The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Administrivia

Overhead

  • Virgin Mobile Customer Service

    Got an email from Virgin Mobile:

    From: Virgin Mobile <virginmobile-service@my.vmu-mail.com>
    Date: Today 14:34:24

    Hi ED,

    Top-Up now to save your service!

    Since you haven’t added money to your account in the last 90 days, your phone has stopped working. If you don’t take emergency action and Top-Up now, you might lose your phone number and any balance remaining in your account.

    Given that I have the account set to recharge itself every 90 days and it’s been doing that for a couple of years, I thought perhaps my credit card had flipped past the expiration date on file. Fighting my way through VM’s craptastic website, noooo, that’s not the case.

    Nay, verily, the account had topped itself off at 11:34, exactly three hours before that email went out.

    So I asked the obvious question, doggedly using the impenetrable Customer Service form:

    The phone seems OK.
    What’s going on?

    Which produced this missive:

    Response (Rommel) – 06/23/2010 08:32 AM
    Hello Ed,

    Thanks for contacting Virgin Mobile Customer Care.

    I really appreciate the time you took to provide us with the information requested. I reviewed your account and found that indeed you have the auto payment set up correctly in your account. What happened is that the system always sent this alerts to keep the customers aware of their account status but since you have the auto payment option, please ignore this alerts, you don’t have to worry about it. The system charged your card for $15 on 6/22/2010.

    Now, your account will be active until 9/20/2010. You don’t have to worry about the alerts, if you have credit on your card the system will always do it automatically. I apologize on behalf Virgin Mobile for any misunderstanding.

    Perhaps it’s just me, but formulaic cut-and-paste obsequious fawning grates on my sensibilities. What I really want is action that resolves the problem, not just having VM’s Customer Service team blow it off. So I fired off a reply:

    > please ignore this alerts,
    > you don’t have to worry about it.

    So, if I understand your advice correctly, when VM sends me a warning message like this:

    ——-
    Since you haven’t added money to your account in the last 90 days, your phone has stopped working.
    ——-

    I should just ignore it. Is that what you mean?

    That’s stupid advice. You do not want to train your customers to ignore email from VM, particularly information saying their phones are “not working”.

    The correct response is that you will take steps to ensure that VM never sends a bogus warning. The people responsible for sending that message must fix their own problem, at the source of the problem, where it happens.

    Your customers should not be required to ignore anything from VM.

    Let me know when you’ve taken effective action to prevent this from happening again.

    Thanks…

    No answer to date. I suspect VM doesn’t monitor incoming email. I wonder why?

  • Digikey Full-Line Catalog

    For the first time ever, Digikey sent me a full-line catalog.

    Digikey catalog
    Digikey catalog

    It’s 2778 pages long, three inches thick, and weight 2 kg.

    Some time ago I made the mistake of replacing our large rusted-out mailbox with a much smaller one: the catalog presented a solid wall of paper when I opened the door.

    Here’s a closeup…

    Digikey catalog vs Arduino Duemilanovae
    Digikey catalog vs Arduino Duemilanovae

    Now, I’d love to have you believe I’m such a high-rollin’ kind of engineer that Digikey spares no expense on my behalf, but the only explanation for this embarassing situation I can come up with is that their customer service system blew a gasket in my general direction…

    What makes it even more ironic is that they’d recently sent me a survey asking how I’d like to get their catalog. I’d emphatically replied that I did not need a paper catalog or a USB stick with the PDFs. Just let me do the on-line searching and occasionally refer to the appropriate PDF pages and I’ll be fine.

    The damned thing is basically useless; I hate to just toss it in the recycling, but I can’t think of any reason to keep it around.

    I just removed my mailing address from their list, presumably leaving my account info intact; we’ll see if that sticks.

  • Printing from QCAD in Xubuntu

    Went to print up a bunch of cards & pocket stationery again. Alas, QCAD wasn’t showing any of the printers. The obligatory search unearthed a discussion that solved some of the problem. The hack:

    sudo ln -s /var/run/cups/printcap /etc/printcap

    That’s recommended for KDE printing in Gnome, which is close enough to the situation: a QT app in Xubuntu. Maybe that’s solved in 9.10; I’m still using 8.10.

    The print dialog now shows all three CUPS printers on the file server downstairs.

    Can’t select Borderless paper, which means the crop lines don’t all appear.

    The Copies field doesn’t work: only one copy prints. That’s not a killer flaw, but it’s annoying when you need half a dozen copies of the biz card sheet.

    But it’s close enough for something I do once in a blue moon.

    Why print biz cards? One year they changed our house number and street name, changed the street name back, changed the area code, and then tweaked the ZIP code. I swore a mighty oath on the bones of my ancestors to never ever buy a commercial card again.

    Memo to Self: Trim the stationery in this order…

    • vertical edges
    • horizontal edges
    • vertical cuts
    • horizontal cut

  • Blog Impulse Response and Summary

    Two recent postings were mentioned on blogs with much higher readership than mine, which provides an opportunity to measure the impulse response of the blog to an external simulus.

    Views Per Day - Dec 2009
    Views Per Day – Dec 2009

    The first peak comes from the Make magazine blog: they liked the trick of holding screws in slit nuts for trimming and finishing.

    The second is from hackaday.com: they loved the Alpha-Geek Clock, although they linked to the inside circuitry.

    It looks like an external blog mention is good for 50 to 60 hours of fame. After that, the search engines take over again.

    You can tell nearly everybody arrives here from search engines, because the monthly view increases slightly more than linearly with the number of posts.

    Monthly Views - 2009
    Monthly Views – 2009

    I’d love to believe that’s the start of exponential growth, but that’s just not going to happen!

    Speaking of search engines, here are the top terms…

    Search Terms
    All Time
    Search Views
    arduino pwm frequency 235
    milling 223
    arduino pwm 212
    transformer model 99
    bellows 94
    staghorn beetle 87
    triple alert redemption 83
    chain catcher 81
    sherline 79
    arduino command line 79
    arduino fast pwm 66
    cold solder joint 66
    sherline mill 56
    hd44780 arduino 50
    cold solder 50
    cold solder joints 47
    sherline projects 46
    magnetizer 44
    avid rollamajig 43
    triple alert 43

    Obviously, Arduino, electronics, and machine-shop topics are hot.

    Who would have imagined, however, that so many people search the Internet to find pix of staghorn beetles? As of right now, though, Google gives my post two of the four image results and puts it on the first page. Evidently I give good writeup. Now, if only I were selling something, huh?

    The most-viewed pages…

    Top Posts
    All Time
    Title Views
    Alpha-Geek Clock 1836
    Changing the Arduino PWM Frequency 1324
    Arduino Command Line Programming: Avrdud 931
    Sherline Mill Counterweight Gantry 928
    Finding Transformer Pi Model Parameters 851
    Arduino Hardware-assisted SPI: Synchrono 850
    Arduino Fast PWM: Faster 740
    Dell GX270 Auto-On Power Setting 659
    Arduino LiquidCrystal Library vs Old HD4 623
    Cold & Fractured Solder Joints 493
    Kubuntu Remote Desktop via SSH Tunnel 473
    Sunglasses Repair: Half a Hinge Is Bette 420
    Sherline Bellows Covers The Cheap Way 380
    Laser Alignment for the Sherline Mill 364
    Recumbent Bicycle Amateur Radio Antenna 341
    Arduino Push-Pull PWM 336
    Tektronix 492 Spectrum Analyzer Backplan 335
    Experian Triple-Alert Signup: FAIL 312
    Holding Machine Screws for Trimming 309
    Silver-soldered Bandsaw Blade Joint 307

    The Alpha-Geek Clock isn’t representative, due to the sudden peak that slapped it to the top of the list. It’s nice to know that folks are finding (and, presumably, using) the tech info that I put together.

    A tip o’ the engineer’s cap to the two dozen of you who keep track of goings-on through the RSS feed. These posts are mostly for my own amusement and record-keeping, but I trust you find something useful every now and again.

    A Happy New Year to one & all… and keep on building stuff in your shop!

  • 7400-Family IC Stash

    Over the years I’ve accumulated a bunch of obsolete ICs; all I can say is they weren’t obsolete at the time. Sometimes I need one, so here’s a list of the jelly-bean collection where I can find & update it as parts emerge from their hidey-holes in the Heap.

    All hulking through-hole

    • 138 1-to-8 demux
    • 221 monstable (!)
    • 139 1-to-4 decoder
    • 156 2-to-4 dual demux / decoder
    • F521 8-bit comparator
    • 373 8-bit latch (transparent)
    • 374 8-bit latch (clocked)
    • 74 dual D flipflop
    • 244 8-bit buffer
    • 393 dual 4-bit counter (ripple)
    • AS869 8-bit up/down counter
    • 191 4-bit up/down counter
    • 157 quad 2-to-1 mux
    • 164 8-bit parallel output shift register
    • 245 8-bit bus transceiver
    • 151 8-in multiplexer

    Memo to Self: What horror lurks in the box labeled “Old ICs”?

  • Source Code Reformatting

    I just figured out how to use the WordPress “sourcecode” formatting and applied it to my software-related posts. It produces much nicer results than the manual formatting I was using, mostly by preventing long lines from jamming into the right column.

    The catch: WordPress imposes a round trip from my original text to the screen encoding and back, which sometimes randomly mangles special symbols. Angle brackets and double-quotes, in particular, take serious damage.

    If you happen to remember a favorite chunk of code in a previous post, please take a look at it and see if I missed any of the obvious text-replacement errors. Trawling through the Software category should turn up most of the posts.

    As is always the case with program listings, the errors will be really obvious to everyone except me.

    Thanks…

  • Credit Card Privacy Choices

    Just got a new credit card, which arrived with the usual “Privacy Policy” flyer describing how they’ll keep our sensitive bits safe & secure. Except, of course, that by default they’ll share those bits with nearly any organization that asks, if there’s even the least bit of money to be made in the process.

    The flyer explains how we can tell them of our privacy choices. Oddly, in this Internet Age, none of the banks have figured out how to put our privacy policy choices on their websites. Maybe that would be entirely too efficient.

    Anyhow, we’re supposed to either:

    • Pick up the phone to deal with their customer service apparat or
    • Pick up a pen, fill out a form, cut it out, and mail it to them

    For our joint accounts, if I forget to say “And this also applies to my wife”, well, then they’re free to share her sensitive bits.

    I’m sure they know that when they make “choosing” difficult enough, nobody will bother.

    Ya think?

    For the record:

    • Chase: press 0 to short-circuit the account info blather and get to a rep
    • Citi: press 6 for that purpose. Why not 0? Huh…

    The Chase folks tell me this may require up to 90 days to take effect. Wow, do they fill out forms and hand-carry the paperwork to Galactic HQ for further transcription?

    Memo to Self: Remember to tell the nice voice…

    • This applies to both account holders
    • Turn off all information sharing options
    • Turn off “convenience checks” (is anybody stupid enough to use those things?)
    • Turn off automatic credit line increases

    This takes about four minutes for each account on a Sunday morning.