Every year, I put together a video with highlights of photos and videos of our family. I just finished assembling the latest one, from the summery of 2011 to the summer of 2012, and I am once again posting it on Vimeo for easy distribution to family members. It’s around 18 minutes long.
If you are interested seeing past family videos, you can access them here (2010-2011) and here (2008-2010).
I think I’m being followed.
All over the web, I am being show ads from Timbuk2, a company that makes bags designed for laptops and other electronics for people who are “on the go”. I might just assume that they are in the midst of an advertising blitz, but it didn’t start randomly. It began when I spent a little time on their website, checking out one of their products. Now I see them everywhere.
I think I know why they are doing this. I did spend some time on their website recently, carefully checking out a particular product, but I didn’t actually buy anything while I was there. I think they know I was interested, and I’m guessing that they hope that if they keep reminding me about the bag, I will finally give in. It’s a good strategy.
Unfortunately, they are wasting their money. They can follow me across the web, but they can’t follow me across computers. I already bought it, but they don’t know that.
A week and a half ago, I don’t think I was even aware of the the company. Then, I saw an article from New York Times reporter David Pogue about his new laptop bag, the Command Messenger from Timbuk2. He was excited about a recent design change to this hybrid laptop bag / messenger bag that made it a breeze to zip through airport security, and I was immediately intrigued. Not that I fly very much, but still.
This is a seriously cool bag. It has a special laptop compartment that folds out for TSA scanning without removing the laptop, and in general they have put a lot of thought into all the details of the zippers, pockets, and flaps that make it a perfect, compact, sturdy bag. They have a two minute web video showing off the bag’s features – it’s worth checking out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqzxZiCNxWk&feature=player_embedded
I have been using a Kenneth Cole laptop bag as my daily “take stuff to work bag” for the last several years. Mostly I just carry my lunch around in it, and it’s perfect for when I need to take my laptop home, but if heavens forbid I need to carry both my lunch and my laptop, it doesn’t work so well. Also, the shoulder pad on the strap is starting to wear out, and I was vaguely aware that maybe it was time to change it out.
So, I saw this bag, and I was immediately hooked. After spending a while checking out various options, I sought out the most important second opinion of all – my wife’s. I sent her the link, and when we were home that evening, she looked at it with me. After watching the video, she shifted from a “why do you need this?” stance to “if you buy it, I’m stealing it when I fly to an overnight conference next month”. With that vote of confidence (and her color recommendations), I placed the order.
That is, I placed the order using her computer.
The next day, back at work, I started noticing that Timbuk2 ads are showing up everywhere. I went to look up “mendacious”, and there it was, staring at me:
I’m reading a blog post, and there they are:
It’s been almost two weeks, and they are continuing to popup regularly.
Now, this certainly could be a big coincidence. I haven’t done any experiments with fresh browsers to see if they will track me. Still, the timing is very suspicious to me. I’m guessing that because I spent time reviewing a product on their site but never made it to checkout, they have some sort of ad network cookie that puts in me into a “hot lead” category. Then, as I browse the web and visit sites that use the ad network, they see “ooh, this is a timbuk2 hot lead – show him the timuk2 ad.”
I suspect many people may be a little creeped out by this, but not me. I love it. Mostly, I feel bad for them, since I know they are spending money trying to get me to buy something that I already purchased. Since I didn’t use the same computer that has the ad tracking cookie, so they can’t figure that out. Brilliant marketers, limited by the technology.
Frankly, I think that targeted advertising is a wonderful thing. I hate going to websites and getting blasted with ads for mortgage refinancing or auto insurance or discounts on clothing. I have no interest in these products. On the flip side, I am a cheap skate. I hate paying for services unless I use them heavily, and even then, it is only grudgingly.
If companies can figure out what products and services I am most interested and use it to show me better targeted ads, and they can use it to make the sites I like to visit free for me to use, then I am all for it. Sign me up.
In the meantime, my bag finally arrived over the weekend, and I am loving it. I used it to take my son to a doctor’s appointment this morning, and it was easily adapted from a laptop bag to taking his books, toys, snacks, and water bottle plus my kindle to read, all while being very comfortable to wear and carry.
So I would heartily recommend you go get one… If you dare… (cue haunted house music)…
While never achieving the popularity of top-tier superheroes like Superman or Spider-man, The Incredible Hulk is certainly one of the more fascinating comic book protagonists. While most of the heroes have a super ability and a super weakness, the Hulk’s ability is his weakness – an uncontrollable temper.
When I get mad, I might grumble or yell. When Bruce Banner gets mad, he transforms into a nine-foot-tall green monster with the strength of 100 people. He can tear, rip, throw or just smash whatever is in his way. Not very productive, but I’m sure it’s a lot more satisfying.
When the Hulk transforms, he is often drawn as a shirtless muscular giant who has burst out of his street clothing and wears only pants. The other day I was looking at my two-year-old son, who was running around with his shirt off. I was immediately struck with the realization that the Hulk is really a two-year-old having a temper tantrum.
My son is usually very sweet, but when he doesn’t get his way, his temper can flare quickly. He will start flailing and grab whatever is nearby and start throwing it. He’ll intentionally knock down the magna-tile structure his sister is building if he doesn’t get the piece that he wants. Okay, he doesn’t exactly turn green, but I can almost hear him saying “Hulk smash!” in my head.
The Hulk’s creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, claim that the Hulk was inspired by a combination of Frankenstein’s monster and by Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. While this sounds like a nice explanation, both Lee and Kirby had children in 1940s and ’50s, so they would have been well acquainted with the temper tantrums of kids. I prefer to think that Frankenstein was just a better sounding cover story, and really creating the comic book character of the Hulk was a way for them to vent some of their parenting frustrations.
As adults, we learn to channel our frustrations into non-violent forms of expression. We might say something nasty or swear. As we get older and more mature, we learn to take it in stride and respond calmly. We make non-threatening personal “I feel” statements.
A few weeks ago, I was complaining to my wife about a trip to the mechanic to get a tire replaced. I had expected it to take about an hour, but a combination of other cars ahead of me, a problem with a pressure monitor in the tire, and an out-of-stock part soon transformed it into a 5 hour ordeal.
My four-year-old daughter was listening and asked me what was wrong.
“I had a very frustrating day,” I told her.
“Did you cry?” she asked. Logical – if you are frustrated, obviously you would cry, right?
“No, I didn’t cry,” I answered.
“Did you go like this?” she asked, pointing down at her feet and stamping them.
“No, I didn’t stamp my feet,” I answered.
Clearly, my daughter is already past The Hulk stage of frustration. To her, when she’s upset, she cries and stamps her feet.
My son is still clearly deep in the Hulk mode. He is getting better about responding, but I still need to be on guard when he is playing with other kids in case a dispute breaks out.
Learning patience takes time. So I will have to be patient too.
When I was driving home with my four-year-old daughter on a cloudy day, she asked me if there were holes in the clouds.
“Holes?” I asked.
“Yes, holes…to let the water out!” she said.
I started to explain how the clouds themselves were made up of water, but I could see that this idea was too abstract for her. I decided a hands-on demonstration was in order.
This isn’t the first time I’ve taken it upon myself to explain scientific concepts to my kids. Every time we encounter some gross inaccuracy in a children’s book (like climbing up a tall ladder to reach the moon in Eric Carle’s Papa, Please Get the Moon For Me), I feel the need to erase any possible misconceptions that this might create. However, this was the first time I tried to create a real interactive experience, as opposed to looking at pictures in books or on the web.
I decided to focus on the three states of matter – liquid, solid, and gas. To do this, we would transform water through all the states and back again – liquid to solid to liquid to gas to liquid. I spent a few days gathering the necessary materials, and then after a practice run on my own, I went through it with my daughter.
We started by freezing the water. I had her fill up ice cube trays and then we tried sticking our fingers in to see how in the liquid state, objects could pass through.
We put the trays in the freezer for a few hours and then tried sticking our fingers in. Now our fingers were unable to pass through the water in its solid state.
Next, it was time to turn it back into water. We took all of the ice cubs out of the tray, put them in a pot, and started heating it up on the stove.
The ice rapidly began to melt, and we watched over a couple of minutes as the ice cubes lost their shape and disappeared altogether.
So far, so good – we had taken the liquid, transformed it into a solid, and then transformed it back into a liquid. Now, the hard part – the gas.
It took me some trial and error to figure out the best way to do this. Back in high school, we had all kinds of wonderful apparatus for distillation, including flasks, rubber stoppers, and tubes. However, my job in computer software doesn’t have access to any of this, so I needed to improvise. I spent a little while looking at distilling kits on Amazon, but I wasn’t really interested in spending $50 or more for this home science experiment. I ended up going to the Home Depot and buying a funnel and some plastic tubing with the idea that I would capture some steam and then divert it into a cool glass where it would hopefully re-condense.
I had the good sense to test the idea the night before our experiment, and I discovered it wasn’t going to work. The cheap plastic funnel rapidly started to warp from the heat of the steam, and no steam made it to the glass to condense; it just formed as vapor near the end attached to the funnel.
This failure inspired me to come up with something much simpler for the actual run-through with my daughter. I took a glass pot top and put it in the freezer to cool it down. We brought the melted ice water to a boil, and then I simply held the chilled pot top about six inches over the pot.
As the steam rose up, it reached the chilled surface of the pot top and immediately condensed into water. Full droplets began to quickly form. I was then able to turn it back over and examine it more closely with my daughter, and show her how there was water on the pot top now, even though it never had contact with the water in the pot.
Just like how water evaporates and rises up into the air to form clouds… right?!
As a final step, we then moved to the living room to demonstrate with blocks all three states of matter we just saw. I put a bunch of square blocks in a tub, we practiced running our hands through them when they were loosely strewn about (just like a liquid).
I then packed them into a well-organized stack, and we looked at how we could no longer pass our hands through (just like a solid).
Finally, we picked some blocks up and tossed them up into the air (just like a gas).
Well, I don’t know how much of this she really absorbed, but she did have fun going through all of the steps.
And most importantly, I had fun trying to teach her.
In the past week 10 days, I have had to work with customer care at both Amazon and Apple to replace malfunctioning hardware. These two companies represent two extremes of how to interact with customers, and I was expecting very different levels of satisfaction.
At one end, Apple has used their 363 brick-and-mortar stores to create an ideal retail experience where customers can interact with products and receive in-person tech support. At the other, Amazon lacks any physical retail locations at all, directing all customers to the website (and phone, if necessary).
Yet, despite these diametrically opposed approaches, both companies managed to deliver excellent service and keep me as a very happy customer. Each one has leveraged the best aspects of their infrastructure to create a great experience.
While on a recent trip to San Francisco, the Sleep/Wake button on my iPhone stopped working. When pressed, it no longer sprang back and the phone did not switch off or on. While you can still wake the phone by pressing the home button, waiting for it to go sleep after being idle for 60 seconds is more problematic than you would think. Every time I would put the phone in my pocket, I would accidentally brush the still active screen, causing it to initiate some unintended feature.
Online research confirmed this was a hardware issue, so when I got back to Boston, I went to an Apple Store to see if they could help me. Unfortunately, it turned out that only the Apple Geniuses could help, and they were out of appointments for that day. Not a great start with this “in-person” approach. However, they pointed me to a website where I could book online, and I set up an appointment for two days later when I had some free time.
I received an email confirmation about my appointment, and I even received a push notification from the Apple Store app a few hours before my appointment.
When I came in, they knew who I was, and a tech named Jeff had me pull up a seat and took a look at the phone. He quickly confirmed that the sleep/wake button was indeed broken, and since my phone was less than a year old, I was entitled to a free replacement. He had one brought out, transferred my SIM card to it, and it activated.
We then went through the process of starting a restore from iCloud. While I’ve been backing up to iCloud ever since iOS 5 came out, I’ve never seen it in action. Initially, my heart sank when the phone announced it did not see any available backups to restore from. However, Jeff took a look and figured out that the replacement’s OS needed to be updated to a more recent point release. He spent 10 minutes updating the firmware, and then, sure enough, it saw the backup. 10 minutes later all of the data was restored, and the process of reloading all the apps had begun. I was able to then leave the app store and complete the loading process using wifi at my home.
All through the process, Apple store personnel were friendly and helpful. They allowed me to borrow power to recharge the new iPhone before I left, and they provided the technical expertise I needed for the restore process. iCloud backup and restore worked just as Apple has always promised it would.
An excellent experience.
On the flight back from San Francisco, my Kindle’s screen spontaneously stopped working properly. The bottom 30% became frozen with gibberish. The rest of the device was working fine, but any text in the lower portion was obscured. Without access to the internet while we were in the air, I tried everything I could to fix it. I rebooted it, I tried changing the screen orientation, but nothing seemed to work.
When I got home, an internet search confirmed that this was indeed a hardware problem, and I would need to reach out to Amazon.
Since Amazon has no equivalent of the “Apple Store” where I could just take it in for service, I steeled myself for the inevitable back-and-forths over email or navigating some nightmare of a phone tree intended to deflect silly questions from clueless users (“If you need help loading content onto your kindle, press 1. If you are having trouble accessing previous purchases, press 2…”).
To my surprise, the process was quite delightful. A visit to the “Kindle Support” page had a prominently labeled “Contact Us” button, which in turn asked me to choose which Kindle device I was having an issue with. I selected mine, and an onscreen menu asked me to choose from a list of possible problems (Content, Device, etc.). Choosing Device immediately popped up a second list of device issues, which led to a third list, allowing me to select “My Kindle is Damaged.”
It then told me I would need to seek support by phone, but instead of providing a phone number, it asked me to enter mine. I typed it in and hit “connect”, and a few seconds later the phone rang! I picked it up and was connected to a Kindle support representative.
He had all of the information about who I was, my Kindle model, etc. After reconfirming the problem, he walked me through the reboot process again (acknowledging that I had already tried this, but he was required to do it anyways). When the problem was still there, he asked me to charge it, and he would call me back in an hour or so to do some further diagnostics.
One hour and 15 minutes later, my phone rang, and the representative was back . We ran through another reboot, and sure enough, it was still broken. He then informed me that they were shipping me a new kindle, and all I needed to do was send the broken one back within 30 days.
It turns out that the kindle was shipped overnight express. Less than 20 hours after having visited the kindle website, my replacement was delivered to my door. It was already registered as my device, so I didn’t need to re-enter my information. I just connected it to my wifi and re-downloaded my current book out of the archive list.
This was a much better experience than I had expected:
I’m a tech savvy user. I spend a lot of time researching issues and trying to solve them myself. When I get to the point of needing tech support, it generally means that I have hardware issue. Since most tech support personnel are generally dealing with clueless users and simpler problems, I often find this to be a frustrating process.
Apple and Amazon each managed to make replacing my devices simple and easy. For Apple, it was a high touch approach – book an appointment, but then make sure that the tech knows exactly how to help me and what to do. For Amazon, it was low touch, but they made sure to use their web infrastructure to leverage the information they already had and get me to exactly the right point where someone could help me.
Since Apple has a physical store, they were able to immediately put the replacement phone in my hands. Since Amazon has a highly streamlined delivery infrastructure, they were able to overnight the replacement and avoid disrupting my schedule.
Both of them were an excellent experience.
We recently took a vacation out to San Francisco with our two young children, ages 2 and 4. While we were excited for the trip, we knew that getting there and back was going to be tough. There is just nothing about flying with young kids that is easy.
Ourfour-year-old daughter does okay, since she has a long enough attention span that she will happily watch television on the iPad for a couple of hours, especially since we would never let her watch that much in a row at home. If it keeps her occupied, quiet, and in her seat for a long stretch of time, I’m all for it.
Our two-year-old is much tougher. What he really wants to do is run around and jump, and that just doesn’t work for a 6 hour flight across the country. He still isn’t at the point of really being able to sit and watch a tv show, so it’s a much more arduous task to keep him occupied. We pack lots of activities (books, a portable train set, playdoh, crayons, etc.), and then we have to work as a team to try and keep him engaged and hope we brought enough diversions.
By the end of 6 hours, both the little one and the bigger one have had enough. They want nothing more to get off the plane and move around. And this is when the flight attendants announce over the loudspeaker, “Please fasten your seat belts, turn off all electronic devices and return your tray tables to their upright positions.”
Ugh!!! Just at the moment where you are desperately trying to keep the kids occupied and not have a hissy fit, the vast majority of your options for keeping them distracted and engaged are no longer available. No more electronics. No more walking up the aisle to stretch their legs. No more coloring on paper using the tray table.
Grown-ups can still read a book or magazine, but for the kids, their patience is now shot. Pulling out a book and trying to read to them isn’t going to get you through the 25 minutes between the announcement and when you are on the ground and parked at the gate.
Our solution? Landing treat.
Landing treat is a secret weapon that never appears until you enter the “no electronic devices or tray tables” zone. It’s the ultimate bribe that will keep the kids seated calmly, patiently, and quietly. For us, it’s Mike and Ike’s.
While we are far from being anti-sweets zealots, our kids hardly ever get treats like Mike and Ike’s (not judging you if you do – every parent does what works for them). A chance to eat these colorful little sugar candies is a special occasion.
Once the landing process beings, we take out “landing treat” and start to dole out the Mike and Ike’s… v-e-r-y…. s-l-o-w-l-y…. A kid gets exactly one Mike and Ike at a time, and they must be sitting in their seat with the seat belt on. Before they can get another Mike and Ike, they must show us that they have finished chewing and swallowing the previous one by opening their mouths wide. They sit there, carefully the candy, and then hold out their hand, pleading for another one.
The key here is a well-known economics principle called “artificial scarcity“. Sure, they are a rare treat, but if we gave each of them a package, we would only get about five minutes out of them. The kids would just sit there popping them in their mouths and get bored. By tightly controlling the supply, we make them much more desirable, and the effect lasts much longer. Mix it up with some commentary about what is going on outside the window (ooh! look at the flaps on the wing… ooh! look, you can see the teeny tiny cars…), and you can make it the whole way through landing without a temper tantrum.
As always, your success with a technique like this may vary widely, depending on the personalities of you and your kids, but it is definitely worth a try.
Do your kids already get Mike and Ike’s? Or are you opposed to them on principle? Here are a couple of other suggestions:
Lolly pops and bubble gum are also worth considering, although it is harder to create the artificial scarcity effect since they last longer, which means your kids will lose interest in getting another one more quickly.
As email spam detection has almost completely eliminated unwanted messages from our inboxes, spammers have been seeking out new avenues for luring unsuspecting users to their websites. When blogs became popular, they quickly seized on posting unrelated messages into the comments section where they would attract the notice of both the blog writer and other readers.
The introduction of a captcha (the malformed words you are sometimes asked to decipher when filling out forms for sites) usually blocks the automated engines that post this data, but some organizations have taken to employing cheap labor (unemployed people working from home or overseas) to manually post data to bypass this protection.
Nonetheless, these messages are often blatant and use poor English, making them easy to spot. However, I’ve seen two cases on my blog recently that upped the bar: well-written text that didn’t clearly hawk a product or service trying to worm its way into the comments section. Wordpress requires me to approve any comment before it goes up, and each of these had me puzzled at first as to whether they were legitimate comments or a spammer.
The first one claimed to highlight a problem with my site:
I tried viewing your site in my new iphone 4 and the structure does not seem to be correct. Might wanna check it out on WAP as well as it seems most smartphone layouts are not working with your website.
At first glance, it just sounds like someone trying to helpfully point out a problem. However, a few things immediately struck me as odd. First they reference a “new iphone 4”. An iPhone 4 is not new. We have been on the iPhone 4s for almost nine months. Second, WAP is a much older mobile phone web technology from back when we all had small clamshell phones, and it (thankfully) hasn’t been used for anything serious in years. Also, I look at the site frequently on my iPhone and I know it looks fine.
Suspicious, I decided to look up the phrase “my new iphone 4 and the structure does not seem to be correct” in Google, and sure enough, I received 128,000 hits for this exact same comment on other blogs. Presumably, these were people who didn’t recognize it as junk and let it through. I’m not 100% sure exactly what their angle was. They don’t clearly hawk any product, but their username had an associated aol website that I am guessing they were trying to lure people to.
I received a second one today that was even more devious. On my post about installing carbon monoxide detectors, a person named “Laureen Caleb” wrote:
Smoke Detectors are very important on our homes. The best type of smoke detector are those photoelectric smoke detectors because they do not emit radiation unlike ionization type smoke detectors. *.,,: Kind regards […link to “health and wellbeing website” redacted…]
This is particularly well targeted, since the content is actually related to the post. However, I never discussed at all what type of detector I used, so why were they sending me this?
Suspicious again, I used my experience in geolocating IP addresses to find out where this user comes from. Wordpress identified their IP address as 110.93.89.27, and running a traceroute to it led me to a path that took over 230 milliseconds to traverse, which definitely placed them outside of the US. A look-up in MaxMind’s geolocation database placed it in the Philippines.
The link takes the user back to a healthcare website for researching various ailments, so I am guessing that this is a well thought out campaign to drive traffic. Identify interesting medical concerns, go find blogs that touch on their topics, and post links back to the site. Use cheap labor in the Philippines to spread them far and wide.
Spam like this is hard to detect. These are well written messages that do not have the obvious typographical errors that show them to be fakes, and their marketing messages are hidden. In fact, it’s not really spam at all. It’s more akin to telemarketers, where a real person is on the other end.
If I have to think about whether these comments are legitimate or not, I don’t foresee a future where anti-spam guards are going to be able to detect them. This is going to be a major nuisance.
Ever since we installed the no-hands prop for our storm door, it’s been much easier to get the kids in and out of the house. However, when we arrived home today, we discovered something missing:
The handle.
My first thought was vandalism, but I then discovered a package tucked in between the storm door and the real door (another benefit of having a storm door in an urban neighborhood). Presumably, the delivery person had knocked off the door handle in the process of opening it to stick the package in.
Of course, there was no note, like “Sorry! Didn’t mean to break your door handle!”
My wife’s first response was, “Are they going to pay for it?”
This is the difference between me and my wife. The idea of calling up UPS on the phone and explaining to them that they broke our door and should pay for it fills me with absolute dread. Aviva is much better for advocating for herself (or us) with random people. When we took our trip to Maine, she’s the one who argued with the ferry operator that they could indeed fit our car on the boat. I would have just looked at the guy pleadingly.
I have no proof that UPS actually broke the handle, even though that is the logical conclusion. How much time and arguing and stress would be involved? It just didn’t seem worth it.
I went over to Home Depot and found that these handles are pretty much one size fits all (a benefit of going with a standard, cheap storm door). For $12, I purchased a replacement handle.
The instructions turned out to be more complicated than I was hoping for (it involves measuring the door’s depth and then using a pair of pliers to snap a rod to the appropriate width), but then it occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t need to replace the entire handle.
As luck had it, the mechanisms were identical, so all I had to do was detach the broken handle and attach the new one to the old latch:
I tightened two screws, and voila – one perfectly functional storm door handle:
So yes, I’m a sucker. UPS broke my door, and I didn’t even complain. I just paid the money and fixed it for them.
However, when I think about the time I would spend arguing with them, and if successful, the hassle of sending them a receipt and getting a check mailed to me for the difference, I have to say that I’d rather just pay the $12 myself. It’s cheaper.
UPDATE: The morning after this post, I received a tweet from twitter:
@jrothmanshore Oh no! I’d be happy to involve local management and have them look into it. Pls send contact info to [@@@email redacted@@@] ^SP @ups
I found this very gratifying. Really what irked me most was the lack of acknowledgement that they had done anything to the door. The fact they took the time to find the post (via twitter) and reach out made me much happier. I emailed the address and told them not to worry about it further.
A few weeks ago, I brought home my work laptop so that I could take care of some tasks over the weekend. I have done this before, so it already knew my wireless network and connected just fine. However, even though it as connected, it stated that “No Internet Access”.
This was puzzling… The wireless was definitely working, and my other computers and devices were connected just fine, so clearly the problem wasn’t the network. I tried disable and re-enabling the wireless adapter, but no luck. I was in a rush, so I ended up plugging in an old fashioned ethernet cable from my router, and my laptop was able to access the internet just fine. It solved my problem and I didn’t troubleshoot further.
This weekend, I needed to bring my laptop home again, and I ran into the same issue – it would connect to the wireless but was unable to access the internet unless it had a physical cable. I decided to spend some more time troubleshooting this time and figured it out.
I opened a command shell (Start > Run > cmd.exe) and ran “ipconfig”, which displayed all of my wireless adapter information. The default gateway showed my router’s address (169.198.0.1), but the IP address for the computer was not a 169.198.0.x address. Instead, it was an address that I recognized as belonging to my corporate network at work. For some reason, even though the laptop had connected to the wireless, it hadn’t given up its old wireless IP address and obtained a new one for this network. As a result, it wasn’t able to route traffic properly, causing it to think that internet access was unavailable.
I spent a while looking at my network settings to see if my IP address was somehow manually set, but it wasn’t. I have no idea why it wasn’t getting a new address.
I decided to force my laptop to obtain a new address. I opened the command shell again and ran “ipconfig /release”, which forced it to let go of any ip addresses it was holding on to. At this point, my wireless network icon changed from a “connect but no internet access” image to a “searching” image.
I then ran a second command, “ipconfig /renew”, which would tell it to try to re-establish connections for its IP addresses. My wireless network icon promptly changed back to a connected image, and this time, it claimed to have internet access!
I ran “ipconfig” again, and I saw that my ip address was indeed a 192.168.0.x address, which would mean that it could route traffic properly.
I still have no idea why it was holding onto the old address. Getting a new IP address when switching between wireless networks seems like a pretty obvious step, but at least I now know how to quickly fix the problem if I ever run into it again.
A moment later
Yesterday on the way home from work, I was rear-ended. I stopped at a light when I realized I was not going to make it before it turned red, and the driver behind me was hoping to follow me through and clipped the corner of my car. We were both fine, but the right rear corner of my car was pretty smashed up.
Since I’m not at fault, my insurance company is waiving the deductible. However, part of me is wondering whether I should consider using the opportunity to upgrade from the seven year old Honda Accord to my latest fantasy car – a Prius V.
Our other car is a Honda Civic hybrid, and it’s our main driving vehicle due to its excellent gas mileage. We use the Honda Accord when we need to bring a fifth person, since two car seats in the back of the civic only leave about 8 inches of additional space. I’ve often fantasized about having a larger car that still earned excellent gas mileage, so ever since I saw the Prius V’s full size and excellent 44/40 gas mileage, I’ve been kind of tempted.
Actually replacing the car doesn’t make much financial sense, but out of curiosity, I decided to inquire about how a trade in process would work. Would I need to have the Accord fixed before trading it in, or would they take it as is? I started looking around the Toyota website when I was prompted for a “Live Chat”.
My last experience with using a live chat was Verizon’s about 18 months ago, and it was pretty dismal. Whatever was at the other end wasn’t able to answer even basic questions, making me doubt whether I was really talking to a person at the other end, but I figured I would give Toyota’s a try. I hit the button to initiate a live chat and then typed my question. The system paused for a moment, then informed that I was talking to “Andrea”.
Okay, so far, so good. It would make sense that they wouldn’t make the actual connection until I typed a question and showed I was “committed”, so the pause gave me confidence I was being connected to a real person.
I started to explain that I wanted a trade in, and “Andrea” sensibly asked what make, model, and year my car was. I provided this information and then proceeded to ask about whether I needed to have it repaired first.
At this point, “Andrea” started to make a lot less sense. When I explained that the vehicle was drivable, she paused and then said that she wasn’t sure of the details. She then offered to have someone get back to me with more information over phone and email.
At this point, I’m not sure who I was talking to, but it clearly wasn’t a trained customer service representative. My questions were about some of the fundamentals of a trade-in, and I would expect anyone who was familiar with the process would know the answer. How could they need an expert here? At the very least, I would expect a real person to ask a clarifying question or two before stating they needed to go to a higher authority.
One possibility is that I was talking to a non-English speaker who was working from a list of common questions and answers. However, I suspect that more likely, this was an intelligent chat bot that was trained to handle various common questions, but the moment someone goes off script, they have to kick off to a real person.
I understand that it’s not very cost effective to have a crew of people sitting around to answer “live chat” questions, but if all they are going to do is generate canned responses to questions, why bother? All this does is leave a bad taste in mouth, since the company is damaging their credibility.
If they are lying about the “live chat”, what else are they lying about? Perhaps the gas milage?
Jeremy Rothman-Shore Blog 