As you may know, I worked for the Nordic part of the Thomas Cook Group. I was the O365 admin for a tenant with over 30,000 user accounts. And we ran the Azure AD Connect service for the entire group and had just moved to pass-through authentication with Seamless SSO. Although it was a royal pain sometimes to work in such a large company where even a minor change could take weeks to implement and get approval for from everywhere.
As you may also know, Thomas Cook Group filed for bankruptcy in October last year. And there was no advanced warning or anything about what was going to happen next. But for our part, we realised that we would (if the company survived) most likely be moving our Nordic business to a new O365 tenant so we began planning for that. Over the next few months a lot of stuff happened. The Nordic part of the group was sold off and started their own company NLTG and the old group was shutting down all parts of their business. Except the German part because they were backed by their government so they survived (more on that later).
When we got back after the Christmas break we were given a clear order to evacuate the tenant before end of February. Since we were a separate company and legal entity we were no longer entitled to share the old tenant which, even though it makes sense, pretty much lit a torch under our asses to get this done now. And we realised it wouldn’t be a pretty or a smooth operation, as I recall saying, “this is going to take a sledgehammer, not a scalpel!”. Fortunately I’m very used to sledgehammer my way to getting results. Yeap, thinking back to that SharePoint upgrade that was all over the place!
So there we were, less than 8 weeks to pull off a migration with 3,000 users, 5,500 mailboxes, 10TB of SharePoint data, 8TB of OneDrive data and 12TB of Exchange data. And this is how it went…
Identities : The building block of any good tenant is the identities. When we first planned for the migration our plan was to have a new on-prem AD that would be fed by.. well that’s irrelevant since there was no time for that. The only way forward was to use our existing on-prem AD. But the problem was that MSFT doesn’t support syncing your on-prem identities to two tenants. Why? I have no idea – I fully get how you wouldn’t want that in a production environment (since the UPN domain can only be valid in one tenant) but for a migration like this it would have solved a lot of headaches if we were allowed to do it like that. But nope, we really wanted to have Microsoft support for this. And we also had to retain our e-mail domains since we’re heavily dependant on the brand which is almost as Swedish as Ikea, at least in Sweden. So that presented us with the first big problem – pre-populating the new tenant with 3,000 user objects so we could start copying the data and when it was time to migrate and then play around with the UPN domains so the matching would work. But the first step was creating the 3,000 users as cloud only “onmicrosoft” accounts. This was done using powershell to export as much info on the users as possible (including “usagelocation” and “preferredlanguages” since we’re an org with offices from Thailand to Mexico!) and then powershell to recreate the users as closely as possible. Another step we had to take here was setting up a filter in Azure AD Connect that would only sync users to each tenant depending on the value of an extensionattribute. That way we could make sure no user was synced to both tenants at any time, although it did take alot of tinkering to get that logic working but fortunately Microsoft have documented how to do attribute filtering, so thanks for that.
Authentication: Remember how I said we’d just gone over to PTA for the old tenant? Well this little thing meant that as long as users were logging in to the old tenant (which we knew the Germany company would) we couldn’t use PTA for our users since it’s all based around a computer object in the AD forest with a Kerberos encryption key that’s tied to the tenant! So if we set up PTA for our new tenant that would change the key on the computer object and they wouldn’t be able to login anymore! So to solve this we did a “quick and dirty” setup of a temporary AD FS for our users to use based on domain. This was a surprisingly easy thing to do in Windows Server 2019 but it was an added “gotcha!” of this entire scenario!
SharePoint : The first problem with SharePoint was to determine which sites were relevant to keep and which weren’t. Our entire SharePoint was well over 20TB so we had to make sure to only copy over sites we knew were relevant to the Nordics business. But there’s no way of determining that without going through all the underlying permissions and groups to determine if “our” users are working on the site or not. It’s not like you can ask SharePoint to “give me all the sites that any user with the UPN domain @domain.se is working on”. Or maybe there is, I just didn’t have the knowledge to write that powershell at the time. Once that was done we used ShareGate to migrate all the SharePoint data. The biggest fear was that it wouldn’t be able to match the old identities with the new ones – which it did! I’m pretty sure it went by “DisplayName” to match them but we’re just very very thankful it did because that would have been a mess to sort out. The biggest issue I had with ShareGate was how unpredictable it was when it came to doing incremental copies, which was done through powershell. We split it up on 4 different servers with about 80 sites per server. Sometimes it could complete them all in 2 hours, sometimes it took 8 hours for one server, sometimes longer. During the weekend of the actual move it took well over 12 hours to complete which caused me a bit of unnecessary stress.
OneDrive : Since we already had a pretty nice “masterlist” of users that we would be migrating it was pretty easy to setup a CSV file to map “Old OneDrive -> New OneDrive” that we then used ShareGate to copy. That went pretty nicely although there were some instances of data not being copied over so we had to sort that our after the switch and people were missing a few files. Other than that the issue was the same as above – it was very unpredictable and I had to mess around with the queues on the weekend of the switch. We had one incident of a users OneDrive being almost empty but looking back at the old OneDrive is was empty too. So our theory there is that his OneDrive client must’ve been paused so we had to send that computer to the lab for data recovery – but that’s not ShareGates fault one bit!
Exchange : Oh joy! I was in charge of the Nordics business moving from on-prem to Online 3 years ago so I wasn’t looking forward to another move at all. After doing a quick check around for what tool to use (with our extremely limited budget – our company had gone bankrupt and we were still getting back on our feets!). It ended up being CodeTwo which was by far the cheapest alternative. But as the saying goes “you get what you paid for” and in this instance we paid for a software to move data from Mailbox A in Tenant X to Mailbox A in Tenant Y. And it did that job without much of an issue. There were still a lot of things to sort out around the move (like transport rules, conference rooms) but the big issue was just moving all the data. The biggest issue I had with that software was that they didn’t have a CSV import function when moving tenant->tenant! When moving on-prem -> tenant that wasn’t an issue, but tenant -> tenant, well the only way to enter a mailbox was to actually manually enter a mailbox! So we spent days entering 5,500 mailboxes and matching them with their new mailbox. A simply CSV import would’ve saved us days of work on this. My next issue with the software was when we were up to about 800 mailboxes per server on 7 servers, that really slowed the UI down. At the end it was so slow that when you started a queue for a incremental copy the UI would stop responding and you didn’t even know it was working until it was done and it just popped alive again.
Teams: Now Teams was the most interesting bit. Because Teams is based on so many technologies it was difficult to do a proper Teams migration. No matter how far we looked we just couldn’t find a tool that would migrate Teams with the channel/chats that also took the entire underlying SharePoint site! If you had other document libraries or data on the SharePoint site, then that was lost if you migrated the Team. But if you migrated the SharePoint site you will have lost the data in Teams that wasn’t in the default document library! So we made the choice of migrating the SharePoint sites since noone should have have posted anything business critical in a chat in a channel in Teams. Fortunately ShareGate comes with the ability to recreate O365 groups so all the groups got recreated and we only had to make the ones that were Teams into Teams manually, that was it. But it was a bit of a “unexpected behaviour” for ShareGate when it came to legacy sites (that were migrated from on-prem) that now had an O365 group, it simply wouldn’t recognise them as O365 groups or O365 Group sites and created them as legacy sites in the new tenant regardless. But that was easy enough to handle afterwards.
Licenses: This was another headache but fortunately not mine! Since our old license agreement with Microsoft was tied to our old company we couldn’t use that. And since our company was brand new we had no credit score anywhere so Microsoft couldn’t just hand us 3,000 licenses and hope we’d pay. After a lot of back and forth we managed to get the licenses in place well enough to start the migration and begin copying all that data. But there was still the matter of support contract with Microsoft. There was alot of options floating around to try different support alternatives but in the end we agreed on a premiere support deal with Microsoft. Even though the paperwork got sorted and we were told on Friday January 31st that everything was done and we now had premiere support with MSFT it turns out that like a lot of things in O365, sometimes it can take a day or two for the wheels to turn and you’ll see how critical this became for us.
Additional headache: One headache we had was that we’re not only running a normal business, we’re also running an airline. And the pilots must be able to check their e-mail for any notices and warnings from the aviation authorities before takeoff. This may include stuff like “this aircraft model isn’t flight worthy so don’t fly this aircraft model” and “Iran just shot down a civilian aircraft, avoid their airspace”. Things like that is absolutely critical for the pilots to check for, so saying “e-mail will be down for a day” is completely unacceptable from that perspective. And we were supposed to retain all the e-mail domains, and a domain can only exist in one tenant at a time. So we had to figure out a way to handle this and move their accounts and e-mail domain as quickly as possible to avoid any flight delays because their e-mails isn’t working. (spoiler – their email was down for 90 minutes)
The plan: So the best plan we came up with was to start an incremental copy of all the SharePoint/OneDrive data first thing on the morning of Saturday February 1st. Then at about 18:00 CET we’d set automatic forwarding on everyone’s mailbox in the old tenant that would forward every mail to their new mailbox with the “onmicrosoft” address. That way we were guaranteed no mail would go missing in case of bad timings. Then we did an incremental copy of all mailboxes. We had done this in plenty of tests and it would only take 2 hours so we planned to start with the first most important domain for our airline at 21:00 CET, then when that was done continue with the largest domain we had (with about 800 users) and work our way through our list of about 10 domains.
The switch consisted of alof of steps since we weren’t allowed to sync an on-prem object to two tenants.
But… “no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force“.
How it played out: I woke up early on Saturday (at about 5) to start incremental copy of all the SharePoint / OneDrive data. Unfortunately Sharegate was a bit unpredictable in it’s behaviour so I had to move sites around in the queues to make it before 18:00 but make it I did. Then I ran the powershell to set the automatic forwarding and started the incremental copy of the mail. The team (4 engineers, 1 external SME/contractor and the project manager) met up at the office at about 20:00 in the evening for pizza and a last “go-no go” check for everything. And at 21:00 I started with our airline domain And by 22:30 it was all done, every user had the proper UPN, licens, login everything was good to go. And that’s when it started – the operations team in our airline said they couldn’t access their emails in the Outlook app on their phones or computers. We had ofcourse verified that it worked through the O365 portal so we knew everything worked. After troubleshooting this for about an hour we decided to log a Severity A case with Microsoft (at 23:30) and one of us would work on this case and the rest continue working with the other domains. That work with the other domains came to a halt for one of our largest domains which wasn’t removed from the ole tenant. No user had it in their UPN, no recipient used the domain, nothing. But the domain never got deleted, it was stuck in “pending”. So another severity A case to Microsoft (at about 00:30) and we proceeded with the next domain. At about 02 in the morning that domain did eventually go away by itself and we thought everything was good when our airline operations team (who’s responsibility it is to keep the planes flying, so I have the utmost respect for them and their challenges!) wanted us to do a rollback and try again at a later date. We spent about an hour with them arguing than a rollback wouldn’t solve this issue and we didn’t have time to try again next week since we had to evacuate the old tenant. Another argument was that this is a client issue and the mails are accessible through the web and we can get Microsoft to solve the client issue after. Fortunately we were able to convince them to proceed but now we’re at 03 int he morning and I had been working for 22 hours straight and I had no energy left in me so I tried sleeping for a bit. After 2 hours I woke up to cheers because now the Outlook clients in our airlines started to work so the biggest issue we had was solved and we could keep on with the remaining few domains.
At about lunch on Sunday morning we were all done with all domains and users and started to do the clean up job of on-prem systems no one knew about that had a EWS configured to the old tenant that no longer worked etc and that continued for days.
So where was Microsoft in this? As I mentioned our premier support deal with them got activated on the day before the switch. But that hadn’t replicated to all systems and instances of those systems in Microsoft so there was a big challenge even to get them to accept a SevA case from us. But we had two cases that managed to register as SevA cases with them during this switch and they weren’t helping us with either of them. The first case was regarding Outlook clients no longer being able to connect. Many blogs on many sites on the Internet says “when moving to a new tenant this may take a few hours”. In our case we were already up to hours and when creating new users we were able to connect to them immediately, but not the ones that had been switched and we didn’t see a reason why. This started to resolve itself after about 6 hours. And it wasn’t thanks to Microsoft doing anything on their side because they called me at about 5:30 on the sunday morning to say “sorry but we still haven’t been able to find any engineer to work on this case”. The other case we had with them was regarding the domain that wasn’t getting deleted. The called back on that issue also after it was resolved to ask us to verify the domain name because according to what they were seeing the domain was no longer in the old tenant so they obviously hadn’t done anything on their end in that case either.
Lessons learned:
SCENARIO
When executing SharePoint Online scripts you need to be connected to your “admin” site or the script will just fail if you’re not.
PROBLEM
When writing a script you can’t assume that you’re already connected to your SPO tenant and unlike the “msolservice” connect call you need to specify your “admin” URL which can be quite long. But sometimes you’re already connected in the Powershell session.
SOLUTION
Writing this little thing in the start of your script will check if you’re connected to the admin site and if not will call the connect-sposervice command with the URL already set.
# First we reset the sitecheck to avoid having an old result
$sitecheck=""
# This is the address of your SPO admin site
$adminurl = "https://[your tenant name]-admin.sharepoint.com"
# Now we try to get the SPOSITE info for the admin site
Try { $sitecheck = get-sposite $adminurl }
# If we get this server exception for any reason, the service isn't available and we need to take action, in this case
# write it to the console and then connect to the SPO service.
Catch [Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException]
{
Write-Host -foreground Yellow "You are not connected!"
connect-sposervice $adminurl
}
We’re having a major heatwave here in Sweden, so bad that even Pokemon Go are alerting me about it! I’ve heard it’s been the same a little all over the planet. And this reminds me of something that’s been on my mind ever since physics in college when we were discussing energy and how it can’t be created or destroyed, it can only be converted from one form to another. And this made me go around thinking how different things convert energy and it didn’t take too long to realise that so incredibly much of today’s society relies on stuff that converts energy to heat!
I mean, even if we disregard the entire greenhouse effect caused by gases, today’s society relies so much on things that create heat as a bi-product that we really can’t be too surprised when we get heatwaves like this. Nuclear power plants creates so much heat they need gazillion gallons of water to cool it, driving your car creates heat both in your car and the asphalt, using your computer creates heat, running your fridge and freezer creates heat, running the train creates heat, running your air conditioning unit to keep cool creates heat, most of the stuff we use today create heat – even your cellphone! And then there’s the fact that every single person is a walking radiator stuck at 37′ and now there are like 10 billion of us?
So yeah, I remember Trump’s tweet about how that cold day in Manhattan was proof there was no global warming – well this is most definitely proof that it’s a thing 🙂
This is going to be a wall of text. And 99% of the people I know aren’t even interested. But I’m writing this on behalf of every other SharePoint admin out there who are unfortunate enough to discover just how easy SharePoint is to break!
Little background: I’ve been working with SharePoint since about 2005. Not that long for some but long enough to know that after a few years of use a SharePoint farm has a few quirks in it and it’s a good idea to upgrade it. And you never upgrade an existing farm, you always start with a new fresh one and import all data! Now one of my jobs (!) is managing a 30k user corporate SharePoint – a business critical solution since all documentation are in there. And not only that, our entire BI solution is in there as well, complete with “PowerPivot” and “Reporting Services for SharePoint”… No pressure!
So now it was time to upgrade it from SP2013/SQL2014 to SP2016/SQL2016, including all BI solutions. We’ve gone through a “dev” environment, a “test” environment and even a “preprod” environment and everything went surprisingly well. There was ofcourse the usual glitches getting the BI features to work (and the S2S cert trust that is required for Excel with data source connection files now that Excel service moved out of SP to OOS!). But anyway, the preprod farm was so great that the plan was to take it into production. Our BI team didn’t see a big problem doing that in an afternoon on a weekday, whereas for me the biggest problem was the 1.5TB of data that needed to be shuffled and upgraded. And “even the best laid plans”, you know. I also knew that one of the biggest issue was network infrastructure which for a global company is so complex that the best way forward was to swap IP addresses of the servers so we wouldn’t have to change DNS or static IP routes anywhere, we’d just solve it at the load balancer level. So I managed to get a whole Saturday from the business to have SharePoint offline, but no more. After all, all documentation is in there!
That Saturday was last Saturday April 14th. I got up at 4am to start shuffling the data. By 7 that was done and I started upgrading the database with the normal “mount-spcontentdatabase”. Here was my first mistake (in hindsight). I had already written a script to do this, but that’ll come later. By 10 everything was loaded, upgraded and I proceeded to change IP addresses around and change it in the load balancer, then go through my long list of checks that normal user SP functionality works while our BI team were updating all of their things.
After lunch we had a “go/no-go” meeting and everything looked good. I also noticed at this point I had a case to create a new SharePoint site for a project, something I actually hadn’t tested since that’s not a “normal user SP functionality”. And that’s when the shit hit the fan! What I had missed thanks to my scripting was that one of the content databases had failed to upgraded and was now corrupt and when I wanted to create a new site it did it in that database since it was the “least used” and hence the error. “No problem, plan a) I’ll just delete this database”, right? Nope, SharePoint wouldn’t have it because the database wasn’t attached since it was corrupt. Yet I could see the sites in that database listed with get-spsite?
Tried a few things but couldn’t recover so I decided plan b) remove the web app and create a new and re-import/re-mount this corrupt DB, all other DB’s were already upgraded successfully so not a big operation. Well, SharePoint wouldn’t have that either – it couldn’t dismount this database because it was corrupt so I couldn’t remove the webapp! I was completely stuck with a broken web app that I couldn’t remove because of a content database that wasn’t mounted?!
So plan C) rename that webapp with the corrupt database and give it a nonsense URL so I could create a new web app with the proper URL. That seemed to work but when I tried importing a new backup of this content DB it didn’t import any of the site collections! .. digging around I could see that the sites in the broken webapp, with the new nonsense URL, still had the original URL! It couldn’t update them because… there was no content DB attached to them! I dug around in SharePoint Manager (which was designed for 2013 I know) but it kept crashing when I clicked any of the sites in the broken webapp.
So there I was with a broken web app with a corrupt contentdb with sites occupying the URL I needed to create our proper web app. Came to the conclusion that the config db was pretty much fucked at this point at now we’re at 2pm. Best option available to me at this point was calling Microsoft premiere support case with a severity A case. I’m pretty sure if I had gone for that they would have looked at it, made the same determination as me and said “since this is a farm not yet in production, I’d say the best way forward is to recreate the farm”. During that time our BI would be in SharePoint 2016 but the “big” web app in 2013 on separate IP addresses! God knows how the network would handle that and getting the engineers in India to change firewall routes in less than a week wasn’t that likely. Because rebuilding a new farm in production would take at least a week, right?…
After clearing it with my supervisor that this was indeed the best way to solve it NOW! All other options led to some unknown hellhole – going back was always a possibility no matter what.
I got a green light and Red Bull at about 3pm …
Basically I had done at least a weeks work in 7 hours and all in production environment!
The “Done!” mail got out at 9pm! Now I’m not one to brag, but any SharePoint admin must be impressed by that! Hell, even Scotty would be proud! I spent a few hours on Sunday cleaning up the mess and sorting out the BI issues (since this was a new farm there were a lot of BI configuration that was lost) but by Sunday 6pm everything was fully operational and I promptly went to be and slept like a baby. And one of the first things to hit me on Monday morning was “why is Managed Metadata empty” because yeah, in my haste I forgot that little thing ?
How was your weekend?
How can I make that statement this of all years, when the best Assasins Creed “in years” launched, best “Star Wars” game ever, sequal to “Shadow of Mordor”, a WWII “Call of Duty” and oh so many other great titles come out!? Well, bare with me…
You know I’ve always been a gamer, right? Ever since my dad dragged home the first “portable” computer in the 80’s and we were playing that terrible olympic Decathlon game, through the Commodore series (VIC20 -> C64 -> Amiga) all the way up till now, I’ve always played computer games. Never been much for consoles though but that’s a different story. And playing games have been pretty much the same for most of that time. But when “World of Warcraft” launched back in 2004 it was… a subscription!? $60 to buy the game plus $10 per month!? Well they pushed out content on content so I thought that was ok. Think I paid about $1300 for “World of Warcraft” all in all. That was for over 10 years of entertainment, pretty sweet deal if you ask me!
And being a Blizzard fanboy I’ve gone through their “Heroes of the Storm” and “Overwatch” too. One thing I never really liked about those games was the lootboxes. I didn’t mind it much, I even bought a HotS lootbox pack once, but I can’t say I liked it. But in Overwatch it was always just skins which made it more ok than in HotS when it was actual characters you needed. But I never actually bought HotS for $60 so still fine (I’ll give them a pass on the D3 AH because they took it down and said “our bad”). Then there’s been “gold edition” of games and DLC packs and stuff like that that ads value over time, but it’s always been optional.
But now it’s just getting a bit much. Like most other gamers out there I am so very frustrated at the new schemes coming out of Ubisoft, Activision and most of all EA. Ubisoft has had “cosmetic” items for purchase a while for both “Assasins Creed” and “Division” but nothing more than that. Now it’s changing and it’s affecting gameplay! The most recent and extreme example of this is Battlefront II. With their way of pushing lootboxes on consumers I absolutely won’t be paying $60 for that game! Maybe I’ll pick it up next year on Black Friday sale, I dunno, but paying $60 for game where I have to grind grind and grind to even play characters that should be there out of the box?! Or you can buy lootboxes for more money! Really!? And then EA releases Need for Speed with… “speedcards” that you can fast-progress by buying lootboxes! Another game I was absolutely planning to already be playing was the new Mordor game (“Shadow of War”). But oh no, they had to go ruin that game too with in game store to buy Orcs. Yeah, buy Orcs in a game for real money!
And they even have the balls to call it “microtransaction”, you know like the “micrtransaction” for a Android app that cost like $1? No, because here we’re talking about getting 20 lootboxes for $60 – as much as the f*cking game costs! And don’t come with any “but games have been $60 for ages now!” because yeah, they have, and have the profit of any publisher gone down because of that? No, they’ve made more and more money every year! Look at “Cuphead” that cost like $20 which is turning out to be one of the best games all year! No, games don’t have to cost $100 million to make! You don’t have the PR push it that bad if it’s good enough, you don’t have to have 1000 song in the music library like GTA!!
What makes this even worse is that in some of these cases you’re not even buying the thing you want – your paying FOR A CHANCE at the thing you want! You may get the Orc you want, but you may end up with nothing. You may get the power up for your Heavy stormtrooper, or you might get a silly emote! It’s gambling and feeding on addiction and it’s loathsome and everyone should be ashamed of it. I know I am and I’m not even buying or playing those games! The irony is that Battlefront 2 is made by DICE – a Swedish studio. And the government in Sweden are pretty strict when it comes to gambling. Pretty strict as in “only government run gambling is allowed!”. Yeah, someone should maybe look into this! (and not the ESRB, that’s like Donald Trump saying his son is a good person!)
The last game I bought was Assasins Creed Origin which came out a few weeks ago. And so far I haven’t run into much lootboxes or “pay to get this über gear” yet, if you don’t count the gold edition addons. But looking at the horizon, I have no idea what I’m actually willing to buy even though there are plenty of games I should love to buy and play but my moral compass really gets in the way.
Fortunately people are rising up and raging against the machine. Just youtube “lootboxes” and you’ll find tons of videos on the topic. Or you may have seen the news that EA’s reply on reddit regarding Battlefront 2 progression is the most “thumbs down” comment ever on reddit?
Lobby of OCCC South
And it really was fortunate that we were the ones to go since sooooo many of the sessions and talk was about Office 365, Azure and the cloud! It was really hard to find sessions that talked about on premises stuff but I managed to go to a few! The event started officially on Monday morning with a vision keynote by Satya, the CEO of Microsoft and had a bit of this and that in it.
Trying to get the new about OneDrive
Another great thing about these events is that you meet the people who are actually working on the other side – when I’m freaking out over the bad SharePoint Online admin center “well that guy right over there is the program manager of that, go talk to him”. Which I did. “Well you’ll glad to know we’re working on version 2, mail us and we’ll get you into the preview”. Done and done! And seeing some really pros at doing presentations, like Anne Michels who constantly made jokes on her expense (and sometimes even Mr. Michels).
And on Thursday evening Microsoft had “rented” the entire Universal Studios Orlando theme park for us! All you can eat, drink and ride all evening long! That was certainly an experience since we don’t have anything close to these theme parks in Sweden! We have plenty of amusement parks, but no theme parks, certainly not like this where you can walk into Jurassic Park and have a dinoburger!
Then friday was kind of winding down and collecting thoughts and writing reports on what I’ve learnt and then on Saturday the long trek back to Stockholm began. I checked in at the airport at about 2pm on Saturday and passed through customs in Stockholm at about 1pm on the Sunday.
But all in all it was an absolutely awesome experience and conference to attend for me. The downside was of course being away from my family for 8 days, that really felt long in the end. My and the wife have never been away from each other for that long since we moved in together 8 years ago!
KFC monument för JFK
SpaceX byggnad & launchpad
After that 2 hour ride we were dropped of a the Saturn station (or whatever it was called) which was just this huge museum for the Apollo program! I completely geeked out there, running around photographing every mission banner there was and every little thing!
After a quick lunch we set off back to the Visitor center where they had a Atlantis museum which was an awesome 3-stage display climaxing in a reveal of the actual space shuttle Atlantis! Completely geeked out again! Like a kid in a candy store on Christmas!! Then it got really emotional! I still don’t know why I get all somber up and even tear up at it, but at the end of the exhibit was the Challenger and Columbia memorials.
We spent a total of 7 hours there and I could’ve stayed a while longer! Absolutely one of the best experiences of my life. My only regret is that my wife and son wasn’t there to share it or see me get that excited about it.
Then we went to what these IT nerds who have been here a few times before thought was the greatest steakhouse ever – Morton’s. To sum it up and as my wife could say – I could’ve done more for less. I mean, it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t all that and it was a pretty pretentious restaurant. But at least the company was good.
All in all a really great day!!
If you’ve followed this blog long enough or have heard me ranting you may know I’m not that big of a fan of US of A. And not only because of their most recent choice of president although that hasn’t helped. But a few months ago my supervisor asked me if I wanted to go to Microsoft Ignite. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a huge convention that Microsoft holds once a year in USA. It’s their greatest week of the year when they release a lot of new stuff for our techies and declares their visions for the future.
At first I didn’t know if I even wanted to go since it would mean actually going to the US. The only time I’ve been here before was when I went to Guatemala and had to pass security when going from one international terminal to another so I’ve never actually sat foot on their soil. But much like 14 years ago when I was asked to work on the project for the state department my initial feeling was “I don’t want to leave my comfort zone”. But realizing that.. I had to accept! After making sure my wife was OK with it I signed up. Fortunately a colleague of mine is also attending so I won’t be alone. And he has a lot of friends in the consultancy business so we’ll be hanging out with them. And there’s always the big “Swedes only” party to go to.
Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida
So on Saturday my wife dropped me off at Arlanda, we kissed good bye and I went off through security checkpoint to start my journey… and flight delayed!! Some part of the plane broke and they had to fly in a new one from Copenhagen (which I believe is airliner talk for “the crew wasn’t allowed to fly anymore because if union rules and we had to fly in a replacement crew). So about 3 hours later (plus one free beer!) we lifted of for Newark airport at New York. After passing through security, customs, security, passport check, customs, security and a tram between the terminals we arrived at the new gate with about 2 hours to spare. We were supposed to have a 6 hour wait, but 3 hours late departure plus all those lines meant we only got 2. And that was plenty because unfortunately Newark airport is something out of the 70’s. It really does need a fix up! Then we went for a bite to eat but when I went to the food court I got this familiar smell of deep fry oil from my days working at a fast food restaurant so my heart told my body I don’t want to eat here. So I didn’t. Fortunately my metabolism goes down, way down, on airplanes to it really wasn’t a problem!
The New York skyline, all the way from Newark
Then onto that airplane that was gonna take us to Orlando in Florida. And when we were supposed to lift off we hadn’t even left the gate yet. The captain announced they had to reboot the plane! I shit you not, it was a literal “have you tried turning it off and on again”-moment!! But it actually worked and off we went. Slept all the way!
After arriving something happened that has never happened in all my travels – my luggage was already waiting for me!! I think there was a mixup in Newark and the flew my baggage out on the flight 2 hours before ours, which goes totally against international regulations of not allowing a bag onto the plane without it’s owner! But I didn’t complain, we went out to grab a cab… and no! Not a cab in sight! Another first for all of my travels, an airport with no cabs! We only had to wait 15-20 minutes for one but they are usually lined up!
So, off to the hotel and sleep ahead of the new days travel to Kennedy Space Center. I’m hoping I’ll get to post about that soon, but I’m actually here to work so not sure when I’ll have the time for that!
[Previously on the blog – me and the wife wanted to buy a new car and ordered an Audi A5 for 492.000 SEK and it was delivered in late February but only after wondering if this was their first car delivery ever!]
Now that was 3 weeks ago. And in those three weeks unfortunately enough has happened to make me say “I won’t go back there again”.
Not only because of the reasons I’ve already listed (1) them telling us to go away from the business section in a rather rude manner, 2) the unprofessional way of handling the tyre situation 3) noone informed us of the deposit we had to make before we got there) but as it turns out they made even bigger mistakes – one huge mistake during the ordering process and two pretty big mistakes with the delivery.
When delivering an Audi, the representative is supposed to help you sign up to the myAudi account and tie your car to that account. Nope, didn’t happend! Fortunately I know my way around Internet and websites but it led me to the next big issue. They also failed to inform us that the little plastic badge on the set of keys we got was actually very, VERY valuable since it had a PIN to enable remote access of the car! Without this I couldn’t use the electronics I paid for and selling it would be pretty damn hard! Fortunately we hadn’t thrown that little plastic thing in the bin yet but at no point did we think it was something we needed to keep! But the major f*ck up was discovered when we were loading up the car with some kids and realised this model didn’t have 3 seatbelts in the back, only 2!!! I didn’t even know that was possible but apparently it’s an extra option for Audi that costs a mere 3.600 SEK! Had the original salesguy informed us about that we would absolutely have clicked it. But he didn’t so now we’re stuck with a car that only has 4 seatbelts! This was a dealbreaker when we started this (one of the reasons we didn’t go for a Mustang!) and we made sure to check that it did have it when we were in the showroom! I can only imagine the salesguy picked up on us only having one kid and in an attempt to keep the price below 500.000 didn’t click it but it leaves a very sour taste! Fortunately we have a cheap ass VW Polo that has 3 seatbelts in the back so if we ever need one extra seat we can use that. But still… And “we should have checked it ourselves”, yeah you could say that, but as I said in part I, it’s a freaking jungle!! Unless you work there knowing what’s included in the “2017 A5 Sportback Proline Sport Edition” from the go, it’s damn impossible! And when adding stuff BAM! you’re told that it’s not compatible with the current loadout! It’s rediculous! Sometimes I think those configurations should have a “these things are NOT included in your layout”-list, that would have spelt it out for us that it was an extra option.
So, expect a new one of these in 3 years when it’s time to buy a new car again. Maybe we’ll go for a Mustang that time around or maybe Tesla if they are affordable by then.
[Previously on the blog – me and the wife wanted to buy a new car and ordered an Audi A5 for 492.000:- and was told it would be delivered end of March]
And so we waited. And waited.
Eventually in mid February we got an e-mail from the insurance company telling us it was time to insure our Audi. ??.. so we called up the dealer in Järva, got put on hold and eventually told by the manager that “I’m gonna have to call you back”. And so he did. And yeah, the car had arrived and we were free to pick it up next week. At this point I’m wondering “how long has it been there and when were you going to tell us!?” but I was just too excited and grateful that it was already here to question that. After our dealing with Toyota I thought it’d be best if we gave them the week and come in on Friday afternoon. This gave them over 8 days to get the car ready. And then he assigned the delivery to another salesman which I thought was weird but as it turns out the salesman, Daniel, that I liked so much and ordered the car from was no longer working there for reasons noone wanted to get into. When I woke up on Tuesday, 3 days before the delivery, it was snowing. And I remembered we hadn’t ordered the winter tyres so it would be illegal for us to drive our new car home from the dealer without it! So I called them up and asked what they usually do in this situation when customers have ordered cars without winter tyres and it’s snowing. And he had no clue. His first response was just hoping it would get warmer and thaw so it wouldn’t be a problem. I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or serious but it was absolutely unprofessional! So I had to ask him if he could fix winter tyres for us which he ofcourse was willing to try to do but couldn’t make a promise he’d get them in time. Seriously, he had 3 days to find new wintertyres for a new car in Stockholm, how hard can that be, pick up the phone to Euromasters and have them send over a set with DHL!? Well, he couldn’t just call anyone to get any kind of tyres, he had to order Audi originals regardless if we wanted it or not! Then we didn’t hear anything from him and we were just left assuming it was sorted when we went in to pick up the car on Friday afternoon. And much to our delight and surprise he had sorted it. On the car was now brand new Audi original winter tyres! “Great, so can we get the car now” … “well not really because you still haven’t paid us the 130.000 that was due”. Huh? Well, as it turns out we were supposed to send in the money to them so they had it before we could pick up the car and noone had told us about this. He said it was the “other guy” that had missed informing us of that. Personally I think it should be on a check list when preparing to deliver a car to make sure the car is legal to drive on the day of delivery and that the payment was settled, but apparently this guy didn’t think that was on them, those were my problems to solve!
So I ended up using Swish, a Swedish “send money instantly to another phone number” system that is quite a common way to send money here – just not supposed to be used for transactions of this size!! Fortunately my bank allowed the transaction, otherwise I don’t know what they’d do but I was furious enough to leave there and then and have another look at the Cupra – just ask Toyota. So now that that was sorted we got a big, long debriefing on insurance options. After that he unveiled our new car. And it was glorious!! I knew the car was so hitech that we were in for long education of what everything did.. but nope, he wasn’t into that, “I could spend an hour talking about everything but you pretty much want to get on the road huh?”.. well that didn’t stop him from talking insurances for a very long time but ok so let’s get on the road.. nope, we had to take a detour to their servicecenter to pay for the tyres. Fortunately the guy there was an absolute professional and got that over with quickly in the kind of “getting it done!” method I love. After that we got an ok to go out on the road, finally!
To be continued tomorrow…
Me and the wife were in the market to buy a car. And my wife has expensive taste. And we had the cash to spend. Sounds like a dream for any car dealer, right? But you know after our dealings with Toyota last year that I didn’t think very highly of car dealers… and that was about to get even lower!
My wife have always wanted to buy a Mustang. But purchasing a new Mustang in Stockholm proved pretty impossible as the only dealer we were in contact with didn’t have any available for us to try as other customers had crashed them both and we didn’t want to order one blindly. Besides I got the feeling he wasn’t too eager to sell one to us anyway. So we checked out a secondhand dealer that had a great Mustang waiting to be bought. After sitting in it we both kinda realised this isn’t the kind of car you use driving back and forth to school or to Ikea. So that idea was put on hold.
The next idea was a Tesla. But in Sweden the start at about 750.000 SEK which is shitload of money but when you start adding on stuff it goes up to 7 digits quite fast. So no, not yet.
Then we went for a sport version of the car we have today, a Seat Leon Cupra. The only dealer we had even remotely close to us turned out to be amateurs! They only had one for customers to try out. And the owner was using it as his private car. And we had to book an appointment to testdrive it! Well we did but it turns out the boss’s wife or daughter had taken the car for high street shopping that afternoon and got stuck in traffic. Who knew there might be traffic jams when going from Stockholm city to Barkarby at 5pm!? And when we test drove it we found their candy stash, we found her wallet and some left over shopping. As I said, amateur hour. Unfortunately the car was an absolut beast and we were tempted to buy one had it not been for the dealer.
So then we raised the bar! As we’ve been happy with both our Volkswagens and our Seat we decided to test the upgrade in the family and go for an Audi! Now I wanted to use Möller Bil again since we were so pleased with how the Seat turned out and how professional they’ve been but no Möller retailer close to us sells Audi. So we went to the Audi retailer in Järva. First thing that happened was they didn’t respond to my e-mail requests. Usually not a big thing but car dealers are supposed to be more eager than this, but oh well. So we went to their showroom and were told that we weren’t welcomed because we were in the business section! Should have gone home right there and then to be honest because the only reason we were in the business area was poor signage from their end! But we didn’t go home, we went up a floor to the consumer section and met a really friendly and nice salesguy, Daniel. He tried to understand what we wanted and our criterias – the wife wanted a bit of luxury but I wanted to pay the least amount for it! We went there looking at an A4 but when the wife saw their latest A5 Sportback she was totally sold! And when I saw their virtual cockpit, so was I. We tested sitting in an A5 to get the feel for the interior, noting that there was indeed 3 seatbelts in the back (more why that was important later!) and then we testdrove an A4 with identical engine to get the feel for the cars power. We were both very, very pleased. So we sat down to go through the list of options for the car to try to come up with a good car that fit our needs and what that would cost us. He went through every option (or so we thought!) with us and based on what he knew of our needs made recommendations. Since every manufacturer has their own terms/language, options and editions it’s a real jungle to sort it out but he did a good job of explaining it. I really liked this guy! So he came up with a car for 492.000 SEK, almost half a million. Naturually we needed to have a talk about it but after two days we made the decision to go for it. We went back and talked with him again to place the order. No fuzz at all, we agreed we’d put down 130.000 which we’d get from selling our current car when we got the new car. It would take “about 5 months” to get the car. A bit long but it would be worth waiting for. Now, did we want winter tyres on this or not? That was an extra 20.000 SEK. I knew I could get tyres for about half that price, and 5 months from end of October would be and of March so no really need for it, so no thanks. And the order was placed and we were happy with it all.
And then we waited. And waited…
I’m going to start another blog. I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time but never really got around to doing it. I’m gonna start a boring IT nerdy blog with my own “experiences from the field” from work!
If you didn’t know I’m an IT pro working with SharePoint both in house but also in the cloud, as wel as alot of other “Office 365” things for an enterprise with some 25k users. And one thing that us IT pros do well is share information. I wouldn’t be able to solve half of the issues I’m faced with all the time if it wasn’t for other IT pros out there sharing their experiences and their tricks. And one of the things I think I can contribute with the most is Powershell script.
Nothing too advanced though, just basic powershell tips that other people in my line of work might find usefull so they don’t have to write them their selves. I’m sure some of these scripts can be approved upon, so please let me know if you have suggestions!
Enjoy!
I’m one of those people who welcome being corrected when I’m wrong. Unfortunately I’m also offended when people try to correct me when I’m right, it’s not a good quality to have.
The most recent thing I’ve been wrong about is Pokemon Go. When it came here to Sweden in July I thought it was a fad, I didn’t take it seriously and I even made fun of people playing it, which I now regret. I still stick by that it’s dangerous though because if you get too much into it even when walking you can hurt yourself or even other people!
Because now my entire family is playing it! My son wanted a go at it and we couldn’t really stop him by saying it’s childish since… well, he’s 6! But after getting him started we realised we needed to learn it and so we started. And now, two weeks later we’re hooked and I like it. Not the game itself, it’s so rudimentary, it’s classic “get people hooked and then make them pay up for the next fix” and not even one little bit creative. But I like the effect it has on us as a family. We go out Pokemon hunting, sometimes just to the nearest city center, sometimes we go to some place that just has plenty of Pokestops. We spent four hours in “Rålambshovsparken” last Friday hunting Pokemons and Pokestops (and looked like complete idiots while doing it!). And we walk – alot! I shit you not if I say we must’ve walked 150 kilometers (that’s be about 94 miles) since we started two weeks ago. And as an added bonus when doing all that walking, except the calorie burn rate, is that we see places and stuff we never knew existed! As an example, we have a school that I pass twice every day to and from work but I’ve ever only seen the front of it. Now I know what the rest of the outside looks like since they placed a “pokemon gym” on the other side of it!
So after a few rounds with customer service at Cloud Imperium Games I got the LA County “Department of Consumer and Business Affairs” involved and that’s when my refund request was finally accepted. So I got all my money for all digital purchases and pledges refunded and my accounts closed and within a week the money was safely in my bank account. End of story (until the game comes out, if ever) I thought.
Well it wasn’t. Because the response to my request from their legal counsel was… in lack of better words – horseshit!
The reasons I stated for requesting a refund was
– They changed their terms of service to free them of all accountability to actually deliver anything. That’s an indisputable fact. I was totally fine with my initial Kickstarter pledge going down the drain but that was a small portion of all the money I’ve pledged to the project so far. Chris, the man in charge, stated years ago that they were solid financially and would still be able to deliver a game if funding stopped. It didn’t yet they haven’t.
– The game is nowhere near being complete. The content that has been delivered so far is barely 10% of everything promised and it’s all buggy as hell as it’s still in alpha. That is also a fact. If you forecast based on that it’s gonna take them several years to deliver the rest and then do the polish to go from alpha to a launch-able game.
– They themselves set “estimated dates” for when features are launched and they are constantly missing them. That is also fact.
– They set November 2014 + a 18 months delay (that’d be May 2016) for launch or they would show their financials and explain “wtf happened!?”. It’s now August 2016 and they haven’t launched any part of the game nor taken any accountability for the failure. Those are also facts.
Those were my 4 main reasons. I never mentioned anything of all the other rumors (like their Austin office being shut down) or issues one may have with the project (like the fact that Chris the CEO is married to the marketing director/actor Sandi) that involves anything that isn’t fact or tangible.
So what did the legal counsel say? “Customer’s allegations […] are completely unfounded and based on internet gossip. Oh and he made the allegations to the wrong corporate entity!”. That is just so insulting! Everything I’ve said are facts that can easily be checked by anyone! If they didn’t think it was good enough reasons to give a refund that would have been one thing, but to say that I’m lying and quoting gossip, what the hell is that about!? That pisses me off so much that my initial thought was “crash and burn you assholes!”. But this is so much bigger than that, it’s a million people strong community, a game that is based on some of the most amazing games I’ve played, the most successful crowdfunding campaign ever, the biggest “up yours!” to major game publishers ever and so much of that good stuff that I can’t be so egotistic and want it to fail just because they insult me. But it really pissed me off and I wonder where the line for “slander” is! And also I hate whenever a company makes that stupid remark about “it’s the wrong company” – I ALWAYS go to the people that I actually paid. It doesn’t matter if it’s a game or whatever, I make the claim to the company that charged me!
You know I’m a nostalgic, retro kind of person right? And I’m a gamer. So I fondly remember the days of “Wing Commander” I & II, the space fighting but most of all the story and the interaction with the crew. And I very fondly remember “Wing Commander III” with Mark Hamill and Tom Wilson and the rest of the cast. And I very very very fondly remember playing “Wing Commander IV” for days, weeks even months. I really wanted to see every possible way that could go, the “evil ending” and everything in between. I absolutely loved it – not for the space combat but for the story. The dialogue is cheesy and the plot quite simple by today’s standards but still, for a computer game it was awesome!!
So in 2012 when I heard that Chris Roberts is coming back with a “spiritual successor to Wing Commander” I got excited. It couldn’t be called “Wing Commander” since EA owned the rights to it so it was called “Star Citizen”. Or “Squadron 42”.. at first it was a mess what was what but that’s to be expected when a small group of people get together to try to do something great. But this time Chris didn’t want a big publisher telling him what to do. He didn’t want a publisher that demanded the game be released at this date, finished or not. He didn’t want a publisher to tell him to make the game so it can be ported to consoles. He wanted to do the game his way, released when it was ready and for PC only. So they started a crowdfunding campaign that got so much attention their initial web server couldn’t handle it and they had to take to Kickstarter for crowdfunding. I happy bought into it at “Colonel” level which then was $125. That’s quite a lot for a computer game I agree but I thought it was worth it considering how much joy his previous titles had given me. I’d gladly paid that for “Wing Commander IV” any day!
Back then they set the “estimated release” at November 2014 but I’m actually pretty sure that’s because Kickstarter forced them to set an “estimated delivery” date and the max they could set was “2 years from now”. So I actually never expected them to deliver that. As a matter of fact, their “Terms of Service” agreement was even altered in 2013 to give them a 12 (then 18) month delay window.
After the initial crowdfunding campaign they kept promising more and more stuff. Not only had the game gone from being the “spiritual successor of Wing Commander” (a single player game), it was blowing up to be a full MMORPG. And I was fine with that. At first. I was so fine that when they showed off the Retaliator bomber I loved it and dished out $225 for one. And the idea of being information smuggler sounded cool so I dished out money for that too. But then as they continued to get millions of dollars every month I kinda saw it getting out of hand. I fully realise I know very little of what it actually takes to deliver a game and I know it takes a lot of time to make a game. A delay can easily be a year. But when they were promising new features, new ships without actually releasing much I kinda saw the problems of this ever being released. If they take two-three months to get a ship to “flight ready” and they keep coming up with 7-8 new ships every year, how are they ever to get done? If they add new feature to the scope before releasing the basic ones promised during Kickstarter like trading, how are they ever gonna get done? 
This picture to the right pretty much sums up what I felt all throughout 2015. And during July of 2015 Derek Smart happened. He’s a game maker who has tried to pull off these grand space games for years and never really made it. Which means he knows some of the pitfalls of even trying. He started criticising the “Star Citizen” project – very vocally, bullyuishly, annoyingly, contrived, “deliberately wanting to turn everything into a bad thing” way. And he got very personal against Chris Roberts, his wife and his lawyer (that all co-founded the studio) in a way that was really uncool. But he always stopped right at the border of lying or making shit up. Yes, he twisted everything into a negative thing. And I was right there to point out the actual facts. But the problem of trying to argue with him was the fact that “CIG” (the studio making the game) never managed to prove him wrong. They never managed to shut him up by stepping up to the plate and deliver. Instead, they made his case stronger by coming up with more irrelevant features (plants anyone?), more subscriber flare, more ship-concept sales, more of everything except actual game content. An all this while constantly missing “estimated” release dates that they themselves estimated and set.
Then they went ahead and wrote a new Terms of Service that we have to accept. Which is fine, Blizzard does it all the time. But I actually read those things, it’s a result of working with lawyers for 8 years – I actually read before I sign. And in this Terms of Service they had removed any accountability what so ever, every chance of demanding a refund. It was basically a carté blanche for them to sail away with the $117+ million they had gotten from backers and as long as the company CIG was still “active” and stating the game was still being worked on (without ever actually delivering anything) then we had no rights at all as consumers. I really wasn’t OK with that. So I refused to accept the terms of service. That had the side effect of me not being able to login to the so called “game”.
And what they call “the game” (as it was the last time I checked) consist of
1) running around my hangar looking at the static non functioning ships that have gone from concept to “hangar ready”.
2) Fly around in a very gorgeous but limited space environment fighting against enemy ships without ever feeling like “I’m so into this battle”, it’s rather plain but a totally acceptable test bed for flight mechanics.
3) Run around one planetary landing zone. Think of Orgimmar in World of Warcraft. But about half the size if that. And never being able to go out the gates.
4) Run around a station, call the ships I “own” that are “flight ready”, getting on board, flying around trying to repair comm relays, exploring a small little station for clues about corporate evilness
.. and that’s it. And it’s all full of game breaking bugs as you can expect from alpha. But compared to what was promised even in Kickstarter, before they even had $20 million, this simply won’t do. There is no exploration, there is no trading, the space combat is mediocre at best, there are no systems to travel between (so no jump points with that mechanic), there is just this. And that’s at “estimated delivery + 18 months”. And there is nothing to indicate that is about to change, that there is a magic key that once implemented will unlock all the missing features and mechanics.
At the end of last year they came up with a trailer for the single player game “Squadron 42” that promised released in 2016. It was freaking amazing! The “admiral” speech was precisely the classic cliche dialogue I know from “Wing Commander IV” and the visuals, oh man… but there is nothing to make me believe that it will actually happen. The space combat right now is way to limited to be close to what has been promised. The cutscenes may be breathtaking but it all needs a space combat simulation to build on, or I might as well see “Wing Commander The Movie“.
I really do hope I’m wrong and that they do actually release “Squadron 42” this year, or maybe even next year. I really do wish that they actually release the game they’ve promised. But right now I don’t see anything that suggests they will.
So where does that leave me? Since I haven’t accepted the TOS I can’t login to the “game” that I’ve spent well over $600 on (not counting merchandise). I was fine waiting until 2020 to see the game develop into what was promised, I really was. But when I’m banned from the game for simply not accepting the most consumer-hostile terms of service I’ve ever been presented with, that becomes impossible. And since there is very little to support the idea that the game will be done anytime soon I find my only recourse is to demand a refund. Although I fully accept that backing a Kickstarter project can go either way and is a bit of a gamble, when they were successfully funded and kept bringing in millions it goes from a gamble to being a downright fraud. My first attempt was denied. But I’m not giving up. Even though I’m fortunate enough to be able to write these $600 off as a dream that didn’t happen, it doesn’t mean I have to accept it without a fight.
And this is not on Derek Smart – this is on CIG failing to deliver. Piling up the “to-do” list of ships and features to get into the game, wanting to release a perfect and fully featured product, delays and now not taking any responsibility for it in their TOS. And I’m not putting the project in jeopardy by requesting a refund. This is a $117+ million project, my ~$600 of that should be less than a fart in space. Think of this as a customer cancelling a preorder because the game changed too much since I made the preorder – which is exactly what I did with The Division & the new Deus Ex when those publishers changed things. Because no one can honestly say that what CIG are pushing today is what they tried to sell during Kickstarter!
To be continued – unfortunately.
As you probably know I have a home cinema in a, almost, dedicated room for the purpose of showing movies on a big screen with good audio. But I still like going out to the movies. The contrasts between the two are ofcourse that going out is about going out, it’s an event, an occasion. And you’ll take the long queues in to the movie, the bad service, the cramped space, trying to carry popcorn & soda while getting the tickets ready, the people talking, the queuing to get out and all of those bad things. When watching a movie at home you don’t have to put up with that – but all of a sudden it’s not so special anymore.
But the new VIP theaters at Mall of Scandinavia in Stockholm puts a completely new spin to it all!! Firstly you’ll get to a restaurant so you can eat actually good, cooked food! Not the food courts of Heron or Kista. You can then order in all the snacks and drinks you want for the movie and it’ll be delivered in a nice basket – even have a beer if you want. Then you go into the movie theater without the queues since it only fits about 40 people! And “why does it only fit 40 people” you ask? – because of the amazing personal space you get! Not only do you get to sit in a comfy recliner chair, you also have more leg space than you’ll need plus a good 30cm of space either side to put your snacks and drinks! Forget about people talking, you’re so far away from each other you can’t really talk when the movie is playing! Then after the movie is done you just calmly leave and go back to the restaurant for some beverage or whatever you like. Yeah, it was expensive but you’ll have to go there alot to make up for all the $$$ that goes into building and maintaining a home cinema.
It’s almost all of the pro’s of watching a movie at home but actually “going out to the movies”! The other con’s against going to the movies (1 – the time to get there 2 – the fact you actually have to drive so one person has to be sober and 3 – the lack of a pause button for bathroom breaks) well I guess there’s really nothing to do against them is it? I mean, scheduling a 5 minute break in the movie for people to do their things might work, but the chances of the building one close enough to me so we can walk are slim to none.
So basically I think this is as far to perfect as a movie experience can get!!
A few years ago my wife’s nephew was playing Skylanders on his PS3 and all he wanted was Skylanders figures to “unlock” in the game so he could finish it. I bought him a 3 pack figure set once because I can’t say no to kids wanting video games.
Fast forward about 4 years and I saw the trailer for Disney Infinity. And so did my son and he basically said “I have got to get me one of those!!”. I remember it well, it was when we saw the “Minions” movie. And I explained to him that it was pretty expensive, €90 for the “big” PS4 version that they were advertising. So he started saving up money and we started giving him allowance on the premise that we won’t buy any more toys, he has to do that himself now. We had a little setback with Minecraft on the PS4 but now he finally had money to buy it so off we went.
We got to Webhallen, he got to hold the big box himself and we went back home for the unboxing.
I expected a rather quick “here’s the disc, here’s the base, here’s the figure, let’s go!”. But no! First I had to create a Disney account. Then it had a parent check, and then enter the codes from the cards in the box to tie them to the account (you know, so I can’t return it or sell it second hand if I’m not happy with it), and all that has to be done on a PC. I wonder how many parents give up at this stage? Because after that you have to login to that Disney account on your PS4 when booting up the game and then… it started in a weird demo kind of way with testing different characters from different Disney franchises when all we wanted was to play Star Wars!? Aha, the “play set” item has to be on the base too so it knows what game we’re playing? Ok, done, “Twilight of the Republic”, go!
Finally it booted up to the awesome Star Wars theme followed by.. “this character isn’t available in this play set”?! What? Oh, we tried playing as Luke Skywalker in a “Clone Wars”-era game, well if that doesn’t work why tha hell does he, Leia and Boba Fett come in the pack?! Oh, you have to unlock the characters in the playset by finding their “champion coin” in the game (or play set?), not cool at all but ok, YouTube helped me and my son to sort that out. Now let’s test “Rise Against the Empire” play set that we got in this PS4 exclusive collector edition. This is the original triology, Darth Vader era Star Wars I know and love. Aaaaaaand “this character isn’t available in this play set” when we had Anakin on the base? Because ofcourse the champion coins are unique for the play set and you have to unlock Anakin “champion coin” in this playset since he “belongs” in the other playset?! Googled around to find out I had to get to the top of a building to get the “coin” for Anakin?! But this means if you buy a “Rebels” era character like Ezra you have to fin his coins in both play sets?!
But ok, all characters unlock in all games… sorry I mean “play sets”.. and let’s roll. On Monday evening we’d finished both ga… sorry, “play sets”. There was two of them and me and my son had them beat in less than two days? And he did most of the playing and he’s 5! What tha hell, what to do after this? … wait for the next gam… sorry, “play set” with the characters from “Inside Out” which kinda requires that Sam sees the movie to understand.
Really Disney? I know you want to make money, I’m not naive but .. really? Not well played Disney, not well played at all. Or to quote the Roberts – “this is bullshit”. You have to make it THIS complicated only to suck as much money out of us as you can? You have gone and totally confused me with “play set”, “power coin” and I haven’t even started with the “power discs” yet and you charge €90 for 2 “play sets” I could’ve played through in less than 3 hours each had I wanted to? That’s really low, the Lego games are atleast challenging and goes on and on! Speaking of which, guess I have to buy the Batman Lego game now that this is already done.
So if you plan to buy Disney Infinity for your kids, get prepared and read up.
I am an avid fan of aviation. Always have been, always will be. I, like any other boy, wanted to be a pilot but never worked hard enough to get the grades to get into that and not doing military service (which was obligatory in Sweden at the time) kinda ruled that out. So I wanted the next best thing, an air traffic controller. I got as far as the trialouts at Arlanda (Sweden’s biggest airport) but for reasons unknown to me they decided “I didn’t have the proper predisposition for this job. This decision is final and cannot be appealed”. That was the end of that dream and I got into computers instead which worked out pretty nice for me.
But I’m still interested in aviation. And I try to see every episode of “Air Crash Investigation” that I can and do my best to follow it when something happens. The bad side is that it takes months, sometimes several years, from a crash until the investigation can conclude something. Like that Air France plane from Brazil that dropped into the ocean, took them 2 years to find them (good job on that by the way).
And about 3 weeks ago I saw the “Air Crash Investigation Special” on the 1 year anniversary since the disappearence of MH370. In it they through the Sherlockian (I love making up words) method of eliminating everything they know didn’t happen come to the conclusion that one of the pilots, most likely the captain, sent away the co-pilot, locked the door, disabled the transponer and the ACARS (which really only a well trained pilot would know how to do), dropped the air preassure so everyone but him would lose consciousness and then he navigated around radar stations before setting a course for the antarctic. They never had a clue why anyone would do it but that’s the only theory that is NOT disputed by the available data.
And exactly 2 weeks after that airs, a Germanwings plane crashes into the alps killing everyone. I’m not going to say that “I knew it must have been a deliberate thing by a pilot” because I really didn’t. I think it was clear right away it was “human error” because the rate that they were loosing altitude couldn’t have been missed by anyone and the fact that they didn’t turn back or radio anyone suggested that what happened wasn’t a technical glitch. Unlike the Greek plane where everyone lost consciousness when a service engineer had forgotten to reset a switch, this plane crashed right away whereas the Greek plane kept on going for hours. So it couldn’t have been a technical reason for it, it had to have been caused by the human factor which is the case in a surprisingly amount of crashes. But I really didn’t think it was deliberately crashed but very quickly it was clear that that’s what happened. And I have to say I am very surprised that this amount of information have been released this soon. As I said these usually take months or years, this one was a few days. The full investigation, with the proper recommendations to the airline industry and regulatory institutions, will ofcourse take a few months but it’s really rare to see it being cleared up this quickly. And I think that’s a good thing, if not for the world to feel safer flying again (or do we?) then for the victim’s families that already this soon have answers. I like that.
I also can’t help but to feel that this isn’t entirely unrelated to the post about corporate greed in the airline industry that I posted a while back. This was a pilot that had mental issues he delt with but from all official channels was cleared to work. But he always had this cloud of uncertainty hanging over him because of the situation in the airline industry – and remember, the Lufthansa pilots have just been on a strike about their situation so it’s got to be serious for them. Not that I’m justifying his actions but I just want to raise the point that that might have been a small contributing factor that shouldn’t be ignored. I’ve been fortunate enough never to have been unemployed in my entire life, although I’ve been close 3 times and all of those times I’ve been extremely stressed out over it. Once I almost got an ulcer because of it so I think everyone can relate to a persons worry about his employment, especially if you’ve worked hard enough to reach the pilot seat.
Another point here is that I don’t think this is just an issue in aviation. This could just as easily have been a train driver that deliberately drives his train into Paddington station at full speed in rush hour, imagine the death toll on that. And the accident in Spain a few years back when a train driver wanted to challenge how fast he could take a curve proves that there aren’t safeguards there either. Did the train industry decide all of a sudden that there should be two people in the driver seat for trains? No, but they have on planes.
But still – you’re more likely to die on the way to the airport than on the plane!
Yesterday there was a big event by some of today’s biggest artist to together really kick off the music service Tidal. It’s the newest and most likely candidate to challenge Spotify’s ownership of the digital music throne. I should like it. But here’s why I don’t – and keep in mind these are MY issues, they don’t apply to everyone!
– The artists keep saying that this service will reward the actual artists way more than the evil Spotify. And that sounds noble, right? Well that certainly goes against most research I’ve read that says Spotify is most certainly paying their share – it’s just not going to the artists. Reason for that is.. well, they aren’t the ones with the contract with Spotify, the labels are. (their own report can be found here and here is a report from Time.com)
– They say it’s good for consumers. And usually I’d agree, nothing like some good competetivness to bring out the best in people and companies. But this is different. With Spotify I have ONE music service where I store my music library. And I can access that music from any cellphone brand I want, from my TV, from any of my computers, from my Playstation, my Sonos and even my TV. If you add another service which has material the other one doesn’t it forces you to either choose or have both which will cost you €20 per month. How is that good for consumers? And the amount of time it will take for Tidal to be supported by say my Samsung TV, Sony Playstation or Sonos… it’s just not good for consumers – IMO – from that technical point of view. It’s the same with the “video on demand service” – I wouldn’t mind paying €50 for one service that had it all, but I don’t wanna pay €10 for 5 difference services!
– They say their music quality is better. I don’t know about you but 90% of my music listening is done from my cellphone on the move. And with those small earplugs I dare say noone will ever notice the difference between Spotify HQ audio (and most people don’t even sync their music in HQ mode in Spotify because of storage limits) and Tidal HQ audio. I hear the difference between 128k and 192k audio in MP3’s but above that it’s simply not noticable – for me! Sure there are audiophiles out there that can spend €500 on earphones and maybe they will notice, or I might notice when turning it up in my home cinema. But it certainly won’t be a big enough quality different to hear it!
– I trust Spotify more than I trust JayZ. JayZ with wife Beyonce have enough money to not give a shit for the rest of their lifes. If the Tidal service is bad, “so what”, that don’t matter shit for them, just a failed project. If Spotify is bad they’ll hear it and change because they can’t afford not to. I got pissed when Spotify introduced their “you have to have a Facebook account” but after tweaking it I really don’t mind. And I trust that Spotify will not make an exclusive deal with say Apple that the hottest music will only be available on the iPhone app first because Spotify can’t afford to piss Android, Windows and PC users!
So I’m left thinking this isn’t just a noble thing and JayZ’s gift to the world of music industry that it’s painted out to be. It looks to me more like it’s their way of trying to increase their revenue. Which is totally fine by me, I wouldn’t wanna work for free. But just don’t make it sound so noble and say it’s for us consumers.
Wind back the clock some 17-18 years when I was working as a computer guy at Min Dator spending my days building computers and installing them for our customers. I thought I was pretty darn good at what I did and good with computers. But then we merged with a consultant firm and getting to know those guys with high certification levels made me realise I didn’t know a helluvalot. And then we merged with Pulsen and I tried being a consultant but I could never compete with those guys. And it didn’t help when the boss referred to me as a “resource filler” – that kinda killed my ambition. Then I worked at the lawfirm and it was the most secure employment I could ask for and I had no need or reason to get certifications. But as I was doing my two rounds of trying to get a job before and after the Carema disaster one question kept coming up during interviews. “You’ve done a few courses, do you have the certifications?” – which I didn’t. I never heard anyone say that was bad or that was the reason I didn’t get a job but it showed me that employers actually do care about that.
So when I got the job here I said I didn’t only want to take the courses I wanted to take the certifications too – and my employer said ok to take that expense (granted, it’s only €100-€150 each but still a nice gesture). And after I had the first course, studied for the exam and made it with flying colours I realised how easy it was for me. So my boss and I sat a goal for me (which we use for bonus calculations) to become MCSE – Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert.
Now 2 years and 7 exams later I did it! It doesn’t change my salary, it doesn’t help me with the ladies, it doesn’t do much at work or at home at all – but it’s a personal achievement that has been in the making for quite a while but I never got the thumb out of my ass to do. It’s also something of a growing up thing – which is totally lame thing to say 3 months shy of being 40. But it is for me! I don’t expect anyone to really understands what it means to me since I’m the only “me” there is – but just respect the fact that for me it’s AWESOME! AND EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!! (yeah, we just saw The Lego Movie)