June 2007 Archives

Not quite the same as being ten minuets from the metro, but it still elicited a smile:

It was fascinating and almost serial to walk through such a place.

Surreal. :-)

Back in February, my Treo took a fall and more or less stopped working. Not completely, but almost nothing worked.

Eventually, I figured out that it was due to the right shift key being jammed in the depressed position, keeping most keystrokes from working, along with a lot of taps. A little surgery to insert a small piece of paper between the contacts of that key, and the phone was up and running again, minus that one key. Since the shift key is the one redundant key on the Treo, it could’ve been worse.

At the time, I was only two months away from Verizon’s “new every two [years]” promotion, so I figured I’d just wait until then and upgrade to another phone. So, in April, I decided to take the plunge and switch from Palm OS to Windows Mobile.

After some research and brief contemplations about getting a smartphone instead of a PDA, I decided on the Verizon XV-6700, a.k.a. HTC Apache, a.k.a. UTStarcom PPC-6700 (this is a phone with an identity crisis).

XV-6700 First Impressions

The XV-6700 is roughly the same size as the Treo 650, though a lot boxier. Style apparently wasn’t ranking very high on the designers’ list when they put this device together — it looks like a rectangular hockey puck crossed with an Oreo.

Ignoring the fashion statement, the major selling point of this phone over its Windows Mobile competition is the keyboard. The front of the PDA only has a few buttons and a five-way knob, but the whole side of the device slides out, revealing a rather large keyboard. It’s actually large enough that you can do four-finger typing without too much trouble. The Treo, by contrast, is pretty much limited to two thumbs.

The XV-6700 also has built in WiFi. Major points for that.

Other nice features are the large rectangular screen, which can be run in either portrait or landscape mode, and the 1.3MP camera. I especially liked the built-in LED, which, while probably not all that useful as a flash, made for a very nice flashlight.

When I started using the phone, one of my first observations was that it lived up to the Windows stereotype — it crashed a lot. Over half a dozen times in the first day. I can see why the reset button is easily accessible, and not hidden in the battery compartment.

I was expecting this, though, especially on my first day or two of using it, while I was pounding the device to smithereens to find its limits. It would seem that Windows Mobile is more ambitious than the device is able to handle. After figuring out some boundaries, I was able to basically eliminate crashes.

XV-6700 Software

On the Treo, MyBible is a killer app for me. It’s ridiculously fast, and does most of what I want in a Bible program. Because of that, I immediately downloaded their equivalent program for Windows Mobile, PocketBible.

That didn’t go so well. Whereas MyBible is perfectly integrated with the Palm OS, PocketBible is, at best, clunky. It breaks the UI guidelines in a number of places, it’s slow, it crashes a lot, it doesn’t remember where you left off last time (usually because it crashed in the meantime), and it isn’t nearly as intuitive as its counterpart.

I really tried to acclimate to its quirks, but just couldn’t do it. I was finding myself bringing a paper Bible around to church and Bible studies instead, because the program just couldn’t keep up, and it would frequently crash and need to be reloaded, which is not conducive to a good Bible study.

In desperation, I downloaded OliveTree’s BibleReader for Windows Mobile. My experience with their program from several years ago hadn’t been very good, but it was better than this.

To my surprise, OliveTree has dramatically improved their product since the last time I’d looked at it, and it’s now positively pleasant to use. It used to take at least 15 seconds to pull up a verse in my old version, but it’s now more or less instantaneous, even when the Bible is on a memory card. Reference books work just as quickly, and OliveTree has really expanded their library to include all sorts of books. Such as Wayne Grudem’s excellent Systematic Theology, which is packaged with the ESV Bible translation. Perfect!

So, Bible software is taken care of with BibleReader. Internet Explorer works well — much better than Opera, Minimo, and another browser whose name is escaping me. Pocket Outlook does a good job with E-Mail, as long as you’re not using a UW-IMAP server (which I am, but POP3 works as an alternative). Contact management, tasks, and calendar both work fine out of the box. MP3-playback wasn’t a problem.

I definitely give Microsoft credit for including a very good package of applications with the out-of-box installation of their handheld OS. Would that they’d do the same thing with their desktop OS!

SSH took a long time to get straightened out, but I eventually found a program that worked and was cheaper than $80 (one SSH program for Windows Mobile would’ve cost more than my phone did!).

That’s nearly all that my PDA gets used for. Oh, and games. There’s no shortage of games for Windows Mobile. Some of them are even free. I tried several demos of the non-free ones, and they looked pretty impressive. In the realm of free games, there were a number of ports of old BBS games, and I enjoyed a much-too-long game of Space Trader on a flight to Orlando (and subsequent hotel stay, at least until I finished the game at the end of the first evening there).

The memo program was nearly the only disappointment out of the built-in software. Each memo is a separate file in the filesystem, and they’re a royal pain to work with. For one thing, there’s no apparent way to categorize them. I have a lot of memos, and this was a problem.

There was a third phone on that list…

I might have been able to find a workaround for the memo problem, but there were a few things that became showstoppers in the meantime:

• Phone quality. The XV-6700’s speaker isn’t loud enough for use in any but the quietest environments. In addition, the microphone is much too sensitive and omnidirectional.

• Too much stylus. The Treo has a keyboard that’s always accessible. It’s smaller, true, but it means there are 31 more hotkeys available before you need to pull out the stylus. This is huge, and it became increasingly frustrating not to have that capability, especially since most of the hotspots on the screen were too small and too close together for a fingernail-press to work reliably. Pulling out the keyboard to execute a command is more cumbersome than I’d like.

• Battery life. This is really what killed the deal. In Boston and Orlando, it worked fine, but in West Lebanon, which is not a pinnacle of cell phone reception, the XV-6700 would barely make 10 hours on one charge, and that was with no use at all. My 2-year-old Treo easily lasts several days, even with moderate use.

Enter the LG vx8600

After about a month of using the XV-6700, I’d had enough of poor phone quality and not being able to make it through the day on one charge, and decided to add another line. This served a few purposes:

• Since we don’t have a land-line, this would give us a back-up line and phone in case one went dead for some reason. It could also become a separate business line, if need be.

• I could turn the phone off on the XV-6700, just use the WiFi most of the time, and have the battery last for several days. The LG phone would be my phone, and the XV-6700 would be my PDA. Bye-bye convergence, but it could be worse — the LG phone is extremely thin, and easily fits in a pocket, so I could still carry both of them.

• It gave me a web-capable cell phone, in case I ever get around to programming some mobile web stuff.

The LG phone is pretty nice. As a phone, it does very well. Sound quality is excellent, and it’s easy to use. It has a good feature set, plus nice bonuses like a 1.3MP camera, MP3 player, and alarms. The vibrate and ringing settings are rather flexible, and you can set it to “sound on alarm only”, which is a great little touch (usually sound is either all on or all off).

The Get It Now and VCast features are much-touted, but I’m not at all interested in them, so I can’t offer an opinion as to whether or how well they work.

The web support is, in a word, terrible. I think the phone’s web support is probably decent, but Verizon has crippled it beyond redemption. They’ve locked out the ability to set a home page, and force you to go through their advertising-laden, useless menus. Even going to a manually-entered URL has to be done through a proxy web page, which means it takes well over a minute before you can get to the site you want. It’s usable, but you’d have to be pretty desperate. Especially when compared to the XV-6700’s web support, which is stellar for a handheld.

The phone’s reviewers talked about getting good battery life, but again, it seems like they live in areas where reception is better. This phone will usually give me 18 hours per charge, though, which will get me through most days.

I tried wearing both the LG and XV-6700 phones, which lasted for approximately 15 seconds. I was very quickly reminded of why I didn’t get a cell phone until I could get one that combined a cell phone and PDA — wearing more than one thing on my belt just feels ridiculous.

After that, I tried wearing the XV-6700 and keeping the LG in my pocket, and alternated that with just wearing the LG, to see which one I would prefer.

So, which phone is on Deef’s belt now?

After alternating that setup for a couple of weeks, I finally settled on… the Treo 650.

Yep, right back where I started.

With a clean install, upgraded firmware, and a better memory card (snitched from the XV-6700), the Treo is now positively zippy. I kept the upgraded (unlimited) data plan and decided to try a new set of software, and I’m very pleased with how well it’s working.

I’m hoping that my 650 will last until Verizon starts offering something equivalent to the 755p, at which time I’ll replace it with that, so as to have more RAM, faster wireless data, and bigger memory card support.

The LG has gone to Christine. I’m not sure if she’s going to keep it yet, or if the battery life is going to be a problem for her — she seems to be getting less life out of a single charge than I did. The XV-6700 is on the other line, and serves as a handy WiFi device, along with a good test environment for mobile web development.

I was going to give reviews of some of the new programs I’m using on the Treo, but this is already more than long enough, so I’ll do that some other time. I’ve definitely come back into the Palm OS fold, though, after experiencing Windows Mobile for a month and a half.

Someone just suggested I change my route to Colorado, taking I-88 and I-86 instead of I-90. Faster and cheaper, he said.

So, I decided to look it up. I was trying to figure out how to coerce Google Maps to use a different route as I typed in the URL, and then the start and destination.

But then, lo-and-behold, as I move the mouse around the map, I get this “Drag to change route” tooltip.

Neat! And incredibly well-timed. It wasn’t there last week.

My only gripe would be that you no longer get an estimate as to how long the entire trip will take — it breaks it up into segments based on where you clicked. I think it might be a little too eager to show that tooltip as well, but I imagine they’ll tweak that over time.

I was reading through a letter late last night from an Assemblies of God missionary family raising support to go overseas. The next letter on my list was from a fundamental Baptist KJV-only missionary family, also raising support to go overseas.

It struck me how similar they were. One calls the process itineration, the other deputation. But they’re doing the exact same thing — visiting lots of churches, building up a base of support so that they’re not alone when they go overseas. Contrast how parachurches raise their support (mostly through individuals, rather than churches, and in just 1-4 geographic areas*), and they look all the more similar.

And yet they were sooooo different as well. Only one of these letters was going to talk about their daughter being prophesied over. Only one of these letters was going to have everyone (kids included) dressed in suits (with ties for the guys) for the family picture in the letter. Even the tone of the writing differed quite a bit — one is exuberant, the other controlled.

As it turned out, neither of them happened to quote scripture directly in these two letters, but you can be very sure that they would not have been using anything resembling the same translation.

Both of them are bringing the gospel to places that need it desperately. One to Europe, one to a Muslim -stan country. And while their particulars differ quite a bit, it’s the same gospel being preached at its fundamentals, so I’m happy to send letters for both of them.

 

* If you’re wondering, most parachurch missionary mailing lists have people in up to four clumps (as applicable):

1. Where they are while raising support (e.g. the college they attended).
2. Where he grew up.
3. Where she grew up.
4. Where they’re going.

They usually don’t travel much while raising support. The lists will spread out over time as people move, and especially as the missionaries themselves move, such that #1 and #4 change.

Denomination-sent missionaries, by contrast, will usually also have supporting churches that are spread out around the country, or at least the region. I haven’t really noticed whether or not there are individual families included around these churches, or if it’s just the churches themselves.

I haven’t done a scientific analysis of any of this — it’s based on eyeballing mailing lists and names as I’m printing and stamping them. So I could be making it up. But it seems reasonable, and fits what I’ve seen so far.

It looks like Amazon might have opened a warehouse in New Hampshire. At least, I ordered a book from them yesterday, and it shipped today out of Nashua (and went south to UPS central in Chelmsford on its way north to Lebanon, but we’ll forgive them that — it doesn’t change the delivery date).

That means next day service at 3-5 day prices, at least for the stuff that’s stocked there. Nice!

Speaking of Amazon, if you haven’t seen my sidebar link to an article describing how Amazon does order fulfillment, it’s worth a read, and has lots of pictures.

In just three weeks (eek!) I’m going to be leaving West Lebanon, New Hampshire, and driving to Fort Collins, Colorado, for CCC’s all-staff conference. I don’t know of any regularly-scheduled event that has more missionaries in one place, so it’s an important place for me to be from a marketing perspective.

I’ve also been going to this conference since long before it had ever even occurred to me to send letters for missionaries, and I enjoy interacting with some friends I don’t see very often, so I’ll be there a few days early for the pre-conference “ministry days” for the campus staff.

I’ll most likely be writing about that quite a bit over the next month and a half. There’s a lot to be done between now and then.

For the purpose of this entry, though, I’d like to get your input on a couple of things:

What should I listen to while I’m driving?

I will have an iPod armed and ready to go. It will be loaded up with a number of audiobooks (with a combination of fiction and non-fiction, including at least one foreign-language-learning set for good measure), and as many sermons and series of sermons as I can remember to download between now and then.

What would you recommend?

Where should I stop? What should I see?

I’ve allotted five days for what Google Maps considers to be a 30-hour drive. This is partly because I’m driving solo, and partly because my vehicle is going to be pretty heavily-laden, and the-restly because I want to leave plenty of room for contingencies.

Barring any suggestions that end up changing my route, here’s my current rough plan, based solely on travel times and the relative size of the dots on the map:

• Day 1: Rochester, NY (or Syracuse, or Buffalo)
• Day 2: South Bend, IN
• Day 3: Des Moines, IA
• Day 4: Grand Island, NE
• Day 5: Fort Collins, CO

(That’s the “under-the-Lakes” route. There’s also an “over-the-Lakes” route that takes me through Canada, but I think I’d like to avoid the potential time-sinks of going through the border twice. The overall time estimates are more or less the same.)

As a Canadian who has never traveled the US (except by flying to a few cities, and one insane road-trip to Florida), are there any “you must see this” sights along that route, or only a little out of the way?

If I can coordinate any of those sight-seeing places with the end of a driving day, all the better, but I don’t mind stopping for an hour or two in the middle of the day for something that’s really worth seeing.

Good restaurants are also fine reasons to stop, if you know of any along the route! :-)

I just found out over the weekend that my snazzy new-customer-easy-signup process got broken a few weeks ago by a security update. Oops.

Normally, when something breaks, I get an E-Mail saying so, and the code presents the user with a mea culpa (just so that we’re clear that any programming glitch is my problem, not theirs).

That E-Mail is more or less my cue to drop everything and fix it, which is usually a matter of just a couple of minutes, if that. My codebase isn’t nearly complex enough that I subscribe to the “some bugs aren’t worth the cost of fixing them” philosophy, especially when it comes to your typical 404, 403, and 500 errors (file not found, forbidden, and internal server error, respectively).

The E-Mail also tells me who encountered the problem (if they’re logged in), so I can follow-up with them, apologize, and let them know that the problem is fixed. It’s not quite as good as not having problems in the first place, but it comes close.

In this case, though, the cause of the problem looked to the code like it was a trivial user error (user clicked “Send Letter” without attaching any files), so it presented a helpful error message (if that were actually the problem), and didn’t bother to let me know.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t actually the problem. The problem was that there was a rule that was redirecting insecure http:// requests to their secure https:// equivalents on-the-fly (geek speak: 302 redirect), but that rule was causing the files to get lost (geek speak: POST became GET).

As a result, the user would attach the files, upload the files, wait for the upload to finish, and then get an error message saying that they hadn’t attached any files, and to try again. It did have a link to the contact form as well, which is how I eventually found out about it, but that’s still not good.

So, the problem is now fixed, and I’ve contacted everyone who I think (based on the server logs) was affected by the problem, to apologize. In some cases, rather belatedly.

And I’ve learned another lesson about error messages and error reporting. It’s not good enough to just have the code E-Mail me when there’s a problem that it couldn’t handle. I need to have it E-Mail me when there’s a problem that the user wouldn’t expect, as well. That way, even if it is a trivial error, if it’s keeping the user from accomplishing their goal, I can follow-up and redesign the process.

That will be a good thing to remember as I go through the code over the next few weeks looking for ways to improve the user experience.

I just had the nicest customer service experience talking with someone from Verizon Wireless. On a Saturday, no less!

• I didn’t have to go through a single voice-activated menu. Just two number-activated menus, without long spiels.

• I was on hold for less than 10 seconds before speaking to a live person.

• She was friendly. And not of the “I’m friendly because the script tells me to be” variety.

• She was located on this continent, and had an easy to understand accent.

• The line was clear. Neither of us had to repeat ourselves at any time.

• I didn’t have to give any redundant information.

• Her instructions (on swapping the phone numbers of a couple of phones, which had to be done directly in the phone due to some glitch in their computer system) were simple and concise. And they worked.

Other than having to update the phones manually through the handset instead of using the standard *228 activation procedure, I couldn’t have asked for a better support call. (And, actually, given my nature, I think I preferred getting to go into the guts of the phone anyway!)

I just thought I’d mention that. Verizon Wireless has consistently treated me well (even if they don’t always get things right the first time), and I appreciate it.

Oh no! It’s another Mac vs. Windows comparison! Run and hide!

I bought a Mac last year because quite a few of my customers were sending Mac-formatted files. Until then, I had two options for dealing with them:

1) Ask them to turn them into PDFs and resend them.

2) Sneak over to the church office after hours to convert them to PDF myself.

It helped that I lived next door to the church, but still, option 2 wasn’t a long-term viable solution, and the whole point of my service is to make it easier for missionaries to send their files, so whenever I can avoid asking them to do any extra work, I do.

At the same time, my then-five-year-old Dell laptop was in serious need of going into retirement, so I was also in the market for a laptop to serve as my non-work and on-the-road computer.

So, I bought an iBook. It’s the 12”-screen model, is tremendously portable, and quickly got named Snowball. (I name all of my computers after either cold things with spillover into natural disasters. It was going to be cold things or weather patterns, but I couldn’t start liking the idea of calling a server “gentlerain.deefs.net”. Avalanche sounded so much better.) It predates the Mac-Intel combination, intentionally, since I wanted to be able to support legacy programs.

I wasn’t sure if a Mac would be able to keep me happy with my personal computing needs, but I was confident enough to give it a go — most of my non-work computer usage consists of Firefox (cross-platform), Thunderbird (cross-platform), Photoshop (cross-platform), and accessing other computers using SSH (which is so cross-platform that my phone can do it). Add the occasional game to the mix and some sort of PDF viewer, and there’s not much else that I use.

Apparently, the experiment worked out, because I just bought another one. A MacBook Pro this time, and on the day of release, no less. I must really look like a Mac addict. Ha!

There were a few things that didn’t work out, so I’ll list those first:

• Microsoft Money. I’ve been using Microsoft Money for a long time. In fact, my current Money file has been around longer than I’ve known my wife. Outside of Windows itself, there’s no program that I’ve used continuously for a longer period of time (I switched from WordPerfect to Word when I went to Dartmouth, otherwise it would’ve won even over Windows). It’s not remotely Mac-compatible, so it’s on my work computer.

• GAIM (now Pidgin). There isn’t/wasn’t a native Mac version of GAIM available. I didn’t like iChat, and none of the other alternatives I tried were all that impressive to me. I think I settled on iChat by default, but drifted away from IM pretty quickly.

• Games. Lots of Yahoo’s games don’t work on the Mac. That was disappointing. Fortunately, Text Twist does. In addition, Neverwinter Nights was a no-go (not that I think the iBook’s specs would have met the requirements). Warcraft and Starcraft both work, which is nice. I did buy a copy of Bejeweled 2 for a low-brain-commitment game while traveling, and that helped.

• The display. After just a year (or, more precisely, just over a year), I have a number of pixels that aren’t working right. I’m not impressed by that, which was never a problem with the Dell.

• Preview. The font rendering is illegible most of the time, unless you’re zoomed in. Acrobat on Windows is much better, especially with small fonts. Presumably Acrobat can be set up in place of Preview. I haven’t checked yet.

I also had a few other gripes listed here, but they’re business-related, and this is more about the personal side of things, so I removed them.

On the positive side, there’s the following:

• Cost. At Dell, the computer I spec’ed out as a not-especially-extravagant laptop for personal use cost between $1800 and $2100. The cheaper stuff was either not powerful enough to run the software I’d be running on it at a decent speed, or the parts were flimsy and/or meant for desktops. The Mac that met my specs was $1299, minus whatever rebate Amazon was running at the time, plus a little extra to upgrade the RAM myself.

• The “it just works” factor. Especially when compared to Windows and Linux, this is truly impressive. Wireless networks just work. Networked printers show up automatically, usually without needing to find and install drivers. Apache, with PHP? Sure, just check this box to turn it on.

• Dashboard. I like having a bunch of frequently-accessed tools just a keystroke away.

• Spotlight. Load any program or file with Apple-Space, first two letters of the program or file, maybe an arrow key or two, and Enter.

• Less lockout. I don’t know about “no lockout,” but I don’t have to authenticate my operating system every time the computer boots up, there’s no 30+ character license key to enter when you reinstall the OS, and I can get updates without having to install validation software. It’s nice when the OS doesn’t (at least visibly) assume that you’re out to get it.

• It’s pretty. Windows Vista makes up some ground in this respect, but the Mac is still more aesthetically pleasing, in my opinion. I’m utilitarian enough that I don’t care much about this aspect, but it’s a nice bonus.

The kicker, though, and the reason I just bought a new MacBook Pro, is the powered-by-Unix aspect. The iBook gives me access to just about everything I like about Linux, and adds a really nice UI, without the need to spend hours upon hours downloading and compiling KDE, replacing it every few months when there’s a new release, and trying to work out compatibility issues.

Having a Unix variant on hand was particularly useful back in April, when I found out that I wasn’t going to have Internet access at a conference that began the next day. I was able to get a full working copy of my software going that night, which really saved the weekend in terms of marketing.

That also lets me put my development server right on the laptop if I want, so I can write and test code wherever, without needing to connect to an outside server.

When combined with an Intel chip and Parallels (if it runs as advertised), that means I’ll be able to take just one computer out to a big conference in Colorado this summer, and use it to do all of my work as well as run a demo server at my booth. Otherwise, I’d need two or three.

I went with a MacBook Pro to get the bigger screen, more RAM and disk space for the PostgreSQL database (9GB address validation database, for instance), and more processing power for running Windows simultaneously with the Mac, the database, and Apache.

My main work computer is going to remain on Windows, for a few reasons:

• Most of my incoming work requires Windows.

• Printing is much easier on Windows.

• I have no idea what the algorithm is behind the green plus button on the Mac (please fill me in if you know), but it certainly isn’t as useful as Maximize is on Windows.

• Windows seems to be better at multi-display than Mac. There’s certainly a much broader variety of video cards, and Windows makes it very easy to do a three-monitor spread, which I prefer by far to one large screen (never mind the fact that my three LCDs combined cost less than a single cinema display). It’s simple to assign programs to a specific monitor.

• Mac desktops strike me as being overpriced. The exceptions would be the non-expandable iMac and Mac mini, which don’t support my three-monitor setup and are therefore not in the running. Going from three monitors to one monitor would be like trading in your Hummer for a Mini-Cooper. Cramped. And you don’t even get the improved mileage in this case.

I’m very curious to see how Parallels is going to affect the playing field. I haven’t installed it yet (I need to do a Windows license shuffle first), though it’ll be happening soon. If I can negate some of my Mac frustrations and get some of the Windows benefits, it might be worth doing. We’ll see!

Every now and then, a deal comes around that you’d be silly to turn down.

Today, I was talking with Xerox sales rep, looking into options for upgrading my main printer. It’s a good printer, with one fatal flaw: it’s horrible at mail merges. They take forever. Or, more precisely, they may as well take forever — a 150-page mail merge with even one picture on it will take over four hours to print. By way of comparison, that same document, non-merged, would take a little over four minutes to print on the same printer.

For whatever reason, this wasn’t a noticeable problem right away. I think it was because my mail merges early on tended to be low-color, so I printed them on a different printer (I lease some printers and own others, so which one I use depends on the color content of the letter).

The number of people doing mail merges with more densely-packed text and graphics rose quite a bit early last year, which is when it became a problem. At the time, though, the lease on my current printer was too new to be able to do anything about it. I ended up getting another printer just for mail merges, which was lower quality, but good enough.

A year later, I decided to call the sales guy again and see what we could do. As it turns out, with my much-increased volume, along with an older lease, I can jump up a couple of product lines and buy out my current lease for less money than I’m currently paying per quarter. Plus, my costs won’t go up as quickly with higher volume as they would on my current printer.

Hmm, faster printing, higher quality, more features, and lower supplies costs, at an overall lower price. Oh, and it can handle mail merges just fine. And I get to deal with the same people (which, since I’m quite happy with them, is a good thing).

That one didn’t require much thought.

There’s a fair to good chance that you’ve been programming for too long if you’re interrupted by a spider that’s crossing your line of sight horizontally, weaving a web.

In my defense, I really haven’t been programming for more than about an hour or two today (so far — I have lofty goals). The spider apparently got its start at my calendar (above my desk), made it over to the lamp (presumably by way of the ceiling), and was working its way back when it had the misfortune of causing me to go cross-eyed long enough to figure out what it was.

It is now squished. Though it’s not the kind of debugging I had in mind for today.

Back to USPS presorting algorithms and tray labels.

For anyone who’s curious (I was), I measured the noise levels produced by my Pitney Bowes DI600 inserter this afternoon, and got the following results:

• 1’ from the control panel, in front of the machine: 80dB

• 1’ from the paper feeders, in front of the machine: 80dB

• 1’ from the middle of the machine, behind the machine: 80dB

• 1’ from the output of the machine (with power stacker): 83dB

• directly above the insertion area: 92dB

For the geeky, all measurements were made using a Terrasonde Audio Toolbox, fast update, using the A weighting. The numbers are +/- 1dB. The machine was C-folding letter-sized sheets and inserting them into #10 envelopes.

For the less geeky, these numbers mean that, by OSHA’s standards, as long as you don’t have your ear glued to the insertion area cover, you can work at one of these machines all day without being at risk of hearing damage.

It’s worth noting that these measurements were hardly done in a controlled environment, so these numbers don’t necessarily correlate to any other machine or office. They may line up fairly closely with other models in the family (as well as the matching Secap models), but will almost definitely be different from other manufacturers and product families.

I never did post a follow-up to my attempt to work a 40-hour (no more, no less) week a couple of weeks ago. It happened — I lost track a little on Friday when I went out to lunch and forgot to make note of the time, but I was within an hour of 40.

I think, given my druthers, that I would work about 50 hours on a “normal” week when there’s not much personal stuff going on. I got everything done that needed to get done, but didn’t really get ahead on anything.

Another thing that I started at around the same time is trying to have an empty inbox at least once on three days of a given week (Sunday to Saturday). Sunday is usually out because I don’t really spend any time on E-Mail, so that works out to be at least every other other day.

I’m on week three of successfully doing that, and it’s been nice — E-Mails equal to dos for me, and I get stressed when buried in to dos. It does come as a bit of a shock, though, when I turn off E-Mail with an empty inbox at 8pm and come back in the morning to 40 new messages.

My next goal will probably be to do the same thing with my paper inbox. But that’s probably not going to happen for a couple of weeks.

I’ve been remiss in posting some of the weird and wonderful searches that people use to get to this site. It’s because I moved the site from one computer to another back in March, and hadn’t installed the log-reading software until last night, when I was reading a site from a Googler whose domain name would really have people wondering about my late-night browsing habits.

She had an article on odd searches that people used to find her site, which prompted me to get the software installed, since it’s usually a form of entertainment for me, too.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that an increasing number of the searches are actually leading to posts and pages that are useful. I wrote a few obscure tips/hacks about Thunderbird a little while ago, thinking something along the line of “none of the people who read this site even use Thunderbird… Why am I doing this, exactly?” But, it turns out that people who use Thunderbird also use Google (whoulda thunk?), and run across the same problems I do.

The short microphone review I wrote years ago still tends to be one of the most common searches, and there are a lot of people who want to know the value of betrayal money in biblical times vs. modern-day times. Caveat: My pastor and I have apparently come to different conclusions, based on a sermon from a couple of months ago, so I should probably recheck my sources, but I still think my conclusion is right, or at least highly plausible. But I’m not going to get into a theological debate over it.

But, notwithstanding those people who find this site useful, there are still a ton of searches for which I’m apparently authoritative, but either have nothing to say, or haven’t said it yet. I’ll fill in some of the gaps here:

• While I’m no longer showing up as a top site for pictures of Panama City Beach, FL (finally!), people looking for the history of PDAs in general are probably somewhat disappointed to find my personal PDA history, even if it does follow the evolution of PDAs fairly well. It’s consistently in the top 10, if not the top 6.

• “What is a Dell warranty?” I think it involves something about them fixing your computer when it breaks.

• “What does deef stand for?” His wife, really good performances (though without getting into the whole ‘every performance deserves a standing ovation’ bit), working at the inserter and stamper, printing envelopes, and bringing mail from office to car and car to post office. He sits for programming, reading, driving the car, playing games, and dinner.

• “Total of deef people in the US” Two: Deef and Deefwife. There are no little deefs.

• “Fort Collins 9-digit ZIP Code” Umm, there are a lot. As of April, 26,685 of them, in fact. 80521-1000 is the first one, numerically. 80528-9700 is the highest in sequence, though there’s a company in Fort Collins that has all of 80553.

• “addresses of pastors who want to give out things to people” I’m curious what inspired that.

• “my hope is built on nothing less” Alas, I hope the lyrics they found here didn’t make it into their hymnal (copy and paste the text into the search bar on this site to find out why).

• “deef killer” Not something that you’ll find out how to do on this site, let me tell you!

• “potable sound system” I’m generally more interested in making my sound system small than making it fit for drinking, but kudos to the search engine that figured out that the searcher was probably thinking (if not typing) the same thing.

• “adult” I have no idea how I managed to rank for that one. There can’t be any shortage of other sites vying for the word.

• “hearing problems from running pitney bowes inserter” Good question. My impression is that it’s not loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage unless you’re running it for an extended period of time. It’s probably worth doing some measurements on, though. I’ll do that and post what I come up with.

• “can unshielded speakers crash computer?” They’d have to have some pretty intense magnets to do that. Especially since, for most people, the speakers are next to the monitor, not the computer.

• “things in a souvenir shop beginning with the letter d” It’s on the tip of my tongue! D… D… Oh, let me search for it. Google knows everything, right?

• “with this stick and my highly evolved brain i shall make fire” What a great movie. The second one wasn’t as good, though I still enjoyed Scrat.

• “is deef a word?” Of course! Proper names are perfectly valid words.

• “communicate with deef people” E-Mail is preferred. As is English, though you can get by with a number of other languages if I’m allowed to use a translator.

• “helpful phases for the newly wed couple” Other than the fact that I have no idea how this person got here, I might offer “<pat> <pat> it’ll be alright.” A serious answer is beyond the scope of this post.

• “was saul a tax collector” Nope. That was Matthew/Levi.

• “what are some things that happen only at midnight?” Date changes.

I really should know better than to start a post with the subject “Two quickies” on anything. It’s guaranteed to result in a post that’s anything but short. So, here’s the second “quickie” on customer service, in its own post.

A recurring problem that I’m coming across is that I seem to have such a reputation for speedy production that people get worried when they don’t hear back from me within 24 hours. There’s also the occasional customer who gets concerned when I don’t reply within three to six hours, but that’s a different story.

This becomes a problem on weekends. I work Monday-Friday, with regular business hours ending at 5:30pm, when I drop off mail at the post office. Anything coming in (E-Mails or letters) after about 3:00pm tends to get left for the next day.

Occasionally, I’ll work late in the evening, or for a few hours on Saturdays, but it’s usually only when there’s a backlog, nowadays. I’m trying to be better about having “off” time.

Weekday mornings, especially on Mondays, tend to be dedicated to administrative stuff, or programming.

The result, however, is that if someone E-Mails me or sends a letter in at 3:05pm on a Friday, it can be nearly three days before they hear back from me, under current circumstances. That’s a really long time in Internet-land, especially when I have a reputation for responding quickly.

I’m not entirely sure what to do about that. I think it may need multiple approaches:

• When a letter gets submitted or approved, give an “expected response time” based on running averages. I’m already calculating them, so the math is easy. Take into account weekends and holidays.

• Same thing for the comment form? I’m not tracking response times for comments, but I do have a service goal, so I could use that.

• Maybe spend an hour or so on Saturday or first thing Monday morning responding to E-Mails. It’s not exactly how I want to start my day or week, but it might help. Generally, even just acknowledging an E-Mail or mailing should be enough until I can focus on it Monday afternoon.

In any case, it’s a real issue that needs a solution in order to keep providing the high level of customer service that I’m trying to provide, so I’ll need to come up with something.

Right now, though, it’s Monday afternoon, and I have a bunch of E-Mails and mailings waiting for me, so I’m off to do that.

When a first-time customer sends you a book about how to provide excellent customer service, unsolicited, and with no further comments, I’m guessing the odds are pretty good that he’s not impressed with the service he’s receiving.

It’s probably because of my phone support policy, which is that I don’t provide phone support. Every now and then, I run across someone who really wants to talk instead of using E-Mail. When that happens, I try to direct them to another company that provides phone support, since that’s likely to work out better for both of us.

A large part of it is that I really don’t like talking on the phone. Whenever I get around to hiring someone full-time (or even part-time), phone-answering is going to be part of their job description, in all likelihood. In the mean-time, I’m more willing to turn away customers than work with them over the phone, except on an occasional basis.

It’s also quite a bit easier for me to write out a comprehensive answer than it is to describe it over the phone, since the telephone medium is one of back-and-forth, rather than extended monologues (sales people and telemarketers seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule, in my opinion).

And, finally, a telephone call isn’t easily prioritized — when the phone rings, especially when it’s in the heavy-production time of the afternoon, I have to decide, right now, whether to answer the phone or finish one or more mailings. One or the other. So, I usually ignore the phone, and opt to finish the mailings for customers who were already “in line,” as it were.

The problem is that my perspective on the telephone doesn’t line up with that of most other people. So, when that becomes an issue, I try to explain my point of view and refer them to one or two other similar companies that have larger staffs and can (and do) offer phone support. If they’re willing to work with me via E-Mail and the web, great. If not, I want them to be using a service that will work well for them, and mine’s not it.

In this case, I guess the customer wasn’t impressed. Oh well. I’ll follow up with him and see what can be done about it, and hopefully get him connected with another company.