I'll admit it... I was wrong.

I thought Master Appliance Service of Hornsby NSW had the world record for bad customer service but they have been comprehensively beaten into second place by Whirlpool - the company whose appliances they were called in to fix.

A month ago I posted about our woes in trying to get our dishwasher fixed. My main beef at the time was that the repair technician didn't know which of the circuit boards on our dishwasher *might* be faulty so he wanted us to replace both of them. I objected to paying a non-refundable $950 plus service call for replacing two circuit boards when there was no guarantee that those new parts would fix the problem, so I went to Whirlpools web site to tell them of the situation and I received an automated email in reply thanking me for my input.

Fast forward to today and we receive a voicemail from the appliance repair company asking whether we still want the circuit boards. This reminds me that I haven't heard back from Whirlpool so I ring their customer support line and am told by John that they don't read the feedback they receive on their web site. However, as a consolation prize, he assures me that they do read their snail mail and offers me a postal address for Whirlpool so I can put my complaint in writing ...

Amazing stuff, but it does explain why I haven't heard back from them.
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How Microsoft could achieve a 'Notes-free' planet

Perhaps Microsoft could install a software version of the LG gadget in a Windows 7 patch to detect when Notes is running on a Windows PC and then automatically delete the Lotus folders. That's one way to achieve 'Notes-free countries'.

"AN ELECTRONICS manufacturer with a history of making false environmental claims has been caught doctoring fridges to make them appear more energy efficient.

LG Electronics has agreed to compensate potentially thousands of consumers after two of its fridges - models L197NFS and P197WFS - were found to contain an illegal device that activates an energy-saving mode when it detects room conditions similar to those in a test laboratory.

The so-called circumvention device was discovered last month by the consumer advocacy group, Choice.

The device detects test conditions - typically 22 degrees - and activates the energy-saving mode, creating the impression of lower running costs and energy usage. The devices have been banned in Australia since 2007."

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OT: Size IS everything... I'm glad Australia is only a 4

This table shows the size of deficit as a percentage of GDP and Australia is near the bottom of the rankings.
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You bet your Life...

Buying Life Insurance is where you bet that you will die before you pay sufficient premiums to compensate the Life Insurance company for their eventual payout, and if you die early then you have won the bet. Medical insurance works on a similar logic where it becomes a worthwhile investment only if you need extensive medical care during your lifetime.

In our case we have just 'won' back approximately seven years worth of top-level Family Cover insurance premiums through Melanie Rose's five week residential in the neonatal intensive care ward last September. The stay in intensive care is SOP for all premature babies until they reach a gestational age of 39 weeks and fortunately there were no complications so she was released on schedule.

I hope that all of our future medical insurance premiums are just pure profit for the insurance company.
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Never mind the Fine Print ... just enjoy the Spam

Linked-In is a useful tool in my business, and every three months or so I consider upgrading my account. Unfortunately for Linked-In, I can never see the USD$25 per month additional benefit to sign up for the basic paid service let alone the USD$500 per month for the 'Pro' package so after tooling around adjusting my profile for a few minutes I put away my unused credit card and go back to my regular work.

This time however I clicked through into the Terms and Conditions of the Linked-In service and found this little gem (my underlining):

You do not have to submit anything to us, but if you choose to submit something (including any User generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques and data), you must grant, and you actually grant by concluding this Agreement, a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royaltyfree (the) right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, and use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, anything that you submit to us, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.

Is it my imagination, or are we all giving Linked-In the legal right to become the worlds biggest spammer, with the recipients of the spam maintaining their own profile on the Linked-In mailing list?

Now I don't think Linked-In have ever spammed anyone, and since such actions would be enormously damaging to their reputation I doubt that they have ever seriously considered such a strategy, however if Linked-In was bought out by a company such as Centabank then the game might change quite quickly.

Probably just my imagination...
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How to be selfish with your wife ...

Many moons and I my wife and I streamlined our giving of presents:

• Birthdays are special - we get a surprise present and it had better be impressive! We also get to plan the day out (on a neighboring weekend if necessary) and choose the restaurant.
  
  
• Christmas is a time for buying our own c.$100 present and hiding it under the tree. Every Christmas morning I find out what I bought for Belinda for that year and (surprise surprise) it's always exactly what she wanted. And vice versa of course ...
  
  
• Wedding Anniversary is for jointly buying a large present that we've decided on during the year ... a new TV cabinet ... a weekend away etc. No surprises here but a lot of satisfaction.
  
  
• Valentine Day is just a plot by the cardmakers to get us to spend money so should be forever ignored.
  
  
• Mother's Day and Father's Day are irrelevant since neither of us have spoken to our respective parents for many years and don't wish to change that arrangement (two very long stories there).

So that works for us, and I'm sure you and your Significant Other have your own unique philosophy for pleasing each other with presents.

This year we discovered a new way to please ourselves. New Years Eve found us short on a few essentials ... milk... bread... red wine etc, so I detoured past the local supermarket for a short excursion. While there I noticed a number of mark-downs on foods whose use-by dates weren't going to make it into the New Year, and I wound up taking home a kilo of garlic prawns and some specialty ice cream.

What a great feed we had! Number One son didn't like the look of the prawns at first but after we coaxed him into trying one there was no stopping his 4 year old stomach. Sure, we'd just finished Christmas with lots of party foods but there's not much choice in deciding what you eat there - tradition has decreed the menu for most of it.

So that's how we will be selfish with my wife from now on - every New Year's Eve we'll go shopping for foods we've never bought at the supermarket before and have a bang-up surprise feast to welcome in the New Year.

Did you think I was talking about being selfish TO my wife? For shame... I specifically said being selfish WITH her.
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A useful tool for all computer gamers

I play the odd computer game and once I figured out that waiting three months after release halved the price of most boxed games I found I could even afford to play them. My biggest problem has been trying to read the system specs written in 2 point Myopia font on the bottom of the game boxes, but now I've found a website that will do that for me. Well actually its the other way around. The 'CanYouRunIt' site reads my computer specs and advises me whether my PC will support a game selected from their list.

Their list is not exhaustive - no sign of the Diablo franchise (but I already know I need a new computer before Diablo III arrives sometime within the next three years). Still, it's a useful site to bookmark.
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Channelling Don Bradman

I blogged previously about the recent Lotus Cricket day in Bowral and now the intrepid Matt Paddon has posted photographs of the day. I appreciate that our American cousins may not appreciate the finer points of this noble sport however let me draw your attention to the pristine conditions of the grounds and the gentle beauty of the surrounding countryside.

Wouldn't you love to play a social game of your favorite sport on such a beautiful park?

... unless you're into ice hockey I guess.
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So this blonde walks into a bar ...

Well, not really, but I would guess that 99% of readers would interpret that title as an indication that this post contains a blonde joke... and they're right.

Last year I replaced all the computers in my office with those new energy efficient kind from IBM, and today I got a call from the IBM Business Partner who installed them. He was complaining that the work had been completed a whole year ago and I still hadn’t paid for them.

HELLLOOOOOOO…………..just because I’m blond doesn’t mean that I am automatically stupid.

So, I reminded him what his fast talking sales guy had told me then, that in ONE YEAR these computers would PAY FOR THEMSELVES!

Helllooooo……??? It’s been a year already!

There was only silence at the other end of the line, so I finally just hung up..

He never called back. I bet he felt like an idiot.

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Same Planet ... Different Worlds

I've been through two apparently unrelated incidents in the last 24 hours which have set me thinking that Earth is actually a multiverse with everyone living in their own reality.

Today's incident occured when I went to pick up a package from my Post Office. The attendant behind the counter was quite confrontational and said that I must have lost a notification that the postman had left in my letterbox. Despite my explanation that I had been eagerly checking my mailbox for this package (a new battery for my completely dead mobile phone) for the last week and I had not received any such notification, the attendant aggressively insisted that I was at fault. When I told him I was going to report his confrontational attitude to his management his reply was "You wouldn't do that if I was a white man". Anyway, I've now made the complaint and I'm happy to let the Australia Post Customer Service team review the video footage and decide what action to take. I can shrug off bad customer service but I don't take gratuitous accusations of racism from anybody. My question from that incident is how on earth did this man decide that a complaint about his customer service must be racially motivated?

Yesterday's event was equally baffling. I was at an IBM roundtable meeting which is where Big Blue invites selected Business Partners to chew the fat on selected topics and hopefully gain some consensus about the best direction to take on those issues. One of the key topics at that meeting was about negotiating commercial relationships between individual Business Partners and one of the people present didn't like the idea because (in his words) "I don't trust anybody".

OK, we've all been burned by people we trusted and I'm sure we could all name some business partners who are lacking in ethics. In my case I chose not to trust those who have screwed me in the past (you know who you are) but I'm certainly open to working with new faces on new opportunities. To hear a business person declare that they don't trust anybody seems completely out of this world. You want your customers to trust you, but you're not willing to trust anyone else... what's wrong with this picture?

Let me clarify that I have known this Partner for many years and he is a thoroughly decent person who deserves the success he has achieved. I'm just baffled by his decision not to trust anybody regardless of the circumstances.

Anyway, both of those incidents left me unable to see where the other person was coming from and I now need to (regretfully) walk away from spending more time figuring out what they were thinking.

Same Planet ... Different Worlds.
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Things I'd like to see - Suicide by fish knife

You've probably heard of Puffer Fish - that Japanese delicacy which can kill you if it's not prepared properly. Now an enterprising company has actually bred a non-toxic version of the fish which sounds an eminently sensible thing to do since the fish chefs "...are traditionally bound to commit ritual suicide with their own fish knife should one of their customers expire after eating one of their meals..."

However there is apparently only a small commercial interest in the safer version of the fish:

It's a very tasty fish, but that's not the only reason people choose to go to a fugu restaurant," said Shinichi Ueshima, the chef at the Dote fugu restaurant in Yokohama.

"It's obviously more than a little exciting to go to a restaurant knowing that it might be the last meal that you ever eat," he said. "Where is the enjoyment in eating something that has no risk in it?"

Now I know why people deploy Microsoft software...
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Loti of Australia v. The Rest of the World ...

... and unfortunately the Australian Loti lost. The event was the first annual Lotus Cricket Challenge held at the Bradman Oval in Bowral and the teams were reinforced by selected Lotus Business Partners and customers all set for a day of fine sport with perhaps a half glass of Chardonnay over lunch.

There could not have been a finer locale or conditions for the day. Bowral oval was the home oval for Sir Donald Bradman, the all-time champion batsman whose sporting records are STILL unbeaten some 60 years after he retired from the game. The Don's career average of 99.94 is fifty percent higher than the next highest scorer (R.G. Pollock on 60.97) with the rest of the world's past and present batsmen all trailing off into lower figures.

For yesterday's match the scores didn't matter. Australia lost on the day but we all had a wonderful day with only the gentlest of sledging ( e.g. "Your Mother uses Outlook!") to ruffle the batsmen's concentration

There were some minor injuries with the RoTW Captain (Tim Royle) flicking a ball off his bat and onto his chin, but he merely retired hurt to wash off the blood and see a doctor then returned to bowl out the Australian tail in the afternoon. Well played sir!

A good day had by all. My thanks go to Lotus for organising the day and inviting me along.
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EDIT: Two days later and I'm still sore. I might need a few days of training before next year's match.
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Quality Journalism? Who needs it?

So Rupert Murdoch is upset because he believes Google is stealing his 'quality journalism' and therefore his ad revenue. Well frankly I've never been impressed with 'quality journalism' the way he (or any other newspaper publisher) defines it. I want to know about the things that interest me , not about the things that Rupert's editors want to load up into the headlines. Sherlock Holmes summed it up best when he dismissed Watson's discussion of the Copernican system with the words:

"What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go around the sun. If we went around the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

Amen brother! Talk to me about Domino v. Exchange or Gilbert & Sullivan or the American Civil War or World in Flames or dealing with a crying two-month-old baby and I'm all ears, but I really don't care if the Hawks beat the Demons on Saturday or who won the car races at Bathurst or that a bank was robbed somewhere and I'm probably not even interested if we change Prime Ministers because of some political scandal.

Murdoch's other problem is that no news organization carries a sufficiently high reputation that they can demand money for something that is available for free elsewhere. Mind you, I could be wrong on that point. Millions of people buy bottled water every day when they have a tap at home in their kitchen.

I pay my monthly access charges to my ISP to receive the news and I don't care who is stuffing the the pipeline with the factoids at the other end as long as they are accurate. I haven't parted with money to buy a newspaper for (probably) the last ten years and I can't remember the last time I turned on the television to watch the evening news. Quality journalism is in the eye of the beholder and Rupert Murdoch's publications just aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

Now where was that Wikipedia article on Jeffrey Dahmer ?
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Evaluating a Consulting company based on their website

Here are some rules for evaluating IT consulting companies based on their website. The idea is to give the work to the supplier who has the highest score at the end of this process:

• Start each company with a score of 100.
  
  
• Subtract 1 for every meaningless (ie unprovable) adjective on their website - look for words like "passionate", "committed" and "highly skilled".
  
  
• Subtract 5 for every graphic on their website depicting a person who doesn't work for their company.
  
  
• Subtract 10 for every client reference on their website where the consultant(s) who did the work are no longer employed at that company. If possible, use Linked-In etc to track down where those top-gun consultants are currently working and include their new employers on your list of potential suppliers.
  
  
• Subtract 20 if their website lists a technology (eg Lotus Domino) without identifying a specialized skill set within that technology (eg System Admin v. Application Development v. integration with SAP v. software upgrades)
  
  
• Subtract 50 if the staff they want to assign to your project don't have current technical certifications in any of the technologies listed on their website.
  
  
• Automatically disqualify any supplier who outsources the care and feeding of their own website to another IT company.
  

Then pick the three companies with the highest score and mention to each of them that you're going to run your shortlist past the Vendor and ask for a recommendation. If any of them offer you a free lunch or other bribe at that point then take it and subtract 10 from their score.

... or you can just pick the supplier who gives you the cheapest quote. That seems to be the way most customers work.
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OT: Which part of "NO" don't you understand?

Having a Microsoft Hotmail account has a number of drawbacks. For a start, you can't set it up to automatically forward your emails to another email account. I'd guess MS organize it that way so that you can't just do an auto-forward and then let the account just wither away from disuse - which is exactly what I'd like to do with it.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that it has the Microsoft Marketing Team behind it. Have a look at their latest email...

***********************************************************************

Dear Windows Live User,

We are contacting you regarding your communication preference settings for Windows Live and MSN.

Currently, your settings do not allow Microsoft to send you promotional information or survey invitations about Windows Live and MSN. We would like to communicate important product updates to you, so if you would like to change your settings, please visit your account profile here [link]to change your preferences.

Sincerely,
The Windows Live Team

***********************************************************************

Now how can I set my preferences so MS aren't allowed to ask me to change my preferences?
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OT: Shoes... who needs them?

I think most men get by on three pairs of shoes. We have the pair that we wear to work, the pair we wear to casual occasions and the pair that we wear everywhere else. Two years ago I replaced my work shoes with a pair of steel-capped black work boots which I keep finely polished. They are comfortable, will last forever and, at the ripe old age of fifty, I don't feel the need to make a fashion statement. When the subject of these boots ever comes up (only by me mentioning them - no-one ever notices them), most women look baffled and most men say "What a great idea! I'll do the same when my current work shoes die!"

This post is about my 'everywhere else' pair of shoes who died completely a couple of weeks ago. Now while I'm quite comfortable in my work boots I don't wear them around the house owing to the overwhelming sound effects when I walk on polished floorboards, and since I had misplaced my casual shoes, I was getting by at home with bare feet or sometimes with socks on cold nights.

My Road to Damascus moment came with an urgent trip to the hardware store. Since I had been working down the back yard in bare feet I just hopped in the car 'sans sabots ' and mentally prepared myself for the outraged stares of the sartorially sensitive members of the community. While standing at the Hardware Store checkout I realized that I was actually enjoying the feel of the carpet on my feet and I began mentally listing the benefits of not wearing shoes:

• Escalators give you a foot massage.
• Puddles of rainwater and flooded drains are irrelevant.
• Grass feels good too.
• My feet don't ache.
• My feet aren't sweaty and toxic after a long day.

I will get another pair of 'everywhere else' shoes soon, but in the meantime I'm enjoying my back-to nature moment. Give it a try and see if you like it.
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OT: Just when you think you're getting your Ducks in a Row...

... life comes along and messes them up again. Last Thursday night started normally enough with getting number one son to bed and then playing an hour of whodunnit murder mystery on the computer with my lovely wife. We still don't know whodunnit but we're getting closer.

Belinda went to bed about ten but got up half an hour later with severe abdominal pains and [lots of needless details omitted]. Neither of us have family in the immediate neighborhood so we drafted a nearby friend to watch over our sleeping son while I broke a number of speed limits getting Belinda to the nearest hospital. Four days and an emergency operation later we have hopes of Belinda getting out of hospital tomorrow and then we can pick up our lives where we left off late last week.

The only benefit I can see out of all of this was it bought home to me quite sharply where my priorities lie. Lotus software has been my career since 1987 but it will never be the most important thing in my life. Yeah, that guy standing outside the San Hospital Emergency ward crying his eyes out was me. Thanks to Nurse Annie Howard in San Emergency who watched over Belinda like a hovering angel.

I've got a meeting with IBM tomorrow at 10am and I hope they forgive me if I'm a little distracted.
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OT: Dammit Jim I'm a Marketing Man... not an English Teacher!

I watched the trailer for the new Star Trek movie last night and I was struck by the typo in the description of the clip. Remember that this isn't a pirate clip uploaded to YouTube by some geek from GalaxyQuest... this is an official publicity release in a major metropolitan newspaper.


Star Trek: Trailer 2 (02:04)
J.J. Abrams' second Star Trek trailer gives a peak at what we can expect.

I was going to send an email to the editor but I realized that they hadn't responded to my last four emails pointing out typos on their web site.

I must be getting old.
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OT: Bill Gates proving that MS doesn't have a 'Chinese Wall'

In the Age of Napoleon the British navy was under threat from woodworm. In the Age of Obama (TM) there is a different kind of worm threatening to scuttle Her Majesty's fleet. When the RN standardized on 'Windows for Warships' as the operating system to run the computer systems on their ships there were a number of voices raised in warning about the unsuitability of that OS to perform as required. If you follow through some of those links in that article you will eventually wind up with the statement of Bill Gates given in 2002 when the State of New York and others took on Microsoft Corporation. That's where our story starts...

Have a read of the following sections of Bill's statement from 2002:

216. In a purely theoretical world, one could imagine developing modest software programs in such a way that any module could be swapped out in favor of a similar module developed by a third party. The replacement module would need to conform identically to the interfaces expected by all of the modules with which it interacts. In the commercial world, it is hard to see what value such replace-ability would provide even if it could be achieved. [Apart from allowing other companies to compete with Microsoft - GD] For Netscape Navigator to suffice as a replacement for Internet Explorer, for example, developers at Netscape would have to devote enormous effort to matching the functions of Internet Explorer and enabling those functions to perform in precisely the same way as Internet Explorer. When they were done, they would have software that is nearly identical to Internet Explorer (a “clone”), providing little or nothing in the way of new value.

217. In addition, if Microsoft were obligated to allow ISVs to clone all the functions of all the “Microsoft Middleware Products” in Windows, Microsoft’s ability to improve Windows would be hampered because the interfaces between modules would necessarily be “frozen” so that third parties could write to them. Given the large number of “Microsoft Middleware Products” in Windows under Section 22.x, the effect would be to freeze large parts of Windows.

The sentence I underlined could have been taken from any book on good programming practice. Was Bill really suggesting that Microsoft doesn't document and adhere to the specified APIs when passing off code requests between Windows and other Microsoft applications? Surely the two development teams don't have access to each others internal documentation? If so, it makes it difficult to continue to claim the existence of the legendary 'Chinese Wall' between Microsoft's OS developers and their application developers. I don't think anyone every took that claim seriously but it's interesting to read Bill testifying to the fact that it technically can't exist.
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OT: Halloween Headcount

I'm not really into Halloween but my Better Half thinks its cute and so we provide little candy bags for the legions of made-up munchkins who beat a path to our door around this time every year. This year we we made up thirty candybags and were short by about five bags in the final rush c. 8:30pm (remember that this is Sydney time so you US folk are probably not even out of bed yet).

For those of you who do play the Halloween game, how many candybags do you give out?

Just curious.
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