When I blew my iPod, I swore for a while. But I don’t have the money to spend on replacing it, especially with no money coming in the door. So I cracked it open and fixed it. It’s actually not that tough if you’re careful and willing to tinker – I searched for other people who’d replaced the hard drive, found some good instructions, and viola, I’m back listening to music a few days later.
Woo-hoo for cheapness.
Book research takes me back to looking through Robert Anton Wilson’s stuff, leads to RU Sirius #78: Robert Anton Wilson Lives!. RU Sirius then leads to number #84: Hal Robins aka Dr. Hal joins us to talk about Secrets of the Subgenii; underground comix, and his latest book, Dinosaur Alphabet…
I recognize Hal Robins’ voice immediately, think “there’s no way” then decide to go look it up. And yup, Hal Robins is Harry S. Robins, and did the voice for Dr. Isaac Kleiner in the Half-Life games, so it turns that without knowing it, I was familiar with his work:
– as a voice actor in some of my favorite computer games
– as a fiction writer and
– with the SubGenius
and knew him, vaguely, from the comic stuff, without ever putting any of these aspects together.
It felt weirdly satisfying, like putting the last piece into a jigsaw puzzle I hadn’t known I was working on.
I’ve always scoffed at Apple’s assertions that iPods are reliable, since they’re not. Anyway, I killed another one today. How? I was sitting in my office chair, listening to it. No drop, no trauma, just sad ipod icon. And what with being unemployed… yup.
So, to sum up:
Apple’s claimed iPod failure rate: 0%! Possibly less than zero.
Macintouch’s survey: ~14% (link)
My experience: 100% in a sample of four, not including a dead replacement iPod shipped to me.
woooowheee.
Short version: If I don’t manage to sell the next book proposal or some stories quick, I’d probably go back to Expedia, but they’re slashing headcount and it doesn’t look like there are program manager jobs. So I’ve been keeping an eye out for other jobs.
Today, I came across one – I described it to a friend as “this listing looks like 50% ‘exactly what I describe the job I’d be willing to return to working regular hours for’ and 50% ‘I’m not sure if I have the accounting/cost experience, or if what they’re describing is really what I’m reading…'”
So I hemmed, hawed, and finally dropped them a line. I figure there are a couple possible outcomes:
1. They toss it in the round file as a poor fit
or
2. They’re intrigued enough by the 50% perfect fit that we talk, and
2a. decide the gap’s too far
2b. decide to talk some more, in which case
3. After talking some more, we decide
3a. there’s no fit
3b. maybe something could be worked out, in which case
4. we discuss what that might look like, and
4a. no agreement’s possible
4b. we reach an agreement and I go back to work
I don’t know how I feel about this, having done it, except that the chance the job is actually an amazing opportunity made it worth it. We’ll see. In the meantime, this establishes that as conflicted as I might be about wanting to get back into IT, I’m at least vulnerable to pitches.
Hey, Hate Life, Will Travel is on the move, and should be up (and on a new, quite lovely WordPress setup) soon.
First, I’m a huge beer drinker. There’s a good chance that if a bar has fifty taps I’ll have tried them all, and if not, I’m going to start down the list.
Second, I’m not a beer snob. When I had money, I loved my Deschutes beers, and Anchor Steam is my favorite beer, but I’m happy to crack open a can of Budweiser at a barbecue or have an MGD with my father-in-law, who only buys Miller.
This is a valuable trait: I’ve been unemployed since July to write the book. I’ve been shopping off the right-hand side of the beer aisle for a long time. If I could only buy the most expensive beers, I’d have gone insane.
Anyway. I always used to make fun of Samuel Adams, because:
– they pretend to be a microbrew but really, they’re brewed by the same regional breweries turning out Mickey’s and all the other huge brands
– they advertise like crazy, and I distrust brands with huge marketing budgets
– their advertising annoys me
But at a really great party, they had Sam Adams Light handy, and a sucker for trying new beers, I tried it. It’s easily the best light beer I’ve ever had. It’s tasty, balanced, drinkable, and if I hadn’t looked at the label, I wouldn’t have suspected it was a light beer at all. I liked it.
Which meant that all of their advertising for it, which I hate, was totally, entirely, correct.
Crow, as it turns out, tastes pretty good paired with Sam Adams Light.
I finally got to play one of these, and I have a couple things to say:
– the control is a lot finer than I’d been led to expect from coverage
– Wii Sports is great fun to play
– I haven’t been that giddy playing a game in ages
– Playing games I felt more responsible for the results than ever
– Going back to my PS2 felt boring, like I wasn’t really doing anything
I loved it, and for the first time I really felt like I understood the schism people’ve been talking about: playing on the Wii is casual, easy to pick up, it’s fun and funny, in a way that I’ve never seen before. I don’t know if the novelty will wear off, or if developers will exploit it, but I’m unemployed and ever since I picked up the controller and swung a bat in Wii baseball, I’ve been even more obsessed with finding one. It’s so much fun.
I’ve read some posts recently on why it sucks to sell on eBay (short version: high-ticket items are scam magnets, etc etc). But let’s say you’re a buyer, like me, and you’re interested purchasing a Nintendo Wii.
Here are the top listings in the Nintendo Wii system category as I write this:
1-4 are Wiis in various states/bundles/misleading “5 games included” when all it has is the free Wii Sports disk
5 is a Wii accessory
6 is a gambling/lotto scam
7-10 are more Wiis
10 is a PS3 with spammy keywords
Scanning the first couple pages of listings, about 30% are clearly prohibited. There are many listings for ways to get the Wii for “free” and “information”on where to find them and whatever else. In a high-traffic category where you should only see listings involving the system itself, where you’d think eBay would be pretty active in policing, since they’re spending a lot of money driving visitors off Google (etc) there, it’s tooth-grindingly annoying to actually shop for one.
What makes matters worse is that, while it’d be nice if they’d police their listings better, they make the process for reporting a bad listing confusing and difficult. Say you want to report that guy at #6 who is running many, many different scam lottery listings. First you hunt the report link, which is all the way at the bottom after page after page of scammy disclaimers and pleas in horrible colored HTML text on why their particular lottery isn’t really a lottery or… whatever.
On the “Report this listing” page, you’ve got two choices that seem obvious: one is “prohibited (banned items)” and the other is “listing policy violations”.
Logically, you might go
Listing violation -> “Misleading title” or “keyword spamming” even, but what you might really want is “other…” and then there’s an option for “Miscategorized items” (or, at that point, since they’re selling tickets or whatever, “Listing more than fifteen identical items”)
Whichever way you wind your way through their difficult complaint form, you reach this page, which I think should win some kind of award for deceptive dead-ending.
Things that are wrong with this page, a non-definitive list
1. The 1-2-3 metaphor breaks on the first page, when you start at 2
2. The “Review Help and Email Us” makes no sense as a navigation pointer or an instruction
3. The yellow-highlighted page is confusing. Is it a post-complaint suggested reading? Am I being diverted?
4. The “Contact Customer Support” link shows no indication that this is what you need to select to proceed with your complaint.
5. Moreover, it looks just like other generic “email us” links and is separated from the rest of the page by a horizontal divider, which says “unrelated” to the user. There’s no “Email us your complaint about item xxxxx” though the page is passed that information.
The result is that if you stumble on the report link, manage to find a complaint category/subcategory/subsubsubcategory that’s vaguely related, you wind up dumped here, without an obvious way to proceed down the path.
As a result, in trying to shop for an item, you pretty quickly see that eBay’s listings don’t reflect that they’re able to enforce their listing policies. Attempting to complain about a particular listing is made difficult to navigate, so eBay either intentionally wants to reduce email volume by frustrating you or they don’t care enough to make the system work.
Then what? Once you’ve complained, you wait. And nothing happens. I’ve been idly shopping eBay on and off for a couple years, and I have never seen them take any kind of action against serial offenders I’ve complained about. De-listing a specific auction is about as bad as it gets. The guy I was complaining about at item #6 in the list I pulled up has a decent feedback rating (somehow, you can speculate whether he got that legitimately or not) despite doing this kind of crap all the time.
It’s clear that the company places raw transaction volume at the top of its priority list – customer service and maintaining any kind of community are things they do only as they must, because doing them well costs money and reduces transactions they can take their cut of.
And yet I have to wonder how this is sustainable. I wouldn’t use eBay to sell a laptop, because I’ve heard too many horror stories, and I’m extremely reluctant to buy anything worth more than $50 on a site where they take their public-facing policies so lightly and treat complainers so poorly. If they’re not willing to listen to and respond to someone pointing out scammers running about, why would I reasonably expect that they would attempt to resolve disputes fairly?
It’s also a market opportunity: eBay’s explosive growth early was fueled in large part by a strong community they’ve exploited and destroyed. It seems like user reputation done better, with more vigorous site (or user-based) listing policing, would attract hordes of people eager to shop and sell there. Even with eBay’s massive initial advantage in having the most sellers for buyers and the most buyers for sellers, if someone offered me a market with far fewer buyers but a much better chance at an honest one, much cleaner listings to shop from, and fewer sellers but more reliable ones, I’d certainly go there, and I can’t be alone.
Library Journal. And they loved it! Woooooo! No link yet.
I’ve been collecting rejections as I’ve tried to sell some fiction in this fiercely competitive market. It requires you to be able to not take it personally, which I couldn’t manage often ten years ago. It’s hard for the publishers, I understand, because they get more submissions than they can shake a stick at: I have this vision of the mail carrier coming in with a huge duffel bag of mail and dumping it down on the editor’s desk, which snaps. So they use form letters, and the form letters rub people the wrong way too often. And on the other side, the writers invest so much in their stories that it’s hard not to take rejection personally.
I thought about this today when I saw a job listing on Craigslist. Once, there was a startup I really, really wanted to go work for and thought I would be a rock star for. We flirted for a while, I went in to interview, I didn’t get it (reason given: I didn’t have enough GUI experience and they were all-GUI then). But I got the feeling that it was really close, and they said “hey, keep in touch”. So I did, and when I left Expedia, they called to see if I was interested in contracting for them, which I thought might be a way for the pro-Derek faction to get me in and prove I rocked… they seemed really happy that I might be available. But the timing was bad, because I had to finish the book and go to Europe, so they said “look, call us when you’re ready to go back to work.
I did. Even when I was at Expedia, I thought “if there was somewhere I would quit to go work at, this would be it.” And they’ve been cool through this whole on/off thing, so I dropped them a line and said “hey, the book’s done, I’m considering getting back to having a day job, what’s up?”
They said “Sorry, no program manager jobs, but stay in touch.”
I was cool with that – the timing’s always been weird. Since then, I’ve had an RSS feed from Craigslist for ‘program manager’ to see if there’s anything cool out there, since I figure if there are other startups out there not recruiting through word of mouth, that’s where they’d post.
Today, as you no doubt expect at this point, was a listing for the job I wanted.
And I thought “faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahk.”
I don’t know if I would have gone for it if they’d called me instead of posting: I’m juggling book projects, all kinds of good stuff’s afoot, and if I’m going anywhere, my first choice is going to be rejoining my friends at Expedia, because they’re a great bunch. I don’t know what the scoop is, if there’s recruiter A and recruiter B, or teams, or whatever.
It’s the first time I think I’ve wished for a rejection, because I held out hope for so long, and now I wonder why. I feel somewhat silly, like I’ve found out my girlfriend dumped me by reading her blog and seeing the “Status: Single” on her profile.