Since I was 16 years old, I have primarily worked in positions that required dealing with customers and providing some level of customer service. Three years at Rasputin Music, where it always seemed that I was paid to provide bad customer service, and then the last nine years at Lanlogic, where we pride ourselves on our customer service. I guess what I am getting at here is that I am very sensitive to how companies treat customers… especially when I am the customer.

Back in April, I ordered a Flip Ultra camcorder (made by Pure Digital). The camera was great, and I took lots of video with the thing. Then in June, prior to us leaving for our trip to the Bahamas, I ordered the Underwater Case for the camera (also made by Pure Digital).

Well, the Underwater Case ended up having a serious flaw… it wasn’t waterproof. The case is supposed to protect The Flip Ultra in water depths of up to 30 feet, but I ended up with a dead camcorder after having it simply get splashed while on “The Current” at Atlantis. When we got back to our room that day, I let the camera dry out on a bath towel and hoped for the best.

After several hours, it turned on again, but any new video that was recorded had audio problems. It did record the audio, but there were consistent popping sounds and high pitched squeals.

When we got back from our trip, I submitted a warranty request on their website. After hitting the “submit” button, I noticed a phone number on the website for support. I called in, waited on hold for about 20 minutes, and then had a very nice girl help me through their process. She mentioned that they were getting lots of returns because of the underwater cases, and that it should take 2 weeks to have my camcorder fixed or replaced. The next day I got an email that my RMA had been approved and so I shipped the camcorder to their office in SF.

The UPS tracking number shows that it was received by Pure Digital on June 30, so my assumption was that I should have a camcorder around the middle of July. Bad assumption…

This past Monday (July 21) I submitted a customer service request on their website asking for a status update (I would have called them at the time, but they have since removed the phone number for support from the website). On the left side of this website, they have their “Customer Support Pledge,” which is as follows:

We will respond to emails within 4 hours during regular hours of operation: 7AM-7PM PST M-F, 10AM-6PM PST Sat/Sun

So, my assumption was that I should have heard something back by the end of the day on Monday, or at least sometime on Tuesday morning. Bad assumption…

Tuesday evening I submitted a second request on the website, essentially saying WTF?!?! No response.

Yesterday morning, I started digging around for a phone number. You won’t find it on the website for The Flip, but going to the actual company website produced a number. I called and got someone in technical support who was initially very confused. I was put on hold 3-4 times, each time lasting at least 2-3 minutes. She told me that it shouldn’t take more than 2 weeks to get fixed/replaced (I see a pattern here), and that she couldn’t really tell me what the problem was. When I expressed my concern about the situation, she replied (in a very sarcastic tone) “Well, you realize that we are pretty busy around here…” Holy crap. Are you serious??!!?

My tone changed at that point, as did my mood. She told me that I would receive a response from the “Pure Digital Support Team” within 24 hours. I’m certainly not holding my breath here, but I am growing more pissed by the day.

Lane biffed it this morning on his way to pick some strawberries in Grandma Linda’s backyard. Oof, it just looks painful. He was his normal self by the time Shelly picked him up this afternoon, but it was (of course) the first thing out of his mouth when he saw her.

I’m actually on my way to bed as I type this, but first I have to sneak some Neosporin onto these scrapes…

Shelly’s Mom turned 60 this past Saturday, and she got quite a surprise! I was sure that someone would end up slipping, but Shelly managed to pull off a surprise party with about 25 people knowing what was going on.

This isn’t so say that everything went perfectly, because there were some “moments…” The worst was on Saturday morning when we learned that the bakery had lost our birthday cake order. It worked out great though because they had a beautiful cake for us a few hours later, and it was on the house!

Then we got to the restaurant too early, so I pretended to misread a parking sign and drove around the block an extra time before parking. Then we took the long way to the restaurant, about two extra blocks. We ended up walking into the restaurant at 2pm, or right on time.

Donna was totally shocked, we ate some good Mexican food, and everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves. Win… win… win.

Lane was super helpful throughout. He helped Donna open her gifts, make a wish before blowing out her candles, and even managed to taste test the frosting on the birthday cake.

It was quite a memorable birthday for Donna, and I am glad that things worked out so well. You can check out all the photos from the party over on Flickr, and my Mom also posted a video from when we walked in and everyone yelled “surprise!”

It seems like everyone I talk to lately has made a point of telling me how great Mad Men is, and then gasped when hearing that I had never seen it. And since I’d hate to not be one of the cool kids… I started downloading the episodes tonight through DirecTV OnDemand (and when I say download, I mean through DirecTV OnDemand since it downloads content using my Internet connection rather than the satellite) because it just so happened to be their featured pick. How ironic.

Hopefully this show is half as good as people have been hyping it to be.

So what road game will we be going to? Denver? Phoenix? Calgary? Montreal? Hmm…

We are already planning to hit a game in L.A. or Anaheim at some point, but we want to hit one other road game a little further from home. Preferably to a city that we haven’t been to previously, meaning Vancouver is out of the race. Montreal is a long shot since the game is the last day in February, and Shelly is cold during the summer!

It also might come down to where we can get the best seats. I’d love to get seats at the glass like we did for the game we attended in Vancouver, but they are really $$$ and I am not sure whether Lane would love or hate being that close to the action. Hmm… Lots of thinking to do…

San Jose Sharks 2008-2009 Schedule

“So how was Houston?” This seems to be the question of the week…

I spent four days last week at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, and it sure was something. They were saying something like 12,000 people from 120 difference countries were there with me…

The content of the conference was somewhat disappointing to a technical guy like me, but perhaps my expectations were too high. Only two sessions that I attended were presented by someone whose title didn’t start with “Marketing Director.”

Each morning all 12,000 people walked a block from the convention center to the Toyota Center (the basketball arena for the Houston Rockets). These keynotes were all pretty interesting. All of them had a musical component with lots of customer stories, etc.

The high point of the week for me was getting to see Muhammad Yunus give a half hour speech on Microcredits, and Social Businesses. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for founding Grameen Bank and creating the concept of Microcredits in his native Bangladesh. You can read a whole lot more about him on Wikipedia.

Other than that, the trip surely had its moments. Cell coverage was ridiculously bad, Internet connectivity was a joke, and the humidity was crazy. Luckily for us, we had the luxury of staying at the Hilton that is connected to the convention center, meaning that we only had to go outside a few times.

I had hoped of skipping part of one of the days and making a side trip over to the Houston Space Center, but it didn’t happen. Luckily, the airport had lots of space stuff and so I got Lane a space shuttle, t-shirt and some “astronaut strawberries.”

When people ask me how Houston was, I’ve generally just been saying that I am happy to be home. It’s a quicker answer than restating all of the above every time…

I can’t get in the car these days without having Lane say “Daddy, where’s your Zune? I want to hear my songs!” (Actually, Shelly has the exact same thing happening, but since this is my blog I chose to include myself in the previous sentence… )

So, what are “Lane’s songs” you ask? While the order that he likes to hear them changes on a daily basis, below are the songs that Shelly and I both have included in a “Lane’s mix” playlist.

• Barry Louis Polisar - “All I Want Is You”
• Beastie Boys - “So What’cha Want”
• Beastie Boys - “Intergalactic”
• Beastie Boys - “Sabotage”
• The Clash - “Should I Stay Or Should I Go”
• Danny Elfman - “This Is Halloween”
• Danny Elfman - “What’s This?”
• Eels – “Flyswatter”
• Eels - “I Like Birds”
• The Ramones - “Blitzkrieg Bop”
• They Might Be Giants - “Birdhouse In Your Soul”

On Fourth of July, rather than going out and battling the crowds (and the heat), we decided to do something that Shelly has wanted to do as a family for several weeks now… make Seitan.

What’s Seitan? From Wikipedia:

Wheat gluten, also called seitan ([ˈseɪtɑn]), wheat meat, gluten meat, or simply gluten, is a food made from the gluten of wheat. It is made by washing wheat flour dough with water until all the starch dissolves, leaving insoluble gluten as a gummy mass, which is subject to further processing.

We followed a recipe from one of our Native Foods cookbooks, and it all together took something in the ballpark of 4 hours to complete. This is not bad considering how little the ingredients cost, and how much we generally pay at Whole Foods for the pre-made stuff.

Mixing the dry goods with the sifter, kneading the dough and then finally rinsing the dough were Lane’s favorite steps. He didn’t seem to care for the process of adding water to the dry goods and making the broth.

After the dough had simmered in the broth for an hour and a half, and cooled off on a plate, we prepared our Fourth of July dinner. Lane helped me puree carrots, potatoes and turnips for a base. Shelly steamed and then pan fried asparagus spears with sesame oil. And then we pan fried some steaks made from our homemade Seitan.

Man, was this ever delicious. All the hard work throughout the day really did make the whole meal taste a lot better! And, now we have a whole bunch of Seitan on hand to use over the next few weeks! Hurray!

This week will be my first trip to the Microsoft WorldWide Partner Conference, which is in Houston, TX this year. I’ve managed to escape this each of the past two years, but not this time. And, to be honest, I didn’t really fight going this time. There is a part of me that is looking forward to this, but I really hate the idea of leaving home for a week (especially since I was gone to Huntington Beach part of last week for work).

With 60 to 90 minute long sessions from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM daily (with an exception on Wednesday morning when there is a 2 1/2 hour long keynote with Steve Ballmer), this will likely be an action packed week. Especially when you consider that I will be attending sessions that have titles like “Transforming IT into a Strategic Asset Through Core Infrastructure,” “Deploy the Optimized Desktop: Windows Vista and Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack,” and “Secure and Reliable Computing: Allow Your Customers to Focus on Their Business While You Do the Rest.”

This week will be equal parts sales/marketing and technical knowledge dump, but it could likely be better described as the yearly ritual of drinking Microsoft blue Kool-Aid. Should be an interesting week.

Shelly’s dad is at Kaiser SF preparing to have his bypass surgery, and so we headed across the Bay to see him this morning. After helping him hatch some escape plots, we decided to grab lunch before going home. Green’s Restaurant at Fort Mason has been at the top of Shelly’s restaurant wish list for a long time now, and we were only 3 miles away!

After I called the restaurant to get proper directions (Google Maps put me in “Upper Fort Mason” with no access to the place), we arrived just 45 minutes prior to the end of “brunch,” plenty of time I thought. I guess I should have taken their website seriously when it said “reservations are recommended,” because they were no longer seating parties greater than 2. At least we could still get food from their “Greens To Go” menu, and boy was it delicious…

Shelly and I each got a goat cheese, tomato and watercress sandwich that came on a (very sour) sourdough baguette and also split a bowl of Black Bean chili with peppers, cheese and creme fraiche. Lane got an Egg Salad sandwich that he mostly just ate the egg out of. We all ate some fruit salad that had strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, nectarines and apples. And, for dessert, we got a Vegan Date Bar!

Not far from the restaurant, we found a bench seated between two piers that looked out just West of Alcatraz. It was quite a view while we ate, and we even got a brief visit from a Sea Lion. Definitely a memorable meal.

After lunch, we walked down to the end of the pier on the right side of the photo, and got to see Alcatraz and the bottom half of the Golden Gate Bridge (the fog was heavy this afternoon). All that was fun, but the game of kick the can that we all played on the way back was likely Lane’s favorite part…