Front Line

I had occasion to call my mortgage company today. I've dealt with a lot of customer service reps over the years, but something really struck me today.

I understand that in the low-paying, cost-center world of customer support, businesses are looking to save every penny that they can. Part of that may mean sending the call center overseas. Whether that's what I experienced today or not, one thing that companies need to remember is that their customers need to be able to understand the people on the other end of the line. The person I spoke to today had such a heavy Spanish (?) accent that it took two and three times of them repeating a phrase before I understood what he was saying.

I work with people in the technology field who speak many, many different languages with varying degrees of heaviness in their accent. It's part of the world I live in. But that's me -- I suspect the same is not true for the majority of people. That being said, I still had a hard time understanding this guy. I'm (pretty) sure that he was technically capable of his job, but if I, as the customer, can't understand him, that pretty much invalidates the service he's capable of performing.

I have nothing against people that don't speak fluent English - I actually find some languages really cool to listen to, Spanish being one of them (and Mia Rose's Portuguese as well), but don't put them on the front line of customer contact if they are not able to communicate with the customers.

Just my rant for the day I guess... Tomorrow - The drivers that cut me off by turning left in the "outside" lane and then cutting me off to get into to the "inside" lane to get on the expressway...

O Rings

I love it when my kids help with the grocery list... When my wife consolidated the lists from the fridge, she copied it assuming that I had written it (is my handwriting THAT close to a seven-year-old?!). When I questioned her on it, we both had a laugh when I told her he meant "oranges." :-)

Apple Fanboy out another 800 clams!

Some people...

…are so clueless they don't even know that they're clueless.

Boo!

My wife helps out at the school by recording kids' names and giving them "Hall Passes" when they come in late in the morning. There is one kindergartener who is notoriously late. When she asks his name, he replies "Gregory." "Last name?" "Boo." Uh, ok. So she writes Gregory Boo on the sign in sheet. Then she writes Gregory Boo on his nametag / hall pass. Then she moves on to the next child in line.

This goes on for a couple of weeks. Then today, as they are recording the name in the online attendance program (by teacher), they see that his name is Gregory, but Boo is not his last name. Apparently his mom, likely, calls him "Gregory Boo" as a nickname. He thought Boo was his last name :-)

My wife's first cat used to be called Pierre No! All of our cats must be related. They all have the same last name... And it's not OUR last name :-)

The Mp3 Experiment - Seven

Have any of you ever participated in anything like this? I think it would be fun. My daughter tried to pull something together a flash mob dance on the last day of school last year (she even got permission from the principal), but alas, it was not to be. She couldn't get everyone together to practice :-(

Now what?

Copyright 2010

Unless someone else has thought of this, I hereby copyright this idea... :-)

There are many sites on the web that allow you to create "Ransom Note" style text where each letter you use is presented in a different font, or substituted with a different picture representing that alphabetic character. My idea expands on that a little (but significant) bit.

My idea is to replace whole words (where possible) instead of the individual characters, but by using images of signs from each specific locality. For instance, if someone was to type "Come see our Saturday Performance at 12345 Mainstreet, 10 o'clock am" and tag the location as Detroit-area, each of the words would be replaced with the image of that word from a picture taken somewhere around Detroit. The images would be crowd-sourced like the Human Clock site after being seeded with some Creative Commons images.

• Obviously not all words would be available, especially at the start of the project, so when that happens, the word would be replaced by random letters for each character, though still from local pictures where possible.
• Logos, recognizable signs, etc would all be fodder for the collection.
• The images should be able to be submitted by anyone, but would need to be moderated.
• Submitter should specify which word/letter they are submitting.
• Submitter should be able to cropthe image upon upload so that it isolates the intended area.
• Submitted images should be commonly sized.
• File formats should be restricted.
• Multiples for each would would be allowed and encouraged to provide more randomness.
• A needs list could be presented based on the most common words.
• A needs list could include the ones that are being used that we need to replace with characters instead.
• Users of the site would be allowed to specify a metro area or allow images from the global catalog of images.
• Once presented with a refined image, the user would be able to refresh for a new set of images if desired.
• The final image should be presented to the user as a single image for download.

Any code hackers out there that want to take a shot at this?

What you seek is what you find?

I remember when I got my first car. From the moment I drove it off the lot, it seemed like every other car that I passed on the street was the exact same model and color. I know that the ratio of cars like the one I had just bought did not suddenly increase geometrically. But it was my perception that was exactly what had happened. It was on the top of my mind, so that's what I saw.

A couple of months ago, our neighborhood started a neighborhood watch program. A pretty run down mall in the immediate area has been recently renovated (actually torn down and completely rebuilt), and the increased traffic, and someone's initial initiative helped kick start the program. We actually live in one of the safest cities in the country for our size, but as the economy continues to struggle we're starting to see the impact a little more as the crime level creeps north a bit.

Some law enforcement assistance, education, a few signs and we were official. The intention was to make sure that we were all looking out for each other. Increased awareness is good for everyone.

As just something interesting to do, I decided to create a map on Google Maps to keep track of any issues that came up. I plot the date and incident on the neighborhood grid. Nothing fancy, not even anything particularly useful, but something for me to do. Thankfully, we've not had many incidents, but I'm questioning whether we've even had any more than we used to. Now that we're watching for, and more importantly communicating about any incidents that do occur, I know that there is a level of "you see what you look for" going on. There is certainly more crime in our neighborhood than I knew about before, but I'm not sure that nay of it is due to the increased shopping traffic.

I think it's a great thing to learn about things that go on around you. I think it's a great thing to be aware of what's going on around you. Whether the neighborhood watch is preventing crime or not, I can't tell, but it does make you aware. And maybe any ne're-do-wells might go somewhere else if they see our signs. Not the solution, but one step at a time.

Olivia Newton-John redone...

I remember listening to "Let's Get Physical" when I was much younger, but everything old is new again nowadays. With the inclusion of Let's Get Physical in a recent Glee episode, the song has found a whole new group of fans. Included in that group are my two sons. Well, kinda. They like the tune, but decided it needed to be updated a bit. On their own, they decided to rewrite [part of] it as Let's Get Digital. The chorus has been completed, but they still need to finish each of the verses. When they sing the "digital" part of the chorus, they vibrate their throat with their fingers to give a warbling effect; it adds so much to the song :-)

When they finish the whole thing I'll try to get them to record it and I'll post it here.

Whew!

OK, I just need to vent a little. I was working last night on a printing solution for my kid's computer (trying to get the DropBox hack to work) . I was working too late, I'm sure. SOMEHOW, in my midnight wisdom, I decided that I needed to "unshare" the Shared folder. I was thinking that I was cleaning up my previous attempt to create a home network on Windows XP, but my Home edition doesn't even support it... blah, blah, blah... Anyway, when my wife came down this morning we discovered that, go figure, we couldn't get to the Shared folders -- WHERE WE STORE ALL THE PICTURES AND MUSIC WE WANT TO SHARE ACROSS ALL USERS OF THE COMPUTER! Wonder how that happened ...

ACCESS DENIED! Even as the administrator! Uh Oh... I feebly tried a few things before I had to run off to work, but no luck. On top of that, our ISP was kaput this morning for about an hour -- which I thought, of course, was also caused by my tinkering... I felt really bad -- sorry Honey :-(

An exhaustive search this afternoon between meetings and tasks yielded absolutely nothing valuable. I had some things to try, but wasn't confident in them. I was starting to sweat. I had backed up the pictures and music fairly recently, but an automated backup is still on my to do list.

I got home this evening and went to work on trying to work my way out of a jam. Nothing was working... In the end, it was a post from 2005, about Adobe, that led me to the solution I needed. A solution that there was no way in HECK I would've come up with on my own. But it worked and guess what I'm doing right now... BACKING UP!

How long has it been since you've backed up your important stuff? Pictures? Documents? Music? Tax info? Favorites? Actually, I don't even do that anymore since it's generally so easy to find something again -- either the site you were looking for (that you had bookmarked) or something even better. I have my Chrome synch'd for the few bookmarks and bookmarklets that I use, and that's it for those.

Anyway, I'm still trying to get the DropBox script working (the kids can simply drop their homework in a folder on their desktop and it will automatically print from the main computer), but I'm still holding out a little hope...

PMS

Just heard what this means... Pissed at Men Syndrome :-)

source: movie, Last Song