Fun With Microsoft

Well, it has been a fun filled few days !! My son keeps telling me to switch over to another BLOG space provider, but till now I really haven’t had an issue with the Microsoft Live spaces offering, other than not really caring for the advertisements. I was looking through the settings section, and lo and behold I noticed in the small print that if I just pay a few $$ and upgrade the account the adverts can be blocked !! Sounds great eh ? Not quite so easy – for the past few days I’ve been bounced back and forth between Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Customer Service, Microsoft Billing and then back to Microsoft Tech Support – bottom line is they have a bug in their data base and I’ve been told that I have to fix it myself because they either won’t or can’t ! It’s amazing, and quite sad really. The Xbox person I spoke to actually refused to delete the data causing the problem (!!) so here I am two days later still stuck.

I will say that with the exception of the Xbox person, they have been unfailingly polite – I got an email from the Customer Support folks – someone by the name of Salie (no idea if this is a real person or just a computer auto-emailer pseudo) who sent me a note saying “Ian, please accept my sincerest apologies for not being able to assist you fully. You are a valuable customer to MSN and we are glad to give you consistent and effective service”. And the Billing guy I just got off the phone with actually said the same thing almost word for word, so I’d say Microsoft at least has managed to give them all the same training and script to read from. Frankly I’d almost be happy to deal with a rude person if they would just fix the problem. The only consistent piece in this story is the general lack of competence, together with some really odd views about customer support from the Xbox clown.

Oh – and the suggestion to allow me to fix it myself ? Create a brand new account ! As a result, I am considering following my son’s advice.

Zurich

Well – I didn’t see any gnomes, but I was impressed by a few things.

• What looked like the same Swiss chocolate I can buy at Costco in Calgary is available duty free in the Zurich International Airport for twice what Costco charges !
• The doors at the entrance to the bathrooms are stainless steel, well over two metres high and nearly take two hands to pull open as they are really heavy – once inside the bathroom, you certainly do feel secure !
• They supply little glass boxes for people smoke inside of – the amount of air being pumped through these must be immense, as although they only measure about three or four metres square, even when packed with people furiously puffing away the air still appears clear inside and (from the outside) there is no visible haze. There are similar ones in the new airport in Bangkok (the one with the runways and aircraft parking aprons that are already falling apart even though it just opened ! ), but there the smoky air sort of spills out through the doorways like a low creeping fog. The one thing that is the same, is that it seems a bit comical having these people on display, peering back at you from inside their little glass boxes – it makes me glad that I quit smoking years ago as I wouldn’t like it at all, but then perhaps that’s the point.

I suppose I should also say that Zurich airport is almost brand new, and as such it is one of the most modern and efficient (from a traveller perspective) airports I’ve been to – on a par with KLIA in Kuala Lumpur, Schiphol in Amsterdam and the one in Vancouver and light years ahead of what you see at places like Washington, Seattle, Chicago, Calgary, Edmonton or San Francisco. The gate agents don’t snarl (at least they didn’t the day I went through there), the people assisting and giving directions by the transit trains were friendly and seem to speak just about any language directed at them. The transfer desk agent I dealt with was knowledgeable and friendly, dealt with my problem quickly (I’d missed a connection) and everything I looked at was in good repair. Of special note was that the same Schindler escalators that Calgary transit can’t keep running for more than a day at a time are everywhere, but unlike in Calgary they are working perfectly and have that nice energy saving feature where they speed up from a sleep mode when they sense people accessing them.

One thing they can’t fix is the punctuality of the airlines – my Malaysian Airlines flight left KL late and in spite of it being a 13 hour flight and it also being a nice new 777, was unable to gain back the time and so arrived late. This caused me to miss my connection – and of course my new connecting flight with KLM ran late also as it is winter so flights out of Schiphol are generally delayed as well. In spite of it all, I almost managed to be in The Hague in time for my first meeting – what scuppered me was that KLM managed to loose my luggage between the plane and the baggage carousel, and then to add insult to injury, the KLM agent decided to argue with me about it ! Just additional proof that you really need a good sense of humour if you are going to do much travelling !

Shanghai

I was recently in Shanghai attending a conference, and again I was impressed about the sheer scale of construction and change that is evident in any of the places I’ve been in China. I would not pretend do be an expert about China having only been to Beijing a few times, within about a 200 KM radius from Hong Kong in the Guangdong area, plus this most recent visit to Shanghai, but it seems that no matter where you look you see a tangle of cranes nestled amidst the high rise apartments and office towers for as far as the eye can see. As is normal also sadly, there is ever present the smog which tends to blur the view, but it is still impressive none the less. I took this photo to the left from my hotel room window at the Marriott Renaissance Hotel in Shanghai looking north. I was using a new smart phone that I was testing from Dopod which we were thinking of deploying. Frankly if you want to take photos, either get yourself a camera or another brand of phone as while this particular device sports a 1.3 megapixel lens, the picture quality and resolution are pretty poor when compared to other similar devices available.

The real high point of the visit for me was the Maglev train which runs between the Shanghai Pudong International Airport, and the south east part of the city. This is a real technology showcase and well worth seeing. While there are other maglev test tracks in service around the world, the one in China is the only one in commercial service – it is a short ride of 30 KM each way, but can hit speeds of 400+ KM per hour making it a very fast short ride of about 7 minutes !! During the evening it runs a bit slower and during my trip the top speed displayed in the passenger car was about 301 KM per hour – still nothing to sneeze at ! The train itself is very sleek, and I was surprised to find myself pretty much alone on it which is a rarity is a place as populous as this. The tracks are two concrete pads about 10 inches wide and one thing I noticed was that the seams between each section of track were not perfectly aligned, which meant the ride itself was not as smooth as I’d expected – not as smooth for example as the French TGV (which can also do about 300 KM per hour).

It will be interesting to see whether the current maglev is expended beyond it current usage – its beautiful, but its total lack of compatibility with any existing rail systems, plus the fact that conventional high speed rail can very nearly match the speed of the maglev will likely make it a tough sell.

Milestone !

Today marked an interesting milestone in my life. In addition to it being the anniversary of my 32^nd year of employment service, February 10^th, 2007 also marks the day that I can retire from the company I work for with a full pension. In some respects I actually missed the day, as I was travelling from San Francisco to Kuala Lumpur and of course you have to cross the date line so I left Friday morning, February 9th and arrived at the hotel at one in the morning February 11th here in Malaysia !

As several folks have pointed out to me, from here on in I’m effectively just working for a portion of my salary, as if I were to retire I’d actually be paid quite a good salary to sit at home and do nothing ! I’ll be the first to admit that it does feel a bit odd, as over the years I have worked with many folks who couldn’t wait for their first available retirement opportunity to arrive and who were desperate to leave, and here am I marking the event by just being on my way to another meeting ! Of course it would be an easy decision if I didn’t so thoroughly enjoy what I do, or if my health were poor. Naturally business priorities can change, but at the moment, at least the role I have is one that the company supports having. And I have told my manager, that I’ll be gone pretty quick if the content of the role became uninteresting or were changed significantly.

We’ll just have to see what happens – within the computer support and delivery area we are currently restructuring yet again, so as always, time will tell the story !