Great Products #1

Today I replaced the brake shoes on my commuting bike. After 350 miles, I had noticed that the OEM pads performed poorly and squeaked and chattered when wet. Worse, while changing a tire I noticed gouges in my rims (see photo). Notice the shininess of the old pads. That shine is metal bits of my rim that the cheap pads ground off with dirt and road debris. While that might tempt some to pony up for disc brakes (thief magnets) but I had a better idea.

1089

Ten years ago I purchased a set of Kool Stop brake pads for my Mt. Bike. I’m not sure how many thousands miles I’ve rode them but they are fantastic pads. They brake wonderfully in all weather conditions including grainy Michigan dirt, urban road grime in Georgia and Washington, and slippery Texas clay. Part of why they brake so well is that they clean the rim instead of grinding in debris. After buying them, I never gave another moments thought to braking problems.

Until I got my commuter. I had looked for Kool Stop pads at two of the Local Bike Shops and neither carried them. I had considered taking the pads off my Mt. Bike. But then it would be lacking a set of decent pads. I did a quick internet search and ordered them off Amazon.com. I’m almost disappointed there will be no rain for tomorrows ride.

e-delivery of invoices

While I’m ranting about business practices stuck in the 20th century, there is a simple reason I frequently decline online delivery of statements. What assurance do I have that after I terminate my account, I will still have access to my account records?

If you want me to sign up for e-delivery, give me some assurance that my records will remain online and accessible for a reasonable period of time. Regardless of the status of my account with you. In other words, match the functionality of paper statements.

If I cancel my account with you, my paper records don’t self-destruct. If you want me sign up for e-delivery, implement and publish your document retention policy that is client friendly and aligns with IRS guidelines. If I have an account with you and cancel it, my account history must remain accessible to me for at least 3 years. 

Considering the cost of printing and mailing statements versus the incredibly cheap cost of storing electronic records, this seems like a no-brainer.

Here are a few more suggestions for a good implementation:

 • Provide a simple method for downloading multiple statements. Quite often I don’t care at all about my statements until the end of the year when I want to download all of them. Selecting a period, clicking download, renaming the statement, and repeating a dozen times is tedious.
 • Give the downloaded files a name useful to humans. Filenames like 82383423546602382_08-08.pdf are not  human friendly.
 • Prefix filenames with a date nomenclature like: YYYY_MM or YYYY_q1. That way, when I’m looking at a folder with several years worth of statements, they are sorted properly.
 • If I cancelled my account with you N years ago and you’re about to expunge my records, make a good faith attempt to inform me prior to that event.

Dear Sam’s Club

Dearest Sam’s Club Business Credit,

Thank you for the kind letter. I feel inclined to reply telling you why I have ended our relationship. For about 12 years, we had a pleasant relationship. It worked like this:

a) I shop at my local Sam’s Club
b) I pay with my Sam’s Club Business Credit (SCBC)
c) you send me a bill
d) I pay it.

It’s a pretty good system.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but about 3 years ago I drastically reduced the use of my SCBC account. You may have also noticed there was no decrease in my purchases at Sam’s Club. Something compelled me to get a MasterCard and use it instead. Read on to learn why. 

In 2005 we moved from Michigan to Texas. One of my moving checklists is a list of all my personal and corporate accounts with utilities, banks, investments, credit cards, etc. On move day, which is already quite busy, I file a USPS change of address to forward mail and then log onto a bunch of web sites to update our postal address.

Everyone I do business with allows me to log on their web site and change my postal address. Yes, this includes business accounts with banks and credit cards. It is very convenient. If I forget anything important, it gets forwarded to me.

It’s a good system with one exception. One company requires that I submit a fax with my change of address request. I cannot update it on their web site. I cannot send an email. I cannot update it at a local store bearing their name. This company also stamps their statement envelopes with “DO NOT FORWARD,” so that they won’t follow me to my new locale. After the 2005 move, months went by before I was contacted by a nasty person who chided me for not paying the bill I didn’t get.

The nasty person was from GE Capital calling about my SCBC. I asked the nasty person why they don’t allow my statements to be forwarded. She told me it’s so that they can get my new address from the USPS and update their systems. Apparently several months of statements being returned wasn’t sufficient to warrant an update.

During the months of no statements, I had visited Sam’s Club stores and was never notified of the outstanding balance. I get regular promotional emails from Sam’s Club but no notification of the outstanding balance. After that unpleasant experience, I all but stopped using my SCBC. Don’t take my word for it, check my (now cancelled) account history.

Fast forward to 2008. It’s been several years of barely using my SCBC account. We’re talking 2-3 statements per year, one of which is because you automatically charge my business membership to the account. In May we moved from Texas to Washington and you’ll never believe what happened. (Hint: back up 4 paragraphs)

This time around, I asked the GE rep to cancel my account. I appreciate the letter of regret you sent but I do not believe you are sorry I’ve cancelled. If you really cared about my business:

• you would make it easy for me to manage my account information.
• my account would still be accessible so I can see my statement history, particularly the ones I’ve never seen.
• you would have updated my address and resend the statement, like my Credit Union did. In the first month.
• you’d have noticed that for the last three months, I’ve been shopping in Washington and am on Pacific time. You could have avoided waking me.

Bonus points are awarded for adding a notification feature that sends me an email or text message N days before it is due like American Express does. Shucks, ANY updates to your web site after a decade of stagnation would be welcome.

Goodbye SCBC.
# 6032 205 090 505190140

too mobile?

iPhone 3G white 16GB
iPhone 3G black 16GB
iPhone 4GB
iPod 40GB white
AT&T Tilt 8925
Palm Treo 755P
Palm Treo 700P
Samsung A900
Nokia 1100b

    My policy of getting rid of old electronic goodies before buying more has been laxly enforced. It’s time for another round of Craigslist/eBay postings. All but the iPhones will soon be sold. Jay Simon, does that answer any of your questions about how we like the iPhone?

    iPhone resurrection

    On Saturday, I attended a housewarming party at a friends. He’s got a great house in Lake Washington and his party coincided with the Blue Angels air show. During the afternoon, a few of us helped him take a dip in the lake. The humor would not have been lost so suddenly if he hadn’t come up minus his iPhone, which went into the lake with him.

    Between the cadre of tech geeks present, we had spare iPhones but this wretched soul had not synced his iPhone since January. I dove in and concluded that the bottom was about 20 feet deep and my lungs are only conditioned to free dives of 15 feet. So we formulated a plan. Jen and I drove home and fetched our SCUBA gear. Nelson fetched his tanks and BCD. We found a couple bricks to use as weights and went in. Nelson took a turn diving and then I did. After 10 minutes of swimming around face down and fins up, I found the phone.

    There was much rejoicing but after 3 hours underwater, there was little hope of the phone working again. To prevent any further water damage I disassembled the iPhone and removed the battery. What surprised me was that I could find no evidence of the magic smoke having leaked out. That meant that either a component I couldn’t see had fried, Apple had some type of circuitry to prevent shorts, or we were just plain lucky.

    Having the battery removed, the phone could now be safely “washed.” As we may remember from high school chemistry, pure water does not conduct electricity. It is the impurities in the water that allow water to conduct and wreak havoc on electronics. To stand any chance of recovery, the dirty water must be removed. Better still if I can also get as much of the lake sediment removed as well. Instead of distilled water, I prepared a bath of isopropyl alcohol and immersed the iPhone for a couple hours.

    Why alcohol? Because even if I placed the phone in a ziplock full or rice, or my warming oven, it would take 3-6 days for the phone to completely dehydrate. Alcohol evaporates much, much faster. Isopropyl alcohol also acts as a water scavenger which further expedited the drying process. Finally, it is a mild solvent, which will help clean up any sediment that found its way in into the phone.

    After a 2 hour bath in alcohol I removed the iPhone and set it out to dry. Exactly two days later I plugged it into my USB charging cable. The Apple logo came up but it failed to boot all the way. Suspecting that it couldn’t draw enough power via the 5v USB adapter, I plugged it into my iPod FireWire charging cable and it booted right up. Voila!  A working iPhone. 

    The grand finale was soldering the battery contacts back onto the phone. After doing so, the battery still had plenty of charge left and the phone booted up off the battery. Our victim was able to sync his iPhone with his computer. Everything on the iPhone works (touch screen, applications, wifi, etc) except the phone radio. I dropped the SIM from my iPhone into it but got only a generic “call failed” error.

    Interesting things learned: The iPhone has an immersion sensor at the bottom of the headphone plug. White is good, pink means it has been immersed. A USB cable does not supply sufficient current to power the iPhone when it doesn’t have a battery. A FireWire cable does. WiFi will not work on an iPhone without the battery. Alcohol worked well as a cleaner, solvent, and drier.

    bicycling to work, update

    As I reported last month, I have been bicycling to work. Since I was out of shape and the ride is 9 miles each way, I started slowly and rode only two days a week. Since Jun 11, I have bicycle commuted 16 days and rode 288 miles. During that time I have cut my commute time from 50 minutes to 35. My legs aren’t yet strong enough that I get a good cardio workout but I’m making good progress. My one-way commute times are:

    • By Car: 20m
    • By Bike: 35m
    • By Bus: 55-65m

    Each day I bicycle to work instead of driving costs 30 minutes of time. In exchange for that 30 minutes, I get my prescribed 70 minutes of exercise. It also saves about $4 in diesel fuel but that cost is offset by buying and maintaining my bike. Of course, there are fringe benefits to biking to work. After the initial weight spike as my leg muscles rejuvenated, I am losing a pound a week. Very soon I shall start riding 3 days a week. 

    iPhone 3G is in demand

    I’m standing in line with 200 others to get my new iPhone 3G. My plan for just waltzing in and buying one a week after release with no wait was optimistic. I estimate that this store had 200 phones in stock today. I have been regularly checking inventory since the release and I know they have sold out of inventory every single day since release.

    home in Washington

    Friday began at 4AM. By mid-morning, not a single boat had caught a fish and we hadn’t gotten a nibble. The four of us headed back with empty coolers and dampened spirits. But as everyone knows, a bad day fishing is still better than the worst day ____ing. At the docks, the warden shared that nobody was catching Salmon. That made us feel better about getting skunked.

    On my way home, I stopped by the Alderwood Mall Apple Store. A couple Geniuses and I agreed that a bug in the latest version of Apple’s iPhone SDK (beta 8) caused my iPhone some irreparable harm. I walked out with a brand new iPhone and a $0 invoice. It’s nice to have a single vendor that builds the hardware, OS, and SDK. It is even nicer when that vendor stands behind it.

    As I resumed homeward on I-5, a great song started playing on the radio. I cranked up the volume and sang along. Loudly. As I popped up over a hill the loveliest of images appeared. The day was sunny and bright without even a hint of haze. Which means that despite being 50 miles away, Mr. Rainier appeared so large and imposing that I paused to gaze at her majesty. It warms a part of my soul to be near the mountains.

    On Monday, we caught fish. See the photo at right.

    avoid GoDaddy

    I have long disliked GoDaddy because using their web site to purchase a domain name is an atrocious experience. It makes me feel dirty and used, like GoDaddy cares more about my credit card info than me. Years ago, I transferred all the domains I manage to eNom and I’ve been quite pleased. My distaste for GoDaddy has been personal until today. It was recently discovered that GoDaddy allows employees to compete with their clients in domain name auctions. Rather than detail the problems with GoDaddy as a registrar, allow me to refer you to NoDaddy.