 |
Out in the hot tub with the girls, we hear a sound not unlike a dragon approaching from somewhere in the woods behind the house. It comes closer and closer. All of the sudden we see this looming from behind the trees. Right up and directly over us. The people on board were friendly, shouting and waving to us.
 |
 |
This is really sad. Pages Bookstore in Toronto is closing because of unmanageable rent increases. Here’s some more information about it: http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=170346
The story isn’t over. The owner and the landlord are working together to try and save the place (perhaps a relocation) and the owner is also hoping for a white horse to save the day. Keep your fingers crossed.
I used to tend bar and play in a club just down the street from here while living in Toronto years ago. It is truly one of the best bookstores ever. I have a lot of fond memories of Queen Street (East and West). Very hip and funky part of town: lots of clubs, record stores, clothes stores, cafes and restaurants, full of students. It would be fun to go back and visit and see what has changed since I was there last back in ‘87.
Last night my oldest daughter, Mia, did what I think took a lot of courage. She got up in front of about 100 people (parents, kids, grandparents) and sang the song Hey There Delilah. If you know the song, you know there’s lots of words that go by pretty fast and the melody itself requires a fairly wide vocal range. While slightly more timid than usual, she sang with her usual grace and sweetness. She is my favorite singer.
Mia is no stranger to the stage. This summer, she’ll be attending another season of her theater camp and will be performing in her tenth play. Last night was a less formal setting (part of a 70s themed end-of-the-year celebration at her after school program), but she still brought her game. I’m very, very proud of her. It was such a delight to have parents tell me after the fact how wonderfully she sang and how brave she was to do it.
The glow of yesterday’s customer support triumph with Samsung has worn off. I sit here in the “business office” of my local Honda dealership awaiting the completion of my 2007 Odyssey Touring minivan’s 60,000-mile checkup. The cost for the basic service was going to be roughly $400.
But the attendant has just visited and informed me that I need new tires. My vehicle will not pass inspection because the tires are worn from poor alignment. But that’s just the beginning of the story.
This car has what are known as PAX tires. Some people know them as run-flat tires. Their claim is that even without air, these tires maintain their shape and their ability to be driven on for many miles. It’s the special frames that allow this. The vehicle also has an impressive monitoring system for these tires. As you might imagine, these tires are very expensive.
But here’s where the fun starts. There’s a class action suit against Honda and Michelin because of these tires. People buying cars with them have been misinformed about their life expectancy. The tires themselves, while excessively priced, are also very hard to replace because there are very few dealerships with the equipment to do so. I got a notice in the mail a few weeks back from a law firm in the Midwest offering me to join in the suit. I have to fill out some paperwork and send it back to them. I imagine, like most lawsuits, I may get fifty cents or so while the lawyers themselves take in millions.
So, my $400 service call now is $1300 (tires and parts, installation, rotation, balancing, blah blah blah). There’s no lawyer here helping me to bargain or talk the dealers down. I will likely have to do this again in 20,000 miles or so (not the advertised 35,000 miles).
I’ve been a very loyal customer of Honda cars for years. In fact, since the junky Subaru I drove after college, all my cars have been Hondas. But this is the end of the road. I’m done with them. I’ll need another car next year when my other Honda finally times out. But it’ll be something else. Something without proprietary equipment that hoses me for years to come.
I apologize for the screaming headline to this post, but I use all caps to emphasize the most amazing thing that happened to me.
I have three monitors on my computer. I do lots of design and testing on browsers, I write a lot, I work with imaging. So all this extra real estate works for me. I use all Samsung monitors because I have always loved their clarity, crispness, and reliability. The two to the sides are widescreen and the center one is more standard. They all are flat-screen at extremely high resolutions.
All this said, the center one has been giving me trouble lately. When booting up, it flashes on, then just as quickly goes black. By hitting the On/Off switch (or the Source button) repeatedly it eventually comes back to a working state. But this situation has degraded and it now takes many more times to get the thing working each day. I tried everything I could think of: installing new drivers, attaching new cables, checking and testing the graphics card. Nothing. So, I finally decide to call Samsung directly for advice (advice, because I’ve had the monitor for two years and my expectation is that that is about all I’ll get).
I call Samsung and within seconds am talking to a monitor expert. Right there, you got me excited. No long hold times, no uninformed “technician.” I describe my situation in detail, tell him all the solutions I tried. He then asks me, would I prefer a service call or an exchange? I am silent. I tell him I don’t understand the question. He repeats it. I say that, sure, I’d love an exchange. He takes down my address, phone number, and email. He then tells me that in about seven days a new monitor will arrive at the UPS store just a mile or so from here. Bring my old monitor there, they will give me the new monitor, repack the old one, and ship it back. Free.
Let that roll around in your head for a moment. Two year-old monitor, exchanged and replaced for free. Within in days. Transaction complete within five minutes. I don’t know, if you’ve had a better customer support experience, I’d like to hear it. You only hear the horror stories about flight check crews and mobile phone vendors. I don’t care what happens over the next 14 hours, I’m having a damn good day.
Oh, and Sprint, Overstock.com, ATI, Charter, First Data: Please call Samsung and beg them to let you know how they do it.
Update: Monitor arrived yesterday, but couldn’t pick it up until today. That’s three days from when Samsung promised to send it. It is a newer model and the picture is remarkably crisp and clear, definitely an upgrade.
+ 
+ 
I am all about convergence. I love that my phone can act almost as a secondary computer. While I tend to write about all the nifty gadgets I find for it, it actually has become a huge part of running my business. But here again, I’m gonna write about the fun stuff.I’ve been spending more time with Facebook lately, posting some inane things, but mostly writing about experiences from my work. And I’ve really enjoyed finding all the applications you can add to Facebook to make it more useful and more integrated with other services. This morning, I found an app that grabs all the photos (in their galleries, no less) from Picasa and displays them to a tab in my profile page. Because I use Photoshop Lightroom 2 to process my images and then directly export them to my Picasa web, I now am able to update Picasa while also updating FB with my photos.
But wait … now there’s more. It turns out this plugin I found doesn’t work so well, and also, only displays the photos and galleries in a tab in my profile, with no announcement on my wall that there are new pictures. And now I find something that is already built into FB that will accomplish this for me, without an additional application. Do this:
Go to your Profile page in FB
Click on the Settings button just below the What’s on your mind box
Here you’ll see a bunch of options for connecting to services like Picasa and Flickr
Just click on the service you want and enter the username used in that service
Done!
To further my aspirations for convergence of everything I hold dear, I even added my deli.cio.us bookmarks to my twitter feed so they also now will end up on my FB page. I am at one with the cyberverse.
I’ve recently noticed several posts mentioning mind mapping and other forms of defining process and capturing ideas. I can’t tell you how many tools I have used over the years for this purpose, Visio being my absolute least favorite. (I’ve also run the gambit of note-taking applications, from OneNote to EverNote, my current favorite.) But mind mapping is a simple and cool visual way to illustrate how a process or system might work. This little example below was quickly done on my iPhone using SimpleMind, which I then saved as an image, then imported into this post (using the WordPress iPhone edition). It’s a simplified example but it does show how easy it is to diagram the initial stages of thought for a project. I’m gonna kick this one around for a while, and see if there is a more complete version for the desktop.
There’s not much more to this application. You create related boxes and can move them about the screen. You can change the color scheme and either export it as an image or export it to the paid version ($6.99). For free, this is definitely worth trying out, especially if you’re like me and finding your phone a bigger part of running your business.
This is cool for two reasons: I love the TED talks, and I can now watch them on the iPhone.
For those unaware of TED, it is basically an online archive of lectures/talks by thought leaders and other fascinating people.
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.
One of my favorites was Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and educator at the New England Conservatory. I met him a couple times while a student there, but this venue really brings out his passion and joyous personality.
I am relatively new to Facebook and Twitter, but have been blogging on and off for several years. Very recently, however, I’ve seen how spending time to tweet and comment and read others communications has helped my business.
I follow Abbie Lundberg, a friend and former Editor-in-Chief of CIO magazine, who recently started her own business. By following Abbie’s tweets I became aware of and registered for a couple of online courses in Social Media, learned of some new sites about business and strategy, and kept up with the adventures and discoveries she’s had while getting her business off the ground (many of which I can relate to from the past couple years). I follow Abbie’s tweets and her comments on FaceBook.
I also follow Chris Koch, also from CIO, who now writes for ITSMA. Chris offers very thought-provoking and engaging marketing research and commentary and usually provides sources that are valuable reads. I like how he ends most of his posts with “What do you think”? I can find his announcements of newly published posts on FaceBook.
Yet another former CIO colleague, Meredith Levinson, recently contacted me to help her author-husband design and develop a new web site to highlight and build community around his work. I doubt that Meredith would have thought of me if it were not for my visibility (and hers) on FaceBook.
In my own case, I recently sent out a tweet mentioning that I am now putting up sites on cloud computing platforms. I need to write something more about this experience soon, but just sending that out brought followers to my Twitter stream and also a couple of inquiries for more information and my insights. That’s powerful stuff!
What I have found, of necessity, is that I need some simple and efficient way to manage this activity. And with the tools at hand (WordPress, FaceBook, and Twitter) I have found that. I have my “channel” set now so that if I Tweet something, it ends up not only on Twitter, but also (and most importantly, automatically) on FaceBook and the sidebar of my blog. Equally, if I write a new blog post, it shows up as a new status item on FaceBook and as a new Tweet. This is where the power lies: the ability to create items of interest and distribute them efficiently, and in the best case, cheaply.
Sure, once in a while I tweet about the dog getting loose or running through a FastLane, but for me these platforms are not just about keeping in touch; they are about keeping people connected and informed.
David Churbuck recently tweeted a quote from Mark Cahill to the affect that “Personal Branding is an artificial edifice that is antithetical to the …. authenticity expected in Social Media Marketing.” This generated a very passionate discussion, mostly because of the definition of Personal Branding. Mark was referring to the bad kind (people who hire others to blog and tweet for them); but several commentors were quick to point out that for many of us (especially those with our owns businesses) social media is a perfect place to inform and communicate with an audience of supporters and potential clients.
That’s why I’m here: to promote the work I do, to encourage people to engage my services, and to learn from my highly respected friends and colleagues. I also like to see where Al Sacco is drinking this weekend.
Pixelpipe runs on an iPhone and provides an interface for uploading images and video to dozens of social media and other channel sites simultaneously. For instance, I can fire up Pixelpipe on my phone, scroll through and flag/tag my images, then hit one button that uploads all the images to Picasa, Facebook, and Twitter, all remarkably fast.
Pixelpipe is a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text and upload photos, video and audio files once through Pixelpipe and have the content distributed across over 75 social networks, photo/video sites and blogs, and other online destinations. We provide a number of mobile & desktop applications for users, liberating their media and sharing their life.