Just more than 24 hours delayed, and I’m about ready to head to the airport to go home to Omaha. You might say that this is a bit of a Winter Break, making my post last year a bit untrue. However, I still strive to eat at those four places every time I go home.
I’m writing this while trying to get through United phone lines. My flight home was cancelled because of the blizzard conditions in Denver. It’s a bit frustrating, because apparently United’s phone systems can’t handle the amount of calls that they’re receiving, because most of the time I get through, I get a busy signal (instead of the hold muzak).
The sad news is that getting through is the worst part of the entire experience. First, I sit through a 45 second message about the Denver snow storm. Interesting information the first time I hear it, but I’m currently listening to it for the 30th time. It’d sure be nice if I could skip through it!
When that wraps up, I get to the first round of automated phone service. I’m presented with 4 options, none of which are the ones that I want. What I learned is that you can press 0 to bypass that entire menu. Then you get directed to the second round of automated phone service - one that “understands” what you say and tries to communicate with you in natural language.
Now, I have friends who work for a company that makes these systems, so I’ll be nice. What an awful experience (yes, that’s being nice). I think that automated systems can be helpful sometimes, but in this case, people need to talk to a person to get their flights changed! It’s a United limitation! So having to struggle through an automated phone service is pretty awful. Frankly, I think the fact that something called the gethuman database exists is testament to the fact that these systems don’t meet the needs of their customers.
For United, here’s the trick. Press 0. Then say “Agent.” Then say “Yes.” Then specify domestic / international, as applicable (for domestic, just say yes). It works sometimes. Other times, it goes something like this:
and after that, I usually get a busy signal (though by now I’ve made it through to the hold muzak). Once or twice, that process is cumbersome. Thirty times, it’s a nightmare. It’s enough to ensure that I never fly United again.
I heard through the grapevine about the announcement of the Adobe CS3 icons, and it’s getting quite a bit of criticism.
Now, I’m not really an icon designer, but I can definitely understand the criticism offered up from those who are. Especially the skepticism at choosing the Periodic Table of Elements to emulate. Seriously, of all the visualizations and symbols in our world to copy, they come up with the Periodic Table of Elements? Quick - what’s Fe? How about K? And Na? They are three commonly-known elements (Iron, Potassium and Sodium) with random abbreviations. Turning to Adobe, can you tell me what Di, Jr, and Sb might be? Personally, I have no idea.
But my main complaint is how they used color in this color wheel. What does any of it mean? Is it just whatever they felt inspired with? (Yes… ColdFusion… that’s cold, we’ll make it blue!) Surely it has nothing to do with what you can accomplish with that product, since ColdFusion (CF), Macromedia’s server communication language, and Photoshop (Ps) are both in the blue space, whereas Dreamweaver (Dw), Macromedia’s web development tool, and GoLive (Gl), Adobe’s web development tool, are at opposite ends of the wheel.
First of all, I always thought that CS3 would be Adobe’s big chance to release a suite of products that really integrated Macromedia and Adobe into one, solid company. Why does one, solid company need two offerings for web development? I would have wanted to see one product that GoLive users and Dreamweaver users could target for upgrading. It seems a better move for Adobe than having two teams developing the same product in different ways.
Secondly, what’s the story on the colors? It seems to me that Adobe had an opportunity to associate colors with different actions. Web development tools could be one color group, image manipulation tools another, and sketching / prototyping tools still another. Instead, it seems like they used color to divide former Macromedia products and traditional Adobe products, which seems to not be very meaningful at all.
But I do think the color wheel is pretty.
Due to high demand, Amazon came up with a new way to sell their limited supplies of gaming systems - randomly select people to purchase them among a group that has signed up. Check it out.
Now, these types of lottery are all so random, I try not to put much stock in them. But it’s good to know, according to Amazon, that we have better odds of winning the game system of our choice (20 to 1 for a Wii) than contracting botulism (2,300 to 1), contracting the plague (299,999 to 1), or getting bitten by a shark (6,000,000 to 1). Personally, I’m holding out for the wii. But if I wake up tomorrow with botulism and no wii, I’m gonna be one pissed off gamer.
The Monday after Thanksgiving, November 27, Seattle had one of the worst ice storms in recent memory. Of course, as a midwesterner, I’m obliged to turn my nose up and say “It was little more than a dusting of snow,” but even then I couldn’t escape a 3.5 hour commute home that night. I stayed home from work the next day.
Fast forward to Thursday evening, December 14, when Seattle was hit by one of the worst wind storm’s in Seattle’s history. My lights were flickering all Thursday night, so I expected to wake up without power. (I did.) As I contemplated whether to go into work, I thought, “Let’s be rational. The only time all of Omaha lost power was during a huge blizzard came through. That was declared as a national disaster, and even then, I was only without power for half a day. Surely Microsoft has power.”
Surely I was wrong. Most of the Greater Seattle area was without power (more than a million homes), and Microsoft was part of that. Power is coming on slowly but surely, though the Kirkland area where I live is still without power. Thankfully Microsoft is up and running, so I’m able to get warm, charge my phone, and blog a little bit.
Whatever is causing this run of “worst storms in Seattle’s history” (did you move to Seattle around Thanksgiving? It might be you…), I hope it moves on soon. In the meantime, one more desperate appeal to Seattle drivers (as if yet another post would make a difference), take heed:
If a stop signal at an intersection is not working, treat it as a four way stop! No exceptions!
And just in case Seattlites aren’t really sure how to treat a four way stop (don’t put it past them, I’ve had about 20 close calls in 24 hours), right of way proceeds to the right. Each direction takes turns, one at a time. Do not go when opposing traffic starts to move; if someone is turning left, you will hit them, and they do have the right of way. And speaking as someone who lives on a side street, stop lights at minor intersections do, in fact, still count as stop lights.
Best wishes to those without power. Stay warm!!!
I was on Facebook tonight (per usual… while I typically ignore MySpace and Friendster, I find myself getting sucked in more and more with Facebook. I hate to say it, but it might just have to do with the News Feed that I trashed; although, what I say in that post still holds true).
Anyway, I found something relatively new (at least I’ve only noticed it in the past couple weeks) under the Friends link: an option called “Friend Finder.” Now there used to be something there that would let you enter a random friend’s email address and see if they were on Facebook (Gee, that’s not painstaking) - but this experience has been upgraded a bit:
Basically you enter an email address and password, and they compare your contacts’ email addresses to email addresses on Facebook.
At first, I was skeptical of how well this would work (I have a lot of random email addresses in GMail), but I was surprised at how effective it was. On more than one occasion, I caught myself saying, “Wow, they’re in Facebook? I had no idea!” Since the info isn’t getting stored beyond the initial search, it’s an interesting way to quickly reconnect. Then, with one button press, invitations were sent to all of the contacts I had selected.
With the movie Eragon coming out soon, I started wondering how the movie might have come about…
Needless to say, I’m sick of seeing advertisements for this movie everywhere I look. I’m not going to see it! Quit asking!
If you stopped by early this morning, you might have caught a glimpse of a post that is no longer visible. I decided to hide it because the subject of the postwas Microsoft’s daily news emails; and while the news stories in those emails are available for public consumption, the news email is somehow Microsoft confidential. Better safe than sorry.
However, I feel bad for those who might have missed the post. So I’ve craftily hidden the story in a comment. While perhaps not really all that crafty, it at least doesn’t have a screen shot of the email, so maybe I’m less culpable. Anyway, check out the comments of a recent post to learn more.
Frequent readers will remember my recent commentary about the Wii remote control, and the potential danger that could ensue if you happen to let go of the control while bowling.
A week after that posting, MSNBC posted an article entitled Nintendo cautions gamers on Wii safety – quite a sensible title, I feel. I found out about this article from Microsoft’s daily news emails, which sometimes takes liberties with imposing their own titles and blurbs about articles. I felt this title selection was an… interesting choice.
And I thought I was getting carried away with the “playing with their Wiis” joke. Very clever Microsoft! Although technically inaccurate – you’re waving the Wii remote around, not the Wii itself – it shows a sense of humor that I don’t see enough of in office communications, and I hope more of it comes along.
On a related note - I beat MSNBC to the story by a week!! I think that just goes to show you where to find important news on the Internet first. I also beat Stephen Colbert to this story by a few days.
Some of you know that the past week was packed with two customer events at work. Between them, a Usability Team offsite event, and a sick day (that cut way too much into my weekend), I wasn’t at my desk for an entire week.
Now there was always talk of people doing things to your office if you were out for a period of time (from full out pranks to minor redecorations), but I thought that it would never happen to me. Today, I walked into my office to find that I was wrong - and, that my monitor had been redecorated:
At the customer events, we have large post-it style pages that we use for voting, and small green and red stickers for people to vote with. It’s a good way to get people moving around during a customer event where they spend most of their time at the computer. Apparently, the green and red dots also double as monitor decoration. Fantastic!
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