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| Monday, May 30th, 2011 | | 11:46 am |
Just for fun...
I sent this e-mail to sjobs@apple.com. I don't actually expect them to do anything for a 5 yr old macbook, I'm just curious what will come back (since I was kinda pissed about being sold defective products and not being notified that I could have gotten it fixed). -- Dear Steve/et al -- I just wanted to share a quick story about the impact of Apple doing voluntary recalls of defective products without notifying customers. Specifically, I am a proud owner of an original 2006 MacBook, which I've used for 5 years as a backup for my iMac. Both batteries in my Macbook (the one that came with it, and the one I purchased from Apple at the same time) started failing after only 125-150 charges (giving a battery service error with all my batteries), despite painstaking monthly calibration, and both being in great battery health. The computer would shut down after just 30-45 minutes of work. So I most stopped using my MacBook and just assumed the batteries were dying of old age. Since I finally did need a working battery this month, I went online to look for a new one...and just discovered that these batteries were being replaced for free by Apple when I was having these problems. It's wonderful that Apple went out of its way for customers like this -- I never would have imagined you'd be acknowledging the defect and replace batteries on 3 year old computers (what great service!). And naturally, I never thought to search the Internet to discover that Apple was doing this at the time, after all, how would I have imagined or known? I just went to an Apple store to ask the Genius if they are still doing anything for customers who purchased these batteries that Apple knew to have been defective. Disappointingly but perhaps not too surprisingly, the answer was 'no' - and I should spend another $145 on a new battery. Two thoughts: * When you ship a defective product where customers won't realize you have a voluntary replacement/recall in place, it would be really fantastic if you actually told us about it before it's too late. Otherwise, we discover that you were doing the right thing for your customers...after it's too late to get it corrected. If you encountered utility theory, you know it feels worse to learn afterwards that you didn't get something you should have gotten (rather than not having been offered it at all.) * Given your fantastic retail channels and reputation for legendary service, this would have been a great opportunity for service recovery for your Geniuses. Even offering me a $50 discount off a new battery in exchange for one or two that were recalled and should have been replaced by your company would have made me feel really happy and valued as a customer (despite having received defective goods). After all, it's not like customers are going to gamble on another full-priced battery after getting two defective ones in a row! Anyway, just some thoughts - thank you. Eli | | Saturday, July 31st, 2010 | | 10:14 am |
All Dutch city names sound like "Amsterdam" to Americans ;-)
So Thursday night I'm at the Streets for All Seattle kickoff party and this woman I'm talking to asks: "So where did you live in the Netherlands again?" Me: "Enschede" Her: "Oh wow, Amsterdam! I've always wanted to go to Amsterdam!" Me: "No, Enschede!" Her: "Amsterdam, right?" | | Thursday, June 10th, 2010 | | 9:33 pm |
Finally declined for a credit card at age 36, first time ever.
First time I've ever been turned down for a credit card: what an alternate universe -- paying off your bill in full and in a timely fashion qualifies you as a deadbeat in their universe! (In truth, I just wanted the $100 reward and then I'd planned to cancel the card anyway after 6 months, so they were right to decline it.) --- Why we're writing you Thank you for applying for the Citi(R) Diamond Preferred(R) Rewards MasterCard(R) account. Unfortunately, we are unable to approve your request for the account at this time because of the following: o Your credit bureau report shows you have no revolving accounts with a balance. If your financial situation changes and you would like to reapply for an account, visit us at www.citicards.com. We appreciate your interest and hope to have the opportunity to fulfill your request in the future. | | Monday, May 24th, 2010 | | 7:07 am |
Our Keepers of the Flame re-release effort: a second perspective
Why am I posting this?Recently, the topic of the unsuccessful Keepers of the Flame reprint that we worked on in 2002-2004 came up on the alexanderfans livejournal group. This reprint effort was something I invested a substantial amount of effort on -- approximately 100 hours of my time over two years -- and $250 to provide an attorney with a minimum-wage gratuity for the many dozens of hours of his professional time. (He was one of Heather's fans who volunteered.) I've consciously kept all the details of this discussion and negotiation private: music publishing is what I do for joy, not for angst. Even as I type, I can easily see this spiraling out into a flamewar. However, after some soul-searching and reading a comment from Alex's business manager, I think I'd like to "come out" with some of the back history of Keepers of the Flame as I see it, and at least provide a second perspective for people to consider. I think it's especially important for the many who have never met the other band members and only had access to Heather's old FAQ. Just a warning: this is going to be really long, as there's a lot I want to say. The KOTF reprint project and how I came into it…( Read more... ) | | Sunday, February 14th, 2010 | | 7:40 pm |
Dear lazyweb - best free mailing list service for Prometheus to move to?
Dear Lazyweb, I've moved Prometheus Music to Dreamhost this week. They seem pretty awesome, and charge half the price of Hostbaby for 10X as much. But their strict anti-spam policy means that all 850 Eagle Bytes newsletter subscribers would have to re-confirm their membership for me to migrate to their mailman implementation. Can anyone recommend a free or free-ish service that respects the privacy of our subscriber addresses and doesn't require nearly a thousand re-confirmations? (e.g. no Yahoo Groups or anything) Thanks! Eli | | Friday, January 1st, 2010 | | 8:01 pm |
| | Saturday, December 19th, 2009 | | 6:25 pm |
30-CD boxes available from my folk/celtic/harp/new age collection: $60/box
For friends from the filk world…When I lived in California, I used to go to Amoeba Records on weekends and pick up used Celtic/Folk/New Age & Harp music CDs that looked interesting to someone with filk/folk-oriented taste. In the iPod era, these CDs have been sitting in boxes in my closet. I'd like to offer these for $60/box (+ $5 media mail shipping) -- about $2/CD. All proceeds will support Julia Ecklar's new CD (to help cover Michael's temporary housing while in Pittsburgh working on the CD) If you'd like a box, here's how it works: ( Read more... ) | | Monday, December 14th, 2009 | | 9:38 pm |
How F*cked CD Baby has become: here's what came with my publisher payment
CD Baby has sadly become a case study of cluelessness after Derek Sivers dumped it on Discmakers to wreck. I'm trying to enter their most recent payment into QuickBooks. Couldn't they at least, like, total up the physical CD sales based on the album? Or just add, uh, strategically placed line breaks? ;-) Or even put the repeated instances of the same items in the same order? Or maybe their accounting e-mail could suggest that I'd sold the same things that the accounting statement on their website suggests? (not sure which to believe) Most small publishers need to know *what albums* were sold, not *who sold it*, since we total up revenue based on which of *our products* generated it. I am *so* looking forward to cutting most of my ties with CD Baby over the holidays and not wasting time with amazingly inept experience design like this. (aka: an hour later, my accounting still won't reconcile.) -- Hi Eli, I sent you a direct ACH deposit for $261.43 today. It was CD Baby payment #{removed}. If the bank numbers you gave us are correct, it should appear in your account in the next week. ( Read more... ) | | Monday, November 9th, 2009 | | 5:32 pm |
Mayor McGinn -- why I'm stoked
(too distracted by this all - just wanted to get this out so I could go back to work ;-)I can remember the first moment I had any interest for politics or participating in local government: it was when I met Greg Perry on the Mountain View City Council. I actually started attending and occasionally even speaking at city council meetings. Greg was different from any elected official I’d met before. He was a school teacher by profession, and brought an advanced degree in mathematics and no aspiration towards career politics. His contributions were less emotional appeals than perspicacious -- and often uncomfortable -- analyses of transportation and land use policy. When nobody was willing to question the politically-driven and insane BART to San Jose extension, he raised all the big questions that nobody wanted to acknowledge. Nobody could debate or counter his analyses, beyond spewing the same tired platitudes about motherhood and "ringing rail around the bay". But it didn't stop Greg -- he didn't care about getting re-elected. He only cared about seeing the right thing happen, and uncompromisingly so. Greg was often shunned as polarizing, combative and uncooperative by his peers and in the press. But he was ultimately effective: he brought attention and change by shining a light where others were too fearful. I found it hard to accept these criticisms of Greg as being more then thinly veiled insinuations that a politician’s job is to avoid a reality-based existence of looking at facts, and instead should be compelled to “jump off the cliff” just because everyone else around you is walking towards it with blindfolds on -- like the Iraq war. I was very sad when he left local politics (as did our mayor -- a high school principal, who moved his family to Italy). I lost interest afterwards when Mountain View retrenched into Palo Alto-styled NIMBYism, and I moved to Seattle. I feel towards Mike McGinn the exact same enthusiasm as I did towards Greg Perry. Mike was the only politician with the courage to critically analyze, ask uncomfortable questions, and speak up against the Viaduct tunnel. Even the critiques of Mike McGinn ring so closely to those of Greg Perry -- and I feel equally unmoved by them. The Seattle Times painted him in a negative light in most of their coverage -- starting with their "Anyone but McGinn" endorsement in the primaries. (papers are normally skewed towards pro-business candidates -- the Times was also big on George Bush, Dino Rossi, etc). I’ve heard McGinn dismissed as a “single-issue” candidate -- but I am at a loss to understand this criticism. If I may be brash, I think it’s more a convenient meme/excuse among lazier voters who didn’t research candidates very well. McGinn articulated coherent positions on many other topics, as part of the 23 town halls he held throughout Seattle. I can only think of images of sullen, inattentive schoolchildren who are surprised that they didn't learn anything: education only works if you actually show up for class! I’m excited about McGinn because I think Seattle is going to be at a crossroads in the coming years of where we want to go as a city: are we truly an urban environment, or are we a collection of auto-dependent suburbs with a "drive-through downtown"? Do we solve all of our transportation problems by building more freeways and mega-parking structures, or do we look at cycletrack infrastructure as a serious alternative? The thought of having a mayor who bicycled to his campaign rallies (no chauffeured entourage like Mallahan) makes me giddy: if you want decent infrastructure, the people at the top need to rely on it. There’s a reason Apple has great food at their cafeterias, and the junk food machines are reportedly neglected: Steve Jobs hates junk food. Likewise, if you build mass transit and bike infrastructure primarily for people with no choice and/or no political power, you get third-rate infrastructure that reflects it -- like Seattle's bike "sharrows", and dingy, unlit bus rapid transit stops. Living in a city with a mayor and several city council members (go Mike O'Brien!) who share my values gives me the hope that we may one day soon make the culturally difficult choices to actually become the walkable, bikable city Seattleities would like to pretend we inhabit (hint: it's not). I feel ecstatic to have been a tiny part of history in volunteering for it, even if only for a few weekend days towards the end. I know all of this won’t change anyone’s minds if you didn’t like either candidate: I am much more excited about McGinn’s impending coming into office than I ever felt about Obama -- especially given how low expectations are for McGinn. At this point, I could easily see myself becoming involved in local politics, and learning how to make a difference, given leadership I actually can believe in. | | Monday, October 5th, 2009 | | 1:38 pm |
If I had $5 for every hour Hostbaby knocked my website and e-mail offline...
...I would have already made a $25 profit on my webhosting this past week alone. Instead, I'm wasting $20/month of our customers' money on a service that's still inferior to what many companies charge just $5-$7 per month these days -- not to mention the fact that it's constantly offline anyway. If you're a musician, don't bother giving your money to Hostbaby. It was a great idea -- but just like CD Baby, it's went down the tubes since Discmakers bought the company from Derek Sivers.-- Eli (definitely changing webhosting next spring when the pre-paid period runs out) | | Saturday, September 26th, 2009 | | 11:30 am |
Toen de toeristen kwamen...
One aspect I loved the most of my last Dutch textbook was the way it presumed its readers were thoughtful, intelligent, and reflective people with deeper interests than their own visceral self-gratification. e.g. whereas my French textbook's chapter on tourism involved delicious food and selecting your ideal vacation, the Dutch textbook presented a variety of perspectives on environmental and social consequences of travel, alternatives to automobiles for transportation, and an interview with an ambulance driver about how the local tourist industry affected his work. That chapter had a poem titled "Toen de toeristen kwamen" (when the tourists came) which I really loved and thought a lot about while in Alaska --- especially when talking with locals about how mass-market middle-class cruise tourism transformed their cities for the good and for the bad. Here's a super-quick translation (thanks to Maarten for help a while back with some of the harder phrases). The Dutch version is way better, sorry. ( Read more... ) | | Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 | | 8:57 am |
The self-love diet
I've been on a self-made diet now for 5 weeks, and I've taken off five pounds in that time. Wanted to put down the "rules" that evolved, both for my own use, and for friends since diets seem to have a bad name. #1: I am changing my diet and lifestyle as an expression of love and care for my own body. I will not "punish" or "deprive" myself. #2: I will eat any healthy food that I love whenever I want it, and won't regret spending top dollar at the farmer's market: organic blueberries, strawberries, peaches, apricots -- and fresh produce, etc. #3: If I'm not hungry anymore, I won't keep eating. #4: If I know rationally I've eaten a normal number of calories for the day (~2000), I won't eat more high-calorie foods even if I "feel" hunger. As I learned on the Alaska cruise, people feel hungry for many reasons beyond caloric need. But I will never "starve" myself or deprive myself of what my body needs. #5: I will do 2500 calories of exercise every week. It seems like a lot of work, but it isn't any more than what I got each week just biking normally around Enschede. #6: If I choose to eat foods that I know are toxic for me, I will do so with enjoyment and without guilt -- but also in moderation. (e.g. sharing a fish & chips platter with a friend last Saturday) If it's unhealthy and I don't even like it, I won't eat it anymore.#7: I choose to never feel bad about my weight or my image in the mirror -- as long as I am honoring the above 6 rules. | | Monday, September 14th, 2009 | | 7:37 pm |
Gratitude and saying 'thank you'
Several months ago, our division president at Microsoft wrote a few blog entries from which one could reasonably infer he held significant interest in the 1960s space race. I delayed for two months (personal anxiety over authority figures, sigh), but finally dropped a copy of the To Touch the Stars CD that we did years ago on his chair. I also sent him an e-mail letting him know it was on his chair, why I'd put it there, and that he should not feel obligated to listen to it. ;-) I did this, of course, on a weekend. Even though he had a enormously important internal presentation later that week, he still sent a thank-you note within a matter of hours. To my surprise a few weeks later, this morning there was another thank-you letter from him -- personal, hand-written -- and hand-delivered by his admin to my office. He thanked me again for the CD, called it "inspiring", and said it was now on his Zune (for you non-MS folks, that's a sort of iPod). For context, this guy has about 10,000 people reporting to him and a $17 billion annual business to manage. I think he's busier than, well, anyone I know other than perhaps Alisa. Especially in that context, it was really inspiring to see that kind of courtesy displayed. | | Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 | | 7:57 pm |
How I nearly shat in my pants this morning...
I won’t spoil this by telling you precisely what instruments Michael Moricz recorded last weekend on Julia’s album, but, uh, check out a 3 minute excerpt of “Going Back/The Dark is Rising”. You'll know why I was glad that I was, uh, already sitting down about 60 seconds through (don't cheat!). You want to hear this MP3. Trust me. Caveats: this is a total scratch track. Percussion is horribly distorted, the vocals are just throwaway/scratch, pieces are missing, and it’s totally unmixed. But, uh, you’ll get the idea. And he got this level of orchestration on (I think) 5 other songs. Michael, you so f-ing rock. | | Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 | | 12:16 pm |
Microsoft coworkers keep me humble
Last Friday at work, I'd mentioned to a coworker how difficult it seemed to me to learn even elementary spoken Mandarin, and that I'd recently written it off as impossible after 15 tongue-twisted minutes of Pimsleur. She disagreed and said it wasn't that hard. Then she continued - in Mandarin. Then I remembered that half my coworkers have PhDs, and hers happened to be in linguistics. ;-) | | Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 | | 9:35 am |
The unreported indie music story of the year: CD Baby is dead
Derek Sivers doesn't even know anyone at CD Baby anymore.Amazing that nobody in the indie music press has picked up on the backlash to the new artist back-end & resulting lack of any customer service or accountability after he sold the company to Discmakers. (see comments at bottom from Derek): CD Baby was all written in PHP + MySQL + Linux. Disc Makers is all Windows. They needed to integrate CD Baby into their Windows system. That's why they had to rewrite. Unfortunate necessity. -- Derek
Frustrating for me, too. I get about 5 emails a day from people having that same problem. Sorry I don't know anyone there anymore, so I have no insider advice. :-( -- Derek
I'm not in contact with them, and didn't even know about this relaunch in advance, but I'm quite sure they won't roll-back and use my old version again. Sorry! -- DerekThe love is also rapidly dissipating from even CD Baby's own forums: http://www.cdbaby.org/stories/09/08/14/1551971.htmlI wonder how many people will be boycotting Discmakers and switching to Oasis for this? | | Saturday, July 25th, 2009 | | 9:33 pm |
| | Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | | 2:27 pm |
| | Friday, June 12th, 2009 | | 8:17 am |
| | Friday, May 29th, 2009 | | 1:25 pm |
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