Big KC

This week I was fortunate enough to get a ticket to Big Kansas City. This was put on by the Silicon Prairie and hosted at Hanger 9 Aircraft museum. Which is an awesome place if you ever get the chance to go, go. This was a 2 and a half day long event. With about 20 speakers there was a lot of information to take in. You can find the full list at http://bigkansascity.co/. There was a common theme with all of the speakers, that was, if you are going to do something don't half ass it.

The first speaker was Dan Hesse from Sprint. There we learned a lot of statistics from him. Like that this time next year there will be more cell phones made a year than people. Or that every month, more mobile data consumed than all data that has ever been before in all of human history. The most astounding fact, there are 4 jobs in the midwest for every 1 person needed to work them. That is fantastic news if you are in IT and work in Kansas City.

The next speaker was Alexis Ohanian. The guy who created Reddit, so kind of a big deal. He spoke about SOPA and PIPA as well as how cheap it is getting to create a new company thanks to services like AWS.

Next was Adam Wilson, who was by far the most important speaker to take notes from on day 1. Adam works for a company called Sphero. They make robotic balls! No seriously, they make remote controlled balls. They can be controlled by whatever device that you want, as every ball comes with an SDK. The theme was if you application or device doesn't have an API/SDK at this point, you system is broken. Because of this, spheros can be controlled by anything and are exploring brave new worlds of gaming, medical help, and military applications. By making the controls be open, you can wire these up to a wheelchair allowing kids who can't interact with more than a joystick, a new way to play with friends. The idea that you should be able to interact with everything is amazing.


The rest of day one was mostly the same. Crazy entrepreneurs talking about how they got their start. Most of them quit their jobs with pregnant wives or while in need of money and it worked out great. They covered things like keep strong in front of your employees, understand payroll, don't give up, and chase your dreams, blah blah blah blah. Every single one of these guys left out one very important detail. BE FUCKING LUCKY!!!! Without luck, your idea won't get funding. Without luck, you won't meet the right person to buy your idea. Without luck, you won't make the right connections to get your ideas off the ground. Yes, I understand the idea is to get people to start new businesses, but either these people didn't realize how lucky they were, or they didn't want to discourage people.

Any way that was day one, I will write more about day two next.

If you don't try, it is the same as failure.

I always give this piece of advice to everybody who is on the dating scene. It is all about numbers. You can stare at a distance, and hope that the hot girl across the way will come over. Or man up and go over to her and say hello. If you get shot down, oh well, move on. If you don't go over and ask, guess what? You just got shot down.

By not doing anything, you are essentially getting shot down over and over again. You can apply this to lots of things. Look at these blog posts. When I first started, I was kind of worried that I was going to get put down for spelling or grammar. Or even worse, be called out for posting something that was wholly inaccurate. I could have sat on the sideline in fear, but I stood up to the internet and said hello. And the internet is the hottest chick in the room.

Same goes for writing code. In the beginning...and middle and end, you need to just hammer out code like your life depends on it. It will most likely suck and be shot down by somebody above you. Guess what though, it isn't the end of the world. You will learn from this, and get better. You will continue to write and write until one day your code is amazing. Then you will go back and look at your old code and think, "damn, the cocaine after affects lasted longer than I thought" Then you will fix it and life will go on. You should learn from this and you will get better.

I think this is the reason why some people are terrified of open source. You are laying it all out on the table. Your hope is that your repository will be downloaded and forked for future enhancements. But what if the fork is to fix some major flaw that you missed? Can you live with that? Or what if you fork something and just make it worse? These things happen, but you will learn from your mistakes and get better.

Just like trying to get a phone number at the bar, these things take time. You have to keep trying over and over again. If all else fails, go after the ugly chick at the bar, or invest in Visine for allergies.....

How to lose customers.

This weekend I traveled back into 1955. That is right kids, I had no internet. On Friday I began to notice that my internet connection was slow to say the least. Come Saturday, I had nothing. So I did the normal thing and called Time Warner. In my head this was going to go something like this.

Me: Hey my internet isn't working.
TWC: We will send a technician out tomorrow, as it is already past noon.
Me: Great, thank you very much.

The next hour on the phone made me realize that some companies just don't care about you. You are a dollar sign and nothing more. When I first called the support line I was talking with a nice lady and explained to her what my problem was and all the steps I had gone through to fix it. Reset the computers, unplugged the modem, hard wired into the modem(eliminate WiFi being the cause); everything that their site says to try before calling. After I explained all of this, I was informed that there were no outages reported in my area, so it must just be me. For some reason this just didn't give me warm and fuzzies like I think she was expecting. 

So next I'm asked if I can connect to any websites at all. I say, it is about 50/50 and even then it is super slow. "Well please try a speed test" Ok not sure how this will help solve my problem but ok. About 6 tries and another laptop reboot, I'm able to load the page. Time Warner has their own speed test page that I was asked to use. Click begin test, 72 ms ping. Not bad. Preparing Download.........10 minutes goes by, 15, 20, 25, 30. After 35 minutes the test completes . I pay for 50Mbs/second. I was happy to see I was getting .04Mbs/sec, money well spent. Upload starting. And the site crashes. Doesn't even try, internet just gives up.

Now at this point is where TWC will lose me as a future customer. I was informed that because I had a connection, that there was no outage, nothing could be done. Excuse me? I'm getting 1/100th of what I am paying for and I'm shit out of luck? This did not sit well with me. I asked for somebody more technical, I have had you guys log into my modem before, why can't you now? I'm elevated to tier two. This lady asked me ping google.com and do a traceroute. Shocking results, 75% packet loss and traceroute times out before the 6th hop. Which six hops is how many hops I have to make before I'm out of TWC network. Now this gets their attention and they connect to my modem remote and attempt to troubleshoot. Note this has been 45 minutes on the phone to get somebody to actually look at logs.

Yup, wouldn't you know it. Critical errors all over the logs, I do have a problem. Let's get somebody out to your place ASAP and get you up and running. How does seven days from now sound?

That is correct Ladies and Gentlemen, I was to wait one week before anybody could think about getting to my place. Needless to say, I was furious. I asked how that could even be thought as a reasonable timeline for an outage. The only thing I got back was an unapologetic sorry. Not good enough. I asked to be transferred over to their billing department because one of two things were happening. I am getting comped for this time without service, or I'll just cancel my service and have another ISP set up in 1 day rather than wait 7 for them. And like some form of corrupt magic, a Monday slot has opened up.

I went to twitter to vent my dissatisfaction, 

@TWC internet outage and the first available time for repair is seven days from now. Unacceptable! Only when I threatened not paying my bill did you magically find a time on Monday. Still, unacceptable.

and was greeted with a response from TWC. They asked for for my information to try and help out. The response I get back.

Thanks I see we have an appointment setup for Monday the 4th from 1 - 3 PM to get your issue resolved. ^JH

So now They aren't helping or reading my messages. I explain that I am still unsatisfied that my service is out for 48 hours with no explanation of what is going on. This is the last response I have gotten from them.

Unfortunately that is the earliest available appointment we have. The notes show your appointment has been expedited already. ^JH

So the notes show that they expedited the appointment huh? You mean the appointment that was never set up because I just threatened to cancel my service? And since when is 48 hours expedited on anything but the mail?

It is just unfortunate that ISP's are monopolies because they don't have to get better. While I was talking with them on twitter, I looked at other conversations going on. It doesn't matter who you are, they don't care. They had business customers who were being told they would be without phones, and internet for 72 hours at the earliest. Business customers, people with SLA's that state they are contractually obligated to being serviced in a timely manner. 

Sorry, that this is just a massive venting post. But dammit, somebody needs to bring down the giant. I am not going to sit on my hands quietly, I'm going to find a way to make it hurt for TWC. The first thing is by canceling my service. And if this post gets even one more person to either cancel their service or decide against stating with TWC, then I have done my part.

And from the bottom of my heart, Time Warner Cable. Fuck You! Go play in traffic and Die in a fire.

As for the rest of you ISP's, get your shit together before Google Fiber spreads like herpes in a Catholic Boys choir.