Promises of Progress

So you unintentionally gave your customers a bad experience of your brand. What can you do?

Well, the first thing is to prioritize handling of the situation. Deal with it now. Secondly admitting failure and being open about it is crucial.

Earlier I wrote about SAS having some problems with an online campaign, and I wanted to add the last bit of communication from SAS to the story. After my (and others) bad experience, I received an apologizing email. The mail stated that they had been examining the logfiles of the (slooow) server, and they could see that I had initiated the campaign survey, but had not finished (presumably because of the server problems). In an attempt to make things good again, they assured that the problems had been fixed (which it seemed) and they had also doubled my chances in the price-give-away.

In conclusion, I believe that SAS actually did make the best of a bad thing. The customers affected were (almost) promptly identified, and contacted with an excuse and with a “token of appreciation”. Well done. It seems that you care a bit more about your customers than other large corporations.

I was crossing my fingers, hoping for new MacBooks to be announced. And it seems that my wish has come thru. Apple Announces October 14 Notebook Event.

Gadget geeks all over the world are participating in a frantic wildest-guesses competition, but so far it looks like a 13″ Aluminum MacBook of some sort is part of the announcement. And also reduced prices thruout the range. Whee.

While I am thrilled with the stability of my “old” 12″ PowerBook G4 (aka. Silver Pup), it IS getting kinda slow. Also, it seems that Intel binaries are the future. I can’t even run the iPhone SDK on the PPC.

Good news every one! It seems that Apple is getting ready for a refresh of the MacBook line. I realise that getting a “just-after-lauch” version of a Cupertino product, may shatter my experience of reliability and stability - but I’m getting desperate.

Maybe a 13″ MacBook Pro will soothe my aches. (Crosses fingers)

I had a Huawei E220 USB HSDPA modem laying around for when I’m on the move. Having heard about it working on Linux (from here and there), I was wondering if I could use it under FreeBSD 7.

The short answer is: not without effort.

It appears that the modem is two-in-one devices. A flash memory stick (umass) and a modem (ubsa). Unfortunately once the umass device has been detected, FreeBSD does not look for the serial device. Thus leaving me with a 10MB memory stick.

The solution is apparently to create a custom kernel where umass is disabled, and then load ubsa before umass in the kernel loader.

It find it a bit much to create a custom kernel just for this single purpose, so I’m almost back to square one.

When travelling by air, I prefer to fly with SAS. The tickets are typically a bit more expensive, but the service level is good (and pretty consistent).

A couple of days ago, I received a mailinglist newsletter from SAS, asking me to participate in a questionaire with the title “what does time mean to you”. Among other things, the survey showcased the various special benefits that SAS offers in order to reduce wasted time while travelling.

So I entered the site and began answering the questions. The only problem was that the server was so bogged down that it took more than a minute after you answered, before the next question would show up.

“What a waste of time”, I thought - and dug up the e-mail address of the VP of marketing in SAS Denmark.

The next day, I got the response from SAS that they certainly did not intend to waste their customers time. Excuses (”we did actually do a load test”) and promises of fixing the issue took up the biggest part of the email.

I just checked - and the server is now responding pretty fast - as you would expect in the first place. The only problem is that the really busy people (that the campaign probably was directed towards) has long forgotten that site that didn’t work. The email is in deleted items. Their input is lost. You fail.

Once you have learned from your mistake you may try again.

At work I have been given the challenge of figuring out how to attract good candidates for a front-end developer postition. The person we hire will have ownership (in terms of decisions) of all the technical client-side aspects. That means structure and strategy in the areas of CSS and JS/AJAX .

I’m searching the web in order to dig up some hints on what to look for:

• John Resig (Mozilla Labs): Interviewing for Open Source
• Pixelbox: Interview questions to ask a front end developer

So - basically I’m looking for someone (in Denmark) who hangs out at sites like A List Apart, Ajaxian, ProgrammableWeb, CSS Mania and Pixelbox

Any hints - or takers?