Oh wow. The bad customer service folks just keep doubling down.
I can’t believe they’ll see this but my name is uncommon – you never know.
Tips:
– Own up. Admit something went wrong!
– Say sorry. It costs nothing.
– Take responsibility. You can’t fix it. But can you learn and improve? Tell me how!
Reminded of this 18-year-old, cheap, simple, but very effective 3D head-tracking concept.
I don’t know why something like this didn’t get built into modern game consoles somehow.
Follow-up question: If our eyes were top and bottom instead of left and right, would we still see in depth the same way?
Bonus question: Are there any animals with top and bottom eyes?
A weird thought/question I had while watching someone film an event today in vertical video format:
Do we “see” in portrait or landscape? Does the fact that our eyes are left and right rather than top and bottom mean we get a wide-but-shallow field of view?
Today was the funeral of a local legend, taken from us early and unfairly.
I was blessed to hang out with him a lot for a few years.
Never seen the crematorium so full. Standing room only.
No amount of healthy stuff can defend you from some things.
I’m inspired to try to live my best life now.
Just… too much tech news today.
– Panic do an awesome Playdate update
– Some company named after a fruit folded. Or something
– Nintendo emailed be about 55 new games coming up
– Tailwind bought by Shopify
– Digital Ocean sponsor the bad guy’s thing
– Some other tech dude in trouble
Crazy!
I really don’t get why I would pay extra for a foldable phone. A tech that I just have Zero interest in. Ideally I’d have a smaller, dumber phone, and revert to a laptop for any real activity.
Perhaps I’m just old.
Anyway. Tonight I went to a badminton club! This is much more my thing than Taekwondo that I tried over the summer.
We did a family “practice” yesterday to see if I was still any good.
Turns out I still got something here!! Not a lot. But something!!
Someone asked when I last played competitively, and I reckon it was when I was Vanbrugh College Badminton Captain in… 1998!
(“I was just starting primary school then!” came the reply. 😂)
Oh gosh. I try not to talk AI, but people so often miss one of the key things in the discourse: It’s so frickin’ inefficient!!
I always come back to the example of the person who had asked Gemini to analyse some data in a sheet and it made a pivot table.
But all it really did was filter a column.
Just learn to filter a frickin column!!!!
My “Psychology of Software Teams” book keeps giving me gold. Today @grimalkina gave me “Mastery Orientation” and “Performance Orientation” as… are they approaches? Traits? I’m not sure. But it ties into a lot of online discourse about tech (IMO – IANAP) and pulls on many other threads.
Nicer things: we obeyed the instruction to not feed birds over the hot summer to prevent spread of disease.
But they came looking yesterday. Juvenile starlings hopping around looking for seed on the ground.
It’s cooler now. So I put the feeder up.
And they entertained me all day.
Even the robin came to visit!
And one of the foxes wandered by too!
Delightful.
I don’t really know why I felt the need to share this.
Perhaps it’s a lesson in customer service.
If you mess up – or if your contractor messes up – don’t double down on being right. Don’t shrug off blame. Don’t ignore the customer’s feelings and requests. Own it. Fix it. Apologise.
It is possible to rescue a screw up. It’s also possible to show that you really don’t care.
These last few weeks I experienced some of the worst eCommerce customer service.
To the extent that when I decided it was too much hassle and asked for cancellation and refund, they blamed the courier and just said “We are not at fault here and will ship the goods on Tuesday.”
They ignored my instructions twice, in fact. When Evri didn’t work, they shipped it via DHL. But to the Evri collection point. I queried this and they said Evri had some arrangement with DHL.
Reader: they do not!
Which resulted in an embarrassing trip to my local shop who had kindly taken a random DHL parcel in for me. They were not happy about it.
The supplier have not used the word “sorry” once in our exchanges. In fact, they were pretty rude and took no responsibility at all.
Awful.
All for 6 bottles of beer.
It’d better be good!!
Amazing. Wordle … but for Discworld fans.
Does Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements” but for HTML exist?
There’s header, footer, section, div, ul, li and svg;
Small and span and audio, thead, tfoot and tbody;
There’s button, fieldset, form input, option, select, anchor and p;
Em, script, aside, address, hgroup, nav, iframe, code, strong, sup and pre
Lots of people talking about 1Password alternatives.
Two that I’ve come across that I don’t see mentioned are:
– AliasVault (open source and self-hostable, but with hosted plans)
– Mega Pass – is Mega bad too? https://mega.io/pass
Any opinions on these?
I should be a software philosopher. I love stuff like this from @jessitron: “Legacy software is software that is not alive in a person’s head” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvr0klVxw5c)
I also love, from @grimalkina’s book: “software ecosystems are vast networks of many people’s solutions that supercharge individual problem solving … these solutions are shared across *both time and space*” (my emphasis).
Powerful stuff.
Something positive/creative…
I’m enjoying making a habit tracker (yes, 25 years in software and never done it!). Hand-coded using my small site template: https://github.com/rosswintle/small-site-template
Trying to use components and keep data well structured and realising that the template doesn’t handle this well.
Have added “slots” though! 😃