ryan kennedy’s blog

On Thursday I received a very strange phone call on my work line. Caller ID indicated only that the call had been transfered to my desk from elsewhere within the company. In the past, this has almost always been the calling card of recruiters. They find my profile on LinkedIn but don’t have my phone number. They know I work at Yahoo!, however, so they call the receptionist and ask to be transfered to me.

This time was different, however. I answered the phone, “This is Ryan.” Booming from the other end of the line I heard, “RYAN” in a strong southern accent. What followed could only be described as 5 minutes of nonstop railing against Yahoo! Customer Care. This gentleman had lost the password to his Yahoo! Mail account and over the course of the last week felt he was being given the runaround by our support technicians, going as far as to say that they had been “rude and hateful” towards him.

Working on his last nerve, he somehow found out about Yahoo!’s “postmaster Ryan K”. I’m nearly certain he’s referring to Ryan Knight, the “Ryan K” who took over the Yahoo! Mail blog after I hung up my evangelism cape. He managed to find the number for the Yahoo! Sunnyvale office and asked the receptionist to connect him to “Ryan K”. There’s more than one, so I can only guess that the receptionist rolled the dice and transferred him to me. Fortunately, he found a sympathetic ear.

After listening to him throw the customer care group under the bus for 5 straight minutes, we finally got to the part of the phone call where he would let me participate in the conversation. I asked some questions to collect as much information as possible. I tried to explain some of what might have happened during his dealings with customer care. He explained how important his email account was and how frustrating dealing with our customer care group was. He wasn’t happy and he wanted to make sure I was keenly aware of that fact.

After about 10 minutes on the phone with him, however, something happened. He came to know that I understood his frustrations and that I was equally disappointed with the experience he had been going through. In that instant, the phone conversation immediately lightened up. We each cracked a few jokes, shared a couple of laughs, established some common ground. Over the course of the next 5 minutes I collected a little more information and told him that I’d work my backchannels to get him the help he needed. It was the full 180. He started the phone call with spite and venom and he finished the call hopeful that we’d have this situation resolved for him. He was appreciative and, dare I say it, a bit happier.

Whether you’re dealing with 250 users or 250 million users, you can’t service your customers without talking to them. I mean really talking to them, not handling them with a phone in one hand and a script in the other. Talk to them, get to know them, understand why they’re upset and then make it all better.

Inspired by the likes of Alton Brown and my friend Jed, I took on the terracotta pot smoker this weekend. Why? So I could make pulled pork for my Super Bowl party.

Aside from getting totally smoked out by it and having to jigger with the lid to get my 7.25lbs Boston butt in there, it’s gone well. The only real hitch has been the thermometer. The first thermometer I used, a replacement smoker thermometer was registering temperatures below 200F. I was about to give up when I figured I’d try another thermometer and it read much higher numbers (around 219F). I’ve switched to that one and the 2-3 hour smoke is underway.

It’s like cooking with MacGyver…it’s awesome.

100mph zip line sort of says it all…

I’ve been with Speakeasy since February, 2004. They’ve provided good DSL and fantastic support. Calling them at midnight on a weekday, you probably wouldn’t expect to have a human on the line running you through some diagnostics and getting you back up and running. Even better, the tech on the other end of the line could generally figure out if you were a dork or a newb and handle things accordingly. Once they figured out I’d done some networking before, they stopped asking me, “press the ‘Start’ key, click on ‘Run’ and type in ‘cmd’” and started asking “can you ping this host?” And, honestly, you couldn’t beat the terms of service. Run a server at home if you want, even their least expensive packages came with at least one static IP address. So if I enjoy it so much, why am I saying goodbye?

I moved about 2 weeks ago and last week got the ball rolling to get my DSL migrated from San Carlos to Santa Clara. I’d done this before, migrating my service from Folsom down to San Carlos. It was incredibly painless and they finished the migration faster than they initially said they would. This time, however, things were different. I went to their online support form and started a request to get things migrated. After a day or two, I got a response from someone indicating that they couldn’t confirm that I can get service at my new phone number and address. I told them it was probably because the house is brand new. They told me to call the sales department. In the meantime, I asked if they could at least stop service at the apartment in San Carlos so I could shut off the phone line there. They didn’t respond.

Today, I called Speakeasy to get in touch with a sales person. I had to do this when I set up service in Folsom too. My house there was brand new and they had to do a few extra checks to make sure the address existed and could, indeed, get DSL. When I called today, I gave the sales person my new phone number and address. He keyed it into the system and told me the same thing as the online tech: he couldn’t confirm that they could get me service. Evidently AT&T’s system was “kicking him out”. He said it might be the result of the phone number’s former life, whatever it may have been. He gave me two options, I could either wait another week and see if the phone line freed up (unlikely since the phone line had already been mine for the past month) or I could take my service elsewhere (if a friend tells you to sign up for AT&T DSL, are they really your friend?).

And that’s when it happened. All allegiance I had to Speakeasy died in that very sentence. The company that had previously provided fantastic, over the top support gave up on me. When I told him I’d just cancel the service, he didn’t try to stop me. He didn’t offer to call AT&T to see if the issue could be sorted out. He didn’t offer a number I could call with AT&T so I could sort it out myself. He didn’t offer anything. Well, that’s not true. He did offer to transfer me to the people that handled disconnects.

I’m pretty wiped out. I stayed up until 4am getting stuff ready fr my 10am talk, then grabbed 3 hours of shuteye. I’m feeling functional, although some breakfast would definitely help in that department. I’ll be heading over to the palace in about an hour to prepare for my talk. Hopefully I have everything pretty well squared away.

I did want to mention this quickly. If you’re super envious of what’s going on here, don’t fret. I have a side project I’ve been working on for my talk. I plan on releasing the source code to it sometime after my talk. If you’re feeling left out of the whole hack day thing going on, feel free to hack away on my stuff. If you get something super cool working before presentation time (2pm Sunday London time, 6am Sunday California time) and want me to present it here on your behalf, I’ll see what I can do. Keep an eye out for the next post. If you’re interested, drop a comment with your email address and I’ll write you back.

I’m off to find morning sustenance. See you on the other side.

Today is the start of a very long weekend (yes…I know it’s Friday). I think I’m headed up to Alexandra Palace to help set up today and then I need to sit down and finish everything for my talk tomorrow morning. I still need to finish up my sample application, get some slides together, make sure I know what I’m talking about and get any sample code transfered to the 100 USB flash drives I brought along with me.

I’m not screwed…I’m not screwed…I’m not screwed…

Well, Akismet has really been screwing the pooch lately on my blog. So I’ve reenabled comment moderation. There have been one too many explicit comments making it past Akismet in the past couple of weeks. As a result, I’ve decided to proactively monitor my queue.

Lately Akismet has been letting through a LOT of spam comments. I don’t know what changed on their end (if anything), but the change has been pretty dramatic on my end. Normally Akismet is pretty good about handling comment spam for me, but lately it seems like I’m having to go back and remove a half dozen comments, or more, each day.

It might seem funny to say that Google Reader is ahead, yet catching up…so I’ll explain. First, I’ll put the disclaimer out that:

• I work for Yahoo!
• I work on a product that has an integrated feed reader
• I’m a Google Reader user
• Before Google Reader, I used Bloglines

With that out of the way, I’ll explain what I mean in the headline. I use Google Reader because out of all of the feed aggregators I’ve used, it’s by far the most comfortable to me. Bloglines was comfortable once upon a time, but then it just went to hell (I have several posts chronicling the Bloglines downward spiral). Google Reader just feels right when I use it. It’s easy, doesn’t get in the way and it fulfills my main requirement of being a web-based reader (aside from a web browser and a terminal window, I really don’t need another desktop application).

So why do I say it’s catching up? Well, they only just added the ability to email posts to other people. The reader built into Yahoo! Mail Beta has allowed this since November 2005. Moreover, the reader in Yahoo! Mail Beta allows you to drag and drop feed items into mail folders so you can save them for later.

Anyway, it’s good to see Google Reader catching up in the places where it’s behind. Still, maybe someone will give them a hard time for copying Yahoo! for once (it’s always the other way around).

As it turns out, Einstein’s birthday is the same day as Pi Day (March 14th…3/14…3.14…get it?). I like Einstein…I like Pie (and Pi). How about an Albert Einstein Pi(e) Day? We can honor three things I think are pretty cool all on the same day.

Enough people griped about me splicing my del.icio.us feed into my blog feed that I’ve disabled it. Evidently it was causing signal-to-noise problems for people who only care about the things I post on my blog. So, if you’re still interested in my links, you’ll have to subscribe to my links feed separately.

I was reading Jonathan Schwartz’s recent post about moving a petabyte of data. Jonathan talks about how it’s faster to move a petabyte of data from San Francisco to Hong Kong by boat than it would be to send it over the internet.

This is amusing to me because 5 years ago when I was at Excite we were discussing the same phenomenon. When Excite@Home started tanking, the company sold off the Excite assets to iWon. The transfer included our approximately 4 million US webmail users and all of their mail. iWon was only interested in their mail (they didn’t care about our software…not that I’m bitter or anything). When it came time to discuss how we would migrate the mail data from our data center in Redwood City to the iWon data center in New York, it was decided that we would open up IMAP access to our mail servers and iWon would siphon the mail across the country.

Needless to say, it was a slow process and required a couple of passes for iWon to make sure they had a fully sync’d copy of the mailboxes. Several of us wondered if it wouldn’t be faster to rent a truck, roll the EMCs into it and drive it the approximately 3,000 miles out to New York. Yahoo! Maps pegs the trip at around 42 hours. Granted, we probably couldn’t take the service down for that long. We could have just taken the tape backups, threw them in a couple of boxes and shipped them using some next-day service to New York. It probably would have been faster.

I realize that some will think I’m working for the enemy with this post, but screw them. The Google Reader team is looking for an intern. If I was a student, I’d be interested in an opportunity like this. Cool product, could use some work, great learning experience, etc.

In other news, it sounds like I might be getting an intern this summer too (evidently I don’t get enough work done, so I get my own intern). I’ll post more about that once everything is finalized, but if you’re interested feel free to fire a resume my direction (rckenned AT yahoo.com).

I’ll be talking at Lunch 2.0 on Wednesday (February 21st). It should be fun. One of the reasons I moved back to the Bay Area is to get more involved in things like this, so I’m really looking forward to attending so I can meet some new people.

The real question is, if I wear this t-shirt, will people find it as amusing as I do or will they take it the wrong way?

Coolest Gadgets mentions the new Bye Bye Standby device. It seems neat on the surface, cut power to devices even when they’re in standby mode. I know things like televisions can still suck down a bit of power even when turned off, well…in aggregate anyway.

One thing that strikes me about the device, however, is what hoops you’d have to jump through if you use surge suppressors. I have my television, my Wii, my DVD player and my cable DVR hooked up to a single power strip. That plugs into the wall. If I were to use Bye Bye Standby between the power strip and the wall, then everything would be shut off. Even my DVR. That’s not what I want, the DVR needs to stay running in the event that a scheduled recording kicks off sometime. That means splitting up my power so I have one strip of devices that are okay to kill via Bye Bye Standby and another strip of devices that won’t go through the device. Not a huge deal, just something to keep in mind. It would be cool if they’d create a power strip where each plug has a configurable switch setting that would allow you do indicate if the device needs to remain powered or not. Then kill the power to the remaining devices when you’re not watching TV.

Well, the Wii FINALLY arrived today. It was supposed to be here 5 days ago, but UPS suddenly decided that they can’t find my address (despite having delivered numerous packages over the past two weeks, all of which also came from Amazon). Anyway, Lisa and I busted out Wii Sports Bowling tonight. It’s fun…lots of fun. It will be even better when we get a second controller (we’re having all sorts of problems tracking one down).

I got a chance to quickly play the other Wii Sports games tonight as well. Tennis is surprisingly fun, Golf looks like it could be enjoyable (better than all the PC golf games I’ve played in the past), Baseball is only okay (it’s really just home run derby) and boxing was fun but the controls seemed lacking.

We’ll have to play some of the other games we got in the coming days. I’m looking forward to Zelda the most, but the others look like fun too.

I’m trying to do a screencast to put up here on my blog. I’ve been looking around for MacOS screencasting software, though, and can’t find any free ones. I downloaded the iShowU demo and played with it a little bit. Is it worth the $20?

Also, I want to be able to redact portions of the video. Does anybody know of any screencast software (again on MacOS) that will do that or any way I can accomplish the same thing in iMovie?

An interesting post on why top employees quit. I think #2 (Unchallenged) and #4 (Dead Company) actually go hand in hand sometimes, at least they did for me at EarthLink. When I left EarthLink, I didn’t have anything to do. I stayed home some days playing video games or hacking on side projects because the alternative was wasting my time in the office. Just before I took vacation for my wedding and honeymoon, my manager reassured me that when I got back they’d have a project for us to work on and that things would be better. Guess what? I got back from my honeymoon and my boss’ boss told me that my boss had left to go to Google and we STILL didn’t have anything to work on.

Money, #1 on the list, has never been a consideration when I’ve left a job, though I will say I’ve been fortunate with every move I’ve made. I’ve always left because there was a better opportunity ahead for me. I left Excite because they were going out of business and I was joining Jel in Sacramento where I could afford a house. I left Jel because they were losing all of their contracts and I was joining EarthLink to, once again, kick ass and take names working on webmail. I left EarthLink because I was bored out of my mind and woefully underutilized and was joining Yahoo! to build an important web service to back the Oddpost powered Yahoo! Mail Beta.

It’s actually interesting to think about the things that made me leave other companies, if only to consider my current situation. I’ve now been with Yahoo! longer than I was with any other company (it’ll be two years in November), so statistically speaking it’s about time for me to move on. However, Yahoo! continues to pay my salary, continues to challenge me and surrounds me with amazingly talented and smart people. I even look forward to my 140 mile drive just so I can be in the office (although I will be quite happy to be living in the Bay Area once again). So I guess what I’m saying is, I’ll be a Yahoo! for a while longer (all bets are off if I win the lottery).

Dear Akismet,

when we first met, it was a rocky beginning. You were clumsy, aloof and kept dropping spam on my blog. I wasn’t sure I’d ever call you back. But something made me do it. There was something about you, the French call it…I don’t know what. So there I was late one night, dialing your number. You answered, we went out for lunch and finally clicked. It was wonderful, I was smitten. You made me feel wonderful, like a huge load of spam had been taken off of my comments. We laughed, we posted, we put spam where it belongs.

But lately you’ve been cold, preoccupied and distant. We used to go out all the time, stopping spam dead in its tracks. But now we hardly go out. You don’t seem to have time for me anymore. My comments are once again littered with spam and I’m too depressed to handle it on my own.

Come back to me Akismet, Papa Bear needs his Honey.

Love, Papa Bear

I wanted to write about this earlier today, but I was heading out the door when I heard about Google’s plan to use your microphone to generate targeted ads. Seriously, how on earth do you drop that nugget with a straight face? People were mad enough that Gmail reads your mail messages to generate targeted ads, this is just a deeper, more invasive version of that. Instead of waiting for you to read a mail message, Google is going to use your computer microphone to listen to the ambient sounds of your location.

This is my favorite part of the article from The Register:

Google says that its fingerprinting technology makes it impossible for the company (or anyone else) to eavesdrop on other sounds in the room, such as personal conversations, because the conversion to a fingerprint is made on the PC, and a fingerprint can’t be reversed, as it’s only an identity.

It’s true, assuming Google is using some form of a one-way hash, they won’t be able to eavesdrop the conversation…in its entirety. Google will however be able to eavesdrop the general topic of conversation, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to target ads (well, they could…but they’d target poorly). While they won’t know every single word of the conversation, they will know you were talking about what kind of new car to buy. Then again, they might just pick up that conversation from the television where the arch-villain is discussing their plan to assassinate someone, triggering their targeting system to find you all sorts of great deals on hit men, sniper rifles and out of the way burial locations (plotted, with directions, on Google Maps, of course).

All that being said, Gmail snoops everything you read and write and people still use it. I guess there’s just no accounting for taste…or privacy (or the illusion of privacy).