A Queer Mobile

Snaps for excellent customer service

Now for something completely different: two stories about excellent customer service I've experienced lately:

1. About a week ago our internet connection at the house become very spotty. The cable modem would disconnect and then reconnect a short time later. The disconnections happened unpredictably, and they were driving John and me crazy. So I finally called Mediacom, our cable and internet supplier. Within a minute I was connected to an intelligible, genuinely nice, smart, and helpful person. He remotely ran diagnostics on our modem and discovered no problem. He then asked me to check the connection to the wall. Turned out to have been a bad connection on my side - I should have checked it, but I've not loosened that wire in six months. I thanked the fellow, who wished me a great weekend.

2. I wanted to upgrade the memory in my MacBook Pro. The problem was the screw fastening down the memory cover was so tight I couldn't loosen it without stripping out the screw. John had no better luck than I. So I brought the computer and the memory to the Apple store at Stanford Shopping Center. I walked in, was immediately greeted, and I explained the problem. I pulled out the machine and pointed to the offending screw. The fellow whisked the machine away and I waited about five minutes - during which time I was politely asked three times if I needed any help. (And everyone smiled at me!). The door opened and the tech brought out the machine. He said they'd needed to apply lots of force to loosen the screw, and that they'd left it partially loosened so I could complete the upgrade - which I did with no trouble at all.

Now am I going to go back to my old DSL provider - who when I called made me wait on hold for a minimum of twenty minutes? Or am I going to buy another Dell, who when I called last I was connected to a singularly unhelpful tech in India after at least ten minutes of frustrating button-pushing to navigate a telephone menu system? I don't think so. (Plus I love my Mac...)

V-Day and Birthday

It's been ten years since I moved from California to live with John. Now we usually celebrate the first time we met (in 1995, two years before I moved), but I thought it'd be nice to have just a little bling for Valentine's Day. There's a great gay jeweler who started a website called Love and Pride. I had been eying one of the designs for a year or so, and I finally sprung for two sets of diamond-studded military tags with a stainless steel linked chain. John's tough to buy jewelery for. Because he's in the shop all the time he can't wear a ring; it's too dangerous with the power tools he uses. I think he was tickled - and he bought me tons of chocolate from our favorite local chocolatier, Bochner Chocolates. We headed out to our favorite local fusion restaurant, Blend, for a special prix fixe Valentine's Day menu. (We're boring: we wound up with the same incredible entree - seared rare Ahi tuna with porcini mushroom risotto, warm baby spinach and Manchego salad, fresh oregano grape tomatoes, and a roasted mushroom puree.)

My birthday's the 16th. I took the day off - which gave me a four day long weekend. John got me incredibly cool books and art. This is a fabulous edition of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-glass illustrated by the amazing artist, Anne Bachelier. Sumptuously bound with gilt edges, it is now one of my most prized books. He also got me an overview of Japanese printmakers during the 1700s and 1800s. One of these printmakers, Utamaro, was the inspiration for my favorite photographer, Imogen Cunningham. She never studied other photographers for inspiration; she turned to this Japanese master for clues on posing people together.

It was another heavy food day! We headed out for sushi - yes, Virginia, there's (very good!) sushi in Iowa, and then home for a deep dish apple pie that John made for me.

Support your independent software developers

While browsing a Macintosh-only newsgroup I found a link to a small software company that produces some very cool products: Hog Bay Software. There's one guy who's writing all the code behind these products, and he's hoping to be able to jump-start his business so he can be writing product code full time. Even if you're not a Mac user, do check him out: he has cool stuff.

(This sort of gig is exactly what I have in mind for my future work. I ran my own shop for four years, and I'd love to have another go at it.)

Redoing my music collection

I've ripped all my music collection onto my Mac. I've been pretty happy with the whole setup - until about a week ago. Now I'm so angry at myself I'm re-ripping all my music. Here's my sad story...

I've been listening to lots of Loreena McKennitt's music - check out her website at Quinlan Road Music. Quinlan Road provides very high quality digital downloads from their website. I'd downloaded one of her collections as high quality (256 kbps) MP3 files - it sounded very good indeed.

Now I'd been ripping my CD collection as 224 kbps AAC files, and I was pretty pleased with the sound. The MP3 I downloaded sounded pretty much the same as what I'd been listening to for the past two years. Quinlan Road also provides lossless downloads. My downfall was downloading and converting one of these collections...

If you're not into such stuff, most of the time when you rip a CD to a digital audio file the computer compresses the file using one of the available compression mechanisms (often called a codec: coder - decoder). MP3 is very widely used; Apple provides a different codec, called AAC, which is supposed to provide somewhat better sound for the equivalent amount of compression. I'd always configured my systems to use a much higher than normal quality compression. If you buy tunes from the iTunes Music Store, you'll get an AAC file compressed at 128 kbps - that's 128,000 bits per second of data. I typically compressed my files at twice that rate.

But there are also ways of transferring music that don't lose any of the original information off the CD; these are called lossless codecs. The downside is that the music files are three to five times larger than the compressed version. The advantage, though, is you get the original quality. I did an experiment where I bought one of McKennitt's collections in lossless format (actually as FLAC - free lossless audio codec). Apple's iTunes won't play FLAC files directly, so I installed some free software to do the conversion. I used Max from sbooth.org: they provide the software as open source.

Max let me convert the same FLAC file into my normal AAC file as well as into Apple Lossless (that's Apple's lossless codec). I installed both of the files into iTunes and listened. Unfortunately...

I set up a test for John when he came home from the shop about an hour later. He listened to the two tracks without knowing what he was hearing. He identified the lossless file within ten seconds - it's that much better than the compressed AAC file.

Now, how is it better? Compressed MP3 and AAC files sound like the music - the frequency response is mostly there. But when we listened to the lossless files through good speakers, it was like a veil lifted from the music. The instrumentalists sounded like they were in the room with us. Will it make a difference to you? That depends on what you're using to hear your music.

So I'm re-ripping all my CDs. iTunes lets you rip a CD using Apple Lossless. I bought a new 250GB hard disk for the music files. And, I must confess, I'm enjoying my music a lot more.

Another link to try: if high quality classical recordings appeal to you, check out Linn Records. It's the same outfit that makes audiophile playback equipment. Their  recordings are stunningly good. And they provide lossless downloads, too...

Temporary (almost) thaw

Our run of above normal temperatures ran out just about the time I returned from California in late January. I've been hibernating inside with the mercury hovering around zero day and night. The past two weeks John and I even gave up our Sunday morning trail walking; my breathing gets bothered by temperatures below about fifteen degrees.

The clouds started to gather last night and temperatures went up all during the night. We got up and headed out to the river trail after breakfast this morning. The area was a study in grays: overcast skies, snow everywhere, and the river largely frozen over. One bit of open water near one of the plants looked like a scene from Hitchcock's The Birds: the adjoining ice was literally covered with ducks and geese.

Snow is supposed to be flying tonight and the temperatures will plunge again. I just keep in mind that Spring's barely a month away.