The Blogg

I would like to post pictures of our wedding here, but I really don’t have any. If you took pictures at this event and have them in digital form, please send me copies. Thanks!

UPDATE: Thanks to the generosity of Keith Erekson, Lisa Simpkins / Andy Shaffer, and Amy Zeigler, we now have plenty of pictures. You can see them at here, here, and here. Additionally, you can see other pictures I have gleaned at here, although the index looks awful.

On Sunday afternoon we had our families up to our new apartment for dinner and the opening of our wedding presents, which had been in their posession. (Thanks everybody!) The result of this was that our apartment, which had finally gotten organized, was once again full of items without a home.

To remedy this situation, we went shopping on Monday morning. Our first desire was to find something we could put in our kitchen / dining room area that we could store appliances in, away from the evil dust fairies that make things dirty, and that we could put our microwave on top of. Our second priority was to find a TV stand or entertainment center, and also a decently sized television to sit atop it. We had been given monies with which to purchase a television from many people at Christmas time, but had been waiting until we had a place to put it. If we managed to find all of that, we were also looking for a glider to set on our balcony, which was to be my parents’ wedding gift to us. A second objective of this trip was to empty my wallet of some of the gift cards that were making it difficult to close, including cards for Target, Walmart, and Blockbuster.

After looking for a microwave cart at several different stores, we found something that was close but not quite right at Target and something that was just what we were looking for at the Walmart on Rt. 145 in Whitehall. Unfortunately, the only copy this Walmart had was the floor model, which they were unwilling to sell to us. Having previously noticed that there are an abundance of Walmart stores in the ABE area, we were not terribly concerned. We wrote down the item number, “J28″, and went on our way.

We also stopped at the Blockbuster store on Rt. 145 around this time. We spent half an hour choosing two pre-viewed movies to purchase: Star Wars Episode III and Wedding Crashers. When we attempted to check-out, we were informed that the Blockbuster computers were not operating, and that they thus could not accept gift cards. Since we wanted to spend the cards more than we wanted the movies, we decided to return at a later time.

We also looked at televisions several places and ended up buying a 27″ Sony WEGA standard definition, flat-screen model from Circuit City. This would not fit in our vehicle without being removed from its box. We had some difficulty moving it from the parking lot to our second floor apartment, but teamwork and ingenuity got it there. Only later that evening did we remove the protective wrap and find that the top of it was scratched in several places. It is certainly possible that this was our fault due to the way we brought it up the stairs, but we do not know if it might have come from the store that way.

At this point, I called the Walmart store on Linden Street in Bethlehem. They did not have the item for which we were looking, but they claimed to have a very similar kitchen cart. I then tried the Walmart store on Easton-Nazareth Road in Easton, and after I waited on hold for 15 minutes someone informed me that they had the item.

We stopped for a delightful lunch of cheeseburgers, sausage, and grilled pineapple, thanks to Keith, Sabrina, and Roe, before we continued with our shopping. We drove up Linden Street to check the Walmart there, and found that the “similar” product was actually quite different. Then we continued to the store in Easton, where we did indeed find the same product on display. Remarkably, it seemed that they were also out of stock, despite my prior telephone call. Strangely, the item was clearly labeled as “K2″ rather than “J28″ here. After talking to an utterly unhelpful sales associate, we made our way to the customer service counter. After waiting some time while the back room was searched, we were informed that there would be no furniture coming for us from here either. However, the customer service representative called her counterpart at another store in Phillipsburg, NJ, who assured her that they had an item that matched the description in stock, although for them it was labeled “J28″.

With the taste of victory in our mouths, we pressed on further east, charting previously unexplored territory. While on our quest for the Walmart, we passed a Blockbuster store. Remarkably, this one did not have a copy of Star Wars Episode III, although the other location had dozens of them. When we arrived at the Phillipsburg Walmart, we found item “J28″ on display, just as we had expected. To our surprise (sort of), there were none of the shevles below the sample. We went through the same tired routine of having a sales associate look through everything we had already done before declaring that they must be out of stock. Then we went to the customer service desk to find this person who had guaranteed the existence of the item. Remarkably, she had “just left 5 minutes ago”. After waiting quite some time, we were able to talk to an assistant manager. His first response was that he thought the item we were looking for had been recalled. As others had already done, he disappeared into the backroom for 15 minutes before informing us again that there were no items in stock. At this point, our conversation went something like this:

So that our day wouldn’t have been a total waste, we stopped at a Target store in Phillipsburg to pick up a TV stand we had looked at earlier in the day. We actually managed to get one, and then I steered Rachel towards their kitchen furniture section. I think I had almost convinced her that what they had was close enough to what we wanted, when we discovered that they were also out of stock of this item.

Throughout this day, we had been looking at outside furniture in quite a few stores: Target, Walmart, K-mart, Sears, The Home Depot, Lowe’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, and probably a few more that I can’t remember. While most of these stores had some outdoor furniture, not a single one was selling a glider.

This really needs to stop, before one of us vents our anger on a sales associate.

Have you ever seen the movie Just Married? Well, I’ve got a similar story to tell, minus the [ahem] more personal parts. This story starts with a beautiful wedding, where the rain stayed away, the wind kept itself at a reasonable level, and the sun broke through the clouds as we recessed, like a blessing on our marriage. Neither we nor our parents were overcome by tears, and the flower girl and ringbearer were even as cooperative as we could have expected them to be. We really could not have asked for anything different.

Then, after the reception, we headed to our first destination, the Days Inn & Conference Center in York, PA. I had glanced at these directions just long enough to notice that we were taking US-30 East to Loucks Mill Road, but did not notice that this was only to clear the median in Rt. 30. We drove through what was, essentially, a mill or quarry for sometime before deciding to turn around, but eventually found our hotel.

On Monday morning we woke up, ate our continental breakfast, and began the journey to our next location, Memorytown U.S.A., in the Poconos. We were about halfway there along Rt. 81 when I needed to rest my eyes for a bit and Rachel needed a drink, so we took the next exit. This brought us to a tiny little village called Delano, where we found no sign of a convenience store or gas station. We did, however, find signs pointing towards the Brookside Restaurant. We followed these signs through several miles of undeveloped forest before we eventually found ourselves in the town of Mahanoy City. We never found the Brookside Restaurant, but after driving through much of the town we eventually found a gas station that would sell us some Diet Coke. Upon our return to Rt. 81, I managed to be confused by the divided highway such that I ended up driving against traffic. Thankfully there weren’t many other vehicles and I only needed to drive 10 feet to where I could make a U-turn onto the exit ramp. Without much further incident (just a long detour for Rt. 380) we made our way into Mt. Pocono, where our directions led us into a housing development. After searching this for sometime, we found a gentleman walking his dog who was able to provide us with correct directions to Memorytown a few miles away.

At this point, I should mention how we came to know about Memorytown USA. When searching for a place to spend our honeymoon, we found a website for a booking agent, Poconos Best. Although most of what was offered through this agent was beyond our price range, we found one perfect location. Memorytown offered private cottages with fireplaces in a wooded setting with a lake and hiking trails, which sounded like exactly what we wanted for a quiet few days together. Best of all, the price for this was only $70 each night. About three weeks before our wedding we booked a cottage for Monday and Tuesday nights.

When we arrived at Memorytown, we were able to find the front office. There was a sign on the door stating that the office was open during certain hours Thursday through Sunday, and that if someone needed to check-in while the office was closed, they should walk down to the tavern instead. We found two gentlemen working outside the tavern, who informed us that it was only open on weekends. When we mentioned that we were there to pickup a key, one of them made a few phone calls and told us someone should be in the office even though it was closed. We walked back there and knocked on the door several times, until a woman eventually came to the door. She initially confused us with some other couple that had already made arrangements to pickup their key elsewhere, and did not recall our names. I gave her a copy of our confirmation email and she disappeared into the office for 10 or 15 minutes. It was quite cold and windy out, but she would not allow us to step into the office. It wasn’t quite what I would call “down home and mountain friendly” staff. Eventually she came back out, informed us that she knew nothing about our reservation, and that they never rented out cabins during the middle of the week. Then she told us that we would not be able to stay there and that the booking agent would be calling us, then shut the door and left us there.

When we were able to find a location where I could get cell phone reception, we spoke with Charlie from PoconosBest. Like the lady from Memorytown, he assured us that this was entirely the fault of the other party and that he would be looking into the matter. Charlie was able to offer us one of three options: a regular room at a nearby Holiday Inn for $90 per night, a cabin at another lake an hour north of our current location that would also be more expensive than the one we had reserved, or a refund of our money. After some consideration, we decided we might as well go home to our apartment in Bethlehem. We had not been living there together before, so it would still be somewhat of an exciting getaway, no less than a night at the Holiday Inn. Throughout this ordeal, Charlie was quite polite. However, the level of service he provided was completely unsatisfactory. I have worked in the tourism industry myself, and our first priority was to make the customer happy. I was not happy that day, and he didn’t try very hard to do anything about it. In my mind, if you make such a colossal mistake as to reserve rooms for people, have them drive 3 hours to arrive at them, and then not have rooms available, you do something to make it right. That doesn’t mean just looking at the local listings for them, it means finding something comparable and absorbing the cost difference yourself. That’s just for acceptable customer service. If you want to provide good customer service you do that and throw in a free meal to compensate the customer for the hassle you have put them through. If anyone knows of a place where I could leave feedback for other potential customers to see how these businesses operate, please let me know.

I had not bothered to print directions from Mt. Pocono to Bethlehem because it seemed fairly straightforward. We looked at a map and decided to take Rt. 80 further east until it intersected Rt. 33, which would take us south towards home. By the time we reached Rt. 33, Rachel was quite asleep. Not wanting to drive as far east as Easton, I opted to take Rt. 209 South instead of Rt. 33 South. When Rachel woke up some 45 minutes later, she looked on our map to find that 209 South went slightly south and very much west. We eventually found Rt. 248 to Rt. 512 into Bethlehem. If I had just taken 33 as originally planned, it probably would have cut an hour off of our travel time.

Later that night after we had returned to our apartment, we decided to go to the grocery store so we would have something to eat. While walking through it, I was playing with my ring, as I had been doing every since receiving it. It feels very strange to be wearing something on my finger. On this occasion, I managed to drop the ring and have to chase it across the floor of the grocery store.

On Tuesday I took Rachel for a surprise. We first visited The Cup, an ice cream shop on Lehigh’s campus. Then we walked across the river. Because half of my ice cream ended up on my hand, my face, and the pavement, Rachel says I don’t know how to eat it. I, of course, know that this is the fault of the clerk who gave me so much. On the other side of the river, we took a “romantic” walk in a park between the Lehigh River and the old canal. We did get to see lots of flowers, birds, fish, and ducks, and there was plenty of time to talk. Unfortunately, the stagnant water of the canal smelled strongly of sewage.

Tuesday evening, we decided to go out for dinner. I wanted to do something a bit fancier than our usual diners and Friendly’s, so we dressed up for an evening at Carrabba’s Italian Grill. We had a lovely dinner, but when our bill arrived I realized that my wallet must have been still in the pocket of my jeans on the floor of the apartment. So Rachel got to sit there for half an hour after she had finished her meal while I drove back and forth.

All in all, it was quite an experience. It is indeed a testament to love that we managed to have a great time in spite of all these issues.

Radio what’s new? Radio, someone still loves you

For many years, I never listened to the radio. If the weather was just right I could pick up WRTI 90.1 out of Temple University, and they played decent jazz at some hours of the day. Otherwise, your listening options in Lancaster County were all country or top 40, epitomized by the terrible and ever-present 96.9 WLAN cycle of the most recent popular (c)rap and modern rock recordings of the week.

When I moved to the Philadelphia area and now the Lehigh Valley I’ve become very fond of listening to the radio while driving. We are fortunate enough here in Bethlehem to be able to easily find signals from 102.9 WMGK, the classic rock station in Philadelphia, 99.9 WODE, the classic rock station in Easton, 93.3 WMMR, the hard rock station in Philadelphia, and 95.1 WZZO, the hard rock station in Bethlehem. Between the four I can generally find something for my current mood; WMGK is generally too soft for my taste, WODE is generally too repetitive for my taste, and WMMR and WZZO are generally too modern for my taste, but mixing and matching works pretty well.

Unfortunately, they are all owned by media conglomerates, so I have no reason to think they aren’t basing their programming at least partially on payola and other influence from the evil RIAA. Listening to WZZO often in recent days, it seems like I can’t get through a car ride without hearing Buckcherry’s “Crazy Bitch”, Nickelback’s “Animals”, Audioslave’s “Doesn’t Remind Me”, or Hinder’s “Get Stoned”. Obviously SOMEONE must want this drivel to be promoted. (Actually, I have to admit I kind of like the Nickelback song, I just don’t want to hear it every hour.)

There goes the last DJ who plays what he wants to play and says what he wants to say, hey hey hey. And there goes your freedom of choice, there goes the last human voice.

What really annoys me, however, is constantly being reminded that you “get me back to the rock faster”, that “we play less commercials”, that “ZZO rocks in 30 seconds”, cute dialogues between the DJs and the supposed person in charge of playing commercials, etc. Honestly, I would rather hear a commercial (*) for a product I might not know about than yet another hypocritical spot about playing lots of music.

* This does not apply to the commercial for Enternet “Are you frazzled, is your computer on the fritz?” or any of the others by that person with the most obnoxious reading style ever. I would rather listen to nails on a chalkboard all day than that.

As part of the process of moving to a new apartment and becoming married, I have the enjoyable state of being able to justify the expense of broadband Internet. I’ve been enjoying this delight for several days through my laptop, and decided it was time to migrate my entire menagerie of computers to the new location. I was planning to use an old throwaway computer as a router, but I was pleasantly suprised to find that the wireless access point that we had registered for and received at Rachel’s bridal shower could also perform routing for wired connections. Thus begins the story of Chad and the D-Link DI-524 (rev. D) wireless router. What follows is a rough accounting of that story.

I planned my network topology such that an Ethernet cable would connect my modem to the WAN port of the DI-524, my laptop would connect wirelessly to the DI-524, an Ethernet cable would connect one of the wired ports on the DI-524 to the uplink port of my hub, and Ethernet cables would connect my server and my workstation to the hub. I implemented this network with little difficulty and found that the DI-524 worked right out of the box. (Technically, I didn’t have the box. Rachel had mounted the thing to the side of her desk before moving, but hadn’t actually used it.)

The first sign of trouble came when I desired to alter the default configuration, as it is unwise to leave such things unsecured. Following the instructions of D-Link’s website, I found the configuration web page for the router at 192.168.0.1 on my local network, and I was able to login with the default password. I successfully changed the password and the SSID of the wireless network. Then I tried to enable WPA encryption. This appeared to be working, but when I applied the changes, the router never seemed to come back up from restarting. The configuration page would not load, nor could I connect to anything outside of my local network.

For lack of a better idea, I decided to restore the factory settings. After all, I had made only minor configuration changes from the way I had originally found it. The method for resetting the router is to insert a paperclip into a small hole, where a tiny button is recessed far enough to prevent accidental activation. I had little difficulty performing this task, and the router came back with its “Power” and “Link 1″ lights permanently lit and its “Status” light blinking.

I tried to access the configuration site again, but found that 192.168.0.1 was now serving a different page — a CGI script that expected a filename on the local system to be uploaded as the new router firmware. It seemed odd to me that “restore factory settings” would actually remove the firmware from the system, since I got it from the factory ready to use, but I didn’t think too much of it. I knew that somewhere there was an installation CD that had come with the router. I can’t see what would need to be installed, since the router is a stand-alone device, but I thought it would be likely that the CD would contain a firmware image that I could load. Unfortunately, I did not find such files on the CD.

About this time I noticed that the light pattern on the router had changed. Rather than the three lights that had previously been active, now the “Power”, “WAN”, and “Link 1-4″ lights were on while the “Status” and “WLAN” lights were off. I also found that 192.168.0.1 no longer pointed to the firmware update page. Instead, no machine claiming that address could be found. This seemed odd, so I reset the router a second time and attempted to run the installation software on the CD. This setup was unable to finish because it failed to find an Internet connection. (I was running it precisely because I had no Internet connection …)

At this point I decided it would be worthwhile to call technical support. After being asked to restore the factory settings on the router a few more times, unplug the router a few more times, and reload the page a few more times, I was asked to switch my cables around such that one of my machines could actually connect to the Internet, download a firmware binary, then reconnect my old cabling and try uploading that firmware from the router’s web page. I did this, but found that submitting the firmware simply reloaded the page requesting a firmware copy, without seeming to have any noticable effect.

After this I had two more telephone calls with support people. These generally consisted of the same thing, varying the amount of time to hold the reset button or pull the power, switching browsers, switching, computers, switching from a static IP in the 192.168.0/24 subdomain to a DHCP lease, and so on. The second of these calls ended when my computer was unable to acquire a DHCP lease. I expected this, since the router did not seem to be performing its function as a DHCP server, but the technician was convinced that this was a Windows problem, and that I could get around it by rewiring my network again and installing a Microsoft patch for knowledge base KB884020. Once I was able to see what this patch fixed, I could tell it did not have the slightest thing to do with my problem. Nevertheless, I installed it and made a good-faith attempt at retrying everything.

By this point I had probably spent close to an hour and a half on the telephone with D-Link technical support and another 2 hours working on it by myself. My patience was wearing a bit thin, but I have difficulty giving up on these sorts of things, so I tried one more call. The following is a rough transcript of the conversation.

TS: Welcome to D-Link technical support. Have you called us before?

Me: Yes

TS: Could I please have your trouble ticket number?

Me: [reads him the number]

TS: Ok, please give me a minute to read through your file.

[silence]

TS: Ok sir, I need you to open Internet Explorer and type 192.168.0.1 into the address bar.

Me: Ok

TS: When it asks you for a username and password, use admin and blank.

Me: Ok, let me try to explain this as clearly as I can. The configuration web page is not working. It either does not load or loads a firmware upload page, depending on how long it has been since I last restored the factory settings on the router. I have tried multiple machines and multiple browsers. I have restored and rebooted the router at least a dozen times with varying lengths of time, I have verified that the problem is not my broadband provider, I have tried to update the firmware. If you read my file, this should all be there. So this line of thought isn’t working. Do you have any other ideas?

[silence]

TS: Ok, if the configuration page won’t load, then it must be a defective router. Can you take this back to the store?

Me: No, I don’t have a receipt. It was a gift.

TS: Hmm. Well, if the store won’t take it we can RMA it, but we would also need the receipt.

Me: So if I don’t have the receipt I’m just screwed?

[silence]
TS: Yes sir, I’m afraid that is the case. Thank you for calling D-Link technical support, and have a nice day.

Since I couldn’t exactly work on getting all of my network services up and firewall holes punched for them, I ended up spending what was left of the night searching the web for possible solutions to my problem. I did not find any solutions, but I did find quite a few disappointed customers. For example, check out this guy, whose second unit seems to have died in exactly the same manner as mine. I also looked through some reviews on NewEgg. Below are a sampling of the ones that seemed most similar to my problem.

Of course, these weren’t the only reviews. There were plenty of people that had less significant problems such as poor performance or incompatibility with other products, and there were plenty of people who had no problems at all. But when you have a problem severe enough to prevent your product from functioning in any way, and the problem is this common, that’s a serious issue. What amazes me is not the poor engineering, but the fact that tech support people seem to have so very little knowledge about the topic. Given how many people have complained about this exact same issue, they should have been able to verify what was happening and save themselves (and myself) 2 hours of our time. Instead, they seemed totally incapable of understanding that the private address 192.168.0.1 could load anything other than an authorization window to a configuration utility. At least the support people were very polite, if quite incompetant. (Except for the last guy, and I can’t claim to have been very polite to him!)

Ugh. Time to build my own router from a trusty Pentium III and Linux.

Google has a new product that allows you to compare the popularity of search terms.  You can run some interesting searches, such as this.  The results are not surprising, but they are rather sad.  Can anyone find a search term that is more popular than “porn”?  This is your challenge.  It’s the best waste of time since Googlewhacking!