Bay Area Gossip

Valleywag has become one of my new guilty pleasures.  While I can’t but help laugh at the hapless participants, I do feel twinges of sympathy for them as well.  Whether it’s Jimmy Wales meeting and breaking up with his girlfriend on Wikipedia (wow they really seem to dislike old Jim), or the continuous articles on the rules for picking up escorts in the Silicon Valley (link not really safe for work), it’s a constant source of entertainment.  Actually, some of its best moments play out in the comments.  Maybe it’s like Burbed though, where it’s that much funnier if you live in the Bay Area.

One of the latest articles did strike a chord with me though was reading about poor old Brandee Barker had to announce to the press  that she wasn’t getting the vice president position, because it’s her job to.  Particularly in a company like Facebook where the billionaire CEO is just 23, you know experience isn’t really a factor (although they did just hire Sheryl Sandberg from Google).

Posted in Bay Area | 1 Comment

3D visualisations with Excel

This is not an Easter egg – these are filled in cells being dynamically updated within Excel.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vypETZbkU94]

Posted in Amusing | Comments Off on 3D visualisations with Excel

Beer beer beer beer beer!

Heineken Beertender Anyone who knows me knows I am a massive beer fan. 2 years ago I organised a trip around Belgium for my friends and myself. We ended up visiting several different monasteries around the country, and sampled some of the most amazing beer ever (such as a 1988 Chimay Grand Reserve). Superb. However, I digress.

I was very excited when my wife sent me a link to this several months ago, and the ever-witty and amusing Joel from BoingBoing Gadgets has a post detailing the new Heineken Beertender. I have a soft spot for Heineken, especially after a visit to Amsterdam when I was 21. That, coupled with the fact that it was one of the few decent import beers you could get in Australia, means it’s still a regular purchase of mine. This Beertender looks like something definitely worth getting, given the beautiful design and delicious cold beer it would bring into my life.

Posted in Gadgets | Comments Off on Beer beer beer beer beer!

Fighting for consumer rights

I’m a big fan of The Consumerist (although sometimes the commenters are somewhat rabidly against the consumer – what on Earth are they doing at a site called The Consumerist?), but seeing as they didn’t post my great experience with Netgear, I’ll post it here. The long and the short of it is that when my phone was playing up and regular support wasn’t helpful, a well placed email to the executives at Netgear did wonders. They could have just ignored me, but I can’t praise them enough for listening to a frustrated consumer and going to such lengths to sort out my problem.

I just had an interesting experience with Netgear. I bought a Skype phone (SPH200D) from them a year ago and it’s been somewhat buggy since I got it. I spoke with an engineer soon after getting it about the problems I was having, and this initial contact was a great experience and we resolved things well enough with workarounds.

Fast forward to last month and the phone was having call quality issues as well as the bugs. I tried to contact Netgear to resolve it and went through customer support hell – people not reading my requests properly and sending out template responses that weren’t relevant (my biggest pet hate of customer support), support tickets getting ignored, and on top of that a repair/replacement program that I had to pay for, which would leave me without a home phone for 2 weeks.

Using tips from the Consumerist of emailing the executive team, I sent an email to the Senior VP of Worldwide Sales and Support yesterday, simply stating what had happened. I wasn’t trying to get a “freebie” or “compensation”, I just wanted to let him know there were problems with their support program. Ultimately it ‘worked’ and I was getting a replacement phone but the process was very frustrating and did not get any initial resolvement.

Today I received a call from an engineer at their Santa Clara headquarters. He apologised for the difficulties and discussed all the problems with me. He then organised an immediate replacement, with free shipping directly to him so he could analyse the problems first hand. This is a great response. I didn’t expect anything, so to get priority replacement treatment was nice, but the best part was that they actually listened to my problem and *are trying to fix it*. It’s very rare that companies will pay such close attention to a product a year old. Kudos Netgear.

Posted in Consumer issues | 1 Comment

Wikipedia is a productivity killer

Start on a page like the Dunning-Kruger effect, and end up on something fascinating like like fact that 0.9 recurring is equal to 1.

The notations “0.999…” and “1” represent the same number. The equality has long been accepted by professional mathematicians and taught in textbooks. Various proofs of this identity have been formulated with varying rigour.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Wikipedia is a productivity killer

Kicking myself over the new NIN album

Nin album cover

The other night I had the opportunity to buy the $300 superdeluxe edition of the new NIN album, Ghosts I-IV. I had my credit card details entered and everything:

Deluxe edition plus a four-LP set on 180-gram vinyl, which is packaged in a fabric slipcase. Two limited-edition Giclee prints are included; package is numbered and signed by Trent Reznor. Limited to a run of 2500, and one piece per customer.

Ultimately several things put me off. I paid $100 for a limited edition Icky Thump album and it was disappointing. I also felt it was too high a price, which I potentially couldn’t get back if I needed to (Icky Thump limited edition still remains on sale, and people are undercutting the official price).

Sadly it sold out within 24 hours and now I’m left with a yearning sadness deep within me. Curse you frugality.

Posted in Rants | Comments Off on Kicking myself over the new NIN album

American Idol auditions

This may be a bit late, but I was sent this explanation of the Dunning-Kruger effect by a work colleague.  It perfectly explains the reason behind the look of incredulousness on the faces of people auditioning.

Kruger and Dunning noted … “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”. They hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

  1. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
  2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
  3. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
  4. If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

Makes me wonder whether I’m imagining my Rock Band skills now…

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on American Idol auditions

Awful baby names

One of my pet peeves is the terrible “unique” baby names people give their children, ensuring a lifetime of confusion and taunts.

As much as I dislike linking to news.com.au (for reasons I am sure to go into in another ranty post), they have a story online that discusses the issue (and an unlikely cause, but hey, they need to make tenuous links to create news):

Parents are shunning traditional spellings for versions such as Alex-Zander, Cam’ron, Emma-Lee, Ozkah, Thaillah and Ameleiyah.

“The use of a ‘y’ instead of an ‘i’ has hit epidemic proportions, as has the use of ‘k’ over ‘c’ like in the names Jaykob and Lynkon, double letters like Siimon and Chriss and hyphens like Emma-Lee,” said Mr McCrindle, of private research agency McCrindle Research. The trend was due to the phonetic spelling in email and text messaging.

I honestly would love to have a discussion with one of these parents as to why they are doing this to their kids. I had it bad enough growing up with a hyphenated last name, let alone some crazy first name. It’s just selfishness in my opinion – but could it also be a sign of a hard-wired Lake Wobegon effect?

The best bit is of course an interview with said parent:

Jacquelene and Ashley Wilkinson named their daughters Briarna, born on February 15, and Maddisen, 16 months, in the hope of influencing their nicknames.

“We wanted conservative, girly names for our children. I don’t like some of the more out-there names people are giving their kids,” Ms Wilkinson, from Bulleen said.

“We liked the sound of the name Brianna, but I didn’t want her be an ‘Anna’ because we like the nickname ‘Bree’, so we decided on Briarna.”

Ms Wilkinson had wanted to call her first daughter Madison, but a friend wasn’t so sure.

“She said, ‘God I hate names that rhyme. They must get so teased at school’ off-handedly once and I thought, ‘Oh no, what am I doing with Madison Wilkinson?’ But I’ve loved the name forever and didn’t want to give it up, so my husband and I were on the internet one night and saw the spelling Maddisen, and knew that was it.”

Posted in Rants | Comments Off on Awful baby names

Bay Area Economics

Since moving to the Bay Area I’ve realised there are a whole different set of different rules for pricing and economics here. Salaries, real estate, and commodities are all distinct from the rest of the US. With that said there is one site that I love that perfectly sums up the idiosyncracies here – Burbed.com:

Are they f’ing kidding me? The local economy isn’t generating jobs? Hello, Apple/Google/Facebook are still hiring like crazy. Even Yahoo is hiring (srsly). Most of the In-n-out’s are hiring too.

I don’t know what evil nefarious agenda Shea Homes has, but clearly they hate the Real Bay Area and are acting as economic terrorists. A cynic would have to wonder if they’re doing this to get concessions from the City of Mountain View.

http://www.burbed.com/2008/02/27/shea-homes-hates-the-real-bay-area-economic-terrorists/

Posted in Bay Area | Comments Off on Bay Area Economics

Improv Anywhere

I have been very impressed by these guys for a while – whether they’re taking desktop PCs into Starbucks, going shirtless at Abercrombie & Fitch or all wearing blue shirts at Best Buy. The latest has been to do group freezes in public locations. Recently they did Grand Central in New York, but my wife just sent me this one in London:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PupR5V9aE2s]

Posted in Amusing | Comments Off on Improv Anywhere