Will's Thoughtstream

This is a simple but clever trick to using sticky-notes (aka Post-It Notes) from Dave Gray, founder of Communication Nation:

Posted by will hertling at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Green

Green eyes are the product of moderate amounts of melanin. They are most often found among people of North and Eastern European descent, and to a lesser extent, in Southern Europe, parts of Central and South Asia.. Green eyes are an uncommon eye color. In Iceland 88% of the population have green or blue eyes. Other ethnically Nordic countries like Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Norway, and (less) the Netherlands  have a high percentage of green eyes. The Pashtuns are often called "Hurry Ankehian Wallay": the green-eyed people. Of all the normal colours of human eyes, it would appear that green eyes are the rarest. Studies have also concluded males perceive females with green eyes as appearing "intellectual".

Violet

The appearance of violet eyes is thought to occur from the mixing of red and blue reflections. Some albinos have eyes that appear violet.

A famous celebrity who is well known for having "violet" eyes is actress Elizabeth Taylor.

Red

'Red' eyes are also found in an extremely small (<0.001%) percentage of the world's population. This is believed to be a result of either large quantities of the normally scarce red areas in the eye, or a small leakage of blood into the iris; however the number of people on record as having red eyes apart from albinos, is believed not to exceed 20 (Recording of this condition started in 1964).

Posted by will hertling at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Identifying what's responsible for the increased prevalence of allergies is difficult--but several theories abound. One is the so-called "hygiene hypothesis," which posits that we've done such a good job eradicating diseases and sanitizing our environment that our immune systems are looking for something to do. Another theory is that we're introducing potentially allergenic foods too early, or too late, into young children's diets.

Could it be that we're all exposed to more and more of the "Big Eight" allergens through processed foods and this might be contributing to the rising rates? "Possibly," says Annie Khuntia, M.D., clinical associate of allergy and immunology at the University of Chicago. "But it's really difficult to come to this conclusion because there isn't any evidence to support it. This issue hasn't been studied." At this point, say experts, most hypotheses tend to be, well, educated guesses. "Even the big players tend to disagree," says Khuntia. "It's an evolving science."

From UK Independent:

One of the most extraordinary increases has been in peanut allergy, up 117 per cent between 2001 and 2005. An estimated 25,000 people in England are affected, and many are at risk of a severe reaction if they are exposed to the nuts. The report says up to 7 per cent of infants have a food allergy - many are sensitive to egg, but this tends to improve with age. Among adults, the Institute for Food Research estimates that up to 2 per cent are affected. This is often distinguished from food intolerance which is less specific and thought to be more widespread.

The report says that guidance to pregnant women and children not to eat peanuts should be withdrawn because it may actually be exacerbating the problem of peanut allergy. In parts of Africa, where peanuts are made into a soup used for weaning and in Israel where they are incorporated into a rusk for babies, the problem of peanut allergy does not exist. Depriving children of exposure to peanuts early in life might increase the risk of an allergic reac tion later.

No one really knows [why allergies are on the increase]. Allergy is an area of medicine more full of puzzles than most. Take hay fever. In 1955, just over five GP consultations in 1,000 were for hay fever. By 1971, the number had doubled and a decade later it had doubled again. Yet this increase was occurring as pollen counts were falling owing to the cut back in agricultural land.

[The hygiene hypothesis] is the leading theory to explain the rise, devised by David Strachan in the 1980s. It can be summed up in a sentence: as we lead cleaner, germ-free lives, and are exposed to fewer illnesses in childhood because of smaller families, our immune systems are under-developed and over-react when exposed to allergens such as grass pollen, house dust mites and cat hairs. The theory has been confirmed by many studies since. Children raised on farms with livestock have a third fewer allergies than those who are not.

However, the theory does not account for the extraordinary increases in allergies such as asthma seen in townships in Tanzania, on Tristan Da Cunha (the tiny island in the south Atlantic) and other parts of the world remote from the infrastructure of developed nations.

Posted by will hertling at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a really funny article on five futuristic inventions we've always thought we wanted but wouldn't really.

Posted by will hertling at 2:24 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)

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)

Last year I received a bonus from work, and discussed with my friend Gene the things I was thinking about spending it on. He suggested getting a handheld game console, as a way to get back into gaming, which we both used to enjoy. He saw it as a way for him to use his down time waiting for planes, waiting for his partner when going out, and so forth.

It sounded really fun, and I was heading down the path of getting one when I realized that I had none of the kinds of downtime that Gene had. I have no time that isn't used for something.

It made me realize that if I was thinking about bringing anything new into my life, then its impact on time would need to be the primary criteria. If I brought in anything new, it would either need to have a 1 to 1 replacement of time spent on something else, or it would actually need to save me time. But it couldn't require me to find new time, because there just isn't any. (Three children under age four, full time work, attachment parenting...you get the picture.)

Enjoyment or satisfaction, traditional criteria for a purchase would have to be secondary to time. If something had immense enjoyment but required me to find time for it, then I wouldn't actually get to use it, and so I would never realize the enjoyment benefits of it.

A handheld gaming console might be fun, but since it would take time I don't have, there's no point. An MP3 player might be fun, and it would simply replace time I already spend listening to the radio, so it's a better decision. (Although there is some up front time cost to organizing mp3s, playlists, etc.) I haven't been able to find any good examples of something you can buy that brings you enjoyment and saves you time. But if you have any ideas, let me know, because half a year later, my bonus is still sitting waiting for me to spend it. It turns out that this time criteria is a pretty strict filter, because I still haven't bought anything.

Posted by will hertling at 7:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I placed a hold on the new Harry Potter book through the Multnomah County Library web site, imagine my surprise to see that I was the 999th hold. Two weeks later, I checked in and found that I had moved to 991st position, and there were now 1,128 holds in total. For a book that releases in another three months on July 21st, 2007, that's an impressive hold list:

Posted by will hertling at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Rebecca's Pocket, here's a great article about building your own personal brand equity. Here's an excerpt:

1. I am known for (2-4 items); by next year at this time, I plan also to be known for (1-2 items). If you are just starting out, make a list of what you would like to be known for.

2. My current project(s) is provocative and challenging to me in the following (1-3 ways). If you don’t feel that your work has any challenges, then you need to identify some new projects or areas that you can experience. Are the new projects you want to work on not part of your job responsibilities? Then volunteer for the new project.

Posted by will hertling at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)