Where everyone knows your name. Or not.

Rec'd a piece of junk mail from The Old Mill, a restaurant in my hometown of Westminster MA.

Staples. It's (not) easy.

Staples has an app. All God's children have an app.
The Staples app purports to let us do things, except the things that seem obvious.
Each time I buy something at Staples, I can't find my card, the loyalty card that enables coupons and discounts. .I provide them with my phone number. They look up the card and apply the credit, if anything, to my purchase.
This last time, I thought I'd be clever. The app lets me store my Staples reward card. I did so.
When I went to check out at the store, I hold up the app, displaying the barcode and number.

The clerk looks at my phone and then enters my number by hand because their scanner cannot pick up the barcode stored on their app.
One less reason to use their app on the way to one less reason to shop at Staples.

At the Mall with Apple and Microsoft

We've seen this before, but it seems worse now. On a winter's Saturday, a trip to the Natick Mall showed two very different retail experiences.

The Apple Store is lively with people of all ages. The further into the store you go, the more customers will you see, excitedly playing with, learning about, and buying stuff.

The Microsoft Store employees outnumber the customers. The liveliest place is not in the store, but out front, where a two-year-old girl is dancing to the big XBox video.

It's no wonder that Apple, with but a sliver of the desktop computing market share, is worth twice what Microsoft is worth.

Vox tells you all you need to know about Common Core

Vox sez:

What’s actually in the Common Core?

The Common Core is a list of things students should know and know how to do at each grade level in math and language arts. The language arts standards include expectations for writing, speaking, and reading both fiction and nonfiction.

But, as we know, a picture is worth a lot of words.

Attention to detail may not be their Forte

Forte.net is a payment-processing service that handles web, mobile, and other types of online payments.
Their website has a nice stock photograph of a diverse group of people, each with their own blurb about why Forte is cool.  Each person has an imagemap associated with his or her picture. Move your mouse over a person's image and a speech balloon pops up. It's a clever bit of Javascript.
As with any service, you want to pay attention to the fine print. In this case, Michelle might quarrel with her designation as a guy.

WISE Learning and Technology Blog: January 2015

Some thoughts about things via my WISE Learning and Technology Blog: January 2015

Happy 19th Birthday, Krista

Krista, with Joe, late 90s

Happy 10th Birthday, Cassie

Thanks

Lighting the Way for Halloween

Because Halloween gives us a chance to celebrate the macabre, the spooky, and the just plain weird, let's find out how LEDs are lighting up this darkest of holidays.
Read more at my blog on All LED Lighting, Lighting the Way for Halloween

How the Telegram does customer service emails

Earlier  today, I described how organizations deal with problems. To that, let me add that I received the following email 36 hours after my initial report.

Words fail me.

How not to solve systemic problems

Organizations generally try to find the nicest, most empathetic people for their customer service department. It's way, I think, of placating customers without really fixing the problem.
The people at the front desk at Charter (our local cable company), Comcast (in spite of their occasional cement headedness), Social Security, Metlife, and other are very nice. It's hard to get mad at them, even when they're explaining something that clearly went kablooie.
My iPad app for our local paper, the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, stopped working the other morning. I was unable to sign in, even though my account was good on their website. Among other things, when I was trying to figure out what was going on, I received this vexing message.

I sent an email to their customer service address and received no response. Twenty-four hours later, I called and talked with a very nice woman who explained that a) my account number was linked to an old address that was no longer valid after we moved in June and b) everything was all set now, except that I'd have to wait another 24 hours before I could use the iPad app.
A day before I can use an app?! That's frickin' nuts. The person on the line was very nice.
We had a similar incident with Metlife, where an important document was sent to our old address and returned (presumably because the envelope said not to forward it). No one at Metlife thought to contact our agent or to call us on the phone numbers we had listed with our account. The transaction just dropped into a bureaucratic black hole from which neither light nor reason could escape. The person on the customer line was very nice in explaining what had happened.
Seth Godin writes that the lowliest employee in an organization is an ambassador. Theirs is a hard job. "They apologize. Not for things they did wrong, but for things that others did wrong." Ambassadors can only be successful if the messages that they receive from customers are moved back up the chain of command, such that the originating problems are fixed. If you hire nice and empathetic people whose job it is to mollify the irate customer time and time again and have no mechanism to learn from those people, you will burn out those employees and lose customers. Unless, of course, you're so big that you don't have care.

Happy 15th Birthday, Lily

Becoming One With the Light

Apple has brought new attention to the wearable computing market with its Apple iWatch. There's plenty of innovation going in the LED world as well.

Read more at my blog on All LED Lighting.

The Hotel Californication of America

It costs more than three times as much to rid yourself of America citizenship as it does to obtain it.
The naturalization fee is $680, including the $85 biometric charge. (If you're over 75, the biometric fee is waived.)
To renounce your citizenship, you must pay an exit fee of $2350, up from $450.
Not a lot of people are leaving, however. The Wall Street Journal reports that 1800 departed these fair shores in 2011, a sixfold increase during the Obama administration. Even though Rush Limbaugh gave us hope when he said he'd move to Costa Rica if Obamacare became law, he's still rumbling among us. 

Ten years of Gmail

I don't remember my first email message. It was some time during the early 1980s when I was working at DEC. For most of that decade, email was all internal, sent from one DEC-owned computer along DEC networks to another DEC-owned computer.
As the 80s closed, there were a bunch of email protocols and messaging schemes. It wasn't until the early 90s that I started using the name@company.com format on a regular basis.
My first non-work email address was through a local provider, now defunct, called iii.net (It's now a parked domain held by a Chinese company.) It was run by a weird, fanatically pro-smoking guy named Joe Something-or-other whom I knew from DEC. We used that for a couple of years and then switched to Ultranet before buying my own domain and hosting services in 2001.
When Gmail came along in April 2004, it was invite-only. Google handed out invitations to a few folks and let those new subscribers invite others. It took until August for someone in my circle of friends to have invitations available. I signed up on August 25, 2004.

They promised a gigabyte of free storage, five to 10 times what other providers were offering. They discouraged people from deleting messages. They did this in part so that they could have more information to search and thus give you ads and also to change our thinking about online storage. Cloud storage is, for most folks, effectively unlimited. I long passed 100K messages. (At this writing I have 113,481 conversations, individual messages plus replies. I am using 11Gb for email and other Google services such as photos and docs.
Threaded messages were confusing to some people at first. In threaded email messages, the original messages and its replies are grouped together. It's much easier to keep track of discussions, but it can be disorienting for people who were expecting each email to be delivered in a discrete chunk.
Some of my friends distrust Google and/or cloud services and prefer to download all of their email to their local computer. Others dislike the Gmail interface, the appearance of ads, and Google in general. Good for them.
For me, the convenience of having an email service that I can use on any device anywhere far outweighs the worries.
Gmail changed the way that we think about email. No other product has come close to having that kind of impact.

The weather's nuts

Musing on weather at Medium: The weather’s nuts

Will Better Networking Mean Better Lighting?

You're getting tired of this, aren't you? Another week, another home automation scheme. This time, it's another new-old configuration: mesh networking. Wireless mesh networks have been around for quite a while, even in the home automation market (see ZigBee).
Read the rest on my blog at All LED Lighting Will Better Networking Mean Better Lighting?

Thoughts on a home office

One in an occasional series about working from home.

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As a part of our move, we acquired an additional 9x12 storage area that we're converting into a home office. It's a windowless room that used to be the janitor's closet. We'll put in some carpeting this week and add decorative items on the walls to make the place feel brighter and bigger.
I have a couple of ideas on how to get this space connected to our home network upstairs. (WiFi won't penetrate the walls, but powerline IP may work. Plan B would require a separate cable drop. I need to talk with some network people to see if there are security risks in either scheme.
So, in a few weeks, we should have a nice workspace.

via Incidental Comics

Standing desks are all the rage these days. They're supposed to help you lose weight and add years to your life. I wonder if this would be an even better solution:

via Vintage Ads

A Clean, Well Lighted Condo

Development teams have used the rather odd expression "eat our own dog food" to describe how they use their own products as they build them. In this case, after writing about LED lighting systems for more than a year, I bring some of my work knowledge home.

Read more at All LED Lighting A Clean, Well Lighted Condo