Images by John 'K'
Life as seen through my lens…
Thanks for 27 wonderful years…
Posted by on November 26, 2006
This one’s for my wife.
As immigrants who have relatively recently moved to America, we’re not yet fully wrapped up in the whole Thanksgiving thing, but we obviously take advantage of the days off work, and we can relate to the wider underlying theme of Thanksgiving, which is to give thanks for family, friends, and the things that make life special.
So we had a strange Thanksgiving on Thursday, with 3 of us popping into San Francisco for the afternoon to visit a car show, and then a family meal in the evening, where we sat and gave thanks for the important things in our lives.
But I really needed to say a special Thank You to one very important person in my life – my wife. We’ve been married for 23 years – know one another for a bit over 27 years, and have been together for nearly 27 years. In all that time we’ve had our ups and downs, have brought 4 special girls into the world (yes I know we moan about them from time to time, but they are special in so many ways), and she’s followed me nearly half way around the world, leaving behind the world she knew and all her friends and family to follow my dream.
I love her more than I could ever say, and as a small token of my thanks we took some time away from our daughters and had a weekend to ourselves in San Francisco. The basic idea was I’d get us there, bring us back, get us a place to sleep, all the ‘infrastructure’ things, and she’d basically have the choice of what we did, where we went and so on. So we spent most of Saturday in Chinatown, and our time on Sunday before coming home down at Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39.
It was a wonderful weekend – so nice to see her happy and smiling and not caring about things at home or work for a couple of days, and I hope she enjoyed it as much as she seemed to (despite the lovely wet weather on Sunday).
Some pics from the weekend are up as an album.
Jan, I love you, and I don’t care how much of a nutter that makes me in your eyes. For as long as you want me around, I’m here for you.
Is someone watching over me?
Posted by on November 14, 2006
When we moved over here to the bay area, we effectively started our life over. Only available cash I had was salary and some savings which were used to set up home here. All my equity was locked in the small house we own in the UK. So we rented. Property prices were climbing, and people kept saying to me "you should get in now before the prices get totally out of reach", but I always said "No, will buy when I am ready to and not before". We had no available down payment, we didn’t even know at the time whether we’d get our green cards and would be able to stay long term (although that was unlikely to fall through, I’m not a betting man), and as I saw it we had certain short term benefits as a renter that we’d have to deal with ourselves as a homeowner. So when it got close to bringing my family over in July of 2005, we found a lovely house for rent in the lovely town of Pleasanton, and moved as quickly as possible to get in.
The rent was a bit higher than I was originally looking to pay, but we fell in love with the place (me in person, and my wife from the pictures) when I came out to view it, and so we signed up for a 1 year lease on the spot, hoping we’d be able to renew. Sure enough, at the end of the year, the owners extended the lease, this time for 2 years, so we are now here at least until July 2008, and we have first refusal on buying the place if at that time they want to sell (and by then, we might be in a position to buy). If they don’t we simply renew the lease for however long is an option and here we stay.
Anyway – all that is good, but today I get an e-mail from the guy I shared a house with for the 8 months I was here without the family. The e-mail had a link to an article from a local guy who watches the housing market closely. I knew things were slowing down, but didn’t quite expect what I read… http://patrick.net/housing/crash.html
Bottom line is he recommends doing what I’d set out to do 2 years back. He says "If you want to buy, look around and see that house prices are falling. Why hurry to buy into a falling market? Save your cash and buy for much less in the future. Find a nice cheap rental, sit back, and enjoy the show till then." For me when I made the decision, house prices weren’t falling, but having lived through one burst housing bubble in the UK, I could see the signs here.
So I’m sat here in a lovely 2800 sq ft rented house in a nice town (but with an hour commute), not having to worry about any of the stuff that a homeowner would be worried with, while I have colleagues who at the height of the price increases early last year shelled out on $million plus mortgages to buy a 1700 sq ft bungalow close to the office, and who are now looking at a negative equity bubble. Sort of makes you wonder if this was meant to happen.
Really funny thing is… as I type this, the cloud from the overnight rain is clearing and the sun is punching through. Not sure I’m a person who believes in signs, but sometimes I wonder….
To My Friends…
Posted by on November 8, 2006
I work in a small group of very dedicated individuals. They all are very family focused people, and so while we all mix well at work, we tend not to mix much outside of it. At home I have my wife and kids. I’ve said much about them already. I love them all dearly and more than I could ever say, but my teenage daughters are busy trying to establish their own identities and have their own lives, and my wife is busy trying to get involved in things outside of the home, and of course my remaining family members are back in England with an 8-hour time difference between us. As such, there are times I find myself needing someone outside of the family or the workplace to talk to.
As a result of leaving many friends, colleagues, and family back in England nearly 2 years ago, I branched out though an on-line ‘community’ of folks all interested in online gaming and made many contacts. Over time, a number of these contacts have become friends, and some have become very good friends. Most of these friends I have yet to meet face to face. I probably never will, but through on-line forums, instant messages, web based audio conferencing software and the like, I have grown to know these people and they me. While spread geographically all over the continent and beyond, through the use of the Internet we feel a bond through a shared enjoyment of a hobby, but in may cases our friendship has gone far beyond that.
There’s the usual bunch of folks in the IT industry who you would associate with such an online ‘community’, but then there are elementary school teachers, social workers, safety officers, schoolkids and college students, nurses, people struggling to make a new life in a new state with their family after having to leave everything they know and love behind. There are many military folks, a number of which are currently deployed in various locations around the world serving their country (and my prayers are with them). There are retired college professors, parents, husbands and wives. All good, decent, caring people, some struggling with various demons, some working through relationship issues, some seeking guidance at critical turning points in their lives, but all seeking in some way to help one another.
To all of these folks that I think of as ‘friend’ I would simply like to say Thank You. Thank you for giving me someone to talk to when I would otherwise face silence. Thank you for being someone who listens when I need to let off steam about something. Thank you for helping me see other sides to problems I’ve faced, and thank you for your companionship and humor. To any of my Friends who read this, know that your friendship is valued much more than a few nicely written words could ever describe, and know that if there is anything I can do to help you with your own problems or issues, you only have to ask.
Dealing with teenage addictions…
Posted by on October 23, 2006
Wow – 2 updates in the same month. Will have to watch I don’t become addicted to this…..
We’ve lived in Pleasanton for 14 months now, and yesterday my wife and I finally got around to taking a hike up Pleasanton Ridge. Why oh why did we leave it so long. It was beautiful. The day couldn’t have been nicer – it was mid October, and we were hiking in shorts and t-shirts. We could both tell that we hadn’t done any serious hiking for a while, as the first real incline left us both looking for breath, but we walked through it, and worked our way to the top of the ridge. The view was amazing.
We would have stayed longer, but we had limited time, so we’ve vowed to return and spend longer. Some of the photos I took have been added as an album.
With stuff like this around us, it pains me that my daughters seem to spend so much time on-line on their computers playing games.
My youngest daughter at least manages to find time to do some things away from her computer – she’s heavily involved in the girls basketball team at her school, and during last year has formed some strong friendships with other girls from her year with whom she goes out from time to time. Having said that, she still spends a lot of time on-line playing Jedi Academy and Medal of Honor. She’s an able student, and when she puts her mind to it is capable of very good grades – she needs to make sure she doesn’t loose that focus, as otherwise her grades will suffer, and she may find herself being kicked off the basketball team if she lets things slip too much.
We have more of a problem with her elder sister though. She discovered Halo a few months back. I’m to blame for that as I play it a lot (I played it a lot more while we were separated last year, but still keep my hand in now) and I introduced her to it as an activity we could do together. I tend to play just one of the multi-player game-types (race), and even with limited time to play I consistently rank in the top 50 race players world-wide (when I spent more time playing I was in the top 10, but I’m trying to not play to those excesses again). Our daughter however seems to have a harder time limiting herself.
She too is pretty good at this game (perhaps it’s genetic), and because she’s found something she’s good at, she is on-line pretty much all the time she is home and not eating or sleeping. She’s ether playing, participating in message forums for a number of groups (clans) who play, and/or talking to them via the various group voice-chat programs available. It has become so much of an addiction for her that she’s frequently been on-line during the night when she is supposed to be sleeping. In recent times she’s done this to a point where she has given herself really bad headaches, and recently has even missed time at college because of her ‘addiction’. Apart from mealtimes, she rarely spends time with the rest of the family, and she has become a virtual recluse. She doesn’t seem to want to make friends outside of the on-line game community, and rarely ventures out of the house apart from to go to college or the occasional shopping trip.
As parents, we are getting seriously worried about this. We have started restricting her on-line time such that she can get some proper sleep, but we may need to scale her access back further. I don’t want to just stop it altogether (cold turkey) though, as I’m really worried about how doing so would make her react. She’s taken the move to the US harder than her younger sister, but she needs to see that there is a big chunk of life away from her computer that she is missing out on.
As a parent, I don’t know how best to deal with this. I don’t want to react in a way that hurts our already strained relationship, but something needs to be done. Not knowing what to do is a strange place for me to be. I don’t like having a problem without a solution… I’m almost at a stage where I think we might need to get professional help to deal with this, as the daughter herself doesn’t seem to see the damage she is doing to herself and her future at this critical point in her development.
Business as usual…
Posted by on October 13, 2006
Well, it’s now been about 2 months since my last update, and as it’s Friday the 13th, I thought it best to do an update just in case some strange masked individual called Jason decides to end it all for me (we have a few Jasons where I work, so who knows!)..
From my perspective, work continues to keep me very busy. Being a ‘customer advocate’ in a company with a multi-billion dollar turnover is not a job for someone who wants a quiet life. ‘So why on earth did I take it?’ some might ask……
Well, I like to help out where I can, and find the best way to do that is by taking my own experiences, and using them in a way that others can benefit from them.
Up until 2 years ago (or there abouts), I’d always been in a role where I was directly interfacing with customers – those poor souls who buy the products of the company that you work for. I’d always strived to ensure that the buying experience was as good as possible, working on the advice of the old saying “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. If I am to buy something, the last thing I want is to be having problems with it, and if there are problems, I’d want them to be dealt with quickly and efficiently.
So I started my working life in in-store sales, selling electrical goods (TVs videos, stereos, domestic appliances), and made it to department manager by making sure my customers got what they really needed (as opposed to what they thought they needed), which kept them coming back. When they had problems, I worked the support system to make sure they were looked after, and as a result they kept coming back. Sure the commission helped (especially when you are young and working for something close to minimum wage), but my main drive was to build customer loyalty.
Skip my next job – it was a way to get into the computer industry back in the day where a home PC was Commodore VIC20 or Sinclair Spectrum, and had me working shifts as a data centre operator for a big international supplier of technology to the military. It got me a regular paycheck and the shift bonuses were just what a young married parent needed! It wasn’t what I wanted to do though.
So, when I heard about a support position working for the company that provided the data communication services for a pre-internet bulletin board type system called Compunet (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compunet), I jumped at the chance. I was a major home computer hobbyist geek back then – wrote software to control devices through the RS232 interface, was a member of a local ‘users group’, and the idea of being paid to play with the technology that was my hobby seemed to good to be true, so I went for it, and they hired me.
Compunet was a small company, and even a lowly technical support person could make a difference. Based on my own experiences, and the feedback of the users/customers, I was able to work with the developers to enhance the system, and add new functionality. I even wrote some of the code that went into the system enhancements and the software copy protection we had (the service would let you download commercial software and run it so long as an integrated ‘dongle’ was present). I also got to rule as in house ‘wizard’ over one of the first commercial multi-user games (MUD – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD). This was a fun job. It was all about seeing what the users wanted, and trying to make the service deliver that. Unfortunately, management lost their direction, and I left shortly before the company folded.
From there I went to work for an emerging business computer manufacturer called Apricot Computers (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_Computers). When I joined, they had just started to get interested in the aspect of computer networking, and my experiences with Compunet and my interest in the whole emerging world of computer communication made this seem like a good fit. I joined as a technical support engineer, and quickly found myself specializing in PC networking with the emerging Microsoft MS Net, and Novell NetWare. As a manufacturer looking to specialize in networking PCs, I got to see Novell NetWare grow through its early adoption phase through its position of market domination, and saw the start of its demise as Microsoft looked to dominate the PC networking industry. I also got to see Microsoft develop MS-Net into LAN Manager, and then into Windows NT and beyond into Windows 2000 and Active Directory.
Working in technical support, I got to see first hand how the decisions of engineers could cause pain for the eventual users of the products, and so worked hard to drive ‘problem ownership’ to its correct owners. During my time there, I brought engineering closer to the customers, got partner companies talking closely together about joint support issues, worked out ways to deliver enhanced support services to our customers through the use of the Internet, and tried to give our customers the best experience possible.
Seeing how the PC network industry was growing rapidly, and seeing as how server centric storage was not a sustainable model, when Mitsubishi Electric (who had purchased Apricot Computers in the 1990s) finally decided they couldn’t compete with the likes of HP, Compaq, IBM and Dell, and so pulled the plug, I looked at a number of possible jobs on the table. The one that interested me the most was for a company I had never heard of (who had about 30 people in the UK at the time), and who had this cool idea of taking the storage away from the server and stick it all together in a big consolidated system that could be accessible by anything on the network that needed it.
I joined my current company as a professional services engineer in a newly formed division of the company (I believe I was the 3rd such hire world-wide at the time I joined), doing installations and on-site troubleshooting. My desire to have customers get the best from their purchases quickly led me to develop standardized installation processes, performance audits, ‘system availability’ audits, and other such services that we could provide to customers to ensure they got a consistent experience, and could get the most out of their purchases. These early ideas were seen by our corporate folks back in California, and soon got rolled into standard service offerings that are even now being delivered world-wide. As our team grew, I realized that I didn’t just want to be a people manager, so looked to build on my problem solving experience, so started specializing in on-site diagnosis and resolution of the difficult issues that time and time again seemed to stump our remote call centers.
One thing I found was that as solutions get more and more complicated, and as technologies from different suppliers get more and more intermixed, having a component level view of support doesn’t always work (and in this game we are typically just a component in a much bigger ‘machine’). Being able to understand the whole machine, and being able to look at everything that happens inside that machine (as opposed to the very restricted view that a remote based support engineer typically sees) is key to quickly diagnosing and fixing problems, and so I became our first ‘field escalation consultant’, working as a troubleshooter for the really hot and painful customer escalations that we could never seem to get to the bottom of with a remote support infrastructure.
Many times, the problems our customers had were not as a result of our contribution to their overall infrastructure, but were more often than not integration or environmental issues, and being able to quickly identify these issues and work with the customers to resolve them earned our company a lot of loyalty with our customer base- we became people they could trust. We’d deliver a solution that did what they wanted (and needed), and we’d understand their environment such that we could even deliver support for parts of their infrastructure that on paper had nothing to do with our part of their solution. Having that level of customer trust and loyalty is invaluable.
For the times where a defect in our products was to blame for the problems, I’d work closely with the various departments back at our corporate HQ to get a quick and effective resolution to the problems, and always made sure that the folks in support and engineering were aware that the customer experience always came first. This was great, and helped us to build a strong base of loyal customers in the UK, however it was always reactive.
As such, when an opportunity came up to take this experience, and take it closer to the folks who design and build our solutions, I jumped at the chance. I’d always been interested in the idea of moving to and living in America, and many visits from the UK to California only helped strengthen that desire, so when an opportunity came up that would take me to our HQ, and have me working on behalf of our customers world wide to influence the ongoing quality of our products, I did everything I could to make it happen.
Over the past 2 years, our products have seen a lot of extra complexity added, and the scope for screw-ups increases exponentially the more complexity that gets designed in; however as a part of a small group of dedicated folks who consistently strive for positive changes in our product quality, we have not seen that trend. In fact, we have seen our quality get notably better over the past couple of years. Sure there are still issues (what company doesn’t have them), but we spot them early, deal with them early, and make sure that our customers are looked after every step of the way.
Oh, and by the way, the role I started (that of Field Escalation Consultant) has now been mainstreamed by our services organization, and we now have teams of such folks dotted around the world, ready to help our customers through those difficult times.
Only the other day, I ran into the area director that I used to report into while working in the UK, and after upsetting him by assuring him that I didn’t want to move back, he said that in his position (as director of customer services for Europe), he’d seen a notable positive change in our quality over the past 2 years. Needless to say this felt good, knowing that at some level I had contributed to this change. If folks at that level are having to spend less time talking to customers after a painful escalation, and can focus more on making our service and support deliverables even better, we all win.
… So what brought on this outburst from me? Well, two things really. One thing that made me sit back and appreciate my job recently was a thread on a message forum that I participate in where someone posted a message titled ‘My Job is FUN (post your job)’, and proceeded to post a number of photos of where he worked (which looked like fun), so I looked at my job, which is now mainly office based, but has over time taken me all over the world in support of our customers, so I dug out a load of those photos and put them together in a collection. Sure enough, as I look back, not only do I get job satisfaction, but I really have gotten to visit some cool places and have fun, and that continues, even now.
The other thing was a comment left in response to a blog entry on one of our competitors sites, where the head of worldwide marketing for HP was singing the praises of their own products in our technology space, and threw a challenge to his peers in some of their competitors (including us) to show that our products were as good as theirs. In response to this, one of our customers independently posted a response that hit home that we really do have that level of customer loyalty that looking after our customers at all levels brings. (see http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/campbell/archive/2006/09/27/1658.html#comment1716 – this really made my morning).
Oh, and let’s hope it’s not another 2 months before I do another entry…..
Images by John 'K' 