This past Christmas my mother-in-law bought my father-in-law a new notebook computer. It was intended to replace his current laptop, which was so far beyond long in the tooth that it was being sized for dentures. (It was a Pentium II running Windows ME. No, seriously.)

His computing needs are very modest so she chose a budget model from a large well-known manufacturer that was a huge step up from the current one. So long as it was able to accomplish three tasks life would be good.

1. Connect to AOL via a modem because they live in an area that is unreachable by cable or DSL.
2. Play Windows card games
3. Run an old version of Excel to keep track of some finance stuff and some sports statistics.

So that’s the stage, we’re not talking giant needs in computation here. The problem is that after a few months the new computer stopped being able to accomplish item #1. The internal modem would no longer detect a dial tone, and even stranger an external USB modem had the same problem. Blame whomever you want, Vista, the manufacturer, Congress, the French, it makes no difference. The bottom line here is that the thing simply doesn’t work.

After I took a look at it, having to resurrect knowledge of modems that I had purged from memory years ago, I came to the conclusion that they’d need to use the warranty and contact the manufacturer to get it fixed. They’ve had the machine for eight weeks now. The call center in India kept explaining that it was at “our highest level of priority” to the point where the mother-in-law gave up and called the corporate office looking for help. Now she has the direct number and name of a guy there and I’m not even sure he’s in the support division.

My advice to him, get it fixed however you can. Ship a brand new machine if you have to. She’s not shy and is very persistent. If she claims she’ll call you, your boss, your mom, your dog, your cousin’s boyfriend’s college roommate twice removed she’ll do it. I cannot stress to you enough the seriousness of your situation.

What this whole story really highlights is the myth of customer support or rather the myth that it is nothing but a loss vehicle at a company. Sure it can be expensive to have competent, trained people working in support. It can also look mighty tempting to cut costs here. But here’s the trick, nothing, and I repeat nothing, will stand out more in the minds of your customers that good customer support. On the flip side, you can spend as much time as you want with whatever grand methodology you choose creating the most bug free software in the entire wide world but it can all fall apart with poor customer support.

When I had a DVD drive go bad in an iBook the guy at the Apple store immediately offered to swap out the entire computer. When I had a heat shield pull off, out of warranty, on an Acura I used to own the dealer replaced it for free and gave me a loaner on the spot. These are examples of places where I will continue to spend obscene amounts of money thanks to support. I’ll also recommend them to anyone I know that is looking for such a thing.

Heck, one time I even wrote to Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster with a question and I wasn’t even a customer of his. It didn’t matter, fifteen minutes later I got a response. That reminds me, I need to go pick up a copy of Delicious Library 2.

At the same time when I had a furnace go out in the dead of winter and called their “on call” guy to come fix it I could tell that his claims of being booked for the night were false. This was because, well, I COULD HEAR THE NOISE AT THE BAR IN BACKGROUND.

I’ll bet you can guess whether or not they got the business when the furnace finally kicked the bucket two years later.

I don’t usually talk about the internal workings at Seapine but in the case of our support organization I’ll make an exception. I do this largely because of the level of seriousness we take it since we have found, over and over again through interaction with paying customers, that it is a competitive advantage for us. All of our support people are full time employees and all of them actually know the products they support. We don’t have call scripts because that encourages the idea that you can plug just anyone into that role so long as they can read. The entire organization is overseen directly by our VP of Quality so he is responsible for internal testing before release and the ongoing help after release. We do follow up surveys with customers that call or email in making sure that the level of support they received was satisfactory. The majority of them are even located at the same physical facility as the developers. It is a huge deal for us, something that we can provide that others choose not to. It has without doubt made us far more money that it costs.

FAR more money.

Do you know the best thing though? It fulfills the modern American dream. It keeps mother-in-laws from repeatedly calling. (I joke with love. Really. No need to call.)

So yesterday I got to have surgery to have my nose put back in the right place after my adventure playing soccer.

Anesthesia, drugs, my doctor, being able to get it done before the stupid thing starting healing and thus avoiding having to re-break it, all Very Good Things. Having the doctor tell you that the break was worse than expected since it was moved both over and in, notsomuch.

Here’s a picture of being normal:

And here’s a picture of smiling:

Smiling for whatever reason moves the face into a position where the nose actually hurts. I’ll have to wear the splint for a couple of weeks and it will be more time after that before I’m allowed to do anything vaguely athletic. On the plus side they say that pink is the new black so my splint is at the cutting edge of trendy.

In unrelated news, if you’d like to a picture of me before my nose breaky breaky craziness I’ve been interviewed in the February 2008 print issue of Dr. Dobb’s.

Now back to my regularly scheduled painkillers.

So for the faithful readers of this blog it has been a slow week with no real updates. It hasn’t been because there wasn’t anything going on, quite the contrary in fact. Let’s start at the beginning.

My wife is currently 32 weeks pregnant with our second kid. Our first kid is about three and a half years old and has a bedroom on the second story of our house. The bedroom location is important because on Monday night, after having tucked said kid into bed, my wife decided to fall down the stairs. Well, truthfully, it was less a decision and more a stroke of truly bad luck. I even got to see the whole thing happen from the comfort of my couch.

Not Good Times.

By the time I made it over to her, in sprinter speed that I didn’t know I had, she was already hurting pretty bad. Maternal instincts had kicked in and instead of falling forward she leaned backwards thus saving the new baby from any harm. The side effect was that her right leg got pinned behind her as she fell. My thought at the time:

“There is no way she didn’t just tear all the ligaments in her knee and ankle.”

I’ve seen some pretty gruesome falls in my day but that one takes the cake. So after a quick calm down, followed by her starting to go into shock, I woke up the kid, carried the wife to the car, and drove to the urgent care down the street. It turns out that she didn’t break any bones (amazingly) and it doesn’t appear that there is any actual ligament tears. Sure, there are some world-class strains and sprains but all things be equal it really couldn’t have turned out better. The only downside is that she can only walk with an aircast and even then only very slowly. Oh, and the fact that she is pregnant and can’t take drugs stronger than regular Tylenol.

Ok, so the second downside is a HUGE one.

So if that alone was all that happened this week things would be ok. But, as you’ve guessed already, of course that wasn’t it. The second shoe to drop happened just this evening during the first half of my indoor soccer game. I jumped up to head the ball clear from in front of our goal. It turns out that a player on the other team had the same idea although I got in the air first. Thus we met when I was coming down and they were coming up.

They brought the top of their head to the party. I brought my nose.

Not Good Times.

So after a blinding shot of pain I found myself on the ground. Now, I’ve been hit in the nose plenty of times and usually you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The pain was subsiding pretty quickly when I raised my hand to my face and promptly started to bleed. A lot. A whole lot. By the time I made it to the bathroom there was a blood trail of where I walked. After I had a handful of towels to try to stop making a giant mess everywhere I looked in the mirror.

Uh-oh.

That friends and neighbors is a nose that is not in the same place of where I last left it. The bright side was I knew the hours of the urgent care where I had just taken my wife so I gathered my stuff, grabbed some more towels, and drove over. Much to my surprise the same doctor that saw my wife was working tonight so he gave me a funny look when I walked in holding my nose with blood all over my arms.

Doctor: “You look familiar, have I treated you before?”

Me: “Not exactly, you treated my wife who fell down the stairs two days ago. This hasn’t been our week.”

Doctor: “No kidding.”

After an examination and a bunch of x-rays the medical community confirmed what I knew in the soccer bathroom. That nose is broken.

To add insult to injury (Ha! Get it?) this urgent care had neither the drugs nor the tools necessary to realign the old sniffer. That means I get to play the “Make an appointment with an ENT tomorrow” to get this honker fixed.

After I left the urgent care I then got to go home and break it to the broken wife that I too had been broke up. And gone to the same urgent care. And saw the same doctor. (Although when I explained how she was doing he was pleased with her progress. I suppose that saves a co-pay by not having her come in for a follow-up.)

So my advice to you my dear readers would be to stay as far as humanly possible away from me. I’m not joking. So far my dark aura has limited itself to knees, ankles, and noses all of which are not mission critical parts. With my luck though the aura is just warming up so for your own safety I suggest just staying out of my way. But if you don’t, or if you’re a risk taker, or you have a death wise, I happen to know a great urgent care facility.

So I just got the link this morning that one of my articles got picked up by Dr. Dobb’s online.

Pretty cool. 

I’ll be more than happy to sign anyone’s monitor that reads it. (Sorry, local monitors only.)

I promised I would post the picture when it got downloaded from the camera. That is one expensive motorcycle right there.

Note: I’m going to try to do a series of daily recaps about my trip to the SD Best Practices conference in Boston.

So the best thing to do when you miss updating a day is to just smush it in with the next one. It is basically for this reason that the ampersand was invented.

During the mornings of the last two days I’ve been able to take in a few more sessions. One was pretty good, a couple were ok, and one was downright awful. But, considering I only had one real dud in my entire time here that’s not half bad. (I guess it would be more like 1/7th bad.) The afternoons were then spent hanging out in the Expo booth talking with people or wandering around talking with journalists.

One of the biggests kicks I had at the Expo was seeing the Intel Chopper that was built by Orange County Choppers. I’d post an image of it but the pictures I took are on Angie’s camera. The matter is further complicated in that Angie’s camera isn’t actually hers, it belongs to Rick who I hear borrowed it from Kelly. The end of this story is that someone that isn’t me has the cable needed to get the pictures and whoever that is is probably in Cincinnati right now. I’ll post them once I get back.

Another interesting thing I’ve been doing this week is looking at the type of notebook computers that are being carried around. In our group there was me with the Mac and then seven other Dells running Windows XP. My unscientific survey showed this percentage to be a little high, I would say there was approximately one Mac for every nine XP laptops.

Notice that I said Windows XP specifically.

I saw nothing running any kind of Linux.

I saw nothing running Vista. Interesting isn’t it?

That’s all for tonight, tomorrow morning is more fun with flying.

Note: I’m going to try to do a series of daily recaps about my trip to the SD Best Practices conference in Boston.

The conference is officially on. I mean it’s ON. Well, I guess that’s how the kids would say it. Today was the tutorial/experimental day of the week which is a fancy way of saying that the classes were three and a half hours a long.

I attended a Design Patterns session in the morning and after lunch it was a few hours of XUnit Testing Smells.

Now, I should take a moment here and explain a little bit about these conferences work. Generally what happens is that someone has a written a book about something that they then turn into a presentation. For illustrative purposes we’ll call this person The Teacher. To keep everything clear we’ll refer tor everyone else as The Class.

The Teacher, or perhaps the The Conference Organizers, then give the name of the session a catchy title in order to attract more members of the The Class. It’s a simple operation that you can try at home. First, you need the list of acceptable words:

Agile
XP
SCRUM
Test Driven Development
Patterns
Unit Testing
Requirements
Smells
Refactoring

To make a session title just stitch as many of those words as you want together. For example:

Refactoring SCRUM Unit Testing Requirements to Patterns
Test Driven Development XP Smells
Applying Agile Patterns Unit Testing Requirements

I jest with nothing but love. Actually not love, I refactored it to adoring this morning and encapsulated it into a Bridge Pattern.

On the surface it sounds like a great deal of marketing and not a whole lot else. If you walk in with a real cynical attitude toward it, you’ll probably find it that way as well. “I’ve been developing sofware for sixteen million bazillion years and, well quite frankly I’m the cat’s meow so I’m not going to buy into this marketing drivel. Where’s the bar?”

Truth be told though, this kind of thing is a great way to push the boundries of what you thought you knew. I mean, just this morning I woke up and bought up a bagel quite convinced that unit tests couldn’t smell. Now I know they can. Who knows what I’ll learn tomorrow, maybe I’ll get an English muffin and see what that brings.

Note: I’m going to try to do a series of daily recaps about my trip to the SD Best Practices conference in Boston.

First things first, I really don’t care to fly. It isn’t that I’m afraid of heights or anything like that, I just find the whole ordeal uncomfortable. Waiting in airports, waiting on airplanes, sitting on airplane seats, the whole thing I’d just as soon avoid.

Of course driving for hours and hours bores me to tears so flying becomes the lesser of two evils. Comfort aside, at least you get to where you are going fast.

Anyhow, because the first day of conference is Tuesday, and the sessions start bright and early at 8:30am, I flew in on Monday. It was this flight that allowed me to experience something that has never happened to me before on a commercial airline:

My flight got in 25 minutes EARLY.

Apparently I wasn’t the only person shocked by this since the grounds crew was nowhere to be found when we pulled to the gate. The captain had to get on the intercom to explain that we’d thrown them for a loop with our super promptness.

I can just imagine the conversation now.

Control tower (calling grounds crew): “Flight 6343 has just arrived at gate A12 twenty five minutes early. They are requesting baggage unload.”

Grounds Crew: “Uhh, tower, did you say early.”

Control Tower: “That’s an affirmative, we repeat they got in early, copy.”

Grounds Crew: *Silence*

Control Tower: “Copy that grounds crew.”

Grounds Crew: “Right, uh, tower we’re talking this over down here, what does the word ‘early’ actually mean? None of us have heard it before here.”

After finally being allowed off of the plane all that was left was the typical white-knuckle taxi drive through the Williams tunnel to the relative safety of the hotel. More updates coming once the show actually begins.

Here it is friends and neighbors, the introduction of a new internet word that you’ll soon grow to hate, iPhlogging.

Yes, you guessed it, its blogging on an iPhone. (Although in this case it is viewing a blog.)

Disclaimer: This isn’t a picture of my iPhone since I don’t have one. This is a picture from one of the adoring fans of my blog.

Disclaimer Two: No, my Mom didn’t buy an iPhone either. I actually have real fans.

Disclaimer Three: Fine, it is actually from the best man from my wedding who bought it and I made him take a picture. I’m still going to count him as a fan though.

Disclaimer Four: Alright, I didn’t even come up with the term iPhlogging, that was his wife. So, essentially, I brought very little to the table. But I did take the time to post this, that ought to count for something.

Update One/Disclaimer Five: After the initial post I got this email from my friend disclaiming Disclaimer Four.


I forgot to check the sending account on mail. That one should have come from me. I'm also the originator of iPhlog. The world deserves the truth.

Sent from my iPhone


So after giving the acceptance speech for the Jolt Award, Paula, our fearless Product Manager, got a chance to be on the ScobleShow. That meant she had a chance to talk about Seapine, product development, and all that kind of stuff.

Well, actually, it may have been before the Jolt Award. And come to think about it Paula might not be completely fearless given her anxiety about giving an interview on camera. On the plus side the other 50% of the opening paragraph of this post is completely true. Besides, she pulled off the interview with aplomb even after I kept saying things like:

“You know that show is watched by like millions of people.”

Thinking back on it now I wonder if I’m to blame for that nervous twitch she developed right before she left. Nah, it was probably just something she ate.

Anyhow here are some links.

The full blown interview. This video has the entire conversation.

The demo. There’s even a cookie at the end of it. Seriously. A really expensive one too.

And a little “best moments of” video. This one is kind of like those catch-you-up-on-an-entire-season shows of the full interview. To put it into cookie terms, to continue a theme, it is like those little 100 calorie Oreo packs.