Panama Day 2 - Panama Canal

Today's adventure was a trip through half of the canal. We started out in Gamboa and ended up in the Pacific. We learned a lot about the canal and Panama's future plans for the canal.

They are building a new canal that can accommodate larger boats. This canal will parallel the original canal. Below is a pic of some large equipment working on this new construction. They plan to have the new canal finished in 2014, 100 years after the original canal.



Here are some pix of the first








They use these vehicles on tracks to help move large ships through the locks.


This is the final locks we passed through. The birds in the air have learned that when the fresh water spills out into the salt water the fish all die and then they can just scoop them up.




This is a view of the locks as we head out into the Pacific.


This ship is used to dredge the banks in preparation for the new canal.


This is a picture of the "Bridge of the Americas". Apparently this road can take one all the way to Alaska.

Panama Day 1

Greetings from Panama! I hope to post a bit every day of the trip.

Even though we arrived yesterday, today is our first official day in Panama. The trip here was exhausting and 13 hours long. Everybody was extremely tired.


Today we spent most of the day in the ocean.














Here are some pix of the house where we are staying.



One of the most interesting things I have learned so far is how cashews grow. We have a a cashew tree in the yard and they are growing now (I think it is toward the end of the season though). The nut actually grows beneath a large fruit kind of shaped like an apple.

Customer Service

I posted the following as an IdeaStorm on Dell's site and decided to repost here:

Customer Service

For a lot of companies those two words mean a great deal. After dealing with Dell customer support over the past few weeks my impression is that Dell doesn't have a single clue as to what even the most basic definition of Customer Service is. (btw - here's a hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_service)

In my specific example an order I placed has been delayed twice. My first interaction with Customer Service was to determine what was causing the delay (i.e. display shortage, processor shortage, etc...) so I could ascertain whether or not I wanted to cancel the existing order and purchase another machine with a different display/processor. Time was a bit of a factor as the purchase is a gift.

My second interaction (after receiving the second delay notice) was to inquire about receiving some kind of discount for the inconvenience of having my order delayed for over two weeks. I will admit that after my very disappointing first encounter I did not have a tremendous amount of patience, but I did remain calm. The response to my request was met with three different phone transfers that I am certain landed me in the same exact call center. This gave me the sneaking suspicion that their tactic is to transfer customers around enough times to give us the false sense that we are actually getting somewhere. When I finally say I have had enough and that I need to speak with someone that has the authority to make decisions about discounts/refunds I am told that there is no such person as Dell does not offer any form of compensation period. Now I know that compensation can be a rarity with large corporations, but customers at least like to feel that our voice is being heard.

Needless to say, this is my very last financial transaction with Dell. Now when I am approached by friends and co-workers regarding computer recommendations one of the questions I will have to ask them is "How important to you is Customer Service?". Unfortunately there is nothing Dell can now do for this customer, but I hope for the sake of future customers they take a good, hard look at their current practices.

Sincerely,

Andy D.

People Helping Robots

Interesting story about people helping robots traverse Washington Square Park in NY.

http://www.tweenbots.com/

Amazing Use of a Chalkboard

I was blown away by this creative use of chalk boards.

Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo.

Fishbot

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Yesterday I was chatting with Cable Green about eLearning stuff when I received a message (see above) from Vengefulsalmon. At first I thought it was a bot or some kind of spammer so I decided to play along a bit. After a few more threads the person on the other end and I realized that we had been fishbotted.

I had read about the phenomenon about a year ago, but had never fallen victim to it. For those of you unfamiliar with fishbotting it is when a bot takes two unsuspecting individuals, gives them new "fish" names (I was OilyCoho on the other end) and puts them in a chat window together. It produced an interesting conversation and once we realized what had happened we moved to our real IM accounts and continued the conversation further. I am not sure what instigated me getting fishbotted but it was fun and I learned a new knock-knock joke!

Netbook Project: Part 1

Over the past few months I have been thinking about purchasing a netbook to use as a note taking device at meetings. I had been looking at the ASUS and the Acer and liked the form factors. Then one day while I was doing some netbook research I stumbled upon this article from jkOnTheRun and was inspired.

A few years back my department at work had purchased a few of the HP tc1100 tablet PCs for faculty to use in the classroom. Eventually our campus added tablet PCs to the computer replacement program so as faculty replaced these machines they found their way back into our office. They were still usable machines so we decided to try loading linux on them to see if we could breathe some life back into them. A few people tested them out but they were never really used much and just started gathering dust.

So after reading the article I decided to try a tc1100 as a netbook. I asked our IT department to image the machine with Windows XP Tablet Edition, the HP apps and nothing else. When I got it back in the office I installed Evernote and ritePEN. My plan is to use Evernote at meetings and sync using wifi so all the notes will be on my main machine right away. I did all this over our break week. I haven't had any meeting yet since this is the first week of the quarter, but plan to document how this all works once I have my first meeting of Spring quarter.