Tonight we had some friends over for dinner. Aaron & Trish Anderson and their two children. We really enjoyed our time with them and learned a thing or two about them. Hopefully they learned a thing or two about us, too (mostly that we’re quirky weirdos). We love having people over and giving them the best time we can with a tasty dish and serving them. If you haven’t had someone over for a meal and honestly served them in some time, give it a shot. You’ll probably gain something from the experience and they will, too. And its known to help solidify relationships, imagine that!
Category Archives: Opinion
Apple Does Right with iPhone Changes
I just read this post from Steve Jobs on Apple.com regarding the iPhone price drop this week. Good on Apple for offering to at least a small repayment for the major price drop after only two months of their iPhone being on the market. I know I probably sound like a fanboy, but Apple continues to impress me with their customer service and their customer centered model of business.
Why should you buy an Apple product? Because their customer service is not matched by enough tech companies and it will shock you [in a good way].
An Open Letter to NBC
[the following is from an email I sent NBC this morning]
I just wanted to let you know that I’m terribly disappointed in NBC’s decision to pull out of iTunes. It is a choice that the company has to make as a business decision but it puts customers at a disadvantage and I wanted to make sure that you knew customers were watching. I would also like for NBC to publicly announce what exact measures they expected Apple to take to prevent the ‘estimated’ illegal content from being distributed.
I don’t know what shows are on NBC that I will be watching this upcoming season, but I would have liked to have grabbed the missed episodes on iTunes for $1.99. I know you wanted to double the price, but that’s rather ridiculous. As it stands I will now have to just wait and watch them when I get home from trips on my DVR, which will record them, allow me to skip commercials, and watch them on my own schedule for the $5.00 a month Qwest/DirecTV charge me. NBC will not get any of that money instead of making some money off of the iTunes download that I would have given them periodically.
Please re-consider your position with Apple because it would be more than fruitful for you to make things available to your customers in a convenient, legal manner, without being invasive to their normal patterns for content acquisition. The assumption that was made in the Press Release assumes that the United State’s legal policy of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is just not part of the way NBC thinks. This makes me very concerned for the future of the network because it makes the consumer the bad guy immediately. Customer centric companies that buy advertising will identify this and may remove or adjust advertising budgets over time to reduce NBC’s income from commercials.
Please don’t distance yourself from customers. The networks operate and exist because of the customers who pay for content through watching advertisements, buying TV series in DVD box sets, and through word of mouth talking about content put out by the network, hopefully building up a fan base for the network’s shows. NBC has indicated to the public that they are not valuable as people, but only as income sources. I know you’re a business, but if you compare this to a restaurant experience this is the scenario that you would find:
The customer comes into a Denny’s every week on Tuesday and orders a grand slam breakfast [chosen as a low cost dining experience, we’re not talking about premium channel television like HBO]. The customer comes regularly and establishes an emotional connection with the routine, Denny’s wins, the customer feels they’re winning and the waitresses become friends. One day the customer comes in only to discover that all of the waitresses were fired because their content delivery method was deemed too susceptible to the fact that people could also smuggle in food from home for their children. The customer who was not smuggling in food for children is immediately shocked that there is a farmer standing outside saying, “We had the owner fire the waitresses because their content delivery mechanism was not bringing in enough for us. Now instead of us getting money for our eggs, poultry, pigs and produce, we’ll get nothing and you’ll have to go other routes to get food! We win!”
The customer loses, the waitresses lose (iTunes), the farmers lose (NBC) and yet the customer will go to another restaurant or a store and get their own food – maybe from other sources that will continue to cut out the very farmers that killed Denny’s supply chain due to the waitresses not being effective at stopping people from smuggling in food, a minority of customers.
I buy legal copies of everything I own. I don’t steel music, I don’t steel movies, I don’t steel software and I’m offended that NBC would imply such a thing. I am a software developer that has to make a living through people buying legal versions of the software I work on.
August Was a Bad Month for Garbage Cans in the Peterman Household
This last month our garbage cans were run over by friends and family. Twice. At the beginning of the month Jessica’s sister creamed them with her parents’ Buick (not pronounced like quick). In the middle of the month my friend Tony nailed them as he was backing out of our driveway.
The good thing is that they’re rubbermades and they withstood the smashing.
In Case Your V@9!n@ is a Roller Coaster
Why on Earth do advertisers demand that commercials have weird, weird, weird implications? The latest maxi-pad (feminine napkin) commercial drives me bonkers! Who decided that they should describe a woman’s body part as a roller coaster? At what point in time does the average woman find herself in a situation where she thinks, “I have got to get a maxi-pad that can handle this Jennifer Garner/Alias type activity. Periods & my daily commute simply don’t mix.”
This sort of thing scares me mostly because I know they’re working on a more extreme commercial with tree chippers and chinchillas. I don’t know how they’ll fit, but its coming.
A Free Upgrade Wouldn’t Be Worth It
When you read quotes like this:
I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled). – Joel Spolsky
Its hard to want to upgrade.
Yet Another Post in Which Randy Cries Like a Baby
Today I got a phone call from AT&T. Well, it was from a computer at AT&T. Or at least I think it was. It could be the nation wire tapping program just doing a routine monitoring of my line pretending to be AT&T. But assuming its AT&T a recording, yes a recording, told me to call AT&T to ask them about my account. It gave me the phone number to call, told me that I should call them about my account, and then gave me the number to call again. Only I had no paper to write things down with so I hung up, tried to dial the number from memory and then got a wrong number message.
A recording! Why is it that they can afford to do any number of things that are called advertising but they fail to offer the customer service experience that would make customers want to do business with them? Can you believe that in a customer service scenario they chose to use an electronic device to 1) irritate me like nothing else and 2) cause me to have to scramble to remember a number and 3) use a recording to communicate ‘an important message’? So I called AT&T’s customer service line that is published on their website and after a little pinball-like action through their automated system I arrived at a customer service rep named Leslie. Leslie was nice and helped me the best she could, she helped me determine that something had shut off my auto-pay plan (which has worked for some time now without a problem). Something had shut it off three months ago. And after accumulating three months worth of bills they were kindly letting me know that, finally, I should pay my bill. Three months! A recording! Agggghhhhhhh!!!!!
I don’t know who is responsible for the numbskullery that is their procedure and policy in dealing with billing snafus but this was a really irritating way to interrupt a Friday. So I’m going to pay my bill and attempt to reset my auto-pay program, but this is just irritating. Thanks for nothing AT&T. A recording!
Tough Day
Today was a tough day for the girls. They were both out of sorts. Evie has some teeth coming and and I’m not 100% sure what’s getting to Abby. She’ll be five in two weeks (22nd) and she’s just been disobedient and she fell a few times from her jungle gym in the backyard.
Jessica spent much of the day scrubbing the kitchen down from top to bottom. It looks fantastic. She just told me it, ” was so disgusting.” And by my standards it was looking OK. Apparently she’s just got higher standards 😉 Actually, the kitchen gets dirty fast because both girls, as old as they are, have a way of trashing any area within minutes of entry. Some people might even go so far as to say seconds from entry. I would be one of those people.
The last thing that made today tougher is that my buddy Dave, whom I have worked with as a co-worker or as a contractor for years now, is moving on to another company. He’s a really, really sharp guy, a neat brother in the Lord, and he’s also funny. All three of those things made working with him great and I’m sure that the folks at his new place of employment will really enjoy him for those reasons and more.
Trials & Suffering
I don’t know how to respond to this article about suffering other than to say that the people involved seem to be enamored with themselves. Christianity doesn’t have simple answers for all things, but the things the people in this article are saying make me want to hurl. Their attitude towards pain and suffering indicates that they have not read their Bibles, they haven’t evaluated the afterlife, and that they don’t understand the full potential of pain and suffering that could take place. I once heard a teacher discussing this very issue bring up a good point: what if God was halving suffering from what it could be? What if we, on this earth, were only suffering one one-hundredth of what we could be suffering? Would we care? Would we be thankful towards God for preserving us and letting us suffer so little?
I have written before about a former elder at our church who simply taught about trials and suffering and went over the need for the Christian to understand God’s use of trials and suffering in their life. Hal actually suffered a lot as he died of cancer, but that cancer was not a trial he couldn’t fathom, he spent much time rejoicing that the Lord used it to bring people into his life that he could share the gospel of Jesus Christ with. Hal saw that the trials and suffering were a beautiful gift that was only temporary. He saw eternity with God as a clear and powerful goal that made the suffering less of a distraction. Yes, he hurt. Yes, his family and our whole church cried when he died, but we all know where he’s going and we all wept with joy as we came together to share stories of love, compassion and awesome counseling that were all part of Hal’s life.
The article linked to above doesn’t offer answers and hope, it offers hopelessness and really nothing worth keeping track of.
Snakes
I have seen two snakes, of the garden variety, around my house. Two! Its pretty cool to see those sorts of critters since we have a garden. As if the snakes weren’t cool enough Abby today watched in rapt awe as a spider wrapped up an earwig near our back porch. She said that it was wrapping the earwig in its yarn. You just have to love kids’ vocabulary.