Recent Activity

Filter by:

All

• 

  MIQ

  Skydeck used to offer a service that would keep your SMS messages from your phone backed up, but they are now focusing on offering what I’ll call “social caller id” and they have rebranded at Mr. Number. MIQ offers this SMS backup along with a few other nice features.  You can send messages through your phone from your computer keyboard, see a list of all your calls and add notes to them and backup the media on your phone all over the air.

  I heard about a guy who had someone else install MIQ on his phone without his knowledge.  Late at night the perpetrator would log into MIQ and send out inappropriate text messages to everyone the victim knew.  It came from his phone, but he had no idea how it was happening.

  

  9 days on
  Mark W. Shead
• 

  Numbers Station

  A numbers radio station is a signal that transmit some type of code. There are quite a few of these and some of them have been operating for quite some time. UVB-76 is one that transmits from Russia. It has been playing a buzzer sound since the late 90′s and occasionally there are voice transmissions.

  Earlier this year it stopped transmitting, but now it seems be back and people are hearing a lot of background noise–almost like there is a microphone left on in a storage room somewhere that everyone has forgotten about. You can listen for yourself here. An archived Russian web page seems to indicate that the station was used to send out military orders and the time they were to be executed.

  

  9 days on
  Mark W. Shead
• 

  Charcoal Bob

  Charcoal Bob is a site that lets you plan out your grilling. You tell it what you are cooking, how each item needs to be cooked and when you want to eat. It will give you a schedule telling you exactly when to start, put each item on, turn them over, etc.

  

  10 days on
  Mark W. Shead
• 

  Plunging Over The Falls

  Plunging over the Falls doesn’t automatically make you a decent orator.

  

  10 days on
  Mark W. Shead
• 

  Dealing with Customer Complains

  Some time ago my wife and I went through the drive through at the local Taco Bell. I don’t know if the person making the food was new, mischievous, or just inept but what we ended up getting hardly resembled the burrito we ordered. If I’m member correctly they were pretty rude in giving us the food as well. So I called the 800 number that was printed next to the drive-through window and explain the situation.

  They apologized, took our name and address, and send us a free five dollar coupon in the mail. I consider this a nice gesture but when I later tried to use the coupon I discovered it was only good at corporately own taco bells. But the Taco Bell where I had the problem wasn’t corporately owned, so I couldn’t use it locally. We were traveling a lot at the time so I figured it would be easy to use the coupon somewhere else. It turns out that virtually none of the taco bells we encountered while traveling were corporately owned businesses. We eventually gave the coupon to someone else and wish them luck with it.

  From a business standpoint, giving us a five dollar coupon was probably more detrimental than simply giving us an apology. Every time I would use the coupon and was denied it reminded me of the original negative experience.

  The thing that made this stand out so much in my mind was how much it contrasted with another experience I have had. Several years before we were waiting to be seated at a Max and Erma’s in Michigan. Half of the restaurant had empty clean tables, but we were still kept standing for 20 minutes. I wrote them a letter explaining that this was frustrating as a consumer.

  They sent me an apology and a $10 gift certificate to Max and Erma’s. I set the gift certificate aside and did not use it right away. About a month later I got another letter from them further apologizing with another $10 gift certificate. Evidently they were tracking to get certificates to make sure I visited the store again. When I didn’t come in after the first one they sent me another one to try to get me back.

  I was impressed with the amount of effort they put into making sure I returned to the customer. If the first experience had upset me so badly that a $10 gift certificate wasn’t sufficient to make me return, they sent out another one in order to get me back.

  While there is obviously a limit to how much effort businesses can expend on dealing with unhappy customers. Max and Erma’s business seems to have a very good, low effort system that makes worlds of difference for the consumer.

  11 days on
  Feed
• 

  Eco Tourism

  There is always something of a delicate balance between nature tourism and trying to keep humans from causing damage to nature.  There are definitely some strong arguments for getting people out close to nature, but people tend to do damage–particularly in large numbers. Even when people are trying to help, then end up doing things like “feeding the bears” which doesn’t take long to start causing dangerous problems–for both the people and the bears.

  Eco-tourism has the goal of minimizing these negatives. It is partially an issue of educating people and partially giving them ways to experience nature and wildlife that doesn’t cause damage. It is naive to assume that you can bring a bunch of tourists into close proximity of wildlife without having any type of impact on the animals, but this can be minimized through careful planning. One of the biggest aspects is education.  People don’t naturally think about the long term effect of their actions–particularly when dealing with unfamiliar things like wildlife. Just explaining how feeding the wildlife can upset a delicate balance of survival can make a big difference in people’s behavior because it isn’t something they are going to think of on their own.

  Their are a number of tours that try to do things in a way that benefits the animals through increased awareness and still provides the full entertainment benefit people are looking for. It is amazing the diversity that exists in this type of vacationing.  Whether you are looking for a Uganda gorilla safari or want to spend a week living in tents on the African Savannah, there are a growing number of responsible options.

  Some of the most effective eco tour operators have found that they are able to provide a form of edu-tainment that gives people a great experience while leaving them with a lasting impression on how conservation efforts are helping to keep a good habitat for wildlife and balance human needs for consumption with preserving a natural environment.

  12 days on
  Feed
• 

  Leadership Quote from Truman

  To be able to lead others, a man must be willing to go forward alone.
  ~Harry Truman

  This leadership quote by Truman really highlights a lot of the problems with people who attempt to lead today. Someone who leads because they want others to do what they say is vastly different than someone who leads because they have a vision–a vision so important they would pursue it entirely on their own if no one chooses to follow them. There is a big difference between wanting to be important and wanting to accomplish a specific important goal.

  13 days on
  Feed
• 

  Wore the Juice

  In 1995 two bank robberies were performed by an individual wearing no disguise. The surveillance tapes insured that he was arrested the same day. When he was shown the videos he was amazed that they could see his face. He said, “but I wore the juice”. Evidentially he had been told that putting lemon juice on your face would keep it from showing up on security cameras.

  

  15 days on
  Mark W. Shead
• 

  Invisible Gorilla Quote

  During the 2008 presidential campaign there was a discrepancy between how Hillary Clinton described a trip to Tuzla, Bosnia and the videos of the event. Clinton recalled being under sniper fire and running for cover, but the videos show no safety concern. The book The Invisible Gorilla talks about these types of memory errors. I found this quote from the book to be particularly funny:

  Even Bill Clinton later proffered commonsense excuses for his wife’s memory lapse, claiming (incorrectly) that she made the comments late at night and pointed out (correctly but perhaps unhelpfully) that she was sixty years old.

  

  15 days on
  Mark W. Shead
• 

  Zoos, Safaris & Gorillas

  When we visit a city, the zoo is one our top family activities. While on one hand it seems like the animals might be happier being in the wild, but on the other their quality of life in a good zoo is much higher than running free. Zoos also seem to serve a pretty important function in keeping people aware of wildlife in parts of the world they are unlikely to ever visit.

  While I’d love to take my kids on a a gorilla tour or some other type of safari, the fact is that they probably wouldn’t have seen a live gorilla without a zoo. There is something amazing about being able to get within a few feet of an animal and see them up close.  Speaking of gorilla’s, the St. Louis Zoo has a bald gorilla that is pretty amazing.  He looks like Gollum from Lord of the Rings.  The zoo keepers say he is fine–he just has no hair.

  Some time ago, some people taught a gorilla how to use sign language. What has been interesting is the new word combinations the gorilla came up with on her own.  She made up things like “water bird” to refer to a duck and “finger bracelet” to refer to a ring. The researchers were trying to get a male gorilla around her in hope that he would learn sign language as well and then they could reproduce and teach the baby, but so far that hasn’t worked out.

  15 days on
  Feed
• 

  Ninite

  Interesting tool for installing lots of free software all at once.

  

  15 days on
  Mark W. Shead