Probably not. Me neither. But our customer care team will be in the office all night long. It will be a really boring night for them, being new years eve. They are there in case you need them all day and night, every day including new years and christmas. So help kill their boredom tonight and open a support ticket.
I’m sure they’ll love me for this post.
Back home now. Beth and I are sitting on the couch watching Virginia Tech beat up on the Georgia Bulldogs. Couldn’t handle drinking tonight for this game. Too tired after 8 days on the road visiting family. We were in Gainesville TX for 6 days visiting Beth’s family, and then Fort Myers FL for 2 days visiting my grandparents again (Grandma turned 90… yep, two 90th birthdays in the same month, and tomorrow is their 68th wedding anniversary!)
So I’m playing with my blog instead… I just added FeedBurner’s “subscribe via email” feature. Check it out – it’s on the right side of my blog.
Quoting TechCrunch: “Based on some stats that Fred Wilson (an investor in FeedBurner) published last year, we can expect about 1 email subscriber for every 5 RSS subscribers.” Lets see if that is still true. Assuming FeedBurner provides these stats to their users, I will let you know my results in a few months.
VT is up 21-3 at the half. Go Hokies!
Update: god dammit Glennon
Webmail Mobile is awesome (webmail.mobi). I just caught up on a week’s worth of RSS feeds from the beach.
1994: No steady email account. Burned through at least eight AOL screen names with those "First 10 Hours Fee" accounts before they finally told me to stop. Also tried Compuserve and Prodigy. At this point just trying to figure out what this Internet thing is.
1995: First real email account – @vt.edu. Eudora 1.5.2 (I think). POP3, no SSL. Everything goes to my inbox. I delete mail after I’ve read it. Wanted to run OS2/Warp, but VT dept of Engineering required Windows 3.1.
1996: Switched to Netscape Mail. Still POP3 and no SSL. Upgraded to Windows 95.
1997: MS Exchange account at Lockheed Martin – @lmco.com. Used company directory and shared calendar. Also had an AIX Unix mailbox at Lockheed, but didn’t know how to use it.
1997: Signed up for first free webmail account so that I could talk to friends while at work – @hotmail.com. 2MB mailbox, so I must delete mail after I read it. Microsoft would buy Hotmail within a year.
1998: Assigned to Defense Messaging Systems (DMS) at Lockheed, where I got to play with the email encryption and archiving technologies used by the US defense department. My project was to integrate an Oracle + EMC archiving solution with MS Outlook clients. The archiving burden was placed on the email user via an "Archive This" button, which was pretty stupid.
1998: At some point back at VT I upgraded to Windows 98 and Outlook 98. Still POP3, no SSL for my @vt.edu account. Started using mail filtering rules to organize my inbox. Stopped deleting mail.
2000: Laptop crashes. A year of Outlook data lost. Reinstalled with Windows 2000 and Outlook 2000. Much more stable.
2000: Hosting my first mail server. Learning a lot. Still using POP3 without SSL. Religiously using mail filtering rules so that nothing goes to my inbox. Everything is organized.
2001: Finally switched to SSL. Had to run stunnel on the server to wrap the plain-text ports.
2002 – 2004: Still a big fan of POP3 and Outlook 2000. 100+ folders. 100+ filtering rules. Archiving anything older than 90 days to a separate PST file.
2004: Turned off Outlook’s auto-check feature. I hate getting interrupted by new email all day long. Now I must press Send/Receive to get new mail. Now I control my email rather than my email controlling me.
May 2005: Reached Outlook’s 2GB storage limit in my primary PST file, and Outlook is now dead and my data is corrupt. What a stupid MS bug. Tried at least 5 recovery programs before finding one that retrieved about 75% of my data. That’s it, I hate you Microsoft… switching to Thunderbird and IMAP.
June 2005: Loving IMAP! Loving Thunderbird! Set up all of my filtering rules via webmail so that it gets filtered during delivery. My mail folders look the same when I check webmail while traveling, which is incredibly convenient.
July 2005: Shit… Just realized that I there is no decent IMAP client for the Treo that can check 100+ IMAP folders efficiently. Many don’t even support nested folders. All are slow when they do. For now, when I travel I send a copy of all of my mail to a POP3 account and use VersaMail. Really need a 2 inch wide minimal html version of webmail.
Later 2005: Want to switch to webmail rather than Thunderbird, but webmail’s folder handling is still too clunky, and folders with thousands of emails are too slow for me to use. Sticking with Thunderbird IMAP for now.
June 2006: A ton of webmail performance improvements have been released this year. Large folders are now fast, switching between folders is now fast. Most everything is AJAXed. Here it goes… switching to webmail.
July 2006: Loving webmail, especially search! I miss multi-colored flags though (Thunderbird keywords). Lets see if I can push this feature with the webmail team.
Nov 2006: Sweet… multi-colored flags added to webmail beta during Hackathon 3. Thanks Steve!
Nov 2006: Finally… I can access all of my IMAP folders from my Treo, via Webmail Mobile.
Dec 2006: Started using webmail’s calendar now that beta has shared calendaring. Everybody at Webmail can see where I am every second of the day, and schedule meetings with me. Also switched all of my task lists to webmail.
Dec 2006: Oops. Used $75 in data transfer on my cell last month checking Webmail Mobile. Switching to Verizon’s unlimited data plan. Checking webmail from my Treo is going to be awesome over the holidays.
Dec 2006: 618 MB out of 10 GB used. I still have a habit of deleting emails that have large attachments. I should stop that.
Still need…
– notes inside of webmail (I use my Drafts folder for notes right now)
– file storage in webmail (again, I use my Drafts folder to store files right now)
– better contacts management in webmail
– calendar/contacts/tasks syncing between webmail and Treo
I received a random phone call today from a nice woman named Katherine, from Dell’s Executive Support department. Katherine said she came across my recent blog post discussing my problematic Dell order, and wanted to see if there was anything she could do to help. I told her that I had in fact received Beth’s new computer yesterday, and that we had set it up last night. We are very pleased with it.
Although, I told her that I never received my shipping notice or delivery notice emails. She’s looking into that.
I never expected to hear from anybody at Dell. Being the size of company that they are, I figured that even if a Dell employee did happen to find my post, it would never get to the right person and nothing of significance would come of it. Apparently I was wrong.
My conversation with Katherine quickly turned into me asking questions about how she found my blog post, and what Dell’s strategy is by contacting people that write negatively about them. She said Dell has launched a huge company wide customer loyalty initiative, and they are taking it very seriously. She said that they have 150 people who’s job it is to scour blogs, message boards and websites to find posts like mine. And then they do something about every one of them.
This is awesome, and I told her that. Props to Dell. That is how you run a business – even when you have 50,000 employees.
I placed an order for Beth’s new computer last Tuesday (Dec 5), and I had my first bad experience with Dell. Beth wrote about this last night too.
If you’ve ever ordered from Dell, you know that they are great about keeping you informed about your order. They email you an order acknowledgment, then a confirmation that the order has been placed, then another email when it ships, and finally another when it is successfully delivered.
Well, I received my order acknowledgment via email right away, but never received anything else from them. But I wasn’t concerned since Dell always seems to have their act together, so I let a few days go by. By Sunday I still had not received any other emails from them, so I logged into my Dell account to check on my order and the order was not listed anywhere. So finally concerned, I opened a ticket with Dell, and proceeded to wait….
On Tuesday I received my first response. A very generic email stating that they are unable to locate my order, and that I need to call their sales department. Great.
A few hours later, I received another email from Dell. This time from a real person, stating that they had indeed received my order but it is pending and not yet processed. They need to talk to me prior to releasing the order into production. So I call.
It turns out that the speakers I ordered must be ordered with one of their flat-panel monitors. Beth already has one of the required Dell flat-panel monitors, so I didn’t order one. I just wanted the speakers so that I could attach them myself. They said I’d have to remove the speakers from this order and place a separate order for them. Weird, but whatever. I removed the speakers from the order.
A 10 minute call to Dell fixed my problem, but…
Dell,
Why does something so simple confuse your processes?
Why did I have to contact you to fix the problem, instead of you contacting me?
Why couldn’t I see my acknowledged/unconfirmed order in my Dell account?
Why did you let me place this invalid order in the first place?
A few years ago I read a book called The Power of Full Engagement. Even though I was disappointed with the book overall, I’ve found my self referring back to one of it’s concepts.
The core concept was that you can maximize your performance by focusing your energy on a task for short periods of time, intermixed with periods of rest. When you focus, your whole self must be immersed in the purpose of the task. And much like exercise, you must have frequent periods of rest in order to recover so that over time your ability to focus becomes stronger.
The power of Focus is what I frequently think about from the book. I agree with it’s importance, but disagree with the frequency that the book says you need rest. The only people I know who break up their work day as much as the book suggests are smokers; albeit that doesn’t exclude them from my next point.
The most successful people that I know have the ability to focus their attention intently on a problem. However, rather than requiring frequent rest, these people have the unique ability to quickly reverse focus and deal with chaos – "the big picture". They have the ability to change gears on a dime in order to deal effectively with the people and the events that surround them.
Successful people divide their time between chaos, focus and rest. They have the ability to always control which state their mind is in. The ability to switch between these states without going insane is what drives their success.
Don’t read the book. Read the summary on Amazon instead. Because after you get past the basic concepts, the rest of the book is trying to sell you on their corporate training program.
Want to learn how to focus? A book on Tibetan Buddhism might be a better read.