Stephenryan.ie

Sometimes you read some that moves you. It hits you and you realise something you always knew.

Reading a blog post from Seth Godin gave me just one of those moments. His post, the worst moments are your best opportunity just clicked.

The Comfort Zone

Lately I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my comfort zone. Be that in how I work, how I train, or even how I relax. What has been occurring to me is that the scared feeling of leaving my confort zone is normal. Being worried about doing something because you aren’t sure of the outcome, everyone gets it.

But at the same time, why do we always aim to push beyond that zone, if even just small steps?

A Realisation

While Seths blog does focus on marketing, life involves marketing in more areas than I originally let myself believe. On a day to day basis you have to market yourself. And while I’ve never really cared what others thought, even to my own detriment, I’ve always tried to go beyond what I knew I could do.

You are presumed to be showing us your real self when you are on a deadline,
have a headache,  haven't had a good night's sleep, are irritable, have the
opportunity to extract  revenge, are losing a competition or are truly
overwhelmed.

Last year I completed La Marmotte, one of the hardest single day amateur cycling events there is. It was made worse by the heat, 40C at the bottom Alp d’Huez. But I achieved it, and achieved more than I had thought possible. I did what I had joked about wanted to do – A Gold Time. And don’t get me wrong, I had dreamed it, but I really didn’t think it was possible. Even on the training trips before hand, it looked like I wouldn’t make it.

A Single Minded Purpose

While I look back on that and worry that I’m not doing enough this year (which I’m not), I no longer feel all that bad. My priorities have changed is all. Last year I went with a single minded purpose for that event. Everything else came second to it, almost This year I’ve readjusted my priorities to tick off some longer standing goals, little big ones. For anything is possible if you set your mind to it and want it badly enough.

To View Oneself

Back to Seths post, it hit home that (for me) it is most important how you see yourself, and just like others, you will see through the lies and excuses. Honest actions win out. Leave your comfort zone and you no longer have time to keep up appearances, the real you will show through.

Hopefully you like what you see.

Sitting here, listening to Auto Rock by Mogwai, a tune iconised by Top Gear, I begin thinking back to a year, 7000km of cycling with my Cervelo S2. And what a year it has been. What started as a “how hard could it be” moment, went on to become one of the most rewarding things to do – La Marmotte.

But with passing 7000km on Sunday gone, and winter really being here now, it’ll very soon be time to hang up the good bike and switch back to the winter trainer, full mud guards an all. The big thing now, is to set some goals. Some real goals, with feeling. Last year La Marmotte proved to be the defining goal, one that got me out of bed at 5am in the dead of winter, battling the ice and snow and pitch black to do hill repeats – and then enjoying it too. I calculated that I made more than a 30% increase in performance on 3Rock (the hill we do hill repeats on) between signing up for the Marmotte, and the week before the event.

In no small part, I owe much of the improvement to my trainer, Ryan Sherlock. He also became Irish National Hill Climb Champion recently which allows me to say I get trained by the National Champion. Nice. To top it off, he also won the MTB Champs letting him retain his national champion title there too. Word has it he is the first man to hold national titles in both road and off road in the same year in Ireland. Talk about getting trained by the best!

But in reflecting on the year, I’ve seen that it wasn’t just one thing that made it such a good year. Lots of little things fell into place. My Cervelo S2 really helped. It was a reward for hitting a weight goal of 85kg although I did go slightly over board when buying it. It is a such a different machine compared to my Giant. Stiffer, more responsive, and even more comfortable which might seem strange since it is a full on race bike with aero wheels, while the Giant is a commuter with 25mm tyres and a more relaxed position.

Having the Marmotte as a goal was another big thing. Needing something to get out of bed on those mornings, well when you have no goal, there is nothing to get out bed for. Even with the Marmotte I took some days I probably shouldn’t have. Or maybe less cake and I wouldn’t have worried about those 4 seconds. Not having a firm goal now does show although this last week I’ve covered over 400km as my stomach is back so the motivation is just to cycle as much as I can while I can.

A training partner also makes a world of a difference. My friend Peter was also training for the Marmotte and was out for the hill repeats on those Tuesday mornings. Even coming along on the long weekend rides – well at least one a week, I was doing a fair bit of training. It does help with those dull gray days when you struggle to get out to know that someone else is doing the same. That someone else is equally as dumb motivated.

Starting from a high weight (I was 229 lbs / 28.8% body fat back in Dec 08) played a part too strange as it might seem. Loosing weight makes you faster on the hills. Plain and simple. But when you are training for a ever so slightly hilly event, well hill climbing times are what is about. And since I was dropping weight, I was getting faster on the hills. Psychologically it helped. You see the times dropping and that object of just finishing gets closer and closer, and then soon becomes a maybe I can do better. Maybe, just maybe.

Body fat Graph over the period

Without any one of these, the house of cards may have fallen down. I don’t really know. I wouldn’t be where I am today cycling wise, I know that much. Every bit of success has an element of luck, but every bit of luck also has a bit of blood, sweat and tears, and that is the part you rarely see.

From the falls on the ice, to somehow not falling while navigating a hill in total blackness and only using the difference in colour of grass and tarmac, to crossing a line thinking I’d missed a goal by 4 seconds, to winning my first race. For all the mechanical issues, the punctures, the crashes. Each added its own small part. Each one made the year a year to remember.

Long time users of Komplett already know that they switched warehouses and had a few account problems during the switchover. The whole thing seemed a little rushed from the experience on the website, but then management could easily have been pushing them. Things such as not being able to open multiple tabs by control clicking was when I first started getting worried.

Don’t get me wrong now, I wouldn’t be a massive Komplett purchaser, at least not on a person level. We did put a little bit of the company purchases through from time to time although it was about to expand out. However when I could no longer login in to the site and read about missing orders, I decided to pass on placing the order at the time, go somewhere else and then return when all the problems were fixed.

Today is the day when all that changed. The following email arrived in this morning marking the end to my use of Komplett.

So what now? Komplett have always been a consistent company and decent to deal with. Well basically any company incapable of transferring account or even telling customers openly about the issues isn’t a company I want to deal with. (I had to google it to find out what was going on – to komplett, a graphic at the top of the homepage isn’t enough, especially a graphic that isn’t the default graphic, correct place is a link on the login page)

In the end it has worked out better for me. We ended up with a large account with one of the supplier that the likes of Komplett use. Basically we are ending up saving another 2-5% of komplett prices, and we get things quite a bit faster, generally next day delivery.

While out the other night, it was decided to go to Nandos. My girlfriend being South African decided it’d be good, and friend from the area agreed. They do chicken, so how could it really be bad?

Firstly, the restaurant works differently than others I’ve been to. You go in, get seated and the menu is explained. Yup, it even comes with a small section with instructions. In short, you choose what you want, then go up and order it, pay for it, then return to your seat. Little strange but hey, whatever works really.

The menu itself is simple enough, chicken, followed by more chicken, with more chicken. I will admit I was slightly worried about portion sizes. Prices are high enough and the menu did have options of 1/4 chicken, 1/2 chicken, and full chicken, so who knows. Playing it safe (sometimes we have to) I decided on the chicken burger and fries on the side. So far so good, nothing more than the usual “teething problems” with some Irish restaurants.

The turning point

Our food had been ordered and here it comes. Immediately it becomes obvious that portion size wasn’t going to be an issue. I’ve cooked some skinny chicken fillets, however this really was the skinniest I’ve seen, even after I’ve crushed mine in a George Foreman! But alas, if this was the only problem, the day would have passed off with nothing much else.

The real problems began when I started biting into the burger. I had taken two or three bites when I was abruptly stopped my girlfriend. Interrupting a man when he eats, how dare she! But it was with good reason, the far side had a lovely big hair in it. Being as I am, I was intent on removing it and continuing but I’d been convinced to go up and change it, so off I went. Pointed it out to the guy behind the counter who saw it, said ok and agreed to replace it. Back to the table to continue the meal and joke about it.

From bad to worse to what now?

I’m sure everyone has experienced something like this. Mistakes happen. It really isn’t anything big. What was big was the response. A few minutes after sitting down, the manager arrived over to ask had I removed the hair before giving the plate back up. Yup, I took it as a souvenir. Off she went again to look again with the staff while making comments that the chef was bald. She did greet us again shortly after saying they had found it and wanted to fill out a report. Alright, that works. Hell doing a report is probably a good thing. Keep track of such incidents. Having a form ready for it, maybe in McDonalds, and definitely not something to bother the customer about.

When the food did arrive the second time, some 10-15 minutes later, it was fine. Can’t say it was anything spectacular, but then I’m not one who’ll be over joyed by a chicken burger. Outback Steak House any day. It was sans-hair too this time.

My real issue with the repeated visits was that she almost had me doubting if the hair was mine or not and if I’d accidently gotten it into the burger somehow. It was a possibility. Lucky for me, at the end of the meal we were once again greeted by the manager to complete the form and given a refund for my part of the meal. Food only. (For the record, I wasn’t actually looking for a refund. Replace the food and I’d probably already have forgotten about it and only joked about it in passing.) The manager did run through the form again taking some of my details and explaining that the hair could have come from a supplier and they’d want to follow up on all of this. Being through, the hair was selo taped to the form too. This was my saving grace though, the hair – while not a long girls hair -  was too long to be mine, even a long hair from my arm!

1 + 1 = 17

I do take some issues with the story given to me. As above, I’d have been happy enough for meal to be replaced and that to have been the end of it. Repeated visits to the table and multiple questions, while it may seem through, it really isn’t. Except for the fact that the meal had been paid for, it would have been the time to walk away and go somewhere else. I doubt this is actually why they ask you to pay first, especially since the place did come recommended. What it did create is someone who won’t go back, and WILL give negative recommendations of Nandos. Don’t get me wrong, the manager isn’t so much at fault. She very much looked like she was following some procedure, and trying really hard to make sure everything was right, almost like she was in someway worried as to the outcome?

Could it have been that Nandos had some pre-existing health safety issues outstanding? Possibly.

• The kitchen is out and exposed.
  While this really isn’t always an issue, just look at the Mongolian BBQ where you take your food up and they cook it in front of you, it is a bit of an issue when things are so closely packed and people don’t appear to be washing up between moving from the floor to the cooker area.
• Gloves, what gloves.
  While I may have missed this, it really did appear they weren’t wearing gloves in the “kitchen”. I don’t wear gloves while cooking, but I do wash. I didn’t see washing but it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
• Hair net hats.
  They did have them, but they didn’t cover all the hair. So really what is the point beyond looking the part?
• Washing washing washing.
  I could be making more of an issue than there is here, but in the case of the hair, if it came from a supplier, in say the salad, then why weren’t you washing the salad before use? I’m not a salad eater so if washing salad before use isn’t the done thing, please someone explain why.

An end to end all ends?

While the food wasn’t all too bad, I really can’t see myself visiting Nandos again. Too expensive for not so much food. I’d rather go else where.

It does mark the end of my girlfriend picking restaurants. Last South African place she picked, Spur, ranks up there as the single worst meal ever, closely followed by the Eddie Rockets we went into straight afterwards. That really was just a bad night though and I was happy to get home and have some cereal. You can NOT burn cereal when using cold milk!

Acronis Backup, a great tool. Backs up files. Lets you set a real schedule (Windows take note). New one seems to compress your older backup files to save space. Forces you to buy new products with every new version. Does not reply to emails outside of maintenance contracts (which you can not renew). Makes it hard to upgrade.

What? Hold on a second. Maybe something is amiss here.

Some Background

I’m a user off Acronis Backup products for close on 18 months now. I’ve been using the TrueImage corporate product. And I’ve been reasonably happy with it, but then I haven’t used it to do any full restores. I did try to pull a large file from a backup in the past. But that didn’t work. it repeatedly crashed while trying to do so. Support, who responded at the time since my maintenance contract was in date, weren’t much help. If the file was critical, I’d have been pissed. Luckily it wasn’t, and a few days and another disk later, I managed a full disk restore, mounted the new disk as an external drive, and then copied the file off. Painful.

Wonderful Search…but only for home users

The lately problem with restoring came from me needing to find a folder on my desktop that I knew existing sometime 5 months ago. All fine I thought, I’ll do a search of the files and it’ll show up. The product doesn’t support searching? Oh your HOME product does but your business one does not. Fine so. I’ll “test” the home version and see if I can switch to that. So in goes the trail version on a blank machine. The initial search looks promising. Finds a few text files in the first backup. I’ll leave it search and see if it can find the files I’m after.

A day later, Windows is still searching, still reading files, sort of, but no results. Watching the accesses, it is bouncing through the individual files in sequence, but then repeating. The Windows search service had also crashed and was unable to index inside the TIB files.

How about Google? They can search everything! And yes, there is an iFilter for Google Desktop. But, and there always is a but, it won’t search the archives either. It craps out.

Again, luckily, I managed to find the files I needed by browsing through a few days in June looking at the desktop each time. Can’t say I’d like to do that for something that went missing randomly.

Upgrades

I don’t know if they make this purposefully hard or not, but finding an option to upgrade took time. Hell I can’t even remember where it was now. All I remember was that the upgrade from the old TrueImage to the new Backup10 costs MORE than buying the home version outright as a new customer. And to add insult, the Home Version has more features, not that you can be sure they work either.

Looking at the upgrades began due to the fact that TrueImage does not work on Windows 7. It has just been added to the DoNotExecute list that Microsoft have in the OS. And it was added by Acronis. There is a way around this list, and everyone who has bypassed it has had NO problems with the program. We can only guess that Acronis have had some reason as to why they did this. Of course it would have nothing to do with their new product coming out. A new product that may or may not actually support Windows 7. The Home one does, but I wanted business style products.

When I didn’t find the upgrade option or any mention of it, I did email Acronis via my customer area. They even replied with one of those auto replies to say the email had been received. All I wanted to know was if the product was supported on Windows 7 and if it could be fixed. If not, what was the upgrade path so I could do it.

Conclusions

Having to wait over a week and counting for a reply to upgrade has left a bad taste in my mouth. It reminded me of the past experiences of the product and it failing.  Also being unable to renew the maintenance support after the initial 12 months is worse. But more so since they operate in a 14-16 month product release cycle going on other people I’ve talked to. That would only be the case to case people to not get product updates under their maintenance agreement and be forced to upgrade or buy the brand new product each time.

It is the lack of support that as sealed the deal for me. TrueImage has been uninstalled from my laptop (not that it worked since I swapped to Windows 7). I’ve already begun searching for alternatives. The inBuilt Windows Backup may do the trick if I can get it to run on weekdays only. One I am itching to trial is inSync by a company called Druvaa. I’ve been testing their new Server backup tool and am VERY impressed with it. So something like this would be overkill for personal use, but it may work. Especially with the dedupe, it may make it a good option. Time will tell. All that is sure is Acronis will not be getting any more of my money, or any from any of the companies I work for. Their loss.

Through one of the feeds I watch I came across a story of a woman who sings to herself while working in a supermarket.

How could this make the news you ask? Well the Performing Right Society in the UK, the group who collects royalties, decided to contact her and threaten so sue her if she didn’t get a performance licence. She laughed thinking it was a joke. Funnily apparently it wasn’t. They were actually serious about wanting to sue her.

Where they see the gain is beyond me? Sue her for what exactly? She doesn’t make money from it. It isn’t even her job. But yet they tried…and then relented to public pressure once it became public knowledge.

Really you have to wonder what is going on in the music industry. Monopolies are a bad thing and I completely understand why even artists don’t like supporting the man!

Full article available here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/8317952.stm

For those who have never done a support job, it probably isn’t really very obviously. Even for those who have done phone support, it may not have occurred. Currently I’ve been dealing with a lot of support issues via email and via ticket system and a crazy pattern has come up.

For about 20% of the problems reported, they do not get fixed, and the user in question never comes back.

Think about this for a second, a person goes to the hassle of emailing a problem in, and then doesn’t want to get it fixed. Maybe in some cases, they just found it easier to ignore? Who knows? But the pattern is really showing itself every time I go clear off old open tickets. It is probably a good sign that we need a “awaiting customer” customer state like so many other systems.

Customer: Hi, I’m having a problem with X.
Me: Could you describe the problem so I can fix it please?
…..

Customer: Hi, my application is running strange.
Me: Please call me whenever suits you so I can dial into the computer to fix this.
…..

Customer: Hi, my Y isn’t working. It does Z.
Me: Can you tell me when is ok for me to test the fix?
…..

In the case of the last one, the user reported a problem with his phone. Very strange forward one too one I could run 2-3 test calls. However no reply when asking when it would be ok to fix.

So maybe we need a challenge on submitting a ticket to the system? Are you sure you really have this problem?

Or perhaps a disclaimer? Fixing this may require more than just this email?

Someday hopefully we can read peoples minds and understand what they want, although since they usually do not actually know what they want, that probably won’t help either.