Jake Ludington’s Digital Lifestyle

It’s easy tell stories about the time someone gave you lousy customer service, but it’s a rare occasion when people bother to mention outstanding service. Hertz provided my family with outstanding service on our recent trip to the Los Angeles area. For that I’m saying thanks!

We went down to LA for the weekend to meet up with my brother’s family in Huntington Beach. As it turned out, I needed to fly to New York from Los Angeles for a conference, rather than return to Seattle with the rest of my family. That left Robin returning the rental car and taking the kids on the plane by herself.

When Robin went to return the rental car, she got to the car return line and the woman checking cars in asked her if she was traveling by herself with our two kids. Robin replied yes and the woman from Hertz insisted on having Robin and the kids stay with the car while she went to get someone. When the Hertz employee returned, she had another Hertz employee drive my family to the departure drop off right outside the Alaska Airlines terminal, avoiding a much longer walk with the kids and luggage back to the check-in counter.

Hertz certainly isn’t required to do that and I won’t expect it in the future, but because they did, I’m far more likely to continue using them in the future. Once again, I say thanks to Hertz for going above and beyond to provide amazing service.

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I like spending less for the things I need, which means I’m willing to look for a coupon or holdout for a sale before purchasing. When I found an opportunity to reduce the price of my recent refrigerator purchase by $96, it made sense to go for it. This was in addition to an existing offer for free delivery and disposal of my existing fridge. The reason I’m telling you about this is there are discounts available on all kinds of purchases that can easily be added on top of any coupon or sale at stores like Best Buy, Home Depot, Target, and clothing retailers like Old Navy.

The key to increasing your buying power is gift cards. Plastic Jungle is an online service that sells gift cards at a discount from face value, allowing you to instantly get more purchasing power for each dollar spent. When it came time to buy my new fridge, I went to Plastic Jungle, ordered $1600 worth of Best Buy gift cards for $1504 and waited for them to arrive in the mail. I could have used the gift cards for a new HDTV or a computer, but what I needed was a new fridge. Upon arrival, I made my purchase with the gift cards instantly reducing the cost of my new appliance purchase.

Restaurant gift cards seem to offer the biggest discounts at Plastic Jungle, although there are also deals to be had on auto fuel from places like Shell and BP, as well as on hotel and rental cars. As I write this, Plastic Jungle is currently offering a 5% discount on face value for Best Buy gift cards, but a few of the other gift card options rates are better than when I was initially looking, so it literally pays to check back. So before make your next purchase of anything, check Plastic Jungle to see if it can save you money – chances are it will.

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I’m back in Iowa for the holidays and getting here was made more painful by a failure of the iTunes DRM machine. We left for the airport on Wednesday morning. Prior to leaving, I signed in to iTunes on my laptop, purchased a movie for Wyatt to watch on the flight, downloaded the movie to my laptop, and then packed up to leave for the airport.

On the plane, as I attempted to play the purchased movie, iTunes informed me that my computer wasn’t authorized and prompted me to sign in, which of course I could not do at 30,000 feet. This is a massive failure of the transactional system that is iTunes. If I purchased a movie on my laptop and subsequently downloaded the movie to my laptop, where else would I want to play it? iTunes was obviously aware that the computer was not authorized. It seems to me that there should have been a prompt to authorize the computer during the purchase process to avoid this scenario.

This will be the last movie I purchase from the iTunes store ever. Some other company can have my money. I need movies that actually work on a plane and it’s obvious I can’t count on iTunes to deliver a reliable experience. Had I ripped the DVD for the same movie (which I also own), I wouldn’t have run into this issue, but then again, that’s deemed illegal.

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At one point in the past, many people purchased Series E savings bonds for babies or for a rainy day and then forget the purchase was ever made. You can find out if you’re one of those people in just a few seconds by visiting the Treasure Hunt on TreasuryDirect.gov. This is the United States government’s site where you can buy and redeem securities directly from the U.S. Department of the Treasury in paperless electronic form. Recently, the U.S. Treasury has been attempting to track down matured Series E savings bonds, which had maturity dates of 40 years for bonds issued before 1965 and 30 years for bonds issued between 1965-1980. There are also some extended maturity periods for these bonds, but if you don’t know you have them you probably also don’t know if they’ve matured. The major limitation of the Treasure Hunt feature on TreasuryDirect.gov is that it can’t automatically look up Series E savings bonds issued before 1973. Be sure to check the Treasure Hunt to see if you have a bond or two issued and now forgotten.

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[UPDATE] As many people are pointing out in the comments, Gmail has the Forgotten Email Detector available in the Gmail Labs experimental features. So the big difference is Rackspace recognized people need help with attachments and turned the feature on by default. In my book, Rackspace still provided better service.

Have you ever forgotten to attach a file to your email? I know I have.

Gmail take note! Rackspace Email is the only email solution I’ve seen that traps this error and helps you avoid looking stupid. I just went to send an email with the words, ’see the attached PDF’ included and forgot to attach the PDF. When I hit send, I got a great warning message that tells me that it seems I have forgotten to add an attachment. Awesome! Any feature that keeps me from looking stupid is a good one. When is Gmail going to add this? In the meantime, kudos to Rackspace for getting it right.

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If you think the new Twitter Lists feature was designed to help you organize the people you follow, you would be dead wrong. On the surface Twitter Lists help you organize tweets into something sensible, but there’s something more in those lists. What Twitter lists really do is provide Twitter with semantic relationships between Twitter accounts, while also establishing the real authority figures on Twitter.

Twitter can already see you are interested in the people you follow. You could also draw the conclusion that Twitter can see you are interested in people who follow you. In a reciprocal follow relationship, there’s an implied stronger bond between two tweeters. That reciprocity is devalued by all of the marketing morons intent on building follower numbers. None of who you follow vs. who follows you data gives Twitter the ability to develop semantics around user accounts.

Twitter Lists create those semantics. Each time 2 people appear on a list together, Twitter can begin to group those two people into buckets. The more lists any two people appear on, the more likely they are to be closely linked in some way. So if Robert Scoble and I appear on a list called Tech Bloggers, a list called Tech Influencers, and also appear on a third list called Geeks with Kids, there’s obviously some similarity between the two of us.

Lists also establish authority. Just like multiple links from reliable sites translate to greater relevance in search, the more people who put someone on a list, the more likely that person is to be relevant. While you could probably discount everyone who adds Shaq to a Twitter list as being a fanboy, anyone who adds my friend Kevin O’Keefe to a list probably considers him relevant to what they are doing online.

The net result of this should be a Twitter search with more relevant results. In addition to showing the latest tweets on a topic, Twitter search should be able to evaluate that certain people are better able to provide data on Seattle (where I live), or Tech (what I’m passionate about) than others. And if I’m signed in to Twitter, this should be further enhanced by an algorithm that provides results based on how other Twitter accounts relate to mine.

Who this ultimately helps is Twitter partners who get the “fire hose” live stream of data. If Bing and Google can use semantic relationships and list affinity to evaluate the relevance of tweets, there’s more benefit for them in aggregating your data. So the question becomes: which lists are you on?

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I’m an information junkie. Put engaging writing in front of me and I’m distracted for hours. Reading tech blogs is a no-brainer for me, but I tend to read about tech stuff while ignoring the rest of the universe of great material. Thanks to some current work with Lexblog, I find myself reading a ton of law blogs. There’s a whole world of great law blog content out there that should be making all of us smarter.

For instance, via the Florida Asset Protection blog, I learned that if I ever need to file bankruptcy or protect assets from a creditor, I hope I’m a Florida resident. I also learned that it might be easier to become a Florida resident for purposes of protecting your assets than it is to become a resident to attend college, but that’s another story.

I’ve tweeted this before, but I’m loving Food Safety News. Who doesn’t want a daily dose of all the food (information) that could kill you? Although Bill Marler’s wry criticisms of the state of the food industry on his Marler Blog cut to the heart of the matter in a style that resonates better with me.

Another great law blogging personality is Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice. I admittedly don’t get everything Scott talks about because I am not a lawyer (IANAL), but I like his writing style and I learn something every time I read his blog.

And because I can’t escape tech, the Nanotechnology Law Report is a fascinating read on the edge of the future where the law meets things that have barely crossed over from the realm of science fiction.

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I found an old post I wrote back in 2004 stating that I’d never buy a device that was just for ebooks. My rationale at the time was that Pocket PC devices and others like them had gotten to the point where the screens were great for reading. Now I tell everyone I know why I love the Amazon Kindle. If E-ink had existed in 2004, I think my opinion then might have been different. At the time, everyone was touting screens that were special purpose LCD, which made no sense then and still makes no sense now. E-ink is easier on the eyes because unlike reading an LCD screen, you’re not staring into a light bulb while you read.

I find I’m reading more now that I have a Kindle because its more convenient than carrying a book around. For many types of information, like the morning newspaper, I like the format better because the text I want is unencumbered by all the ads. Not everything works on the Kindle. I don’t like reading magazines on a Kindle even though the content is largely the same. The difference is magazines have specialized in combining imagery with their text content to create something that’s better than the printed word alone. On a Kindle, the images are either gone or muted by the limitation of a monochromatic display. I don’t like these same magazines on the Web because they’ve gone to great lengths to make advertising more important than the content, so I find myself continuing to subscribe to several of the print editions.

If I were to gaze into a crystal ball and look for the device I’d really want to read this stuff on, I think my 2004 desire holds up, because I really want a multi-function tool like an iPhone or my T-Mobile G1, with all the applications that includes, plus the ability to get an E-ink experience when I simply want to read. Will we see that anytime soon? Hard to say. In the meantime, the number of books I purchased for Kindle in 2009 is close to double my book purchases for the 2 previous years. How about you? Are your reading habits changing because of technology? If so, how?

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Exporting data from Wordpress to take it almost anywhere else is a crapshoot as to how well the data will migrate. The extensible nature of Wordpress via plugins means you get an unknown assortment of data coming along with the base contents of your post, tags, and comments. If you didn’t delete spam comments before your export, you get to bring your spam with you. The awesome Wordpress revision feature hobbles your export file with every revision and autosave you ever made. Depending on where you choose to move your data (I know, who would ever leave Wordpress, right?) you may be stuck cleaning the Export file in order to get your content properly installed anywhere else. I’ve even had the misfortune of having another Wordpress install barf on content importing because a plugin from the old install wasn’t on the new install, which meant that the new WP install didn’t know what to do with some improperly handled metadata.

Instead of just giving me a dump of all data when I click the Export tab, WordPress should walk through a little wizard asking me what I want to keep. Let me choose to leave spam and revisions behind. Let me choose to leave all comments behind (without deleting them from the database). Maybe my tagging skills we lousy in a past life and I want to make a fresh start, so give me the option to exclude tags. These are all easy features to include. Maybe that’s asking for too much usability out of a free solution, but if it’s really the ultimate content management solution (it’s not), WordPress should be making it easier to work with data.

I know I’m going to hear that I should use plugins or develop these features myself. After all, WordPress is infinitely extensible. There is a plugin to delete revisions from WordPress. I don’t want to need a plugin to get clean data out, because I have no way of knowing whether that plugin will actually be stable. This is core functionality that would make Wordpress more useful to me and anyone else who ever moves their data around. I just wish they would fix it!

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We’ve all been on the receiving end of an employee following company policy at one time or another. For me, the instance that sticks out as most obvious to me was an occasion when I went to cash a check at the bank I visited every week, only to discover I’d left my driver’s license back at the office. The teller recognized me, but because it was bank policy not to cash a check without proper identification, I was out of luck. My lunch hour schedule prevented me from having time to go back and get my ID. Sure it was my fault for not having my ID with me, but I was no stranger to the people who worked at the bank. I was left with a bad feeling that I remember many years later.

Falling into the company policy trap can be even worse for small companies, because the the stakes are much higher. To use a hypothetical company as an example, lets say I own a video hosting service that competes with YouTube. My service charges a monthly subscription fee for a bunch of advanced features you can’t get from YouTube. Because of some exclusive distribution partnerships we worked out, our service also requires you to launch your video channel with at least 5 video segments. The 5 video policy was put in place because our distribution partners are concerned that too many video publishers launch with one video, realize it’s too much work, and abandon posting videos, which makes their network look bad. Your channel won’t be visible to the world until you have 5 video segments uploaded, although we will do the necessary configuration so that you’re live as soon as the 5 videos are ready to go.

To continue with my hypothetical example, lets say you are an artist who uses video as your medium. For your current project, you want to shoot a three minute video at exactly the same location, starting at the exact same time every day for an entire year. You want your video channel to go live starting on January 1 and continue throughout the year. Part of the experience of your project is that you need people to view videos from day 1. You can’t launch with the 5 videos I require, because our requirements do not match your vision. While we clearly spell out the requirements to everyone who joins our service, you contact customer support and request that we make your video channel live on January 1 with only 1 video.

There are two ways my video company could proceed. Customer support could respond that our policy is to require 5 videos and we refuse to make an exception. As a result you might take your business elsewhere and tell other artists that we aren’t a viable option for creative people. The other thing we could do is engage with you more directly, clarify what our concerns are about why we require 5 videos, and recognize that your goals are sound even though they don’t match up with our policy. Choosing the later course probably means you’re going to tell more people what a great service our company offers because we empowered you to succeed with your vision./p pBy being flexible in company policy when it makes sense, you can build a stronger company with rabidly loyal customers. In the hypothetical example I use, the 5 video policy exists to create a better experience for distribution partnerships, however, in the case of your art project, our company can have reasonable confidence that you will follow through because you have a track record for doing interesting art projects.

What about situations where an exception is made and the customer fails to live up to their end? There’s always that risk, but every business decision involves some risk, it’s a matter of assessing which ones will get the company closer to its goals.

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