Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

"Peak performance, every one, every time."

That's the Virginia DMV motto. And when I first walked in, I believed it. A person standing at the door, directing people to the correct area. A large waiting area with powerful ceiling fans to keep it fairly comfortable. Pleasant lighting.

But that's as far as it got. It took us three trips to the DMV to get our new licenses today. And it ALMOST took four, but the final rep took pity on us and stayed late and allowed us to call the dealer where we bought our car and have them fax the sales receipt.

Why would we need to have the sales receipt faxed? We had the title! We had the registration from Utah, the safety and emissions, and proof of insurance!

Ah, but in Virginia, if you've owned the car for less than one year, you have to prove you've paid sales tax on the car.

That little fact is clearly stated on one of the pages of the photocopied documents they handed us. In small print, at the end of a long paragraph about dealer transactions. On the back.

And you are married? So the name on your wife's birth certificate doesn't match that on her driver's license? Ah, well, if you look in the small print at the bottom of a different page, it mentions that if your proof of legal presence documentation doesn't exactly match your proof of identity, you need a chain of identity document. So for those strange cases where somebody got married, they need to bring a marriage certificate as well.

These details were slowly revealed to us over the course of our many trips to the DMV today.

Yes, it's all there, in print, somewhere on the website. But -- I'm an avid reader, and I still couldn't bring myself to read all those irrelevant details to find the few grains of painfully relevant stuff.

So I was thinking about an online paperwork assistant. You select the task you need to do from a list of common tasks. Just moved in to Virginia? Here are the three most common tasks you'll need to do, just click here and they'll all be selected.

Okay. Step one: you'll need to provide a proof of identity. Here are the acceptable docs, select the one you'll be bringing. Your Utah driver's license? Great.

Step two: proof of legal presence. Here are the acceptable docs, select the one you'll be bringing. Oh! I see you're bringing a birth certificate. Is the name on it the same as the one on your Utah license? No? You'll also need to bring a marriage certificate. That okay? Great.

That's all for the driver's license. Set your Utah driver's license, birth certificate, and marriage license aside. You'll need to bring those in.

Now, for your car registration. Do you have a lien on the car? (And click here if you don't know what a lien means!)

Etc.

Wouldn't be that hard to build. If somebody from the Virginia DMV reads this and wants me to put together a nifty web app that walks people through this process, I'm willing to do it. Heck, I'd do it as a public service.

It would take me less time than I spent today trying to get my new license.

Sweet day. I want a button-hole camera.

This morning I saw a clip of some Air Force Academy cadet whose roommate left a secret camera in the room. Though I think I'd probably want to sue somebody who did this to me, the cadet in question apparently approved of the release of the resulting footage. It showed him dancing to some pop music and getting pretty funky with it all.

I know a guy who bought the X-10 back when it was the subject of all those popups. He said it never really worked very well. I've found a much better variety of spy cameras at Pakatak. They've got all the standard stuff -- digital cameras are easy to make silent and IR or night vision responsive. But some of the cameras are specifically designed for concealment. That means they're sneaky!

One, for instance, has a front piece that looks like a button. But you'd have to have a golf-ball-sized cavity in your chest just behind the button to get away with that one. (Okay, so you disguise it as a shirt that you just didn't put away last night. And left conveniently hanging over your chair just so, and nobody is to disturb it, see?)

Okay. But just a small camera with a wireless transmitter. Think of all the opportunities! My dad and I used to talk about a game we'd like to play with remote control robots with lasers and targets. Wireless video cameras to provide a robots-eye-view of the mini battleground would be so cool.

Some of you may be asking, "Tom, why do you want one of those?" I'm sure you also wonder why I want to build a 3d camera with mirrors and wood planks. And why I'm always humming Japanese techno music.

The point is, your opinion isn't important. :o)

Someday, I will have my remote controlled, wireless video enabled robot. And I will rule the world.

The quality and utility of Craigslist varies widely by location.

We bought my dream desk from Staples in Utah before we moved. We actually hoped to set it up in our old house; it was part of the plan to reconcile ourselves to living there forever. But then we got word that we'd be moving out here and we decided to just hang on to it. Easier to move in its original packing, you know?

Then we arrive here and the desk dwarfs our little condo. So without even opening it, we decide to sell it on Craigslist. It sells for $450 new from Staples, so we decide to list the desk at $350.

In Utah, the desk would never have sold for that price. April and I wouldn't have paid that price for it new, anyway. We got it on sale for $300!

Here in Northern Virginia, within 12 hours of posting it, it was sold and gone.

We also got three of the exact model of Ikea stools we were looking for from somebody else on Craigslist for less than the price of one, new.

Conclusion: We're not in Kansas anymore. And while that has its downsides, it has a lot of unexpected upsides, too.

I just checked my Google PageRank. It's a 3 of 10. That means it's six orders of magnitude less important than Amazon.

If I were running for class president, I'd be just behind the kid with the perpetually runny nose, in terms of popularity.

If I were running for ranks on the keyword "paul allen yacht octopus," I'd be behind a bunch of spammy, auto-generated sites that recycle each others content and participate in shady, reciprocal linking schemes. ("This link systems uses a trapezoid!")

As it happens, though I'm not really running for ranks on that keyword, I am ranked behind those spammy sites. Those shady link schemes work, by and large. For spammy sites.

Why only spammy sites? If they work for those sites, why not for your big business?

Because those spammy sites are not individually important to their owners. They are like bubbles on the ocean. Individual bubbles can come and go, but the foam remains. Any single spammer will have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of sites that each contribute a tiny bit of revenue to the overall operation.

Businesses put their eggs all in one basket. One website. One shot at rankings and revenue. Play with fire, get burned, and go out of business.

There are safe ways to get free backlinks that won't destroy your site. And there are lots and lots of dumb ways to get links that just might completely hose you.

But, as I have said before, I don't have to care about this anymore. I'm mostly just writing this for the money. This is a Pay-Per-Post post, of the sort which I anticipate writing every couple days until I've saved enought to buy a Wii. :o)

Dinner theater's been done. I've never actually been to one, so I don't know what I'm talking about, but I never let that stop me.

How-to-host-a-murder dinner parties I have much more experience with. Fun, costumed entertainment -- amount of fun varies directly with energy committed by attendees. The usual pattern is lots of obvious misdirection and all the clues don't really coalesce until the final round.

But have you ever gone out to eat at a restaurant and had somebody pass you a manila envelope while you ate?

So the real question is only... what other insanely cool things could be part of a game like that?

How to make money on the Internet?

Start an online book store, then slowly branch out to provide everything in the world. Everything from A to Z, you might say. All you have to do is set up a nationwide series of warehouses and one of the most advanced commerce platforms in the world. Patent a couple pieces of your system. Hire a couple thousand employees, survive the dot-com crash, become a household word.

Boom! Instant wealth.

Or, let's say you're not going to be able to do that. Maybe somebody already has. There's affiliate marketing, self-publishing, brand creation, pay-per-click arbitrage, eBay, web development, spam...

And then there's the really easy way: Payperpost. "The fastest path to tens of dollars on the Internet." (And I'll sell them that phrase if they want to start using it in their advertising!)

If you already have a blog (and if you don't, there's about zero chance you're reading MY blog, but if you are anyway then what's wrong with you? go get a blog!) all you have to do is fill out the Payperpost signup form. About ten minutes of work, ten hours of waiting, and then ten dollars per sponsored post you write.

This very post, strangely enough, is sponsored and takes me one step closer to my Wii. Yay!

Of course, the value to the sponsors on whose behalf Payperpost asks me to write is the links they get. It would be nice to believe that mere buzz is enough, but I think most blogs on the Internet generate as much buzz as mine does -- which is to say, absolutely none.

But I can create a pagerank-passing link as well as anyone, and here comes one now: Payperpost pays you for blog reviews!

In this case, Payperpost is both intermediary and actual sponsor, in an odd, self-referential circle of promotion. The Internet allows for these loops of causality. If you don't believe in time travel, don't think about this too much or it might injure your brain.

The point is, forty dollars. That's how much I've made already. The major world economic powers are trembling, I know. But I'll commit my newfound wealth into their established channels soon enough. Just two hundred and sixty dollars more.

About a month, I think. It's a cool incentive to blog!

I have been grossly deceived. For all the hype and buzz and glamor surrounding it, I figured the iPod and its accompanying iTunes software must be the bees' knees. (All of their knees collectively, I suppose.)

Well, imagine my surprise upon discovering that iTunes actually doesn't do what I wanted it to do, and it's slow, and it's crummy! Imagine it. Seriously. Picture me, sitting there looking at my iPod as nothing happens. My movie playlist is empty. Quite the striking mental image, hey?

That image is copyrighted to me, so you owe me $2.00 for imagining it.

But that's not the point of this entry. I really, legitimately just wanted to share with the world my shock at discovering that iTunes is no better than any other music or media management program I've used. Windows Media Player, even!

I spent a long time bringing all my files into my library in iTunes. Once I finally got them all imported, I synchronized iTunes with my iPod. Twenty minutes or so. The songs went over, the movies did not.

The helpful messages telling me why the movies didn't move over? Nonexistent.

The intelligent, automatic reformatting of my movies to move them over? Nonexistent.

Apple's support for avi and quicktime and mpg? Nonexistent.

My jaw-dropped delight at having an iPod? Meh. Not nonexistent, but also not nearly as strong as I realize now I had subconsciously expected it to be.

So that's Word One on the new iPod. Words two and beyond as events and blocks of free time warrant.

Having just started work for the Federal Government (in all its glory and splendor) I am reminded again of the joy of drowning in strange language. Acronyms, in my case -- why write a full sentence when a handful of letters will do? IJESMME,S? (It's just ever so much more efficient, see?)

Search Engine Marketing was never really like that to me. It grew as I grew with it, so I don't remember ever having an overwhelming adjustment. But I watched a lot of our new employees struggle with it. 404 errors! Meta tags! 301 redirects! Internal links!

So sponsor of this post and Austin SEO Firm Apogee Search Marketing's search engine glossary is a good thing. It doesn't have 404 error, which is a painful omission -- but maybe that one's common enough that everybody already knows it. Strongbad makes fun of it. That didn't used to be mainstream, but it surely is now. (Unless you don't know Strongbad, in which case you need to stop reading this blog and go Google it.) Anyway, most every other jargony word you'd care to know is in there.

They even have a special entry for Matt Cutts. Cute!

So that's all I've got for tonight. Be good!

I just clicked on a "live support" button on a certain website. I wanted to communicate with their tech support people. A popup window appeared with a large, colored logo:

"RIGHT NOW TECHNOLOGIES!"

In small text below... "Please wait. This could take a few minutes."

PROMISES WE DON'T INTEND TO KEEP!

Is that any way to greet a customer? (Yes, it's certainly one way.)

I guess it's basically impossible for business owners to view their customer interactions from the customer's perspective. A business owner knows the history -- knows how much worse it used to be, perhaps. Or how expensive it was to get what he has. So he cannot see clearly how bad it may still be.

But this wouldn't have been anything more than a passing thought, had I not been clicking the "live support" to share an existing bundle of less-than-glowingly-positive feelings.

I love the Clearplay technology. It's a million miles better than any other filtering system out there. TV Guardian is horrible, the fixed-edit DVD rental or purchase sites lack flexibility and cost too much... Clearplay wins on every front.

But when we went and bought their new player at retail from Target, I found a front on which Clearplay didn't win. Some problems presented themselves at several points in this interaction with Clearplay. Let me share my recent chat transcript with a support rep:

===========================
Eva: Hi, my name is Eva. How may I help you?
Tom: Hey -- just bought the player from Target.
Tom: Want to watch Casino Royale tonight.
Eva: Have you registered your player yet?
Eva: You can still watch the movie regularly, but if you want it filtered you need to register it first.
Tom: But our "free month" costs $8?
Eva: You still get free thirty days, but you have to sign up as a regular member first. Then you get two months for the price of one.
Eva: and you can call within the first thirty days to get a full refund.
Tom: Okay -- that's what I wanted to know. Forcing us to pay $8 to use something we just bought at the store is a bad plan.
Eva: It is supposed to be where you don't pay, but for some reason the glitch in the system has not been fixed yet, and I'm not sure when it will be.
Tom: Okay. We were seriously bummed about that last night. Got all ready to go, and then saw that we have to pay more money.
Tom: And that there's no filter in the box -- the box says it comes with 2000 filters on a USB stick.
Tom: = no good if you want to watch a movie as soon as you get the thing home and set up.
Eva: It says that you get a filter stick with the 2000 plus after you register. It is complimentary for signing up.
Tom: Um... Have you read the box?
Eva: Once you register and are waiting for your filterstick to come in the mail, you can download filters to your own usb stick, or burn them to a cd.
Eva: Yes, I have read the box. Of course I know what it says.
Tom: "FREE and yours to keep just for trying Clearplay: 2000+ filters, 30 days of updates, clearplay USB FilterStik."
Eva: Those are what you get for signing up.
Tom: That's at best an ambiguous way of telling us we'll have to register online and have it mailed to us. Cereal boxes are plainer about the prizes they'll mail out vs. what's in the box.
Eva: If within thirty days you decide you don't like it, you can keep the stick and the library on it.
Eva: Yeah, well complain to my management. I don't like it and I don't think it's fair or honest, but that is how it is.
Tom: I'm sorry -- I'm trying to complain to your management. Don't you relay chat session transcripts to them?
Tom: I certainly have nothing personal against you. I wanted to communicate my dissatisfaction to the company.
Eva: I'd recommend sending an email to adam@clearplay.com
Tom: If there's a disconnect there, that's another issue they ought to address.
Tom: Oh well.
Tom: I'll send an email.
Tom: Thanks for your help -- sorry for the trouble.
Eva: Thank you for contacting us! Please let us know if there is any way that we can improve your ClearPlay experience. You may now close this window.
Eva Has Disconnected
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A little sad.

Two months for the price of one! That's just like "one free month," right? Like a restaurant coupon that says "FREE PIZZA!" and then the waiter tells you that you get that free pizza with any purchase of another pizza. And you and your wife look at each other and wonder what on earth you're going to do with two pizzas.

I'm going to forward my chat transcript to the email address the rep suggested. We'll see if anything happens.

Something should, but companies can't run perfectly. I know. You have to pick your focus.

As a customer, though, I can demand unrealistic levels of perfection. :o) I love being a customer.

I've never seen Johnny Mnemonic -- something about Keanu Reeves and R-rated movies just doesn't appeal to me. But the idea of a data courier is pretty interesting.

And we just got a bunch of letters today that were sent on Friday. So Friday afternoon, somebody dropped this stack of envelopes in a box in California. By 4:00 on Monday, they were in our box here -- clear across the country.

When we moved, a company packed all our stuff in a truck and less than one week later they unloaded it all in our house here.

FedEx overnight. UPS in a few days. Sponsor of this post, Logistics Group International, provides heavy hauling for commercial moves. Like your crates of anvils and pianos. Shipping, shipping.

Asymmetric proximity?

We can move ideas across the world. They can exist in multiple places at the same time. The Internet facilitated that.

Is the global transit infrastructure facilitating fluid reality?

Not until I can ship something and keep it, too.

"Are we allowed to (insert dumb idea here)?"

Do you answer with a policy, or with a principle?

Policy has the advantage, at least initially, of being simpler than principle. For a new employee, to just say "no, you can't do that" takes much less effort than teaching why that might not be a good idea, and when it might be okay. For an organization, policy has the advantage of being enforceable -- a company can protect itself against outside action and internal exploitation with policy.

But over time, policies pile up. A small set of good ideas becomes an unwieldy and often contradictory mess of rules that may make no sense because they lose their context. And a snap policy decision can gloss over subtle distinctions that might justify deviations. When experienced employees who understand the reasoning behind the policies make needed deviations, younger employees inadvertently learn that it's okay to break the rules.

Principles, on the other hand, 'empower' employees in the true sense of the word. And in the long run, that improves organizations. Employees who understand the reasoning behind answers to their questions become able to apply that knowledge to other situations without having to ask for further, specific guidance. Principles do not multiply -- they strengthen and deepen.

"But," the company argues, "our employees won't follow principles properly! We need clearer policy that we can rigidly enforce without being accused of discrimination or selective enforcement or unfairness!"

If your people won't learn and follow principles, you do have a choice -- either become an organization that relies on policy to control all employees, or become an organization that removes poorly performing employees and allows motivated and intelligent employees freedom to act. Before you make that decision, though, it would be wise to look at your own approach to teaching the principles that employees ought to be following. Are you actually teaching those principles well?

Teaching principle is harder than teaching policy. Policy can be taught in Powerpoint. Principle can only be taught in practice, experience, and over time.

But principle is the better path.