Occam's RazR » Personal

Taking the Long View

Ike — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:20:34 +0000

(the following is mine and mine alone, and does not in any way reflect opinions or viewpoints of my employer.)

I understand when people get on indignant rants. You see something that is so clear to you, and you just feel like verbally slapping a few people across the cheek to wake them up, so they can see what is so plainly in front of their faces.

However, the Indignant Rant often reveals the boundaries of one’s concern. When I was a reporter, I recall many people who would call and berate me for not giving ________ more time and attention than it was getting. “But you don’t see, if they name Mr. So-and-so to the committee, it will mean the end of civilization as we know it!”

Okay, their lips weren’t foretelling the end of Western Civilization, but their body tics, tremors, and voice inflection certainly did. It was classic fight or flight, and it’s definitely not what our bodies evolved as a proper response to our anguish over the makeup of the school textbook committee.

The Whiffle Life

P.J. O’Rourke – in his classic Parliament of Whores, calls this the “Whiffle Life.”

My friend’s kid lives in a well-padded little universe, a world with no sharp edges or hard surfaces. It’s the Whiffle Ball again. The kid leads a Whiffle Life, and so does my friend and so do I.

The premise is that we’ve dumbed down our existence and taken the risk out of so many things, that we’ve literally knocked evolution for a loop. Some of us (in the modern, industrialized West) live in a world where our mistakes have virtually no consequences for survival. You can screw up often, and the worst that happens is you get a little unpleasantness. Much in the same way that a thrown baseball can hurt, so we replace them with Whiffle Balls instead.

When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about being eaten by hyenas, you worry about whether pets are spayed and neutered.

When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about your teeth rotting out, you worry about whether they are white enough.

When you live in a Whiffle World, you don’t worry about having access to safe drinking water, you fret over whether it’s the right flavor or brand.

When you live in a Whiffle World, you watch the thermometer like a hawk because of Global Warming, and doom the planet to extinction.

History in an Icicle

Yes, this is the Indignant Rant that reveals the boundaries of my concern. I happen to think that human beings are wonderful creatures, and we have shown an amazing capacity for creating beauty and hope. I also worry that in trying to preserve our accomplishments, we’re squinting at the tiny and ignoring the very real, big threats to everything we know.

I want you to look at this graph by J. Storrs Hall. It’s taken from a Greenland ice core:

Yes, that is indicative of temperatures increasing. But notice they’ve been going up since the 1830s. You could try to tie this to industrialization, but remember, this is just one sample from one location. What I want to do is change your perspective for a moment. Let’s roll back even further:

It would seem that 1000 years ago, we were warmer than we are now. But that’s not enough of a Big Picture.

Go back a little over 10,000 years, and look at where we were. Ice Age. Pay attention to that little uptick at the end that so many people are getting all frothed about. Watch where it goes when we dial the Wayback Machine to 50,000 years ago:

That tiny little tick mark at the end of that line, which is smaller than each of the commas in this sentence, is the danger? Seriously? Pay attention to the scale at the left of the graph. We’re looking at temperatures 10-25 degress Celsius cooler than what we have now. Human civilization, and agriculture, and iPods could not have emerged before now. And what makes you think we could survive when it does get cold again? Switching to the Vostok core in the Antarctic, we see this:

Where is that 150-year rise at the end, again?

Cultural Arrogance

I’m fairly certain, that even if the planet heats up a little more, that we could adapt. People along coastlines move a little inland. Arable farmland actually increases, so we’d be better able to feed the masses.

What worries me is that in concentrating on this tiny epoch of time, we ignore the real threat. It’s clear from the graphs that we live in an epoch that is an anomaly. Yet we pretend as though nothing ever happened before recorded history.

Every time someone shows you one of those pictures of a glacier from 150 years ago, ask them: “And just what is the optimal climate for the Earth?” They can’t tell you. But for some reason, the Arrogant Anointed have decided that the Earth is supposed to be exactly the way it was when their great-grandparents moved to Martha’s Vineyard. Or when their daddy was sworn into the Senate. It is foolish to believe the Earth is not in a constant state of flux.

There are people who believe God created the world 6,000 years ago. I am not one of them, and boy would I be pissed off if a bunch of them started crafting public policy that would wreck the economy, based on their belief that the world ought to be Eden, and Eden started the moment they opened their eyes and started drinking Enfamil.

There used to be astronomers who believed in the Steady-State Theory, that stars and matter must be continually created to fill the void left behind, as galaxies move away from each other. (Doppler red-shift tells us galaxies are all moving away.) Not as many do, because it requires a belief in spontaneous creation of matter.

And here we are today, with environmentalists who cling to the belief that our planet, the way it is today, is the way it has always been and ought to always be. They have absolutely nothing to base that belief upon. And in a way, they deserve even more scorn for that belief than the traditionalists who tout a 6,000 year world history.

I’m all for being a good steward of the environment, but before we wreck the global economy chasing a fantasy about a steady-state Earth, how about putting some research dollars into the threat we know is coming? How does man survive when it gets too cold? Are we going to move out and find new sources of food? Look for hospitable worlds elsewhere? We have the time and the resources to do it, if we don’t starve ourselves to death on granola and pray to Gaia as the ice envelopes us.

Fire From the Sky

Forget about how we’re overdue for an Ice Age for a moment. We know we’ve got at least a thousand years or so to lick that problem.

What about a comet strike? Or a sufficiently large meteorite?

In 1908, a piece of a comet nailed a remote section of Russia. It created an explosion and a mushroom cloud, and wiped out everything for miles around. If we didn’t know any better, it would have been called a nuclear bomb. In fact, it’s a good thing we didn’t know any better, because if it had happened 50 or 60 years later, the world would have been glowing from the remains of retaliatory strikes before anyone bothered to figure out it was a natural occurrence.

But what if the Tunguska comet had been larger?

Make it larger by a factor of 10, and it would have rocked the world. Make it even bigger, and it could wipe out nearly all intelligent life on the planet.

So while we’re dickering with Mars missions and Moon missions and all manner of foolishness, we’re ignoring the very real instant threat to civilization. (And that means all the puppies will die, too. And the Black Eyed Peas.) We’re investing next to nothing in discovering or tracking the large objects that sweep into near-Earth orbits. We’re investing even less in researching technologies that would allow us to alter their orbits, or even explode them remotely where they would pose less of a threat.

I’m talking about something that could strike tomorrow. Or a year from now. That’s the Indignant Rant that keeps me up at night.

The Big Picture

We’ll solve the plastics problem, and the Styrofoam problem, and the nuclear waste problem. We’ll figure out how to leave cleaner and meaner and smarter, because we’re humans and that’s what we’ve done for 10,000 years. Occasionally, in the middle of miles of steps forward, we take one or two back. That’s okay, because we learn from those missteps.

Or at least we do, when we bother to look back with enough perspective.

Angles Are Everything

Ike — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:32:11 +0000

Peyton Manning is a nice guy, with a self-deprecating and healthy sense of humor.

But man, he looked positively evil on the sidelines of the Super Bowl. Some people started referring to him as ”Satan Manning.”

Now, is he an intense competitor? Yes.

You think he might have been frustrated by taking only six snaps in the entire second quarter, then waiting through “CSI: Halftime,” then not getting the ball to start the second half after the Saints executed a brilliant onside kick? Yes, yes, and yes.

But the “evil” that seeps through the photo and wants to tear out your liver is a function of the angle.

Take a look at these pictures of the very same Elmo party hat.

The angle makes all the difference in the world, doesn’t it?

Elmo is an iconic symbol of acceptance and peace. His inquisitive nature instantly rings true with children, who recognize their own yearning to learn about the world around them. The fact that the party hat could appear evil must therefore be strictly a function of visual tricks, and the angle of perspective creating an optical illusion.

My son used to adore Elmo, and as far as we can tell it had no deleterious effects on him.

There is nothing inherently evil about Elmo.

Or is there?

Well, maybe I ought to re-think letting my son hang out with Peyton Manning when he grows up, too.

(content partially adapted from material at my old blog, with my permission.)

Out and About

Ike — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:22:15 +0000

From Zoer on Flickr

Last year, I did a bit of traveling and speaking. While it’s been nice to share, it’s also nice to learn a little. For the next few weeks I’ll be doing a bit of both.

Friday the 29th, I’ll be at the University of Alabama, talking with the faculty of the College of Human Environmental Sciences about social media.

Sunday, I leave for New Orleans, where I’ll spend a day and a half learning about Crisis and Emergency Risk Communications from one of the best in the field, Dr. Barbara Reynolds. She plays a key role communicating for the Centers for Disease Control.

Wednesday the 3rd, I am back in house for a presentation to another department. Then on the 10th I’m back in Tuscaloosa, spending about an hour talking with Dr. Suzanne Horsley’s Public Relations students about how to integrate social media with traditional channels.

Then I will be in Atlanta for the Ragan Social Media Conference February 21-24. I was privileged to present this past March in Las Vegas – this time I will be something between a spectator and a sponge.

What I Am Up To

Ike — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:41:11 +0000

“You don’t write about your job anymore.”

After a couple of gentle prods, I was reminded that I don’t talk about my work as much as I used to. The nature of my work with Alabama Power is quite different than what I did with the American Red Cross. The Red Cross is in the spotlight whenever there is a major disaster, and I’ve had more than a few inquiries from people who wanted to know more about the relief effort in Haiti. In contrast, when a regulated electric utility deals with a storm, the goal is to work quickly and restore power, then fade back into the background.

So what are you doing there, anyway?

When I came to Alabama Power, fresh off having my position eliminated, my role was primarily in internal communications. I edited the news on the company site, inherited a number of geek-related communications projects. It involved a broad array of internal needs, including the exploration of social media.

You sold Alabama Power on Social Media Koolaid?

No, I didn’t really “sell” them on anything. I was, by every account, quite patient. No one wants to hear from the guy who busts down your door each morning screaming “Blog Twitter Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Facebook Twitter Foursquare Twitter Blog Facebook Blog Blog!”

Instead, I merely posed questions to my boss. And we had some rich conversations about how and why some of these tools might integrate into communication goals. Not as enterprises in their own right, but toward a high-level purpose (like everything else we do.)

Then one day late last fall, my boss and my VP approached me and said “It’s time.” While I still play a role in scattered geeky-tech communications projects and research, social media will be a huge part of what I do.

So now you’re the face of Alabama Power on social media?

Nope. Not at all. Some companies have elected to take that approach. We’re not.

I don’t want to be the face of the company. I am not a company spokesperson, and that is not my role.

The way we’ve defined my job is as an internal facilitator. I don’t want to be the guy who “owns” the social media accounts. Rather, I am the guy who helps people in other departments and divisions figure out if they need to be in social media, how they might use it, and how to get started.

Photo by Linda N.

Maybe you could think of me as the Instructor Pilot. I ask you why you want to learn how to fly, help you chart some flight paths, show you where all the dials and gauges are, and fly with you until you’re comfortable enough.

I have no desire to be the “Social Media Guy,” because that doesn’t scale. I can only monitor so many accounts, moderate so many conversations, and cultivate so many communities. But if I can show others how to do it, with the right spirit and attitude, then I be a part of something bigger.

To that extent, we’re doing that too. I’m one of more than two-dozen Southern Company employees working on a committee to set some standards and direction. Unlike some corporations, it didn’t bog down into micro-managing, but has stayed at a high-level framework which leaves us purposeful yet nimble in an ever-shifting environment.

Coaching, Not Doing

Sure, coaches ought to have a little experience in what they teach. But the best manager is one who realizes his job is to bring the best out of others, not to belittle them by reminding him how much better he is at what they do. (Really great managers surround themselves with people who surpass their own skills.)

In a way, I’ve been teasing toward this for months. I wrote about “Building a Dynasty,” and the differences between practitioners, teachers and coaches. In “Coaching is an Art” I expounded on the qualities of a coach. I wrote those as I was developing the mindset for this position. Officially, I am a “Communications Strategist,” which is exactly what I was before. (Salary stayed the same, too…) However, I want to approach the job from the perspective of the coach – one who is graded on how many games his team wins, how much their skills improve, and not on how many free throws he can make in a row.

And that is what I have been up to lately.

Failure by the Numbers

Ike — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:18:47 +0000

Sudoku.

It’s a logic puzzle that involves placing numbers or letters in a grid such that you get no repeating characters within a given row, column, or highlighted grid.

I got a book of puzzles for Christmas, and things finally slowed down enough I could check it out.

You’d think a publication so prestigious to be designated as the “OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL SUDOKU AUTHORITY” would only promote and publish puzzles of the highest quality and rigor.

That there would be a painstaking process of editorial control, whereby the selected puzzles would represent the very essence of Sudoku as originally intended — and that the puzzles therein would go through a vetting round to earn their stripes as “Easy,” “Middle,” “Hard” or the pinnacle: “Devious.”

You might also assume that the publishers of “SUdOkU Fever” would choose to properly market their product with a sample puzzle right there on the cover. A puzzle that was chosen to establish the first pillar of Customer Satisfaction – that all-important initiative to properly establish and manage expectations.

A Sudoku book with a crossword or a word-find on the front, for example, would be a colossal failure, because not only would it not engage those seeking Sudoku, it would be mistakenly purchased by one seeking a letter-based, verbal puzzle.

In fact – since so many of my readers here have a more decided verbal orientation, maybe a little primer in creating a Sudoku might be in order.

You create a nine-by-nine grid where there are no repeating numbers in columns, rows or the smaller 3×3 grids. Then you turn most of the numbers into blanks. But for the sake of all that is holy, you start with a working grid. You don’t begin with a broken grid and expect it to suddenly blossom into a working puzzle.

And if you do have a broken puzzle, well, I suppose it’s okay if it winds up on the cover, just as long as that error isn’t too obvious — like having two of the same number so obviously in the same frame.

Y2KX

Ike — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 04:02:48 +0000

Of course, the proper name for the year is MMX. 2010. The Year We Make Contact, or some such rubbish. Start the countdown clock for the Mayan Calendar hoaxes.

I remember where I was ten years ago.

I was a member of the working media, assigned to sit at the “bunker” of the state of Alabama’s Emergency Operations Center, as all the authorities and grand-high Poohbah muckety-mucks gathered to observe — well, as it turned out, nothing.

Many of us had sounded the alarm that there was nothing to be alarmed about, but we were drowned out with the Millennial Panic that was Y2K. (Which, in another fit of ill-informed irony, wasn’t even the start of the Millennium, which began in 2001.)

Team Coverage of Nothing

I remember the news accounts leading up to that day. For months, the national media had a field day recounting doomsday scenarios for what would happen when internal clocks got thrown for a loop. The news media and the late-night comics had their way with the state of Alabama in particular. While private businesses, state and local governments were throwing budgets to the wind to corral this “Y2K bug,” companies and particularly municipalities in the Heart of Dixie weren’t following Chicken Little’s lead.

At one point in mid-1999, there was a wire story indicating that if Alabama tripled its Y2K preparedness spending, it would still rank last among the states. Of course, it was followed with dire predictions about what would happen, and the obligatory jokes about how Alabama didn’t have enough technology anyway, and was still coping with Y1K compliance…

…yet I don’t remember a single story after-the-fact about how Alabama didn’t waste billions of dollars preventing Dutch Tulip Blight, or the oncoming stampedes of Jackalopes. Funny how that happens.

Personal Impact

Because of Y2K, I spent that New Year’s Eve away from my fiance. She was at her apartment, and I was in Clanton at “Ground Zero” for “live coverage” of an “event” that was less than a zero. (By the time in was midnight in Alabama, more than a dozen time zones had already made it safely across the threshold. I think that would make it cease to be ‘news’ at that point.)

As it happens, I was able to pass a coded message to my now wife, in clear defiance of FCC guidelines about using the public airwaves for personal communication. My wife’s name, Brenda, happened to be the same as our lead female anchor. So when I punched the name in the sentence “Happy New Year, Brenda… I’ll be back to see you soon” none were the wiser.

Still, it sucked to be away on a nothing assignment.

Panic Feeds the Needy

There always needs to be a scare of some type, because there is a healthy percentage of the public that doesn’t feel Important unless it is seen to be caring about Big Important Things. Usually, when Big Important Things have to do with personal issues or matters of faith, they don’t have an impact. But when enough people use their panic about Big Important Things to �spur government action, they can be very adamant about saving the world with expensive remedies.

Afterward, they can call their prescription a grand success. After all, there was no Tulip Blight, and nary a Jackalope footprint in the snow.

Have a happy and blessed 2010. Make a resolution to keep things in perspective.

Owning My Links

Ike — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:48:10 +0000

Part of the reason I started noodling with Wordpress was the ability to “own” my own site. Not have it hosted elsewhere, not beholden to anyone else’s whims and limitations. I can do what I want with the template and the look and the feel and the content. I can even move the URL around, break it, and start all over if I choose.

I’ve learned a lot of helpful things about coding along the way.

Today’s “currency” on the internet is still content, although sharing and linking are vital. You’ve probably noticed that most of the links being shared online are “shortened” links. TinyURL used to have the space to itself, and as the default shortener for Twitter it was poised to be the all-time king.

Now there are many competitors. Bit.ly is the new Twitter default, and even Bit.ly went even shorter, with J.mp. Add in ri.ms and cli.gs and is.gd, and you’re only part of the way there. Google for List of Link Shortening Services and see for yourself.

I wanted to make the move to own my own links because there are some heavy hitters moving in. Bit.ly will be offering its own custom domains for link sharing. Wordpress now has WP.me, Google is trotting out Goo.gl, and Facebook will have FB.me.

My links will be at ike4.me.

That will look strange to some people, for sure – but no stranger than adj.ix or anything else that comes along. After all, we’re inclined to click on just about anything.

That’s the other motivation for me. When you see me sharing a link with http://ike4.me you’ll know where it came from. I’ve locked it down, so scammers and spammers can’t use it. It’s also a nice piece of branding, if I say so myself.

The Ike4.me domain is powered by Yourls, and is fairly easy to set up. With little technical knowledge (more than most of my friends, but far less than many who get paid for coding) I was up and running within an hour. More customizations to come.

Oh, and you can find me on Twitter at http://ike4.me/tw and on Facebook at http://ike4.me/fb.

The Accidental Tourist

Ike — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:57:19 +0000

Usually, I have a good idea why people come to this site.

I use the free Sitemeter tool to track hits, and as I generally have low traffic and no ads, that’s decent enough for me.

Sitemeter tracks the last 100 visitors, and let’s me know (among other things) the page they hit, how long they stayed, what site they were on when they clicked over, what operating system, which city — a treasure trove of information.

(For instance, a lot of my traffic comes from search engines, so I can tell when people are looking for “Chocolate Covered Cockroaches” and coming to my site.)

In the last week or so, I have seen a lot of traffic from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And in the last couple of days, a similar spike from Tema, Ghana.

A couple of years ago, the spike in Saudi traffic was almost entirely centered on my “Live Nude Girls” post, but in this current wave I have no clue. The Riyadh and Tema visits are clean, no trace of the info.

It’s quite possible those are just compromised proxies, and I am being auto-scanned for vulnerabilities by overseas hackers. And, with that in mind, time to boost my security settings…

That’s why it pays to pay attention to these sorts of things.

Different Strings

Ike — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:32:13 +0000

I am a bit of a music snob, but I am grateful for the opportunities I had when I was in elementary school and junior high. In fifth grade, we learned to play the recorder, which provided a way to get a bunch of kids to learn note duration and simple sheet music while still remaining somewhat in the same key.

But nothing tops my experience in seventh grade, with the�ukulele. That was fun, pure and simple — but only because we made it fun.

I didn’t realize how boring the�ukulele�could be until we did a joint concert with the other junior high in town. In theory, we had both learned the same songs, but you couldn’t tell. Some of those kids were strumming so slow you could hear individual strings being plucked 1-2-3-4. � 1-2-3-4.

Meanwhile, Paul and James and I were engaged in serious exploration of the space, incorporating syncopation and other sorts of stop-time arrangements that would have gotten us bounced out of choir, if it weren’t for the fact that it sounded really cool. (Yes, we tried doing Yngwie Malmsteen, and it didn’t translate as well but we shredded it anyway.)

The uke worked for us, because it was simple enough to learn, and versatile enough for us (as a group) to do other things. With the right arrangement, “Tom Dooley” doesn’t sound so melancholy, but nothing could save “If I Had a Hammer.”

So… with the ukulele clearly in mind, I present four minutes of awesome.

Paul? James? This could have been us…

Doesn’t this video makes you want to throw more support into music education?

Secure E-mail for Kids

Ike — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:02:20 +0000

My daughter is able to read enough words now that the idea of email is appealing to her. She likes the idea of writing to and hearing back from her grandparents. Being an independent sort (I wonder where she gets that from,) she wants to do it through her own account.

Not wanting to subject her to spam and unwanted email solicitations, I started researching email programs for children and teens. What I found were a number of programs and services that fit in one or more of these camps:

Outdated and no longer supported.
Not available for download
$40 or more for purchase
$4/month or more for service.

I liked many�of the features of the web-based services, including the screening of email and even kid-friendly graphic user interfaces. But I didn’t want my girl to have an address at “kidsafemail.com” or anything like that. So here is my system.

First, secure your child an email address in something other than their name. Use a gmail handle that means something to your family, but not identifying your child. “Punkinpatch@gmail.com” might do the trick.

Next, configure the webmail account so it auto-forwards all e-mails to both parents’ email addresses. This way, if your child registers a pet or something at Webkinz, you’ll know about it (and have a handy copy of the account info, should your child lose the password.)

Your child will never log in to the actual gmail account. You’re just using it for the spam filtering and the back-end archiving. Instead, you will use an e-mail client on the computer.

I recommend downloading Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition from PortableApps.com. There are many useful applications there that are designed to run off a USB thumb-drive. The original program is tweaked so it is not bonded to the registry of the computer, and is completely self-contained in a folder.

Instead of putting it on a thumbdrive, we’re going to install it in a folder on your computer.

Once installed, make a shortcut of the .exe file and add it to the desktop.

Next, you’ll need to configure Thunderbird. This is easy, as you are just going to link it to the Gmail account. When you do, you’ll want to use the POP settings instead of the IMAP. IMAP is generally considered more modern, advanced, sophisticated and useful — but not for your child. We will use the POP protocol, so the messages downloaded will stay on the server for archival purposes.

After creating the account, you’ll need to add in the approved contacts in the Thunderbird Address Book. Add as many addresses for your family members as they might use, because we’re going to filter out everything that isn’t in the Address Book.

Now, go into the Options for Thunderbird, and set up a filter that deletes any message that is not from a known sender. You might want to jack the default display font up to 32 or so.

Once it’s done, you now have an interface for your child that allows contact only with those people you want them to communicate with. Since your child doesn’t know the password of the account, there’s no way for them to log in from the web interface. If the child does add contacts to the address book, you won’t really be surprised because all the messages are forwarded to both parents anyway. And if the child starts interacting with a person, business or organization that you’d prefer they not (like a Hannah Montana fan club featuring ads for a line of Pole-Dancing wardrobe) you can set up auto-delete filters on the Gmail end – and the issue is gone.

Best of all, the entire system is free. And my daughter is able to write back and forth to her Mamaw.

Do you have any other suggestions? Share them in the comments. And if you’ve found this idea useful, let me know.

Is it time to close the barn doors?

Ike — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:40:46 +0000

Honestly, it’s a question that doesn’t get asked enough.

“Is it time to shut down this site?”

I’m not so much concerned about content and direction for my writing; indeed, I am happy contributing within niches elsewhere. It’s my question about the format itself.

I write, I share, I communicate through several media now. I do pithy video at 12seconds.tv, I’m playing around with Meedeor as a change of pace for short takes on photos, I have a thriving Facebook tribe and Twitter is always as interesting as you dare to make it.

The thing I haven’t experienced yet are the spammers who want to use me as a vehicle for goosing their link rank.

In the past, the spammer’s best tool was a ‘bot – a piece of code that checked sites for certain hooks, then tried to place a comment that linked back to a site they wanted to promote. Because these were automated, they were clunky and easily punted.

But lately, I am getting comments that are on-topic and show that an actual human being read them for context – yet they are very spammy. The sites at the end of the chain are of no value to anyone.

I enjoy this platform because it invites an eclectic audience. I enjoy this platform because it allows me to experiment with different forms of communication such as the Venns, the My Quotes, and other recent attempts at merging content with layout.

I used to enjoy this platform because of the conversations that would develop in the comments – the connections to real people with real interests. I don’t enjoy it so much now because the weeds are overtaking the lawn. I want real communication, not a well-placed comment from someone who doesn’t care about the subject and only wants link-rank.

So… I’ll be thinking about this for a while.

I’ll let you know where to find me.

HELLO Ruby Tuesday!

Ike — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:20:58 +0000

Every month or so, we’ve included Ruby Tuesday�in our post-church Sunday lunch rotation. (exact location here). The kids are old enough now to not freak out that the chicken comes in real strips instead of molded nuggets, and will occasionally deviate from chicken tenders and find other things on the menu. My daughter even sneaks a piece of lettuce or so from my wife’s salad.

For us, the salad is the visit. The salad bar at Ruby’s is pound-for-pound one of the best you’ll find. I use the arugula mix and spinach leaves as my base, and add on whatever looks fresh from there. For the past several months, we’ve enjoyed the avocado ranch dressing.

Yesterday, it was not there.

I didn’t throw a fit, but I did let loose with a barely audible exhale. A passing server asked if I needed anything, and I told her there was no avocado ranch.

“We don’t make that anymore.”

I asked if there was anyone we needed to write to lobby for the return of the best salad dressing ever, and that I would buy this stuff if it were ever sold in the store. She said “Hang on, I’ll be right back.”

Within 20 seconds, Susan the manager walked up and said “We don’t make it anymore because it doesn’t stay fresh long, but let me see if we have any avocados in the back, and we’ll bring it to your table.”

I was amazed.

Not only did they bring it to the table, they gave me a take-home tub with the rest of the batch.

Good morning, corporate America. This is your Customer Service wake-up call. Rise and shine!

(This bout of sane customer relations is not an anomaly at this location. One day, when my son really wanted pizza, one of the servers made him some using texas toast, marinara, and mozarella already in the kitchen. He got a big tip that day, too…)

Strike Two

Ike — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 02:32:14 +0000

This is not a baseball story, but there is some batting involved.�Specifically, the kind of batting that is used in making quilts.

My wife is an award-winning quilter (yes, she is good, and no, she will never admit to being as good as she is), and needed a couple yards of batting for one of her projects. We have a neighbor whose children are younger than ours and doesn’t get to the stores as often, and my wife graciously offered to get her a yard while she was out.

At a certain crafting store that we reserve the right to name later, my wife asked for three yards of batting, cut into two-yard and one-yard lengths.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, �we can’t do that.”

What???

Apparently, store policy dictates you can’t get multiple pieces of the same fabric, just one chunk. When asked why this policy was necessary, my wife was told:

“We had a woman come in here and ask for 11 one-yard segments, and she ended up returning two of them for refunds.”

Well, it would seem to me that’s a shady transaction on the part of the buyer, but the appropriate policy adjustment might be to just not refund money on cut cloth. (After all, once it’s cut, you can’t un-cut it…)

My wife proceeded to buy her two yards, and left, determined to buy the other yard of batting at a competing store. While on the road, she called the manager, a clueless 20-something that we will, for the sake of fun, call “Skippy.”

Skippy has very little people skills, even less managerial aptitude, and from what we can determine, it’s a toss-up as to whether he knows less about marketing, word-of-mouth, or even quilting and crafts. Skippy didn’t offer to make it right, just stuck by the ‘policy’ the store itself had imposed.

My wife called me from the road, and started to feel bad. Not for the store, but for her friend who needed the batting. I advised her there might be a way to still get the batting and deliver the message that poor customer relations will not pay in the long run. I told her to get the name of a regional manager, and to take matters one level higher.

Back in the store, my wife encountered the same woman back with the batting, and is not entirely certain the woman even recognized her from an hour earlier. My wife asked for a yard of batting. As the employee measured it, she said:

“There’s just a little over a yard here, let’s just give you the rest.”

Well, maybe – just maybe – here is a little bit of contrition. A way to satisfy the customer who not long ago threatened to not come back. And it’s not like it cost the store anything to do it, because once you have a leftover piece that’s less than a yard, you’re likely just going to throw it away because it’s too small to be useful.

At the register, the batting rang up at $10.99, which was unexpected, since the price was $6.99 per yard.

“Ma’am, you have more than a yard here.”

My wife did not (as I would have fantasized) shove the batting down the employee’s throat and order her to sing opera. Instead, she marched her to the cutting block and got her yard, not an inch more.

So, store-to-be-named-later, you are on notice. You’ve got two strikes, one more and your outed.

3653

Ike — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:44:07 +0000

Three thousand, six hundred and fifty-three days ago…

…at this moment…

..married.

Happy Anniversary, Sweetie!

Recommendation

Ike — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:45:27 +0000

I’m not a fan of memes (those wanna-be viral ideas that are supposed to spread in a self-perpetuating way — think chain-letters for blogs.)

Still, I would be remiss not to share some spotlight.

Dr. Mark Story works for the Securities and Exchange Commission in DC, and for fun, in his off-hours, he teaches at the School of Continuing Studies at Georgetown. He’s long claimed to be a fan of my work, and is now on a personal mission to highlight others who express themselves well online. He calls it “#blogmonday,” and has appropriated that tag to make it easier to find mentions of it throughout social networks.

I’m going to call it a recommendation. And in honor of Mark’s gig at Georgetown, I’l nominate a Hoya that’s under his radar.

Her name is Olivia Cooper (but I’ve always known her just as Cooper, or nowickedwitch), and she writes in several places. I got to know her through a friend of a friend of a friend back in the LiveJournal days. We’ve both pretty much abandoned that platform, but still drop in on each other frequently. Her main site is Wonderland or Not, which is a mixture of notions and cultural observations. Her politics are decidedly left of center, but she never sacrifices the frontal lobe.

Cooper also writes at Darfur: An Unforgivable Hell on Earth. Before you accuse her of being a wannabe or a latecomer, check out the archives link. That site has been active for over two years now, and that’s just after it re-started on the Wordpress.com platform. She was writing passionately about Darfur before it was trendy to care, and she keeps it on the front-burner when everyone else leaves the kitchen.

She’s a grad student now, working on dual degrees in public policy and international affairs to go with that double major of anthropolgy and photography. Smarts plus arts. Always worth checking out, because you never know if you’re going to get insight, inspiration, or a little music dusting up from “Old School Friday.”

Both Mark and�Cooper are worth following on Twitter, if you aren’t already there.

(Mark… I know the concept of #blogmonday was to highlight several. I’m going to do mine one at a time, much in the same manner that I eschew shotgun blasts of #followfriday recommendations on Twitter. Somehow, I don’t think this will surprise you.)

Oh… and if you’ve made it this far, maybe you’d like to help me and Mark spread this recommendation idea around. I’ve installed these neat little icons here at the bottom, that let you quickly share this article by email, on Facebook, on Twitter, or Stumbleupon… you get the idea.