Fred Thompson explains this whole economic crisis thing to us out here in flyover country…
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Well, it turns out I did get to have a little road trip in September. Not quite the leisurely exercise in relaxation I might have hoped for, but it was definitely some serious road-time. How serious? Oh, two back-to-back 17 hour days of driving, one day with a mere 4 hours on the road, then a day of standing for 15 hours, and finally another pair of 17 hour driving days. I almost felt like I was back in college. When I didn’t know any better…
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Image via WikipediaI just read a tweet from Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) about a foodservice issue.
jeffjarvis Fucking Starbucks. What’s so hard about keeping a pot of coffee full in a COFFEE STORE? I had 2 min. to get a cup. They wasted my time. Grr
What’s hard about keeping the supply of ready-to-serve product full is the actions of the customers. Lots of things come into play here. First, Starbucks has developed the expectation that when you order coffee, you’ll get it right away. Not a bad expectation to build, but it does set you up for problems when you don’t meet that expectation. And you will fail to meet that expectation at some point.
In this case, all it would take is for one or more customers to buy more than what the system (designed to build those high expectations) could accommodate. One customer ordering ten coffees for the office when there is only enough for ten coffees brewed means the next customer or next few customers is going to have to wait. There isn’t much that can be done to avoid that. There is, however, much that can be done to address it when it does happen.
The situation should have been explained to Jeff. “I’m really sorry, but we just had someone come in and order a dozen coffees to go, and it ran us out. We’re brewing more right now, and it’ll be a few minutes before its ready.” That would probably have blunted Jeff’s initial frustration at Starbuck’s not meeting his expectations. Any questions Jeff may have asked at that point would have been an opportunity to tell the Starbucks story of fresh vs. stale coffee and maybe the suggestion of an alternative that could have been made ready quickly – at the same price. In any case, Jeff should have been given a card for a free coffee at a later date, as a gesture of contrition for not meeting the expectations that they’d created.
Whether Starbucks has a policy where any employee can do that kind of damage control, I don’t know. If they don’t, they should. They had no idea that Jeff would tweet about it to his 2665 twitter followers, but his greater reach into the public shouldn’t matter. No customer should walk out of any store or shop angry that the expectations the store or shop has built for themselves weren’t met. Meet the expectations and make sure you can cover those rare times when you don’t meet them or work to build new, lower expectations that you can meet.
Sometimes the fates seem to conspire against fun. This weekend is Denvention, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, in Denver. I haven’t been to a Worldcon now for several years, and I’m going to miss it again this year. <sigh>
Next week is SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics/animation show, in Los Angeles. It would have been a perfect place to do some networking in association with Micoy Omni-3D, the technology I blogged about earlier. Omni-3D is the kind of thing that isn’t easy to grasp for a lot of people unless they can actually experience it, and it’s probably a safe bet that a lot of folks at SIGGRAPH would have been able to not only grasp what Omni-3D is, but grab onto it and run.
It will soon be September and that’s the perfect time for vacation. Still good weather, but outside the normal vacation period and far less busy because of it. I just have a feeling that this will be another September without a roadtrip. It’d fit the Pattern of Threes…
I subscribe to a dozen or so food blog RSS feeds. (I should probably add links to them here somewhere…) These aren’t blogs that just discuss the relative merits of particular foods or how best to make a meal into a dining experience. Nope. All the ones I follow have recipes to go along with their commentary. And some of the most amazing pictures to go along with the recipes. Most are copyrighted, which makes it a bit difficult to show just how amazing they are, but I’ll provide this link to a picture that went with a dessert recipe that got made the day after I read the blog post about it. It’s from the Bake or Break blog, and it’s for something called Chocolate Cobbler. I know cobblers are usually a fruit dessert, and I have nothing against the fruit variety of cobbler. But sometimes, you just want something chocolate and a little out of the ordinary. Let me tell you, Chocolate Cobbler nails it. Gooey, cocoa-y sauce covers to the bottom of the pan, with a rather fluffy yet crunchy cake on top. Scoop what you want out of the pan, spoon the still-warm sauce over the top and drift away into dessert bliss. Some will want to dip out some ice cream or whipped cream over it all, but I think that just detracts from the richness of the cobbler itself.
If you like chocolate, go! Visit the Bake or Break blog, get the Chocolate Cobbler recipe, and make it tonight. Save room for it, because you will want a second helping. Or two.
“Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.” – James M. Barrie
I mentioned my ’service thing’ a couple days ago and said I’d post about it later. I guess it’s later…
I’ve been in the foodservice business for over 30 years now. I’m sure many of my high school and college classmates see me as an underachiever, because they see me working in a hot kitchen, serving a pretty basic menu of food, still in my hometown. Many of them hold high-level jobs in industry, government and academia. I’m glad for them. I hope they’re happy. I am, and I think it’s because I hold service as not only a valid career choice, but if done correctly, a noble one. That’s my goal. To do it correctly.
“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.” – Herman Melville
Service, to me, is about extending a helping hand. And in some way, you always get compensated for your service. Not always with money or stuff. Or with public recognition or acclaim. Or any of the myriad other rewards that drive people to do things for others. Sometimes, the compensation is internal – you know you’ve done a good thing and that made it worthwhile. For me, the drive is almost always internal. Sure, money and stuff is nice. (Public recognition and acclaim… meh.) But knowing that I’ve helped someone – that’s a payoff.
If Herman was right and we really are connected by invisible threads, helping someone radiates out from us and hopefully resonates, so that person helps another, and another, and before you know it, the whole world has been touched by the pyramid scheme of service. I’m sure there’s a spiritual lesson in there. Karma. Good Deeds. Whatever. But it seems simpler to me.
Doing good makes me feel good about myself. Easy to do, get rewarded almost right away, can be repeated as often as desired. What’s not to like?
I’ve got a friend who came up with a way to capture and display 3D images all the way around a sphere. Not just a relatively narrow ’sweet spot’ like all the 3D out there is today, but 3D wherever you look. It’s called Omnidirectional 3D, and it’s only available from Micoy Corporation. (In the interests of transparency, I own some stock in the company.) It is mind-blowing.
Omni-3D can be tough to fully comprehend, much less embrace, but once you’ve seen how the content you’re watching can be outside the projection surface of the dome, on the projection surface, and within the dome, the potential for its use sparks the imagination. The number of possible applications of Omni-3D is huge – from pure entertainment to architectural walk-throughs to therapy for the mobility-impaired to first person shooter games to, well, let your creativity run wild.
The first open-to-the-public (as in people who aren’t investors, potential investors, or potential content producers) demo of Micoy Omni-3D will be at the International Planetarium Society Show in Chicago this weekend. The technology can utilize a full dome theater, and the future of planetariums may be in showing non-traditional content.
If you’re in the Chicago area this Saturday or Sunday, and would like to see what this is all about, please use the contact email address on the Micoy.com website to request a demo. You won’t be disappointed.
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I continue to be amazed at how many people either don’t understand just what evolution is, or don’t communicate what it is very well at all. The recent news of a species of E. coli bacteria that now ‘eats’ citrate is a prime example. Here’s an excerpt from the linked article:
In nature, there have been a few reports of E. coli that can feed on citrate. But these oddballs all acquired a ring of DNA called a plasmid from some other species of bacteria. Lenski selected a strain of E. coli for his experiments that doesn’t have any plasmids, there were no other bacteria in the experiment, and the evolved bacteria remain plasmid-free. So the only explanation was that this one line of E. coli had evolved the ability to eat citrate on its own.
The way that’s stated, “this one line of E. coli had evolved the ability to eat citrate on its own,” it sounds as if the line of E. coli had taken some action to develop that ability. E. coli didn’t take any action beyond living, reproducing, and dying. The citrate-eating ability showed up in one flask of many after more than 33,000 generations. Somewhere along those many generations, a mutation that allowed the cell membranes of one E. coli bacterium to pass the larger citrate molecule through took place. That one bacterium passed that genetic trait on to at least some of its offspring, who passed it along to some of their offspring, and so on.
In a closed environment (a lab flask in this case), the population of E. coli reaches a certain point and then maxes out because the environment won’t support any more. But as more bacteria gained that citrate-eating trait, the environment could support a higher population. The mutant bacteria could utilize both the glucose that every E. coli bacterium could utilize and the citrate that only the mutant bacteria could. They were better equipped, because of a random mutation, to utilize the nutrients in the environment than the non-mutant E. coli were, so their numbers increased while the non-mutant population decreased from lack of suitable nutrients to sustain reproduction. The bacteria didn’t do anything to cause the new trait. They just capitalized on its presence by surviving and reproducing.
What isn’t said is that there were undoubtably many, many other mutations that occurred over the 33,000 generations. But they were mutations that didn’t provide any advantages over the normal genetic makeup of the bacteria. Those mutant bacteria didn’t have a survival edge over the non-mutant bacteria, so they lived and died like the non-mutant bacteria. Evolution is survival of the fittest, and only occurs when a mutation provides some kind of survival benefit in the environment where it occurs. Having cell membranes that allowed larger molecules to pass through was a survival benefit in that environment where citrate was apparently the only ‘large’ molecule to be found. Had some other ‘large’ molecule that was detrimental to the bacterium’s survival been present, the mutated bacterium would likely have failed to live long enough to pass that genetic trait along and the ability to eat citrate would have died along with it.
So, a change in environment can end the advantage a particular genetic trait gives to the organism that has it. The evolutionary process is tied to genetic traits that provide certain abilities in certain environments. Change the environment and the process is altered, sometimes to the detriment of the organism involved. How many species died during an ice age because they lacked the genetic traits that allowed survival and reproduction at colder temperatures? How many species died when the climate got warmer because they lacked the genetic traits that allowed survival and reproduction at hotter temperatures?
The evolutionary process is also tied to the number of mutations that occur, which is dependent on the number of offspring produced. Number of offspring increases in two ways. More generations of offspring and more offspring per generation. It may be that had the E. coli been bred in a larger environment, the number of generations it took for the citrate-eating genetic trait to occur might have been smaller (larger number of offspring per generation), because an equivalent number of offspring had been produced.
Evolution seems to be the province of the winners of the cosmic crapshoot of mutation. There are untold billions of mutations that did not provide any survival benefit in the environment where they occurred. Only the mutations that provided a survival benefit in some kind of genetic trait that was passed along to the next generation are part of what ends up being called the evolutionary process.
One can observe the changes wrought by mutation along the way, but only when the changed survive and reproduce better than the unchanged can one describe it as evolutionary. Evolution is not a play-by-play one can report as it goes along. It is history, observed in retrospect.
Mostly, I read tweets. I click on links. I learn. Twitter is good.
I followed a link from a @GuyKawasaki tweet today that took me to a demo page for a new web company called KickLight. They’ve got a way of integrating graphics with a videoplayer, so the graphic block below the video can be synced up with the video being played. It looks like it could be very useful for online presentations of various kinds – informational, training, sales, etc. I look forward to hearing more about KickLight. That was the learning part.
Sometimes, though, it’s not about learning something I didn’t know so much as having someone make me think. One of the four examples on the demo page was an excerpt from a Art of the Start presentation Guy did at some point in the past. In it, he talked about his stance that companies that focused on meaning were almost always more successful than those that focused on money. The core of a company, according to Guy, should be “making meaning” and that if a company does that, it will make money. Which I’ll translate into being successful, since Guy was addressing a group of entrepreneurs at the time. I hope he doesn’t mind.
We all have our own experiences that shape our perceptions of things. I’ve worked for Delphi Forums for, well, a while now, and I’ve seen the meaning being made in lots and lots of our forums. The support forums for medical conditions and diseases, for example, provide a lifeline for many of their members. I’ve had tears streaming down my cheeks more than once while reading member posts about the importance of a forum community to someone with a life-threatening or even life-ending illness. Online communities make huge and real differences in many people’s lives. The hosts of those communities and their staffs obviously make meaning with and for their communities. Because Delphi doesn’t provide any monetization for forum hosts, money can’t be the measure of a forum’s success. But all you have to do is read through some of the posts by a forum’s members to see success. True success.
I’m not high enough on the food chain at Delphi to know exactly what, if any, monetary success we’ve had. I have a sense that we’ve done okay. Well enough that the bills get paid, but probably not enough to do a lot of open development. (Meaning development that isn’t funded by one of the larger paying clients of the parent company…) But in terms of providing a service of value to our members, I think we may be among the most successful companies online. Sure, we have our stumbles from time to time, but we have lots and lots of communities that are an intrinsic and meaningful part of the lives of their members. It’s something that makes me proud of being associated with Delphi Forums, and fits rather neatly with my whole service thing. (I’ll blog about my service thing later.)
I’m not quite as clear on how “making meaning” applies to the business I’m part owner of. When we started the restaurant 29 years and 2 weeks ago, I don’t recall ‘changing the world’ as one of the guiding principles. We wanted to make a living – money. But maybe the uniqueness of the menu we chose, and the underlying philosophy of producing a high quality product at a fair price was an attempt at changing at least the local restaurant world. I’m not so sure we changed that world, but we’ve certainly provided an alternative that seems to satisfy the needs of a fair number of people. We know what a rarity it is to survive for almost 30 years in the independent restaurant business, let alone thrive for that long. We’ve served a lot of food to a lot of people over the years. Perhaps it was a different world we were changing…
I’m finding that bits and pieces of history are repeating themselves for me and I thought I’d dip my toes back into the blogging pond a little deeper with an observation or two about the deja vu moments I’ve been having.
Once upon a time, in the online days before the web, I found myself in an online community of science fiction and fantasy authors. It was the SF/F SIG on Delphi, back when there were only a handful of broad-based online places for sf folks to gather. Compuserve, Genie, and Delphi. There was a regular weekly chat session (all text-based back then) and authors like Mike Resnick, Gardner Dozois, Jack Chalker, George Effinger, Pat Cadigan, Orson Scott Card, and others I’ve lost to the fog of age would socialize, and maybe do a little business. It was a bit much for a mere reader like me to wrap my brain around. Here were a whole bunch of Big Name Authors, just a keyboard away. I have to admit I was a little awe-struck for weeks. These were the people who wrote the stories that I spent my hard-earned cash on, for pete’s sake. They had a different vocabulary than I did, they spoke about people and things that I was ignorant about, and I felt like I would never find my own voice among these masters of voice.
Then one week, Pat Cadigan sent me a hello, you’re awfully quiet kind of private message. Whoa. An author spoke to me! I responded and she replied. Woohoo! Things began to change. Pat fed me a lot of little bits of information that I would otherwise have never known, I did some research into sf fandom to learn its history and language, and my shyness about being among a bunch of Big Name Authors began to fade. (I don’t think I’ve ever thanked you for that, Pat. Well, better late than never. Thank you!) As I found my voice and started contributing to the conversations, an amazing thing happened. All those Big Name Authors turned into real human beings.
I’d learned online behavior back when ASCII was all you had, and part of that old school etiquette was to lurk long enough to understand the dynamics of the group you wanted to join, and only when you felt like you wouldn’t come across like a complete buffoon did you start making your presence known by contributing. (Not that there weren’t plenty of buffoons out there, but some people just never RTFM and dive right in…) I learned enough about the other participants and how their world fit together that one day I just started talking (well, typing) and I was welcomed into the group without hesitation. I have a lot of fond memories about that time…
Over the course of weeks and months, I realized that my earlier awe at being among Big Name Authors was, well, uninformed. Not that these folks weren’t Big Name Authors (they were) or didn’t deserve accolades for their work (they did), but that for the most part they were people who did one thing for a living, or part of a living, and that I did something else for a living. They had bills to pay, illnesses to deal with, relationships to maintain, anxieties, fears, joys, and all the rest that makes up the non-making-a-living part of life for everyone. They weren’t so much different than me, or anyone. The big difference was that they wrote and wrote regularly and wrote well. It was a revelation that has shaped my view of “celebrities” ever since.
You’re probably wondering how this little trip down memory lane relates to web celebrities. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Big Name Bloggers, like Hugh MacLeod, Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Chris Pirillo, Jeff Jarvis, and many more, aren’t all that different than me, or anyone, either. The big difference is that they actually blog and do so regularly and blog well. And as much as I enjoy what they have to say (most of the time), I’m not in awe of any of them. And I don’t think I should be. Respectful of what they do? You bet. Thankful for their insight? Of course. Wide-eyed and starstruck? Nope.
Another observation about web celebrities is that, for the most part, they are big fish in a relatively small pond, just as genre authors are. Want a quick reality check? Go out and randomly ask a dozen different people who any of the above bloggers are. Or any of the writers, for that matter. Odds are that most of the names will draw either blank stares or complete guesses. For those of us who swim in the ponds, those names have meaning. But to the rest of the world, they’re just other people you don’t know. That’s not a judgement of any kind. It’s just a statement of the context and the reality. Sometimes it helps to step back and remember that life happens offline, too.
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