spugbrap’s blog

News/Info:

My at&t wireless service has been horrible for the past 3 days, and I am not alone. My wife and several friends in my neighborhood (in Bristow, VA) have been having the same issues. We are not able to reliably make or receive calls or text messages. Details on the problems we’ve been having are below in the My Story section.

I finally called 611 for at&t customer service, this evening, and the Customer Service Representative (CSR) told me that this issue is affecting quite a few customers. She rattled off a list of states that were reporting these issues, and although the list may not have included every state in the Northeastern United States, it definitely included most of them. I can say, for sure, that DC, Maryland, and Virginia were on the list, since those are the ones I was listening for.

The CSR found as much information as she could, for me, from her computer and from other reps. As of 5:25pm EDT on 4/13/2008, 3200-something minutes had passed since they first learned of the issue (note: There are 1440 minutes in one day). Although she couldn’t tell me when the problem might be resolved, she said that it’s a “priority” and they’re working on it. For what it’s worth, she told me that our 911 service was still fully functional.

If it’s affecting people in that many different states, I figure that means potentially millions of customers may be without reliable voice and SMS service. The outage does not seem to affect all areas, though, but I know it at least covers about a 5 mile radius around my house. So, the actual number of at&t customers affected may be a lot smaller, if it’s just a bunch of small areas that are experiencing these problems.

My Story:

My cell phone started having issues late Friday night (4/11/2008), but at first I thought it was just my phone acting up. I just upgraded the OS on my AT&T 8525 (HTC Hermes) to Windows Mobile 6 last week, and it’s had a few minor issues every day.So, when a friend of mine IMed me and said they kept getting sent straight to voicemail when calling my mobile number, I figured my phone was just being stupid. So, I tried making an outgoing call, but it just kept saying “Dialing” and could not seem to connect.

I checked my signal strength, and saw that I had only 1 bar. Usually, in my house, I have 3-4 bars and my cell phone works just as well as the landline. So I went outside, to see if my signal would improve. I think it went up to 2 bars or something, and after a couple tries, I was able to call out. But, the call was very broken up and staticky–pretty much useless.

Still thinking it could be my phone’s fault, I went back inside, turned off the phone, and removed the battery and SIM card. I left it that way for a few minutes, since that was one of the troubleshooting steps that a Cingular CSR had be perform when I had some kind of problem last year

After about 5 minutes, I blew the visible dust out of the back of my phone, put it back together, and turned it on. When it was done booting, I still had only 1 signal bar, but I tried to make a call anyways. As expected, it was still not able to connect, and when I told my friend to try calling me again, they said it was still going straight to voicemail.

Oh well, it was late at night, and I needed to go to bed anyways. I didn’t really need to use my phone, so I just hoped it would work better in the morning.

On Saturday, my family and I planned to go out and have a pretty busy day with some friends. I ended up having the kids at home while Lacey went out with her friends Jena and Anne. It was a beautiful day out, so my kids and I went outside and planted some flowers (I tried to call Lacey to find out where, exactly, to plant them, but could not get a call through, so the kids and I just kinda used our best judgement for planting locations.), then took care of some long-overdue outside work (cleaning plant debris off the deck and treehouse).

We were expecting Dallin and Xander to come over eventually, to hang out while the wives were out shopping. I could not seem to get ahold of Dallin, though. When I tried to call him (from my landline), it went straight to voicemail. When I tried to send a text message, the message stayed in the Outbox for longer than usual, then popped up an error saying that it was unable to send.

I retried it a few times, and eventually got it to send, after about 10 minutes or so. I didn’t get a reply, though. About a half hour later, I tried to text him again, but had the same difficulties. A few minutes later, though, I received 2-3 messages from Dallin. Apparently he didn’t receive any of my messages when I sent them, but they had just come through all at once. Along with those messages from Dallin, I also received one from Lacey, which had a timestamp of about 45 minutes before. I tried to reply to Dallin and Lacey, but still could not get messages to go out without several retry attempts.

By this time, my kids were bored out of their minds, and we were all wondering what we should do. I eventually managed to get a voice call to Dallin, and by talking fast and repeating ourselves, we were able to have a short conversation, despite the fact that the call quality was horrible and static dominated the conversation. The gist of the conversation was that they were at their house, and we were going to come over.

So, the kids and I went over to Dallin’s house. We wanted to go out and do something fun, like go to the park and/or Chuck E Cheese’s. The girls had been out for quite a while, though, so we wanted to coordinate with them before going out anywhere. Of course, we were not able to effectively communicate with them. Thankfully, they arrived at Dallin’s house shortly after we did.

We had more trouble communicating with one another that evening (from the park, Burger King in Gainesville, etc.), and still more on Sunday. It’s been quite frustrating for all of us. We take our cell phone service for granted, since it’s usually pretty reliable. Jena and Dallin don’t actually have a landline, anymore, so they are pretty much cut off from the world right now when they’re at home (or anywhere near home).

I noticed that when we took the kids to their swim lessons in Manasass, Sunday evening, our phones worked just fine. We still couldn’t talk/message with Jena and Dallin, though, since they were at home. This is the point when I realized that the service problem seemed to be confined to a 5 mile radius around our neighborhood.

While the kids were swimming, I went ahead and called at&t, which brings me back to where this post started: Widespread outage, no ETA for a fix.

I’ll post updates when I find out anything more. Hopefully this entry is useful for some of those at&t customers that have been having similar frustrations. I was surprised that when I Google searched the web, news, and blogs, I did not find anything about this outage, even though it covers a wide area and has been happening for about 3 days now.

I was trying to register to take a CLEP exam, to earn some credits and work towards finishing my degree at University of Phoenix, but I had trouble with a couple questions on the registration form. Question #22 on the CLEP registration form asked for information about the “Score Recipient”, which, in my case, is University of Phoenix. But the form asked for a “Code No.” and “Institution Name and Address”.

Here is the appropriate information, according to my academic counselor. She said it’s the only “Code No.” and “Institution Name and Address” that anyone needs, when trying to have any test scores (not just for CLEP tests) sent to UOP:

CLEP TEST CENTER ADMISSION FORM

22. Score Recipient:

Code No. 014593

Institution Name and Address:

Phoenix-Uopc-Student Services AA-K101
1221 N. College Ave
Tempe, AZ 85281

---

Okay… I just had to share that information publicly, since it was rather difficult for me to find. Now, I’ll discuss how hard it was for me to find it.

Well, I couldn’t find the information in any of the CLEP-related emails and documents that my academic counselors have sent me, over the past few years, so I searched on the UOP student website. I couldn’t find the code number, and did not know which of UOP’s addresses was the one to have test scores sent to. Since UOP has campuses all over the US (and beyond?), as well as a particularly large online presence, I didn’t know whether the scores should be sent to my local campus, or the main Phoenix, AZ campus, or what.

When I looked up UOP on the College Board’s website, I found a code number, and two addresses: some kind of main address, and the admissions office; both of which were in Arizona. I didn’t know which one to have the scores sent to.

So, I emailed my academic counselor, giving her the information I’d found, and asked which address to use. I was feeling impatient, though, because I’ve been procrastinating this CLEP stuff for a *very* long time, and was so close to finally dealing with it. So, I kept looking for the info, myself.

The main UOP website was not very useful, but I did run across some kind of “Chat with someone NOW” link, so I tried that. When I asked the person for the info that I needed, he was not sure, so he asked for my phone number, called me, and conferenced me in with my academic counselor. I felt bad for nagging her, since I had just sent her that email so recently, but she was able to find the information that I needed.

Hopefully the information is correct, and hopefully others will have an easier time finding it, now. I’ll post some sort of follow-up, to let you know how things go with my CLEP registration, as well as the subsequent score reporting.

I’m becoming increasingly aware of usability flaws, as time goes by. I’m a professional web application developer, and tend to work on the presentation layer most of the time, so it makes sense that I pay close attention to user interfaces. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on the subject, but it is something I’m very interested in/passionate about.

But, it’s becoming more of a curse, kind of like the way typos jump out and punch me in the nose, whenever I encounter them. Actually, it’s very much like that. When I run across confusing instructions, misleading button labels, dead ends (pages that don’t include any navigation controls to get back to where I need to be), or any other UI elements that don’t make sense to me, I want to fix them!

Unlike typos, though, I feel like I have a better chance of enacting a change by reporting usability flaws, so I’d like to start emailing companies’ customer service/tech support teams about this kind of stuff.

This requires several steps, though:

1. track down the correct people to contact (may or may not be trivial… depends on the site)
2. write up descriptions of the issues, in a way that the recipients will be able to understand (optionally may involve screenshots, URLs, steps to reproduce, etc)
3. suggest potential solutions/improvements (optional)

As this seems like an awful lot of unpaid time/labor, I think I’m going to start by posting some of this stuff here, on this blog, so I will have it handy if/when I’m ready to deal with the companies directly. That way, I can just post a few quick  notes/screenshots immediately, and can deal with some of the details later, if I feel like dealing with it. Unless it’s something I encounter repeatedly, or something that’s really easy to explain, I’m not sure how often I’ll actually follow through. But many companies keep tabs on the blogosphere, so there’s a slight chance they’ll run across it without me having to actually tell them directly. That would be ideal!

An added benefit of posting these things here is that other people (like you!) will be able to comment on them, and perform a bit of sanity checking for me. You can tell me if I’m overreacting, or missing something obvious. Or, you can chime in and say “I’ve run into that, too, and it bugs the heck out of me!” Or maybe it’s a common gripe, and you know of a GreaseMonkey script that addresses the problem. In any case, comments are always welcome!

I’ve had a sticky note on my cube wall for almost a year now, but it keeps falling off, and the information is not useful in my everyday work now anyways, so I decided to post it here and throw the sticky note away.

First, the formulas:
Pixels (x-axis) = PBU / 4.571429
Pixels (y-axis) = PBU / 4

Second, some 4NT aliases that use the formulas:
pxc=echos %@eval[%@int[%@eval[%1/4.571429]]+
%@if[%@eval[%@int[%@eval[(%1/4.571429-
%@int[%@eval[%1/4.571429]])*100]]] gt 50,1,0]] >clip:

pyc=echos %@eval[%@int[%@eval[%1/4]]+
%@if[%@eval[%@int[%@eval[(%1/4-
%@int[%@eval[%1/4]])*100]]] gt 50,1,0]] >clip:

Finally, an explanation:
I was doing some PowerBuilder to Jasper Reports conversion manually last year, and this meant creating new reports in iReport (a GUI front-end for JasperReports), and creating all the various column headers/data fields/groupings/etc. I could have just eyeballed it, visually comparing the old report to the new one, and being content with “looks about the same”, but I’m a bit too anal for that.

I wanted to make each element the exact same size and place it at the exact same {x, y} coordinates. The problem was that the old version of PowerBuilder I was using would only give me these attributes (width, height, x, y) in some funky unit of measurement called PowerBuilder Units (PBU). I researched PBU for quite a while, hoping to find a formula to make the conversion simple. But, from what I read, these units are designed to adjust to the platform that the report is being created or viewed on, or something like that.

There was a way to make PowerBuilder show me the values in pixels, but it involved a multi-step process with multiple mouse clicks, menu selections, etc. for every element, which was just too annoying. So, I ended up creating a new element in a PowerBuilder report, and giving it dimensions that were powers of 10, so I could then switch to the pixel view one time (for just this one test element), and derive a formula for the unit conversion. I think I created one or two more elements with much higher and much lower values, to make sure the formula was actually linear, and it was.

I ended up coming up with the two formulas (shown above), which I promptly stuck on a sticky note for easy reference. I also made some 4NT aliases (also shown above), to make the calculations more convenient. This allowed me to simply paste the PBU values into my 4NT window, using an alias like: “pxc 375“, and the pixel value would be copied to my clipboard for easy pasting into iReport.

One more thing to note is that, for some reason, some (but not all?!) of the values needed to be reduced to 3/4 scale. I don’t remember exactly why, now, but there was some sort of pattern as to which values required scaling. I had a few more 4NT aliases for these cases:
scale34c=echos %@eval[%@int[%@eval[%1*0.75]]+
%@if[%@eval[%@int[%@eval[(%1*0.75-
%@int[%@eval[%1*0.75]])*100]]] gt 50,1,0]] >clip:

px34=scale34 %@eval[%@int[%@eval[%1/4.571429]]+
%@if[%@eval[%@int[%@eval[(%1/4.571429-
%@int[%@eval[%1/4.571429]])*100]]] gt 50,1,0]]

py34=scale34 %@eval[%@int[%@eval[%1/4]]+
%@if[%@eval[%@int[%@eval[(%1/4-
%@int[%@eval[%1/4]])*100]]] gt 50,1,0]]

I hope this is useful to someone. I wish I could have found these simple formulas posted somewhere last year, even if they required a disclaimer like this one: I will not claim that these formulas are correct in all cases, since I do not completely understand PBUs. But, I can say that they worked for me, for every element on every report that I converted, and the formula was consistent on 3 different machines that I tried it on, which all had different screen resolutions (among other differences).