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I don’t often choose to single out companies for bad behavior around here, but when I do, they’ve usually managed to screw up to a point where there’s no hope of redemption. Congratulations, Furniture Row (also known as Sofa Mart, Oak Express, Bedroom Expressions, Denver Mattress Co., and Big Sur Waterbeds), you’re on The List.

A few weeks ago, I stopped in their store in Draper (across the street from Ikea) on my drive home to pick up a waterbed fill kit. This is kind of a hard to find item as waterbeds are about as popular as disco balls these days. (But ask anyone who slept on ours and they’ll tell you how awesome it is.) Finding one locally was a score, or so I thought.

The kit itself was about $17, not a hugely extravagant purchase, but a bit inflated by the chemicals included to treat the bed and keep it in tip-top shape. I pulled out my Mastercard to pay and they asked to say ID. As part of my long-standing policy of enforcing my cardholder rights per the merchant agreement, I declined. Of course, they dug in and said they couldn’t accept it. While they attempted to reach the manager, I tried calling both Mastercard and my issuing bank, but being 4:30PM, everyone who could do anything was gone. I left without getting the kit having spent 45 minutes just trying to get them to take my card.

When I got home, I immediately filed a complaint with Mastercard and with Furniture Row. Neither of them sent a response. Well, until today. In the mail, Furniture Row was kind enough to send an ad for their Veterans Day sale. That’s right: instead of responding to my complaint that they were in direct violation of the Mastercard merchant agreement (repeated violations of which can result in a suspension of your merchant account), they instead took my complaint information and added it to their marketing database. What the crap is that?!

Needless to say, I will never patronize a Furniture Row business again, and I would encourage all of you to avoid it as well. Disregarding the merchant agreement, ignoring my complaint, and having the gall to try selling me stuff based on it? Three strikes, you’re out.

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Rants on November 7th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Dear people who keep on trying to put science and religion at odds with each other at every opportunity,

Stop.

Sincerely,

Religious people who think science is pretty darn awesome and don’t intend to change their minds anytime soon.

PS I’m a member of a church where the second in charge has a bachelor’s degree in physics in addition to his PhD in business administration. They don’t hand those things out in Cracker Jack boxes, you know.

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Church, Tender Lumplings on October 24th, 2011 | No Comments »

I’m a fairly “public” person. I post a lot of things in the public view on teh Interwebs and harbor little expectation of privacy when I do so. I’m also a bit selective as to what I share as a way to help reduce the noise I create for others, not necessarily because of any desire for privacy. I assume that anyone who wants the “firehose” will follow my shares on Google Reader and my posts on Twitter, thus capturing almost all of my public social activity. I do, however, have a problem with forced sharing.

This is the direction Facebook is going in, to force you to “share” anything you do on other sites as a condition of using them as an identity provider. Look at what they’ve been doing with Yahoo News and Spotify and you’ll see what I mean. I’m not okay with this and you shouldn’t be either. I don’t particularly care that a lot of it may be public (it doesn’t matter to me much though it may matter to you immensely); I care that it creates even more noise in a redesigned interface that’s already too noisy and gives you inadequate and confusing controls for controlling that noise. Go look at the ticker. Facebook made an assumption with the redesign that we care about everything our “friends” do. The sad truth is that we don’t.

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Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Geek on September 25th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

One of the biggest problems with all social media problems is noise control. You will inevitably end up with a lot of content that just doesn’t appeal to you at all. Despite the various ways that platforms attempt to address it, none of them manage to really figure it out.

Inevitably, the problem is that you have to categorize people rather than the content they produce. Facebook’s Lists feature requires you to push people into one category, making no distinction between the pictures of their kids and the celebrity gossip they post. Google+ has the same problem; you can put people into several Circles, but it just means their content shows up in multiple places. Unsurprisingly, Twitter creates the same problem with Lists. Some clients can apply per-column filters, but they aren’t persistent.

A similar problem shows up when you publish content. Both Facebook and Google+ make the assumption that you want to publish content to specific people. While this can often be a good option (especially if you don’t want your co-workers seeing that you went to that ball game), what about when you just want to give people the option to partake of your various types of content? Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense for the people you know to self-select the content you categorize?

We already have a system that does this: blogs. WordPress lets you tag and categorize all of your content. A subscriber can then pick a category- or tag-specific feed to get just that content, or they can take the whole shebang from the main feed. Why can’t we get a similar system from social networks? Shouldn’t we be able to keep functionality that’s been around for years? It would certainly help cut down significantly on noise, decrease user fatigue, and increase user participation. Right now, I have to guess if someone wants to see content of a specific type while in the process excluding everyone else from acting on it.

The rumor mill says that Google+ is working on this right now. I sure hope so. If they can’t find a good way for us to control noise from both ends, we’ll be right back to FarmWars crapola.

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Geek on July 26th, 2011 | 2 Comments »

It’s been about two weeks since Google unleashed its latest effort to “get” social networking and I must say that I’m very impressed. After such huge duds like Orkut, Buzz, and Wave, I was beginning to think that The Big G didn’t quite understand how to do the whole collaboration and sharing thing. Google+, however, seems to really understand how to make the tools we want and correct some of Facebook’s larger shortcomings. I’ll warn you now that this is going to be part review, part tutorial and will get really lengthy.

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Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Geek on July 13th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

When I first noticed Empire Avenue, I derisively dismissed it as “Farmville for the Twitter crowd”. It sounded like just another game designed to waste hours of time to meaninglessly raise arbitrary numbers. I had already witnessed (and experienced) the same thing from the various Zynga games that clutter Facebook, many of which were direct clones of each other with a new skin slapped on top. The real standouts in social gaming, like Travian, are few and far between.

About a month ago, I started using it on the recommendation of Phil Windley. He pointed out that it operates as somewhat of a reputation system. The idea behind it is that each person or company that joins it becomes a stock you can buy or sell, complete with daily dividends based on activity. By getting people to buy your virtual stock, they are, in effect, vouching for you as an online presence.

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Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Blogging, Geek on June 25th, 2011 | No Comments »

My previous job had a rather lax dress code. I showed up every day in jeans and a collared shirt, but I could have just as well been dressed to go to the park. I was kind of done with it towards the end, but I had already set the expectation that this was how I dressed at work. Once you’ve set that expectation, changing is near-impossible. You either very sneakily start upping your standards over the course of weeks, or you do it all at once.

Well, this new job gave me the opportunity to start fresh. Yeah, I could continue with jeans and casual shirts if I wanted to and blend right in, but this was a chance to bring an A game. Now I’m sporting suit pants and a button-down shirt every day, maybe occasionally mixed up with khakis or something similar. And I feel great.

So why do it? First off, I think it immediately sets the tone. By dressing well, I’m sending a message that I’m taking this job seriously to both co-workers and superiors. Second, it means that I’m going to feel and act more confident. This is critical since I’m learning a new product and new processes with the expectation to be ready to go quickly. Finally, it influences my behavior and makes me act the part. By dressing smartly, I feel like I’ll act much more calmly and professionally.

So what do you think? Are you dying for your inner “Sharp-Dressed Man” to pop on out? What keeps you from doing so?

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Life, Work on June 15th, 2011 | 4 Comments »

Every time a website wants me to register a new account, I reflexively tense up and feel my blood pressure rising. Sure, it’s inconvenient, but that’s not why I do it. I do it because using your own registration system as the only option is abysmal security. Here’s why.

The first problem I have is that now I have a new login to manage. Good security dictates that you should use unique and complex passwords for each account you have, and preferably variable usernames. This sounds like a great idea, but when you have to register for several dozen different sites, that quickly becomes impractical. While you could use a password manager like KeePass or LastPass, this often chains down your passwords to a single PC or a thumbdrive, neither of which is convenient. The reality is that you’ll have a few passwords that you’ll rotate out periodically.

The second problem is that you now have to trust the site you’re registering on with managing proper security. Preventing intrusions is a tough sell even for major sites, much less smaller ones. If the site you just registered on gets compromised, your login details could be exposed and if you’ve used them on another site, those get compromised as well. Hashed passwords are no protection either; using a relatively cheap video card, even complex passwords can be cracked in a matter of minutes. Your last hope is that the website operator was smart enough to salt their hashes before storing them, and that the salt wasn’t compromised either.

The final problem I have is that it is very, very easy to integrate third-party registration and authentication solutions into your website. Twitter, Facebook, and Google all make it very easy to use OAuth, a solution that does not require that you store user credentials and provides most of the information you need for registration processes. Heck, even Yahoo and LinkedIn use OAuth if you’re so inclined. Between all of those providers, the odds are good that almost all of your users will have and be willing to use at least one of them to sign up. Sure, keep an in-house registration system as a fallback, but do not make it your primary account system. The ease of using a third-party system means there is no excuse for not doing so.

All of this is in addition to the obvious convenience factor of using an existing account. Please, for the love, allow people to use their existing accounts. Users will thank you later.

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Geek, Rants on June 9th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Back in April, I found myself in the ranks of the unemployed. The reasons and causes are, in hindsight, not all that important, but I’ve learned a lot of very valuable lessons in a very short timespan about finding a job.

• Know people. Half of the interviews I went on were due to personal referrals. The other half consisted of dumb luck from sending my resume out to literally a hundred different employers. The response rate from sending in your resume blind is about the same as you’d expect from a targeted direct mail campaign. (In other words, not too good.) So how do you meet and know these people? I did it from blogging and using social media (Twitter and Facebook). I’ve also started participating in a few professional networking and user groups as a way to expand my social circle. It’s 50% what you know and 50% who you know.
• Requirements aren’t set in stone. You’ll often see job openings with a list of requirements much longer than what you likely know. Don’t sweat that. If you can meet most of those requirements and prove your ability to pick up the others, you’ll probably do just fine. Especially in technical fields, nobody can know everything.
• Be persistent. Don’t just go on an interview and leave it at that. Make follow-up calls or emails to see if any decisions have been made. Most of the time, it’s going to be a “we went with another candidate” response, but you won’t know until you ask. I didn’t get an offer back until almost two months after one of the interviews I went on, and part of that was rattling the cage to see what was going on.
• Hustle. I had my resume up to date and had followed up on a half-dozen job leads by the end of the day I had been let go. In under a week, I’d been on several job interviews. Why? Because I didn’t give myself the opportunity to mope around. I was constantly hitting up people I know for leads, going to networking groups, going on interviews, and sending out resumes. Jobs belong to those who hustle and look for a  job with a sense of purpose.
• Don’t be in a job you don’t like. I hadn’t been happy at my last job for a while because I felt like I had hit a professional dead end. The career path that was clear when I was hired on became much more murky within just a few years, and promoting from within became an increasingly rare thing. In hindsight, I should have started looking in earnest a few years earlier instead of taking the “lucky I have a job” approach.
• There are a lot of resources you aren’t using. Sure, you think to hit up Craigslist and Monster when you go job-hunting. But did you think to check in with the state Department of Workforce Services? How about seeing what your church has to offer? (The LDS church has an AWESOME employment service.) Also don’t forget to find out who the major employers are in your area and go to each of them directly, including state and local government. If benefits aren’t a big deal for you, taking on short-term contract work might play out nicely for you.

I feel a lot smarter about job hunting now that  I was forced to do it. Lifetime employment is largely a thing of the past, so be prepared now for when the inevitable strikes.

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Work on June 2nd, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Ever since we had Liam, we’ve had a vexing problem on our hands: our dogs. As soon as he came around, our ability to pay attention to them dropped pretty significantly. A new baby is a lot of work, especially one that’s required multiple surgeries and has been a little “off” in many developmental phases. Unfortunately, this has created a bit of a problem for us: our dogs don’t seem to like anyone anymore.

My theory is that they know that Liam is why we couldn’t pay as much attention to them and they resent him for it. Unfortunately, this makes them act out to try and get attention… which makes us want to pay less attention to them, repeat until they are both thoroughly annoying. Bad habits they’d never had before, like raiding the garbage and stealing food, are so bad that we leave them in the backyard most of the time. It’s kind of gotten to a point where they’re like jealous siblings.

It certainly wasn’t helped by Shauna being in school. I couldn’t take the dogs and the kid to the dog park at the same time, and nights when Shauna’s home we’ve lacked the motivation to do more than relax after a long week of both work and school (not to mention that was some of the little time we had together). She’ll be done in two days (woohoo!), but even with trips to the dog park, I don’t know if it’ll get better.

Have any of you with kids after dogs had this problem? What’d you do to fix it? We’ve really at our wits end with these boogers.

Written by: Jesse | Filed under: Annabelle, Church, Liam, Life, School on May 17th, 2011 | 1 Comment »