Not Friday humor...
2:43 PM 08/27/2004
A USB 2.0 calculator? The tech snoot in me scoffs silently everytime I see one of these "desktop calculators" on store shelves nowadays, and I wonder what made Canon think that putting one of these in-line with a USB connection would really help its "mass appeal". The last time I checked, kids in high school were loading games on their supercool T-whatever calculators and charting sine waves on their fairly oversized LCD screens. With the Zire going for about $100, does it really make sense to sell a $85 calculator? The little solar cell strip ain't going to make it green enough to make me part with my green...
I dig that our lives are getting real fast lately, but I didn't quite realize the full brunt of life's speed till I read about "aluminum beer bottles that keep beer colder for 50 minutes longer". I didn't realize the extra hour mattered that much to the average beer drinker who emptied his / her bottle a lot quicker than that. Maybe I don't hang with the right keeping-their-beer-outside-the-cooler-but-not-drinking-it-either crowd. I dig the resealable quality of these aluminum bottles, but I don't see why they couldn't make the regular glass bottles have a screw top. Like they're doing to new wine bottles. The old school frowns on 'em, and perhaps I'm being old school by frowning upon these new fangled beer bottles, too. Technically, I shouldn't care, since I don't do the brew and words like 'keg' and 'draft' rank just below phrases like 'driving around for a parking spot' or 'low carb diet'; in my book. However, on the upside, I guess aluminum beer bottles could make bars and the sort a lot safer and quieter. Or is that too Utopian to mention? 'tever...
A Personal Misting System? Seriously?! And I'm not even referring to the interesting acronym it makes for...
Fact, as they say, can be a lot funnier than fiction. Happy Friday!
Nice try, but...
5:37 PM 08/25/2004
Could accessories sell the parent gadget? The transparent, light-up speaker accessory for the Panasonic MD player made me wonder. By itself, transparent, light-up speakers sound real nice. Using 'em to sell an MD player? Umm...I dunno. The other big M & M combination in the music world's gonna be rolling over most other sound storage formats very soon. M & M? MP3s & Megabytes. Solid state players are getting real cheap thanks to solid state memory getting real cheap. Ditto for good old IDE hard drives.
Would that mean that kids would spot CDs in the Computer History Museum within a couple of decades? I don't see why not. Vinyl tried to make a comeback with audiophile endorsements of how it sounded better than CD, but I don't see that trend hanging around for too long. Most DJs are going digital know, and they've got almost-like-the-real-thing scratch pads and shufflers that make it look like they're juggling vinyl, but they're not. I could never really understand vinyl, anyway. How does one know where to set the darn needle down? And what if I wanted to hear the song again? Would I have to get up and take the needle back to some position on the disc? Could there be a "shuffle mode"? Or programmed playback of certain tracks? And did they really have "chocolate LPs" that one could eat after playback? And was that fun?
MiniDiscs were cool in the few weeks that they were cool. I think they still sell 'em, but I don't think that's going to stick around for too long. CDs could, but I'd give 'em till 2020. After that, methinks we'll be sticking SD cards into "players" or having our "players" receive a customized audio feed wirelessly over a ridiculously high-speed connection from a neighborhood server that housed a trillion terabytes of every fathomable favorite known in the last 75 years.
I'm in a weird Wednesday mood...
Delay HelL
10:17 AM 08/24/2004
Yes, this is probably one of my first obvious product / service slams. I prefer to stay away from these since its usually the few proverbial rotten eggs that make the entire box stink, but I'd like to think that it makes for some constructive feedback to the vendor, and some helpful comments for the future customer. I hope that made for an adequate politically-correct, CYA opening that will cover for what follows:
About two weeks ago had me spotting an interesting deal on a popular prosumer item. Ten minutes of contemplation, twenty minutes of review-searching and two phone calls to the vendor (to verify inventory and availability) later, I had almost purchased it when the ubiquitous "What's missing here?" question got answered in my head. The product page didn't have a link that pointed to a downloadable rebate form. A third phone call to the vendor had a rep promise to send me the rebate form via email. Clicking "Checkout" had me spotting another interesting something. The difference between "Ground shipping" and "Two day air" was under a dollar. Hey, quicker's always better. I sprung for the extra few and hoped to have it before last weekend.
So far, so good? Well, y'know what they say - "If its too good to be true, it usually isn't". It sorta applied. The next day had me looking at an email from the vendor saying that the item was backordered (made me curious, since the checkout page that I went past previously didn't say it was backordered) and that I had the opportunity to either cancel my order or wait a while before it became available and was shipped. I opted for the latter.
Five days or so later, I get another email saying that my order was completed. This was August 18th. Two-day air made the delivery date August 20th. The Delay Hell tracking page confirmed this. August 20th was last Friday. It wasn't delivered. Irked me a bit, but since I didn't have somewhat of a specific use for it on Friday, I let it slide. The Delay Hell site mentioned that they worked on Saturdays, so I was quite certain that it would come in on Saturday.
Saturday afternoon and still nothing. A phone call to Delay Hell had me talking to a rep who said that they would have someone from the local office give me a call on Monday morning and that the item would be delivered on Monday. Alright, cool - I can go with that. Stuff happens in delivery offices. In fact, I've always been quite surprised at the service level promises made by a lot of these delivery carriers. "Overnight delivery" is a lot harder than it sounds, especially if you factor in stuff like rich people living on faraway hills outside the city, and not-so-rich people living in the city sprawl. Making cross-country deliveries in that short duration is a big deal, and I can imagine a few things going wrong with the gears every now and then. However, with all the ads coming out that spoke about Delay Hell being the new kid on the block, to offer customers an option other than the two market leaders, had me expect that they would pull up their socks a bit higher and tighter than the others - to sorta make a good first impression on the market. But teething trouble is almost a fact of new life and a day's slip on a two-day delivery wasn't that bad.
Monday morning, and I got a call. Cool. The guy on the phone asked me if I could hold for a supervisor. Sure, I could. A few moments later, I was told that the supervisor would call me back shortly. Um - ok. "Shortly" turned out to be never. I called 'em back in the afternoon and was told that the package would reach me before 8 PM in the evening. Alright, cool - I guess.
Monday evening, 8:10 PM - and still no package. I got on the phone with Delay Hell to tell them all of the above and had the standard apology being doled out to me, with the assurance that "a note was being put into the system to request my delivery tomorrow morning". Make that a "strong request"!
Tuesday morning, 11 AM. Still no call from the local office supervisor. Still no delivery indication on their website. Think its time to call the BBB?
Shipped on August 12 with "Airborne Second Day delivery" as a shipping option.
Timestamp on the delivery carrier's tracking page reads August 24th, and their estimated delivery date is August 20th. And its been "scheduled for delivery" at the local office for the last four days. Interesting, no?
No, it doesn't stop there. The rebate form (Another story of repeat email reminders to the vendor's reps. Short story: the links they've sent me with a link to the rebate form has been the wrong form first, and a dead link next. A supervisor sent me the form itself as an attachment, and my updated Adobe Acrobat Reader tells me that it can't open the file right. I took a screenshot of whatever did display and printed that out!) says that the rebate has to be postmarked within 14 days of purchase. Fourteen days after August 12th is two days from now.
"If its too good to be true, it usually isn't"
Update: Tuesday afternoon, 4 PM. Still nothing. On the phone with a DHL rep who tells me that the package shows up as "inbound" to the local delivery office now. This either means that their online tracking system can't be trusted, or that the rep isn't reading her screen right. Oh, and "It'll be there between the hours of 5 and 8 PM this evening". I heard that line from the local delivery office supervisor yesterday, and I'm hearing it today. Fingers crossed...
Update: Tuesday evening, 8:10 PM. The doorbell rang and there stood the friendly DHL guy. He mentioned they were swamped with business and apologized for the delay. Alright, so the new kid on the block's real popular. Groovulous for 'em, I guess. I'm calling the vendor tomorrow and ensuring a refund of my second-day-delivery charge. End of story.
The good, the bad and the ugly
12:24 PM 08/23/2004
Three years ago, the argument for home automation wasn't a good one. Although computers were crawling into every nook they could find and broadband was trying to wriggle its way into every wall, it wasn't exactly as user-friendly as the recipe required. The super-rich had "head end" servers installed in their homes to control video and audio feeds to various rooms et al, and the rest of us read stuff like that in periodicals and rolled our eyes. Partly because it seemed like overkill ("Isn't it easier to gather the family around one TV instead?"), and partly because it seemed like another way to say "mine is bigger than yours" to the neighboring stock-market billionaire on the adjacent hill.
A lot has changed since. Its now de rigeur to mod your computer case into previously unthinkable shapes and sizes, have flash memory with ridiculously large capacities that'll fit into the size of a postage stamp, have flat screens that exceed the traditional screens in size and quality, have flat speakers that seem to speak old school treble & bass just fine, and have a wireless network at home that nulls the need to have Ethernet cabling in the walls. To top everything, vendors have actually taken notice of the consumer segment and have whittled down prices while beefing up feature sets. The underground's teeming with cookbooks that show how one could use game consoles or old computers as home media centers, and to unlock "undocumented features" in new multimedia gadgets that let networking capabilities be used better. Methinks its safe to say that we're on a roll!
Now that broadband's getting to be truly ubiquitous, home automation is a great way to use some of that bandwidth. Products like the WebLink II from HomeAuto show great promise. A Web-ified, webcam-powered, realtime look at your home while you're ten miles away at work, or ten thousand miles away on vacation. Easy, verifiable answers to age-old questions like: Do we have an honest maid? Do we have a good babysitter? Is the neighbor's dog running over my roses?
As with any other "recent" technology innovation, I would give this another year before digging out my wallet. The convenience of having a Web-ified, webcam-powered, realtime look at your home can quickly turn into the horror of having a Web-ified, webcam-powered, realtime look at your home if access to the Web interface that lets you do everything is in the wrong hands. Think Sliver. The ease with which you monitor your home against intruders could easily be used by intruders to monitor your absence to do their thing. I wouldn't hesitate to advocate something like a RSA SecurID token to secure stuff like this. Good, strong security that's known to be real-world strong enough to hold its own against most of "them" out there.
I recently spotted an Internet-friendly thermostat, and couldn't help mulling over the obvious benefits. Dropping the degrees once everyone's out of the house in the morning and hitting the "Warm" button on the way out from work in the evening would be a great way to save the power bill. In addition, the 'intelligent display' could suggest changes to the ambient temperature by detecting future weather changes via the Internet. Perhaps an RSS-like feed from this thermostat, on a room-by-room basis, could be used to calculate power usage for the thermostat alone, letting homeowners figure out rooms that need more heating and potential heat leaks, etc. Of course, the same security argument applies. A remote-controlled thermostat in the wrong hands could mean severely lopsided power bills, damaged heating and cooling elements in the house and heat / cold-related damage to stuff (and God forbid, people) inside the house as well. I'm sure there's an override switch, but even so...
So, even with the "wait a while for the technology to sufficiently mature before buying" warning, connecting physical, in-home stuff to the Internet can be a good thing. With one exception. The Wave Pillow. Not clicking that link wouldn't have you miss much, and that's all I'm going to let myself say about it.