plaxoed!

I know there are a lot of folks out there that have been waiting for this and today, all of their feedback has finally been answered. To get started, head over to http://www.plaxo.com/downloads/tbird

Yes, it took a while, but we wanted to do it right. Yup, it’s written in JavaScript to make sure it’s runs wherever Thunderbird runs. We also have a bunch of smarts in our syncing engine to make sure your contacts can flow between Thunderbird, Outlook, Yahoo! and any other address books we support in the future. Lastly, it’s open source under the Mozilla Public License - after all, it’s an XPI file which you can unpack and play with to your heart’s content.

Shout out to Dru, Wendy, Par, Christian, Bill and Adam for a job well done!

If you have any feedback or questions about this release, I’m the producer on the project so feel free to contact me or leave a comment. We’ll be actively listening to you guys and gals out there, let us know what you think!

between Ms. Powers and Microsoft becuase she was rejected for a job there. Yikes!

I’m not exactly sure why she chalks it up as discrimination, but at least now I know why she’s upset. We’re having a lively discussion in the comments of my last post; she’s thrown in some personal attacks on me based on my demographic and I’m not really sure what that has to do with the issue at hand, but hey, she’s entitled to free speech I suppose…

On a side note, (from a comment she left on Dare’s blog) she’s got to be pretty lucky if she’s never had a bad hire. Not a single hiring manager I know anywhere has ever made that sort of claim. If it’s true, I bet some people over in Building 19 (the MSFT recruiting building) would love to talk to her!

Anyways, I still stand behind my opinions that:

1. The playing field in the IT industry is more level than it has ever been
2. Someone who wants a job in the IT industry should be able to at least solve a rudimentary computing problem

Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t really want to work on a team with a dev who can’t code IsAnagram…

I ran across Shelley Powers’ post about women getting the shaft in the IT industry and I’d have to say I disagree with her.

First, I’m not really sure if there is discrimination against women in the IT industry; I haven’t been everywhere, so I’m not in a position to make an accurate general statement. However, I have been at IBM, Microsoft, Google, Plaxo and a few other internet startups. I didn’t see any discrimination against females at any of these places. Boy’s club? I don’t think so. Geek club? Heck yes. As a matter of fact, in my experience geek females are usually held in extremely high regards. If anything, being female and knowing your stuff is actually more powerful than being just another one of the guys.

Second, although Shelley doesn’t believe it, I know for a fact that Microsoft, Google, Plaxo and tons of other companies are trying to fill thousands of open positions. You know why they aren’t filled? Because it’s extremely hard to find qualified people, that’s why. I don’t think it’s because companies are conspiring against hiring women or minorities or whatever. If you’ve ever been at any of these places, you’d know that all of these companies would hire a fleet of albino hermaphrodites in a heartbeat if they were all rockstar coders.

On a side note, I’ve conducted quite a few technical interviews and let me tell you, 95% of the time the candidate is unacceptable for the job - and I’m talking about entry-level developer positions. Is my bar high? You bet it is. Smart companies know that a critical part of remaining competitive is to only hire smart people. Can’t code AtoI, IsAnagram, or StrStr? Guess what, you’re not getting a job. Believe it or not, 19 out of 20 interview candidates can’t do it.

Maybe the unemployment rate is so high becuase during the dot com boom, too many unqualified people joined the industry to try to get easy money and now they can’t find jobs. But now I’m just wildly speculating…

In any case, many skilled professions are very competitive - the IT industry is not alone. Try being a creative writer, or getting a job in Hollywood, or a pro athelete, or a med student, or a politician - the list goes on and on.

My feeling is this: with technology today, the playing field is as level as it has ever been. Any person regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, etc. can build the next Flickr, a better Google, or a more secure Firefox. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Stop pulling out references to what happened during/after World War 2 and start filling the history books for the 21st century.

According to blogpulse they are! Here’s the graph of my BlogPulse blog rank; clearly you can see a decline over the past month.

No big deal; blogging isn’t my day job The blogpulse tool is pretty cool though.

My new Etymotic Research ER6i headphones smell really bad. I hope this smell goes away soon… anyone else run into this?

Aside from the smell, I just switched the tri-flanges for the foam eartips and they sound even better! I haven’t even given these headphones an adequate break-in period and they are already impressing. I think these “cans” are a definite winner.

Even though I told buy.com to cancel my order and I had my credit card company refuse the charges. Apparently, they decided to ship them out yesterday (the package was postmarked 7/18) and I got them today - err technically yesterday, 7/19. Bleh, I’ll have to sort this out later I suppose…

I’ll be posting up a thorough review soon, but so far, these headphones have been unbelievable. The only problem is that when I use them at work, people have trouble getting my attention. I need a sign that says “I can’t hear you, IM me please “

I’m looking through my mail today and what do I see but a nice card sent to me from my friends at Seattle Chinese Alliance Church. I admit I haven’t been very good about keeping up with them one on one since I’ve moved down to San Francisco, but since at least one person is tech savvy, they subscribed to this blog and saw my baptism and testimony posts.

Well, well, well… it looks like the original purpose of my blog is being fulfilled. For those who’ve been reading for a while, you know that I originally started my blog to keep in touch with friends and family - a way to let them all know what was going on in my life now that I had moved to San Francisco and started working for Google.

Of course what actually happened was a media frenzy over my initial postings, I got fired, and then another media frenzy about that. Oh well, that’s life! At least I can’t say it hasn’t been a wild ride

But on a larger scale, this is what blogging is all about! Keeping connections vibrant, making new connections, sharing with the world… Hmmm actually kind of reminds me of Plaxo’s mission: keeping your strong ties (people you already know) stronger.

Thanks to my friends in Seattle! You guys should all start blogging so I can keep track of what’s going on in your lives too. Leave your blog URLs in my comments so I can add them to my blogroll

In response to my buy.com snafu, I called up my credit card company. No waiting at all, I was connected immediately to a customer service agent. I explained the situation and she immediately started the dispute resolution process and issued a temporary credit. The agent was extremely efficient and knowledgeable - no hassle at all. Now that’s what customer service should always be like!

Buy.com has completely pissed me off now. Here’s what happened:

June 23rd: I placed an order for Etymotic Research ER-6i headphones
June 24th: They shipped the order to the wrong address
June 27th: According to USPS, my order was delivered to some random address in San Francisco, CA 94188
June 27th - July 7th: Even though I know my shipment has been lost, I am unable to do anything about it becuase Buy.com policy says that they don’t do anything until 13 days after the ship date.
July 11th: I try to use their online system to report a lost shipment. The online system is broken; to my knowledge there is no way to report a lost shipment online. I then attempt to contact customer service using the e-mail form. They tell me they will get back to me “as soon as possible”
July 13th: I finally get an e-mail back telling me that they will file a claim. I tell them that I would like them to send a replacement as soon as possible.

As of today, I hadn’t heard back from them, so I looked around on their website for a customer service phone number. AFAIK, they don’t publish their customer service number! (At this point, I am begining to realize why they probably don’t have their customer service phone number posted…)

So I look around online and find that I’m not the only one who’s been looking for the number. Fortunately, I found the number on someone’s blog . They actually have a few numbers: 949-389-2000, 1-877-780-2464, 877-776-7625.

Buy.com: Sorry, there’s nothing we can do right now. We can file a claim but you’ll have to wait 3-5 business days for the result of the claim before we can do anything else.
Me: Excuse me?!?! There’s nothing you can do for a mistake that you made? Can you at least cancel that order and put in a new one?
Buy.com: We can put in another order, but it will be at the current price of the item.
Me: Well, it seems that since it’s your mistake, you should be at least gracious enough to allow me to re-order the same item at the same price.
Buy.com: Sorry we can’t do that.

Well at this point, my course of action is pretty clear. I’m calling up Citibank right now and disputing the charges to my credit card.

But I have to ask: What kind of company hopes to survive with this type of customer service? The only other time I’ve seen such shoddy customer service is in the wireless service provider space - but I suppose they can get away with it becuase I don’t have too many choices there, I just have to pick the lesser of 4 evils. In the online e-tailer space, I have tons of choices. What makes Buy.com think I’m going to ever buy anything from them again?

A few people around the blogosphere have linked to dontclick.it so I decided to check it out. I’m not exactly sure what to make of it… what’s the point?

I spent some time on the site but found myself just getting frustrated. If I accidentally move my mouse, half the time new content will appear since I’ve rolled over a different hotspot.

I tried to read through the site, but eventually just got fed up and left. Are they really trying to promote click-less UI? Or is the experiment to see how many people actually have enough patience to read through a site that’s so annoying?

The most annoying thing is when you click, it blows up on you and gives you a 10 second “time out”. Except what if I had changed windows to do something else real quick and then was click the browser window to bring it back to the foreground? Oops, can’t even do that; I’m not supposed to click! >