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Mexican Moonshine

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

Legend has it that some ancient man ‘discovered’ tequila when an Agave Plant got flash-fermented by a lightning bolt.

Outside Magazine recently ran an article in which the authors took a tequila tour in much the same fashion as a typical wine tour. Those of us living in the finger lakes know what that’s all about. No, it’s not about drinking as much as you can for free (you’re supposed to spit remember?). Wine tasting is all about finding the wines you really enjoy and refining your palette to enjoy those you don’t already.

I for one hate tequila. At least I hate the typical tequila shots you take. I’ve never understood what the excitement was all about. It always burned more than it tastes and the only part I enjoyed was the lime afterward.

From reading the article it sounds like tequila gets a really bad name. This is because most people (myself included) have only had bad fake tequila. As the article reads:

Tequila is made from a single species of agave, AGAVE TEQUILANA WEBER…and comes only from Jalisco – a Mexican state about the size of South Carolina.

Sounds a lot like Champagne doesn’t it? You can’t get the real flavor of good wine from trying Franzia Box wine and you can’t get the real flavor of good tequila by doing shots of Jose Cuervo at the bar. In fact no two tequilas are the same. Their flavor can range from caramel to apricot, anywhere in between and beyond.

To taste good tequila you need to hook up with Miguel the zucchini farmer and try some of his De la Sierra. You’ll have to get in line though, his home brew is a local favorite and he only makes about 20,000 liters a year.

After reading the article I definitely have a new respect for tequila and I would love to go on a tasting of my own. Anyone up for the trip?

Maybe they should make a wine that can be used as shots.

Go Digital with Your Discs

~ randyaa ~ 1 Comment

Old DiscsThere are several reasons to get rid of your discs. This includes software you’ve purchased, backup discs, games, and even operating systems. I had two reasons to get rid of my discs. One was that the rack of discs was another piece of clutter in my home office. The other more important reason is CD’s and DVD’s have a shelf life. I recently pulled a disc from the rack and attempted to use it. It had no scratches or scuffs but was completely unreadable.

To get go digital with your hard copy discs follow these simple steps:

  1. Take an Inventory
    You can’t determine how to get rid of what you have unless you know what you have. I suggest creating 3 piles.

    • Discs you can easily replace for free. These will probably include backup copies and driver discs.
    • Unimportant discs you haven’t used in the past 6 months and probably won’t use within the next 6 months but need to keep. These most likely include things like Software Installation Discs.
    • Discs which you use occasionally and discs that are too important to lose. These will most likely include things like games which need to be in the drive to play and operating systems.
  2. Throw out your replaceable discs
    They’re replaceable. You don’t need to keep them around. Things like drivers can easily be downloaded and are often well out of date anyway. Backup discs are an old method of backup and should be replaced with off site storage of some sort.
  3. Box up the unimportant discs you haven’t used in 6 months
    There’s probably a reason you haven’t used them. Either they’re for software you keep installed and have no reason to reinstall them or they’re for software you don’t use often at all. In either case chances
    you won’t use it again for 6 months or more. Why keep it around cluttering your office.
  4. Rip the important discs to ISO disc images
    You probably have plenty of storage. Why not use it to store your discs in a reliable way? It also makes accessing them easier as all you need to do is locate the disc on your hard drive and mount it.
  5. Put purchased discs that you can’t part with back in their box
    You’ve already ripped them so you can access them any time you want. Put the discs back in their box and put the boxes on a shelf or in a box.
  6. Throw out the remaining discs
    Clean up your office by getting rid of all the discs and the cd rack itself.

More and more our software is moving to downloadable or even online applications. Get rid of your hard copy media now and stay ahead of the curve!

Feed Oriented Browsing

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RSS ImageHow do you browse the internet? It’s a funny question to ask really, but you’d be surprised at the different ways people will respond.

  • I look at the front page of Digg
  • I check my friends new Del.icio.us bookmarks
  • I search
  • I visit my bookmarks and see if there is anything new of interest
  • I browse my friends profiles on Facebook
  • I check MySpace updates
  • I watch top rated YouTube videos
  • I see whats new at CollegeHumor

There are many many many more ways to browse the internet and far too many to list here.

I use none of these and yet all of them. I prefer to call how I browse the web Feed Oriented Browsing or FOB for short. It’s something I’ve only begun doing this year. As my final post in 2007 I thought I’d share it.

What is Feed Oriented Browsing? It is a way of browsing the web that gives you the most relevant and up to date information at your fingertips without looking for it.

How can I get the information I want without looking for it? It’s not as hard as you might think. Instead of checking if there’s new information, you are told that a website you found interesting in the past has a new update.

Everytime you go to a website you already make a relatively quick decision on whether or not the site contains relevant information for you or not. It could be the information is not immediately useful but could be used as a reference in the future or it could be the answer you’re looking for right now. Normally, in these cases you would bookmark it either in your browser or using a web service such as del.icio.us.

Bookmarks are stale and not useful. We all know that technology in general changes so fast what you know today is outdated tomorrow. Since Bookmarks point to a particular page this means that information is likely to be outdated by more relevant and better information somewhere else. Does this mean you should just forget the site and move on? No! Your mind has already made the determination that the site contains relevant and useful information. Chances are the website you found is likely to share new information that you will find interesting and relevant in the future. This is the power of Feed Oriented Browsing. Instead of bookmarking a stale link to the site, add the site’s feed to your Reader. If the site doesn’t have a feed create one using a service like feed43 or feeditiy. Often times the feed will contain items that does interest you and items that don’t interest you. If that’s the case use a tool like feedrinse or yahoo pipes to clean up the feed so that it best matches your interests.

The real benefit of FOB appears after you’ve built up a good set of feeds. At that point you can stop browsing the old way all together. Instead use your reader to find new relevant sites. If you like discovering new feeds and new sites still, rather than searching for common phrases all the time, subscribe to a feed of your search. You can easily do this on sites like Digg and Del.icio.us. You can subscribe to searches or tags so that if a new item appears in that list you’ll get notified. If you’re using FOB correctly it will be rare that you need to leave your reader except to discover a new feed and even that is possible within some readers.

Observe your browsing habits. If the first thing you do after leaving your reader is visit the front page of Digg then it’s time to subscribe. If you then hop over to your friends blog to see if he posted last night… it’s time to subscribe.

It takes time to build up a good list of feeds. Making the switch to FOB doesn’t happen over night. You begin the process by visiting your reader first every day. Only once you’ve read all the items or marked them as read should you move on to the other sites you use.

Once you adapt this method of browsing the web it will truly change your web experience. A few months ago I read a study that made a bold claim that 2 out of every 3 ‘clicks’ on the internet were wasted because the content at the other end of the link had not yet been updated (I cannot speak to the accuracy of the numbers but the point is clear regardless). Meaning if someone checked a particular website three times in a day chances are that the website would only be updated one of those times. What a waste!

Often times you search the web to find the answer to a particular problem. You find an excellent resource that tells you exactly how to solve your problem and then forget all about that site again. If you have the same problem in the future you can always get back to that site by searching again right? Well, maybe. Search indexes change and you may or may not be able to remember the search you used. However; If you subscribed to the feed for the site, that piece of information will be in your reader and if you use a reader (such as Google Reader) that allows you to tag and search items it will be incredibly easy to find.

In addition to finding old pieces of information, it is likely that the site that had that great piece of information for you in the past will have more great information for you in the future. If you subscribe you’ll see new information posted by them whenever they update which means you’ll get new information before you even realize you need it.

if you subscribe to every feed you come across won’t your reader get so bloated its unusable? Yep. That’s why you need to be selective in your feeds. Determine whether or not the site has relevant information to you or not before subscribing. To find out if the site has other useful information browse for a moment and see if any other articles besides the one you’re looking at are interesting. If not then don’t subscribe simply use del.icio.us or digg or some other such service to bookmark it. You have already subscribed to your bookmark feed right? If so then that one article will show up in your reader and nothing else from the site.

Once you subscribe to a feed your job is not done. That feed needs to satisfy your interest. If it doesn’t then it needs to go. I give every feed I subscribe to one month. If i don’t receive at least one more piece of relevant and interesting information within one month of subscribing then that feed is gone. Additionally if the ratio of articles posted to articles I find interesting is too low I either attempt to clean it up with feedrinse or yahoo pipes or simply unsubscribe.

Hopefully Feed Oriented Browsing will get you started on the road to a better web experience. It has certainly helped me.

If you’re struggling with feeds and need to learn a bit more before you dive in check out this great video presentation entitled RSS in Plain English. RSS is a type of feed.

If you found this post interesting you might like to subscribe to my syndication category in which I try to post tips to help you deal with all the available feeds out there.

Subscribe to Feeds using TwittFeeder

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

RSSTwitter is a great update and notification system. You can send it messages with a variety of tools including Instant Messaging, Text Messages and the Twitter website itself. Twitter’s mission statement reads:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

One of the most useful features about ‘new web’ is feeds. Getting updated whenever the sites you check change is probably the best enhancement to come out of the internet. No more wasting time checking sites that haven’t updated yet.

TwittFeeder asks the question: What are your favorite websites doing? It allows you to easily subscribe to feeds using twitter. Once subscribed you’ll get updates via Direct Message.

To use it first start following TwittFeeder. Once you are it will automatically start following you. When it does you can start subscribing to feeds. To do so simply send ‘subscribe http://feedurl’ to twittFeeder as a direct message. If you’re using one of the standard Twitter tools this is accomplished by sending the following message to twitter:

D twittFeeder subscribe http://feedurl

That’s it! once you’re subscribed twittFeeder will start sending you direct messages using any notification system you’ve already setup in Twitter. The great thing about this service is if twitter ever adds another notification type you automatically get your feed subscriptions sent there for free.

The notification system twittFeeder uses is whatever your notifications are currently sent to by Twitter since it simply sends you the updates via a Twitter Direct Message. If you’re not a user yet you should be but the notifications currently supported are:

  • Text Message
  • E-mail
  • Instant Messages
  • Twitter website
  • Lots and Lots of 3rd party applications

To unsubscribe to a particular feed simply send ‘unsubscribe http://feedurl’ as a Direct Message to twittFeeder.

Disclaimer: at the moment twittFeeder is scheduled to run every 10 minutes so updates won’t necessarily be immediate. That number might go up or down depending upon usage and several other factors.

Geico and BestBuy – Crappy Customer Service

~ randyaa ~ 1 Comment

Out to LunchWhy in the world should you make things difficult for your consumers? Why make them wait, why inconvenience them?

I don’t have an answer, I’d be willing to bet nobody does, but they still do it!

I had two crappy customer service experiences in the past few weeks which iritated me very much. The first has to do with my car insurance. I’m not a very big fan of insurance companies to begin with but when they do something that inconveniences me and makes me do extra legwork for reason it just pisses me off.

What happened with Geico is I recently turned 25. When this happened my insurance is supposed to go down right? wrong! Geico sets up your policy and prices only once a year. When that happens if you’re under 25 (even if its 1 day before your birthday as in my case) you get shafted. You get your ’24 year old price’ until the next time they reevaluate your policy or 364 days in my case.

When I found this out I gave Geico a call and asked to speak to a manager. I explained that if they didn’t reevaluate my policy using my new age that I would simply transfer my account to another insurance company for a day (or less) and then transfer back to Geico because I did some quote checking around and Geico is still the cheapest for me. He thought this sounded silly and had me hold while he checked to see if he could just give me the newer price without me closing and reopening my account. Sadly despite his efforts this was not a possibility and he appologized. Well I hope your happy Geico because of the crap you’ve made me go through I haven’t bothered to spend the time transferring my insurance around.

My second experience was at a local BestBuy. What happened affects me more than most consumers possibly because of my Wegmans background. I took my camera with me to the store to get repaired. Dust was getting behind the screen and was starting reduce the visibility. When I walked up to the Customer Service counter I noticed that the line for the Geek Squad was about 10 people long. There was nobody at the normal counter and 3 workers standing around doing absolutely nothing.

I went to the normal counter, explained my situation, and was told that I needed to see the Geek Squad. I told them to look at the line and all I needed was turn in my camera to get it repaired. They appologized but said I’d have to wait for the Geek Squad. While I waited in line I noticed all 3 workers at the regular counter just standing around gossiping together. I wanted to speak to a manager but I didn’t want to take the time. I wish I had.

Why don’t these companies take customer service more seriously?

Dynamic Categories

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I determined a while ago that I wanted to reduce the clutter on my blog and eliminate most of what’s normally displayed on the front page of any blogs. However I didn’t want to lose any functionality and wanted to always have the ability to add links and categories and have lists of them that were generated dynamically somewhere. I figured that adding a page for each makes a lot of sense so I wrote a dynamic content wordpress plugin. At the moment it has 3 hard coded keyword tokens that it replaces with corresponding content. However the next release will allow you to specify a keyword token and what widget to insert in its place.

Consolidate Your PCs

~ randyaa ~ 4 Comments

Random Home NetworkThere are many reasons to have and use multiple PCs. Until recently I, like many of my friends, had several computers to accomplish the simple tasks I do with them. I had a web server, a file server, a laptop and my PC. However, I had lots of reasons to consolidate my PCs.

  • My PC has grown to old to be useful for gaming, which was its original intention.
  • I switched from hosting my own sites to using powweb.
  • Upgrading to Media Player 11 allows me to stream to my PS3 eliminating the need to use a separate file server running a media server.
  • Running only one PC costs less money than running three PCs 24 hours a day.
  • All my files were being stored on a Raid 1 array by the file server. This was easily transferred to my PC since it was just two SATA drives.
  • When working on my PC I would often transfer files locally to do work and then move them back to the file server. Now I can always work locally and still have the data being duplicated.
  • Running on a standard installation instead of a server configuration allows me to use services like Mozy for off site backup.
  • My printer is now directly connected to my PC instead of shared through my server.

So Consolidate your PCs today and simplify your network and your life!

It's your content

~ randyaa ~ Leave a comment

If you’re on the web you’re creating something whether you like it or not. If you’re watching a youtube video, enjoying a post by Matthew Mullenweg, letting your friends know what you’re up to on facebook or just doing a search for some needed info your actions are likely recorded somewhere and this becomes part of the giant repository of information that is the Internet.

There are basically 3 types of information about you available on the Internet.

  1. Your Content. This includes things like comments on a video, Blog posts, uploaded photos and forum topics that you replied to.
  2. Your Status. Things like your away message, your facebook status and Twitter let people know what you’re up to and where you’re at.
  3. What You’re Reading. You can intentionally share what you find interesting via tools like Digg, Del.icio.us or Google Reader shared items or you can let general web trends speak for you.

Different people are probably interested in different information about you. Luckily we live in a world that includes syndication feeds. This means that if you’re interested in a person’s contributions to the Internet, and they’re savvy enough to help you, you can subscribe to ‘groups’ if Information about them.

So, If you’re interested in what I have to contribute to the Internet I’ve created the following feeds to help you.

My Content

My Status

My Shared Items

To Serve or Not to Serve (The Customer)

~ randyaa ~ 1 Comment

He who wishes to secure the good of others, has already secured his own. ~Confucius

We are affected by Customer Service more than once every day. It makes a difference when you get your coffee in the morning, it matters when you fill your gas tank on your way home and when you buy your weekly groceries. The way in which you are served leaves a lasting impression on you. To that end it is my belief that Customer service should be the most important part of any business regardless of its particular niche. This week two companies left their impression on me and I’d like to outline those impressions below.

The Good News

Sometimes when you’re at the brink of never shopping somewhere again they can unexpectedly surprise you. That was the case with Circuit City this week. I live approximately 5 miles from the nearest Circuit City and rather than go there and find out they didn’t have what I wanted in stock i decided to give them a call. Literally 20 minutes after being on hold, being transferred 10 times, calling back twice and complaining, I finally got in touch with a manager who then instructed me she’d check the inventory and call me back. All this for a simple inventory check?

She called me back to let me know what I needed was in stock and that she’d have it held at the desk. Perfect. I headed over picked up what was held at the desk for me and went home. The problem arose when I tried to use it. The item I picked up turned out not to be the item I had asked for. Furious, I stormed back to Circuit City the next morning expecting a fight since I had already opened the package. When I arrived back at the store the same person was working the counter and instantly recognized me (it was also the Manager who I had talked to on the phone the previous day) and said:

You’re just not having any luck with this are you?

I said “no I’m not” in a gruff early-morning voice and she then proceeded to do the exchange without any more complaints. At the end of the transaction she explained that she had also credited my card for $8.50 (when there was no price difference) simply for the ‘inconvenience.’ Instantly she transformed my frustration into acceptance and even happiness. Not only did she fix my original problem but went above and beyond to simply make sure I wasn’t frustrated with their service.

The Bad News

My wife Rachel and I are planning on going to the Brian Regan show with some friends in our hometown in a few weeks. Since I sent out the notice to let people know about the show I offered to buy tickets for everyone so that we would be seated together. Originally I priced the tickets on TicketMaster at $30 a piece. This is what I told everyone and what I collected.

When I actually ordered the tickets The real bill included $2.50 (per ticket) for a facility charge, $7.50 for a convenience charge(per ticket) and a $3.60 service tax(total). That’s $10 per ticket more than advertised and an additional $3.60! After giving them a call I found out that the facility fee is actually charged by the venue so there’s nothing we can do about that however the tax and convenience charge is something Ticketmaster applies on top of the ticket price. Also I found out they only charge this convenience charge on the phone or on the Internet. If you go to the Ticketmaster counter the fee is waived.

How in the world does this make sense? Because it’s more convenient for me order my tickets from the comfort of my home you get to charge me more money? I say shenanigans! When I order from home especially over the Internet, I’m not distracting your customer service people from their real jobs, serving people who really need their help. It costs you no additional money to let me buy over the Internet. In fact I say it costs you less because you don’t need to have someone standing at a counter.

So what did I end up doing? Going to the actual venue and buying them direct. I had to leave work early just to get there while the box office was open. Such a complete inconvenience and utter customer service failure.

In Summary

The age old statement

The Customer is always right

Shouldn’t just be a saying on some old warn out poster behind your counter. Make it your policy, your goal, your JOB. After all, who pays your salary? What’s the best type of advertising?

That’s right Customers.

Keep it Simple Stupid

~ randyaa ~ 1 Comment

Keep it Simple Stupid (or what’s commonly know as the KISS principle) is something I picked up in my Software Engineering classes during my tour of duty at RIT. It is something I try to carry over into my every day life. That being said I’d like to share a few simple ideas I try to utilize to simplify my digital life.

Your Blog

For those of you reading this directly from the website you should have already noticed a complete redesign. This is only part of my new Zen overhaul. I have taken several points from Skellie‘s post 50 Tips to Unclutter Your Blog. If you’re interested in exactly what I did please check out the article. You may find some additional tips which I haven’t yet implemented as well.

Your Wallpaper
My Simple Wallpaper
A recent simplification I have made is my wallpaper. I was a fan of scenery wallpaper, most often shots that I took were my favorites, but I recently decided that this just adds to clutter. Photographic backgrounds can hide icons and can be a distraction. I created this simple background which provides a central focal point for any icons you wish to display on the desktop. I’ve provided several sizes so feel free to download it if you’d like to try it out.

Your Feeds

Chances are, if you’re like me, you subscribe to a lot of feeds. You probably also generate a lot of content on the Internet and therefor a lot of feeds (whether you realize it or not). If that’s the case why not manage both in the same place? I use Google Reader extensively and this is one of the biggest reasons why. Essentially I maintain two feeds: My Shared Items and My Content. Both are exactly what they sound like. My Shared Items is a feed in which articles, Videos, pictures and anything else i want to share will appear. I do this by utilizing Google Reader’s Shared Items feature. My Content is another feed in which any content that I produce will appear. For example, Any post on this blog, My posts on Randy and Rachel, My Comic Strips and my Youtube videos.

Your Archives

Lets face it, in this digital age chances are you have a lot of digital stuff. Stuff you want to keep. For most people this might just mean photos. For some it means photos, videos, music, software and more. To store all this and keep it organized you need a system. I have dual 250Gb SATA drives in a Raid 1 array which i use strictly for storage. On the root of this array I have the following directories:

  • Files
  • Music
  • Videos
  • Photos
  • Software

Everything I need to store fits somewhere in these 5 categories. Music and Videos are broken down by genre. Files and Software are broken down by category. Photos is broken down by date. This is probably where I’m the most organized. My Photos directory contains photos dating back to the 1950s all the way up to the present. To do this I created decade directories (1950s, 1960s etc) and within that year directories(1951, 1952 etc). Finally within the years directory I list the actual albums which also have a naming convention (MM – DD – name). Because of the shear amount of photographs I store I needed a system and this has greatly simplified things for me.

KISS

Regardless of what you’re doing, when something seems like its too complicated it is. Simplify it. Do whatever it takes to reduce the clutter and the complexity in your Digital Life. I will be making this a recurring theme for this blog so let me know if you have any specific topics you’d like to know how to simplify.