site rank

Just so you know, this isn’t exactly a technorati realm blog… according to Netcraft, this site ranks as the 8,717,350th most popular website on the planet!

That is going by the name chuck.goolsbee.org, it ranks 8,789,401th by its other name blog.goolsbee.org.

I stumbled upon this stat while doing some work investigating bandwidth usage by some of our clients. We have some folks that pull in a lot of traffic for reasons that are not readily apparent. Usually though they are really obvious, such as:

Adam Engst’s TidBITs at 69,044
Glenn F’s isbn.nu site weighing in at 99,231
The MacSlash boys at 10,542 (a shockingly high rank, way to go guys)
Shawn King’s Your Mac Life at 67,059
John Rizzo’s MacWindows resource site at 24,534
The Steves, who have several sites high in the rankings such as BidNip at 23,828, and cheatcodes.com at 56,623.
Perennial d.f favorites Car*Toys at 74,450
And at the top of the heap, Neoseeker at 4,045

The one that caught me by surprise?

bbs.trailersailor.com at 21,007

Quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

I’ve waited until almost midnight on the west coast to say this (as I don’t really like to toot my own horn) but I was quoted in a technology story in the WSJ today. Pretty cool.

It was an interesting social experiment to see who among my “Internet friends” spotted it and emailed me today. A lot of people I assumed would be WSJ readers did not notice and many who I would not pick as WSJ readers did. Interesting.

Reading update.

I realized today, halfway through my latest book, that I haven’t updated my reading selection on the weblog here. Sorry. I finished “Madison’s Notes” weeks ago, and am now deep into Keegan’s “Intelligence in War.” John Keegan is my son Christopher’s favorite author, and this is Chris’ book I am borrowing. Good stuff so far. I’ll update links tomorrow.

Forests & Trees

I went to the JCNA AGM on Saturday, and like the making of sausages, I would be better off not knowing what goes on behind the scenes.

(Of course meetings are about the least effective method of getting things done. No great human achievement ever came out of a meeting. But I digress…)

In this case I was able to observe large-scale nearsightedness: Shortly after I arrived they discussed with alarm the shrinking membership numbers and subsequent loss of revenue. They pondered the fact that the club was not attracting any “young” members. A look around the room seemed to confirm to me at least that the average age was somewhere between “retirement” and “deceased”… and the presence of the three of us there to talk about XKEdata … all of us firmly in our “middle age”… helped to pull the left side of the bell curve downward quite a bit. The sad reality is that Jaguar is not a car sold to young people anymore. They stopped making sports cars in 1970 (the S3 E-type is a GT car, not a sports car), and have priced themselves out of the “young” market anyway. The new XK is very nice, and a bargain compared to the Aston-Martin, but hey… $100k for a car?? Very few “young” people can afford that! The since-70 cars are becoming ‘inexpensive’ in a relative sense, but… The XJ cars are big sedans, and even though they are available for cheap nowadays, they hold little appeal for the average “car guy” really. The XJS is aging gracefully, but 12 cylinder cars will always be thought of as “exotic” rather than “fun.” So the reality is that “young” people do not buy Jaguars. Sure, there are the “tarted up Fords” – the X- & S-Types, but I have to wonder how many of those buyers are interested in joining a club for their cars? A very small percentage I would guess.

The other “young Jaguar owner” demographic that the JCNA is missing right under their collective noses is the “Second Generation Car Guy”… which would be me, and those just like me. We are their children, and grandchildren. Odd that they’d not see us eh?

Well, I can tell you why: They have chased us away.

From what I can observe, the focal point of the JCNA of late has been Concours, and the focal point of the Concours has become “Ultimate Originality”… meaning the car that “wins” is the one that appears as close to how it did “when it left the factory. ” This is kind of silly because it means that the “winner” eventually becomes the guy who can effectively seal his car into some sort of perverse time capsule… becoming a sort of “Ship in a Bottle.”

I would think that William Lyons would spin in his grave at that notion. He designed and built cars for people to USE, not preserve for all eternity.

Of course the other way to “win” this Concours is to $pend your way to victory. This is also ironic since Sir William was notoriously cheap, and pre-dated Wal-mart by decades at success-by-squeezing-suppliers for dirt-cheap components (not to mention paying his staff poorly… but once again, I digress.)

I guess the JCNA doesn’t want the Concours competition to come down to whose car came out of the Chrome & Buff shop or had the most recent full-body Armor-all dip ala the hot rod roadster crowd… but to be honest, I’d rather bring my E-type to a local small-town car show & shine, than a JCNA “Concours d’Arrogance” (a wonderful term coined by “Eric The Bastard” on J-L’s E-type list). At least at a local show & shine, the people will be interested about the historical importance of the E-type, rather than tell me that I have an incorrect screw in my headlight surround and that my centerlaced wheels are not stock.

So by making the focus of the club the creation and maintenance of ONE car, because really only one car & owner can “win”, they are actively discouraging the vast majority from participation. The vast majority of us have no interest in spending metric tons of money to create an undrivable “perfect” car… as that is a fruitless endeavor. In the end you have no money and a collection of trophies. Yawn. We’re the ones that have inherited, rescued, or resurrected our forebear’s cars and are their current caretakers. The vast majority of us are not intimidated by technology and embrace Internet based communities. We also are aware of the vast leaps in automotive engineering that have occurred in the past 50 years and not afraid to adopt them to keep our old Jaguars running and driving as their designers intended… racing, and running country roads at speed.

Cars are for DRIVING. The club need to put an emphasis on tours, rallies, slalom, autocrossing (slightly different but similar to slalom), gymkhanas, etc. Car shows are frankly… boring, and the hyper-critical anal-retentive JCNA Concours are the absolute pinnacle of that mountain of boring.

So, once the subject of declining membership was concluded, they went on to some amendments to the competition rules. Slalom went by swiftly, and (predictably), Concours went on for hours. Hours. Literally from noon until almost three, they debated such inane subject as “whether license plate frames should be considered in judging”…. I swear I’ve had root canal work that was more enjoyable than merely being in that room. I had to leave on a few occasions. Thankfully Rick Korn’s E-type racing car was on display out in front of the hotel. Far from being Concours-perfect, it was nonetheless a stimulating car to observe. Sigh.

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” –Helmuth von Moltke

So Steve, Roger & I planned our talk a few weeks before. I was there for two purposes:
1. I have a lot of experience as a public speaker.
2. I could “moderate” the talk and prevent Roger from droning on and on.

This is not a dig at Roger, he actively sought out somebody for the job! I volunteered and I knew that I was quite capable of doing the tasks assigned to me. Unfortunately the room was laid out for a meeting, not a presentation. To use the clock metaphor: The “table” was a large circle with the screen at 6 o’clock. They had a computer there (a Dell laptop) and a projector, but they were only using it to show the agenda. There were three microphones, but they were at 9, 12 & 3 o’clock.

(Ironically, whoever had put the laptop there did not set the screensaver to “off” prior to the meeting, so a woman seated at the 7 o’clock position would stand up about every 10 minutes throughout the day’s meeting, to scrub the trackpad in an effort to prevent the screen from blanking! Weird.)

As it turned out, I went to the 6 o’clock station and swapped the projector into my laptop and adjusted the screen resolution on the fly (thankfully I drive a Macintosh so that was a painless exercise.) Roger was at 9 o’clock, Steven at 3 o’clock, and the JCNA president held the other microphone, standing on the other side of the table and about 50 feet away from me at 12 o’clock. Roger and Steven started into the presentation, and I was left to the role of “demo-boy”. So, rather than speaking, I was the mute guy at the far end of the room clicking links on the sites (I had bought the $10 a day wireless Internet access from the hotel).

Thankfully Steven was coherent, and Roger managed to NOT drone on and on too much. He started to twice and I gave him as much of “a LOOK” as I could, and Steven interrupted him to swing the talk forward. Unfortunately just as we were getting to the logical end and a potential Q&A section, Roger did get into a bit of an apologetic rant repeating himself a few times, and avoided eye contact with me… which meant he drifted into his “on and on” stage… and then, somebody distracted Roger by walking up and talking in his ear. Steven started to talk a bit more, then the guy at the 12 0’clock microphone interrupted us and shut the whole meeting down. Bang. End of everything.

Roger later told me the guy had told him that they “already had a registry of E-types.” My answers to that are how useful is it? How up to date? How can I search it? How accessible is it to somebody in Australia for example? Since it is likely on paper, the answers are: “Not very.” “Who knows?” “Not without access.” and “Not at all.”

Worries about declining membership. Three hours of arguing about license plate frames. Then 5 minutes of what appeared to me as reaction ranging from indifference to hostility. Hopefully somebody in the room appreciated what we had to say, and more importantly what we represented… namely the next generation of POSSIBLE club members. And of course a group holding at least one of the answers to their questions about stopping their declines in membership, a database of just two models of Jaguar which together, represent a number larger than the current JCNA membership.

I am a member of JCNA and the Seattle Jaguar Club, but in terms of interaction, I really am more of a “member” of Jag-Lovers. I participate in JCNA events about three times a year… I participate in Jag-Lovers almost every day of the year. Like the computer user group, it could be that the car club, at least on a physical, regional basis, is a thing of the past. Maybe technology has outstripped the usefulness of a regional club. We still need to get together in “real-time” to participate in events, especially driving events, but if the clubs do not EMBRACE technology to facilitate communication among their membership, they risk extinction.

Paper newsletters and book-based registries do not scale to global communities. I can get better information about keeping my car running, from people all over the globe, in literally seconds… than I could ever hope to get from a lifetime of club meetings or newsletters. Yes, we still need to meet face to face. But it doesn’t REQUIRE a club to do that. The JCNA needs to adapt to that reality.

Soon.

Pictures!

Some pictures from recent events…

1. A couple of weekends ago I took two boys up to Mt. Baker for some skiing. Well I did some skiing, but the boys chose to give snowboarding a try. I used to snowboard about 15 years ago, but gave it up after getting involved in a collision (and NO, it was not my fault!) with two drunken skiers up on Snoqualmie Pass. Plus, I think snowboarding is only fun when the snow is really wet and deep, otherwise it is just a pain in the ass. Literally.

I don’t think the boys had as much fun as they thought they would. I think Nick is going to stick to skiing.

Here are the pictures.

2. The Jaguar Clubs of North America are having their Annual General Meeting here in Seattle, in fact a stones throw from my office. So I’m attending (actually speaking to the group with Roger Los & Steven DuChene about XKEdata.com). They had a dinner last night at Boeing’s Museum of Flight (even CLOSER to my office) so I took some pictures. The first new Jaguar XK on the west coast was there, so lots of pics of it too.

Here are those pictures.

Lego Geek Cool

a Lego Jaguar E-type.

Ok, this is just … cool.

Other than his mistake about the engine configuration (the V-12 did not appear until 1971, and by then the E-type was a very different car) this is VERY well done. Even though he says it is a V-12, the modelling looks very close to the gorgeous-to-behold XK inline 6… though with the cam covers removed. I love the 3-carb intake and hinged bonnet. I’m impressed!

Here is a rotating version.

OK… it looks like he’s corrected his text now. So I’ll forgive his error.

Check it out though:

Note the details: 3 carbs, spark plug feed down the center of the cam valley, heater box & fan, engine frames, battery, suspension, etc. Very nice!

Compare:

PowerBook repair wrap-up & epilogue

I doubt I’ll ever walk into that store again.. or ANY Apple Store for that matter. I have been into two of them in search of assistance so far, and I can say without hesitation that I have had dental work that was a far more pleasurable experience. Root canal? Sure. Apple Store? Not unless they let me suck on Nitrous Oxide at the Genius Bar.

I never did post a post-repair summary with Apple when it finished in February. Today something happened that prompted me to finally write it up. Basically my conclusion is that Apple has seriously dropped the ball with regards to the repair process at their retail stores.

From start to finish it was a BAD experience for me. Things that should take minutes stretched into HOURS. Today I found out I am not alone in that experience. So let me summarize the wait/queue/loiter times for you here, then I’ll follow up with a rant from a friend of mine (also a digital.forest client) who just had a similar experience as my own with repair at an Apple Store.

1. Diagnosis and Drop off: ~30 minutes wait time.
I walked into the store, with a known recall issue, complete with a printout of the Apple web page outlining the recall. I had to turn away from the counter, and make a reservation at another computer. It said I had a 15 minute wait to see the “Genius”.
The Genius wasn’t helping anyone at that moment. A few minutes later he called some names. Mine wasn’t one of them. None of the people were there who had reservations. Then he vanished into the back room for some time. Five minutes AFTER my assigned time, he re-appeared and called SOMEBODY ELSE’S name… who also wasn’t there. He fiddles some on a computer, then called my name. We then went through diagnosis/etc… documented elsewhere.

He was about to take the computer away when he asked if I had a backup of my data. I did, but it was a day old, so I decided to take it back to my office, make a new one, and bring it back the next day. Since all the paperwork was done, I assumed that the drop off would be easy. It wasn’t.

2. Drop off, take two: ~90 minute wait time(!)
OK, so I return the next night to drop off my powerbook. For some reason I thought that since I had been through the entire process of diagnosis and filling out the paperwork/repair work order/etc that I could just walk in and hand it to them. Boy was I wrong. I walked in and just like the night before they would not even talk to me until after I had made reservation. I went ahead and checked in on their computer reservation system only to find out it they were booked for another 70+ minutes. I grabbed the next open slot, walked out to my car, grabbed a book and went off to find something to eat elsewhere in the mall. I grab a meal from Taco Time, sit and read my book for an hour, then amble back to the Apple Store. Unlike an hour before, when the store was literally empty, it was now stuffed with humans. This is one of Apple’s “Mini stores” so it was unimaginably chaotic with that many people. My time reservation time comes and goes, and I’m still loitering. FINALLY they call my name, I walk up, hand them the powerbook, confirm the name, turn around and walk out.
Summary: A 30 second transaction which took an hour and a half due to an inane process.

3. Repair Wait Time: Two Weeks. (documented elsewhere)

4. Pick-up: ~120 minutes wait time. The Icing on the Cake of Bad Customer Experience.
They called me to let me know it was ready to pick up. I could not get there for almost 24 hours due to being 70+ miles away, so I show up the next night. The store is moderately busy. I walk up to a store employee, and tell them that I received a call to pick up my repaired powerbook. Did they walk back and grab it? No. Her answer, as if she were an automoton: “You need to make a reservation.” “Just to pick it up?” I ask. “Yes sir.” she replied. Frustrated, I spun around, and once again, entered my name into the queue and found that I was destined to wait at least 45 minutes. Sigh. I amble out to the car and listen to music for a while… to soothe my savage breast I guess. 30 minutes go by and I head back into the store.

It is a literal mob scene. There are at least 15 people loitering about the counter in the back of the store. Two people are being assisted, one with an iPod, another with a G5. There is a display on the back wall which alternates between “Mac Hints” and a status board. The status board is obviously broken since it just repeats the same thing over and over:

Next Customers:
Next open slot at about:

No data mind you JUST the text above, so I was ignorant of how many of these people were ahead of me. In the end it turned out to be ALL of them. I waited, and waited, and waited. I waited some more. They helped everyone in their turn. The crowded store slowly became less crowded. They called lots of names. Easily 90% of those people were not there. They would call a name and wait… it was like an 80’s replay: “Bueller? Bueller? …Bueller?” Then there would be a pause, and another name… and a pause, and another name. At one point I started counting the names without bodies… there were over 15 called, while at least four actual humans just stood there waiting to be called. I waited and waited and waited right along with them.

So in the end, I waited through everyone who was there when I arrived, and a whole bunch of people who weren’t even there(!), and it was down to me and one other person… and they called her name. Sigh. I had been standing around now for well over an hour. All this time I have made direct eye contact with every single Apple store employee on several occasions. Not a single one of them asked me if I needed help, or anything.

They finish up with the woman, and then call several other names(!) I’m the ONLY person in the whole damn store other than staff. This is beyond absurd. It is surreal. Why the guy didn’t just speak directly to me is something I’ll never know.

The Genius (I guess they must call them that for their deductive reasoning skills!) finally says “Then you must be Chuck.” I affirmed his less-than-brilliant deduction, and told him I was there to pick up my repaired powerbook.

There are times I wish I could capture a moment and hold it… spin it in my hand, carry it away, to be replayed for another person. This moment was one of them. It was obvious that this “Genius” felt a profound sense of embarrassment at that very moment. He knew how long I had been waiting. He had seen me patiently waiting, standing in the very same spot, for well over an hour. In fact he had seen me walk into the store almost two hours before and seen me get turned away. The whole surreal absurdity of this stupid reservation system and forcing people to queue like soup-kitchen panhandlers or Soviet-Era bread lines finally collided with his retail reality. I wish I could have captured that moment so that I could transport it down to Cupertino and reveal it to the pinheads who thought up this insanity and provide them with clue on why this is antithetical to what a good service organization does for and with their customers. Unfortunately I couldn’t capture that moment… and these words can not do it justice.

He vanished into the back, and returned with my powerbook, and the store Manager, who apologized for having me wait so long, thanked me for being so patient, (yes… he was among the store staff who I had looked right in the eye many times over the past two+ hours, and no… he never had said anything to me up until this very moment) and handed me a 10% discount coupon good for anything in the store.

I was happy to have my PowerBook back. I’m still dismayed at how difficult it had been to just drop it off and pick it up though. As I said earlier, it pales in comparison to my previous experience of Apple Repair, which despite being in the “bad old days” was a fantastic customer service experience. Especially in light of this recent experience, with an Apple Computer that is supposedly so much better than before. To sum it up:

1996 PowerBook Repair Time & Effort:
* 5 minutes of my time
* 2 days of Apple’s time

2006 PowerBook Repair Time & Effort:
* 4+ hours of my time (largely spent being actively ignored while in close proximity to Apple Store staff)
* 14 days of Apple’s time

The insult to injury: A 10% Discount, should I decide to reward this bizarre treatment with my money.

I suspect the store Manager was sincere in his belief that he was somehow giving me something valuable in exchange for my time. I can’t fault him for that, but honestly I doubt I’ll ever walk into that store again.. or ANY Apple Store for that matter. I have been into two of them in search of assistance so far, and I can say without hesitation that I have had dental work that was a far more pleasurable experience. Root canal? Sure. Apple Store? Not unless they let me suck on Nitrous Oxide at the Genius Bar.

It took me almost two months to get around to write the above. Mostly because, like my other rants about bad experiences, I wanted to have the time to cool off and look back without any raw emotion to cloud my judgement and have me end up sounding like a raving lunatic. I work in a service business myself and I know how tough it is to take a raving lunatic seriously. I’m a patient guy… probably too patient for my own good, as I probably could have created a scene at virtually any point in the above situations and accelerated the outcome. In hindsight perhaps I should have started being a squeaky wheel… I’m just not that kind of guy though.

Today however, I heard from that friend and client of mine, Sam Crutsinger, who related a tale very similar to my experience with getting repair service from an Apple store. Unlike me, he wasn’t patient, and in fact gave up on dealing with Apple and found service elsewhere. Here is his story as told to the “Your Mac Life“ mailing list:

Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 18:42:52 -0600
From: Sam Crutsinger
To: Your Mac Life
Subject: Crap Service at Apple Store

Riddle me this Batman... I have a Mac that won't boot up. It's drives never
spin up. I've hit the mobo reset button, I've pulled the extra RAM and HD
and everything else but it's still not coming up. It lights up the power
light and the fans spin, but there's no startup chime, no HD whir, no caps
lock wink or anything that says "I'm alive!"

So I take it down to the Austin Apple Store at Barton Creek Mall to drop it
off. It's only a couple of months old but old enough that I'm cool with
repair instead of replace.

I get down there and say, "I need to drop this one off for repair. It's
won't come up." to which I'm met with "Do you have an appointment?"

Sigh.

Could someone please tell me what nimrod corporate weasel came up with that
system?

At first I thought it was cute. It was like they were trying to make
computer repair seem like a shi-shi experience. Now it's gotten out of hand.
Today the system is so NOT cute that I very nearly made a very loud scene in
the middle of the Apple Store about it. The only thing that kept me from
going off was the fact that before things reached "absurd," I'd already put
in my name and email address to see when the next available reservation slot
was open. If I could have gotten out of there anonymously I would have made
a speech to the masses.

The funny thing was that there were so many store employees in the room that
the floor manager had just instructed the sales kiddies to spread out evenly
so they could be more effective at standing there with nobody asking them
any questions. That was just before I engaged him with a rousing game of
"Take it!" "No" "Take it!" "No."

I told him that I just wanted to leave the computer. "It's dead.
[troubleshooting play by play] So there's nothing to diagnose. I just want
to drop it off and get a warranty repair going."

"The geniuses are the only ones who can check in the computer for repair."

That's when my blood hit about 212°F (That's 100°C for you people with your
fancy metrics.)

"So let me get this straight. I have to come back in FOUR HOURS just to drop
this computer off for repair?"

"Yes sir. The computer has to be entered into the system and that has to be
done by one of the people at the bar."

"NONE of all these people standing around can type the numbers into the
system for a broken computer?! You're telling me that you, the MANAGER,
can't just put it in?"

"No, it has to be the Geniuses."

"So I can't just drop this off and you'll fix it later."

He went off on some justification about how they found that this system
worked better because somehow having a "genius" do data entry prevented
Apple from losing systems so some such crap.

I said that I don't want to talk to a genius. I don't want to wait for 4
hours. I don't want to waste my time going through all this BS. I just
wanted to drop off the computer.

He actually said something along the lines of "This is the way it works
everywhere. Where can you just walk into a store and drop off a computer?"

My friend and I listed off several choices off the top of our heads which
seemed to genuinely surprise this guy.

After pushing a bit more the guy started getting cute and telling me that I
was welcome to leave the computer sitting by the bar and leave but anybody
could just walk off with it and they wouldn't be held responsible for
it...and I'd still have to come back in 4 hours to fill out the paperwork.

What the hell is wrong with Apple support these days? There's no reason for
this sort of thing to be going down. I can understand where it could be good
for dealing with the riff raff just trying to set up their email or learn
how to make their iPod reset, but to lump all of it together is absurd.
Apple needs to have a fast track drop off where you can just leave your
contact info and leave the computer and they can get to it when they get to
it. I don't need a hand job from a "Genius" just to drop off a computer. All
you need is a high school drop-out with a computer who can read and maybe
operate a barcode scanner. Actually, the literacy bit is probably optional.

Oh, and don't get me started on the ProCare that they brought up more than
once. If there's nobody to help your clients then there's nobody to help
your clients. Are you saying that if I had a card, a space would suddenly
open up?

So after getting all pissed off and feeling like I'd just been bounced from
some trendy night club, I went to CompUSA, an authorized Apple service
center, and dropped off the computer. I walked straight up to the counter,
waited as the one guy ahead of me was showing the tech his problem for a
couple of minutes, and then the tech said "Let me get someone for you." and
he called for backup. Another tech came out and took my info and then handed
me some paper work and I left. How screwed up is the world when **COMPUSA**,
the company with possibly the worst Mac track record in history, can just
take in a broken computer and send me on my way without a reservation?

A part of me would love to just find someone to make a reservation bot that
could go in and fill all their time slots every day with randomly generated
names and phone numbers. The reservation system needs to be either fixed or
destroyed.

--
Sam Crutsinger
Media Kingpin, TackyShirt
http://www.tackyshirt.com/
Training and Fun are NOT mutually exclusive

Ditto. Sam is right. Apple needs to have a look at their repair program inside the Apple Stores and fix it. The retail angle might be working for them in terms of sales, but in terms of SERVICE, it is just plain awful if this is par for the course. Technical Support is a channel into repair, but not ALL repair requires a “Genius” and an appointment. If CompUSA can figure it out, Apple should too.

Ironically, I used to have all service work (except for the specific PowerBook 5300 issue mentioned earlier) on my Apple gear done by a local reseller (Westwind Computing) who unfortunately went out of business last year. The reason for their demise? Apple going into retail of course. I could have walked in, dropped it off, had it fixed within days, and picked it up without delay. Their owner might have even taken me to lunch.

I don’t expect a lunch from the Apple Store, but I would hope that they would at least have their feces amalgamated.