This didn’t sit well with the bossman, to say the least. He gave me the contact info for our sales rep, whom I promptly told, “bullshit”. Here’s the email I wrote– names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Good afternoon SALES REP, here’s what we have going on.

One of the main forms we use in APPLICATION is “KY Owensboro NP-1″, which is the Net Profit License Fee return for the City of Owensboro and Daviess County Fiscal Court. This is available online at http://www.owensboro.org/sites/default/files/finance/Net_Profit_Return.pdf. In APPLICATION, this is just one page, but the version available on the City’s web site also has several worksheet pages attached before the instructions section meant to be linked back to the first page.

If you take a look at “KY Owensboro NP-1A” (Amended Net License Fee), you will find that it is the same as the worksheets after the first page of KY Owensboro NP-1, with the word “Amended” added where necessary.

I have called APPLICATION support twice over the past couple of weeks and everyone I have spoken to has been very helpful. The editors insist these additional pages are not part of the return, but rather the instructions, and the one page already in APPLICATION is current and correct. No one at this firm disagrees with that, but the return form is nigh useless without these additional sheets. The impression I get from the editors’ response forwarded to me by SUPPORT REP this morning is not what I would expect from professionals who are there to help us and make our jobs easier. A lack of an update to this form is negatively impacting our firm’s productivity and greatly diminishing the value we see in APPLICATION.

If you could help us get an updated form into the software, I and many of my colleagues here would appreciate it very much.

Today I received an email telling me the form would be updated next week. Moral of the story: if you’re unhappy with something, talk to your sales rep. It’s their ass on the line and they will get shit DONE.

Hey, check out that date.

Hopefully this is a sign of things to come this year. We have had a few years of relative dormancy and hopefully 2009 is more active. I need some adventure in my life!

This is what I’ve been doing the past few hours. I know I’ll pay for it dearly in the essence of that I’ll not get any sleep, but it’s pretty cool. I’ve been poring through FCC records all night looking at the owners and locations of all communications towers in the area. It started when I was researching license ownership of the cell phone frequency bands around here (mainly out of disbelief that Boonville, Indiana, population 3, has 3G in the middle of a cornfield and we don’t). AT&T owns the license to the 850MHz band, Alltel in fact has the 1900MHz band. AT&T apparently needs both to deploy 3G, as I noticed while researching locations that actually had 3G. Anyway, back to the story at hand, this ASR database has the location, owner, and height of every tower in the nation. As I was looking at the list of towers licensed to Owensboro, I decided to plug the values into Google Earth and see what I got. Most impressive and lifelike was the array of towers behind Time Warner Cable, shown in the image above. (Click it for something bigger.) That’s cool and all, but you learn a few things, like the fact that AT&T actually owns that tower right behind Ohio Valley 2-Way Radio out on 54, while Ohio Valley 2-Way Radio’s tower is actually about a mile down the road behind Highland Elementary. Speaking of AT&T owning towers, they own all their own towers (as “NEW CINGULAR WIRELESS PCS LLC”), while carriers like Verizon rent them from a company called Crown Castle International. Kenergy also has towers sprinkled throughout the county, and there are apparently two towers with two different owners on Fulton Drive spaced 1/10 of one second of longitude from each other. Drive by on the 60 bypass, and you see only one. The city of Owensboro owns the tower on Police Hill and even though Regent Broadcasting does own that behemoth tower on Frederica behind their studio, it’s actually the backup transmitter according to their FCC license. The primary transmitter is near Utica and is much taller at 320 meters compared to the one we see, which stands at 130.8 meters.

Anyway, that’s enough of me boring the crap out of you with this meaningless drivel. At least I thought it was cool.

This is how I look at what’s coming. I have KML files of the NWS warning polygons and several assorted radar images loaded into Google Earth, including storm relative motion and wind velocity data. (Download here.) This is cool because if you’re into that thing you can be just like the people on TV that zoom in on towns and show the little polygons and whatever. 

I just remembered that I posted almost the exact same thing almost two years ago but the images that went with it have been lost somewhere.

It’s kinda like a hybrid of Guitar Hero and Tetris for the PC, but you choose music out of your own collection to “surf” to. You fly this spaceship-looking thing on a three-lane road, weaving in and out of colored blocks (called cars) and picking some of them up. Your ship hovers over a grid of spaces and once you pick up a block, it gets placed in this grid. Get three blocks of the same color touching and they’ll disappear, giving you points. The game generates a track for each song in your collection. Mellow songs or parts of songs will make the track go uphill and you’ll go slowly. Intense songs will be a fast-paced trip to hell weaving in and out of traffic at high speed. I’ve only played a demo but once I buy this game, I’ll write more.

Note: While I was writing this blog entry and referenced Tetris, it prompted me to look for my favorite Tetris clone, Quatris II. How happy I was to see that the developer now offers the full version for free. I remember playing this on DOS 6 when I was little. This is just as good as Commander Keen 4, I swear.

P4220100, originally uploaded by nedrubwerd.

Last night, I drove to Evansville to see Barack Obama speak at Roberts Stadium in Evansville. I took a few pictures, and people have been swarming to see them.

I sat there for several hours just to hear Senator Obama speak for about 15 minutes. It was worth it, and I think Cameron is an Obama convert now. You really have to go see this guy speak to really appreciate his views and plans for America as our next president.

M-m-mouse is outta wack

I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T Geek, fix it fo’ me man
I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T Geek, fix it fo’ me

Come to yo’ house
They wire up ya car
Tune up jobs, replace yo’ motherboard
If you ain’t got no sound, it keeps shuttin’ down
If you ain’t got no sound, it keeps shuttin’ down

I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T Geek, fix it fo’ me

Been hacked? Just relax, they’ll fix ya blue screen
Router, hubs, IP, get ‘em mega mega clean
Call ‘em on the cellular if ya got Windows ME
Can fix anything, even Token Ring

If the popups ’bout to make you go insane
Give a ring, get your Wi-Fi to extra far range
Printer tools, backup tools, even make your web page
yoursite.com, it’ll be all the rage

Corrupt database? Let’s take a look
We’ll give you the services off the hook
Just call 215-4290
‘Cause man, Windows 95 has got to go

(break)

I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T Geek, fix it fo’ me man
I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T Geek, fix it fo’ me

Come to yo’ house
They wire up ya car
Tune up jobs, replace yo’ motherboard
If you ain’t got no sound, it keeps shuttin’ down
If you ain’t got no sound, it keeps shuttin’ down