Installing a BT45-HON3 in a 2006 Honda Odyssey

I finally decided to add bluetooth to our 2006 Honda Odyssey minivan this weekend and I thought I’d document it here.

I purchased the BT45-HON3 from Amazon and it arrived the next day. I’ll admit that after I opened the box and realized that the instructions were, understandably, just about the device and nothing specific to my vehicle, I was a bit nervous. For example, I knew how to hook it up to the car’s radio, but not where or how. But I have YouTube, so no worries.

Above is how it started, so first I needed to take off the panel around the climate control section. Using a basic screwdriver inserted under the panel, I was able to pop it out. Here is a shot of it popped out off. Note, I had to put the emergency brake on and then use the key to pop it out of park to drive in order to get it around the shifter.

Next you need to unscrew the radio. The first two screws are obvious on the left and right of the bottom of the radio. But the third one is harder to see. It’s under the radio in the center. You’ll need a decently long screwdriver to get to it.

Once that is removed, you can simply remove the radio.

Once I pulled the radio out I pulled out the main radio jack, plugged in the new one from the BT device, and plugged the BT device cable back in its slot in the back of the radio.

I then ran the BT device’s audio cable down and out to where the brake pedal is for the time. At this point, I turned the radio back on, and following the guidance, I was able to pair my Android phone to the device and listened to music for a bit. Very rewarding.

So, then I clipped the microphone near the rear view mirror and started to run the connecting wire toward the driver’s side door, tucking it under the liner.

I then tucked the cable and hooked it up to the BT device, which I was able to easily just tuck up in the area above the brake pedal.

All in all, if you don’t count the time where I stopped working to admire the ability to listen to music, I’d say it took ~30 mins.

PCC EMEA Agenda

I’m excited to be traveling to Amsterdam this coming weekend to deliver two presentations on The Value of Avaya Support’s tools at our annual Partner Conference for EMEA partners. This is also what I’ll be blogging a lot about this month at http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/author/carl-knerr.

I’m a pretty well organized guy, so I like to have the conference’s full agenda in my calendar so I only need my phone’s calendar app to know where I’m headed to next during the week. I couldn’t find any existing calendar invites available, so I built my own. Given that this takes some time, I wanted to save other attendees the hassle, so below is a zip file full of .iCalendar formatted meeting invites for everything on the agenda.

Calendar Appointments

Please try to make one of the following two presentations I’m delivering:

1. The Business Justification behind Automated Alarming and Fault Resolution
2. The Value of using SAL, SLA Mon^TM, and EXPERT Systems^SM; a Deep Dive

I hope to see many of you there.

The 5 Reasons Why I Joined Avaya Global Support Services

The following was originally posted at http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2015/02/the-5-reasons-why-i-joined-avaya-support-services.html

A couple months ago, I found myself around the family kitchen table attempting to explain to my wife why I was considering leaving my current role at Avaya for another. Between requests and “stories” from our three young children, I explained that I was considering joining the leadership team of our support organization as a strategy leader.

As I cut some food for my daughter and passed the ketchup to the boys (is there such a thing as too much ketchup?), I told my wife about how Avaya Support has gone through a huge evolution in the last couple of years, earned a lot of recognition, and are now looking to take their delivery to another level.

Although I would very much enjoy having you, oh beloved reader, at our family dinner table, alas, the logistics just do not allow for such wonderful things. While I cannot share some of my wife’s amazing cooking, I will share with you the reasons why I think Avaya Support will continue to be not only an industry-leader, but an innovator in delivering value to our clients.

Downtime is the enemy

We know that system outages are the worst thing that can happen to our clients, and as such, we have dedicated teams trained on restoring down systems as fast as possible. If that isn’t great enough, I’m really excited that they have begun to reach out to our clients when we know they are at risk.

For example, we know that having a recent backup allows restore times in 2.5 hours instead of 1.5 days. Given the industry average of $110,000 of cost to the customer for every hour of outage, this makes a huge difference to our clients. If a client doesn’t have a recent backup, we reach out and help them implement a backup strategy. These engineers are inspiring on how customer focused they are.

Death to Rework

Our support team hates rework and that’s why every time one of our wicked-smart engineers finds a new problem, she will document it and publish the solution tohttp://support.avaya.com instantly. As if that isn’t enough, we use our own Avaya technology,Avaya Automated Chat, to help our customers easily find what they are looking for.

In fact, our implementation of this technology, dubbed “Ava”, has become the face of Avaya. How cool is that? Even when Ava fails to find you a solution, she succeeds by putting you in touch with an Avaya engineer and passing that engineer your full history, so that you don’t have to start all over.

Not Just a Phone Company

As a Gen-X’er myself, I despise talking to customer support on the phone; and Avaya gets that. Not only do we work with customers over the phone, email, or online chat, but last year, they deployed a first-in-the-industry video chat option using our own products.

If you haven’t tried this yet, stop what you’re doing; and just check it out. Wicked cool stuff. Of course the hot topic is support via social media–something I’ve written on–and now you have an opportunity to see what @Avaya_Support can start doing.

Innovative Diagnostics

Perhaps my most passionate topic over the years has been around diagnostics for Avaya products.

Avaya Support continues to raise the bar in the space of diagnostics. I get irritated when I see valuable time of our human experts being used to validate basic settings, gather log files, etc.

We’ve got really exciting technology that leverages our lessons learned from years of troubleshooting hundreds of thousands of customer systems and we embed that into tools that can solve product issues without an engineer; which means our customer gets an issue resolved in a matter of minutes.

I’m excited that we’re not resting on those laurels, but continuing to invest in improvements and all-new tools to keep satisfying our customers.

Satisfied Customers

As a result, in 2014, 92% of our clients indicated that their overall support experience was excellent, very good, or good. Read that last sentence again. 92%! Isn’t that amazing!

When we look at Avaya’s Net Promoter Score, as an entire company, we were at 65 the last quarter (average of 50 over the last 4 quarters), putting us in best-in-class with Amazon and other companies and beating out companies like Cisco, Microsoft, and Shoretel. Read morehere.

Please don’t just take my word for the impact of the items above. In October 2014, I was proud to join other Avaya Client Services leaders in Las Vegas at the TSW 2014 Conference, hosted by TSIA. Avaya walked away with three awards for our efforts in Avaya Client Services, putting Avaya in TSIA’s STAR Awards Hall Of Fame.

As you may surmise from the above, I was convinced this was the right move for me and I’ve made the shift. As part of this new role, I plan on continuing to bring you stories from Avaya Support as a means to help our customers and partners derive as much value as possible out of their Avaya Support agreements.

*Based on internal metrics in 2014

Firey Snow Fort

Two days ago, on Twitter, this image came across my feed:

(Link to source)

I posted it on Facebook thinking, Ha! Wouldn’t this be cool. Then, yesterday, I had a few hours to kill with the kids, so why not? We only had 2 feet of snow on the ground in my backyard, so it was no small feat to build up the walls. First, we had to locate the circle of stones that we use as a fire pit in the warm months. After that, we dug out around it, piling the snow up on the walls. Later, I got the snowlbower out and snowblowed in the yard, throwing the snow where the walls should be. Overnight, we got ~3″ of wet packing snow which was great today and I spent a couple more hours building up the walls and even making a built-in snow bench (the kids wanted this. Me? I’d rather sit in a dry chair.) It was wicked nice to spend the afternoon today sitting around the fire with the family in the sunlight, and pretending that the frigid cold wasn’t coming back tomorrow.

Relaxing after a long day of shoveling

The boys helping me; good shot of the built-in bench.

Overhead shot of the job.

High Hope Farm – January 27

Not sure what happened, but I seem to have taken zero pictures on the 26th, oh well.  We cleared a bunch of property of small trees and brush, making an impressive burn pile.

On Tuesday, we focused on the same spot, doing a good deal more clearing and burning. It was very rewarding to see just how open and clean this area now is. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t like burning big bonfires of brush!

M continues to love getting time on the ATV or “four wheeler” was we call it. He will drive around with me sitting behind him to the point that he says his thumb hurts from holding the gas down!

T continues to not want to really drive, but does like me to take him for a fast drive. I am able to get him to drive through the gates as I open and close them for us.

Afterwards, Pops has me do some harrowing of the long drive way to the house, a drive on the farm, as well as a paddock and a chewed up part of a field. We do the harrowing with Pops’ very old tractor for some reason. The noise and exhaust prevent the kids from joining me, so it proved to be a nice hour of alone time.

High Hope Farm – January 25

Another gorgeous day on the farm. While it started out freezing cold, the sun really came out and we got up to the low 60’s today. Unfortunately, last night, M came down with a fever thing that T had earlier in the week, and then S got the same this morning. M recovered well and was active, but S stayed bundled up on a couch all day.

The boys went out and we helped Pops pick up sticks and debris to pile up with other such things to help create a bern to better manage water and reduce erosion. And yes, M seems set on wearing his sweater vest every day this week.

We did a lot of walking and playing with the dogs as well. We painted a gate (barn red, of course), and started to move the rails for a new herb garden. Grandma was also sporting the day-glo orange hats. 🙂

As the day wound down, we fed all the animals while Grandma played “bump” with the boys.

High Hope Farm – January 24

Bear with the slight deviation from non-personal and into the personal space.

Every year, my family and I head down to High Hope Farm, run my mother and stepfather. We love coming for visits and typically come between Christmas and New Years, but due to two funerals, we had to reschedule for late January. Anyway, we’re here now and I thought I would share some moments.

First off, Grandma had given each of the kids their own rolling suitcase, which they loved having for this trip:

The next morning, as typical, our kids woke up before dawn and “sneaked” out of the bedroom to go find their grandparents and get the day started. After bellies were filled with homemade waffles, we were out for the morning chores. It was in the low 30’s but with the sun shining, and good jackets, it was quite pleasant. M has decided, and rightly so, he can drive the ATV as long as I’m on it with him. He’s quite good at steering and judging speed. Here is a shot of the chickens who are ready to move to another pasture, or to the hot tunnel to ride out the rest of the winter.

Afterwards, we had a quick lunch and headed down to Mississippi St. to see the Bulldogs take on the Georgia Bulldogs. The boys and I had gone last year for an evening game, but S got to join her big brothers this year. We were pleasantly surprised to see that for the pre-game even for kids, not only were there basketballs to play around with on the court, but a bouncy-house!

Then on to the game where M really got into the score and who to root for where T was more concerned with why one fan nearby was yelling at the court so much.