Dear AT&T:

At AT&T’s store I contracted service for $30 a month. Later operators told me to go back to the store to figure out why they gave me the wrong price.

On August 20 I walked to the AT&T store near my house (located at 2180 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, Calif. 94704) to get pricing information for standalone DSL service. After talking with James (not his real name*), the sales representative who helped me, I signed up for AT&T DSL Direct Pro service at $30 per month. I received a printed confirmation and then email confirmation of this order (see enclosure). My activation date for my order () was set for Aug. 27, one week later.

On Aug. 27 my DSL modem could not detect a DSL signal by the end of the day. The next morning I made the first of many phone calls to AT&T support. The first person I spoke with told me that my service had been activated. I checked the phone line in my house, searching for obvious problems. When I turned up nothing, I called AT&T again, at which point I was told my service had not been activated. Getting these two short but conflicting messages consumed near an hour on the phone, so I decided to take the problem to the source and return to the AT&T store.

Over the next several days I called several times. During one call I spoke with Grace (14 minutes), John (16 minutes), Mike (36 minutes), and Danny (42 minutes) in an unsuccessful attempt to talk with someone in provisioning. At some point after Danny transferred me to another department my call was dropped.

Friday evening, Aug. 29, I spoke with Ann (14 minutes) who informed me that, “Your order is supposed to complete by 9:55 pm Pacific time tonight.” There was no change by that time, so I called AT&T where I spoke with Nicholas (12 minutes), who told me to call the “due date no-sync” department in provisioning. He gave me the number 888-722-3755, saying that it would connect me with provisioning. Since it was the beginning of Labor Day weekend, I waited until Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Sept. 2, I called the number and was informed that it was not the number for provisioning. I spoke with Angie, who waited for 57 minutes on hold with me to speak with provisioning, at which point she suggested that they were not going to be available to take my call. She transferred me to technical support where I spoke with Gonzalo. He told me that the problem was that I was not registered. He had me set up an account and password over the phone and enter the information in my 2Wire router. When this did not work, he assured me that, “this is a typical problem with dry-loop lines. We’ll have to wait for a few minutes. If it doesn’t work, we’ll open a ticket with maintenance.” After doing that, Gonzalo told me that my service would be working by 10:00 am the following morning. If it was not, maintenance would give me a call. My total time talking with Gonzalo was 25 minutes.

The next day my DSL was not connected and maintenance did not call. I called maintenance at 888-322-5274 and waited on hold only to be told that I needed to talk to provisioning, “because the order is still open in provisioning.” I was again told to call 877-722-3755 to speak with provisioning. I stated that I had used that number before and it was not the provisioning number, he simply reaffirmed that it was.

On Sept. 3 I tried calling the number and after waiting on hold, I spoke with a representative who told me I could not receive DSL service unless I also contracted AT&T phone service. When I explained that was why I selected “Direct” DSL service, which does not require additional AT&T services, she told me that meant that I didn’t need phone service from AT&T, but that I needed to get a phone line from someone else. When I expressed complete incredulity that I could progress so far in this process without having been informed of this significant caveat, she put me on hold to check with technical support, and subsequently my call was disconnected.

I called again and the next representative told me that I did not need phone service in addition. My case was transferred to Minnie in second tier support. She confirmed that I had “absolutely no signal” and assigned me the case number which she said I could reference when talking to maintenance if necessary.

The next day I woke up at 5:15 am PST to make it more likely that I could speak with someone in provisioning shortly after the office opened at 7:00 am CST. After a short time I spoke with Lucy who explained that there was a glitch in the system that accounted for the problem. It was a common issue with some new equipment, “the circuits are not picking them up.” She said that they had about 10,000 orders with this problem and that she could cancel my order and reissue it, which seemed to be solving the problem. She told me that she “put the order back through to them,” and it should be up in 3 to 4 days. I was told to call back on Monday to check the status.

When I had no signal by Monday, I called back Tuesday, Sept. 9 at 888-443-2430. I spoke with George (52 minutes) who told me that my original order had been cancelled, but that there was no new order. “There’s no pending orders under your address—the only one is your cancelled order.” When I explained what Lucy had told me, he said that no one in his department, provisioning, had the ability to put orders into the system. I needed to call the business office to put this order in.

I called the business office at 800-288-2020 and was told that I could sign up for AT&T Direct DSL Pro for $40 a month, $10 more than I was told at the AT&T store. I said that I was offered Direct DSL Pro for $30 a month. The woman I spoke with told me that wasn’t the right price, despite my official order sheet from AT&T and my email confirmation which stated the terms clearly. She told me that the people in the AT&T store should not have offered me this particular AT&T service because they work on mobile service. I explained that it was irrelevant to me how AT&T set up its stores. A service was offered to me at a given price, I signed up based on that knowledge, and this was nothing more than a classic bait-and-switch. She said that I could pay less by contracting phone service as well, but I was not inclined to sign up for additional services. I finished obtaining a new order from her, order number , associated with . My new activation date would be Sept. 16, another week later.

When I spoke with George in provisioning he suggested that I might be able to expedite the process by calling provisioning once I had my new order number. I tried to do so without success. After waiting on hold for 58 minutes, I had other matters to attend to and I ended my call.

Friday morning, Sept. 12, at 10:00 am I heard someone knocking on my door. An AT&T technician, Larry, arrived unannounced to work on my DSL installation. He told me that they had been unable to contact me regarding the visit despite me having provided several support representatives with my phone number to store with my record. After 30 minutes made some adjustments and my 2Wire modem indicated that I had a DSL signal for the first time since the beginning of the process. Before he left Arthur gave me an account number, , a third and distinct number to the two I had received previously. I assumed that was sufficient to finish my installation and I could talk to technical support to finish the process.

When I called technical support I provided the new account number (). The tech sounded confused and transferred me to DSL status where Becky told me that order had been cancelled as well. My call was dropped and I called back to speak with Michael who transferred me to Jose. Jose said that the order had not been cancelled. His system showed that it was scheduled to be activated Sept. 13. He called tech support to confirm this and returned to report that the order had been cancelled. The third order was still pending and would be activated on Sept. 16.

On Sept. 16 I could not connect, and the DSL signal that had been established when the technician visited my home was gone. I called AT&T where I spoke with Daniel, James in the dry-loop department, and another representative in technical support. After some perfunctory testing—unplug the modem, check the phone line, log into the router—I was given a trouble ticket () and I was told that maintenance would definitely call me tomorrow to resolve the problem. Fortunately, they won’t have to.

Twenty-seven days after I ordered my service and 20 days after I was told my service would be activated, I still have no Internet access. During this time I spent over 580 minutes—nearly 10 hours—on the phone with AT&T and I spoke with 26 people at AT&T, most of whom asked me for the same information repeatedly before determining they could not help me and sending me to hold for another department. During this time I collected several AT&T phone numbers including 877-722-3755, 800-288-2020, 888-722-9337, 888-443-2430, 888-322-5274, 866-593-0724, 866-274-4357. Many times the phone numbers I was given were useless. Each time I called the primary DSL number, 800-722-3235, I traversed the phone tree, and spoke with a representative who informed me that he or she was an Illinois representative and that I would need to speak with a California representative.

When my original order was cancelled and replaced with two others I was told that my service would cost $40/month, $10 more than I was told at the AT&T store, $10 more than appears on my store receipt, and $10 more than appears on the email confirmation sent to me. When I told a phone representative that I was offered service at $30 a month, she told me that I had my facts wrong and that I misunderstood.

I called the customer retention department and an empathetic representative offered me a free month of service when it was finally activated.

During this trying support saga I never raised my voice, yelled at a representative, or treated a representative with disrespect. Do not construe this to mean that I am not furious about the way I have been treated as an AT&T customer. The AT&T store sales staff pleasantly signed me up for service and charged me for a DSL modem, but after that point not a single person took responsibility for resolving my problems without wasting my time. Some service representatives were pleasant and tried to be helpful, some waiting patiently on hold with me for an hour or more while we called the provisioning department. But no one from AT&T actively communicated with me during the entire process. Were it not for my persistence, I would still be waiting for some sign of service four weeks after I contracted AT&T to provide it for me without so much as an email or phone call from AT&T. For a company dedicated to communication, AT&T is downright awful at practicing it.

I called on Sept. 16 to inquire about my still inactive connection and I was told to wait until 8:00 pm when it would be activated. I had heard this routine now several times. I waited until 8:10, confirmed that service was still not working, and I made my last call to AT&T. I cancelled my DSL service. The call only took three minutes and ten seconds. It was the best service you provided me in weeks.

* I obfuscated the names of representatives to respect their privacy.

Probably the phrase we used most often, however, was “muchos toquis, pocos indios.” Toqui entered Spanish from the Mapuche language. The Mapuche were people indigenous to south and central Chile, and it refers to the chief or head of a group. Here indios best means tribesmen or workers. When we combine the elements, the saying is “too many chiefs, not enough workers,” a riff on too many cooks spoil the broth.

I was delighted the other day when my mom showed me a Chilean wine she found in Costco (of all places) called El Toqui. The symbol matches the meaning of the word I just described:

This El Toqui wine might introduce some confusion into the phrase, though: now having too much toqui could mean something completely different….

Most people hire a professional photographer for their weddings, but I thought you would see some great shots from guests simply because there are so many more of them. Besides, it often takes professionals weeks before you actually see their photos. Having immediate access to candid shots from the day would be nice for the couple.

But when everyone returned home, I found that there was no good way for all the guests to give Kate and Chris their photos. Email can’t accomodate such large files; posting them to Facebook or a free photos sharing site like Kodak doesn’t allow you access to the original files; and recording everything on a CD-R and dropping it in the mail is a hassle. What’s a solution?

As I reviewed the photos I noticed two things. First, the vast majority of pictures weren’t good. Most pictures suffered from technical problems, like red-eye, noise, blurriness, and improper focus. Camera makers still have plenty of areas for improvement. In low-end point-and-shoot cameras it seems like everything could be better. Here are a few typical shots:

A wedding is presents a difficult environment for good pictures—there’s low light, you may be far away—but it’s also prototypical example of when people want to use their cameras.

Spending more money on a better camera may help: one guest was using a Nikon D200, a high-end digital SLR (in consumer terms), and looking at her pictures was like a breath of fresh air. Nearly every photo was in focus and few were blurry.

The high frequency of poor shots might be discouraging, but the odds are on your side when you have a large quantity of photos. My second point is that almost every set of pictures had some excellent images. Not excellent as in publish-in-National-Geographic, but still meaningful pictures of an important day. A professional photographer can’t take pictures of all the guests all the time, and you get a wider spectrum of photos with crowd-sourcing.

From what I’ve seen, professional photographers don’t have to worry about being replaced at weddings by an army of amateurs; You want someone who is highly skilled to take the most important pictures at your wedding. It’s a nice addition, however, to have the extra pictures your guests take. Who knows—maybe downloading guest photos is a service some professionals will provide one day.

One final esoteric note: Most people have the date set correctly in their cameras; next to nobody has the time set correctly, even adjusting for time-zome differences.

The next time I would see the place would be when I arrived with all my belongings and furniture, so I wanted a way to size up the apartment to determine what would fit. I took a couple dozen measurements and made a rough sketch of the rooms in the house. The next day I turned these into a blueprint of the house using InDesign. Once I printed out this blueprint I could cut out paper rectangles to represent my furniture to see what would fit.

The end product was nifty enough that I think it’s worth sharing: feng shui my apartment. Take the place for a whirl. How can I set up the bed and nightstand together with that furnace in the way? Will I have room for a media center when I actually get one? And maybe you can let me know how the sofa looks over there.

Note: Don’t take the “my” in “Feng shui my apartment” too literally. I wasn’t crazy about posting the actual layout of my home online, so this blueprint is actually that of a fictitious house with about the same amount of floorspace as mine.

One of the things I miss most about Chile is the ability to walk and take public transportation almost anywhere. People probably arranged the system from necessity. I didn’t have a car, and most of the people I knew didn’t either. I didn’t drive for over two years and as my return date approached, I was itching to get back into the driver’s seat. I realized quickly that I had to be in the driver’s seat, or at least in a car; the area where I live is in Utah is just built for driving. Sure, there’s a supermarket just two miles away, but you have to brave a four-lane road without a sidewalk to get there. In one of those ironic twists, I realized shortly after I got back to my car that I didn’t want it.

I should have taken this photo on the road instead of indoors, but I’m waiting for my helmet to arrive so this baby’s parked for now.

How much more walkable is my new home? You might have to content yourself with my qualitative description if it weren’t for Walk Score, a Google Maps mashup that uses a set of criteria to rank the walkability of your home. Here’s my score:

Using whatever metric Walk Score has in place, my home in Utah scored 15 of 100 on the scale, “Car Dependent.”

My new home scores near the top of the scale at 91 of 100, a “Walkers’ Paradise.” I’m not sure what I need to break into the 95th percentile, but I’m content with 91. What’s your home’s score?

I still have my car for weekend getaways, which is a nice luxury. The rest of the time, I’m taking a page from Frankie Valli’s playbook and walkin’ like a man.

Both schools are just a few blocks from the same highway, it’s just 2200 miles between them.

Fortunately I just drove the leg from Salt Lake City to Berkeley this time. My dad and I spent all day Wednesday and Thursday morning on the road. Now I’m unpacking and getting set up in my new home.

Seriously. This is as far as you should go.

When I went to see The Dark Knight—fantastic film, by the way—there was one part that stood out for me. Early in the movie Bruce Wayne and Alfred are planning an operation where Batman needs to board a flying plane from the ground. Alfred suggests a program that the CIA has been working on called Skyhook. After an action sequence, Batman uses this Skyhook apparatus, and given all the other far-fetched technology in the movie, you might think that Skyhook is imaginary too. It’s not. In fact, it’s old school.

My grandfather was a navigator aboard this MC-130E during the Vietnam War.

I know this through something of a coincidence. A few weeks ago I was visiting my grandfather in Massachusetts for his 80th birthday. We got to talking and he showed me some pictures from his days in the Air Force. During the Vietnam War, my grandfather served as a navigator aboard the MC-130, a modified version of the cargo plane. One of the pictures he showed me depicted the plane with a strange, Y-shaped protrusion from the front nose. When I asked about it, he explained the Fulton Recovery System, which sounded to me like something from a movie. Using this system, which is also called Skyhook, a person on the ground wears a harness which is connected by a nylon cable to a giant balloon hanging the in sky. The MC-130E flies into the cable, the V-shaped fork catches it, and the person on the ground shoots into the sky. The plane’s crew then opens the rear cargo bay door and retrieve the person dangling in the distance using a winch.

Although the maneuver sounds dangerous, it was actually quite safe. Robert Fulton invented the system in the 1950’s and in the dozens of years it was in use there were only 1 recorded fatality.

Time Magazine actually has an article in their archives from December 1964 describing the Fulton system.

This frame from The Dark Knight shows an aircraft about to pickup Batman with the same V-shaped fork as the MC-130E. © 2008 Warner Bros. Pictures

The Batmobile, Batman’s armor, and his other gadgets may be from a time in the future, but his Skyhook liftoff is over 40 years old.

This is my first step towards fixing that, or at least the writing portion. I’m making a commitment to write something for my site at least once a week for the foreseeable future. My goal is to make it more than just an account of what I’m doing; I’d like it to be about things that I think are interesting and that I’m thinking about. There’s no point in posting boring material just for the sake of meeting a deadline.

A new version of this site is also in the works. I have been tweaking a design for the last several months, one that eliminates my superfluous landing page and incorporates things I post at Twitter, Flickr, and Delicious.

So stay tuned. Hopefully as it gets easier for me to write, it will also be more enjoyable for you to visit and read.

There is only one prison in Belize. It is filled with about 1300 inmates; Belize’s population is 300,000.

I visited the Mayan ruins at Caracól.

Belize doesn’t have any highway patrol police officers, so instead their highways have speed bumps. I’m not sure if I believe this one completely, but that’s what our driver said. And we did stop every 10 minutes or so for a speed bump, so maybe it’s legit.

Leaf cutter ants are fascinating. They march along the jungle floor, 50 feet up a tree, and come back with nickel-sized swatches of leaves.

Scorpions have to be one of the most sinister looking things out there. And I think you should double the sinister factor when you find one crawling on your bed. Anyway, I tried to capture it so that I could release it outside, but the trapping process lead to the accidental amputation of some important scorpion appendages.

Related to the previous point, it takes ants less than 6 hours to discover and complete devour a four-inch-long scorpion.

Underwater photography is much more difficult than I expected. It’s essentially like sports photography, except you’re holding your breath. I got a few good shots, but I found that movies were a better way to capture being underwater. It is fun to be able to submerge your camera in water, though.

Sea turtles have amazing jaws. In general you don’t hear much underwater, but I could hear crunching as I watched a turtle devour lobsters. If you turn up your speakers, you can too.

Before we left I was a bit disappointed to learn that English is the official language of Belize (Belize was part of British Honduras before its independence in 1982) because I wanted some Spanish practice. I was pleased to run into many Spanish-speakers; about 50% of the population speaks Spanish as a first language.

I actually wrote about it here at the time, but I can’t be sure that I conveyed the intense rage the situation provoked. Around February, probably the hottest month of the Chilean summer, there ceased to be any distinction between ants outside and ants inside. Our floors were covered with ants and there was no obvious solution. If ants are streaming into your house, forming a black river across your floor, or counter, or whatever, then your task is simple: find what’s at the end of the ant stream, probably an open jar of Smuckers or a torn bag of sugar, remove it, and destroy the ants. Our ants, however, were wandering aimlessly through the kitchen, living room, and bathroom. When the ants are aimless, that’s when you know you’re screwed. You could sweep them all up—they’d form a pile of dirt that moved—and throw them out of the house, but their cousins, or college roommates, or great-grandkids would be back half an hour later.

Ultimately I built my own solution. In fairness to words, I didn’t actually build anything, but I did something equally impressive: I devised a system. It was a deadly combination of Raid and water, mixed with quartz-crystal timing. I would spray and flood, wait, and repeat. After a few applications—and I can’t stress how crucial the timing is here—the ants came to believe that the correct course of action was to evacuate the cracks under our house, carrying their eggs. Then I would wait until all the ants and their offspring were in the open and BOOM—I’d let lose with the hose and then laid down some Raid cover-fire. The resulting massacre gave me the name, Operation Black Rain. It was usually enough to keep the ants mostly out of the house for a couple of days.

Back in the States I’m thankful not to have ants inside. But if they were, it’s comforting to know that I could pull out some skillz from my past.

And for the record, it was a rainy winter.

I remember seeing this double rainbow over I-80 when my dad and I were driving back to college before my senior year. While I was organizing some old digital photos I found this shot and I was surprised by how vibrant the color was. The pavement is as black as I remember it, the sky as deep blue. I made a global levels adjustment in Photoshop, but I didn’t do anything special to highlight the rainbows. Thought you might enjoy the shot.

If you want to see the original, I put together a side-by-side comparison. It might look like I pumped up the blues, but the original has a yellow color cast.

Sometime sophomore year my college roommate Chris and I discovered that we both collected Absolut ads. I can’t say that either of us were particularly taken by Absolut’s product, but between us we had amassed over 100 different ads. All of them clipped from magazines—no cheating by taking them from the Absolut Book. Over Christmas break that year I didn’t have much to do, so I spent time scanning, restoring, and re-cropping the ads. Back at school I printed a batch on 3-by-4 inch cards size and we arranged them in our room.

The year before the big news on Notre Dame’s campus was that student affairs had instituted an on-campus ban on hard alcohol. When the news broke I was working for Scholastic, the campus newsmagazine, and we were preparing our annual parody issue. This issue was our once-a-year chance to pretend to be The Onion. Editors were brainstorming ideas for the cover when I mentioned an idea that just happened to stick.

A week ago I was at Bryce Canyon in Southern Utah with Caitlin where we hiked the combined Navajo-Queen’s Garden loop. The whole area is peppered with hoodoos, strangely-shaped rock formations. As we finished up the two-hour hike I saw an unmistakable rock formation.

I always thought that an Absolut Utah ad would be something of an oxymoron, but maybe that was premature. This thing just keeps turning up in the most unexpected places.