Studio711.com – Ben Martens

It seems like a short chunk of time
Since I married my partner in crime
But now there’s a son
Who can nearly run
And my thoughts are all metered and rhymed

I can’t end a line with your name
No rhyme exists I claim
Four years ago
You married your beau
And my heart is still aflame

Did you know that you can download a report of your Amazon orders? I pulled all that data into Excel and started playing with our Power BI toolset even though it was a pretty simple scenario. Here are some of the facts I discovered:

• First order: Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, January 11, 2001. This would have been my Junior year at Purdue. I discovered that some books were cheaper on Amazon than our bookstore. Strangely they didn’t have many of my textbooks and even then, they weren’t always cheaper. Times have changed!
• Most popular item category: Health & Beauty
• In our current home, we order 3.3 times more items per year than we did in our last home.
• There is an average of 1.7 days between ordering and shipping. The median is 1. There are some outliers when I made orders that weren’t fulfilled by Amazon and they can take forever to ship.
• Item purchased most often: Purina Pro Plan Dry Adult Dog Food, Large Breed Formula, 34-Pound Bag
• 804 total items ordered

Here are some graphs over the data. It will be pretty obvious that I signed up for Amazon Prime in June of 2008. On a side note, the recent Amazon Prime price increase doesn’t bother me at all. It’s still one of the best deals in online shopping, not to mention that I also get some free Kindle books, and a pretty good collection of streaming video for free. They could charge a lot more and I’d still pay for it.

I’ve written many times about how I believe it’s a lot more useful to be involved in local politics than national politics. Here’s a good example about how much more responsive your local government can be.

Safeway is a little less than a mile down the road from our house so we frequently take walks down there. Tyla also runs along that sidewalk sometimes. There was one stretch that was getting destroyed by tree roots. It was so bad you almost couldn’t push a stroller over it anymore. It’s right on the boundary between cities so it took a while to figure out who owned the sidewalk, but after I found the right government, it was fixed in less than a month!

The end result looks a lot nicer and is much safer! You can see the before and after photos below. Thanks to the Woodinville maintenance crew for such a prompt response! I’ve had a similarly positive response with them for some traffic light maintenance. In that case they were out the SAME DAY to fix it.

Tyla has a Christmas village from the Thomas Kinkade collection. She feels like she has enough big pieces but was interested in a couple accessories so back I decided to order her something for the Christmas of 2012. There’s only one website where you can get this stuff (other than used on eBay.) I placed my order and was told it would be 6-8 weeks. Oops. Well that’s ok, I’ll wait. After 3-4 months and a couple postcards with status updates, I was told that they would never ship my order. Ugh. For the Christmas of 2013, my mom decided to order Tyla some little accessories. The exact same thing happened to her!

I was really frustrated at this point so I emailed customer service. I tried to be very nice in explaining my situation and asking what we’re doing wrong. Is there a better time of year to order? The reply was “We regret to inform you that the item has been retired.” Huh? I didn’t mention any item in my email. It was a general question. I replied “Did you even read my email?” The second email was a bit longer but it was still a canned response that didn’t answer my email. In the vain hope that a human who cared was actually reading, I replied once more and ended it with “You don’t need to reply to this. You’ve lost me as a customer.”

I’ve been reading the Ford book about Alan Mulally so I guess I have CEO on the brain. I believed that there must be somebody in the company who cared about treating customers properly and would want to know about an experience like mine so it could be corrected. A little searching revealed the CEO’s name. I guessed what his email address probably was and forwarded my customer service chat to him along with a note. I said that if I was in his shoes, I’d want to know about something like this. I wasn’t looking for any retribution. It was simply for his information. I figured that would be the end of it (whether he actually received the email or not.)

The next morning, my phone rang and it was someone from the company! I guess they looked up my number from my previous order. She said the CEO had forwarded my note on to her and she apologized for my situation. She then stated a couple things she had done to get some fixes started (removing retired items from the website, scheduling a meeting with the manager of the email customer service group, etc.) She thanked me multiple times for emailing and I apologized for ruining her day by getting the CEO involved. She insisted on giving us something for our trouble so if it all works out, Tyla should have a small gift arriving in the mail.

It was a wild story but I’m happy to know that the senior management does seem to care. This isn’t how I normally recommend lodging complaints against a company, but in this modern world, there are some extremely affective tools available if you choose to use them. They did regain my business and I’ll give them another shot.

A couple years ago, TimS and AndyD convinced me that I need to try wool socks. It sounds silly, but it was a life-changing discussion. Since that first purchase, I have worn wool socks almost exclusively. In the winter they keep my feet warm and in the summer they keep my feet from getting sweaty and wet. They’re brilliant! You can get them fairly cheaply in big bundles at Costco. Unfortunately they only sell them during the winter so I like to stock up and have a few bundles in the closet in case I wear some out.

I love that everything around us is becoming a gadget. The buzzword/phrase is the “internet of things.” Add our printer at work to the list. It has always had capabilities like scanning and emailing documents, but it was also a huge paper waster and logging in for advanced features was a pain. People would print stuff and then forget to pick it up. The default setting is that when you print something, it sits in the printer’s queue but doesn’t actually print until you walk up to it. At that point you swipe your badge over the card reader, it brings up all your jobs and ask which ones you want to print. At this point you’re also logged in so scanning and emailing is very simple too. It’s one of those seemingly obvious “why didn’t we do this before” inventions.

Microsoft has a new CEO! I’m sure it’s a bit intimidating to be on a list of three CEOs with the other two being Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, but I’m really happy with the choice of Satya. He’s probably not a household name (yet) outside of the company, but internally he has been doing a fantastic job.

I’ve been in his org for quite a while, and I’m particularly happy that they picked someone who is so familiar with our cloud and enterprise offerings. When you hear analysts talking about Microsoft and they only mention Xbox, Windows Phone, Bing, etc, you can mostly dismiss them because they’re missing the biggest moneymakers for the company. Satya’s org was one of the three main pillars of Microsoft’s revenue (Windows, Office and he ran cloud/enterprise offerings.) It might not be a flashy org, but we crank out around $20 BILLION a year. That’s about 25% of the entire company’s revenue and this org has seen double digit year over year growth for more quarters than I can count.

So while it would be fun to have a flashy, public figure as CEO, I’m happy that we have Satya who intimately understands the core businesses of our company. (And it doesn’t hurt that he loves the product I’m working on too!)

I’m no psychologist, but I’ve found that if I really want to change something in my life, writing it down is a big motivator. I’ve been eating pretty poorly for the past couple months, so I decided to write down everything that I eat for one week.

Wow. It worked even better than I thought. Even though I’m not planning to show the list to anyone else, it’s embarrassing to write down a handful of chips, a candybar or two, or a morning piece of pie.

Writing it down on a piece of paper would probably have been good enough, but I took it one step further and tracked it in the Fitbit website. They have a huge food database so I just enter in what I ate and it adds up the carbs, etc.

I probably won’t keep this up for a long time, but it has been a good exercise and it’s one that I’ll revisit if I find myself snacking a lot again. Let me know how it works for you if you try it too!

Tyla and I have a tradition of buying one new Christmas ornament every year. It’s generally on one of our big vacations together. This past year we took a babymoon to Orcas Island and purchased a purple starfish in a tiny shop on the island. It’s a lot of fun to decorate a tree with memories!

You can find our past ornaments here and here and here.

When Tyla and I moved into our house, we signed a two year contract with Comcast in Exchange for about $30/month off of our bill compared to a month-to-month plan. That worked well since I knew exactly what I wanted. Since Elijah was born this summer, our TV watching has fallen off a cliff. We are trying not to give him much time in front of screens for the first couple years and that means that we also get less screen time (good for all of us!)

Our contract with Comcast ended and our bill went up to ~$120/month. That got us the Digital Starter TV package and 25/2 Internet. I don’t pay for a DVR since I built my own and I own our cable modem too. Those two things might make our bill lower than yours for the same package.

Normally I call Comcast every 6-12 months to tell them I’m cancelling or switching to satellite and they give me a lower bill. I even had one rep TELL me to call back in 6 months to lower my bill again. This time I made multiple calls but couldn’t squeeze and promotional deals out of them. I’m not quite ready to pull the plug on TV and get everything over the internet, but there were still ways I could lower my bill.

I ended up with the “Blast Plus” package. That gives us 50/10 internet (double the download speed and five times the upload speed) but it drops us down to the Digital Economy TV package. There are about 40 fewer channels. The major losses for me are all the ESPN channels and Fox Sports One (the old SpeedTV.) It also drops TNT so that means I’ll only get to watch the first third of the NASCAR season before it moves over to the other networks. I thought I’d never get rid of those channels, but I also can’t remember the last time I actually had time to watch them.

This change saves us $42/month! The package is $79.95 plus local taxes and fees. It also comes without any contract so if we change our mind at any point, it’s easy to bump back up to a bigger plan.

If you’re interested in something similar, here is a list of the channels that we keep and the one we lose. It might be different depending on your area.