annoyances, shipping, TMI

Too Much Information

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Many years ago when I was a teenager … Whoops, wrong kind of TMI.

I speak of the TMI from information overload foisted on the buyer by some online ordering systems. When you order online, most sites give you a tracking ID so that you can check the status of your order. Those tracking systems often include a lot of useless information that skirts around the one piece of information I want to know – when will the item(s) I ordered arrive in my hot hands?

For the most part I don’t care what day your warehouse finally handed the item to the shipping company. I also do not care that it then languished in Bumf**k, Georgia for a day or more, for example. Nor do I  truly want to know that your truck driver averaged less than 40 mph travelling cross country to a meaningless warehouse in the highlands of Colorado. And I really question the reason it took 36 hours to leave the rural warehouse to head out here to the plains.

What do I really want to know? Plain and simple, the only important fact is the day the item is going to arrive on my doorstep. It is not like my knowing all the other details will change that date. Nor will I feel empowered just because I know all those odd routing details.

I just want to know with certainty the day it will arrive, especially since you invariably ship it in the colorful display box advertising the contents

and then simply leave it on my front door step for all to see without even ringing the doorbell. This gentleman follows your truck around for a reason.

So how do you feel about shipping TMI?

(None of the images are mine, nor do they the local version of reality.)
musical preferences, seasons

It Must Be Fall …

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… because my musical taste is migrating towards “fall” music.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to undergo seasonal modification of my choice of listening music. Summer leads to a preference for springy and funky music, akin to this Mungo Jerry classic:

But in the fall and spring, my taste turns to heavier and more cathartic music like these Jefferson Starship classics:

and

Of course, come the hard days of winter, there is only one possible salvation: the full 17+ minute version of In A Gadda Da Vida by Iron Butterfly. (Unfortunately, the YouTube time/bandwidth constraints only allow mutilated short versions of this classic to be posted. Trust me, the full version is worth searching out and puts the poor pale mutants to shame.) Here is the full song split into two videos. If you want the full experience. put both together in a YouTube playlist and they will play as one full length song. (It helps to have dropped some serious hallucinogens before seeing the original video circa 1969 contained herein. {*grin*})

Anyone who can listen to the full song and not feel rejuvenated and renewed must have grown up in the wrong generation. Or maybe they were just not exposed to enough hallucinogens early in life. {*grin*}

So how does your taste in music gyrate with the seasons?

purchase oddities, tipping point

What’s Your Tipping Point

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Over the last month I have been contemplating a purchase, one that is more $$$ than what I consider as trivial but less $$$ than what I consider a major purchase. So I researched and agonized and finally decided on the size and manufacturer I wanted. Then it was time to select a vendor, since it was an item not carried locally.

I narrowed it down to two vendors, one that I had used and liked before, W, and one that many people swore by and many swore at, Y. Y offered the object of my purchasing frenzy for about 6% less than W. But then I looked at the shipping and handling costs – W’s was less that $1, Y’s greater than $10. Even with the shipping and handling added in, Y was marginally cheaper than W.

I waffled back and for for a moment, teetering on the slippery slope of deciding on Y due to a less than 1% difference in total cost. I fairly quickly decided to go with W because of my past experiences with them.

In physics, a tipping point is the point at which an object is displaced from a state of stable equilibrium into a new, different state. Like adding another coin to this stack:

 In those terms, the difference in price (including shipping) between W and Y was not enough to exceed my experience based tipping point. I really haven’t been able to figure out what my tipping point is for this particular transaction, but I suspect that if Y were another 3% cheaper, I would have slid down the slippery slope and tried them.

So what is your tipping point. When does your loyalty due to past experience give way to financial differences? Inquiring minds want to know.

gray, joke, spoof

I Have Proof …

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that having a kid causes gray hair.

Let me present my case, step by step.

Let us begin back in the days of yore circa 1988, before L and I had the Son. Here we are with my brother’s two oldest kids:

Note the nice dark hair on my head and face. I was Josh’s (the one in my arms) favorite uncle because I was one of the last adults able to lift him up (and because I am his only uncle, but …).

Then a few years later the Son was born and not much had changed:

But note the lightening already starting. (The flowers in front were from one of my clients in celebration of the Son’s birth.)

About a year later and look at how the gray side-burns were coming forth:

Add another year or so and look at the gray as we played on the floor at mom and dad’s:

Add another bit and see how the hair on top is turning gray and starting to thin:

I think it was because of all the toys I got to fix. {*grin*}


From there on out it just seems to go faster and faster. Here we all are a few years later:

By the time 2000 rolled around, we were still up for a good dress up occasion, but the white was running rampant:

Of course, the teen age years were yet to come, and with them came still more white (and the Son got a lot taller!):

In the same time frame, here is a better view of the gray taking over. (And no, I don’t know why the Son is pointing at the ceiling.)

I’ll leave you with this shot of me in my office a few years ago. The thing I am holding is an original art creation sold to benefit the local historical society – I called it “Thing-a-ma-boob”.

Notice how gray and sparse the hair on top is? I do from time to time. And it sure seems to correspond with having kids. {*grin*}

(I’m kidding of course – the Son had little to do with the changes in my hair.)
costs, revolution, telephony

The Oddness of Current Living

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(Or how I learned to love the phone … with apologies to Dr. Strangelove.)

I just got off the phone from a 90 minute call with a marketing madman in Russia. Let me put that a different way – I just had a Skype video call with a person about software development and marketing who happened to be located in Russia. Nothing odd about that except for handling the 10 hour time differential – the call started at 10pm my time, 8am the next day his time.

But, … (You knew there had to be a but didn’t you?)

My memorable telephone experiences began with a phone little different than this:

You turned the crank and asked the operator to connect you. Heaven forbid that you actually wanted to call outside of the local switchboard. Then the operator would have to arrange the circuit and call you back to connect the call.

But life went on and the dial phone arrived.

Do you know how much of my life that the idea of a 90 minute long distance call was petrifying for fear of the size of the bill? I remember when I was a kid and people didn’t even talk on the phone much since there were *gasp* local message unit charges. By the time I was in high school, the local message unit charges were gone and most people had a private line rather than the party lines that preceded them.

Then came college and I was thousands of miles from home (and from the college L was attending). Calls on weekends and late nights were made for the incredible bargain rate of $1.25 for three minutes. I could sometimes afford to call once a week! People locked phones in the dorms by the simple expedient of a dial lock in the 1 hole. That prevented dialing any number or even O for Operator.

But some were clever enough to tap the pulse code the dial generated on the switch-hook, beginning the whole new enterprise of phone freaking.

After graduate school, calls were down to $0.30 a minute and the nascent idea of a cellular phone was hatching. Still, a 90 minute call would have been a true luxury. Not to mention a budget breaker. And the touch-tone phone started to become the norm and the surcharge for having a touch-tone phone on the line disappeared as well with time.

Then came the internet and cell phones and the break up of the AT&T monopoly.

Suddenly there was competition and phone costs began a long decline. Until today we think nothing of fixed price unlimited calling and free or nearly free calls. So my 90 minute video call? Cost me nothing per se.

We sometimes forget about the silent revolutions happening around us all the time. Having a video call with someone was the stuff of dreams and Bell Labs when I was young.

Now it is so common that my shock is not that I talked so someone half a world away on a video call, but the fact that it cost me nothing beyond my already existing internet connection.

Viva The Revolution!

Things Done Right