Mr. Beer. That name again is Mr. Beer I bit on the Mr. Beer home-brewing kit last woot-off. Much to my dismay, the kit arrived in a giant brown cardboard box, with a sizable puncture would in the side. Opening it verified the damage: The brewing container was smashed inward, and the plastic was too thick to pop back into shape. I tried contacting FedEx, as the damage was definitely done in shipping. As it turns out, after creating an account with FedEx | submitting a claim ticket | waiting | waiting, FedEx has you contact the sender when the item is shipped via “Smartpost.” Whatever that entails. Not very helpful…just a reply email sending me back at woot. I was sort of pissy, and ended up forwarding the email from Fedex to the primary woot returns email. Details are as follow:

I’m very sorry about that. We’ll get a replacement sent to you and have our crack team of commandos that make the Expendables look like babies go after them. No need to return the damaged one to us. Riley ——————- Original Message ——————- From: SWANIACHI Sent: 02/01/2012 To: RMA; RMA Woot; RMA@woot.com Subject: damaged shipment from woot (MRS), case # W-1030992-R925 Passing the buck… ———- Forwarded message ———- From: SPCustomerSupport Date: Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 7:45 AM Subject: Re: damaged shipment from woot (MRS) To: Joseph Swanson Good Morning, Thank you for your recent inquiry. We have received your request, however when packages are lost or damaged, only the party directly paying the shipping charges to FedEx SmartPost may file a claim. Please contact the Shipper with your information so they may file a claim. We apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you, FedEx SmartPost Customer Support —– Original Message —– From: Joseph Swanson Date: Tuesday, January 31, 2012 9:02 pm Subject: damaged shipment from woot To: SPCustomerSupport@fedex.com > In regards to Smartpost tracking #02927009713120839115… > > I received a package from woot.com today (1/31) that was damaged by > something en route to my front stairs, likely a forklift tine. > > I recognize that mistakes are made, accidents happen, etc., but it so > happens that the damaged item is a Mr. Beer home-brew kit. The (assumed > forklift) did quite a number on the brewing vessel in particular, and > the > plastic used is not well-suited for popping back into shape. The reduced > volume caused by the damage render the vat unable to accommodate a full > batch of beer, which is the end goal. It turns out that our baby daughter > is angrier that first assumed…half batches may not cut it. > > Kind regards, > > J. Swanson > Awesome support, Woot. FedEx should take note. FedEx should also teach their forklift drivers how to drive forklifts, but that is another topic entirely. You will continue to receive my business…well done. I owe you a (Mr.) beer.

Consider the following set: S = [ outsourcing, crowdsourcing, trialsourcing ] You probably have heard of the first two elements of set S. Each of the first has merit, and each has its drawbacks. Whereas one gives you a desired quality at the cost of time, the other gives you a desired timeline, at the cost of quality control. The third item, trialsourcing, bridges the gap. I stumbled across a company called vWorker that has come up with a truly novel idea. Their solution is On the job trial: crowdsourcing, trialsourcing. The principle idea at the heart of the approach a project by letting potential employees provide actual code, for both small (crowdsourcing) efforts and larger (trialsourceing) implementations. It effectively takes the guessing game out of the equations, allowing the person issuing the contract to have confidence in the quality of the contractor’s work. Hit one of the links to take a look. It is very novel.

Samsung kills it when it comes to hardware…Galaxy S 2 is high on my list, and I’m fairly certain I will end up snagging a Galaxy Tab at some point. Turns out Samsung makes one hell of a baby monitor too… Only the best for the nerd princess…

Cranky baby. Not a whole bunch of sleep. Shifted sense of humor, or some sort of tiredness induced insanity. Either I have completely blasted past any sort of touch with reality, or this is really funny… A bit of a side note. I was poking around for some new frames, started looking at some online prescription frames, and got fully side tracked. Somehow looking at basic options found me checking out [link removed], and ultimately dropping a pair of V-Day glasses on top of a sweet robot jpeg. One must admit, the frames are both completely conducive towards Valentine’s day cheer, and for robotic…oh I don’t know…something. Zenni kills it, regardless of the style. Take a quick look at the source of the image… I think they would look equally amazing on a human. Preferably a female human. Tired stupor aside, it is very amazing how far the internet has brought certain industries into the hands of the consumer. Glasses provide a terrific point. I have purchased three sets of frames from Zenni, and can say with a great deal of certainty, that my time in a brick and mortar spectacle shop are done. Have prescription, will go. Anyhow…sorry about the tired ramble post. It still cracks me up though…

Before the rugrat showed up, I managed to make some progress on my next project. I just realized that I hadn’t put together a teaser post, hence this quickie. I started thinking about how to make a better UI to control my remote control via Android project. Instead of going with a touch base, I figured I could implement control utilizing the on-board orientation sensors. This ultimately led to figuring out how to break said values out…a la this little app: I wrote a simple app that dumps the sensor values of each x, y, and z axes, for values between -90 and +90 degrees. The next step would to be to clean up the display, provide some visualizations, (graph-ish perhaps) and use the values to control something physical. No promises on the timeline, but if it gets to be too far out, I will dump this code on GitHub for general public perusal. Back to diapers…

Unboxed and rooted… …bloatwear wiped. Going to research ROMs a bit, but will likely be on CGM7.1 in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

We had a great run… …the old D2 finally met its match. Broken and bruised, the little guy is still working like a champ, bulging battery and all. New phone soon…going to have to figure out how to root Gingerbread I guess.

Zig and I have been having some heated Words with Friends battles recently. I had to snap a screenshot of this ridiculous game status… It was bullshit that Ziggy wasn’t awarded more points for playing his handle, and bullshit too that Europa wasn’t an acceptable play. We both got over it. We are pretty evenly matched…I might be ahead by two games. Sad day in Mudville when I am addicted to a Zynga game…too bad the Scrabble app for Android was borderline unusable. Zynga would kill it, score-wise. Mental note.

I stumbled upon a SOPA protest last night…I first thought Wikipedia had jumped the gun, but realized it was after midnight on the Eastern side of things. Elsewhere for some entropy info…which will show up shortly in a post. Anyhow, this morning I found some good info on the reddit blog that concisely runs through some technical details of SOPA and PROTECT IP. Take a look…it is important.

So, I’ve been doing this software thing for a while now. It is a strange, strange industry. It is becoming more apparent that every implementation of a generic service ends up falling into a similar life cycle. They all start with an idea, mash together a product, and go to market. The tricky part lies in new features, new connectivity, implementing the product on new technology as it arises, etc. That et cetera is sort of the name of the game. As the playing field changes, the product must too change. To make matters worse, things move at a quicker pace now more than ever. It is pretty shortsighted to assume your product will ever hit a true support phase. When that happens, you are likely no longer a player in your industry. The name of the game is managing your services… From time to time I check out hosting and virtualization providers on the nets. I stumbled across NCC Data, a [shitty company who bought a link] offers a product that essentially addresses my rant above. The key word is, undoubtedly, manage. Once you hit a certain level of critical mass, you must make the decision weather to support your goods in house (custom code, legacy systems, chopped and screwed…) or take on somebody to hammer out your details. NCC can handle your virtualization, support, security, and the whole other range of hosting headaches. Hit the link to take a look.