Author Archives: woodp

Lessons from Bob Hoover

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At a recent aviation conference, legendary test pilot Bob Hoover was a guest speaker. He moves a little slower than he did as a test pilot but his wit and story-telling still came through. Among pilots, safety and learning are prominent themes, and Bob used the occasion to tell a story about safety and learning.

Seems years ago piston and turbine aircraft had the same size fuel hoses and a young line boy accidentally serviced his piston engine aircraft with jet fuel. This is similar to pumping diesel into a standard, combustion engine – It’ll run for a while but the the engine will die. Worse, diesel fuel can actually hurt engine components. It’s similar in airplanes.

In Bob’s case, he had enough fuel in the fuel lines to taxi out, depart and climb to almost 100 feet when the jet fuel caused his engines to quit. The airport (Brown Field outside San Diego) is surrounded with mountains which are probably the worst emergency landing locations imaginable. Bob drew on his skills and landed uphill, stalling right at touchdown, and pilot and passengers emerged with nothing more than scratches. Amazing!

Later, after he returned to the airport and found the extremely red-faced line boy. He looked at him and said “Tomorrow I’ll be back to fly and I’ll need my aircraft serviced. And when I do, I want only one person servicing my aircraft. And that person is you.”

Bob knew that of all the line boys at Brown Field, only one was guaranteed to have learned that jet fuel in a piston engine was something to be avoided.

Being different on eBay

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Anyone who’s ever bought or sold anything on eBay knows about feedback scores. Essentially, both the seller and buyer have the ability to judge the other party’s behavior in the transaction. A 100% score means the individual received positive feedback in 100% of their transactions – 90% means that 90% of all transactions received positive feedback. Average scores at eBay seem to fall between 98% and 100% indicating that buyers were generally happy with their purchases and sellers were generally happy with their customer’s payment. My score is 100% on 170-some odd transactions.

Historically, the buyer usually is first to provide feedback. If it is positive, the seller will reciprocate. If the buyer gave negative feedback (perhaps the seller shipped defective product), the seller might take revenge on the buyer even though the buyer did everything right – Paid promptly and went through the correct conflict resolution steps – and give the buyer negative feedback. I don’t like this “revenge” methodology.

My philosophy is to provide feedback when the other party satisfied their part of the contract. So, when selling, I give feedback (positive) the minute the buyer’s payment comes in. After all, they’ve satisfied their part of the transaction agreement and now it’s up to me to ship their item safely and quickly.

However, when I’m the buyer as I was three times this week, I expect the buyer to behave similarly and not withhold feedback until I provide mine. That leads to a completely befuddled seller some time …

Seller: Did you get your product?
Me: Yes, thank you!
S: Could you provide feedback?
M: Sure, could you since I completed my obligations to you over a week ago, and you only satisfied your obligation to me yesterday?
S: Is there a problem?
M: No, I just expect the same that you expect from me – PROMPT feedback.
S: Huh?

… and so it goes. Sure, I don’t get feedback from this seller, but it’s not as important to a little shopper like me than it is to volume guys. Maybe someday he’ll figure it out …

DIY Sushi

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Two Nigiri rolls in most restaurants runs $5 and up – I usually order Maguro, Sake and Hamachi and rarely does a lunch end up costing less than $20 . And I’ve on occasion paid more. But when you realize that one Nigiri roll is rice and less than an ounce of fish – Fish which averages $10/lb – The markup becomes very evident.

Around here we have a fish monger who will sell sushi grade salmon for $12/lb and tuna for $13/lb. Sushi rice (medium grain, not the normal long grain) is cheap, and the little rice vinegar to season it is equally inexpensive. Pickled ginger and wasabi powder can be picked up in almost any supermarket.

One drawback to DIY Sushi – Since you’re only using 3-4 oz per person, and most fish mongers don’t like to sell such small portions, it becomes a challenge to create plates with a variety of fish. Usually it’s Sake today, Maguro tomorrow and so on.

And my knife skills still need some work, but all in all, a sushi dinner for 20% of what the restaurant charges is nothing to sneeze at!

Email Foibles

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Regularly, I receive complaints from individuals who didn’t receive some mailing or special offer. 80-90% of the time I take one look at their email address and immediately recognize the problem – They’re using their employer’s email address for personal business. Wow!

In the personal email world, we rarely have any email filters (other than SPAM) and usually receive everything emailed to us. But the corporate world is different. Corporate IT managers work to ensure only work-related email gets to employees. My former employer blocked Facebook, Match.com, Yelp and a whole host of non-business sites. This is done for two reasons, to keep unrelated email traffic off the internal networks, and to prevent employees from wasting too much time on non-work activities.

Personal email doesn’t look like “work” to an IT manager. For starters, it frequently has misspellings, or long forwarding chains, or includes multiple pictures and icons – It just doesn’t look like business and it’s fairly easy to filter.

People who use their corporate email account don’t realize the potential problems they’re creating. When they leave the job they lose their emails and email directory, and I’ll bet even though they signed an email acknowledgement form, they still think IT would never snoop on their emails. Baloney, my former employer did. And I know another that flagged emails destined for outside the company that contained secret program names. We chuckled when the filter would intercept an innocent email containing the name  “Harpoon” or “Dolphin.”

Yeah, I know I’m whizzing into the wind. People are going to continue to use their faa.gov and ibm.com addresses for personal mail and nothing I say or do will stop it. But at least I feel better now.

Computer illiterate people

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As the treasurer of an organization, I’m responsible for ordering membership badges. At our Christmas Party last month, one member walked up and asked me if I could order a badge for his 10-year-old son. After I got home, I sent the member an email asking him to confirm his son’s name, mailing address and so on.

Today, 36 days (!) after my outgoing email, the father responded that I had the right name and address and then he offered the following editorial:

Sorry to take so long to reply. Our computer has been down since summer time and my brother-in-law just got it kind of working. It’s not perfect but it works so I’m trying to catch up on e-mails. We are the most computer illiterate people in the world – each of us has several thousand unread e-mails dating back at least 2 years. We live our lives in the real world and really could not [sic] care less if computers had not ever been invented.

The real world?

It’s not widely known, but the direct dial phone preceded the computer by 28 years. Prior to direct dial, you picked up the party line phone, Mabel answered and connected you … and then probably listened in. When direct dial became popular, you had to look numbers up and interface with that phone thingee – Actually dial the numbers yourself!

From a human interaction standpoint, I don’t see a lot of different between the transition to direct dial phones and the transition to computers/email. So when I apply the 28-year factor to this year, 2012, I come up with the following:

Imagine telling people in 1984 (28 years ago) that you lived in the “real world” and weren’t going to communicate via direct dial phone. Now that Mabel had been removed from the loop, you weren’t going to make the effort to master that confusing dial on the phone. After all, you now lived in the real world.

I feel sorry for the couple, and I really feel sorry for the 10-year-old who will soon want a computer of his own. What will be his parent’s reaction?

Official Christmas Resignation

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Dear Hallmark, Target, Barnes and Noble and all the rest:

Please accept this letter as my notice of resignation, effective immediately.

This was an easy decision to make. I have spent too many of my years mindlessly wandering malls looking for the perfect gift for that special relative I see maybe one, maybe four, times a year. After very little consideration, I have decided to ignore your Black Friday sales, your Christmas specials, your post-Christmas blowouts and anything else associated with the season. Why? Let me count the reasons:

  1. The hundreds of “valued customer” emails I receive that are obviously cranked out by some mindless computer with no special thought that I now have to sift through.
  2. The mindless idiots who hold up thirty cars waiting for one parking spot to open up when another spot two cars earlier would have been much faster for everyone involved.
  3. The throngs of shoppers who go as a group and use blocking aisles as a social event for themselves.
  4. The extremely narrow aisles at stores that just aggravate #3, above.
  5. The store managers who place interesting items at the end of these narrow aisles so #3 and #4 are more likely to occur.
  6. The other store managers who don’t manage checkout properly  so standing in the wrong line is a penalty. (Bed, Bath and Beyond, I’m talking about you.)
  7. The seasonal employees who offer to help, but then when asked a simple question respond with “Let me go check with my manager.”
  8. The [bleeping] teenager on her cell phone who didn’t notice my car and narrowly avoided hitting me, and whose slamming on the brakes scared the [bleep] out of everyone behind her.
  9. The other [bleeping] teenager on her phone who did hit someone while backing out of her parking space!
  10. The many Goodwill, Teen Rescue and others who further block and mug shoppers trying to get in and out of stores.
  11. The traffic.
  12. The stress of unrealistic expectations.
  13. And I’ll say it, some of the oft-repeated Christmas music barely qualifies as music. It’s so bad it deserves a place on the Gong Show.

So there you have it – A baker’s dozen reasons why I no longer want to play. Call me a Grinch - I might actually be proud of it – But I’m sitting the next one out. And the one after that. And so on. I quit and there’s no amount of money or perks that will get me to reconsider.

Any questions?

Pomegranates, I love ‘em!

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Pomegranates, I love ‘em!

And pomegranates, I hate ‘em! Large is the number of t-shirts and other clothes permanently stained by a juicy berry. And deep are the stains in cutting boards – Even the plastic ones!

And the extraction process is a pain … until today. Today I figured out a great way to isolate the berries from the fruit’s membrane:

    1. Fill a large bowl with water.
    2. With a sharp knife, slice halfway through the pomegranate, enough to pry it apart by hand.
    3. With the pomegranate submerged in the water, gently pry the berries off the membrane with your hands.

The freed berries sink to the bottom of the bowl while the lighter membrane rises to the surface. And any berries that do squirt their juice will not do a lot of damage in the bowl of water.

Pomegranates, I love ‘em!

Five Rules to Remember in Life

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Not original, but funny!

  1. Money cannot buy happiness but its more comfortable to cry in a Mercedes than on a bicycle.
  2. Forgive your enemy but remember the bastard’s name.
  3. Help someone when they are in trouble and they will remember you when they’re in trouble again.
  4. Many people are alive only because it’s illegal to shoot them.
  5. Alcohol does not solve any problems, but then again, neither does milk.

Blogging Terrorists

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Following in the grand tradition of United States senators commenting on technology topics they know nothing about (See Senator Ted Stevens), Senator Joe Lieberman recently penned a letter to Google CEO Larry Page. Seems Joe was pretty upset that Jose Pimentel – an alleged al-Quida sympathizer who planned to bomb military and police targets – had a blog on Google’s personal blogging site, Blogger.

According to Verge, Joe wrote that “As demonstrated by this recent case, Google’s webhosting site, Blogger is being used by violent Islamist extremists to broadcast terrorist content.” Joe continued that “Blogger’s Content Policy does not expressly ban terrorist content nor does it provide a ‘flag’ feature for such content.”

Huh? Content Policy? Blogger already has a ban on “hate or violence.” That’s not enough? Doesn’t terrorism fall under “hate or violence?”

But a flag? Serious? We don’t have enough Facebook “Like” and Google “+1″ flags? Joe thinks we need a “Terrorist” flag for blogs?

Hm, please don’t be offended, but I’ll get to work on my “Terrorist” flag just as soon as I finish my “Uninformed US Senator” flag …