevin might say).

As Mr. Garber said the other night, I, too, am in awe of the organizers and participants of this event. I’m already looking forward to the next one with great anticipation.

I can’t say it enough - thank you organizers, thank you sponsors, thank you presenters, thank you Fleishman-Hillard, and thank you participants. Thank you everyone!

I spent all day today discovering something that’s both useful, and frustrating. To put it shortly, having a primary key on the join table for your habtm relationship will cause you problems. But having an :id field that isn’t a primary key does something useful. Want details?

I was trying to figure out how, even though my join table only defined a relationship between two records, ActiveRecord appeared to know which direction that relationship was created in. I have two classes, Product and Language, which have a habtm relationship with one another. If I take a Product p, and a Language l, and do first “p.languages

Is it just me, or is every single phone company in the world a huge pain to deal with?

A few months ago I had a Frontier phone number ported over to Packet8’s VoIP service. Everything went perfectly. Almost. Since then, anyone in the world who is using any carrier other than Frontier gets routed to my VoIP phone when they dial the ported number. But if you’re using a Frontier telephone and you dial that number, you still ring through to the old land line.

It gets better. That land line shouldn’t even have a dial tone on it anymore, yet it does. I can even make outgoing phone calls with it. I haven’t been billed by Frontier since March, and yet I have a fully functioning phone connected to their service.

But since I want Frontier customers to be able to call me, I decided to call Frontier and point out to them that their switches are still routing calls for a number that doesn’t belong to them anymore to a phone line that does, when all the rest of the world - Verizon, Ameritech, Sprint, Pacific Bell, whomever - gets it right. On the first call I made the mistake of calling customer service who, if you start talking about switches and other things technical, get confused and flustered. Their stance was that since it’s Packet8’s phone number, it’s Packet8’s problem. Apparently the striking coincidence that the only people in the world who cannot call me are Frontier’s own customers was beyond their ability to comprehend.

2nd phone call, I ask to speak to repair. I explain the issue all over again, and repair tells me that they cannot open a trouble ticket to fix the problem because I am not their customer. Brilliant. I told her that if Waste Management were dumping trash on my front lawn, I would call them to ask them to stop even if I weren’t their customer, because no one else could fix the problem but them. I am a Waste Management customer, but that’s beside the point. She didn’t get the analogy at all. So I told her, “My point is this: If I’m not your customer - great. Stop routing phone calls to my Frontier phone line, then.” This did not make her happy, but I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere further anyways, so it was worth it.

On the 3rd call I got someone in customer service who actually sounded like he understood the issue and wanted to help me, but he put me on hold and I accidentally pulled the phone cord out of the wall when I tried to get something out of the fridge. Dammit.

Oh yeah, at this point I’m using their own “disconnected” phone line to call them, just for the irony of it.

It isn’t until the 4th call that I finally get sent to someone in repair who actually has a couple of brain cells to rub together, fully gets the issue and can see it’s obviously Frontier’s switches that are to blame, and says she’ll open a trouble ticket and everything should be sorted out by Thursday at the latest. Funny that she was able to open a ticket when the woman I spoke to on my 2nd call told me it was impossible, since I’m not their customer.

It occurred to me during this 4th call that here I was putting up with all kinds of flack from Frontier and jumping through all kinds of hoops just to convince them that they probably shouldn’t be giving me free phone service anymore.

I’m not really sure why.