Devauld.ca

From Ghost River Valley

My head has been down, and the list of things that need to get done does not seem to be getting any smaller.

The winter semester of classes has started at the U of C, and it looks like it is going to be a rough one. The last of the course work that I need to complete is Analysis IV, and for those of you not familiar with the family of mathematical branches, Analysis is one of the more abstract mathematics. It is also one of my weakest areas. Further, there's five assignments and a midterm, which means that over the next 89 days, I have approximately an assignment every two weeks, a midterm that will most likely be nasty, and a final project worth half my grade.

On top of the class work this semester, I need to start putting my thesis work on paper. I have been beating my head against some nasty integrals for months, so today I'm meeting with my supervisor to see if I can apply more computational brute force to get an approximation, instead of attempting to apply quadrature to the integrals themselves. Basically, I'm asking if I can throw out a good chunk of the work done to date, in order to do something easier.

On the BeefyApps front we have a very exciting project for the new year. We worked out a partial ownership agreement for the final product, so it looks like our new partner is in this for the long haul. This should be a refreshing change after the malady we ran into across various projects last year. Being that I'm the project manager for the company, this year is my re-certification year for my PMP, so stack on about 30 hours of education credits I need to secure before March.

Last, but certainly not least, the wedding in June. Sonja, bless her, has been working hard and shouldering a good deal of the responsibilities up to this point. Although there is a lot of work that has to be done in the next few months.

With this stack of work, I've found that I don't have as much free time as I'd like. I'm planning on a couple of ski trips in the next couple of weeks before the mid-semester craziness, and initial product rollouts become my sole focus. This hard work is supposed to pay off, right? Ideally by the fall, I will have more free time to get back to some photography, and to play more with my new found hobby: brewing beer.

I purchased a Kindle for myself around the beginning of the year.  The honeymoon was amazing.  I could carry around a virtual library, that was able to give me anything for which I had a whim.  My digital library ballooned, as I weighed the marginal value of owning a digital copy versus a physical copy against the convenience of having the book available anywhere I had my phone, computer access or, of course, my Kindle.

The ability to make notes on the literature, and be able to retrieve those quotes at a whim easily outweighed the occasional impulse buy that resulted from finishing a book and being led to a 'You may also like' screen.  Measurements of battery life are counted in days, not hours; a full charge lasting almost a month with regular daily use.  If anyone asked, I simply told them that I loved my Kindle.

Then, it broke.

I placed it into my backpack daily and for months it was not a problem.  Then one morning I pulled the electronic tome from it's pocket to find a crack running across its e-Paper screen.  Suddenly, all of the hundreds of dollars of books I had purchased became 'inconveniently available'.  Of course I could access them from my phone, killing the battery, or from my computer when I was planted firmly infront of it.  It was then that I realized that there was a distinct disadvantage to the Kindle platform: It breaks.

Of course, you are able to physically destroy a book.  Although, making an entire book unreadable takes considerable effort.  Most often the edges are molested, or a page or two removed and very rarely is the entire book rendered unreadable.  Amazon's crafty lock-in never really bothered me, as I usually keep my books.  My only lost book is one lent to a friend and never returned, and the difference between the digital and physical was never an issue with me.  Although, after my original Kindle was rendered inoperable, the careless act of destruction coupled with the vendor lock in required me to purchase another Kindle.

To Amazon's credit they made the exercise  extraordinarily painless.  I purchased the lowest-end kindle from the store Tuesday morning and even with the make-it-happen shipping price, I had my new kindle in my hands the very next day for $100.  I've paid more for a textbook.

Recently, after years of service, we decided to sever the ties with Bell and TekSavvy in favour of Shaw's unified service.  Now, to be clear, I do not really like Shaw's service; as I find their PVR functionality and usability to be an order of magnitude under Bell's similar service.  Although, their internet offering is what drew me away from TekSavvy.

My difficulties with TekSavvy were never with the company itself.  They choose to not compete as heavily in the West, and as a result I can get internet 4x as fast for about the same price.  In the few times I have had to call TekSavvy on a technical issue, their service was top notch, and every time the problem boiled down to the service they were reselling.  Honestly, if they would have offered a similar cable option out here, I would have stayed, even if I had to pay more to use it.

Bell's television lineup and technology is top notch in Canada.  Their PVR is much easier to use than Shaw's similar offering, and you get more channels for equivalent price points.  My problem with Bell is an even split between very bad customer service and their stupidly draconian stance on usage based billing.  Just because I can get a month's worth of HD movies for the price of a single 'download on demand', does not mean you should cry to Ottawa that internet should be more expensive.

Regardless, the point here is customer service.

Today I called both companies, TekSavvy and Bell, to cancel my service.  For TekSavvy, the experience was a dream.  I only needed to penetrate 2 levels of the automated call system, and I was faced with a human being.  I mentioned that I needed to cancel my service, and he countered with a question as to why I would like to leave.  After a short discussion on not having cable internet, I was given a confirmation number and sent on my way.  Total time spend on this endevour: four minutes and thirty five seconds.

Bell on the other hand, was an exercise in restraint.  My first call to their system, resulted in me being on the receiving end of a hang up.  Two minutes (and four seconds) down and I'm starting all over again.  On my second call, I knew how to navigate the menus, so I was in very quickly.  For those of you familiar with Bell's phone service, one of the first identifying pieces of information they ask for is the account's phone number.  My face went right into the palm of my hand, when the first thing the human I encountered asked for was my phone number.  This sort of inconsistency is what puts Bell's customer service on par with being screened at an airport.

When the human on the phone was satisfied I was the same customer I claimed to be, I told him that I would like to cancel my service.  Then I had to run the gauntlet of 'what if we offered you this discount', which honestly only serves to frustrate me.  If you are willing to offer me these prices, why not offer them to me when I am a happy paying customer.  After I made it clear that I was leaving, I was placed on hold for whatever reason; nearly 2 whole minutes later the gentleman returned with the latest bombshell.

Apparently, as part of my agreement (from almost 5 years ago), I need to give 30 days notice to cancel my service.  I'm not entirely sure why, considering I own the dish and receiver, and the only effort on their part is to toggle a bit from one to zero in their system.  Regardless, I'm going to have to pay for an entire month's service for no reason other than a lawyer put it in writing.  In the end it doesn't make me feel like a valued customer.

My second call to Bell took a hair over ten minutes.  Half of that time was arguing that I didn't want to keep my service, or waiting on hold.  Add in the time for getting hung up upon, and it took me three times as long to cancel my Bell account, than to end services with TekSavvy.

In the end, the support received is what you remember.  If TekSavvy unrolls a new, faster service in Calgary, I will jump on board even if I have to pay a premium over similar service.  If Bell offered me their service for free for six months, I would still recall being bartered with to keep on using Bell as well as the fact that their system dropped me the first time I called.

I hope that more people feel the same way I do, and after all is said and done, those companies that care more about what their customers want, as opposed to quarterly bottom lines for shareholders, will fair better in the long run.

Recently I have been pondering the asymmetry of user provided content on the internet. These thoughts have been growing in magnitude since they first skipped across my consciousness about a month ago.

The adventure started when I purchased myself a kindle to start off my 34th revolution around the sun. The device brought me back to the butterfly romance stage in reading. Easy to use, and ever available, I unfortunately began to diverge away from my required studies to spend time reading adventures of protagonists and fables of disbelief. Exploring the internet for possible leads into worlds unknown, I found myself on the goodreads website.

This is where the fabric of the perfect tapestry started to show some loose ends. My difficulty with good reads, is that I do not want to go through the effort in adding all of the hundreds of books I have read up to today. To the benefit of goodreads, they allow for an import, and export and although I could enlist a delicious monster to help me get all this data together, I paused; my thoughts running about wildly.

I was previously burned on spending time to provide the internet's most valuable commodity: user provided content. I spent some time on Rotten Tomatoes forebearer Flixster, rating a plethora of movies that I've seen. The time spent was rewarded in being provided with highly rated choices from people that shared interests very similar to my own. The problem being is that even though it was my, and my peers, effort that created the value in the database, once the information had landed on their site, they came to view it as theirs. Then about a year later, when I was test driving Netflix, I found that I wanted to get the information I created out of it's current repository and into my new acquaintance so it would be able to help me out in my viewing exploration. Nowhere could I find even a simple listing of ratings that I've made, so that I may cobble together a script to extract information that is rightfully mine. It appears on the surface that they went out of their way to prevent me from getting this information.

The one-sided view of information on the internet was once again right whispering in my ear. Just as my Flixster ratings are forever locked within their vault, to never grace the likes of IMDb or The Movie Db. Even simple asymmetries like not being able to get my Canadian Amazon Wishlist into my American Amazon Wishlist so it can be viewed on my Kindle are starting to irritate me.

In the end, the problem is a mindset. Some darling visionaries like Wil Shipley and Otis Chandler are chipping away at the wrong mindset that the medium controls the information. Truth is, the information held by those other websites are my opinions, and although there is probably a clause or five in the end-user-license-agreement-that-nobody-ever-reads that says otherwise, I'm pretty sure those opinions are still mine. There needs to be a shift in mindset, moving towards focusing on the user. Think of the benefit to both large commercial entities like Amazon as well as little ol'peons like me if I could easily get an export of books and push them into their system. Sure, you run the risk that if something better comes along, that I'll just take my data and leave; this is the main reason that I believe the curmudgeons of business keep these exports from being readily available. Do they really believe that by not allowing me to see all the media I've rated, that I'll just keep coming back to rate more stuff? Instead, as soon as I discover their desire for a one way flow of information, I clam up and stop giving them any information. Instead I option for mediums that allow me for an unfettered flow of information that I help create.

The advantages of keeping this information open far out weight the costs.