Will's Thoughtstream

This delicious recipe is from the January 2006 Gourmet magazine. It is originally a 1992 recipe. The sirloin is a wonderful texture-rich alternative to traditional chili meat.

Black-Bean and Sirloin Chili

Adapted from Fog City Diner, San Francisco

Serves 8

Active time: 30 Min

Start to Finish: 2 HR

2 lb boneless sirloin steak, cut into 1/2 -inch cubes

½ tsp salt

½ tsp black pepper

1/3 cup olive oil

2 cups chopped yellow onions (2 medium)

1 TBSP finely chopped garlic

5 fresh jalapeno chiles, seeded and finely chopped (1/2 cup)

3 TBSP chili powder (not pure chile)

½ tsp cayenne

½ tsp ground cumin

¼ cup masa harina (tortilla flour)

3 ½ cups beef broth (28 fl oz)

½ cup water

2 cups cooked black beans (drained and rinsed if canned)

ACCOMPANIMENTS: grated mild Cheddar; finely chopped red onion

v     Pat beef dry and season with ½ tsp salt and ¼ tsp pepper

v     Heat oil over moderately high heat in a wide 4-quart heavy pot until hot but not smoking, then brown beef in 3 batches, transferring as browned with a slotted spoon to a bowl, and about 3 minutes per batch.

v     Add onions, garlic, and fresh chiles to fat remaining in pot and cook over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 3 minutes. Add remaining spices and ¼ tsp pepper, then cook mixture, stirring, 3 minutes. Add masa harina and cook, stirring, 2 minutes (mixture will be dry).

v     Add broth, water, and beef to masa harina mixture and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally and scraping with a wooden spoon or spatula (more frequently toward end to prevent scorching), until meat is tender, about 45 minutes. Stir in beans and simmer 10 to 15 minutes to meld flavors.

Chili can be made 3 days ahead and cooled completely, uncovered, then chilled in an airtight container. Reheat chili slowly (to avoid scorching bottom), thinning with water if necessary.

Our notes: As specified, this recipe is incredibly hot. The jalepeno chilis can be left out entirely, or only one or two used, and the heat will still be ample. If you can't locate masa harina tortilla flour, then regular white flour can be used with success.

Posted by will hertling at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My mom moved about a month ago, and signed up with Verizon DSL in her new house. I first learned she was having problems with her Internet service when I emailed her a movie I made on JumpCut, and she wasn't able to view it. It turns out that Verizon gave her a DSL line that had less than 56kbps speeds. Yes, that's right - Verizon was charging her DSL prices for less than dialup speeds.

• Verizon Mistake #1: If you aren't providing the product or service you promised, don't charge the customer. Verizon certainly could have monitored the quality of the connection and measured the transmission rate and determined that they were never delivering on the promised broadband connectivity. Therefore, they shouldn't have charged for it. This wasn't merely a case of "results may vary" - Verizon agreed that the speeds were excessively slow.

After several frustrating customer service calls with Verizon trying to resolve the speed issue (including one marothon session that went on for several hours), she gave up, and decided to get a broadband cable modem instead.

• Verizon Mistake #2: Verizon shouldn't have allowed several support calls to go by without resolving the issue. If it wasn't resolve, Verizon support should have escalated the issue on behalf of the customer to get it resolved. Once the customer has identified a problem, and said that the problem isn't fixed, Verizon should not put the burden of following up on the issue on the customer. That's Verizon's responsibility to the customer. They should have kept working on the issue until they got it fixed, and (to go back to mistake #1), not charged for the service until it was working correctly.

After my mom got her cable broadband connected, she called Verizon back to cancel her DSL service. Verizon told her that when she moved she was automatically entered into a new one year contract with DSL, and therefore there would be an early termination fee of $79 to cancel her contract. They were insistent that she would have to pay the fee even though she had complained many times about the lack of service and spent hours with technical support.

• Verizon Mistake #3: Don't charge an early termination fee unless it really is to recoup a cost of a discount product. It's not like she was getting a new cell phone. Verizon flipped a few bits to turn on her DSL service (or not, as the case may be). What's the early termination fee for? In this case, it is just another way to extract money from the customer without delivering any value. As customers, we may not like cell phone contracts, but at least we can understand that the early termination fee for a cell phone contract is an attempt to recoup the cost of the discounted phone. There was no lost cost to recoup for the DSL line. And especially don't charge an early termination fee for a customer who is leaving because of technical problems.

My mom was very unsatisfied with Verizon's response, so she asked to be escalated to 2nd level support. The 2nd level support agent reiterated the early termination fee contract clause. So my mom cited the poor service she had received. The many hours spent on the phone with Verizon technical support. The lack of anything approaching DSL speeds. The support agent claimed that Verizon had no record of the calls because they were handled by a different department. He also claimed that the technical support department should have referred my mother to a different department to have the DSL speed issues addressed.

• Verizon Mistake #4: Keep track of what happens to your customers. There's nothing more frustrating than explaining something over and over ahead. For goodness sake, this is what enterprise databases and CRM software is for. If you don't know what your customers are calling about, how the heck can you ever address their concerns or improve your services? 
• Verizon Mistake #5: Don't shift the responsibility onto the customer. The customer doesn't care which department owns what issues. That's Verizon's responsibility to address. If you can't empower someone to fix the issue, then at least make sure that one person can talk to another person so the issue can get fixed without shuffling your customer around.
• Verizon Mistake #6: The customer is always right. Verizon didn't deliver the service they promised, they didn't resolve the problem when asked to, and now the customer wants out. Verizon should be doing anything possible to appease this customer.

Since my mom was still adamant that she wasn't going to pay a $79 termination fee she asked to speak to the 2nd level support's manager. He responded that there was no further escalation, that he was the top of the support chain. My mom asked him if he was claiming to be the CEO of Verizon.

• Verizon Mistake #7: Don't lie and claim there is no further support. I don't know if this is something that happens as a result of policy at companies (i.e. a policy to resist escalation), or if it is something that agents do to avoid bad feedback on their handling of the case, but there is always a path for escalation. It is absurb to believe that there is no further path for escalation.

The end result? Verizon received their $79 early termination fee, but they lost my mother as a ongoing customer. She's now looking into alternatives to Verizon for her telephone service, of which there are many, of course. In an age with so many alternatives for telephone service you want, companies like Verizon should do anything within their power to keep their customers. Especially a customer like my mom, who would normally never change her telephone service provider, never move again for ten years, and never pay a bill late. My mom is the ideal long term, low cost, high revenue customer. But through exceptionally bad customer service, Verizon has permanently lost her as a customer.

• Verizon Mistake #8: Every mom out there has a son who blogs and will gladly tell the story of the bad customer service their mom received at the hands of Verizon. The risk and exposure associated with bad customer service is only going up. Not only does Verizon risk losing their customer to the growing number of phone service alternatives out there, they risk losing many other prospective customers who hear the bad customer service stories.

I think these kinds of mistakes are not unique to Verizon. Every company that wants to retain their customers and get new ones needs to look at customer support to systematically address these kind of customer service mistakes. Many companies are looking at ways to take the cost out of customer support. Doing that by reducing the quality and effectiveness of support does reduce costs, but only at the sacrifice of future revenue from lost customers. The real trick to reduce customer support costs is to reduce the need for support by (a) improving the quality of the product, (b) automatically detecting and fixing problems - my mom's problem would have been an excellent candidate for this, and (c) having highly effective and usable self-support options that customers prefer to use. If the customer has gone through all of those, and they still have problems, then you're out of the realm of reducing support costs and into the realm of trying to retain your customer. And that shouldn't be done with a cost-reducing approach.

Posted by will hertling at 8:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Very good. Can't wait for the last book in the series.

Posted by will hertling at 9:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On a Thursday night long ago, Mike and I went to see Carrie Brownstein play, and eat the amazing food of Naomi Pomeroy. One of our conversation topics: Who are your ultimate dinner party guests?

Mine would be:

• Writer Kim Stanley Robinson
• Musician & poet Ani DiFranco
• His Holiness the Dalai Lama
• Friend and founder of BGI Gifford Pinchot

Posted by will hertling at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

These three books are all pretty interesting. If you haven't read Accelerando, you certainly need to. For those that don't know, these books all feature the technological singularity as a primary plot element. The technological singularity is the point at once artificial intelligence surpasses man's own intelligence, and continues to increase at an exponential rate, leading to machine intelligence so rapidly and so vastly exceeding our own intelligence that we can hardly begin to imagine the changes that result. Ray Kurzweil has written extensively about the singularity, including his own book The Singularity is Near, which I highly recommend.

Charles Stross brings those concepts to life in his books. Once you've read his books, it will profoundly change the way you perceive science-fiction. Since then, every sci-fi book I've read feels a little less believable - they frequently take place in what would appear to be hundreds of years in the future, and yet technology, and especially artificial intelligence, has hardly progressed at all. That's just laughable once you've read The Singularity is Near and Accelerando.

So please read them, because they are fantastic books. But prepare to be changed.

Posted by will hertling at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Still good even 13 years later. I thought it would feel dated, given the whole dot com bubble, and all the changes, but it still feels fresh and relevant.

Posted by will hertling at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Launching a new wiki, like launching a new blog, is hard work. Simply putting it out there isn't enough.

I've successfully launched two wikis, one at the major corporation at which I work, and one at Bainbridge Graduate Institute. What defines success for a wiki? I define it as the point at which the wiki is self-sustaining. The users of the wiki reach a critical mass, at which point the original founder can go away, and the wiki will continue to be used. (My first wiki, launched in January 2001, is still in active use despite the fact that myself and almost all of the first round of early adoptors have all moved onto other projects.)

Information makes a wiki useful. Usefulness is what brings users back to the wiki over and over again. If the wiki isn't useful (in other words, it doesn't have information in it), the users won't contribute. So this is apparently a catch-22.

This is where the role of a wiki founder comes in. The role of the wiki founder is to seed the wiki with content. When I launched my first wiki, I thought this meant that I would put a few documents in the wiki, and presto - everyone would start using it. Of course, that wasn't enough. Odds are that people in the community of users that you want to attract are already sharing information - even if they're doing it in a disfunctional way. So it's not enough to put a few tidbits in there. You've got to make it compelling.

In our corporate group setting, that meant that I seeded the wiki with a few documents, AND then I continue to take every reuseable piece of information that crossed my email inbox and put it in the wiki too. That meant that when a team member send out build documentation by email in a Word document, I spent the time to put it in the wiki. When another team member started emailing out updates on server configuration, I put that in the wiki. When an updated copy of the build documentation showed up in my inbox again, I updated the information in my wiki. I didn't conjole anyone, I didn't whine about it, I didn't blame anyone. I just keep force feeding the wiki. Each time I did take something sent via email, I'll email back the group with the wiki URL for the documentation. Gradually people learned over the course of a few weeks that anything important was going to be found in the wiki, so that's where they started looking for it first. The early adopters started editing documents on their own, and I walked others through the process one on one. (This was 2001 afterall, and few people understood even the concept of a wiki.)

Over the course of a week, the number of contributors increased from one to about five. Over the course of a month, the number of contributors increased to about a dozen, and we were close to critical mass. The flow of email that was really knowledge base type stuff decreased to a trickle, and over the next month it was necessary only to handhold a few more users through the process of contributor.

Once the content reaches that critical mass that it becomes useful and people are drawn to the wiki to use that content, the founders role changes from force feeder to gardener. You start running into questions of community conventions (do i just change this, or do i comment on it?) and access (how do I find what i'm looking for? why is the content organized this way?) But that's a whole separate discussion.

When Mike and I were talking over this process of seeding a wiki, we had a real interesting revelation. What if the folks at Encyclopedia Brittanica had been observing Wikipedia more closely? What if they could have seen the future, and decided to start their own wiki encyclopedia. What if, back when Wikipedia was in its infancy and had only 5,000 or 10,000 articles, Encyclopedia Brittanica had started a wiki encyclopedia and seeded it with their whole library of 40,000 articles? Encyclopedia Brittanica would then have had more content, and therefore would have been more useful than Wikipedia, and therefore attracted more users and more contributions to their own wiki encyclopedia.

This intellectual exercise suggests that organizations that are contemplating Web 2.0 type community projects, and whom have assets in the form of closed knowledge bases can use those knowledge bases to seed wikis, creating an instantly useful source of information. This instant content/usefulness is a strong force for attracting a community of involved participants, one of the single most important criteria to the success of a wiki.

Posted by will hertling at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're just about to start Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and it has been a while since you read the first six books, then you may appreciate a review of the story so far. And while we don't have a "Story So Far' book by J.K. Rowling, we do have the next best thing: the Harry Potter Summary on WikiSummaries. Just scroll down carefully so you don't accidentally read the summary of the seventh book!

Posted by will hertling at 6:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• 1 cup black rice
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 can unsweetened coconut milk, stirred well
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Posted by will hertling at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think this is the future of technical support: user generated support content, preferably in video format. Here's a video showing how to take an Officejet 7410 that was originally setup as a locally connected USB printer, and switch to wireless connectivity without reinstalling any drivers:

Posted by will hertling at 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I love chocolate. I love buying organic. Buying organic chocolate is expensive. But in my local supermarket, organic chocolate chips are the least expensive way to get delicious organic chocolate. So I've invented a few ways to eat them.

1. Add chocolate chips to your favorite ice cream: Every ice cream can use a few more chocolate chips!
2. Make instant hot fudge: Pour a handful of chocolate chips into a microwave safe cup. Add milk or soy milk until the milk is just visible in the chocolate chips - not covering the chocolate chips. About halfway as high as the chocolate chips is right. Microwave for about 30-40 seconds, keeping an eye on the cup; as soon as the milk starts to bubble and froth, shut the microwave off. Stir the chocolate milk mixture until it is very even and smooth, about 20 seconds. Pour over ice cream (regular or non-dairy). The result is very chocolatey, rich, smooth, and works great with non-dairy milk.
3. Urban S'Mores: Put graham cracker on plate. Put chocolate chips on top. Put marshmallows on top. Put another graham on top of that. Microwave for about 20 seconds until the marshmallows begin to inflate, and then shut off the microwave. Delicious (and very, very hot.)
4. Urban S'Moreos: Open up chocolate sandwich cookie(s). Set aside cookie with icing on it. Put plain cookie(s) on plate, and cover with 4-8 chocolate chips per cookie. Microwave cookie with chocolate chips until chocolate melts, about 20 seconds. Place cookie(s) with icing on top of cookie with chocolate, and let cool several minutes.
5. Chocolate chip cookies: The very best chocolate chip cookie is from How It All Vegan. I've made this recipe probably a hundred times. For our annual ice cream sandwich cookie party, I've made as many as 200 of these cookies at a time. I consistently get raves and requests for the recipe. Here it is:
   ¾ cup sweetener
   ½ cup margarine (I normally use butter)
   ½ cup oil (I normally use olive oil)
   3 tbsp water
   2 tsp vanilla extract
   2 ¼ cups flour
   1 tsp baking soda
   ½ tsp salt
   1 ½ cups chocolate chips
   
   Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a small bowl, mix the sweetener, margarine (or butter), oil, water, and vanilla extract. It can help to microwave the margarine or butter first to make it easier to mix in. In a large bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, and salt. Add the contents of the wet bowl into the dry bowl, and stir. As the mixtures begin to combine, add the chocolate chips and optional walnuts. Stir until just mixed.
   
   Using your hand or spoon, drop cookie sized amounts onto an ungreased baking sheet. Bake in oven for approximately 11 to 14 minutes. Makes about 24 cookies.
6. Mint chocolate chip cookies: At this year's ice cream sandwich party, mint was the big hit. Every year mint is popular, but this year even more so. Every last mint chocolate chip cookie and every bit of last mint chocolate chip ice cream was eaten before the party was over. To the above recipe, simply add one teaspoon of mint extract to the wet ingredients. Or, you can use two teaspoons for "surprisingly strong chocolate chip cookies".

Posted by will hertling at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently Wired had an Actually Work From Home When You Work from Home guide as part of their How To issue.

As someone who works from home three days a week, I was looking forward to reading their tips. But I was disappointed when I finally got to them. Here's a typical example of one of their tips:

1. Switch into work mode. It's hard to feel like a productive professional with flannel jammies, fuzzy slippers, and bed head. Get up, take a shower, and dress like you're actually going to work (because, hey -- you are).

Fun for the person who is new to working at home and likely to goof off, but not exactly helpful for the person who is dedicated to work, and wants to make working at home a success.

Here are my five tips:

1. Have an office space that is good for you to work in. The corner of the kitchen is fine if you like being there and if you have no kids or other people at home. And conversely, having a separate office space that is dark and dingy with an uncomfortable chair isn't going to work either. For me, given what I like and the kind of job I have, my criteria for a great working space are: plenty of ample light with a view of the outdoors; a large screen monitor; a good phone with a quality hands free headset and a dedicated phone line; and being out of sound, out of mind, and out of hearing of my small children who are home all day. I used to have a converted garage as a home office: it was ideal because I added a bank of windows to it for light, and it was a separate building, so I wasn't distracted by my kids, and they weren't distracted by me. Now I'm in a basement, which isn't as ideal from a lighting and view perspective, but I still have the separation I need from the children.

2. Use the time you save by working at home mindfully. When you work at home you can save yourself the time and expense of commuting (an hour for me, round trip). You can also save the time it takes to shower and get all fancy for work. (Yes, I'm part of the "it's not necessary to shower if you don't feel dirty and you're not going to see anyone camp".) That's 90 minutes I get back into my day. How are you going to use that time? I suggest that this should be a mindful decision you make each day you work at home. Have a big project you want some extra time on for work? Great, use it for that. Need a little break, and want to go to a coffee shop? Great, do that. Want to lunch with your kid? Do that. Whatever you choose, just choose with intention. The result is that you'll feel more satisfied with your day. You'll be able to point to that extra thing you got done, that you chose to do, and that you enabled by working from home. Creating a sense of satisfaction with yourself and your day will make you happy and productive all day long.

3. Give yourself breaks. If you're like me, you probably get way more done on your days working at home. There are less phone interruptions, less people walking into the cube/office interruptions, and less distractions of things going on around you. Not to mention the time saved getting lunch, the time saved packing and unpacking your laptop, etc. I feel that I often get about 50% more done at home. But working every minute of every day will lead to burnout. If you do get burned out, soon you will find yourself needing Wired's advice to avoid the TV, XBox, and bong when working at home. So instead of burning out, instead choose to reward yourself on a regular basis. Make sure you do go for a walk at some point. Do take some time to go out for coffee. Again, you'll be more refreshed and productive if you do.

4. Have an effective system for managing email and prioritizing work. If you're working at home, odds are good that your jobs involves plenty of email. That makes it all the more important to have an email system that keep you on top of your email and prioritizes your work. I'm fond of Dave Allen's Getting Things Done book, but I'm sure there are plenty of good systems out there. Pick one, just one and stick with it.

Here's how I've taken Dave Allen's system and made it work for me:

• At least once a day, I spend 15 minutes thinning out my inbox. Alternating between sorting by sender and sorting by subject line, I clean out the stuff I easily know I can get rid of.
  
• At least once a week, I spent about an hour going more through my inbox. For each item, I either delete it, file it, take action on it if i can do that in less than 2 or 3 minutes, turn it into an action item, or defer action on it. I usually turn items into an action item simply by editing the subject line. "RE: operations concept" turns into "TODO: Read operations document and give feedback by email". Between these two top items I can usually keep my inbox to 100 items or so.
  
• Every other week, I spend about 4 to 5 hours on a Friday morning exhaustively going through my inbox. The goal is to get through all those items I was deferring. at this point, I still go through delete, file, take action, or make actionable, except that now I take action on anything that takes less than 10 or 15 minutes, and I don't defer anything, no matter how complex. By the time I'm done, I'm usually left with 10-20 action items in my inbox.
  

With this system, I'm able to stay on top of my email, and make sure nothing falls between the cracks. The leaner I keep my inbox, the more productive I am.

5. Save hobbies for later. Some activities are just too compelling for us to engage in during the work day. For example, even though I reward myself with breaks and outings, I would never do something like pick up a sci-fi book to read. That would be the end of my day. Similar, if you've got something you're passionate about, whether it's reading or gardening or building model rockets or even going to the gym, then the work day is probably not the right time to do that. No matter how disciplined you think you are, engrossing activities will make you lose large blocks of time, and you'll spend the rest of your time stressed out over the time you lost.

Posted by will hertling at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)