MacHeist and the Long-Awaited Dream Bundle

FOR the next couple of days, MacHeist is giving away $154 in software for free as part of its "nanoBundle" promotion. All you have to do is establish a user account.

Before the sign-up process is complete, a pop-up appears to ask whether or not you'd be willing to pay for the six apps on offer and, if so, how much. As I already own the one application I'd be interested in, I responded that, no, I still wouldn't pay for them. Unfortunately, I wasn't given any space on the form to explain why that answer didn't make me a dirty cheapskate.

Since no one asked, I thought I'd slap together a dream bundle, the sort of thing I'd like to see in the future and would buy at the usual bundle-type discount without a moment's hesitation. Some of these (the ones above the divide) are apps I already own and find to be utterly indispensable. The others I have used in the past and/or would really, really like to own, though I have yet to spot them at a reasonable price. Keep in mind, too, that there are excellent apps like Little Snitch and LaunchBar; or MailTags and Mail Act-on; or Twitterific, CandyBar, and Transmit, that are created by the same developer. As much as I would like to see them all in the same bundle, I've tried to avoid double developer entries.

1Password

Fetch / Transmit

The Hit List

iBank

LaunchBar

MailTags

Parallels / VMware Fusion

----------------------

Bento

BusyCal

DiskWarrior

iRatchet (aka MacFreelance)

MacJournal

Stationery Pack

Toast

Tweetie (registered version)

Unison (given Fetch and not Transmit above)

Yep

No, no games. And no word processors. And no image editors. That breaks with the usual bundle assortment, I know, but once you're the proud owner of — to pull from the latter category by way of example — Graphic Converter, Pixelmator, and Acorn, all from different bundles, it actually dampens the appeal of new bundles that include them. Yet another 1Password license, on the other hand, is something that I can easily gift to anyone who owns a Mac.

What would you like to see? What would the above bundle be worth to you? Is there a bundle logic that I'm not quite following? And is anyone from MacHeist even listening?

A Tour of Hamburg's Burchardkai

ONE of Hamburg's most renowned and distinctive features is its port. On most days you can see immense container ships cautiously navigating the Elbe, often with the help of a tugboat that seems diminutive in comparison, and when they dock the giant gantry cranes swing into action. Even the largest ships can be fully divested of their cargo, as infinite as the occupants of a clown car, in a matter of hours. The port itself rarely sleeps. It's a 24-hour operation with only a handful of holidays per year.

Recently the teaching company I work for began providing English training to select groups of the longshoremen who work along the port. Although going into the lessons I had no idea what form and direction the actual classes might take, the participants have so far shown a surprisingly good command of English as well as an eagerness to make the courses worth their while. Maybe that's why, having sensed that I'd only culled from books the technical English that I was passing on to them, they invited me to what turned out to be a very hands-on tour of the famous Burchardkai on the southern shore of the Elbe.

It was a cold, foggy evening punctuated by rain showers, and my self-appointed guides emphasized that winter work under similar conditions could be brutal, since they had to make mechanical repairs without gloves to retain a modicum of dexterity when dealing with small parts on the gusty, frozen catwalks, and that the work was much better in the summer, even though the temperature in the cranes' electrical rooms can reach 50°C/120°F on the hottest days. We sped across the HHLA complex in an orange van that wore a spinning warning light: first to see a ship being offloaded, then among the stored containers where the long-legged van carriers slipped in and out like dystopian devices out of Blade Runner, then on to a row of unoccupied gantry cranes.

The cramped, slow-moving elevator took us up to a height of around 50 meters (164 feet), and we disembarked into the cabin, which offered a clear view — straight down — of the spreader (the extendable grip that lowers and hoists the containers) dangling above the river. After the pros made a few test runs to clear the water from the cabin's path along the crane's arm, I was put in the captain's chair and invited to drive the thing myself. Which I did. With great care and deliberation. In a way, the most unsettling thing was the realization that these countless tons of metal and cable could be controlled with virtually the same equipment I once used to play Kung-Fu Master on my Commodore 128.

I wasn't too worried about accelerating so quickly that we went rocketing off the arm and into the Elbe (there are multiple buffers to prevent such a thing, and besides, I made extra sure that they were really, really sure it couldn't happen), but I did wince at the recurring thought that I might raise or lower the spreader too quickly, resulting in whatever insane amount of damage that might cause. For the longshoremen, working at that height and with that massive bulk of equipment was as natural as breathing; they were completely at home in a world where everything is of grossly exaggerated proportions: weight, size, temperature, height.

The last leg of the tour took us to the workshop, where we warmed up and saw some of these Brobdingnagian objects divorced from their equally gigantic surroundings. The spreaders, for example, appeared slightly less imposing on their repair pallets. That still didn't completely alleviate the feeling that I was a dwarf lost on the set of an epic sci-fi movie.

Although they still might not convey the true (or apparent) scale of things, my Flickr page has some photos in addition to the ones shown in this post.

The 7 is for "7 Years too Late"

A GREAT piece on Microsoft's slide into irrelevance by Fake Steve Jobs, the essence of which is this battery of rhetorical questions:

How did all these billions of dollars slip through Ballmer's fingers? How did Microsoft find itself a leader in nothing and playing catch-up on every front -- in MP3 players, on the cloud, in search. How did Amazon roll out S3 and not Microsoft? How did Google control the search market? How did Apple take over online music retailing and MP3 hardware? How did Microsoft let that market for smartphones get away from them? How is it that everything about Microsoft's business is backward looking?

Sure, Windows 7 is coming out soon. [Cue musical fanfare and cut to vox pops.] After eight years (almost to the day), that'll finally bring Windows users to a level that kinda sorts approaches what's already been available on OS X for quite some time. And then in another two years, as their OS development cycle brings another system upgrade, Apple will once again extend its lead even further. When it comes to checking my calendar for key technology-related dates, the release of Ubuntu's "Karmic Koala" on October 29 holds much more excitement. Windows 7 is merely Microsoft's attempt to recover after fumbling Vista; Ubuntu, however, is making Linux into a viable OS alternative for the mainstream user.

It's also worth reading this New York Times profile, which, as FSJ points out in a follow-up post, dances the dance of feigned deference while trying to get a simple message across: that Microsoft is a lumbering, outdated behemoth.

Calling on the Internet to Do What It Does Best

MY ELDEST daughter is now at the age where she points to everything, even things she recognizes, or even if it happens to be a vague object off in the distance that only she can see, and asks, "What's that? What's that called?"

She's posed this line of questioning several times with regards to a particular bush that we regularly pass on the way to the park. With both of us unable to give her a satisfactory answer, she's taken it upon herself to name it "yellow fruits."

So, with the aid of the above photos, I'm calling on the collective power of the Internet to help identify this bush, which in late summer began to produce yellow, sometimes orangey, speckled apple-sized fruits, grows about waist-high at its peak (though it appears to have been pruned, as it forms a decorative perimeter to a grassy lot), and is fairly unremarkable as far as its green, rounded, slightly ridged leaves are concerned.

Doing this the usual way, that is, by Googling for "yellow apple-sized fruit" turns up a lot of searches about yellow apples, but otherwise hasn't been very helpful so far. I'm hoping the crowdsourcing/social media method turns up some results.

Please leave any and all useful suggestions in the comments, and thanks in advance.

[UPDATE: We think we may have a winner: the Japanese Quince, aka Chaenomeles.]

Like Punching Pillows Underwater

WELL, color me impressed. I'm left reeling by a combination of the power of social media (particularly since I've been guilty of calling Twitter's utility into question) and the fact that someone from Creative actively sought me out to rectify things.

Less than an hour ago, as California was just rubbing the sleep from its eyes and my "Simple Solutions to Creative Problems" blog post detailing my customer service saga had been live for under twelve hours, Creative's social media rep contacted me via IM. The conversation started like this:

Hi there, are you online? This is Tawnee from Creative.

I just caught wind of your blog, I'm so sorry to hear about your experience. I was exhausted just reading what all you had to go through

I'm thankful you wrote the blog though, as it gives me a better insight to what our support process is like. I run social media here at Creative-- so luckily, you were able to find help through this outlet.

And then she offered me a superior set of Creative speakers as a means of compensation and replacement.

This level of concern and generosity was wholly unexpected, and, quite frankly, has completely changed my disposition towards the company. Amazing how a gesture like that works. Yesterday evening I'd sworn off anything with the Creative logo; this evening they're at the top of brands I'd consider again when making this sort of purchase in the future. Yes, you could rain on the parade by arguing that their overture was nothing more than a cynical attempt to make a public restitution for a public problem, but that's almost beside the point. I don't think any company truly delights in appeasing unhappy customers. The important thing is that I don't feel that I've wasted money and time, and I genuinely feel like I was listened to, that someone heard my frustration and dissatisfaction and took them seriously.

The most maddening, demoralizing part of any customer service runaround is that you're left feeling like you have no voice, no efficacy, no leverage other than your own sense of indignation. It's like you're punching pillows underwater. Thanks to Tawnee, I don't feel that way now towards Creative. I'm no longer a faceless consumer to them; someone there knows my name. And raising every consumer out of that hopeless anonymity ought to be the incontrovertible aim of all customer service.

Simple Solutions to Creative Problems

MY RUN-ins with awful customer service are nothing new.

But they seem to be happening with increasing frequency of late; one such recent off-putting experience was with Creative.

It goes like this. About six months ago I bought a set of Creative I-Trigue 3000 PC speakers. I'd spotted them on the desk of a friend. They had a nice design, good sound, and were reasonably priced. Not a bad trifecta.

So I ordered a set from Amazon. The first unit arrived and didn't produce sound from the right channel. My first thought, as it ought to be, was that I'd incorrectly set up a system that by all accounts should be very easy to set up. I carefully re-plugged in all the wires, then did it again. Then I went online to see if, for some reason, my iMac wasn't capable of playing 5.1-channel sound, or if something needed to be adjusted in System Preferences. In the end I realized that the speakers themselves were defective and I got in touch with Creative.

Two days later, I finally got an e-mail response: Take it up with the retail outlet.

Amazon, despite some of their more glaring screw-ups, is a company that does understand the importance of customer service — no matter what you've bought, no matter which Amazon you go to (.de, .com., .ca, .co.uk, and so on). As soon as I lodged the complaint, they offered printable mailing labels with which to send the product back (at their expense), and they immediately sent out a replacement unit. That replacement promptly arrived within 48 hours.

The replacement system was and is not perfect. When I adjust the volume with the desktop knob, the sound fluctuates between VERY LOUD and then very soft AND THEN LOUD AGAIN before finally settling somewhere in my desired region. But it was tolerable, and I was beginning to suspect that tolerable was the best I was going to get from a Creative product.

No knob jokes here, folks. Move along.

After a few weeks had passed, we realized that we were going to be moving back to the States. And, of course, I thought it would be nice to take my new, tolerable PC speakers with me. But Creative, unlike almost every other electronics manufacturer on the planet, had skimped on their cinder block of a power supply. It wasn't dual voltage auto-switching; it was limited to 240V, and therefore only good in Europe.

Internet searches revealed that there was a 120V power supply for the US version of the I-Trigue 3000, so I sent this e-mail to Creative USA in early June:

Dear Creative, I would like to purchase a Creative 12V/2.9A power supply for use in the US (120V). I believe the part number is MAG120290UA4. I'm currently using this Creative speaker system in Europe and the power supply (part number MAG120290TH4) is only for 240V outlets. When I move to the States in late 2009, I'd rather not have to purchase a whole new PC speaker system. Can you please tell me how best to go about this? Thanks in advance for your help.

And I received this reply:

Thank you for contacting Creative Labs. You may order a new 12V 2.9 A power adapter for $11.99, plus shipping and sales tax by calling us at 1-800-998-1000. Someone is available to assist you Monday - Friday, 9am to 6pm central time.

Best Regards,
Flaxn (15745)

Simple and efficient, no? All I had to do was call a toll-free number and pay a nominal price to have working speakers in the US. Thanks, Flaxn (15745)!

As I was preoccupied with the process of actually buying the house we'd be moving to, I put off calling for the time being. In September, though, I was ready to order and called the 800 number.

That phone number, however, was no longer a proper customer service line. It simply redirected me to the Web. Here is the actual message, which loops indefinitely, in its entirety:

Hello, and thank you for calling Creative Labs. For product information, technical assistance, or to place an order, please visit us on the Web at www.creative.com. That's www.creative.com.

In less than ninety days, the company had decided to shift every aspect of its customer service to the Internet. That might not have been such a bad thing if I weren't ordering an out-of-the-ordinary part. But for something like sourcing a replacement power supply, their website is absolutely useless.

So I Googled. I trudged through web page after web page. And I finally came across a Creative technical support number that led me to a real, live human being. The customer service rep on the other end, after hearing a story that was now growing longer and more irritatingly convoluted, told me that he couldn't help me and that Creative USA was now handling all its orders through Amazon.

That's right. The guy at Creative technical support told me to take up a manufacturer-specific problem with Amazon. And to indicate that he was indeed conclusively passing the buck and sending me on my way, he gave me the generic 1-800 customer support number for Amazon. How I longed for the polite, informative helpfulness of Flaxn (15745).

Thus began a continued hunt for this cursed power supply and series of e-mail exchanges with a rotating cast of customer support reps: Zhao Yu, Xu Xin, Xiao Li, although not necessarily in that order. I was forced to repeatedly restate my business before, in response to the exasperated e-mail that follows, I got something that indicated a human mind had actually taken the fifteen seconds necessary to process and comprehend my query:

Dear Xiao, Xiu, and any other customer service rep I will be passed on to,

I am well aware that this item is not available for sale in your US store or through your authorized retailers. Last night I spent more than two hours on the Web and the telephone trying to locate it through one of Creative's formal sales channels.

What I was hoping was that you might find a spare MAG120290UA4 power supply in one of your warehouses (surely there has to be an extra lying around somewhere?) and then sell it to me or, as a gesture of goodwill, ship it to me if it is no longer officially for sale.

The hoops I've had to jump through so far just to get a straight, human, personal answer to this inquiry have left me with a very negative feeling toward Creative, and at the moment I'm not terribly inclined to buy another Creative product in the future.

Please let me know if you can locate a MAG120290UA4 power supply for purchase or as a complimentary replacement.

The final, definitive response had this to say:

With regards to your enquiry, I am very sorry but unfortunately, we do not have replacement parts for the power adapter of the Speaker System. However, if your product is still within warranty, you can send it in for RMA, If your product is already out of warranty, I am afraid that you will not be able to purchase the replacement parts. I apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Which, I have to be honest, still doesn't make a lot of sense. There are power supplies in stock for official RMAs but not for purchase separately? And is the hassle and expense of me sending back a tolerable speaker system as an RMA really better than the alternative, that is, just mailing me the power supply directly?

At the end of every e-mail response from Creative was the text: "To provide feedback on your 'Creative Experience' please click on the following link." Believe me, I tried to provide feedback as many times as I was given the opportunity. But the link, wouldn't you know, was inaccessible for the entire duration of our correspondence. Now, ten days later, I've noticed that it's working again.

This farce gets an extension of sorts with a steam-venting tweet of mine from yesterday, which prompted the following reply from @CreativeLabs:

@nostartnoend I'm sorry you feel that way about us. Is there anything I can do to help?

To which my own response is: Yes, Creative, there is. On a personal level, find some way to get me a 120V power adapter for my I-Trigue 3000. (I'm still willing to pay the twelve bucks for it, and I'll continue to quietly put up with the fact that the volume knob is dodgy.) On a more general level, rethink your approach to customer service. Your first commitment should be to top-quality products, so that customers don't end up with multiple defective units. And your second commitment, almost on a par with the first in terms of importance, should be to provide first-rate support when those products don't work as expected.

The more barriers you erect between Creative and its customers, the more you try to replace considered responses with blanket autoreplies, the more responsibility you slough off to third parties like Amazon, the more you will simply piss people off. The sour experience will drive them away from Creative, and it will negatively influence potential customers as well. This is not rocket science, and yet it seems like the first cost-cutting measures most companies try to implement, like hacking away at their customer service infrastructure, are the ones that are clearly the most counterproductive.

To put that all in some kind of nutshell: deferential, face-saving replies on Twitter are simply no substitute for Flaxn (15745).

[UPDATE: When you're done reading this, please refer to my follow-up post to see how the situation was ultimately resolved.]

Young Republicans

"[T]HE modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old."

I'm surprised that it took Paul Krugman, normally a pretty astute observer of this sort of thing, so long to come to that conclusion. But at least someone besides the Daily Kos is drawing attention to the hypocrisy of this particularly vile strain of Republican thought and behavior. Patriotism, as Johnson's oft-quoted saying has it, is indeed the last refuge of the scoundrel, though one might want to make a further pedantic distinction between patriotism and nationalism; and this juvenile glee over Chicago's thwarted 2016 Olympic bid proves that love of country is not quite so close to the heart of Republican sentiment as they might like us to think. Their complaints of liberals who ambush and then duck for cover behind political correctness (and here I would say, no, President Carter, racism was not behind Joe Wilson's outburst; it was crass, misguided populism) will lack much substance until "I love America" stops being bandied about as though it were a Get Out of Jail Free card.