Author Archives: Ron Bieber

Customer Self Service

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As a customer, I like to be in control.

Our family goes out to eat at least once a week (on weekends, mostly). Many times once we are seated we spend quite a bit of time waiting for our initial drink order to be taken, then for our actual order to be taken, then for the check to be presented, and finally for our payment to be taken by our server. I know, pretty normal scenario — what is there to complain about?

Well, I’m not complaining really, just thinking. How could you enable customers to order for themselves and pay when they are ready to leave? Would putting customers more in control of the things they have to participate in anyway increase their satisfaction with the service?

I’d love to see a restaurant in which you are handed a wireless device with a card swiper as you are seated (or it could even already be at the table). The device can be used to select your drinks, appetizer, and meals which is routed to the serving staff (haven’t figured out the specifics of this one yet) who can then fill the order and bring it to you. Once you have finished your meal, the device can present the charges for you, allow you to swipe your debit and / or credit card and pay for the meal. Absolutely no waiting involved except to have the actual things you order delivered to your table.

Tom the Architect has told me that they have something like this in Vegas. I can’t wait for it to get to the mainstream. As a customer, I like the idea of being able to take care of the things I’m able to take care of without waiting on someone else to act first. I like to be in control — and I’m guessing that most people feel that way. I’m more satisfied when I feel like I’m more in control of the situation.

I think the one area that would have to be worked out is the security of the system. As we were sitting in a restaurant one day, I decided that I would enlighten my wife, Jonna, about these ideas. The first thing she hit me with was the opportunity for credit card fraud (she has the innate ability to point out flaws in the utopian ideas I come up with).

She brought the same thing up a couple of weeks ago when I was complaining about having to wait on someone to come over to the Jewel self-service checkout aisle to press a button to allow us to buy a six pack of beer. I started railing on as to why friction had to be added to the transaction, since the bank that we have the credit/debit card knows how old I am and can verify my age electronically. Jonna brought up that it would be quite easy for kids to take their parents credit cards and just go buy alcohol if age verification was done from the credit card (see, I told you she was good — I didn’t think of that).

Ok, thats a problem. What if in these situations you could get the benefits of “frictionless shopping” if you transacted with your debit card only and kept the PIN away from your kids? Then I could have my “lack of friction” and we could ensure that the kids weren’t off buying Tequila on my identity.

These are just a few things that I think about every now and again when I have to wait around for things that I know technology can solve. I love the idea that we are getting to the point where we can automate the friction out of a lot of the transactions we perform in daily life. Now and again, I’m disappointed that we haven’t removed all of the friction that we could out of the process.

As a customer, I just really like being in control.

List of Languages I have coded in …

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Tom the Architect’s latest posting details a list of languages he has coded in. I thought this would be a pretty interesting exercise, so thought I would throw one together as well:

  1. BASIC (quite a few flavors from old school CP/M up to Windows)
  2. xBase
  3. DataFlex
  4. C
  5. C++
  6. x86 Assembler (light, but still counting it)
  7. Pascal (Turbo / Quick)
  8. Unix Shell (BASH. KSH, etc)
  9. Java
  10. JavaScript (light, but I think it still counts)
  11. Perl
  12. Python
  13. PHP
  14. Ruby

You know what? That wasn’t a very interesting exercise. Thanks a lot Tom …

First Experiences in Second Life

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At Curry Castle - With T-Shirt

After all of the talk in the podcasting community around Second Life, I finally decided to take some time and take a look at it. The first thing I did when I got there was look around for Adam Curry’s place, “Curry Castle”. The thing that impressed me the most as I was walking around aimlessly was how much things have developed. So many people have built up around the castle since Adam first started talking about it. It was interesting to watch the interactions among people, from people sitting on the couch on the top of the castle, to Comic Strip Blogger periodically bombing the castle, throwing newbie me into space not able to figure out what happened.

I only spent a small amount of time in Second Life, but I have to say its pretty interesting. I did play around a little with creating clothing using some of the Photoshop templates that they provide on their site and after some fiddling finally got the nice Bieber Labs Podcast T-Shirt you see in the picture. Its not the best, but it will definitely do for now and I think its an ok start after only spending ultimately an hour in the environment. The shirt has the banner of the podcast site on the front, with the URL on the back.

Unfortunately, I decided to mess around with the clothing stuff in the “newbie public area”, something I would recommend you do not do. There is something about the phrase “Congratulations, you’ve figured out how to remove all of your clothes” directed at you in a public area thats a little disconcerting when you are trying to figure out how things work. I did finally figure out how to reclothe myself and get my cool T-shirt on though.

Overall, I think Second Life is pretty cool. It would be cooler if I actually enjoyed IM’ing type of communities, but I haven’t really been into that kind of thing for quite a while. I’m not convinced that I will be keeping the account, but it is definitely something interesting to play around with, at least temporarily. I enjoyed just walking around and checking out the things that people are building for other people to come and socialize.

Music: Dimebag is back with Rebel Meets Rebel

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Rebel Meets RebelYesterday while at the mall I found Rebel Meets Rebel, the result of a musical partnership between, David Allan Coe, the late "Dimebag" Darrell Abbot, Vinnie Paul Abbot, and Rex Brown. The album is an interesting mix of country and Pantera / DamagePlan type heavy metal music.

I have to admit that I was skeptical that I would like the album. I’m not a big country fan. However, I have to say that not only is the music great, but it is so nice to hear Dimebag play again. I’ve really enjoyed his playing since starting to listen to Pantera in late 2004 shortly after his death and I think was in one of those “new fan” modes where I just wanted to hear everything he had played. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long before I was out of new stuff.

Now, the posthumously released Rebel Meets Rebel gives Dimebag fans something to listen to. Dimebags playing is excellent on this album, and surprisingly the mix of the two genres of music works really well, so much so that I’m tempted to pickup earlier DAC recordings to see what the pre-Dime music sounded like.

Its too bad Dime is gone. Its obvious that he was starting to really branch out and experiment with different ideas. This album gives us a glimpse into what I’m sure was only a small piece of it. I think these guys were on to something.

If nothing else, you can hear Dime again. That in itself is worth the price of the CD.

Ruby on Rails – WOW

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Over the last couple of weeks I decided to re-familiarize myself with the Ruby programming language. I was first introduced to it back in 2002-2003 at OOPSLA (or was it the Software Development Conference?) when I took a full day workshop with the Pragmatic Programmers, Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt.

Back then I loved the language, but decided not to focus on it since the support in the form of libraries just weren’t there like they were for Python at the time. I wrote a few programs in Ruby, but left it to the side and focused on Python.

Well, those days are over. When I started with Ruby, I decided to take a look at Ruby on Rails as well. Over the last couple of weeks all of my spare time has been focused on learning the Ruby language and this completely awesome framework, even at the expense of regular podcasts.

First off, I’m absolutely enamoured by the language. So much so that with Rails piled onto it I couldn’t imagine programming in any other language. For quite a while I’ve hated Java and the complexity that it brings to projects. There’s just too much work involved in doing Java development anymore.

Ruby combines complete object orientation with the flexibility of a scripting language. Some of the features it has baked into it, such as iterators and blocks make life so much easier.

Now pile Rails on top of it. Rails is an elegant MVC framework written in the Ruby Language by the folks over at 37 signals. These two things combined make for the perfect programming environment for web applications.

I’m still on the steep end of the learning curve. I’ve got the Programming Ruby : The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide and Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide (The Facets of Ruby Series) constantly at my side as I pull my hair out trying to learn all of this stuff.

But the cool thing is, even with my unfamiliarity with the language I’m still productive. If that isn’t the sign of a great development environment, I don’t know what is.

I’m working diligently to become proficient in the language. Rails is a little complex and I’m still struggling to learn all of the conventions. However, I think most of my programming moving forward will be with these tools. Its just a lot easier to spend time thinking about the problems you are trying to solve and being able to express them eloquently rather than struggling with the complexity and code/compile/run process baked into Java development.

The Downside of Certification

Aside

I found this article, The Downside of Certification, over on Slashdot. Its about time that people stop looking at how many pieces of paper one has and instead on what they can actually DO. Certification programs have always bothered me because of the implication that if you have the certification you are more qualified than someone who has been doing the job for years. Glad to see people are wising up a bit.

Google Mail for Domains

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Well, its been about a week since I received notification of my ability to use the beta of Google Mail for Domains. Once again, Google has outdone themselves.

I moved the domain over to Gmail for Domains on Monday or Tuesday of last week. I had some issues with DNS populating accordingly but after about 48 hours and one (yes, only one) email to the gmail support team, I had the domain up and running on the new service.

Setting up new accounts on your domain is a breeze, thanks to the simple UI design within the control panel. It really is a lesson in simplicity, with nothing in the admin pages that doesn’t need to be there. Its really the bare minimum to get someone up and running on an account. Its kind of refreshing to have something as large as an email domain to administer to have such a minimalistic, common sense user interface. I was quite impressed.

Each account on the domain has a standard 2G limit on space. According to the documentation, these accounts do not grow when you hit your limit. Quite frankly, even with the volume of email I get from mailing lists and the like, I’ve never hit my limit on my normal gmail account anyway, so I’m not too worried about it. Unlike me, most of my family keeps their inboxes pretty clean. I’m a pack rat and keep everything.

This is a nice service and I think I’ll stick with it. Its probably the best email system and easiest admin service I have used thus far.

The Digital Life

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In November of 2004 I wrote a posting up here called “Web based email on your home network” where I mentioned some of the control issues I had around being able to manage most of the technology I used and not depending on other services in order to have things I want.

As I started thinking about this recently, I realized just how much of my digital life I have “outsourced” over the past year. When I think about it, I’ve outsourced my picture storage to Flickr, my bookmarking to del.icio.us, my contact management to LinkedIn, my email to Google Mail, and Jonna and I have recently started tracking our schedule on a shared Google Calendar. Hell, I’ve even outsourced my goal tracking to 43 Things. Even most of my entertainment is retrieved from the Net, as I haven’t listened to radio in months opting for programming found through podcasts.

The network is becoming the one area that I cannot live without, because most of the relevant things that I need to track about my life is on it now. I no longer have to search for files on my hard drive and ensure that I get that notepad text file with all of my contacts through the years. Its on the net. I no longer have to worry about backing up my digital photos, because thats all taken care of for me by Flickr.

My how the times have changed since late 2004. I’ve actually moved away from the control issues that I used to have about having to run and maintain everything I use here in the Labs. As a matter of fact, I am now dependent on the whole network in order to know whats going on with my life.

Just a brief observation. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit lately.