Learning about people from their signals

You can learn a lot by watching the signals coming from what people do. My friend Rich Menendez has this analogy that he told me that I like to use as the basis for this:

Let's say it's your first day on the job. You ask a subordinate to come by your desk at 2:15 the next day and put a post-it note on the bottom of your monitor. Basically, the simplest task ever. Then you wait for the next day and see what happens. Does the guy show up at 2:17? Does he put the note in the wrong spot? Does he forget and apologize? Any one of those things is no big deal, but each of them is a signal of things to come. The guy who shows up at 2:!5 sharp and puts the note on the bottom of your monitor is probably a guy you can rely on. The guy who forgets and tells you there was no point is probably not going to be so reliable.

I think these signals are really valuable in all parts of life. If you can pay attention to the little signals that people give, you can reasonably accurately predict what they're going to do. You can give them the benefit of the doubt, but probably they'll prove you wrong and you'll be facing the same situation you predicted would happen based on your earlier observation.

If you're able to read these signals, then you can make an early decision on how to deal with any issues. It's great to be able to make that decision earlier rather than later - you're going to have to deal with it either way.

Perhaps the best book ever written?

A few weeks ago, I was up skiing with my friend Tim, and he introduced me to the book Squallywood. This may in fact be one of the best books ever written. I read it cover to cover the night he showed it to me.

The book is about all the big cliffs and hardest lines at Squaw, along with how to ski them, and the ski videos they've been in. They have a system rated 1 to 10 for difficulty. People say I'm a good skier, although I think I'm not really that good. I think that maybe I'd be willing to try one of the lines in the book that's a 1 on a powder day.

In addition to the descriptions, there is a list of places to stand and watch people huck these lines, as well as the GNAR point system for basically local skier tough-guy points. I think that most people will not understand this at all, which is why I think it's genius.

When I got home after the trip, I ordered the 2nd edition of the book. What could they have improved, I wondered? Well, several things:
1. Some people have since skied some previously unskied lines. Nice.
2. They added a chapter about epic crash stories. Awesome.

The only drawback about the book is that it's about Squaw. I'm really not a big fan of Squaw because I had a bad experience there a few years ago where it was late in the season and a few friends had asked me to go up and sell some day passes they had left over. I did so, and one of their undercover security people pulled me into a room and started being all gestapo on me threatening to arrest me and stuff. I didn't feel like I was doing anything wrong, and they way overreacted, which was lame. So, I generally take my business elsewhere unless I'm with someone who really wants to ski there.

Anyway, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a good skier, or claims to be a good skier. The GNAR point system even gives bonus points for the ego claim: you get extra points for riding up in the tram and exclaiming loudly "I'm the best skier on the mountain!"

I got an Apple TV

I've been interested in the notion of downloading all of my entertainment content from the internet for a while now. It makes sense. Cable TV sucks - I don't need most of the channels that they give me, and even the channels themselves really don't provide value: why do I care what channel "Heroes" is on? I want to watch the show.

I've tried a lot of these media players over the past few years. The Apple TV is the latest, and I decided to get it because it sounds like it got a lot better with the new software update. Here are my thoughts:

Out of the box: where are the wires? They don't even supply the basic wires necessary to use it. I have a box full of spare wires, and there are multiple ways to connect the Apple TV to your TV, so I'm not sure where I shake out on this. Probably good to not include the wires since I don't have to pay for wires I don't need. That's just for me though.

Once hooked up, it asked me to sync with my iTunes, so I got out my laptop and entered the code, and it started cranking away. The preferences seemed reasonable out of the box, except for trying to copy all of my music. Too much.

Video that played was nice, and generally looked good. Videos I already had on my laptop played nicely. The Apple TV only supports H.264 video, which is kind of annoying because almost all of the stuff I already have is in the DivX or XviD format, so I'm going to have to figure out how to convert it.

I was able to buy a TV show from the iTunes store, and it downloaded and sync'd to Apple TV automagically, so that was cool.

I thought you could buy/rent movies right from the device? If you can, I don't know how to. I RTFM, and I still don't know how to. I see there are movie rentals in iTunes when I browse it on my laptop, but even that is not very clear. Renting movies is one of the things I really wanted to do. Bummed that it's not clear, and the selection is pretty poor too. Movie trailers were pretty cool - I liked being able to browse them right from the remote. Music playing is pretty sweet too. My Airport express was never reliable enough, I think the Apple TV will work.

It's too early to tell whether the Apple TV is going to supplant my 3 year old networked DVD player from Japan, but it's possible. We'll see.

Update: It turns out that they shipped the new Apple TV with the old software. There is no indication of this anywhere. So, now I'm sitting around waiting for the new release.

How to Steal Coffee

I'm writing this in the Foster City Noah's Bagels, and I'm pretty sure I just saw someone steal coffee. Here are the steps to repeat:
1. Enter store, go to coffee station (which is not behind the counter)
2. Fill own travel cup that you brought in.
3. Go to the bathroom. This ensures that any employees that noticed you have now forgot about you.
4. Leave store when done in the bathroom.

The Slingbox is really cool

I just got a Slingbox. It's totally sweet. Here's what they did really well:

1. It just works. Like TiVo, there are a lot of wires, but once you connect them, it pretty much just works. You run the install disks on your computer, they connect to the Slingbox, you click next, next finish, and it working. You can watch TV on your computer. Some caveats - the install CD's software only works on XP and below, so if you have Mac OS or Vista, you have to go to the website and download some software, but that was pretty easy and just took a few minutes.

2. It just works. It was pretty cool that it worked on my home network right out of the box, but it was even cooler that it worked on an external network right out of the box. After I was done installing, I brought my laptop down to a local cafe to grab some lunch, and give the Sling Player a spin. All I did was open the player software and it almost instantaneously started working. Amazing.

3. It just works. Because of where I live, I have pretty slow DSL at home, and I was on a wifi connection at the cafe. I expected the picture to be pretty crappy. Wrong. Somehow they're able to auto-adjust everything so that the picture and the sound all work well, even with that remote connection. Cool.

4. It works on my Treo! I downloaded the Treo app and installed it pretty easily, and I entered a very long string of numbers to identify my slingbox, and it also connected and just worked. The picture even looks pretty good. I don't really take trains or wait for buses, but I do have the unlimited data plan from Verizon, so maybe when I'm mad at them I'll leave this on all night so that I can use a lot of data.

Overall, I'm really impressed with this. I know it works with TiVo too, so I think I'm going to hook up my TiVo to this whole setup. I was wondering what I was going to do about watching the Olympics - now I have my solution!

Your call is very important to us (not!)

I am trying to return something I got for Christmas to Amazon. Here's the procedure:

1. Go online, click returns area
2. Don't have order number, need to speak to someone. Click the kinda cool interface that calls you and connects the call with a rep.
3. Clearly rep is in India, and it's a VOIP connection, so the connection is not clear and they are not good at understanding my american accent. As a result, I need to speak slowly and clearly for them to understand me at all.
4. The rep tries to help me, but is very slow at comprehending what is going on. I do not have the order number, and because of that, they have to look up the information of the sender to find the order. I'm faced with a really slow process of communicating all this information to them.
5. They put me on hold, during which time I hear an endless 15 second loop telling me over and over that my call is very important to them and they'll be with me shortly.
6. Finally they find the order, and say they are going to email me a shipping label and instructions. I hang up.
7. Email doesn't come. Wait a day, call back, repeat steps 1-6.
8. Email comes, but I'm returning 2 things, and only get one return label.
9. Wait a day, call back AGAIN. Repeat steps 1 thru 5. This is the dumbest guy yet. He has no idea how to even process a return, so I lose my shit, start swearing, ask for a manager.
10. Sit on hold for 20 min. Write an angry email to Amazon during that time, get a response that says that they don't accept email at that address. Guy comes back, manager is in a meeting or something, he'll call me back. Everything they have told me so far has been a lie, so I don't believe him. We'll see...

The upshot of all of this? I thought that having a wish list on Amazon would be a good idea. Unfortunately, the downside is that it's almost impossible to return something, so I'm probably not going to put stuff on that list anymore, or only things that I really, really want. Amazon could make a lot more money from me if they would just have even halfway reasonable customer service. The experience is similar with Dell these days, and I won't use their products and strongly recommend against them to others as well.

By the way, are you from India?

I just got off the phone with a customer service agent who I'm 99% sure was in India. He must have said "by the way" about 25 times during our call. I've heard this many times before when talking to Indian customer service people, and people that I know who are from India also say that pretty frequently. What's up with that? Is there something in the Indian language which is getting translated?