Merry Christmas 2009!

Greetings of peace & joy to all. And a special warm welcome to visitors who received our Christmas photo card and felt duty bound to visit our blog. Welcome, and thanks for dropping by.

(To see more pics from Christmas Sunday service, including some in-focus ones where I am not wondering, "gee, I wonder what will happen if I twist this thingy on my camera", click here.)

We started blogging in October 2004 (see an amusing picture of how teeny the two kids looked back then). At the time, I thought of the blog a time as a replacement for the Christmas letter with the added benefit of more authentic and frequent updates. While there is joy -- and value -- in looking back at an entire year of work and school and life, it's also tempting if you're only doing it once a year to adopt the self-congratulatory tone of an alumni magazine. With a blog, you can be self-congratulatory every day of the week. :-)

So here we are, 795 posts later. We must confess, though, that our rate of blog posts slowed dramatically, as 2009 became for us (like for the rest of the world), the year of micro-updates delivered via Facebook status updates (see Frank's and Fedora's) and Twitter tweets (see Frank's stream @withfries2 and Fedora's stream @flchen1).

Still, this is the appropriate outlet for paragraph- and Christmas-letter sized thoughts (as opposed to the sentence- and 140-character sized updates), so here we go with the year-in-review for the Chen clan:

• Frank started a new job with Andreessen Horowitz, a startup venture capital company based in Menlo Park.
• The cozy intimacy of a 10-person firm -- especially since this is Frank's third time out with co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (#1: Netscape, #2: Loudcloud/Opsware) -- is a welcome contrast from the lumbering anonymity of tech behemoth HP.
• He is learning a ton (which he loves) and feeds on the energy that naturally bubbles out of tech entrepreneurs.
• A few days each week (weather permitting), he's doing the 26-mile round trip commute to work on his mighty steed, the Giant Twist Freedom DX electric assist bike. To date, he's logged over 1,000 miles, 1,160 pounds of offset CO2, 110,000 calories, and 1 near accident. Since this is a Christmas letter, he will avoid a salty dress down of drivers who don't share the road and simply say, "blessed are the bike riders, for they shall inherit the road." :-)
• This is also Frank's first full year on the Fellowship Bible Church board, where he is introducing useful bits of the business world (e.g., setting objectives, aligning our spending behind those goals, and adopting best practices) to the church. (You may quietly hum "Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat" to yourself as you read.)
• In typical Silicon Valley geek fashion, he wonders idly whether this is the year to learn how to play Settlers of Catan (rather than golf).
  
  
• Fedora is shaking her head at her own foolishness in thinking that with all the kids in school (for at least part of each day), she'd have more free time this year. She volunteers at their schools and contrary to any rumors, does actually leave school grounds during the day. And no, she's not secretly running a business using school resources. The days zip by in a blur of kid herding and avoiding household chores.
  
  
• Colin ("serious young man") is halfway through 4th grade, and in an abrupt shift of metaphors, is rounding 3rd base and windmilling hard for home on his elementary school education. How is that even possible?
• His teachers tell us he's doing well, though remains somewhat reserved in class (a carbon copy of both his parents).
• Outside of school, he enjoys video games, drawing, origami, watching TV, and collecting Pokemon cards. (His parents are thinking "professional video game player" or "professional video game designer" might be good career trajectories.)
  
  
• Katye ("look out, here I come") is a 1st grader, and her teacher is a Huge Fan. It helps that she'll likely pass the 5th grade reading level by year-end, good news for the school's median test scores.
• Her teacher one day declared, "if I could pay her to come to my class, I would" on account of her energy level, eagerness to participate, and willingess to play with anyone.
• Her self-proclaimed hobbies: watching Pokemon on TV, playing with her animal friends (but still no dolls), playing Webkinz, drawing, writing stories, and above all reading.
  
  
• Cameron ("think twice if you think I'm getting left behind") just started a half-day pre-kindergarten at Gloria Dei (as his sister did before him).
• This makes mornings a little challenging, as two caravans must leave the house and arrive at their destinations by 8 and 8:15 am. Luckily, Frank can usually trot him over before going to work.
• He just started getting into video games this year, and his favorites are Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones, and Wii Sports Resort. As I am writing this post, he has just completed the Forest (level 5) Showdown on Wii Sports Resort. So now he has gotten as far his daddy (Colin is, of course, way past this level.)
• Mom and dad are proud that at the annual children's Christmas service program at the school, he managed to remember his lines, hand gestures, and music -- or at least, close enough for pre-K purposes.
  

We wish you and your family a peaceful, joyful, and love-filled holiday season. Come by and visit, either electronically or physically. We'd love to see you either way.

Christmas Letter Goes Here

Hi, everyone! Here is where our little Christmas update is going to go once we write it. Rest assured, it won't be filled with news of our incredibly brilliantly accomplished children or photos of our immaculately clean home or cute stories of our world travels. But perhaps you'll feel caught up and mildly entertained anyway! Here's hoping ;)

Oh, and if you have a few minutes while you're waiting for the good stuff, consider backing up your computer. See recent posts below for some how-tos and whys...

(Just FYI, this is Fedora, who rarely contributes content--if you're not feeling sufficiently amused, apologies, and please check back, when our real update is posted by our actual blogger.)

iMac Repair Post #2 -- the Backup Regimen

We're taking a brief break from the chronicle of how our iMac got its new hard drive to describe our backup regimen. Here's what I want my backup strategy to accomplish:

• Survive the failure of any single hard drive.
• Be able to restore all our documents, especially media files (music, photos, videos).
• I'm not interested in restoring my system files, as I prefer to re-install the operating system over restoring a whole system backup. This recovery takes more time but results in (even on a Mac, and especially true on a Windows machine) leaner, speedier, and more stable machine.

The Main Ingredients
The two main ingredients to our backup strategy are Mac OS X's built-in Time Machine feature and a HP MediaSmart EX 485. But alas, as simple as Time Machine is, backup is a little more complicated than just hooking the two up and turning Time Machine on -- mostly because we also have to take into consideration how our media applications (primarily iTunes, iPhoto, but include a host of other less commonly used applications for accessing our music, photos and video) need to use the files.

For all our documents except for our media files -- music, photos, and videos -- it is actually just plug and play. The HP MediaSmart comes with software that makes it look like a Time Machine disk. To set this up:

• Plug the iMac and the MediaSmart into the same switch (in our case, a Linksys WRT54G)
• Install the HP MediaSmart software on the Mac
• Login to the HP MediaSmart Server Control Panel using the MediaSmart's admin username/password (same credentials you use to manage the server itself)
  
• Decide how much space you want to set aside for Time Machine backup (we're using 500GB).

Once you've down this, fire up Time Machine and select the 500GB disk named "Backup to HP MediaSmart Server" as your Time Machine backup disk.

Note: I've heard plenty of horror stories from folks trying to use generic SMB volumes for Time Machine backups. Do so at your own peril, and read up on best practices before you go down that treacherous path.

In the Time Machine Options... window, I've chosen a few directories not to backup:

• The Backup to HP MediaSmart Server disk itself
• The external hard drive containing my virtual machines and photos -- more on this later
• System Files and Applications

Time Machine then goes to work, automatically and continuously backing up all our documents, applications, application settings, and local mail directories.

For our media files, here's what we do:

Music files live on the HP MediaSmart server, managed by iTunes.

• I let iTunes manage the contents of the directory, so there's a folder called iTunes inside the Music directory, and iTunes is mostly ok with pointing to that directory -- provided you make that volume available automatically when you login. Use System Preferences | Accounts to make that happen.
• I let the HP MediaSmart automatically backup the contents of the Music folder to multiple hard drives automatically.
• Finally, I sync the entire contents of my Music library to my 80GB hard-drive based iPod once in a while.
• This means our music library lives on at least 3 hard drives: two inside the HP MediaSmart server, and one in the iPod.
• Since the audio files live on the HP MediaSmart server, most any client can access the music -- our Tivo, other PCs and Macs (via iTunes or Windows Media Player), my iPhone (via HP's iPhone app), and authorized folks on the Web (via HP's Flash-based streaming app).

Photos and videos live on an external hard drive, managed mostly by iPhoto, and which I manually sync to the HP MediaSmart

• I have a Photos directory on an external Firewire 800 hard drive.
• The iPhoto library lives on this external drive.
• We currently have >250GB of photos and videos.
• We use an external drive for performance reasons. iTunes is ok with files living on a slow-to-access network drive, but I doubt iPhoto and iMovie would be ok.
• After loading new photos with iPhoto, I sync the files to my HP MediaSmart from the Terminal:

rsync -avnr --progress /Volumes/MyExternalDisk/Photos/iPhoto\ Library/ /Volumes/Photos/iPhoto\ Library/

• In the above -- MyExternalDisk is the name of my external drive; Photos is the name of the folder the HP MediaSmart exports to the iMac.
• As with Music files, I let the HP MediaSmart duplicate all photos in this directory to multiple internal hard drives.
• So our photos are also on 3 hard drives: the external drive connected to the iMac and 2 drives inside the HP MediaSmart server.
• In addition to this backup, I usually upload photos to Smugmug, where we have an unlimited account which lets us upload anything we want. But we didn't start using Smugmug until about 2.5 years ago, so the archive there is incomplete.

I'm told the new HP MediaSmart servers will do a better job of automatically scooping up media files, even when they live on a Mac. Hopefully folks like me who own the EX485 will get that improved media syncing next year.

Next up: because we don't backup our system files, restoring the OS and applications requires a bit of manual work which I'll describe in the next post. Is it worth the manual tweaking? I think so.

Even on a Mac, systems accumulate crud over time, and a fresh install gets your system back to its factory-fresh -- read: speedy -- state. A factory fresh install of Snow Leopard feels snappier than one that started as 10.4.x and eventually made its way to 10.6.x. This is of course even more true for Windows machines, which I'll routinely rebuild every 6-12 months as a matter of system maintenance completely independent of backup needs. We'll see if Windows 7 makes this unnecessary, but, as one of the new Mac ads point out, this seems unlikely:

iMac repair post #1

As promised, here is my first in a series of posts about our experience getting our beloved iMac fixed. We got our iMac in April 2008 off Craigslist from someone who was planning to get a Macbook instead. She originally bought it in the fall of 2007 and had bought an AppleCare extended warranty on it. Boy, am I glad she did -- and that the warranty was transferrable. (The seller was a paralegal and had carefully highlighted the clause authorizing transfers in the warranty agreement -- nice!)

After transferring the warranty online, I promptly forgot all about it. Until, of course, when the hard drive started acting funny last Friday. Since the original warranty had expired, I was sure glad we had gotten AppleCare. We don't usually buy extended warranties on our consumer electronics or computer parts, but this purchase turned out to be a good gamble.  (At the store while picking up my machine a few days later, I asked how much it would have cost to just pay out of pocket for the repair. The reply: $85 to troubleshoot, plus around $300 for the 320GB drive. Ouch!)

Sometimes we would see that question mark at boot time. Once or twice, I got the machine to boot, but it will take 10 minutes. "What is this," I thought, "a Windows machine?"  :-)

Next stop: Google. 

• I tried rebooting while holding down various keys down to reset the Mac's PRAM and NVRAM. No dice. 
• I tried booting from the Mac OS X installation disc which came with the machine to run Disk Utility, which "saw" the drive. I tried tried running Disk First Aid, which took about 15 minutes and failed halfway through its session. Uh-oh.
• The next time I booted from the OS X installation disc, Disk Utility didn't even "see" the drive. Double uh-oh.

Next station: AppleCare tech support. I called in Saturday morning.

The technician had me basically repeat the above. When that didn't work, he tried to have me boot from a utility CD-ROM which came with the AppleCare Protection Plan. It had TechTool Deluxe on it, a diagnostic utility, but it wouldn't boot for some reason. During one of our reboot-while-holding-down-the-option-key sessions, the Startup Manager launched and "saw" the drive.  So we selected it and the iMac got through about 1/3 of its boot sequence in 5 minutes.

At that point, we gave up, and the tech support rep made an appointment for me to take it down to my local Apple Store later that afternoon. It's nice that he was able to do this so I didn't have to.

Overall, the session lasted a little under an hour and would have been way better if (1) the phone connection had less delay (call center in India?) and (2) the technician  had listened more instead of just walking through his troubleshooting checklist without listening to what I had already done. Overall, I'd give them a B for the overall phone tech support experience.

  

Next post: the Apple Store repair experience.

Our iMac is back, as good as new

You do not want to see this icon when you boot your Mac. It means your Mac can't boot off its internal hard drive.

The best case is that the disk's volume data (essentially, your hard drive's table of contents) has somehow gotten corrupted or the Mac has forgotten which disk to boot, both of which can be fixed with special reboots or Disk Utility from your Mac startup CD or DVD.

The worst case (as it was for us) means that your hard drive is dead and needs to be replaced.

In my role as "tech support for my friends and family", I've gotten a bunch of questions about what happened and what my backup regimen is. So over the next few posts, I'll describe what happened, what I did to restore our data, my experiences with Apple tech support, and what we do to backup data.

Here's the Reader's Digest version:

• After a call with Apple tech support where we tried various reboots and software-based repairs, I took the iMac down to the local Apple Store and they replaced the drive with a brand new one.
• We had a Time Machine backup on the HP MediaSmart server, so we didn't lose any data.
• After restoring from Time Machine (my first successful computer restore experience ever, I think) and a few application re-installs (most Mac apps don't need this, but I'll name names for the few which do), we're back in action. Hurrah!

Details coming soon, but if you have not backed up, please please please do so. This is 100x true for the drive with your completely irreplaceable videos and pictures. These days, even Quicken data doesn't seem that sacred to me -- but our pictures and videos absolutely are. (Thankfully, our photos were on an external drive which is itself backed up to two separate drives in the MediaSmart server, so they weren't on the drive that failed.)

Our family does not have a physical disaster emergency prepardness plan (yes, I know -- it's on the list with getting our trust notarized), but we do have a data disaster plan. You should too, if any of your data is important to you.

Snow Leopard

So I've upgraded to Snow Leopard on two machine (my latest generation work Macbook Pro and my home, slightly older iMac). The upgrade process itself was very smooth: the installer does all the work, reboots the machine a few times, and freed about 20 gigs of space on my boot disk. Can't remember ever seeing that any software upgrade.

Only a few things changed, none of them dramatic but all of them useful in their own way. It boots, sleeps, and resumes even faster than before. Day-to-day use feels marginally speedier -- mostly because it the Finder and Safari are both faster. I have not encountered any apps that won't launch or devices that don't work. I was a little worried about the scanner in my Canon Pixma MP500 because the Apple site reported it did not ship with Canon scanner drivers baked into Leopard, but the Canon software worked just fine.

On the flip side:

• iPhoto 08 won't play videos anymore. This one makes me mad, because Apple should have caught this trivial-to-fix bug in their own product family.
• Symptom: If you find the files in the iPhoto library from the Finder, they'll fire up just fine. But if you double click on videos in iPhoto, nothing happens.
• I'm surprised they didn't fix this in 10.6.1. I hope they fix this in the next week or two. Handling photos and videos is one of the reasons I switched to a Mac in the first place.
• My Logitech mouse's special buttons don't work. The Logitech forums speculate that an updated version of Logitech Control Center is coming soon.
• Suggested workarounds seemed to work for me the first few days but have since quit working (the Control Center stopped recognizing my MX700 mouse).

Other than that, I'm pleased overall. It does seem a little lame that Apple is charging as if this was an upgrade rather than a dot release. But I guess by comparison, it seems like way smaller a rip off than what Microsoft is charging for Vista Service Pack 2, er, Windows 7.

Also, not looking to the complete re-install Microsoft is going to force me to do to upgrade from my Windows 7 Release Candidate.

Update on 9/15/09: For some reason, the Logitech workarounds worked the 2nd or 3rd time around. I ran the installer from inside the Logitech Control Center 3.0 package, rebooted, and it recognized my MX700 mouse. Then copying Expose from the /Applications/Utilities folder to /Applications got the Expose mouse button shortcut working. OK, Apple, it's all you now: get your own products to work with your own operating system, please.

1 week, 3 round trip rides, 72 miles by bike

So I survived my 2nd full week of commuting. This week was somewhat warmer (low to mid 80s) but nothing really to complain about (aside from the bother of slathering on sunscreen sometimes before both the inbound and the outbound trip).

My legs are complaining but not as much as last week. I'm generally taking the Canada route to work and the Alameda route home. Alameda is shorter (11.5 miles versus 12.8 miles), not as hilly, but has much more street traffic -- making certain streets a little scary to ride on.

Here is a typical ride, complete with route map and elevation change. Gotta love the free iPhone app (available from MapMyRide.com) which tracks the rides (though I'm told there are better paid versions, which I'll investigate later).

Interesting things I've seen on my commute, partly because I'm now on a bike and partly because I'm just seeing more since it's a much longer ride:

• A zebra crossing painted on Canada that has horseshoe symbols in it
  
• Quite a lot of, um, evidence of horses along Canada, but no actual horses on the road -- though I have seen a half dozen horses in corrals along the side of the road
  
• Two Tesla Roadsters, my electric motor-powered brethren (alas, still have not convinced any of my wealthy coworkers to buy one)
• Two small vineyards (one on Canada and one on Alameda)
• A sign offering tractor-related services
  

On the way home, I find myself wishing I lived 2-3 miles closer to work. But the workout is good, and I must say it's a complete different "feel" arriving at my destination on either end. I'm much more alert and I feel like I've achieved something just by getting where I'm going.

One last thought in reflecting on Week 2: there is a sense (read the biking boards, for instance) that the electric motor is "cheating". While I understand why True Bikers believe that. If the bicycle is meant to augment human power, then adding electric power certainly spoils the purity of muscle + mechanical advantage = motion.

But I'm not in it for the Purity of Biking or glory or training so I can race. I'm in it primarily for the exercise (and the long-term health benefits thereof) and the sense of accomplishment. So I feel like my electronic steed helps me decide to bike more often than not. So the bike doesn't feel like cheating to me: it feels like the enzyme which lowers the activation energy so that the reaction can actually complete.

Besides, my flavor of electric bike doesn't have a throttle that just hauls me along: it's still quite a bit of work, as I'm guessing somewhere between a quarter and half of the power the system generates is consumed hauling itself around. After all, a good road bike weighs 15 pounds, and my bike weighs over 60 so something's got to move the 45 extra pounds.

As Insik suggests, I'll have to try the hills on a road bike a few weeks down the line. Stay tuned for the experiment, maybe in October.

My new ride

As promised, here are a few facts & thoughts about my new ride, the Giant Twist Freedom DX.

First, the facts:

• Giant calls it a hybrid bike, presumably to liken it to the hybrid cars like the Prius. Though for the rest of the industry, a hybrid bike is a cross between a road bike (think Tour de France racing style) and a mountain bike, so this is a little confusing.
  
• Like the Prius, the bike turns battery power into torque to help propel the bike and rider forward. In theory, the harder you pedal, the more assistance you get.
  
• Unlike the Prius, the batteries do not regenerate while coasting downhill.
• The bike has an electric motor integrated into the front wheel.
• There are four settings: Off, Eco, Normal, and Sport.
• Sport mode assists the most and Eco the least.
• When the assist system is Off, you get to feel what it's like to pedal a 62-pound monster of a bike. I assure you this is no fun, and I only have the system off when I'm rolling downhill.
• Unlike some motor systems like the BioX (my brother just got a bike with one of those), there is no electric throttle -- so you can ride it like a moped. No peddling = no go.
  
• You switch manually between the two batteries.
• Giant estimates the range thusly; these numbers seem a touch optimistic to me. Either that, or I'm a lot fatter than their test rider. In practical terms, a single battery lasts me about 30 miles, or call it a commute and a half on a route like this one with a few hills.

Now some thoughts after a couple training rides and 3 round-trip commutes:

• Overall, I quite like my trusty new steed. It will help me get in shape, and having the electric assist available will get me onto the bike more often than not.
• Without it, I probably would not have started commuting by bike. 
• I'm proud of the distance I've biked and look forward to some pounds coming off.
• Never before has arriving at work or at home seemed like such an achievement!  :-)
• The bike is a beast. Something about the size of the frame makes it seem very large. The good thing about this is it feels more stable on the road. But it is a 60+ pound monster, no two ways about it.
  
• How's it feel? The best way to describe how the bike feels is to say that it "flattens out" the terrain. Mild uphills feel like flat terrain; steep uphills feel like moderate uphills.
• I still have to work hard to get up 5% grades like Ralston Avenue -- but the electric assist makes it do-able for me without having to hop off and walk, or take a break.
• Riding position. The bike's geometry puts you in a very upright riding position, which takes pressure off your wrists and back since you're not hunched over.
• OTOH, sitting up straight with a loose T-shirt on basically turns your body and T-shirt into a sail. When the wind is blowing against you, this is not good. :-)
• This posture also makes it harder to get the right kind of leverage when peddling up big hills -- it's hard to come off the saddle and put your whole body into the effort.
  
• In general, I like this riding posture because it's relaxed and doesn't make my arms numb after a long ride. This is why I didn't get the very cool folding Swiss Bike with the BioX conversion kit like my brother -- the Swiss Bike's geometry has you bent over more, and I wanted a mostly comfortable posture for the commute.
• Sidebar: if you do want a Swiss Bike + BioX combo, visit the great folks at Velolectric Bikes in San Carlos. Very friendly and knowledgeable.
  
• I'm glad I got the 2-battery version. Giant makes a cheaper and lighter 1-battery version, but I've had a battery run out of juice on half of my rides, and being able to flip to the fully charged backup battery is a huge relief. The thought of biking up the 92 pedestrian path on my 60+ pound monster with no electric assistance brings tears to my eyes. :-)
• The saddle bags are useful but you need to pack carefully. The built-in saddle bags are really designed to protect the battery packs. But you can get a change of clothes and your lunch into them if you pack carefully. I've been wearing a backpack to carry stuff that won't fit (like my laptop), but am investigating ways to mount something on top of the racks to get the weight off my back and prevent the sweaty back phenomenon.
  

OK, more later. Leave questions in the comments if you have them.

New job -- and a new ride

So I started a brand new job today (very exciting) -- and even managed bike to and from the office (very sore but personally gratifying).

Some factoids about my new job and my new ride:

• Brand new job: Andreessen Horowitz Fund
• Brand new office: 2875 Sand Hill Road
• As psi points out, it may be outright illegal for a venture capitalist not to occupy a Sand Hill address.  :-)
  
• Total commute length: between 12-13 miles (Google Maps guesstimate until I get a bike computer)
• Furthest I've ever gone on a bike in 1 day: true
• Total commute time: about an hour each way
• Commute route: Home > Canada Road > Whiskey Hill > Sand Hill Road
• Commute vehicle: Giant Twist Freedom DX electric bike (more on this in a later post)
• Weather: just about perfect: cloudy and low 70s on the way in, sunny and mid-70s on the way back
• Number of bikers I passed: 2
• Number of bikers who passed me on their non-electric road bikes: 5
• To the bikers who politely passed me: keep riding -- you are inspirational!
• Must get my RPMs up   :-)
  
• Number of joggers who passed me: 0, thankfully
• Muscles that are most sore: thighs, calves, butt, and my right arm (from dragging my beast of a bike up the stairs at work)
• Calories burned: 1,354 says this calculator
• Primary motivation: get in shape
• Other motivations: see cool sights, reduce carbon footprint (though given my trusty Prius gets nearly 55 mpg on the trip to/from work, this is pretty marginal)
  

Speaking of cool sights, here are some I saw today:

• A black limo following an older Indian gentleman on his bike (a foreign dignitary? a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a backup crew?)
• A house right on the banks of the Crystal Spring reservoir -- wonder who lives there?
• The Pulgas Water Temple
• Various entrances to Filoli
• A horse park
  

Strangely, they're closing Canada Road this Thurs, Fri and Monday, so I'm going to try and bike in Tuesday and Wednesday. Stay tuned for more on the bike commute saga. And on the new job.

Ciao for now, must go nurse my legs. :-)

Bowling

We've had the kids in our church summer camp. They gave the kids a day off today, so this feels like our first real day of summer vacation. We enjoyed it by... (wait for it)... taking the kids bowling.

We thought by going first thing in the morning would help us avoid the crowds. So wrong. We barely got a lane even though we got there maybe 20 minutes after the alleys opened up. About half the lanes were occupied by what looked like a senior citizen's competitive bowling league.

Everyone in the family bowled. Let me just say that our two games took over two hours since it takes a while when the ball is about a third of certain bowlers' body weight. When you are rolling the ball at 1.5 mph, it takesa a long time to get to the pins... :-)

But everyone had a good time -- and Colin even broke 100.

All in all, not a bad way to start off a 4th of July weekend. Bowling does feel somehow quintessentially American.

Political science discussion on the way home

Actual conversation we had in the car on the way home about why there are only 4 days of day camp this week (instead of the typical 5).


Mom: We're celebrating July 4th this week, so we get Friday off. Who did America win independence from?

Katye (enthusiastically):  France! No, Boston!

Image via Wikipedia

Colin (hedging his bets): Great Britain. Or maybe slavery.

Mom: Right. America was a British colony.


Katye: What's a colony?


Cameron (must participate even if I have no idea what's happening): Is Colin a colony?

Case study in how not to do marketing

Image via Wikipedia

So I've been toying with the idea of getting an electric bike. These are all the rage in China, which makes perfect sense. But it'd be great for me on the short trips to the grocery where the thought of getting up and down the hill with groceries puts me right into the car (yes, I'm pathetic that way).

But that's not the point of this article; instead, this is a case study in what happens when you haven't thought your marketing all the way through to the point of sale.

I say all this, by the way, as a Best Buy shareholder. Sigh. Anyway, here's the good, bad, and the ugly.

• The good: Articles about Best Buy carrying electric bikes surface in the blogosphere (see example article below). Good way to leverage social media to build awareness.
• Still good: My local store puts up a banner visible from US-101 proclaiming, "Electric bikes are here, come in for a test ride!". Again, good: a direct, clear call to action in a place where lots of people will see it, including thousands of people stuck in commute-time traffic. Perfect target market.
• Here's where it goes from bad to comically worse:
  
• Attempt 1 to test ride a bike: Two weeks after the banner went up, I walk into the store for a test ride. Some of the bikes they are supposed to carry are not even on the floor; two models are in boxes. No one in the store knows when they are coming out of the boxes or when the rest of the models are arriving. Test ride? Nope, not sure when you can do that either. FAIL.
• Attempt 2 to test ride a bike: Two weeks later, I call the store. They say, "nope, still not on out of the boxes -- should be good to go this weekend". Remember, at this point, the store has a freeway-visible banner up for at least a month with that precise call-to-action emblazoned on it. FAIL.
  
• Attempt 3 to test ride a bike: Two weeks after Attempt 2, I drop by the store. Sure enough, the bikes (and the Segway) are on the floor out of the boxes. After asking a half dozen blue shirts for a test ride, I'm finally directed to the Appliances team. The Appliance guy makes a call, and says, "yup, it's what I suspected. We only have one guy who can help with test rides, and he's in once a week on Fridays. Please come back then." FAIL.

Why generate the awareness and then the leads when you can't deliver on the call-to-action? Looks like the bike-enthusiast bloggers who were dismissive about Best Buy being in this business at all were right.

p.s. Digging this Zemanta add-on, which I blogged about earlier. Definitely saves a lot of back-and-forth with other browser windows.

Related articles by Zemanta

• In China, Bicycles Are Back - But Now They're Battery Powered (time.com)
• Best Buy to Sell Brammo Bikes (shoppingblog.com)
• Best Buy Will Start Selling Electric Bikes (keetsa.com)

Recommended Firefox extensions

I have the following confession: it's hard to write down paragraph-sized blog thoughts when it's so much easier to post word and sentence-sized thoughts via Twitter and Facebook. Pathetic but true.

Image via Wikipedia

Anyway, to buck the trend, I'm here to recommend a few extensions: three for folks who run Firefox on a few different machines (e.g., work, home, in a virtual machine) and one for the dwindling numbers who still blog (though also good for the increasing number of Gmail users).

First an aside about Firefox. I've definitely flirted with a few other browsers in the past 3 months (Safari, Chrome, and Opera) -- primarily for speed. The new Javascript engines in Chrome and Safari are super fast, and you can definitely tell in everyday browsing. But Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is pretty fast too and also offers the killer feature of supporting a wide variety of extensions. So until Chrome or Safari create a rich ecosystem of must-have extensions, I'll always have Firefox on my machine.

OK, onto the extension recommendations. First, for the nomadic Firefox users:

• Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) synchronizes bookmarks (and saved passwords, though I don't use that feature -- see below for why) across IE and Firefox. It mostly just works, though does insist on alphabetizing the contents of your Bookmark Bar which I found somewhat annoying. I use separate work and a home profiles to keep a separate set of bookmarks. For those into the teams behind the features, Xmarks was cofounded by Mitch Kapor, the guy who built Lotus 1-2-3 and was the founding Chair of Mozilla (the fine folks who build Firefox, Thunderbird and more).
• LastPass stores your username, passwords, and profiles (for filling out those pesky forms) "in the cloud" and features browser plug-ins for both Firefox and IE which will leap into action and offer to fill out your password when you hit a site that needs one. When I was on Windows, I used something called Roboform which did the same thing -- but Roboform didn't have a Mac version when I converted. So I gave LastPass a whirl, and it's generally the first plug-in I donwload after I install a fresh version of Firefox. (Try 1Password if you are addicted to Safari and don't need something that works across platforms and browsers.)
• FEBE does for Firefox extensions, themes and preferences what Lastpass does for passwords. It allows you to back them up and import them. Super handy if you find yourself installing Firefox on lots of different machines and dread the task of downloading all those extensions into your brand-new Firefox installations. It supports saving your stash-o-goodies on Box.net for storage in the cloud.

Image via Wikipedia

Finally, here's a recommendation for bloggers or Gmail'ers who want to create fancy email messages. Zemanta is a plugin that will automatically recommend tags, links, pictures, and other resources for your blog posts or email messages as you are typing them. Some might find this a little big brother-ish, but I find it super useful. It might even get me to blog more.

As I've been typing this entry, for example, it's offered to insert links for Mozilla, Mitch Kapor, Foxmarks, Opera, Xmarks, and more. In other words, I didn't have to insert the links manually.

It's also offered to insert a list of relevant tags on ths blog post (not as relevant to me, since this mostly just a personal blog).

And it's recommended a set of images to insert such as pictures of Mitch Kapor and Jon Stephenson von Tezchner, the cofounder of Opera, the Firefox and Opera and Foxmarks and Facebook logos), and so on. When you drag-and-drop them into your post, it automatically inserts the images as well as the reference links below the images. Genius!

Beatboxing flute player on NPR

I've been watching this guy's eye-popping YouTube videos for a while. Greg Pattillo, the "beatboxing flute player" was interviewed on NPR recently.

I'm sure most of you have seen this given that his Inspector Gadget video has been watched nearly 18 million (!) times. But if you haven't, and especially for all my flute-playing friends out there, you have got to see this.



Subscribe to his YouTube channel for more beat boxing, flute playing goodness. Especially if you're also a Mario Brothers fan, because then you'll see his Mario Brothers theme performance too.

Yes I've been blogging less

• Yes, I've been blogging less.
• Yes, I blame it on Facebook and Twitter.
• Yes, I really shouldn't be constraining myself just to the sentence-sized micro-thoughts I can share there.
• No, I don't see it getting much better: it's too easy doing it the other way.
• Yes, the Web browser needs to make it easier to upload pictures.
• Yes, even finding pictures to upload on a Mac using the built in pictures browser is too much of a pain.
• No, Picasa for the Mac doesn't solve this problem because it has difficulty keeping itself synced up to the iPhoto photo database.
• No, Windows 7 doesn't solve this problem either.
• Yes, what we need is a way to right-click upload files to whatever social network/blogging platform you want. Kind of like Pixelpost but built into the file system. And not just for pictures.
• No, I can't think of a way to turn that into sustainable revenue. Otherwise, I'd start it.
• No, I don't know if someone is already doing it. But tell me if they are.

Comcast brought fiber to my neighborhood. Woot!



I wonder if the explains the connectivity hiccup we had last week? Anyway, no problems since then -- though the hiccup forced me to do a big conference call from my cellphone, which really doesn't work well. Oh well, onwards and upwards hopefully.

Happy surprise while breakfasting @ Hobee's

Pictures from Pixelpipe

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Posted via Pixelpipe.

Colin and Cameron on Easter Sunday

Posted via Pixelpipe.

This is one of my favorite shots from Easter Sunday (the rest of the album is at Smugmug). Colin and Cameron are delighted because it's their second Easter egg hunt of the year, they got to leave the Sunday service early, it's the start of Spring Break -- and I've got the week off as well, thanks to HP "recommending" that we all take this week off. What's not to like? :-)

Separate topic, this time on how this photo got published to this blog. I've been searching for an easy way to post pictures from iPhoto to Blogspot (which hosts this blog). I installed Picasa for the Mac, which I like in general. But it was taking a long time to refresh its database with the iPhoto pictures. Plus, I'm not sure I want my entire photo collection re-thumbnail'ed and re-indexed just so it's easier to post to Blogger.

In Googling for a solution, I happened across Pixelpipe, which is a much more general purpose publishing service. I'm giving it a whirl. You'll see this picture here and in Twitter and in Facebook all at once, something I did just by exporting the picture from iPhoto once. Still have work to do on making the posts more friendly (by default it labels your post with the filename), but seems very useful.

On the road to geekdom...

Yup, it started early in our family. Here are the boys visiting their virtual animal pets at Webkinz.com.

Lest you think only the boys are geeks, Katye is in the office playing from our Mac. :-)

Cameron is surprisingly adept at navigating the fairly complicated Webkinz.com world given that he barely has the fine motor skills needed to control a mouse -- oh, plus he can't read.

Waaah: Beard Papa in Redwood City closed!

Chrysler, Schmysler: the real impact of the global economic meltdown has visited Redwood City in the form of our beloved Beard Papa shutting down.

Waaaah! Now we have to go all the way to the city or Berkeley or Cupertino to get some of these delectable cream puffs.

Beard Papa lovers of the Bay Area: it's time for the Beard Papa bailout plan. Go to one of the remaining stores and buy your cream puffs. Eat some in the stores, then buy some for home. Get some for deserving friends (like me). Then buy some for your undeserving friends (okay, maybe like me).

We can't allow Beard Papa to go under. They are too delicious to fail.

Easter Retreat 2009

Although attendance was down this year, the folks who made it out to our church's annual Easter Retreat enjoyed a relaxing weekend, fabulous weather, and a great time of fellowship (that's church codeword for "hanging out").



Since I lugged the Nikon along, I took a ton of pics. You can see as many (or as few) of the 488 on Smugmug.

If you want just a few, here they are:









And a few pictures since I finally worked out that "take lots of shots when I leave the trigger down" feature on my camera:

Mind-blowing visulization of population data

I've been watching TED Talks and Hulu while treadmilling (wireless video inside the house seems more reliable now that we're on Comcast's super-fast Internet service) and randomly chose this talk from the Top 10 list by doctor and researcher Hans Rosling. Bottom line? It's must see TV.

If you are a fan of data visualizations, population trends, government policy, comparisons between countries, or just even mildly curious about changes to our world in the last 30-40 years, prepare to be blown away by this video.

The TEDTalks site blurb has it right: 

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."

After you've watched the video and are hungry for more, visit Gapminder.org, Dr. Rosling's nonprofit venture to help people create visualizations like the ones you saw in the video.

First week with Comcast Digital Voice: it just works

We've been on Comcast Digital Voice for about a week after nearly 5 years with Vonage. Verdict? I'm pleasantly surprised: just like Google, the service (so far) has the "it works" feature.

I must say it is a relief that I don't think about my phone service anymore: people can hear me and I can hear them (I actually had to turn down the volume on my handsets because the VOIP box must be pumping out a stronger signal to my phone). Things with Vonage had gotten so bad, I'd have to do phone calls with two phones -- listening to my regular phone (Vonage) with speaking into my cellphone (AT&T). Not a pretty picture.

Anyway, a few other feature advantages to Comcast Digital Voice vs. Vonage for people thinking about taking the plunge:

• Again, it just works. I've read calls get routed over a private Comcast-managed network as opposed to the public Internet. Apparently this is how they are delivering the "it just works" feature. To me, it feels like the phone and Internet service are totally separate. Not sure if this is technically accurate, but I've had (shhh, don't tell anyone) moment where I'm on the phone, watching YouTube, doing a Webex, and doing a broadband speed test all at once. Phone call quality didn't glitch once.
• Local dialing is local dialing again. Just like the old phone company but unlike Vonage, I can dial 7 digits for local calls. Kinda refreshing actually. (OTOH, long distance calls actually need to prefaced by 1, unlike Vonage).
• Better voicemail on the Web GUI. Comcast's voicemail-on-the-Web feature lets you forward the voicemails to other people, a nice feature. Also the UI for listening to messages is friendlier since it doesn't pop up a separate external media player for every message you listen to.
• Easier voicemail from the phone. There's an option to skip the password check if you're fetching voicemail from your home phone. Nice.
• Automatic E911 service. You don't have to explicitly register for E911 service. For some reason, even though Vonage knew exactly where I lived by virtue of having sent me their VOIP box, I still had to manually sign up for E911. Go figure.
• Phone calls without power. The integrated cable modem and VOIP box has a battery backup. In theory I can talk for 8 hours even without power from the mighty PG&E.

On the flip side:

• Different Web interfaces. Switching between the many different Web front ends for managing your phone service, billing, and email is needlessly confusing. Because Comcast outsources billing (Convergys), email (Zimbra), voicemail, and basic account management to different companies, there are at least 4 completely different Web interfaces for reading email, managing your phone features, looking at your bill, and managing your Web features. They didn't even try to make them look like they are offered by the same company.
• Confusing Website navigation. The Comcast family of websites is disjointed. The product teams (e.g., phone, TV, billing, video-on-demand, Web) obviously don't talk with one another, and navigation is confusing. And don't even get me started on their completely retarded cable TV Web site. I dare you to go find out what the channel lineup is in your area. Even after you've logged in and they know enough to route your E911 call.
• No SimulRing. Comcast does not have Simultaneous Ring, only Call Forwarding. So if you had gotten addicted to that Vonage feature, Comcast flat out just doesn't have it. Call Forwarding places a "courtesy" ring on your main number and forwards it on to the number you pick. It's a courtesy ring because no matter how fast you pick up the phone, there's no way to answer it.
• Typically inaccurate and impossible to read bill. Naturally, the first bill from Comcast after the switchover was completely incomprehensible and nearly twice what I agreed to pay. At some point, I'll have to call and figure out what that's all about.
• Long time to port my number. It took them about 3 weeks to schedule the appointment for the technician to come out and swap my cable modem. Apparently negotiating the number port with Vonage is tricky, so not sure this is Comcast's fault.
• Took the better part of a day to get me running. It took a village to get me hooked up and to the point where I wasn't dropping phone calls and my Internet connection every 3 minutes: two technicians (one of which I had to call 4 times and summon back to my house twice), 4-5 phone reps, 2 cable modem/VOIP boxes, and 3 replaced physical network doohickeys. Total elapsed time: 6.5 hours. Percent of time I was on work conference calls during that stretch: 100%.

All in all, I'm glad we switched and I can stop thinking about whether people will be able to hear me when I call them. I completed the phone torture test last night: Webcast and phone call with Asia-Pacific for 1.5 hours -- and it just worked.

Microsoft Office launches in 1/2 second

So I've been running the Windows 7 Beta for a little over a month (on a 2-year old Dell laptop and an even older Dell desktop), and while I still think this is what Vista ought to have been, it's suffering from the dreaded Windows cruftification:

• Everything -- boot, standby, resume, hibernate, application launch -- is slowing down,
• My desktop refuses to shut down half the time, and
• I had to turn the new sharing feature called Homegroup off because it was breaking my Linksys wireless router (symptom: it would refuse to form wireless network connections with the Dell laptop without power cycling).
  

So it looks like Windows 7 has yet to solve one of the biggest problems with Windows: the distressing tendency for applications to dramatically slow down in all the everyday things that really matter to me.

So with that backdrop, enjoy this video about how some extreme hardware can come to the rescue of sloppy Microsoft coding. Skip the first few minutes about how they set up the extreme array of solid-state drives, and skip to about the 2:04 marker to see some jaw dropping performance. I definitely want one of those. Watch to the very end: the last speed race is genius. :-)

Disclosure: this is marketing from Samsung. But I happen to think it's awesome, out of the box thinking from a company you don't usually think of as a savvy social marketer.

So close...yet so far

So I have to talk to a person to cancel my Vonage service. I called the service number, and I was pleasantly surprised that:

• The up front computerized prompts were clear and easy to navigate by speaking
  
• The voice recognition was outstanding -- it correctly understood me when I said my phone number as well as the answer to my security question which I had typed in at registration time
• The automated responses were clear and struck the right tone ("I'm sorry to hear you want to cancel your account. I can help you with that.")

I was just about to record this (FTW, as they say on the Web) as a surprisingly pleasant customer service experience -- until it dropped me off to a recording that said their offices were only open on weekdays. Aaaarrgghh!

From FTW to FAIL in one easy step. They knew that I needed to talk to a real agent early in the interaction -- and rather than take me through more prompts, they should have just told me that immediately.

Comcast and VOIP

So we've been on Vonage for just about 5 years. Aside from some hiccups in the early months -- way back in spring of 2004 -- we've had no major complaints. (Though the simultaneous ringing feature takes some time for both you and your callers to get used to.)

Then just this year we started having serious voice quality problem. People would say I was breaking up on nearly every call. Calls would drop right in the middle of phone calls. People would say they called us but rolled right over to voicemail. Multiply all these small aggravations by my working from home more and routinely doing 6-9 hours a day on conference calls, and I knew we had to do something.

Vonage said it was Comcast's fault; Comcast said it was "congestion in my neighborhood" or my Linksys router's fault. Reading the press about Comcast's bandwidth caps and bandwidth shaping, I suspected Comcast was merrily dropping Vonage's VOIP packets.

So we made the switch to Comcast Digital Voice today. As much as I dislike potentially rewarding the guilty party, I need a reliable phone service -- and a single throat to choke when I can't get that. The finger pointing was driving me crazy, and my phone just wasn't working. (In case you are wondering, the AT&T coverage near my house is not that great, and other VOIP services including both Skype and MagicJack weren't much better, quality-wise.)

So we'll see how the grand experiment goes. As is typical, I lost a bunch of hours today managing the 6 Comcast people (two on-site techs, 3 phone support folks, and 1 voice-chat person)
that it took to switch me over from Vonage. But after two new modems, two physical network doodad replacements, 8 cable modem and router resets, I think I'm back to normal now.

Call me if you want to hear that Comcast VOIP sounds like. :-)

The upside: this new package features super-fast Internet access. Check these two bandwidth speed test results from earlier today. Yup, that's 17 Mbps downstream and 8-9 Mbps upstream. Woot!

Bad Bank

If you haven't listened to This American Life's coverage of the banking meltdown appropriately called Bad Bank, run, don't walk to your nearest iTunes or Web browser and give it a listen. In less than an hour, you'll understand how we got into this situation and what the main possible treatments are -- and why the government has yet to decisively chose one over the over.

Like that? I thought you would.

If you liked that show, listen to This American Life's two other great episodes about the financial crisis:

• A Giant Pool of Money
• Another Frightening Show About the Economy

If you liked all three of those, subscribe to NPR's Planet Money audio podcast. And if you just can't get enough of this stuff and want more advanced reading, try the Baseline Scenario blog.

I firmly believe that financial literacy -- or illiteracy, as the case may be -- has a role to play in this all-too-frightening debacle.

A teaser: here is a graph mentioned in Bad Bank. In this century, there have been only two years when US personal household debt has exceed the GDP. Yup, you guessed it: 1929 and 2007.

Stem cell research

President Obama is moving to lift the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Regardless of whether you consider the embryos we use to get these so-called pluripotent stem cells are human yet, I wanted to highlight a few things which the mainstream press is not covering much -- presumably because it's easier to tell this story as a "liberal Obama vs. conservative Bush" story. (I was reading the Wall Street Journal's coverage this morning, and it seems typical.)

• New technologies are turning adult stem cells into pluripotent stem cells. Scientists have had recent successes turning adult stem cells (the ones you and I have in abundance) into pluripotent stem cells -- that is, cells which can turn into other types of cells. Pluripotency is one of the main things which got scientists excited about embryonic stem cells in the first place. (If you the Wikipedia link is a bit too dry, try this article in Nature.)
• Stem-cell therapies working today. Stem cell-based therapies are working today to treat blood problems such as leukemia. Most the media attention is focused on embryonic stem cell research which will take years to develop into effective treatments (if ever), and I thought it worthwhile to remind people that therapies based on adult and umbilical cord stem cells -- neither of which require destroying embryos -- are working today.

US News and World Report has an article by Dr. Bernadine Headey which provides some more context than the typical mass media story.

Also, update on 3/9 -- here is a CBS news story on regrowing body parts, which I learned about, of all places on Twitter via @tonyrobbins. Yes, that Tony Robbins.

Close up of the cake

The older I get, the more I appreciate the more subtle nature of cakes made by Chinese bakeries. This was a mango cake, and everything: the cake, the mousse, the fruit, and even the chocolat shavings and petals (around the edge of the cake) are 1-2 steps tamer (less sweet, less buttery, less dense) than the similar cake turned out by your typical neighborhood bakery. Yum!

Katye turns 6

Our princess turned 6 this past week. The whole gang is into giving each other -- and cakes and so forth -- bunny ears in their photos, so this is how they wanted to remember the occassion.

Interestingly, only Colin (and mommy and me, of course) really enjoyed the cake, which I got at the Sheng Kee Bakery near work. Cameron would have have been just as happy with the fruit, and Katye liked the idea of a cake better than the cake itself. I wonder if that will change as they grow older.