Community Guy – Jake McKee

It's a girl!

Today at 2:42 pm CST, my daughter arrived. Here’s the stats:

• Name: Bridget [middle name yet to be selected] McKee
• Weight: 6 lbs 15 oz
• Length: 19.5 inches

Both wife and baby are happy and healthy. My wife is a rockstar!

The Great Labor of '06

It looks as though my wife’s labor might be starting to happen, so if posting in thin you’ll know why.

I’ll post pictures as soon as I can! (Assuming this isn’t a false alarm)

Social media – the time has come

Lately I’ve found myself in the midst of a number of conversations talking about the early days of the internet. I was one of the people who saw the "utopian vision" that was the power of the internet almost as soon as I was introduced to it. With the way that social connection has been supercharged by the internet in the last few years, I find myself thinking a lot about that famous Victor Hugo quote:

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Clearly I'm ready for fatherhood

The video below was featured on the YouTube home page last night. When I found the clip, it was late night Friday and I was still working. I had work stress, weekend task list stress, and pending birth stress. This clip immediately washed away everything except barrel laugh and excitement about the upcoming baby.

Enjoy!

Clearly I’m ready for fatherhood

The video below was featured on the YouTube home page last night. When I found the clip, it was late night Friday and I was still working. I had work stress, weekend task list stress, and pending birth stress. This clip immediately washed away everything except barrel laugh and excitement about the upcoming baby.

Enjoy!

My Tabs are out of control…

Seriously, I need help. You know when you find something you like, and you use/consume/buy it until you’re just simply overwhelmed? Like when you say "I’ll get started with photography", and before you know it you have a pile of lenses, more books than you’ll ever read, and 7 different types of camera bags.

Now that tabs are standard on programs like Firefox, NetNewsWire, and Flock I’ve created a hole I’m having trouble getting out of – tab abuse.

Despite my diligent efforts to put any cool Web finds into my delicious stream, I still find myself with no less than 64 open tabs across the three applications listed above. These aren’t just pages I want to keep for future reference, or things I want to save to pass on to a specific person. No no, my friend – these are active content that will soon be blogged, quoted, or referenced for one project or another. Try as I might to clear at least some of these out tabs, more appear to replace them. That damn ctrl-click function to open links into new tabs is far to easy. I call it the "Enabler Key Combo".

It’s official: there’s simply too much great content on the Web.

BlogFusion 5 arrives!

That’s right, I’ve just upgraded this blog to BlogFusion v5. In fact, I’m using the cool Performancing blog editor, a new capability of v5. And even better, Jeremy has been helping me to design (nay, designing for me) a new look for this blog. Much more professional and much more tasty that my current hack job!

If you notice anything weird, please leave a comment in this thread or drop me an email.

Office 2.0 Debate: Jumping in feet first…

Sometimes I just don’t know enough to stay quiet. This weekend there was a bit of a blow up regarding the fact that of the 53 speakers at the upcoming Office 2.0 conference, only one was a woman. Shelley is very upset:

The conference organizer wrote in Tara’s comments that we should suggest some women and to point out the conference, but that makes little sense when the conference is a month away, the speakers have already been slotted, and the organizer is less interested in representing women and more in getting attention directed to his conference. Well, he has his wish: I am giving him attention.

I have been told that the way to make a difference is for women to be more proactive; to submit proposals for conferences, to put ourselves on lists, to create our own conferences and web sites. I’ve been told these things, and I’ve watched as this has become the ‘accepted’ way to generate change in this Web 2.0 world. The thing is, I don’t see that it’s working.

In an effort to try to learn and challenge and debate (something I’m infamous for), I jumped feet first into the comment thread, both on Shelley’s site as well as a few other sites. The two blog posts that stuck out to me the most were Tara’s and Kathy’s. (As a sidenote, I read Kathy’s site nearly every day, and had no idea she was a woman… actually, I’d been so impressed with the content that I’d never really thought about it. I was too busy going "Yeah yeah! Now who am I going to send this entry to?")

Overall, it’s been an enlightening, thought provoking line of discussion. I’m certainly going to make a bigger effort to seek out more women in my role as speaker organizer for Refresh Dallas.

But it’s also been a bit frustrating, as I struggle to widen my perspective and challenge my own beliefs. Shelley tells me I "just don’t get it". Maybe I don’t, but how am I going to learn? And if I don’t learn, how am I going to change/help change? How do I begin to reconcile posts like this and this without some help?

I look at conferences like BlogHer and really applaud Lisa, Elisa and Jory for putting it together. I’m impressed that they took action to balance the male dominated dynamic at conferences. That said, I’ve yet to go to BlogHer, despite having tons of interest in the content lineup. Why? Mostly because I’ve not felt welcomed. Certainly not after reading posts like this. (For more of this discussion, check out Dave’s comment here. I’m no fan of Dave’s, not by a long shot, but this discussion is very worth following) It’s hard to not look at Dave’s post talking about how impressed he was with the event, which was followed up by an outpouring of irritation and not want to just back away slowly.

I’m not complaining that I didn’t feel welcomed, that’s my hangup. I completely and totally support Lisa, Elisa, and Jory in their efforts, and am happy to help however I can. I’m also committing to pay more attention to trying to expand my female contacts, offer suggestions for female speakers, and make changes where I can. I’m also going to step away from the open discussion threads, as they seem less about helping me learn than punishing me for not knowing more in the past. If I was smarter, I’d probably know to leave well enough alone!

Stem to Stern

OK, I have to share this one…

I’m driving home yesterday and pull up to a stoplight. It’s a long wait at a busy intersection, and I start looking around. As I look to my left, I see a woman pick up her cell phone (I think it was ringing), get it almost to her ear only to pull it away a stare at it. After a good second or two of staring, she put the phone up to her mouth and…. licked it from at least the middle of the keypad to the top of the screen. We’re talking full tounge bath. Seriously.  After a very quick brush on her sleeve and BAM! back up the ear where she proceed to converse with the party on the other end of the line. I had to wonder if they heard the licking and rubbing…

From now on I’m not going to be looking around in traffic anymore. Eyes straight ahead at all times.

Live blogging the dealership

Just a quick rant while I hang out at Courtesy Nissan. Short version of the story is that 2 weeks ago I brought my car in because at low speed the car would die when I pushed the gas. Not break down, but not move forward either. Brought it into the dealership that morning and they couldn’t find anything. Yesterday I came out to the car to discover a sizable puddle of gas and a visible leak. And when I started up the car to drive back to the dealership this morning, the same lurching problem came back.

I come into the dealer when they open (7a) in order to get a prime spot in line, only to discover their mechanics don’t start until 8a.

Then at 8:15a, I’m told that they can’t find "any evidence" that the car was leaking gas or that there was a problem. Since the computer didn’t set an error, and they "couldn’t see any gas residue", they told me they’d be happy to hang onto the car overnight and see what happens after it sat for a while. Of course, I’d be paying for my rental since, again, the computer didn’t tell them anything.

Of course when I asked to see the underside myself, I immediately pointed out two, yes two area of gas leak "evidence". Only then did they decide to put their trust in themselves rather than in the computer.

Good customer service isn’t difficult. Trust from your customer is easy to build. You just have to want to create that kind of relationship. Here’s some tips fo rmaking that happen:

1. Run the numbers – Make sure to review your entire cost/benefit analysis before building a business that is developed are nothing more than cranking customers out as quickly as possible. Personally, I’d have a hard time recommending this dealership to anyone. When we turn in our lease in a month or two, I’ll have a hard time buying from this dealership. Is the hour of labor they give to researching my problem worth loosing a $25k-35k sale? Worth loosing the recommendation? Funny thing is, they probably spend a sizable amount on bad TV commercials that barely work.

2. Fight the stereotype - Here’s a tip: when people are pre-disposed by years of poor treatement to believe that your industry/business is out to screw them, don’t give into the stereotype. Make yourself stand apart. I’m not an ACE certified mechanic, yet I’m the one that had to point out the "evidence" of the problem I clearly witnessed?

3. Language is important – As you can tell from my repeated use of "evidence" (in quotes), I was irritated with the advisor despite his overall polite approach. Because he was clearly sending the "I don’t believe you" signals, I was immediately turned off and more willing to fight to prove I’m right. Maybe this advisor has become jaded at level or regular customer incompetence when it comes to cars. If that’s the case, he should be fired and a new, unjaded advisor hired in his place.

4. Rely on your customers, not computers – We hear stories all the time about computer mistakes. We know that computers are buggy, error filled, and often problematic. We know that a few misplaced keystrokes can turn a 20 year old man into a 60 year old woman. Yet, what the computer says is always correct. The service industry has become so dependent on the computer that human customer input has no effect on the conversation. Because the computer didn’t tell the dealership that I had a gas leak, I didn’t have a gas leak… despite my driveway still reeking of gas. If you want us to put our trust in your business, perhaps you should put a little trust in us, no?

UPDATE: Turns out, I was right. The car was, in fact, having problems. Big problems with the fuel delivery system. A valve was broken, causing a vapor-only filter to fill with liquid gas. After 45 minutes of removing the rear end (relatively short, really), the problem became obvious to the mechanic almost instantly from what I was told. Why this warranty work was being resisted so hard is beyond me. I’ve reported issues that were all inter-related going back four or five service visits now…

Here’s an extra rule to round out this discussion:

5. Apologizing doesn’t make you less of a man – After all this back and forth, a simple "Sorry about that, we should have just gone ahead and dug around a bit more before sending you on your way" would have made me love the dealership. As it was, you could tell the service advisor was doing everything he could to get me out so he could avoid the eye contact that would have given away his embarrasment.