Zappos; Pre-M&A vist

During the Zappos M&A due diligence I took a tour of the offices in Henderson. Super group of folks there who really rolled out the red carpet. I found this picture from the tour. if you've been there you'll know what this is about. If not, I highly recommend that you take the tour.

Andromeda. Military Inspired Tri-rail Lamp

Andromeda, the world's first ever, military inspired tri-rail lamp. It utilizes the picatinny rail system (aka the MIL-STD-1913 rail or "tactical rail") allowing customization of the shade and leg positions. It's the latest project to which I've committed funding on Kickstarter. Check out the funding page and join in!

How much are three eggs?

If one egg is $2.50, and two eggs are $4.00, how much should 3 eggs cost. Hint: not $6.50.

It is difficult......

Upton Sinclair, the author, once said:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Emma in the New York Times

Emma made the New York times on April 2 in an article entitled Giving Women the Access Code that covers Maria Klawe, Harvey Mudd and women in engineering and computer science. The irony of course, is that Emma is attending Harvey Mudd but is wearing a Cal Lair of the Bear hoodie in the picture...

Laser Cut Mikey Jewelry Box

Quick holiday project: Mickey-themed jewelry box. Pre-made acrylic box from Tap Plastics (why make one yourself when they do it cheaper!). I cut twin Micky heads with flat bases and acrylic-welded them to the box. A simple and swift project that looks rather fine. Could be scaled up to a full-size end table (although I'd have to manufacture the box component myself as Tap don't have an off-the-shelf version that large).

(Note: Not for commercial use/sale; personal enjoyment only)

Kindle Fire - Laser Engraving

Ah - the power (literally) of an Epilog laser. I dialed down the power to 15% and set speed to 100%; didn't want to wind up cutting my Fire in interesting ways! Took about 30 seconds to raster my name into the rubberized back of the Fire. Depth is about half a millimeter (or so). Nice compliment to the Kindle logo just above it. You see the detail of the rastering in the picture below. Click on it for a enlarged version.

Destruction of Time: The Videos (Finally!)

And a slightly longer video showing hours and minutes:

Facebook Video Calling: Fail

Facebook Video Calling was announced on July 6th. It's now July 9th and all I've seen so far is the "will be available soon - Please check back later" (and I'd much prefer that Facebook notify me when its available rather than me acting as an unpaid click farmer for them....). Is this actually working for anyone????

Maker Faire

Maker Faire this weekend at the San Mateo Fairgrounds showing "The Destruction of Time". Evan and I are in the Expo Hall location 10 (North east corner of the building). Hop over to The Destruction of Time blog to see construction details. I have a few videos I'll be uploading when the show is over). What is it? An over engineered, expensive, doesn't-tell-very-good-time, clock. (HM:MM) built from ink jet printers and paper shredders.....

Chase Down Again......

Just when I thought Chase had a handle on the availability of their website they prove me wrong. Perhaps merely the act of thinking good thoughts caused the outage......

Let's decompose their message:

1. "We're working quickly to restore access" - Now, if this is a 'planned' outage for database backup or the application of patches, then tell me when that process will be complete. If it truly is an unplanned outage then I presume you're working diligently (but I don't really know what 'working quickly' means). In fact I'd rather you tell me that you don't know what he problem is, but your on-call staff have been notified, the SLA for response is 15 minutes and you'll post regular updates. That would be much more valuable;
2. "and we encourage you to log on later" - Well, duh. If I was trying to log on now and the site is unavailable then it's reasonable to expect that indeed I will be coming back. I don't need any encouragement to do that (late fees for not paying my credit card bill on time is all the 'encouragement' that I need...).;
3. "Thanks for your patience" - rather presumptuous of Chase. I don't have a choice and I'm certainly not being patient.

So Chase, here's some advice. Drop the dumb message that one of your engineers wrote when told to throw up a Gone Fishing page. In fact they would have been more successful with a simple "Gone Fishing" message as that's about as useful as the message you are currently displaying.

What's the best Gone Fishing message you've ever seen?

Eagerly Awaiting my Desktop CNC Machine

Now that I have my Egg Bot and the build is underway I decided that i really need a small, desktop CNC machine. Low and behold, Kickstarter has such a project underway: The DIY Desktop CNC Machine. I kicked in a pledge for a fully assembled machine (and yes - I will do a tear down when it arrives so I know exactly how it ticks). More of the project details and history at mydiycnc.com

Eagerly Awaiting My Egg Bot!

I first met my new best-friend-to-be at the 2010 Maker Faire in San Mateo. The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball size to that of a small grapefruit-- roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (4 - 10 cm). Super adjustable; designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally "impossible" to print on. Not just eggs but golf balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, eye balls and even things like wine glasses-- with a bit of work.

My order will be satisfied from the first production run of the kit -- I know, liable to be snafu's along the way, but that's half (actually 99%) of the fun. When it get bored with imprinting my picture on Ben Wa Balls I'll send it down to Emma at Harvey Mudd to play with.

Honey, did I put the parking brake on....?

Even More on Chase' Outages

Datacenterknowledge.com has more information about last the outage experienced by Chase.com. One of the most telling comments is "The company said its web site crashed Monday evening when a third party vendor’s database software corrupted the log-in process."Now, where I come from if your web site blows up you take responsibility for it and don't go pointing fingers at 3P's (including CDN's - think you may have a problem with 1? Then execute agreements with 3). Pointing fingers at Oracle is just bad form. Chase selected the database and operates it - one would presume that (a) they would have at least one form of redundancy, (b) they would have done much better end-to-end testing and (c) would have been able to fail-over to their standby systems much faster than 12+ hours.

Still pisses me off their their CS folks vacillate between "it was a failure" and "it was scheduled outage".

Chase Responds

With all the ups and downs recently with the Chase website I prompted the company to come clean - was the downtime scheduled or unscheduled? This is the response I received:

I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience you are experiencing trying to access our website.

Please be informed that from time to time we need to perform maintenance on our website. Since this maintenance is planned it is termed as scheduled maintenance.

Further, since your concern will require a more thorough review of your account and will require additional questions to be answered, I am unable to assist you by e-mail. Please contact us at the number listed below so that we may assist you in resolving this issue. Representatives are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If you have any further questions, please reply using the Secure Message Center.

Thank You,

Pramila Fernandes
E-Mail Customer Service Representative

Bearing in mind that I also have e-mail from Chase that says:

I am writing in response to your inquiry about not being able to see your account information online.

Please be advised that we were experiencing technical difficulties with our website. Our technicians have corrected this issue and the website is now available online. If you still face any difficulties, please call our technical department on the number mentioned below.

Chase staff members appear to be rather conflicted. What confounds the imagination is that (a) Chase has to take their site down for hours at a time to preform "scheduled maintenance" and (b) why don't they tell customers ahead of time that the site will be down so they can plan accordingly? It's not like they have our money or anything important....oh, wait....

(I also love the fact that questions about site availability require a "more thorough review of my account" - I wish I made enough money such that my billions could cause them problems. Sadly not.)

Chase.com down for > 12 hours

Going on now for at least 12 hours (point in time when I first tried the site -- but could have been much longer), Chase accounts are unavailable. They keep a rudimentary web site up so they don't get reported for being down - although to all intents and purposes they are down. Kinda rough if, like me, you signed up for their web-only account information and opted out of snail-mail communications ("to save money and be green") - looks like I'll be flipping that decison as soon as their site is back up for me to do so. Who takes as website offline for maintenance these days?

Update: August 9. Just received the following communication from Chase:

I am writing in response to your inquiry about not being
able to see your account information online.

Please be advised that we were experiencing technical
difficulties with our website. Our technicians have
corrected this issue and the website is now available
online. If you still face any difficulties, please call
our technical department on the number mentioned below.

I apologize for any trouble it may have caused to you.

If you have any further questions, please reply using the
Secure Message Center.

Thank You,

Vinay Shankar
E-mail Customer Service Representative

So Chase Customer Service says it was an unplanned outage; Chase Web-dev team say it was a planned outage. I asked them which one. I wonder if I'll even get the courtesy of a response ;-)

Emma's Graduation - Book Now on Sale!

Emma's Graduation by Colin Bodell | Make Your Own Book

I'll be doing signings at locations around the US and in the UK, Romania and Ireland in the next few months. Hoping for an appearance on Oprah too!

Beatbox Flute

Seattle native Greg Pattillio is lauded as the best beatboxing flautist - admittedly there is not that much competition (Ian Anderson excepted). I must hear him live!

Maker Fair - This Month

Look forward to seeing you at this year's Maker Fair. Evan will be demonstrating his laddervator!