Month: August 2007

Among the funniest 5-minutes in the history of film
http://youtube.com/v/6aFUv2KO8So
Mother?
Not mother? This kills me.

Don’t email us, call us

The Times today has a piece on how Netflix, in an effort to distinguish itself through customer service, based its call center in Oregon (I guess as opposed to some off-shore, accented locale) and dropped email as a route to customer service, feeling people wanted to talk to a human. Fools. Phones are for losers. Phones are for the digital have-nots. Phones are for lonely people who would otherwise talk to their cats.

“Netflix’s decision to greet anxious consumers with a human voice, not an e-mail, is also unusual in corporate customer service. “It’s very interesting and counter to everything anybody else is doing,” said Tom Adams, the president of Adams Media Research, a market research firm in Carmel, Calif. “Everyone else is making it almost impossible to find a human.”

Southwest Airlines also doesn’t read its email, and this post is sparked by yet another pissed off SWA customer who was beached somewhere due to a delayed flight and is perturbed she can’t fire off an electronic hate missile. (I‘m still waiting, SWA, just ask, and the post gets croaked).
Okay. We all hate email. I hate receiving it, have nearly a 1,000 cluttering my work inbox, and have three other addresses ranging from my churbuck.com vanity address to various spamcatchers and Gmail variants. Yes, electronic mail sucks ass as its name is usually spam, but the notion of cutting off email as a customer service mechanism is utterly insane to me.

I dislike the phone a lot more than I dislike email. First off, I don’t want to talk to some solicitious human (who may be monitored to insure blah blah). I don’t want to navigate phone prompts, press star, say “More Options”, and finally get to some perfectly nice stranger who, for all I know is in maximum security prison doing time for heinous crimes. The phone sucks, is low-tech, and when it rings in my house it generally brings bad news in the form of bill collectors, college fund raisers, or the Police Athletic League looking for money to put another graduating class through the Sheriff’s Youth Camp where it is better to build boys than repair men.

So, go for it Netflix, turn off your email. Next time my copy of the 300 skips and pixelates and I want satisfaction I do not want to talk to you about it. I want to email-the-facts-Jack, and be done with you. If I want a conversation I will call my Mom.

Blue Crab Abundance

 Blue Crabs return
:Blue crabs have been showing up in estuaries from one end of Connecticut to the other, and have proved to be particularly abundant this year, officials and recreational crabbers said. “That’s what we’re hearing,” said David Simpson, associate director of the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Marine Fisheries division in Old Lyme. “We’re getting a lot of calls. I’ve been out myself.”

This from the Stamford, CT Advocate by way of Capecodtoday.com, verifies what Cousin Pete was learning all June — there are a shitload of blue crabs around, very tasty crustaceans one traps and then steams with a ton of Old Bay spice. Hard pickings, but the best crab meat there is. Pete was so overloaded with them (I can manage four at a sitting), that he pulled the traps and let them be.

from Bluecrab.info
Trapping isn’t nearly as fun as stalking them at night with a flashlight and a net. The pugnacious suckers make their stand and wind up in the bucket.

One of my favorite analogies of all time, one used to describe the tendency of some-naysayers, pessimists, and weasels to put down success is to call them crabs, after the observation that if you study a bucket of crabs long enough, one intrepid crab will stand on its tippy-toes, get a claw onto the handle of the pail, and begin to pull itself up and out towards freedom.

And every time the crabs below it reach up, grab the escapee, and pull them back into the doomed mob.

I guess our estuaries are completely doomed by human cess. — Callinectes sapidus  is doing fine for now.

I highly recommend Beautiful Swimmers by William Warner, a great book on the culture and natural history of the Chesapeake crab fishery.

NYC in mid-August

Streets are vacant. Like a scene from The Omega Man. All sentient creatures are on Nantucket or in the Hamptons. Me? Two days of intense meetings, then back to the Cape. Beautiful flight in this morning from Hyannis — came in low over Nantucket and saw swarms of bonito breaking in the channel between Tuckernuck and Muskeget.

Free or Paid — WSJ.com

NEIL BUDDE

Neil Budde was the founder of the Wall Street Journal Online in 1995 — and is now the editor in chief at Yahoo News. I’m dying to hear his opinion on the question of what would happen if News Corp. were to drop the longest standing and most notable of the newspaper cost-walls.

“Budde and his team recognized that the Internet offered a better technology platform for achieving their goals. Work switched to the Internet in early 1995, and the team launched its first site – Money & Investing Update – in July of that year. In April 1996, the team rolled out the full Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition and stunned many observers by announcing that it would soon begin charging for access to the site. It stuck with that business model through the Internet bubble and steadily grew the subscriber base as well as advertising revenue, achieving a cash-flow-positive status in late 2002.”

The Wistful Weekend

Strange, maybe it’s come on with age, but it seems the time to start mourning the summer came early this year, brought on as it usually is by a cold front and a shift in the wind from the southwest to the northeast.

Then again, the old days, when summer ended in a parade of Volvos laden with bicycles and teary children on Labor Day, are long gone, replaced by a new end of summer — the middle of August. It seems the classic definition of school vacation no longer is true. Colleges get started before September, most public schools, especially those in the south start in mid-August,   never close their doors.

What has brought on this early termination of summer? I have heard the theory that standardized testing, and the impact it has on teacher salaries and job security makes it compelling for educators to get kids back in school before the lessons of the previous year have faded. Sounds specious to me.

Anyway, as a townie in a vacation land, the good side is the place clears out a little, and left turns become possible again. The downside is sad faces and the unmistakable feeling that the days are growing shorting, the flower garden looking a little tattered, and the pungency of a New England autumn is a little more than a month away.

Camping – Wikipedia

Camping – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Camping describes a wide range of activities. Survivalist campers set off with little more than their boots, whereas recreational vehicle travelers arrive equipped with their own electricity, heat, and patio furniture. Camping may be an end unto itself, but often it is done in conjunction with other activities, such as hiking, swimming, fishing and binge drinking.”

Any other WP bloggers have problems formatting headlines with the YouTube blog-post function?

All my video posts out of YouTube never carry titles/headlines. Attempts to go in and code them in the HTML always hose the blog formatting. I know there are some video embed plug-ins, but Mark and Esteban — the men who know WP — have told me to stay away from further plug-in dicking around.

Whereabouts week of August 13, 20

8.13 – Monday, Cape Cod

8.14-15 – Tuesday/Wednesday, New York City

8.16-20 – Thursday-Monday, Cape Cod

8.21-23 – Driving daughter to University of Virginia, freshman orientation