This is pretty cool:
The Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera which captures a full spherical panorama when thrown into the air. At the peak of its flight, which is determined using an accelerometer, a full panoramic image is captured by 36 mobile phone camera modules.
Seth Godin says it’s the law of large groups at work, messing with the way we perceive the world.
It’s also true that most of your friends have more friends than you do.
The law of large groups is at work here. This explains why the people you see at the gym tend to be in better shape than you are.
People with lots of friends are more likely to be friends with you than people with no friends, right? And the people who are at the gym a lot (as in the people you see the most often) tend to be in better shape because they show up more often.
Discernment is the hardest part of marketing–seeing the world as it is, instead of how you experience it.
It’s also true that the other lane in the supermarket or freeway is faster than yours and your toast does land butter side down.
I’ve been meaning to write something on customer service inspired by the following.
FollowSteph.com – Why do Some Companies Just Not get Customer Service?
I can understand that customer service might not be as important if you’re a company working on volumes with extremely small margins, but if you’re a “service” company, such as a restaurant, the experience your customers receive will ultimately affect the amount of business you generate. Such a simple concept, do right by your customers and they will come.
Which is why it baffles me when restaurants get this completely wrong. To show what I’m trying to explain, I’ll share with you the terrible experience I had recently eating lunch at Pizzadelic (a local Pizza restaurant). This includes having someone else’s bill in my pizza crust!
How you treat your customers has a HUGE impact on how your company is perceived. Good service-oriented companies know that people will buy more and more quickly if they know any defects or problems, or even second thoughts, will be dealt with in a comfortable, friendly manner.
All that said, I had an experience last week that must be published.
Almost a year ago - call it 330 days ago, I managed to purchase a laser rangefinder (Sightmark brand). It was heavily discounted and much cheaper than most rangefinders — but still more than I really wanted to spend. I used the rangefinder one time in October, and it worked delightfully and proved to be very useful. I tried to use it on a very cold elk hunting trip, and it failed on me. I assumed it was a cold-induced weak battery. When I got home, I bought replacement batteries and thought no more of it. I replaced the battery and tried to use the rangefinder this September and found that it still did not function — and it had a rattle. I opened the case and found that a part had come unglued - maybe because of the cold.
So - now I have an expensive toy almost a year old that doesn’t work. Good news - Sightmark’s manufacturer warranty is one year, and I have a couple of weeks in which to act. Bad news - Sightmark no longer sells any kind of rangefinder. They told me they could not repair it, probably would not get a refurbished unit any time soon, and they could offer me credit (not cash) toward something else I don’t want. My best bet “since I still have the receipt” is to “take it to Big 5 Sporting Goods” where I bought it in the first place. As If.
So, since I don’t currently want anything Sightmark sells, I took my 330 day old receipt to Big 5 Sporting Goods, with expectations of rejection. I spoke with Jason, who happened to be the manager on duty. He explained that the closest comparable unit was not really comparable - it’s $100 more and has never been on sale. He offered a modest discount and I offered that they could cut further into their margin to make me happy. For the record, I actually offered to split the difference, which would leave me $50 out of pocket. Jason told me that he did not have the authority to discount that deeply, but — and here’s where the lesson starts — “corporate” did have that authority, they often were willing to work with customers like me, and he would send an email to start the discussion.
This all happened on a Friday, so I had to wait until Monday to check back. I didn’t get to it on Monday, and called on Tuesday, when a different manager was on duty. She picked up on my issue and realized that there was an email for me. “Corporate” gave the go-ahead on a discount to $139 plus a 10% discount if I signed up for their email list. That brought the price down to three cents over my original purchase price! On top of that, the manager found a loose nickel and paid the balance for me.
I started this whole process a year ago with the opinion that Big 5 was a discounted close-outs, buyer beware kind of place. I had an item almost a year old that the manufacturer wouldn’t support, and Big 5 (and Jason) stepped in with compassion and respect and made me more than whole. I now have a better Simmons rangefinder, I’m not out any money, and I have a very different impression of Big 5. Thanks Big 5, and Jason in particular.
Grandma and Grandpa try to take a picture with their new webcam.
You can read some background here:
Grandparents with webcam become new online stars - Yahoo! News
Read on if you care to: The Alternative Secret History of the World
A confluence has occurred - time to write a post!
Wow. That’s very observant, and kind of funny (to me anyway).
So, my corporate password was expiring shortly after I read this, so I decided to change my pattern, chose three motivating words, and set the new password. Then I went to a meeting. Then I went to another meeting. That meeting slid right into our Friday afternoon bash, with pizza and beer (though I’m sure that is an irrelevant detail).
After that, I went back to work and for the life of me could not remember the first word. A co-worker brilliantly pointed out that I can VPN in to the network using my RSA key, and can thereby access the password-reset application without providing a password. It’s late on a Friday, so I put my laptop in standby and go home.
At home, I do the VPN trick from another computer and reset my password. Then, I see the flaw in my plan. The laptop is locked with the old password with a missing first word. To unlock it with the new password, it must be connected to the office network. I can connect using VPN, but must unlock it first…
So, I ended up working a couple of days from a krufty old back up laptop using the Outlook Web Interface to mail and without any support tools.
The workaround (for next time) is to install a local administrator account while I have access, then use that account to establish VPN. Our Very Smart IT Guy says that when I then switch users, it will use the active network session to check for access and change the cached password. Note: I don’t actually anticipate there will be a next time.
This came up today:
I like it.
I stumbled upon these two gems in close succession. Regardless of how you feel about the competing budget “plans,” the debate is absurd.
Paul Ryan puts it beautifully in this clip:
“Let’s pass a bill to cover the moon with yogurt that will cost $5 trillion today. And then let’s pass a bill the next day to cancel that bill. We could save $5 trillion.”
He [Ron Paul] puts it more seriously in this post:
When a cut is not a cut
One might think that the recent drama over the debt ceiling involves one side wanting to increase or maintain spending with the other side wanting to drastically cut spending, but that is far from the truth. In spite of the rhetoric being thrown around, the real debate is over how much government spending will increase.
…
In reality, bringing our fiscal house into order is not that complicated or excruciatingly painful at all. If we simply kept spending at current levels, by their definition of “cuts” that would save nearly $400 billion in the next few years, versus the $25 billion the Budget Control Act claims to “cut”. It would only take us 5 years to “cut” $1 trillion, in Washington math, just by holding the line on spending. That is hardly austere or catastrophic.
…
In Washington terms, a simple freeze in spending would be a much bigger “cut” than any plan being discussed. If politicians simply cannot bear to implement actual cuts to actual spending, just freezing the budget would give the economy the best chance to catch its breath, recover and grow.
Ouch. That hurts.
Cowboys & Aliens, Smurfs Tie at Box Office with $36M Each - TIME
For many, the surprise this weekend was not that The Smurfs did so well but that Cowboys & Aliens had such a wan debut. With a budget of $163 million, plus another bundle for marketing costs, the film mostly attracted the geezer demographic (63% of the weekend audience was over 30), and even with that, it managed only a mediocre B CinemaScore, which bodes ill for the movie’s shelf life. Universal publicist Paul Pflug wrote in an e-mail on Sunday that “the pedigree of the filmmakers and bold concept made the film a bet worth taking.” Yet plenty of indicators could have warned the sponsors of Cowboys & Aliens that this was a sucker’s bet. Here are four:
My concept of geezerhood requires a few more decades.
Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist , has snide comments about our debt ceiling debate.
“It’s not that easy. The percentage of household income spent on handbags has been considerably exaggerated by your weaselly father. Far more important is the mortgage. If we stop the payments, we lose the house.”
The Doctor and Rose decide to go undercover at Fawlty Tower’s after Mickey reports strange goings on there. But the real threat is yet to come, and only the unlikeliest of heroes can save the day.
Think your luggage and personal items are safe? Think again! Here’s how anyone can get in your luggage without you even knowing.
Click through for the video. He also has lots of other interesting looking videos, like
Ball of fire! Make fireballs you can hold with household items! They are fun to play with! Amaze your friends! Learn how magicians do it!
As my son put it, “What!!! handheld fireballs!?! Let me see!”
Savage Chickens is one of several “cartoons on post-it notes” sites I’ve encountered recently.
You have to go see it.
Schneier on Security (my italics):
Security researcher Charlie Miller, widely known for his work on Mac OS X and Apple’s iOS, has discovered an interesting method that enables him to completely disable the batteries on Apple laptops, making them permanently unusable, and perform a number of other unintended actions. The method, which involves accessing and sending instructions to the chip housed on smart batteries could also be used for more malicious purposes down the road.[…]
What he found is that the batteries are shipped from the factory in a state called “sealed mode” and that there’s a four-byte password that’s required to change that. By analyzing a couple of updates that Apple had sent to fix problems in the batteries in the past, Miller found that password and was able to put the battery into “unsealed mode.”
From there, he could make a few small changes to the firmware, but not what he really wanted. So he poked around a bit more and found that a second password was required to move the battery into full access mode, which gave him the ability to make any changes he wished. That password is a default set at the factory and it’s not changed on laptops before they’re shipped. Once he had that, Miller found he could do a lot of interesting things with the battery.
“That lets you access it at the same level as the factory can,” he said. “You can read all the firmware, make changes to the code, do whatever you want. And those code changes will survive a reinstall of the OS, so you could imagine writing malware that could hide on the chip on the battery. You’d need a vulnerability in the OS or something that the battery could then attack, though.”
As components get smarter, they also get more vulnerable.
Schneier on Security (my italics):
Good article:
Halderman argued that secure software tends to come from companies that have a culture of taking security seriously. But it’s hard to mandate, or even to measure, “security consciousness” from outside a company. A regulatory agency can force a company to go through the motions of beefing up its security, but it’s not likely to be effective unless management’s heart is in it.This is a key advantage of using liability as the centerpiece of security policy. By making companies financially responsible for the actual harms caused by security failures, lawsuits give management a strong motivation to take security seriously without requiring the government to directly measure and penalize security problems. Sony allegedly laid off security personnel ahead of this year’s attacks. Presumably it thought this would be a cost-saving move; a big class action lawsuit could ensure that other companies don’t repeat that mistake in future.
I’ve been talking about liabilities for about a decade now. Here are essays I’ve written in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2006.
I just saw this warning on Terry Zink’s Cyber Security Blog. Click through for the details (short version - don’t click it).
I didn’t get one of these emails, but I know some readers who fall into the target audience for this one.
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