Cox Crow

Power is out in Beekman today. NYSEG‘s electricity emergency phone line had a recorded message about the outage last night, and power was expected to be restored by 03:00 this morning. However, when we awoke it wasn’t.

I called NYSEG again, and the message indicated that they now expect service to be restored around 18:00 tonight. We listened to the radio to see if there was any news, and I heard a traffic report mention a transformer fire in Beekman. After a couple of phone calls, we found that part of the town had power, but the elementary school probably didn’t — their answering machine did not answer.

On the school calendar there’s a phone number labeled “School Call.” WTF is that? Whatever it is, the number is busy. Our jargon-fraught school district apparently hasn’t realized that they cannot communicate with the parents by way of the web, nor by way of an answering machine, if the power is out. Luckily, the telephone network is independently powered.

I realize that the district has some scaling issues because of the number of students, but a phone tree scales fairly well. Think of it as an organized rumor mill.

Make the first sentence pull the reader in. I’m reading syndicated content in Newsgator Online. Even in full-content feeds, it displays only the first few lines to make for easy scanning, so if you don’t pull me in immediately, I’ll never make it to the second sentence.

Dear Mega Brands:

I am not buying any more Rose Art® crayons or MegaBloks. Neither are my friends and acquaintances. Next time, listen and act when one of your customers tells you that your toys kill. [via Rick Klau]

Yours,

I’ve noticed that I am becoming more impatient with spending the time to learn new software. I don’t think this impatience extends to learning anything new, but only those things which seem to involve a large investment in time for little tangible reward.

I’ve a story about Verizon Wireless’s anti-customer service, but the heat of anger has faded. And while I want to tell this story to destroy any hope they have of retaining customers, I have the feeling it will take longer than the two minutes this did.

As a serendipitous follow-up to my problem with piles, John Gruber points the exact procedures for Not Getting Things Done.

Well, hell, I could have told you that. I didn’t, because I’m not getting things done.

If kids are smarter today (maybe), then why the hell can’t they do basic math?

I know I’m not the only one who has come across the cashier who can’t give the correct change without the help of a machine, even for simple sums. Say my bill is $5.04 and I give you $10 — and a nickel after you’ve punched one-zero in the cash register. The register’s telling you $4.96, but now you’ve got this nickel to contend with. How long do you puzzle over the problem before calling the manager? Are you sure he can help?

I don’t read things as fast as I find things to read, so I end up with piles of magazines, and newspapers, and books, and print-outs on my desk, or fifty tabs open in each of four Firefox windows. This situation was aggravated recently after I was given subscriptions to The Atlantic and The Economist. The Atlantic is a faster read than The Economist, and it only comes once a month, so I’ve been well behind current events.

Then last week when I was putting out the recycling, I accidentally threw out four weeks of The Economist with a week of unread (except for the comics) newspapers. That was a relief.

Now I can concentrate, sort of, on The Tycoons.

I think I’ll throw out this week’s Economist when the new one arrives tomorrow.

And, y’know, I’m not keeping up with the paper. I think I’ll suspend my subscription — and read the comics online. I just cancelled my Science Fiction Book Club membership again. And those 3,000 unread items in the Newsgator? Gone.

If you need to get in touch, mail will work.

Why is my account inactive?

Yahoo! Mail deactivated your mail account because:

• You have not logged into your mail account during the past four months.

I never used Yahoo! Search regularly. I was an AltaVista user when it was still altavista.digital.com, until I found Google sometime in 1997 and no longer had to dig through pages of search results.

I never really used Y! mail. It was always too slow, and too annoying. It has these large advertisements, you see, which not only take up screen real-estate but network bandwidth. And until this company, POP3 and IMAP4 were not forbidden protocols, so I never used web-based mail at all. But that’s not true anymore

I used Y! Maps, because it wasn’t as annoying as MapQuest or Expedia. But I don’t anymore.

I used Y! Groups, because that’s where the people were, even though it has the same problems with advertising that all of the Yahoo! sites have. But I never read them anymore.

I used Y! Messenger, because some of my friends have Y! accounts, until gaim became good enough. The Y! product was just too annoying. My friends are still there, but I’m not anymore.

The Y! developers come up with some neat stuff, and their bosses buy some neat stuff, but their marketing team must think we have all day to download their advertisements.

Meanwhile, they have this Pipes thing. It looks interesting, if your data is exposed to the Web.

Joel Spolsky suggests seven steps to remarkable customer service. Along the way (in step one), he used the industry category containing a certain large employer of mine as a counter-example.

When we handle a tech support incident with a well-qualified person here in New York, chances are that’s the last time we’re ever going to see that particular incident. So with one $50 incident we’ve eliminated an entire class of problems.

Somehow, the phone companies and the cable companies and the ISPs just don’t understand this equation. They outsource their tech support to the cheapest possible provider and end up paying $10 again and again and again fixing the same problem again and again and again instead of fixing it once and for all in the source code. The cheap call centers have no mechanism for getting problems fixed; indeed, they have no incentive to get problems fixed because their income depends on repeat business, and there’s nothing they like better than being able to give the same answer to the same question again and again.

Ah, but there’s the cost of fixing the problem. We have processes for increasing those so that out-sourcing is still cheaper.

I’ve mostly switched instant messaging services. I still have AIM, and Y!M, and other accounts, but the only one which I use with any frequency is Google Talk. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is that I spend most of my time on my work desk. I used to have two, but the other was left behind when I began working mostly from $HOME. For this desk, there are company policies which restrict the installation of third-party software, including instant messaging clients. While I had gaim installed for use with something I’d set up internally, some time ago, gaim broke, so it was no longer available for use during off-hours. But Google Talk works from the Google Mail page. So there you have it.

This has led the people with whom I keep in touch to wonder where I am. I’m still here, but disconnected.

Steve Jobs asks

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system?

Ernie the Attorney bemoans the abundance of laws in this country. Les Hancock has the solution. Rather than limiting the content of laws, such as is done with the Bill of Rights and other instruments, limit the number of laws. The legislature may enact any law they choose, as long as the total number of laws is not greater than a given number.

I’m sure there’d be a way around that limit by referencing sub-section 301(c) of article 64, so perhaps a word limit is also necessary.