I recently moved to California from Atlanta for work, and had to make the hard decision — which van lines should be used to do the [not so] heavy lifting. I did extensive research online and had 5 on-site estimates made for the move, which ranged from $1800 to over $5000 (seriously). The discrepancy in estimates is a laughable yet disturbing commentary on the moving business itself. So, I chose the company, a local representative for Atlas Van Lines in Atlanta, for the move, as their price was about mid-range, and seemed fairly competent and responsive. One criteria for all the movers – I grilled them on moving two 1970′s Vespa motorscooters. “Everything else is replaceable,” I said over and over again, “except the scooters. I can have them crated if necessary.” “No problem, we do this all the time” was the response.

Read on for the move and the damage (and the response so far).

Moving day arrived. I looked out for the van, which judging by the promotion materials was to be driven by a professional looking guy with a few helpers, all wearing uniforms and logo caps. The van arrived, pretty much on time. The one helper I saw first, a big guy but not huge, just wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The driver came around the truck and was a grubby looking guy wearing kind of nasty looking shorts and a t-shirt draped over his gut which had peep holes that allowed views of the same. Once again, I expressed the importance of the well being of the Vespas. Once again, “not a problem.” I opted for the $25,000 valuation [insurance supposedly] to cover the move.

The goods arrived in San Francisco a little over a week later. This time a different helper and the driver, wearing I think the same thing as before. Everything seemed to be coming out of the truck just fine. The rubbermaid storage tubs wear looking fairly brutalized (which should have been a hint), but they mostly contained clothing or other things undamageable. Thankfully, I had packed with paranoia – several of the boxes were nearly destroyed as well, but the contents were ok. Then the mattress came off the truck. For some reason there was petroil (gas oil mix) on one corner of the box, which had soaked through a little bit — again, not a huge deal, but a little weird. The scooters were finally rolled off (last on the truck, last off, for some reason). Both scooters sustained significant body damage. On the Primavera, the front fender was sandwiched, the leg shield has several small dents up and down as did the floor, and the paint was damaged in several places. The rear rack and spare tire holder was dangerously loose – not sure yet if the body is cracked where it is mounted. The Rally 200 has crash bars and rear cowl protectors, but nonetheless suffered a sandwiched front fender, damaged chrome and trim, several dents and fairly serious scratches, and the mechanism holding on the right rear cowel was damaged to the point that it was knocked off and broken. That was October 30, 2006, I reported the damage immediately.

On October 31, I received the claims form dutifully and returned it to the office in Atlanta. On November 3, I received confirmation of the receipt of my claim by the national Atlas Van Lines department. It was then up to me to arrange dealing with the appraisal company in San Francisco, who had me move the scooters up to First Kick Scooters. (Thanks to the folks at First Kick for helping me deal with this whole thing.) The appraisal company has been pretty responsive, and due to the nature of the claim, allowed First Kick to do the appraisal, since they were to be the ones doing the work. The total for both scooters with body work, paint, replacement parts, and labor to over $7500, to give you an idea of the damage.

About two weeks ago, around the 5th of February, I was notified by the national claims person (after several calls a week) that they were sending the estimate back to the local Atlanta office again. Ridiculous, right? What “sending” meant was that the local Altanta office was now calling the appraisors again to have them send all the data they sent to the national office to Atlanta. So here is the chain I am now waiting on appraisor–Atlanta office–national office. I will continue to post updates more regularly. The key to getting this done at all is persistence, I know; unfortunately, I now have to catch the Atlanta office claims person and the national claims person by surprise in order to get any information out of them, as they no longer return my calls. I am waiting now to hear back from the appraisors again to make sure that they have provided everything they need to so that I can hold the Atlanta office accountable for progress.

The lesson to the story so far? Don’t trust Atlas Van Lines to protect your belongings. They clearly believe that it is not their job. If you are moving a Vespa or perhaps a vintage motorcycle, have it crated by a professional crating company. It will end up tacking on another $500-$1000 to your move, but it will be less that you have to worry about. $1000 if you can afford it at all is worth not having to deal with poor customer service for over 3 months.

Unfortunately, the jerks that delivered them took the shipping bolts for the washer with them. The shipping bolts are supposed to be left behind, and, according to one person that I spoke with at Best Buy, if the bolts are taken away at the time of delivery they are thrown away, so if you need them, there is no way to get them from Best Buy. I am moving these things across country, and according to my friendly LG representative from today, moving the washer without the shipping bots voids the warranty. Best Buy totally dropped the ball on this one. They were completely unhelpful on the phone and could only recommend that I call LG, even though we have a warranty with Best Buy for the set. Best Buy’s customer service in my case was POOR. (just typing that a few times for the search engines).

The LG customer service, on the other hand, was great. I had read some bad reviews of their customer service before and I have to say today contradicted that for me. I have to pay for the bolts, of course, but they are shipping them overnight to me so that I can prepare the washer for the movers coming on Friday (tomorrow if Thursday). If you end up without your shipping bolts for your LG, call the customer service number and explain the situation and they will hook you up with the parts line – where you can order the new bolts.

I am here instead of workiing on the last of my packing because my cable internet is supposed to be on until Saturday (today is Wednesday). Someone at Comcast made the decision to go ahead and send out the technician today to remove the filter from my line (or whatever the line was they gave me) because they had an opening in his schedule. They sure as hell didn’t send someone out 3 days early to set up my service in the beginning. Comcast’s service has been somewhat spotty, although download is pretty fast, and this I can only say unfortunately, is par for the course with this company that has a rather poor record in my book.

How to deal with it. Ok, its been a rough week so far, so this kind of pissed me off. I would have let it slide and gone off the network for a few days, and just come to a place like Octane for printing out my plane boarding pass and whatever other online errands I needed to run. So, I asked to speak to the supervisor, who apologized and has someone comoing out to turn it back on tomorrow morning, at a rate slightly lower than I would have paid for keeping the service on the whole time. Not optimal, but acceptible at this point (because there is no other choice…).

Ok, well, in the interest of science, I checked for theatres and I’m a loser. I will still be far from a showing theatre when it comes out…how far is it to East Ridge, Tennessee from Atlanta?

However, I recently discovered that the Remote Desktop protocol, which you can turn on in your system sharing preferences, is roughly equivalent to VNC. OSX VNC is great, but has historically been problematic on my old G4, for whatever reason, so it was nice to be able to take it out of the equation. I can still connect using Chicken of the VNC, which can still discover my G4 via Bonjour, and in fact, the performance is a tad better.

Why can’t any person living in Atlanta? And…I’m not talking about one of those signs on the side of the road that says you paid to adopt a half a mile of highway. I’m talking street names here. Honestly…

Norman Berry in East Point turns into Bobby Brown Parkway. BBPkwy turns into Toffie Terrace, which pretty much dead ends into the Atlanta airport…

Thought I’d take a shot of this mug that we had salvaged from our house a couple of years ago which has been sitting in the garage since then until I was cleaning some stuff out of there the other day. Unfortunately it’s a bit cracked, but it still holds its liquid.

In the news, today saw Jobs’ 2006 WWDC keynote, in which several things were announced and alluded to. One of the interesting things that came out of his talk apparently had something to do with I think the word was “spaces,” referring to the ability in Leopard (due out by next spring) to have multiple work spaces running at the same time (sounds familiar to those of us who remember the BeOS). Anyhoo, with all the fuss about virtualization and dual-booting on the Mac, it makes me wonder if they are working toward their own brand of virtualization integrated into the OS, or if they are considering perhaps buying out (or driving into the ground) Parallels.

In other virtualization news, apparently Microsoft decided to kill future production of a universal binary version of Virtual PC, thereby stepping aside in the Mac virtualization department. VMware, on the other hand, announced today that they will be bringing the Workstation product to the Mac OS, which they will purportedly be demoing at the Apple developer conference as well.

I am now typing this entry on an installation of Ubuntu flavored Linux in a virtual machine running on a Dell [L]atitude loner machine running Windows XP (I’m diggin the Ubuntu much more than the XP) The Linux machine itself is the secure Browser Appliance that can be found on the VMware site. Until I receive my permanent machine (hello mactel), I’m stuck with this little guy that sort of feels like I could crunchily fold it up and stick it in my back pocket. This is my second week at VMware, where I am working on the thin client, the web interface to the Virtual Center, which is the virtual server management layer of the VMware Virtual Infrastructure product suite. It’s a switch from the world of web marketing application work that I’ve been looking forward to; its also nice to be working for a company that is at the forefront of some big things in computing. I have to say, having spent the formative web bubble years on the East Coast, it’s interesting to go to work around the corner from the main HP headquarters and Xerox PARC. I’ll be heading back to take care of things in Atlanta at the end of the week and work remotely for a few months, but most of our stuff is being dropped off in Bernal Heights in SF tomorrow…

More later. And Flickr updates coming as soon as I get my new Mac…BTW – thanks to Less Rain for linking me up in their little blurb about using Eclipse and FDT…;)

Been a while in the making, but I’ve started migrating the plasticular inscriptor over to wordpress, as I have been able to find several nice plug-ins so far unavailable to moveabletype, such as code syntax coloring plugins.
In addition, wordpress is written in php, which I am a little more familiar with, and is a bit easier to work with on a limited level. I had originally started using moveabletype while working on pastiche magazine, and since that has gone into dormancy, I really don’t have the need for a system as complex. The full migration will probably take a few weeks, since my last day at avenuea-razorfish is this friday and the San Francisco move process begins soon… I am temporarily using a modified version of the Blix theme since it was one of the least painful ones for me to look at, and it will be evolving slowly into its final form starting this week. (which explains why it looks so crazy right now).

I had to do some research which didn’t really help me figure out a problem with setting up the WordPress blog with my Flickr account. I found many references to the problem that I was having, that Flickr could not find the API Endpoint (the xmlrpc.php file in WordPress) even though all my settings were correct. I eventually got it to work by choosing the MetaWeblogAPI Enabled blog option instead of the WordPress option. Of course, event though that still works, I’m not entirely sure that was the solution, as I can now also add this WordPress blog to my Flickr account as a WordPress blog…maybe its just flaky? I did read a couple of posts where people did say to just keep trying the correct settings many many times and eventually it would work…

From June 22: I used to work with some folks that have recently produced miniego.com. Its a little community avatar site. I would recommend NOT registering for this site, at least for a while. I checked it out in the interest of seeing what was up and registered yesterday, only to receive a spam filtered message today from my domain. As it turns out, something is going on there and the site is blasting every subscriber with the W32.Beagle.CQ@mm virus with the attachment called “Suzanna.zip”. Not too good. In addition, when I went to change my email address for my account on the site, I kept getting errors that prevented me from changing it, REALLY not too good. Anyway, just avoid it…at least for now. This message has been brought to you as a public service announcement by the letter “V”.

Yesterday I got my new Sony DSC-T5 camera that I purchased with my amazon credit card points (i.e. free). I wanted a portable little camera that could also take decent shots. So far, it seems to fit the bill. I will probably stop carrying the palm zire so much, although I will miss the crudsty quality of its photos. On another note, still haven’t had much time to do much with the Flickr API project I was working on, as we have been jet setting across the continent to find a place to live in San Francisco. Jenna starts at Google this month, and its looking like we’ll end up in Bernal Heights near Precita Park (and near Bernal Heights Park), but more to come…

On the satan tip, however, there is this one article that is a bit more apropos: http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news0606/666.html.

Took this yesterday at Tri-Cities high school in East Point — also known as the arts magnet school where Big Boi, André 3000 from Outkast went to high school. Interestingly enough, with all the talk about immigration in the news (specifically focusing on Mexican workers in the US), this sign on the fence to the football field was not accompanied by an English “No Trespassing” sign. (OK, not going to indulge the obvious pun “sign of the times” outside of parenthesis here.)

It’s the little things, ya know?

20040513120006_t300.jpg
Originally uploaded by intafon.

]]> http://www.plasticstare.com/plains/2006/04/09/flickr-up-to-date/feed/ 0 http://www.plasticstare.com/plains/2005/11/15/on-to-firenze/ http://www.plasticstare.com/plains/2005/11/15/on-to-firenze/#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2005 01:01:55 +0000 plains http://www.plasticstare.com/plains_wp/?p=56 13:35 – just finished writing the last w entries to catch up. We are now on the way to Firenze, which is a much more scenic route than that to Roma (although our train there was in the dark mostly – so now we are actually seeing what we missed visually on the last leg of that trip). We are passing mostly through grape filled farmland and rolling hills, with the occasional villa filled town.

That is not to say that it doesn’t sound like BOC, which it certainly does, albeit an evolution from earlier work. Less influential are the ’70′s era instructional 8mm films. BOC seem to be borrowing now from a more recent era in their lives, and the memories evoked aren’t quite as poignant and the messages are either less cryptic or buried deeper than in previous albums (have to listen more…); as a total geek, I’m also a little disappointed on the first couple of listens at the lack of math references (ah, what are ya gonna do?). The arrangements are, however, quite catchy and sonically rich, and the album as a whole does not disappoint — definitely worth a place in your permanent music collection.