GreenPunk

Julian strode through the forest as if he owned it, which is ironic because he believes no one can own the land.

Pensacola Junior College has horrendous customer service

Way back when I first attended Penn State, I was warned by more than a few people that in such a large university I'd be nothing more than a number. Well, I never felt that way. I never had a problem reaching a faculty or staff member who could provide answers and help. My instructors and professors knew who I was. I have my issues with academia but when it came to good ol' customer service, Penn State never let me down. Whether it was questions about what courses to take or financial aid, answers were quick and easy to come by.

About a year and a half ago I began taking courses at Pensacola Junior College, and I've had nothing but headaches from the financial aid department. 3+ hour waits, phone calls transfered back and forth from office to office...heck, I can't even get a human on the phone right now. I mean, I can but she transfers me to uselessness. WTF!? Yesterday I drove to campus, waited in line for a mere 20 minutes and then was told they couldn't help me. "You didn't hear my announcement," the lady at the financial aid "triage" desk informed me. Pardon my language, but, NO FUCKING SHIT! If they knew they were out of short term loan funds, just put up a sign and save a lot of people from wasting time standing in a useless line. I can't just call and get an answer so I have to drive across town only to find out something that'd take 2 seconds to announce or even post on their freakin' web site.

I never had trouble with my funds at Penn State. I always just registered for classes and things were taken care of. No trouble with my Stafford loands. At PJC, though, I have to wait weeks for my funds to be dispersed so I have to take out a loan to tide me over until I get my Stafford loan. Fees are due at PJC over a week before classes start. That seems back-asswards to me.

People laugh when I make comparisons between Penn State and PJC and I feel a little ridiculous about it, too. There's no reason, though, that PJC can't do a better job serving the people who pay for its existence. Train the people who answer the phones. Train them better. Make it possible to talk on the phone (or IM) with a person who can answer questions about financial aid. PROVIDE MORE TIMELY INFORMATION in a variety of formats. It's easy to do.

And to the financial aid triage lady, some words of advice: people waiting in line tend to be edgy/grumpy; think about what you say before you say it. I wait tables for a living so I deal with hungry, impatient, grumpy people all the time. If someone waited half an hour for a table and then ordered the dinner special, which we ran out of an hour ago, I wouldn't say, "Oh, you missed the announcement." I'd simply say, "I'm sorry, we're out of the dinner special." In the first instance, I blamed the guest. In the second I simply provided information.

a letter to my constituents

Funny how in my last post I mentioned Live search. A month and a half or so has passed since then and Live is done, stick a fork in it. 

Now, if you go to www.live.com you get bounced to Bing. WTF is Bing? It's Microsoft's latest attempt at contesting Google's dominance of web search. I've used Bing a couple times. I can't say anything bad about it, but I also can't say that there's anything special about it that gives me reason to use it over Google. Millions of people are in the habit of googling. How will Microsoft convince them to stop googling and start binging (not to be confused with bingeing).  Maybe some of them wonder if you can google on Bing. Is Bing a better googler than Google? Will Bing become a verb? How will Bing conquer the internet?

As I type this, I'm watching the national soccer teams of Spain and the USA in the first period (or half or however soccer's split up) of their match in the FIFA Confederations Cup, somewhere in South Africa. Neither team has scored yet, at 11:45 into the match. I'm not a big soccer fan but I like watching it sometimes. I'd rather watch soccer than hockey, that's for sure. It's hard not to be drawn into the crowd's enthusiasm for the game. Soccer fans are maniacs, and I mean that as a compliment. I love the intensity. It reminds me a lot of college football.

The last 3 days I had jury duty. I was grumpy at first that I'd be taking a pay cut for a couple days (I don't get paid if I'm at jury duty) but I soon got over it and started to enjoy my civic duty. I figure it'll be one of the few times in my life where I'm directly involved in a government function. Or maybe it's blown my mind and I'll go on a quest to be the next John Adams.

I will say this, I feel a little more patriotic than I did before serving in that jury. It also gave me a little more faith in my fellow Americans. And I'd say I feel a little more compassionate towards human beings in general. I'm a better person for having served in that jury. I'm glad the founders of our country laid out such an excellent system. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think it's pretty bad-ass. My fellow jurors and I were the center of the universe there for a few. Everything hinged on what we decided. I had moments with dim recollections of Kafka and Dostoevsky. Sometimes I thought I might go insane with boredom and break out of the courthouse screaming with several sheriff's deputies sprinting after me. But mostly it was an awesome experience that improved me as a man and as a person. I'm glad I didn't labor over ways out. I'm sure I could've imagined up something to get out of jury duty, but why? WTF is wrong with people that they want to get out of it? Those people should be sent to countries that don't have trial by jury.

Storms moved through the Pensacola area yesterday. They were a welcome relief from over a week's worth of heat indexes over a hundred a couple record-setting days...

USA SCORES!!!!!!!!!!! (around 26 minutes in)

...there's nothing like waiting tables outside in over a hundred degree temps and worrying that the sweat which has built up all over your face just in the brief time since you wiped it off before walking to the table will drip off your nose and disgust the guests. That sucks. Mostly I don't mind the heat (sometimes it annoys me) but I did welcome yesterday's rain. It'd been too long and we needed a break from the heat. I'm pretty sure most of the plants liked it, too...well, except for one of my fellow juror's tomatoes. He said he was going to be having a bunch of fried green tomatoes because the rainstorms damaged a bunch of his plants. Oops. Collateral damage.

Cheers,

mitchell

Lazy Man's XP Optimization

I recently did a Live search for the terms "optimizing xp in older machines". The first link Live gave me was Optimizing Windows XP on an older machine. The link led to a useful page. That's all I ask for from a search engine.

From there I chose Eric's first link, A faster Windows XP? Here's how. I followed the instructions to disable indexing services. Cool. I just learned a little about how Windows XP works, and I sped up my computer a little.

Afterword
The more I learn about how computers and operating systems work, the more I realize that they use a significant amount of resources doing things that most people don't care about or need. I'm also surprised by how much is required of a computer's processor(s) to just deal with the increasingly graphics/video-centric Web. I wonder how many computer crashes are caused each day simply by going to MySpace.

Web browsing showdown: old Toshiba versus not as old Apple

If you read gadget and tech blogs you'd think that you can't even open Google's home page without a brand new quad core laptop with 4 gigs of RAM. Thing is, most people who use computers on a regular basis aren't using the latest equipment.

In preparation for the A+ exam, I've switched to using my old Toshiba laptop as my primary computer instead of my iBook. When it comes to browsing the Web I've noticed that there's almost no performance difference using this Toshiba Satellite (1.8 GHz Celeron, 256 MB RAM, Windows XP Home SP3, Chrome) versus my iBook G4 (1.42GHz PowerPC, 1 GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4, Safari). It surprises me that a 7+ years old Windows laptop plays just as nicely with the Web as a 3 years old Apple. Using Chrome helps a lot. Also, I'm not running anything other than Chrome. Whenever I'm using the iBook I almost always have iTunes open and running and maybe Adium.

For browsing the Web and checking email, an old PC works as well as a not-so-old Apple. When it comes to start-up and waking up the computers, the iBook smokes the Toshiba. When it comes to opening up applications, the iBook is faster. If I'm viewing an animation laden web page, the old PC starts to bog down and the iBook is markedly superior. But as a general Web machine, both computers operate at pretty much the same speed and have the same functionality.