Travel tips

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On Tuesday I left Denver to visit some customers, expecting to return home on Wednesday.  It’s now Friday afternoon and I’m still not home.  As you probably know Denver got clobbered by a big snow storm that dropped 30 inches of snow at my house.  The Person Who Prefers Not To Be Blogged About just dug out this afternoon after being snowed in for almost three days.

I’m sitting in an airport still waiting to get home, so assuming I really do leave this afternoon I will have set a personal record for a flight delay of 48 hours.  Everyone I’ve talked to is surprised that I’m not upset about this, so I thought I would share a few travel tips that have helped me keep my good humor.

  1. Keep smiling – you really can choose your attitude.  Being annoyed is not going to help and it will just ruin your day.  Who would you rather help?  Someone who is mad and acting like a jerk or someone who’s taking the delays in stride?  I once got bumped into first class and got home while the guy ahead of me got stuck and probably had his baggage sent to Alaska.  The difference – he yelled at the gate agent because of a mechanical problem with the plane, and I simply smiled and told her that I understood it wasn’t her fault and that I appreciated her trying to get me home.  The longer the delay, the more fun it is to be smiling while everyone else is losing their head.
  2. Enjoy your time – yesterday I spent a few hours exploring the city.  I can work from anywhere and it was fun to sit in a new coffee shop and answer emails.  I enjoy seeing new places so no matter where I am I can find a new neighborhood to explore.  Having a portable GPS really helps too.  I just head off in an interesting direction, knowing that I can always get back to my hotel.  Now that I’m at the airport, I’m catching up on emails, making a few calls and generally just enjoying some time where I have no choice but to sit still.
  3. Be creative – There might just be another route home that the airlines won’t volunteer, so having someone to help look for alternatives can mean the difference between getting home and spending another night away from home.  I’m lucky to have someone helping me who doesn’t take no for an answer, and for less than the price of another night in a hotel I’m (fingers crossed) going to be home tonight.  The airline originally said I would not get home until sometime next week.
  4. Travel light – I have a small bag that I don’t have to check, so last minute changes don’t disrupt my travel as much.  I sometimes have to buy new clothes on the road, but it gives me something to do when I get stuck.
  5. Keep it in perspective – I’m traveling on business and I’m on my way home.  There are lots of people in the world who have it a lot worse than I do, even if I do sleep in a terminal tonight.  This is a bump in the road.

Safe travels!

Terry

Customer obsessed and company values

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I happened to meet a person from Amazon.com this week and when I was introduced to him and I said, "I’m a customer" the first thing out of his mouth was, "Are you happy?  Are we doing a good job?"  I love that, especially since it was pretty far from his job description to care about individual customers.  (Or so I thought)

I’m a big amazon.com fan.  It seems like they are always innovating and everything they do seems to be designed to make it easier for the customer.  I made my first amazon.com purchase in September of 1996 – ten years ago – and in that time I’ve had two problems, and both were resolved not just to my satisfaction but each resolution exceeded my expectations.

A few years ago I bought a Wise Crackin’ Shrek and Wise Crackin’ Donkey from amazon.com.  (They do speech recognition – it’s my job to understand this stuff.)  Donkey was fine, but Shrek was stuck in demo mode.  On Saturday I went to the amazon.com website and filled out a return request page.  On Sunday I discovered an email saying that a new Shrek was being shipped on Monday to me, and that I should return the broken Shrek, postage paid by amazon.  The new Shrek arrived on Tuesday as promised.  I became an even bigger fan.

Thinking about my new amazon friend I did a little poking around on the website and found the company values.  Sure enough, number one is Customer Obsession, and number four is Ownership.  This person definitely fits the values.  If you are a skeptic about the idea of company values, like I was once, think of it like this.  Company values are the basic characteristics that you look for when you hire a new person.  The person’s character really.  And sometimes they are the characteristics that force you to fire a person.  If you find yourself saying, "they just didn’t fit" then it was probably a values mismatch.

Jim Collins writes about core values in Built to Last, which of course is a bestseller on amazon.com.  I see that he also now has a great selection of mp3s available on his website, including one one titled "Getting Back to Values and Other Lessons on IBM."

Disclaimer:  Years ago I bought a few shares of amazon.com for my IRA, but that’s not why I’m writing this.  Also if you buy anything I’ve linked to on the amazon.com website, I make a dollar or two, but trust me that doesn’t even pay my monthly hosting bill.  I just really admire the company and it was fun to meet someone who works there and who really is customer obsessed.

Update One  This is what I’m talking about.  I just checked to see if I had the link to Built to Last correct, and I noticed something new.  For some time, amazon has made it possible to view pages from a lot of the books they sell, but you could only view excerpts.  Here’s what I saw today:

Amazonreader Online books?  What online books?  It turns out that I have nine books that I’ve purchased in the past that can be upgraded to "read online."  The price to upgrade ranges from $2.49 to $10.59.  What’s really interesting is that of the seven books, four are by local authors Jana Matthews, Richard Hackathorn and Theresa Szczurek.  Cool!

Thank you Apple, Thank you Zune

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Rather than rant about which is better, an iPod or a Zune, which I frankly got tired of hearing the same afternoon I got my Zune, let me say thank you to the iPod developers and to the Zune developers.  Long ago, before there were any MP3 players or digital music of any kind, I became passionate about all kinds of music.  This was even before 8-tracks.  I had a nice stereo and I would sit in front of it for hours with my guitar trying to imitate what I heard.

Fj_on_the_zune

During college when I should have been listening to even more music, I was working to make a living and the music all but died for me.  I still played the guitar, but not so much.  Skip ahead to the iPod being released.  I didn’t get one on the day it was released like I did with the Zune, but I soon found my passion for music again.  It wasn’t just that I could take my music on trips or to the office that made the difference.  I think it was the simple idea of playlists.  Suddenly I could easily organize my music and play what I felt like listening to at any moment.  I ranked my music compulsively from the beginning and so I always had a playlist of “Most favorites, least played.”  Although I bought a few tracks from iTunes, I still mostly bought CDs and ripped them to the iPod.  In fact I bought a lot more CDs thanks to MP3s.  Most CDs were ripped and put on the shelf and never touched again.

Last month the Zune was released, and now the way I listen to music has changed radically again.  Music makes me really happy, and I’m listening to more of it and I’m discovering new types of music too.  I do like the Zune better than the iPod, but that’s not the point of this post or really the reason that I’m listening to new music.  Every Zune comes with a free 14 day free trial of Zune’s subscription music service – that’s what changed everything.  I may never buy another CD.  I’ll warn you, if you try it you may get hooked just like I did.

Here’s how it works.  You install the Zune software on your computer and then sign up for the Zune Pass subscription service through the Zune Marketplace.  Then you can search by artist, song, genre, album or year.  There are also lots of “Top whatever” lists.  Most songs, but not all, can be downloaded and transferred to the Zune.  At $14.95 a month, it’s still going to be too expensive for a lot of people to justify, but I probably spend that much on CDs now and some of them are duds.  With the subscription service I can download as many albums or a track as I want with the only limit being the size of my hard drive.  If I don’t like an album, rather than being out the price of the CD, I just delete it.  There is one big catch.  If I ever stop paying the subscription fee, the tracks that I downloaded stop working.  You don’t have to use the subscription service though.  You can still buy tracks from the Zune Marketplace, just like iTunes, and purchased tracks never expire and can be burned to a CD.

Because Zune allows the tracks to be played on three different computers, I’m going to have access to all my music at work, at home and even in the FJ, and of course on my Zune.  Even the Xbox 360 can access my Zune library at home making it easy to connect to a media center.

So thank you iPod for bringing music back into my life, and thank you Zune for opening up a world of new music.

Tech-time flies

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My friend and Editor-at-Large, Verna Wilder, writes about her first job as an operator at The Phone Company in San Francisco.  Verna always tells a great story.  It wasn’t that long ago that long distance calls were exotic and expensive.  Another friend of mine was telling me about being in college and how his uncle would allow my friend’s girlfriend to use his phone on Sundays so they could keep in touch.  He said the thought of it would help get him through the week, and he wonders if college students today are missing something with their instant communications.

I’m still fascinated by the idea that by dialing a series of numbers, I can make a bell ring almost anywhere in the world.  Yes, I’m easily amused.  Of course now I don’t have to "dial" or punch buttons – I can just say the name of the person I want to talk to (assuming they are in my contacts) and I’ll be connected.  Hmm, I think we’ve just come full circle, haven’t we? 

Crank_phone

Lee Shainis – Non-profit Entrepreneur

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I first met Lee Shainis a couple of years ago at an introductory meeting for Boulder’s Social Venture Partners.  Like many other entrepreneurs, he and his co-founder, Shawn Camden, started Intercambio de Comunidades because they saw an opportunity and they believed that they could get something off the ground that would make the world a better place.  They had very little money and they had never run a non-profit or any other organization for that matter, but they believed they could do it.  That’s all it took to get started, a strong belief in an idea and the willingness to take the first step.

Intercambio is now almost six years old, but I know from talking to Lee that his vision is great and that the organization is really just getting started.  Lee’s making a difference and just last week he started a blog about his experience as a non-profit entrepreneur.  Check out Lee’s blog here, and if you would like to know more about Intercambio, click here.

Happy Zune Day!

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It’s even nicer than I expected!

Update 1 There is new Zune software, it doesn’t plug in to Windows Media Player.  The screen isn’t much bigger than a video iPod, but it looks a lot better.  That’s my opinion and everyone else who has seen the two side by side that I’ve talked to.  The software did a great job of pulling in my old playlists and now it is searching for all my missing album art.  Very cool.

Update 2 I’m still very happy with the Zune.  One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that the Zune software can monitor multiple folders for new content.  What this means is that you can use a podcatcher to automatically update the Zune with podcasts.  I’ve done something else with it that I couldn’t do with iTunes, as far as I know.  I set up a directory on each of my computers called Zune that I sync using www.foldershare.com.  Now I can drop a photo, video, mp3 or podcast into the directory on any of my computers (including the FJ!) and it will automatically sync to the Zune next time I plug in.

There has already been a lot written about the Zune so it should be easy to find plenty of information online, but many of the early "reviews" were written by people who already had a bias and didn’t own a Zune.  The website Zunescene.com has a good list of reviews and while most people seem to love their Zune, it does seem fairly balanced.  There’s also a blog by one of the Zune Team members that I just discovered.

Here’s where I see this going.  The Zune is the first mainstream, connected media player and it is going to evolve from here.  I imagine that the Zune will be updated with new firmware throughout its lifespan, just as the iPod has been updated.  With a built-in WiFi radio, all sorts of new capabilities are possible.  Right now it is a bright-screened, better sounding, easy-to-use serious competitor to the iPod.  I can’t wait to see what updates are in store over the next few months.

Where did iTunes go???

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This afternoon I tried to start iTunes on my home computer and discovered that the icon that I keep in my task bar has gone missing.  Same for the Start Menu icon.  Digging deeper, I found that the executable is gone too, though the DLLs and my music are still there.

Now I remember that the new auto-update process kicked in last night to update iTunes and Quicktime, so maybe it failed.  Either that or iTunes has figured out that my new Zune will arrive next week.  Apparently some new sites will be launched with the Zune.  Check this one out and click on the tall robot.  The people-eating gumby creatures are fun too.

Update:  I guess I won’t be reinstalling iTunes after all, or at least not easily.  In case you can’t read the text of the error message below, it says "A later version of iTunes is already installed.  Installation of this version cannot continue."

Ituneserror

Update 2:  Video iPod for sale.  Available late next week.

Update 3:  The new updater doesn’t actually run the install program.  My shortcuts didn’t point to the install program so they didn’t run the install program as iTunes expected.  When I noticed that the installer had created new shortcuts, I was able to complete the installation.

Update 4:  Video iPod still for sale, available late next week.

Kansas City to Boulder Video

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Several people said they would have liked to have made the drive with me last week when I drove the FJ to Kansas City.  Here’s your chance, compressed down from about 12 hours to a minute and a half.  I had my web cam running all the way back from Kansas City to Boulder, saving a photo once every minute.  Most of the time I had EVDO wireless Internet service and I know of at least a few people who kept track of me by watching the web cam live on www.terrygold.com. It really was a fun trip and not boring at all.

Video: Kansas City to Boulder in the FJ Car Computer

Helping the community, one blog at a time

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Yesterday I was part of a panel talking to a great group of local non-profit organizations.  Jesse Sarles from Channel Four, Seth Levine from Mobius Venture Capital and I were asked to talk about The Wave of the Future – Non-Traditional Media – Utilizing the Internet, blogs and other non-traditional media to get the word out. 

It was exciting to meet so many people who are dedicating their time and energy to helping other people in the community.  It also re-enforced my belief that this technology stuff is still way too hard.  More than one person said that they have websites that someone developed for them and now they aren’t able to update it for themselves.  Most though had their websites and email working and were just curious about how blogging might help them get their word out to more people.

I think that starting a blog can still be pretty easy, but I’d like to offer these good people a hand.  If you can spend a tiny amount of your time helping one of these non-profits get started, drop me an email at tgold@goldsys.com and I’ll help you get connected.  If you are a non-profit looking for help, email me too and I’ll see if I can find someone who can help you get started.  It really isn’t that hard to do.

Stopin’ at IHOP

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I got an early start this morning and it has been a really nice drive. The leaves are turning and the air is crisp.

I listened to Internet Radio from Kansas City almost to Hays, which says great things about Verizon’s EVDO coverage. I really didn’t expect to have it work for most of the drive, but it has.

The webcam has been posting on 1 minute intervals and when I get home I’m going to turn the trip into a movie, compressed to a minute or two.

I had a great time at the Kauffman event and I’ll write more about that soon. My pancakes should be here in a moment and then I’ll be back on the road.