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A Rant on Amazon’s Super Saver Shipping
Posted by – June 22, 2009
Mostly to save my Tweeps from a half-dozen tweets venting my frustration.
I ordered a HDHomeRun networked tuner and a chunk of ethernet cable from Amazon on Friday morning, June 12. The tuner was ordered from Amazon proper; the cable from whichever of their providers had it the cheapest. I opted for Amazon’s super-saver free shipping, both to save the $6 and because I didn’t have enough $$$ on the gift card I was using to pay for shipping.
Additionally, I ordered a RAM upgrade for my Mac Mini from newegg.com on Tuesday evening, June 16. It came with free shipping.
Now, as to arrival times.
The network cable shipped the same day I ordered it, and arrived in the mail on the 16th. Snappy response, well done to the Amazon retailer.
The RAM shipped from Newegg on Wednesday June 17th, and arrived this morning via USPS. 5 days, including the weekend. Not bad.
Amazon finally got around to announcing that my tuner had shipped on the evening of Tuesday the 16th. So it took them three full business days to even get around to shipping it. And the USPS tracking number they gave me says that yes, they entered the tracking number into the system on the evening of the 16th. However, the arrival scan for the package doesn’t show up until the afternoon of June 19th. So between the time they boxed it up and the time they actually got it to USPS was another three business days.
Now they’re telling me that the anticipated delivery date to my home in Iowa (from, per the tracking info, someplace in Kentucky) is not until Thursday, June 25th – a full two weeks after I ordered it, and a full nine days after they told me it shipped. I know the USPS isn’t the fastest carrier, but hey, that’s just awful.
I have had better shipping service from Amazon in the past – maybe this is just a fluke. Or maybe it’s part of a strategy to dissuade customers from actually choosing their free shipping option. Either way, it’s pretty awful.
End rant. Carry on.
Fever° Version 1.01
Posted by – June 22, 2009
This morning Shaun Inman pushed out (with notice via Twitter) version 1.01 of the Fever° feed reader. First of all, major kudos to Shaun for the auto-updater built in to Fever°. (Yes, I’ll go ahead and conform to the official naming of this tool, adding the little degree symbol to the end.) Once Shaun pushes the update out, Fever° will auto-update within 24 hours. Or, you can do an instant update from the menu. Very cool, very very simple. (Here’s the changelog for V1.01.)
I’m not sure exactly what all kicked loose, because it seemed like some feeds started working even before I pulled down the 1.01 update, but since updating Fever° is kicking butt. The scrolling issues I reported in V1.0 are all fixed, and the feeds appear to all be pulling in nicely. I’m gonna run it side-by-side with Google Reader for the day to make sure they seem like they’re catching the same stuff, and if Fever° passes that test, I’ll be saying adios to GR for the foreseeable future.
Now if I could just get him to set up some sort of referral bonuses…
Shaun Inman’s “Fever” a day later
Posted by – June 19, 2009
I’ve had a Fever install up and running for 24 hours now, and I’ve gotta compliment Shaun for working through the emailed bug reports – he responded back twice, once to acknowledge my email, and a second to ask if I had any tips on reproducing one of the errors I reported. ( I couldn’t reproduce it either.)
Where I am seeing problems, though, is in the feed updates. I thought it seemed kinda slow today activity-wise, so I just went and opened up Google Reader. Sure enough, GR has nearly 1000 unread items, just from the last 24 hours. I’ve seen maybe 200 or so in Fever today. I spot-checked a couple of feeds, and yeah, they’re missing. For instance, Andrew Sullivan over on theatlantic.com has at least a dozen updates since this morning… but Fever, even though it says it’s refreshing every 15 minutes, doesn’t have anything newer than 16 hours old.
My one fear with host-it-yourself apps like this is that all of the connectivity issues get thrown back upon the user (and webhost) to resolve – i.e. if there’s no other discernible bug, maybe it’s just something with your server. In this case, though, I think there’s something else going on.
Anybody else have any Fever reports, good or bad?
A first look at Shaun Inman’s “Fever”
Posted by – June 17, 2009
Twitter and the blogs have been abuzz today over Shaun Inman’s newest creation, called Fever. Some of you may be familiar with Shaun’s previous creation, Mint, a really nifty blog stats package that you host yourself. Inman is on familiar ground this time with Fever, creating a spiffy feed reader, full of AJAX-y goodness, suitable for hosting on your own website.
I’ve been a regular Google Reader user for years now, occasionally trying out other readers… there was that fling with Feedlounge, before it went under, and occasional dalliances with NewsGator’s line of readers… but I’ve always gone back to Google Reader. I took a look at Inman’s demo of Fever, though, over on feedafever.com, and knew it was time to give it a try.
Does the world really need another feed reader, anyway?
Creating a new RSS feed reader is no simple task. Taking accepted existing designs and improving on them requires creativity and good ideas about usability. Inman is on the right track here. But aside from the UI design, Inman has created a dual-purpose tool. On one hand, Fever is a traditional feed reader. You subscribe, it updates the feeds, you read. On the other hand, though, Fever is something like your own personal Digg. You can subscribe to all those noisy feeds, those linkdump feeds that occasionally have something interesting in them, and identify them as “Sparks”. Then Fever will aggregate them, pick out the hot topics, and present them to you in a “Hot” category, grouping them around a specific topic or link. This, to me, looks like the really slick part of Fever.
After the jump: my experience with installing Fever, importing my feed list, and some thoughts on usability and performance.
There are no chapter titles
Posted by – June 17, 2009
I think it really hit me when I saw the dirt bike. I hadn’t seen that dirt bike in years, but I remembered the story behind it. It had been bought cheap, fixed up in a garage, and when finally complete, was brought to a party at a friends’ house in the country. The owner rode it first, then handed the helmet to my wife. She proceeded to take it on a loop of the property, then lost control and ended up riding the thing directly into the corner of a limestone barn. Becky recovered within a couple of weeks from her spill, but when I saw the dirt bike sitting out waiting to be loaded into a moving trunk on Monday afternoon, I realized it had set for the last seven years with a bent rim waiting to be repaired.
On one hand you could say “come on, a bent rim, that’s an easy fix, why has it taken so long to fix it?”, and you’d be right. But having been friends with the owners of that bike for the past ten years, I know the stories of how life has intervened. Her chronic illness. His serious infection that cost him the vision in one eye. (No small thing for a pilot!) The business start-up. Later, the provision of a flying job. (Can you believe they let a one-eyed pilot fly 747s? I can.) The births of two delightful children. The struggles and joys of families, friends, church. I can very well understand why that dirt bike still has a bent rim. (On a side note: I wonder what projects I have sitting in the garage that still need completed…)
Monday afternoon I helped load the contents of these friends’ house into a long moving van. Assuming all went well yesterday, they drove the eight hours and arrived in Indiana where they are moving to be closer to family. With his gone-17-days-at-a-time work schedule, it makes sense for them, but we still hate to see them go.
Life has chapters, but there are no chapter titles. We can only turn the pages and see where this next chapter takes us. I look forward to an upcoming chapter that sees us visiting those friends in Indiana, and I have only one request for them: once you get the bike fixed, let somebody other than my wife ride it first.
Fox News, knee-jerk reactions, and out-of-context statements
Posted by – May 28, 2009
If my previous posts in which I declared my support for Obama and for civilly-recognized gay marriage weren’t enough to convince my church friends that I have become a heathen leftist Commie pinko, I’ll probably do it with this post. Why? Because I’m going to be mildly critical of Fox News and of those who blindly follow it.
Yesterday I linked to a Rod Dreher column entitled “I was wrong about Sotomayor speech”. (Yeah, there’s an article missing somewhere in that sentence, but live with it.) To catch anyone up who hasn’t heard about it, the controversial statement from Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was made in a 2002 speech at Cal Berkeley, where she said this:
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
There was (as one might expect) immediately a lot of noise made by conservative groups like the Judicial Confirmation Network and bloggers (I’ll link Michelle Malkin here as just one example), and when I was on the treadmill at the gym for 30 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, Fox News host Glenn Beck had that quote up on the screen seemingly every minute of his show. And let’s face it: as a stand-alone statement, it seems bad. It’s not the sort of thing that a “judges apply the law, they don’t make it” conservative like me likes to hear at all.
So back to that Dreher article I linked. Conservative columnist Rod Dreher candidly notes that after reading the full text of the speech in question, he says he is
…still a bit troubled by the remark, but not in any important way. Taken in context, the speech was about how the context in which we were raised affects how judges see the world, and that it’s unrealistic to pretend otherwise. Yet — and this is a key point — she admits that as a jurist, one is obligated to strive for neutrality.
And then he quotes another passage from Sotomayor’s speech, one that didn’t ever make the screen at Fox News:
While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law. Although I agree with and attempt to work toward Judge Cedarbaum’s aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases.
Now, that puts a whole different spin on things, doesn’t it? All of a sudden Judge Sotomayor sounds a lot less like a radical legislate-from-the-bench sort of judge and more like an idealist who nonetheless understands the role of the judge in the three-branch governmental system.
At this point I have to put a disclaimer in, because just as my support of civilly recognizing gay marriage caused friends to think that I no longer believe homosexual behavior is sin, this post suggesting that Judge Sotomayor isn’t quite as radical as Fox News suggests will cause some friends to think that I’m soft on abortion. So here’s the disclaimer. Judge Sotomayor does not appear to be the type of judge I’d prefer to see picked for the Supreme Court. I much prefer the staunch conservative views of Justices Roberts and Scalia, and the late Chief Justice Rehnquist. And abortion remains a heinous sin. OK? Are we cool? So let’s proceed.
Here’s the thing I want to get to in regard to Fox News: if you watch it and for a minute think that you’re really getting a “fair and balanced” view of the news, think again. Is it truly “fair and balanced” to hammer on Sotomayor for the one line that sounds bad, without bringing in the other line from the same speech that balances things out?
So next you’ll say to me “OK, Chris, we’ll admit that Fox News is biased towards the conservative viewpoint. But all the other networks are biased towards the liberal side, so why can’t we have our one network?” And that’s OK, I guess, as long as you recognize the bias. Because, let’s face it: if your only news source is Fox News, you wouldn’t even know they have a bias. (Me personally? I don’t watch TV news at all. But my news sources of choice should really be the topic of a separate blog post.)
So my plea to my friends this morning: read, watch, and listen widely. Think about things and come to your own conclusions. Don’t just assume that if it shows up on Fox News, it’s the gospel truth. (Don’t assume that it isn’t, either.) Be willing to see shades of grey in areas where there isn’t a black-and-white standard. And be gracious and loving to all as you do it.
10 years
Posted by – May 22, 2009
Last Sunday we visited Noelridge Park Church for the morning service so Laura could participate in the AWANA recognition Sunday. (She’s been a regular there in Cubbies even though we’ve not been attending Noelridge for the past 18 months.) As we got ready to go Sunday morning, I noted to Becky that it was nearly ten years, to the day, since the first time we visited Noelridge, immediately after we moved to Iowa.
That was then…
Ten years. Nearly a third of our lives to this point. In one sense I look back and say “wow, time flies”; but in another sense I look back and remember all that we have lived through in those ten years, and it does, indeed, seem like a long time.
- Ten years ago we had been married less than a year, two kids moving across the country to an unfamiliar city and state. Now we’re both into our thirties, have three kids of our own, and Iowa feels a lot like home.
- In ten years we’ve been from an old rental farmhouse in the country that leaked heat like a sieve in the winter, to unintentionally renting a house in town from the most notorious landlord in Cedar Rapids, to owning our own place, to starting to wonder when/if we’ll outgrow our own place and have to look for something else.
- In ten years we’ve gone from being young newcomers at a church to being in and out of leadership, to then dreaming up and leading a church plant, and then finally being led away from the church plant to participate in a different church.
- In ten years we’ve gone from knowing no one here to having made a lot of friends. Then it’s just sad to see them go. We were sad to see the Majerle’s move to Minnesota five years ago, though we were glad we could buy their house.
This summer, particularly, feels like the end of an era, with the Garner’s moving to Indiana and the Finley’s moving to Texas. I guess now we have new places to visit on vacations. - In ten years Becky’s job description has changed from “CAD drafter at a stone quarry” to “wood shop worker” to “mom of one” to “mom of two” to “mom of three“. I’m pretty sure she likes her current job description best.
- In ten years my job description has been more consistent, changing only from “software engineer” to “software team lead” to “software certification specialist”. I’m hoping to make the certification thing a long-term gig. Hopefully this fall it’ll all come together.
- In ten years I’ve gone from being a smooth-cheeked youngster with plastered-down hair to slightly-less-plastered-down hair to a beard and shaved head. I’ve had this look going for three years now, and think I’ll be keeping it for a while. Sooner or later I won’t have to shave the head as much.
- In ten years Becky is still the beautiful woman who took my arm and came to Iowa sight-unseen. She’s still kicking butt on the softball field every summer, growing yummy stuff in the garden, keeping our household running smoothly, and making our home a place I always want to come home to, and never want to leave.
I can only imagine the changes I’ll have to reflect on if I’m still writing on this blog or something like it ten years from now… teenaged kids, middle age… I can wait. But if the next ten years are as rich and full and wonderful as the past ten have been… I will (continue to) be a man most richly blessed.
This is now…
[Well, it's the latest I've got. We still haven't gotten a family photo taken since Katie was born.]
Canadian Travels and Weird Internet Friends
Posted by – May 15, 2009
This week business took me on my second-ever cross-the-border trip, once again to Canada, though this time to a part of Canada (Toronto) that felt much less alien then last time (Montreal). Something about them still speaking English in Ontario makes it a little more comfortable.
Anyhow, there wasn’t much time for sight-seeing as we sandwiched a day of customer meetings and round-trip travel into a 48-hour window, but I did get the chance to finally meet, in person, some “weird internet friends”: Dan, Laura, and Wally. First, a little photographic evidence, then, the narrative.
Dan and Laura:
Wally, Dan, and me:
It should come as no real surprise by now to anyone that reads this blog that I have a group of “weird internet friends”. We’ve had some visit in our home, and met up with others in Minneapolis, Nashville, Lincoln, and Charlotte. Each time I’ve found them to be decent, enjoyable people, and we’ve had great times visiting. I had a little extra anticipation this time, though; Dan and I had hit it off so well online that I figured our in-person meeting would either be brilliant or amazingly awkward.
This meeting fell into the brilliant category. Without minimizing my enjoyment of Wally’s company at all, I have to say that Dan and Laura felt less like new acquaintances and more like long-lost family. We had a fantastic time visiting, eating dinner, and drinking coffee far too late into the evening.
While it is a nearly 12-hour drive from Toronto to Cedar Rapids, I extended the invitation to Dan and Laura that I’d extend to any of my weird internet friends (and you know who you are) – any time you have a long weekend and want to come visit, we have a spare bedroom, an expandable dining room table, and all the excitement of Eastern Iowa for you to enjoy on your visit. Hope to see you soon.
