This is your banner ad on MSNBC.
It’s nice to see them alerting their customers but this is one of the strangest ads I’ve seen.
I can’t imagine a car company like Chevrolet creating ads like this one that say, “Please keep visiting Chevrolet.com for our updated list of Malibu and Impala recalls“.
When Firefox burst onto the scene it was a breath of fresh air. It was the quick little browser that ran circles around Netscape and Internet Explorer. It was small, fast and stable. Over time, add-ons were written extending the its functionality. Some of these add-ons have become an integral part of my browsing such mouse gestures, tiny URL creator and IE Tab.
But something happened with Firefox version 2. Specifically, stability took a nosedive. I could go weeks without a problem when I ran the earlier versions of Firefox, but with version 2, daily hang-ups and crashes have become the norm. One bug I’ve found especially annoying is when I login to view my email using Outlook Web Access (OWA) and try to reply to an email, the browser hangs for a second and then closes down. It does this nearly every time I first launch OWA. Yet when I go back into my email, everything works fine.
I’m afraid Firefox has become the new Internet Explorer: Slow, buggy, and unstable. Yet I feel as locked into Firefox as I do to Windows as I can’t imagine not being able to run my favorite add-ons, but I’m getting close to installing Opera. I tried Opera about two years ago and it was super fast and included an open plug-in architecture like Firefox. But far too many sites wouldn’t render properly.
I might give IE 7 a try as well. Maybe I can slap a theme on it and make it look a little less homely.
My Sony DVD burner died while serving well for just over four years. It was still sort of working but having problem ripping audio CDs. It was also starting to rattle and make weird sounds that a burner shouldn’t make.
So I went to Fry’s tonight to check out a new burner. I decided to look at the newer SATA versions. Fry’s has half an isle dedicated to burners, a third of which are external models. I skipped over those and figured I’d be in and out of the store in less than 15 minutes.
Well, nearly 40 minutes later I was still in the store pulling out boxes and reading labels. You’d think that Fry’s would have a section of SATA drives and a section of IDE drives but that wasn’t the case. Everything was tossed together, except for the well organized section of external burners I had no idea people still used.
Some brands included a SATA cable. Some didn’t. Ditto for power adapters. In fact, it was very difficult to tell if a model was IDE or SATA. Some brands like Sony put IDE right on the front of the box. Others required reading the cryptic label. Had I been able to read Chinese I may have been in business.
Maybe I’m getting old, but I’d sure be frustrated trying to choose a DVD burner if I were a regular user. I’d have about a 50% chance of returning home with the wrong type of drive or a drive that doesn’t include a cable. Reminds me of some printers that don’t ship with a USB cable. Very very lame indeed.
I left the store with this model from Samsung and in the 2 hours I’ve had it I’ve been impressed. It rips and burns a lot faster than my older Sony.
I took our Honda Odyssey to Grease Monkey to have have the oil changed. As I sat in the waiting area, several customers came looking to do the same. Listening to the exchanges was interesting. Whenever someone would ask for a basic oil change ($31), the person behind the 
counter would ask if they would like to upgrade to one of the following:
Several people came in with cars well over 100,000 miles. These people would be good candidates for the high mileage oil. Yet I didn’t see a single person upgrade to any of the fancier, more expensive oils and I think I know why: The Grease Monkey employee could not explain the benefits in layman’s terms.
I would guess that most customers who use a quick lube and oil shop are also owners who don’t know all the nitty gritty technical details of their cars. They want to get in and out with minimal fuss. I’ll bet few know what kind of oil the manufacturer of their car recommends let alone the difference between 5W-20 and 10W-30.
The Grease Monkey employee might have given a great technical explanation on why a synthetic oil would be a better choice, but the soccer mom, the teenager and the elderly man I saw today were lost seconds into the explanation. The Grease Monkey employee was using words like grade, viscosity and SAE which confused the customer. And when a customer is confused they will revert to what the know. In this case it meant asking for the standard, least expensive oil they’ve used before.
Although the Grease Monkey employees were helpful and well trained from a technical level, they were not able to explain their services to customers who would benefit most of their services and upgrades.
Can your employees explain the services and products your company offers? Better yet, can they explain them in the terms your customers will understand?
Ebay has been pestering me for the last several months saying I owe them $2.79 in seller fees. I don’t dispute that and have tried to pay them on three separate occasions.
One would think that Ebay would make it easy for everyone to pay their bill, but they don’t. I’ve received several emails saying I owe money and I needed to follow four steps in order to pay my bill. But I couldn’t figure it out after several minutes and would give up. Why wouldn’t Ebay provide a direct link to where I can pay them?
Finally, tonight I logged into my account and was going to bid on an item, but couldn’t because my account was on hold until I paid the $2.79. After about 5 minutes of clicking around aimlessly, I stumbled upon a page that said I didn’t owe anything! I’m still not sure what happened or how my bill got paid.
Remember when the front page of Ebay was clean and not so cluttered? Take a look at it now. What a fricking mess.
And no, I wasn’t trying to bid on Jerry Garcia’s sink.
I believe that top companies handle returns with grace and flexibility. But many companies train their employees to hassle the customer to the point that the return is more painful than the refund or exchange.
The first company I worked for out of college provided training on how to wear out the customer when handling a return. The idea was that employees were trained to toss out so many road blocks that it would eventually wear down the customer to the point of leaving the store. In rare instances, exchanges were allowed but only if we could resell the original item for full price. Refunds were only allowed if the product was defective. Such policies are near-sighted and will never result in delighted customers.
Both Nordstrom and Costco are two companies that have consistently treated me well when making a return. In fact, Nordstrom seems as happy to deal with my return as they do selling the item in the first place. It’s as if they understand that each interaction is a opportunity to show how much they value me as a customer. And in doing so they earn my loyalty.
As I waited in line last night at Fry’s I noticed something peculiar: Customers (I counted 8) in line carrying boxes of Norton Anti-Virus. I also noticed three people waiting to buy a spyware program. I think it’s called Spyware Blaster.
I don’t ever recall buying an anti-virus program because there are a number of decent free one’s available. Personally, I’ve used eTrust for years, but I don’t know if it’s ever done me any good. I don’t open email from people I don’t know let along download or click attachments from them.
But it made me wonder if things have changed much for the average PC user over the past 10 years or so. When Windows 3.11 was around, there were many utilities one could buy to help keep it running properly. Remember PC Tools and System Mechanic? This was well before the spyware and adware days. The utilities I used most back then were a disk defragger and a duplicate file finder.
I notice the latest version of System Mechanic is advertised as fixing the following Windows (Vista compatible) issues:
Optimize PC for peak performance
Repair problems and errors
Clean up clutter
Remove spyware and fix security vulnerabilities
Maintain reliability and speed
I can’t imagine paying for Windows XP or Vista and then spending another fifty bucks to fix it. There’s an entire cottage industry around helping people fix or work around the Windows problems. Are PC users so lazy and so stupid that they mess up their computers to the point that 3rd party software is required to keep them operational?
Or is Windows so slow, so bug-ridden and vulnerable that such software is required?
Is this guy smiling because he switched to Linux?
Wasn’t Windows XP supposed to fix this? How about Vista? How would you feel spending up to $400 on a new version of Windows only to find out that you’ll need to cough up more money for utilities to keep it running? Given my experience with Vista, I don’t believe there’s a utility in the world that can make it run as it should. It’s just downright annoying to deal with.
Ten years from now are Windows users going to be in the same predicament?
I visited the Apple store in Bellevue this afternoon and Apple 
might as well call it the iPhone store. There were two giant iPhone replicas in the display case as well as two large tables of full of iPhones to touch and demo.
Say what you will about Apple but they know how to display their merchandise. Go into a Best Buy or CompUSA and their cameras, computers, mp3 players and phones are usually tied down. If you’re lucky, they are attached to a metal tether that’s long enough to lift it 6 inches off the table. You have the sense the last thing they want you to do is actually test out their products.
But the Apple store is just the opposite. Everything in the store is situated and displayed as if to say, “Pick me up and see what I can do!”. Which is exactly what I did with the iPhone. A few quick thoughts gleaned from the 10 minutes I spent with it:
For obvious reasons I couldn’t test out the phone feature but as a video iPod it was fantastic. Apple is so much further ahead than Microsoft and its Windows Mobile it’s not even funny. Compared to the iPhone, Windows Mobile is years behind.
It’s probably a good thing the iPhone doesn’t support Exchange mail or I’d want to ditch Verizon and switch.
I was in Orlando last week to attend to help support a conference. I stayed at the Rosen Centre Hotel located right next to the convention center where the conference was held.
On the last night of my stay, I jumped into bed to watch some television. As I rolled over on my bed something caught my shorts and snagged them. I looked down to find a metal spring sticking up through the mattress! I removed the sheets from the bed and noticed two large holes in the mattress.
I had two Queen beds in my room so I slept on the other bed that night. The next morning I returned to the lobby to check-out of the hotel. I mentioned to the women at the front desk that I got poked in the butt by one of their mattresses. She didn’t even look up from her computer screen.
She kept typing and finally said, “Oh that’s too bad. Sorry about that” as she handed me a bill for nearly $1200 for a 5-night stay.
If you need a place to stay in Orlando, I can’t recommend the Rosen Centre. Not only are their beds dangerous but they don’t seem to care about their guests.
On my drive to work this morning I noticed the following sign displayed on on the lawn of house a few blocks away from our neighborhood:
“Dentist Chair for sale. Good condition”
The sign was made of wood and the letters have been painted in black with pink accents to give it curb appeal. Those strike me as strange colors to use on a sign of this sort, but I could be wrong since this is the first dentist chair I’ve seen someone advertise from their front lawn.
I suppose the chair could be used for other purposes besides dental work because I can’t imagine a practicing dentist purchasing a chair from what appears to be a one item yard sale.
Maybe I’ll notify my dentist.
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