Wherein I attempt to justify something ridiculous

I made it about 25 years on this planet before I really had any first hand interaction with the "designer" world. My then-significant other was into nice bags of varying brands, but more interestingly, she had an old (and real) Louis Vuitton handbag. It was a one of their signature medium-sized handbags in classic monogram print; it had been a gift well over 10-15 years prior.

One day -- at her insistence, because I was a hater at that point -- I took a closer look at that bag and was honestly impressed by the quality of it. It may have just been a bag to tote around junk and had spent a significant amount of time sitting on public transit seats, but you could tell some serious craftsmanship had gone into the design and creation of the bag. Kinda like when you got your hands on a unibody Macbook and just thought, "This feels like quality."

The leather had aged very nicely -- and once you have a general idea of what quality, aged leather looks like, it definitely caught your eye -- but most importantly it was in 8.5-9/10 condition cosmetically, and 10/10 condition functionally. It had a few scuffs on the highest impact areas, but overall it was kind of amazing at how well it had tolerated a decade or two of abuse and minimal care.

Shortly after, she started dragging me into various designer stores and we'd have fun browsing around but very rarely bought anything, and almost always something quite small, but then a certain line leather used in a lot of men's stuff at Louis Vuitton really started to grab my attention. I was really impressed at the texture, color, stitching, and quality of anything in their "Utah leather" collection -- which varied from wallets to $3,000 messenger bags. Something about it really appealed to me and I found myself wanting some of it, but just laughing at the ridiculous prices.

But one thing was for sure: I definitely need a new wallet. My then-current one had lived its 7-10 year life of abuse and was finally falling apart. It was the 4th or 5th wallet I had owned, and the 4th or 5th to fall apart. All of my previous wallets were $5-$20 but the one that needed replaced was a nicer $40 one from a well known brand. And it was in shambles. I went to Nordstrom and looked at all their wallets, I went to Coach and Gucci and a few others I forget the names of to look at nicer ones, but nothing came close to matching the appeal of something from LV's Utah leather collection.

Nothing came close to matching LV's ridiculous prices either. But I did it. Under a haze of rap music and Thai food, I wandered into the LV store literally across the street from where I was working at the time and just blindly bought the one I knew I wanted. It was so ridiculously expensive, but it was kinda fun. I looked at all of their wallets and landed on one of the most expensive ones: a $740 + tax "compact wallet" in "coffee" color.

Louis Vuitton has even nicer packaging than Apple!

Guess how long it took for my nerd friends to start making fun of me? It was pretty much immediate. But I stood by one thing: as long as I didn't screw up, this should be the last wallet I ever buy in my entire life. I won't quite break even unless I live to be like 110, but at least it will become less ridiculous with time. As I was reminded during Thanksgiving, not enough time has elapsed yet, and people still find this purchase ridiculous.

When we saw Inception, like 3 people turned to me after the line, "Here's my wallet, there's $500 in there, and the wallet is worth more than that," said by the rich guy. I gave them the death stare back. I am genuinely embarrassed when people call attention to this purchase around other people who don't really know me because, I imagine, a lot of incorrect things are inferred about a guy who would spend that much on something like that.

Of course, the handful of people I know that have a taste for the designer world were "golf clap" level happy for me. One of the things I liked the most about it was, at the end of the day, it looked like a normal wallet. I see the occasional monogram or other well-known printed wallet from a designer in the wild and, first, it's hard to tell if they are fake or not without taking a close look (unlike most bags, which are obvious from a mile away), but second I was not buying a logo; I was buying an extremely high quality product (rationalization is a very important life skill).

In the 3 years since buying it, not a single person has noticed it and said anything unsolicited. The only time it has come up has been when the conversation has turned on me and it's time to make fun of my ridiculously expensive wallet. Most of the time, I don't even bother to defend myself anymore. (It's all in good fun).

3 years of being sat on by me daily later

Thankfully for my wallet -- literally and figuratively -- LV has lived up to my expectations regarding quality (so far). Every few months I clean it off and recently I took a close look at it: not a single stitch is even blemished, let alone damaged or broken. Other than one very small scuffed area on a high impact corner, a couple tiny marks I've made on it, and some minor wear caused by plastic cards that can't really be avoided (I bought it to use it and do almost every day), it is in perfect condition. I'd give it 9-9.5/10 cosmetically, and 10/10 functionally -- after 3 years of abuse by me, and being sat on. A lot.

Try to find something wrong! Other than the price tag

The only way I can buy any ground with haters regarding my wallet is when I compare it to Apple stuff (which can totally backfire, of course), some of which just "feels" right the second you pick it up, or, say, Intel SSDs, which are "cool" to hold, especially in quantity, because they "feel" kinda futuristic (probably because of how light they are). Or probably the same feeling car people get when they sit in certain cars ranging from Miatas to 30 years worth of M5s to the ridiculous SL65s (Steve Jobs -- somewhat known for his pickiness -- drove a SL55 for years).

There is probably some corner of the academic and corporate world that is dedicated to studying this feeling and people out there who can drop some serious Knowledge and Words about the topic, but that person is not me.

If a stitch seems misaligned or not the right size, it's probably functional; this is the highest use area of the wallet

I am not a rich person, nor did I buy a logo (I think), nor do I think I'm awesome because I own some material good, nor have I ever shown it to anyone without them wanting to see it for some reason (okay, I showed it off to my sister unsolicited, I admit it). Usually it comes up because someone witnesses some haters who already know about it hating. Part of the disconnect that happens with the haters of "the $800 wallet" is that by caring less about money -- like I like to think I do, but am not sure about overall -- and material things in general (ditto), it becomes easier to make relatively poor financial decisions (but nothing that is going to send you to bankruptcy court at the end of the month).

If I lost the thing, I'd be sad, but I might buy another one (probably/maybe not). If it got stolen, I may replace it via insurance (I've asked and it's covered). If a pet ate it, I'd probably be upset for about 5 seconds, but at the end of the day it's just a wallet, and it's not the end of the world; plus, hopefully it's a rich friend's pet and we find ourselves at LV the next day; perhaps in Vegas as well. I do my best to take care of it and keep it out of harm's way, but I definitely bought it to use it.

And by "haters", I usually mean friends. Like I said, its all in good fun. If you haven't done anything stupid with a credit card in your life, you haven't lived at all.

Over the years I have seen plenty of 10 year old wallets that cost $20 and are still in good condition (but not as nice as this one will be! and arguably lower-abuse -- like carried in backpacks or bags instead of back-pocket) and I respect that some people just can't process spending that much money on anything like this, but hey, I'd do it again, and hopefully you understand at least a little bit of why this random guy on the internet did.

While researching this post I learned the wallet I bought has gone up in price by approximately $100 since I bought it.

Clearing up the cloud

Congratulation Mercedes! I was watching TV the other day and one of your commercials where you said your cars are "cloud powered" or "cloud enabled" or something like that came on and I knew it had happened: the use of the word cloud has officially become a joke.

Overall, I realize marketing and salespeople mean no harm when they drop the c-word, and I realize that the vast majority of consumers aren't big enough nerds to have a nuanced idea of what cloud computing is, but I definitely think there is room for some general education on what the word means, and what systems administrators hear when you say it.

If the term cloud strikes you as an old one, it's because it's been around forever. You won't get 50 pages into any networking book from the 90s before you find your first network diagram that involves something that looks like a cloud. Historically, the cloud has been used in network diagrams to signify the public internet -- the part of the network where you no longer have control.

The first definition of cloud is simply the public internet. So if your company has a presence on the public internet, congratulations! You can put cloud on as many pieces of marketing you want to.

Obviously that is not a very high bar -- just about anyone is on the internet (you bet your ass my blog is cloud powered) -- so this definition of cloud has become more like #2 at this point.

The other definition is much more interesting, but requires a little bit of digging into how the internet works. I'll do my best to keep it simple.

Amazon Web Services is a shining example of what cloud computing really is. Note that I have never actually used it before, but that's part of why it's so good: I could be torn out of my world of physical servers and trips to datacenters and thrown into a world where everything is virtually hosted by the AWS cloud of servers that I will never see or physically interact with without really feeling that much pain. Amazon built a great system of servers to sell people stuff, but then they started to say to themselves, "What else can our cool network of servers do?" and they came up with AWS. Now I question what date the projection charts say AWS will be a bigger business than amazon.com the shopping site, if it hasn't happened already.

Traditionally, if I wanted to host a website somewhere, I'd have to do it myself using my own computer resources, or I'd pay a managed hosting provider to do it. Managed hosting is the right choice for a lot of people (and we can think of Google as the managed hosting provider of this blog), but you have to live within the confines of what the provider is willing to let you do (Google won't let me install Wordpress on blogspot for some reason), and what other people you share the servers with are doing. These drawbacks are often irrelevant (I could care less how many catblogs blogger hosts), but as you design more complicated web-based software, you really start to see the advantages of managing your own hosting.

It used to be that managing your own hosting in a business environment was a much more significant cost and time undertaking than it has the potential to be now, largely because of services like AWS that make it easy. You had to hire a systems person to coordinate it all, you had to find and lease some space at a datacenter to put your servers in, you had to buy a significant amount of server and networking hardware. The scale hugely varies, but nobody would call it cheap. I'd ballpark a full cabinet in a nice datacenter with a reasonable amount of bandwidth as bare minimum $1,000 per month, probably closer to $1,500, and definitely with 2-3 year contracts attached. That's just the rent, humans and hardware not included.

Another disadvantage to managing your own servers is that you have to worry about a lot of things that aren't necessarily top concerns at managed hosting places. For example, suddenly you are responsible for all the redundancy that must be built into your servers in expectation of hardware failing, you are responsible for keeping your backups running consistently and knowing how to use them, you are responsible for figuring out how to serve your clients traffic if your entire datacenter goes offline -- which definitely happens (though good luck getting a good datacenter sales guy to even acknowledge the possibility of it happening).

I'm not saying all managed hosting providers are competently on top of all these major issues (some certainly are), but at least they aren't entirely your responsibility.

This is where AWS comes in. Instead of having to deal with your own physical servers located in datacenters, what if Amazon told you they could sell you some of their unused capacity and you could treat it exactly as if it were your own computer? And you'd be charged based solely on usage. And it can scale as big as amazon.com which is infinitely for all intents and purposes. And it can handle catastrophic failures because it is big enough to be designed to. That is what AWS offers.

This is cloud computing: servers that scale immediately and pretty much infinitely, located in geographically distinct locations in case of major catastrophes, and have the ability to heal themselves within some generous limits.

It would be like if your Mercedes SL sports car suddenly turned into a G people-mover when you had more passengers to transport. Or if you got a flat tire, an identical Mercedes would appear within a few seconds and seamlessly move you and your passengers into the working vehicle. Now that is a cloud powered Mercedes!

Managed hosting is still the right choice for a lot of people. AWS is the right choice for a hugely increasing number of people. Hosting your own hardware is the right choice for another significant chunk of people. For now, the tech world is respectably split into these categories and none hold a significant monopoly, but I have a feeling that will change as AWS puts managed hosting out of business, and companies can't resist the appeal of doing things cheaper in AWS instead of managing it by themselves entirely.

No matter what you do, you are technically "cloud powered" to some extent if you are on the internet, but marketers and, more importantly, sales people need to understand when you drop the word cloud on a nerd who manages private clouds, or one that manages servers within a public cloud, you are using an extremely loaded term -- certainly not one that has any business being applied to cars.

Finally, I have used AWS as my sole example of a cloud computing provider in this post, but there are plenty of competitors, and the number is growing daily. I am still of the school that does everything in-house and I think I like it, but I do get jealous of my systems friends who provision very large servers with a few dozen keystrokes, while I have provision large servers by researching exactly what hardware I want, convincing my bosses it's a good idea to buy then, lugging them to the datacenter, getting them mounted and cabled properly, installing them, and networking them.

Everything I Love and Hate About iTunes Match

Almost 7 months ago -- in November 2011 -- when iTunes Match was just about to become available, anyone with a paid Apple Developer account could use the service, and it sounded interesting to me for one big reason: I already used iOS to play most of my music through my phone, and I could probably live with using iTunes (Genius is pretty cool). Previous services that are very similar -- like Google Play -- sounded neat, but not practical for me because too much would have to change about how I currently listened to music. That's what made iTunes Match different.

The first thing I did was grill my buddy Mike on IRC knowing a) he was using it because he uses everything Apple does and is an iOS developer, and b) he could reliably tell me the objective pros and cons, and if it sucked or not in general. There were some similar old friends in the channel as well who were using it in late-beta and provided input.

Mike and I go way back. When we first met I was around 16 and he was around 18 and we both were pack-a-day smokers and I would make him buy me cigarettes constantly. Over 10 years later, he's a well established developer and family man, and has the disputatious title of being the first person in the state he lives in to purchase an iPhone on their original retail release date; and we both quit smoking years ago (at different times for different reasons).

Anyway, the general consensus was that iTunes Match didn't seem to suck, so I signed up in the first week and spent a day making iTunes the center of my music world, which wasn't that bad overall. The biggest impedance was simply the ~12,000 songs I was working with.

I think it is safe to say I wouldn't feel compelled to whine about iTunes Match nearly as badly if my music collection were, say, 1/10 the size. But it isn't -- my collection is large-ish (oh, I've seen much bigger collections, so I salute the people who scoff at calling ~12,000 well organized songs "large-ish"); I like music; I like collecting music. It's all well-ripped and well-tagged and well-organized too (which went a long way in making my conversion to iTunes not that bad).

I make no comment as to my taste or selection; to each their own!

The consequences of not having network access are too dire, and it doesn't save enough stuff locally

One of the first things I noticed about iTunes Match was that it seemed to be smartly downloading songs as I listened to them and storing local copies. The first time I went to listen to music on my phone without reliable network access, I was thankful for this feature, but I quickly found it was only saving around 50-100 songs and I wasn't happy with my local selection. On one hand I was happy that I no longer had to manually manage gigs of music on my phone and there was significantly more free space (that I didn't particularly need), but on the other hand I didn't seem to even have a complete album available to me when I went offline the first few times.

Sure, this could (probably/maybe/eventually) be helped with settings somewhere, but the iOS settings are just getting too big; I feel embarrassed to have found out about turning "Simple Password Lock" off just a few days ago. My argument against having to toggle knobs is that making customers not feel totally screwed when they lose network access -- which is going to happen -- should have been in the top-3-ish design goals. I felt screwed when I went offline and tried to listen to my music, so now I keep at least a dozen full albums manually downloaded, and avoiding the manual management of how my devices access my music is like the whole point of using iTunes Match in the first place.

The Windows version of iTunes still sucks in comparison to the OSX version

I use an OSX laptop at home and a Windows 7 PC at work and that's how I want to live my computing life. I could request any PC I wanted at work, and I want to use Windows 7 because it best fits the needs of my job. I could also buy any PC I wanted to for home, but I like my Macbook that turns 4 years old this month and still looks 90% new... although it really needs a nice, big SSD.

The performance and stability of iTunes between the two operating systems is simply a joke to contrast; the Windows version sucks in comparison, and anyone who has been in the position to regularly compare the two for any amount of time will probably agree with me: it's always been like this.

Can we just accept this is true?

Or, 5 things I hate about iTunes in Windows that don't happen in OSX: 1) it randomly restarts itself every time I close it and I have no idea why (even after reinstalling the whole OS), 2) it crashes monthly (my work PC averages 2-3 month uptimes), 3) it's one of the slowest and most unresponsive applications I use regularly, especially when it hasn't been used it in the last 5 minutes, 4) the updater used to automatically try to install Safari every single time iTunes needed to be updated (that was really stupid Apple), 5) the hotkeys and UIX suck in general in Windows because they try to be like OSX to varying degrees of success; for example, you only recently (6-12 months) got the ability to easily add large amounts of specific folders via cntrl+click.

My intention is not to talk about the pros and cons of using iTunes as a music player (<whine>I have to toggle a lot of knobs to be content with it as the center of my music life!</whine>), but I did want to call out some specific things that have bothered me about the Windows experience of using iTunes that are non-existent or significantly less of a problem in OSX.

As someone who works with developers, I understand the myriad of programming reasons that could explain and contribute to why this is the case. I bet the parts of Apple's spaceships -- I mean campuses -- that spend all day dealing with Windows APIs are relatively lonely, loathsome corners. And as someone who works with people who wear suits, I have a general idea of the myriad of business reasons to not really care that iTunes sucks in Windows -- go buy a Mac: problem solved, right?

And to be fair, using iTunes in Windows has gotten significantly better over the last 6-12 months. But I'm still whiny. And to the nerds, we're talking about cleanly-ran, fully patched, well taken care of OSX Lion and Windows 7 Ultimate boxes running on hardware that never exhibits any problems, and I've been taking computers apart since I was like 10 years old and working full-time in IT since I was 16 so, respectfully, lend me a little qualification to say the root of my problems are not the simple fact that I suck at computers (but, hey, anything is possible).

It's stable enough to be generally usable, but unstable enough to be a pain in the ass sometimes

First and foremost, from an engineering perspective, let me frankly say iTunes Match sounds pretty fucking cool to figure out how to do well and manage effectively. What a fun project that must be (I hope). Thinking about the system architecture and server resources needed to run iTunes Match and all the little software tricks you could pull (a wet dream for anyone from file system to database to network to deduplication nerds -- especially if it's all on modern hardware you manage yourself, Unix-based, and virtual!) to make the whole operation very efficient and a perfect harmony of redundancy and availability; oh, and the scale -- so fun. I'm gonna guess, overall, that Apple pulled all the tricks off pretty well, cause I'll happily bet their engineering folks don't suck. Other than I occasionally hear this totally unconfirmed rumor that their whole operation runs on Windows Azure which, well, if true (and I have never seen actual evidence that it is true), beyond the obvious irony, I'm sorry.

But it still breaks like weekly for me. I cannot count how many times I have had to go turn iTunes Match off and then back on to fix it. Granted, this (usually) takes about 5 minutes to do (and, in Windows, freezes the rest of iTunes for most of that time), and (usually) fixes all my problems, but it is stupid that the best solution to everything is the brain-dead nuke-and-restore option; it's a hallmark of poor design. Remember when that was the default solution to most Windows problems? Cause I sure do, and it sucked (and it still is the best solution in a not insignificant number of Windows cases, but it seems to me even that is becoming the exception if you're not running thin clients already).

Specifically, it stops working in Windows pretty much every time I have had iTunes open for weeks, iTunes Match connected fine (as far as I know; my only connectivity status information is a cloud icon about the size of favicon) the whole time, and then I have to close iTunes and re-open it (say, for an update, or simply on accident; also, often after rebooting). It just sits there with the little cloud icon in the "waiting" animation, denying me access to all of my cloud-stored music, and giving me zero output what-so-ever about what it is actually doing. It's not my internet; we're talking 30/30 SLA fiber here. It's fucking iTunes or iTunes Match fucking up and that's all there is to it. At this point -- in Windows -- I have manually (re)downloaded my entire cloud-stored music collection onto my local hard drive just so I can actually listen to Pet Sounds when I really want to listen to Pet Sounds regardless of how broken iTunes Match feels like being at the time.

I have significantly less problems with stability in OSX and iOS (and those devices aren't on wired, fancy fiber lines the majority of the time!), but the same thing still happens everywhere I go.

Overall, I think iTunes Match has a long ways go to meet that famous Apple goal of "it just works" consistently -- and that's unfortunate because that's where I expect every single Apple product to be the second I buy it. Again, to be fair, it is getting slightly better as time goes on.

But it's been 7 months and you guys have like a 1,000 billion dollars in liquid fucking cash just sitting in like a checking-with-interest account or something! Start writing checks, knocking heads, and build a fucking time machine if that's what it takes cause we all know Apple could build a time machine if they really wanted to; Apple can do anything. Make it work!

If you want more specifics and proof regarding iTunes Match's inconsistent stability, some quick Googles will lead you to hundreds of whiners like myself.

The exceptions -- the songs iTunes Match simply does not deal with in any productive way -- are another hallmark of bad design

In my ~12,000 songs I currently have 3 "exceptions" that iTunes Match simply chokes on no matter what I try (re-add, re-tag, re-encode, re-rip, re-create, etc) and always has since day 1 (again, to be fair, I used to have several dozen exceptions, and right now I have exactly 3):

1. Cake - Hem of Your Garment (Prolonging the Magic, 1998)
2. Jay-Z - Intro/A Million and One Questions/Rhyme No More (In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, 1997)
3. Jay-Z - Izzo (H.O.V.A.) (Unplugged, 2001)

First off, Apple, ya'll are starting to sound a little like you're fucking with Jay-Z, and no matter how big of a juggernaut you know you are, do not underestimate that man. And Jay-Z, will you please make 1 phone call to Tim Cook and make iTunes Match work perfectly? "Difficult takes a day, impossible takes a week," right?

I respect that this represents (exactly) 0.0000245% of my music collection, and that's why they are called exceptions, but the end result to me is by converting my entire music-life to iTunes Match, I have lost access to these 3 songs (without jumping through hoops by adding them locally). For me, for these 3 songs, it's not the end of the world (but Izzo -- really?), but think about that person out there whose favorite song is falling into the "I'm just fucked" category of songs.

That particular version of the all-knowing cloud icon means the song is cloud-fucked

You're just pissing me off because it seems like such a brain-dead easy problem to solve: you can't match the song, you can't "deal with" the song, your code is not working -- you hit an exception; great -- that is not really relevant; go QA it -- just upload the song and deal with it for me and me alone and let me have my song. It's like 10 megs of data for all 3 of my exceptions. You have 1,000 billion dollars, you can afford to give me 10 megs of data in your (I'm sure) fucking amazing datacenters, and you can afford to scale that to every single iTunes Match users' list of personal "exceptions"; not to mention: didn't I pay you guys something like $25 bucks a year to use this thing in the first place?

Overall, I still love iTunes Match more than I hate it and have been using it the entire time I wrote this

Even with all that cathartic whining out of my system -- and, whew, that was a lot of whining -- I still think it's a cool service and I will be somewhat hesitantly paying for another year when November rolls around if things remain at the status-quo or, obviously, get better.

It's cool, it's convenient, using iTunes isn't the end of the world (prior to iTunes, I used ext3 + samba + Winamp 2.95 + manually managing iTunes for my phone/car-iPod for like... ever, and I still use that method to listen to stuff occasionally for various reasons, but 90% of my music-life is officially done via iTunes/iOS, which was honestly a fairly radical change in my computing-life). It works well enough most of the time and has enough knobs and band-aids available to force it into usability (aka going back to storing shit locally).

But it's not perfect, and call me a pathetic, whiny nerd (it wouldn't be the first time), but I don't see why it can't be perfect. I strongly believe you know who else would want it to be perfect too (and immediately acknowledge I don't know shit about you know who else).

During the two hours I spent writing this post I was using iTunes Match the entire time and rocked out to a few songs, so life isn't all that bad; just make it perfect, especially in Windows, thanks in advance.

What I listened to while I wrote this post, and prior to that; it's all about the music

Finally, the bug with iTunes Match matching censored versions of songs was really bad for a while, seems to be getting better, but has currently ruined like 10% of my music collection and I get fucking pissed when I can't belt out profane rap lyrics while flying down the freeway.

Why tech support is the most important job in IT

When I was young I made the impulsive, somewhat stupid decision to drop out of high school and go work for an ISP I had set my mind on getting a job at. As a kid in the early 90s I had a very isolated computing world, and my ISP was a large part of it. They hosted newsgroups, an IRC server linked to a major network, sent detailed, technical announcement messages, had a really advanced website with lots of graphs, and had really smart people who would answer the phone 24/7 to help me get my external USR modem connected via serial. I wanted to meet these wizards who were up at 2:00AM setting up ISDN lines; I kinda wanted to be one.

Thanks to the bohemian owners and leadership at the ISP (and knowing one person who worked there via an extremely small IRC channel), I got a full-time job there one week before I turned 17. In hind-sight, I wouldn't have hired me with whatever color my hair was that month, but there I was on day 1, sitting on the floor of the office and being taught how to crimp CAT5 cable, because they were moving their datacenter around and that's all I did for about 2 weeks.

Over the 2 years I spent there (and 1 additional year at another similar company), I took about a million phone calls, knew how to setup every email client in existence off the top of my head, could configure dial-up modems (and, later, Cisco 675 DSL modem/routers, and even later, PPPoE DSL) while playing nethack, and could run through basic network configurations and troubleshooting without even trying. I had front row seats to the ILEC, CLEC, and DSL broadband revolution that happened. They built a giant datacenter that I got to watch come together every day, and play a minimal role helping them set it up (mostly via physical labor). Towards the end of my arc there, I was getting on the network gear and bringing up new routed blocks for colocate customers. That ISP was the highest concentration of smart, kind people I have seen so far in my life, and it was the best job a nerdy teenager could ever hope for.

And, eventually, I hated it. 3 years of total immersion in open source nerd world and generally doing my job well left me way overqualified (in skill) to do tech support. Unfortunately, I didn't quite have the skills or, probably more importantly, the maturity to make the often difficult jump from customer service to internal support (aka system administration for me), and I got increasingly frustrated with being sent easy but relatively advanced work from admins (like editing zone files) while helping a customer setup Outlook on the phone.

So I made another impulsive decision -- I quit my job, said fuck IT, and went to college. I didn't even make it through high school so I never expected or really wanted to go to college, but I got talked into taking a class at the local community college by a friend and unexpectedly found it very enjoyable. My mantra during college was to a) not take any computer or engineering classes and b) learn stuff I didn't already know.

5 years later, I had my BA in English and felt like a much more developed person. I also didn't really care about computers anymore -- my home LAN used to be quite impressive and was now down to one desktop and one headless Linux box -- but I knew way more about how they worked than just about everyone I met in the philosophy and English circles at my large, public university. Although I did catch one of my English advisers using Pine one day and gave them props (and mentioned mutt).

I made my life as easy as I could using technology while in school, but this was pretty limited. On campus I rarely carried a laptop around and mostly used the lab or library computers to download stuff from my home apache server and print it. In hindsight, I would have loved to have had a Macbook Air and Dropbox, but they didn't exist yet and one wouldn't have been a very practical purchase.

During college I was fortunate to have my writing ego stroked slightly by doing several contract gigs for Pearson Education. They kept asking me to write instructional-type stuff on something I knew stuff about, and I kept delivering it. It was a pretty awesome part time gig during college.

Right out of college I knew getting a job in anything related to English-degree-land would be an uphill battle -- to say the least. I didn't even want to be a writer. In fact, I was sick of writing papers, and although everyone told me I should go to grad school, I never seriously considered it. I thoroughly enjoyed college but my favorite part was graduating and it being over.

I threw my resume at my editors at Pearson and offered to relocate but it wasn't going to happen. So, after a quick month long road trip to drive around the states and see some friends, family, and clear my mind, I resigned to the fact that I would have to dust off my computer skills to pay the bills.

Within a couple months I got a low level job doing QA for a small software company -- which I felt was a good mix of computing and other skills I had picked up, and they slowly realized I could do a lot more than QA so I ended up doing a little bit of everything. But after about a year they weren't doing great and had to 2/3-time me. Shortly after that, I lucked out and landed sort of my dream job at a somewhat dysfunctional company in desperate need of a nerd who was motivated to untangle their mess of Linux servers. By the time I started, they had already fired the last admin. It has been an uphill but productive battle getting their servers in order and out of the stone age, and I've come to really like the place and the people.

What's even better is there is enough technical talent around that the help desk duty is minimal and my desk phone very rarely rings. It took about 6 years and a detour through the world of literature, but I made the leap from support to admin.

For a short time I let the relief of not ever having to setup another fucking Outlook install again sink in. It was a huge blessing and I subconsciously told my brain to start removing that dated information -- time to free up that space for another literary criticism paper.

One evening I was sitting at home (probably watching TV) and my phone rang. It was one of my bosses and I knew he was out of town visiting a big client, so I answered. He tells me he's sitting in the client CEO's house and they need help with his email program -- it's Outlook, and it's not working correctly. I tell him I am way rusty on this kind of thing, but I will try. We aren't even sure what version it is but the phone is passed over. A few minutes later, I've got my laptop out and the correct Outlook screenshots and instructions up and am helping the CEO of a multimillion dollar company setup his personal email. It goes perfectly -- he is an easy person to give tech support to because he happily follows the instructions -- it takes about 10 minutes total, and he is very appreciative, as is my manager, and the CEO of my company, who is also there.

There was no parade when they got home but I immediately realized that, as much as I don't want to admit it, I had to have my IT knowledge include basic tech support. I immediately got on our internal wiki and started writing basic documentation on stuff we setup or need to troubleshoot commonly, created some virtual machines of various versions of Windows and various versions of common software I would probably care about some day, and started refreshing my knowledge of email clients, browser settings, general Windows 7 troubleshooting, OSX troubleshooting, and mobile device setup.

I viewed this process not as going backwards in career, but as reinforcing my fundamental computer knowledge. I thought about it in terms of cars (which I know nothing about): a mechanic that can take apart and rebuild a motor but couldn't check the oil would be fired. I felt like even though my system administration and network engineering skills were becoming more advanced every day, I should still have a solid fundamental computing knowledge. To me, that started in tech support, so that's what I built my foundation on. My tech support knowledge is far from perfect but it's solid enough that Google is only complimenting it (as opposed to guiding it) -- most of the time. And to be honest, it's more about communicating than knowledge.

One job of a system administrator is to do cool shit with beefy hardware, but at the end of the day you and your closest IT peers are going to be the ones most impressed by the fact you migrated from physical machines to an HA cluster of virtual servers -- there is now a lot more magic available and it seems to work okay too!

Another job of a system administrator is to just making the stupid system work. Some days this means using your computing hammer on the database servers at 2:00AM, but some days it means explaining the difference between POP3 and IMAP to a new hire when all of their email seems to have disappeared. These tech support skills are useless if you don't actually use them, so make yourself available (but not too available) and be friendly (but not too friendly).

Make the stupid system work and don't be a jerk in the process -- it's a balance. Until you get to know the person a little bit and they come to trust your computer skills a little bit, treat everyone who needs help like those grandparents who would call in with a skeptical demeanor, have a rocky start, but be so thankful when you finally got it all working.

Tell people what you're doing, explain it to them, don't treat them like idiots -- use that English degree (heh). Most of the time this is totally appropriate and welcomed, but sometimes it isn't. Maybe the next time someone POPs all their email off and begins to panic, one of the people you've explained it to before will take care of it for you and you'll never even hear it. You can teach people to fish without making them crab boat captains.

Although the vast majority of my job involves evoking the dark magics and pleasing the blood lords (like any Unix admin), I still help a lot of people with a lot of basic stuff, they are still thankful when it works, and I still crimp a lot of fucking cables.

Brick and mortar stores still suck at the internet

It amazes me that prominent members of the brick and mortar retail industry are still completely clueless when it comes to how they need to be operating online. I remember about a decade ago I had tracked down a specific part for my vacuum via the sears.com website. When I drove 15 miles north to pick it up, they had no idea what I was talking about, couldn't do anything with the online item number I brought from the website, and had no vacuum part. First world problem -- I know.

Over the weekend I have been rearranging the living room and it turns out my 6' TOSLINK cable that pipes delicious audio from my desktop computer to the nice speakers isn't long enough anymore. We have a new furry member in the household that likes to eat wires so I have to do the new wiring carefully and it is somewhat inconvenient to change it later after it has all been bundled nicely and "locked in". With this in mind, I was ready to pay the 100%+ premium (compared to ordering from Monoprice or Amazon) and grab a cable at Fry's.

Turns out I suck at estimating lengths and the longest cable Fry's sells (15' for $30) didn't make it by about 3'. Doh. I checked Amazon Prime for 25' ones (preferably from their quality Amazon Basics brand) and they didn't have any obviously available, so I found what I needed in about 45 seconds on Monoprice for $5 + $5 shipping. I'll take the other one back to Fry's -- done deal, or so I thought.

This morning -- in a mix of curiosity, boredom, impulsiveness, and disappointment with the temporary, shitty wiring job I had to do using the too-short cable -- I decided to check Best Buy's website to see if they have what I need. Hey, with a family member who seems to survive on a diet of about 10-15% wires, it couldn't hurt to have 2 of these around.

I hit up http://www.bestbuy.com and searched for TOSLINK. Wow! A 20' Startech cable for $21 -- that isn't bad at all. I see a trip to Best Buy in my immediate future -- perhaps with an impulsive video game buy, or a replacement iPhone cable (stupid cat).

Best Buy doesn't have the best reputation for being super competent but hopefully they have enough clue to have their online to brick and mortar situation down pretty well.

Green Flag: "Check Stock In Stores Near Me" -- this should be standard at any online store with a significant brick and mortar presence.

Yellow Flag #1: the "BETA" icon next to the in-stock search -- it's 2012 and fairly talented US web developers are a dime a dozen. Find a shop or hire some coders and get the online stock checking perfected now. Fire anyone who tells you it's very difficult or impossible, because it isn't if you don't suck.

Yellow Flag #2: "Marketplace Item, Sold and Shipped by Buy.com" -- fuck this. Best Buy, don't be naive; don't waste your money trying to be Amazon; you will never win. Amazon built a brilliant shopping platform (and an even more brilliant computing platform) and you can't compete without bringing significantly new things to the table, which you aren't. I'm going to go out on a hyperbolic limb and guess Bezos has more innovation in his morning piss than your entire board of directors combined.

Anyway, back to the website and still feeling hopeful I will be making a trip to Best Buy today. Let me put in my zip code -- which is one of the densest neighborhoods on the west coast, with close to 4 million people in the surrounding area, and has at least 5 Best Buys if you go 10 miles in any direction -- I'm sure this relatively common 20' cable from this well known cable manufacturer is available at this store that should have its online shit together. "Go".

"There are not any stores within a 50 mile radius of 98122 with any of the displayed products in stock"

What. The. Fuck. That is one harsh informative message and one grand display of online retail incompetency. Entire floors of marketing, retail, and online sales people at Best Buy's headquarters should probably be fired over this.

If I wanted to order something online, I'm going to go to the place that I already pay $79 a year to for fast, free shipping and order it. They have almost everything I need if I can wait a whole 2-3 days (sometimes less). And if they don't have a sort of specialty item like a really long TOSLINK cable available via Prime, I'll go to a different online site that specializes in high quality cables of every type and size you could imagine at simply amazing prices that really highlight the insulting markup on cables found in most brick and mortar stores.

At no point during my online shopping experience does the thought of going to bestbuy.com and paying for shipping for something that is likely at least a little bit overpriced (and sometimes significantly overpriced, like cables) enter my head, nor will it ever at any point in the foreseeable future. I don't think I've ever ordered anything from bestbuy.com, but I've definitely made about a half dozen trips to the local stores in the last year and spent a few hundred bucks.

The only time bestbuy.com becomes relevant is if I'm being an impatient, impulsive consumer and I want to know if I can get my cable now -- possibly without even changing out of what I slept in or taking one look in a mirror. And it completely fails at this seemingly no-brainer service.

I guess I'm waiting until Wednesday or Thursday when my Monoprice cable shows up. Best Buy lost $20-70 worth of revenue today and won a badge they should be trying to avoid: sucking at being a brick and mortar store with a website. And they are far from alone.

Off the top of my head, one place that seems to be doing it right is Walmart. I honestly don't shop there very often (they don't have a large footprint in the Seattle area), but I recall their site-to-store connectivity being high quality. You've probably been taking lessons from Walmart for years -- here is another one.