WS-2

US Navy Leapfrogs parachute into UofM

2010-09-11T17:24:00.000-05:00

Monitor Your Heart on an iPhone!

2009-10-26T08:30:00.001-05:00

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kate-rockwood/bizzy-body/latitude-app-makes-doctors-data-sexy?partner=homepage_newsletter

GOD BLESS AMERICA

2009-08-20T13:25:00.000-05:00

and such.

That is all.

Enter the New Frontiers Sweepstakes

2009-03-11T08:22:00.001-05:00

Learn about Star Trek(r) and enter the New Frontiers Sweepstakes for a chance to win a trip to the Star Trek Hollywood Premiere with 3 of your friends or a Zero G flight for 4.

random hello

2009-02-15T22:50:00.002-06:00

Hey guys hope all is well..

just in case I did not give my new blog address here it is.

Http://web.mac.com/joshuahughes

or click this link

hola

hope all is going well. Looking forward to this coming weekend when Steph and I do our annual V day weekend trip. We will try to stop by the cities on sunday I believe.

The voice of reason

2009-02-05T18:02:00.002-06:00

I'm not even sure if I can write this post and maintain credibility, but here goes. As a communicator and as a hearing female human being let me tell you that I CAN NOT STAND WOMEN WITH BABY-DOLL VOICES. Quite honestly, hearing that kind of voice provokes feelings of violence at worst, and anger at best. Anger toward the speaker for not taking action to correct the 'issue', anger toward her parents for 'letting' her develop that voice in the first place.

Wow. This makes me sound really intolerant. And I am I guess. But mostly I desperately want that woman to be taken seriously. And if I'm having that 'nails on the chalkboard' reaction to her voice, what are other people going to think? Are they going to be able to LISTEN through the high-pitched but still too soft to hear clearly baby voice to HEAR the content of what she's saying?

Yes, I do have someone specific in mind, a young woman from my class this semester. She was just in the library (where I am right now) asking for a book she reserved. I hope over the course of this semester she can gain some confidence to speak up loudly and clearly to get what she wants. And I hope that along the way, at least ONE of her professors will give her that encouragement.

In the meantime I will try to get to know her and judge her ideas, not just her voice.

The future is here

2009-02-04T16:30:00.000-06:00

Early in college I remember setting AIM statuses that faked a satellite locking in on my location to tell my friends where I was at the time. (Class, UDS, Work..) I also remember going on a long road trip and providing fake updates on a map on WS-2.

Now all that trickery can stop. Google Latitude is here. Finally someone is combining the GPS and data plans in a phone with internet based maps to give a quick picture of "where are all my people at?"

Privacy concerns aside, it is pretty cool to see one of my friends is in the area and I could meet up with them, especially as everyone spreads out around the metro.

Garage door opener

2009-01-14T18:35:00.002-06:00

I feel so accomplished by such a small thing that I felt the need to share.

I've been having a weird problem with my garage door opener this winter - some mornings the safety sensor is "tripped" and the door won't shut using a remote. (You can still close it, but you have to use the house panel to override the safety sensors)

I've moved the sensors around, taken them off their mounts, done just about everything. In two of the past instances, something in all this jumble "fixed" the problem. Tonight, none of that would bring it back to life.

At Trevor's suggestion, I turned to our good friend Google. My original query was to find a way to just disable the sensors (against code), but I stumbled upon a forum full of people having a similar issue and noted two things: (1) They all had the same era of garage door opener and (2) they all mentioned it was really cold.

One poster said he took a hairdryer to his safety sensors and they just fired up again. I was going to try this approach, but I couldn't get anything electric over that far and my only extension cord is frozen to the patio.

This, my friends, is where the "flash of brilliance" came from. I had just been on a ski trip, and what did I have sitting around? Hand warmers! I broke open a package and taped them to the garage sensors - and within 5 minutes, the receiver light came back on and the system was functioning again!

Huzzah.

5th Annual Ski Trip

2009-01-12T19:45:00.000-06:00

A success!

. . . and on Earth peace, and good will toward men.

2008-12-24T10:11:00.003-06:00

That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Favorite Restaurants

2008-12-13T23:00:00.001-06:00

I like to try to stimulate the economy by dining out, so I figured I’d try to solicit some ideas of good restaurants around the cities. Anyone have favorites that they like to go to? Particularly any non-chain restaurants (Friday’s is not an acceptable response, although it is a quality restaurant). A few of my favorites include:

Kramarczuk’s – Polish restaurant and deli in northeast Minneapolis. If you like sauerkraut, this is the place to go. They also have some non-kraut options such as a large selection of sandwiches, soups, and salads. You can usually get a meal and drink that will have leftovers for somewhere around $12.

215 East Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55414

Mac’s Fish and Chips – What it sounds like. Fish, fries, and chicken strips for the non-seafood lovers. Fantastic quality and malt vinegar on every table. The place doesn’t look like much, but the food is fantastic. Around $10 for a meal and drink.

1330 Larpenteur Ave W, St Paul, MN‎

Windows Live Writer

2008-12-13T15:52:00.001-06:00

I’ve been browsing for ways to try to make blogging a little easier so that I can try to do some posting in regards to my lab work. (If you would like to read it I can get you the address, but I don’t know as though it will be of much interest to anyone, even me. We’ll see how it goes).

Anyway, one of my friends suggested Windows Live Writer, which is a desktop app that allows posting to basically any type of blog service such as Blogger, Wordpress, and Windows Live. I’ve only used it for a couple of posts, but it seems to work pretty well so far. Easy to use and makes adding links/tables/images much easier than most of the web apps. I’d definitely suggest trying it out!

Blog blurr

2008-12-05T19:08:00.003-06:00

I'll try to keep this short: who the heck writes these long blog posts?! And, who reads them? Going through my Google Reader tonight trying to get caught up (and procrastinating my final stretch of school work) I realized that this one blog post I was trying to read was VERY VERY long. It was so long that I stopped reading and copied/pasted it into Word. It was over 1600 words and laid out to just about 3 and a quarter pages. Is she kidding?

Needless to say, I didn't finish it. It was boring anyway.

Keep 'em short, people. Maybe that's why I like Twitter so much. Follow me and I'll follow you!

Yadda yadda yadda

2008-11-26T20:52:00.003-06:00

Friends, family, health, employment, housing. Thankful, grateful, blah blah blah.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Friendship

2008-11-16T20:16:00.002-06:00

Getting reconnected with my old grammar and high school friends on Facebook has got me thinking about friendship, and how relationships come and go, and then come back again.

This weekend I finally accepted that one of my adult friendships is definitely over. Last September I sent an email to my friend Kate to check up on her and see if she wanted to get together. She replied back that she was sorry, but she just couldn't hang out "right now". She said she was ok, but that she just couldn't. In essence, she dumped me as a friend. In an email. Without any explanation. I replied back that I understood and would wait for her to contact me if she wanted. She didn't.

Not quite a year went by and as her birthday approached in June, I decided to send her an email wishing her a happy birthday and asking her if she would at least tell me what I had done "wrong" in our friendship so I could avoid making that mistake again. She replied a few weeks later and told me that she had been through a lot emotionally and that some things in her life had to go, i.e., me and a few other people. Wow. 'Kay. .

Kate was one of my FB friends. I had avoided unfriending her on the off chance that she might reach out to me once things had settled down. I had also avoided checking her profile. After all, she had asked me to stay out of her life. Well, this weekend I clicked on her profile and found out that in the time we weren't in contact, she'd had a baby. That's when I finally decided to unfriend her. It's hard to accept I'm no longer welcome in her life.

Other friends simply drift away. Just now, I received an invitation to go to West Palm Beach to see one of my grammar school friends who is also on FB. She was the first person I met when I got to first grade at a new school. We were friends for 8 years, but her family moved to Florida right after 8th grade graduation. Neither one of us wanted to lose touch, but stuff happens. Neither one of us sabotaged the relationship. I'm seriously tempted to go see her, even though we haven't seen each other in many, many years. It would be great to reconnect with her.

I guess I won't give up on my friendship with Kate. Maybe her friendship will come back again. I just hope that if she chooses to contact me, I'll have the grace to forgive her and accept her friendship again.

"Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other gold."

Semester 1: Complete

2008-11-13T13:52:00.002-06:00

I just had to write a post about how incredibly happy I am that we're done with our first semester back at school for MBAs. It was a lot of work getting into the program, taking the GMAT, etc., and this semester of two core courses shows we can make it. :)

Only 4 core classes were not waived from undergrad classes we've already taken, so Brian, Wes and I have 2 core classes left! Yay! Well, at least I know I do. With one of those two being next semester, I hope it will be a lot of fun elective courses for the remaining 36 credits... like the Wikis and Blogs class Wes just might have convinced me to take. Hmmmmmm.

Would this blog be extra credit?

Too busy reading blog posts to write a blog post

2008-11-11T17:32:00.002-06:00

I know I said I was going to try to post more regularly, or at least more often. And it's not like I'm not thinking about it, I just find that I'm spending more time reading blog posts that come into my Google Reader. There are a lot of people out there who have interesting and relevant things to say, but right now I'm learning how to scan the entries and ditch the stuff I'm not interested in.

As for me, right now I'm regretting my decision to have a cheeseburger and fries at the St. Thomas cafeteria, I'm getting caught up on my Reader, doing some last-minute review of my Law material for tonight, listening to Sirius satellite radio online (awesome!) and IMing with a friend in Pennsylvania. He and I are discussing the menus at our respective families' Thanksgiving day festivities.

Tomorrow afternoon I'm off to yet another doctor to get cortisone injections into two facet joints in my spine. I am NOT looking forward to the process, but after what I've heard, I am looking forward to the results. My pain has escalated to the point of nausea, and that is not fun. Here's hoping the injections deliver the desired results, and that I start feeling like myself again!

More Bad Customer Service - Citibank

2008-11-08T16:48:00.004-06:00

Last week's bad customer service experience was with Citibank (NYSE:C). I've had a MasterCard with them for 6 years and always promptly pay the bill when received. Citibank started offering an auto-pay service recently, so in an effort to reduce some bill-paying, I signed up. I was warned to continue paying manually until I received a notice on my statement that autopay setup was complete.

After making a manual payment for the full balance of my statement in Mid-October, I assumed everything would be set for this month. Much to my surprise, on October 31st, another payment in the exact same amount as my manual payment was taken out of my checking account. Citibank's autopay processed and paid the statement balance again, despite having an account balance of $0. My card now had a positive credit balance, and my checking was down double what I planned on it being.

I promptly contacted Citibank and asked them to reverse the payment back to my account. I told them I did not want a paper check sent to my house as the automatic "request credit balance refund" option provided. If they can ACH the money out, they can ACH the money back in. Despite my instructions, Citibank replied back saying "we have issued you a credit balance check that should arrive in 2 weeks."

TWO WEEKS. Thankfully I don't run my checking account on razor thin margins, but if I did, I could have been overdrawn and without my cash for half a month. I know Citi is running low on capital, but stealing it from their customers does not seem like the best way to do business.

After my steaming email back to Citibank, I got a form message stating "We are unable to assist you online, please call us." With a check already in the mail (the credit balance promptly disappeared), what is Citibank going to offer me to keep my business?

Would that make me a bad person?

2008-11-04T22:22:00.004-06:00

So, with all the social media/online community opportunities that exist right now, how do you decide who to be 'friends' with, or be connected to? The reason I ask this question is because I'm not sure what to do about Facebook 'friends' or people I follow on Twitter whose political views are different than my own.

Random people from my high school are coming out of the woodwork on Facebook these days because my class is creeping up on a significant reunion year. Some of them are vocal Republicans. The comments they make in their statuses and wall posts are highly disturbing to me as a non-Republican. People I don't know but follow on Twitter for various networking reasons fall into the same situation.

Do I 'unfriend' them or stop following their Tweets because their beliefs are opposite to mine? Would that make me a bad person? I want to think that I'm an open-minded person, but when your fundamental political believes conflict so strongly with mine, (and you make me aware of it) can that relationship work?

There was a similar situation at work with people discussing the election today. Certain people do not hide their political affiliation. Ordinarily that's (mostly) OK. But today, I had to put on my headphones to drown out a Republican gab fast in my aisle. I don't want to hear what that person thinks or how he voted because despite my best intentions, it may affect how I interact with him as a co-worker. I want my assessment of my co-workers to be based on their job skills, not how they voted at the polls. And, I would expect the same from them.

Is this all just election angst that will wane now that it's over? I hope so. In no way do I want to gloss over this historic election season, but let's get on with it.

What's next?

Today's Bad Service - Minnesota DVS

2008-11-04T17:14:00.006-06:00

This is actually from last week, but I was too frustrated to write about it. I received a letter from my bank "releasing" me from their lien on my car. I called and asked them what if anything else they did, such as contacting the DMV or insurance. They informed me all they do is send the letter they already sent. OK, sounds good - but I'll call the DMV just in case.

After a good 10 minutes of holding music I finally get an agent who informs me all I need to do is bring my title and the letter down to any DMV office and everything will be taken care of. "Great!" I say and look on my calendar for a good time to trek over to a DMV office.

An opportunity arised on Friday afternoon to get into their office before they closed, so I drove over with title and letter in hand. I grab my number, wait patiently, and then eagerly hand over my letter and title when called upon. "This isn't notarized" immediately the girl in costume (Halloween) at the counter says. She starts to hand everything back to me right away when I explain that this was all the bank told me they would provide and that I spoke to someone at the DMV on the phone who said it would be sufficient. She takes everything back and says she'll "go check." After disappearing for what was probably enough time for a quick smoke break, she again states "this isn't notarized. Here's the form you need to have signed and sent back. NEXT!"

Now, this form makes some sense - it has all the information the letter from my bank had, and a spot for notarization! However, the agent at the DMV call center felt no need to inform me of this form's existence. If you want, you can play the Minnesota DVS scavenger hunt and try to find it on their website. It is out there, but unless you happen to know that you need form-2017 and what to do with it, there isn't a very good process outlined on this website from 1995.

Voting

2008-11-04T09:05:00.002-06:00

So, I went and voted today, and let me tell you I was surprised.

Based on the news and rumors, I thought it was going to take forever. I had prepared for the worst, but was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. I was surprised to find out that I wasn't registered! Fortunately it was pretty easy to take care and I was in line and on my way in about 35 minutes total.

Basically, all I am trying to say is that it is important to go and do it. Bring a book, wear comfy shoes, but stand in line and vote. Everybody - GO VOTE!!!

Wow.

2008-11-02T08:15:00.002-06:00

Despite my dislike of the new Comcast tv planner site, I still use it because it is the only option I have. Just when I found something else to NOT like (if you scroll forward in time on a certain section, it brings you all the way back to the top of the channels - duh), I noticed this at the top of the page:

The Comcast.net team has been working to improve your Comcast.net TV channel. We've added an HD video gallery, an On Demand page, and access to free Full TV episodes. Unfortunately, some features - such as Favorite Channels - were removed. In response to your feedback, we are working diligently to restore these features. We apologize for this inconvenience.

I must not have been the only one who complained.

Now, if they could do something about their scrolling issues. . .

Comcast Customer Support Part 2

2008-10-28T19:41:00.002-05:00

Well, Comcast gave me a call last night and setup a time for a new modem to be installed in the evening today. I'm now posting online with my new (and functioning) cable modem! :)

Thanks for the outstanding response.

More on Comcast

2008-10-27T15:09:00.004-05:00

Since Wes had such good success getting Comcast's (NASDAQ:CMCSA) attention, he suggested I follow suit with the issue that I've been having with them. I'm no longer surprised that they continue to remove channels from the line up (in an attempt to drive viewers to the more expensive digital packages - so far not worth it). What does surprise me is that one of the first channels I remember them removing was the viewing guide channel.

Enter the technology. I went out to their web site quite a while ago to see if they had a channel guide, and low and behold they did! And it was GREAT. By entering my ZIP code and selecting my package, only my channels were displayed. I could further refine the listing by choosing my favorite channels. They displayed a little red heart (awww) and were placed in order at the top of the list, thereby eliminating the need for me to scroll through all the public access and other generally annoying channels I never watch.

Last week (or thereabouts) that page went away and was replaced by a new page. A new page that no longer offers a way to designate my favorite channels. A page that, at my preferred laptop resolution, is nearly impossible to navigate due to the annoying scroll bars. Why Comcast? Why? A page face lift I could understand, maybe. But why REMOVE functionality that I found extremely useful?

Dumb.

G1

2008-10-24T22:46:00.002-05:00

I just got the new G1 phone from t-mobile on tuesday and love it! Now that I always have internet, I don't know how I made it this long without a phone. The SDK for Android is also fantastic, I've made 3 apps already, one of which is public and has had >50 downloads in about 36 hours. If anyone wants to see it, let me know!