That Tall Dude.com

Today, after many hours, and possibly days, of procrastination, I finally cleaned my room.  For those of you who don’t know, I’m currently living back at home, and if you must know, it’s because I got financially stupid for awhile, and am recovering from my mistakes.  Anyways, my brother is graduating this weekend, and Mom thinks everything NEEDS to be spotless whenever people are here.  I don’t think spotless is really necessary, people do know we live here, but like a good boy, I cleaned up my room, on the off chance that a bunch of people decide to come downstairs.  Yes, you can make these pictures bigger, and yes, some of them are VERY blurry.  No tripod.

It was about 1:30, and I started off by taking 4 pictures, so you can have a general idea just how messy it is.  Organized confusion, I know exactly which pile my stuff is in, although that doesn’t do anybody else any good.  It’s still organized confusion, only now it’s not on the floor, and you can see the desk.

In the fifth and sixth pictures, you’ll see a fair amount was accomplished in 2 hours.  It helped that iTunes kept my mind occupied as I placed stuff in boxes and filled garbage bags with stuff I should’ve thrown out years ago.  I’m a sentimental guy.  :)

This entire project was made infinitely easier, because about 2 months ago, I went through virtually everything, and threw out about 5 garbage bags full of random stuff I had been holding onto.  I finally decided that those Coca-Cola Classic Minor League Baseball Cards did not need to be kept any longer, amongst other things.

This freed up several boxes and containers, which have been sitting empty since.  Once I filled up the regular old cardboard boxes, and placed them back on the shelves, I rearranged a few things to be displayed more prominently, giving it a better feel, like somebody actually cares about what it looks like.  This left me with general stuff, and rather than take the time to organize it all, I just dumped it into a couple containers, covered it, and called it good for today.

By 4:30, I was essentially done.  In the last 6 pictures, you can see the dramatic difference from start to finish.  The small square table will resume its place next to the couch after graduation, it was needed in the garage for the grad party, so I had to clean everything off of it.  I must admit though, it’s nice to be able to calmly walk everywhere again, rather than cautiously stepping over everything.

I suppose you’ll all be looking through the blurriness in some of the photos to scrutinize my life now.  Be it the books I read, the gadgets scattered around, Spurs hats, or random decorations.  Now that the drums aren’t covered up by jackets, I should make a concerted effort to raise the money for new drum heads, so I can play it again.  The old heads are pretty worn out, and most haven’t been replaced in the almost 10 years I’ve had it.  The cymbals are safely tucked away in a hard case.  If you want to help me get new heads, send me an email or a tweet, and I can give you my PayPal info.  Several months ago I priced them at $300.

All in all, it’s not a bad setup, all my movies and TV are watched through the computer, gotta love a TV tuner card.  Couch is literally 4 feet away from the computer, so it’s easy to watch it all on that 21″ wide screen, although I’d like a 24″ model.

Anyways, feel free to scrutinize the pictures of my room.  Make suggestions, make fun of me, whatever, I don’t care.  It’s an up close look at the daily surroundings of thattalldude, who just happens to be 5 inches shorter than his graduating brother.  Hopefully I can keep it clean now, that’s the hard part.

I found this package of Doritos laying on the kitchen table today.  I had never seen a bag of Doritos that was black before, so naturally, always interested in new food, I had to find out what delicious new flavor this might be.  I would be disappointed though, as this bag of chips has no flavor described on it.  Doritos, known for great flavors like Cooler Ranch, and my personal favorite, Jablanero, declined to bother with this new kind.  As opposed to any kind of a name at all, any description to give us any sort of a clue, we merely get the caption on the bag, which states:

Yeah, that’s right, “guessing” the flavor.  Apparently somebody in marketing got a new kind of chip to market, was having a bad day, or maybe just had a bad cold and couldn’t taste anything, and just decided that I don’t care, I give up.  I’ll let the customer tell me what it is.  Doritos is not the first company to do this though.  A very popular candy bar has been baffling people for a long time.

Hershey’s long ago presented us with the Whatchamacallit.  Long after using either quite simple names like the ‘Hershey’s Milk Chocolate,’ or more creative names like ‘Hershey’s Krackel,’ someone else got a little flabbergasted when it came time to name the product.  They put slightly more effort into it though, by at least giving it the name, Whatchamacallit, as well as a short description, ‘Peanut Flavor Crisp – Caramel – Milk Chocolate.’  Doritos completely skipped that part.

Now, you can walk into a store, look for Doritos, and know that you’re getting chips, but you don’t know what kind.  ’The Quest,’ it’s not a name, it’s a journey.  We dare you, open it, explore it, might we even say, taste it.

Don’t worry though, this isn’t completely pointless.  On the bag is a link, snackstrongproductions.com, which will ultimately lead you to doritosthequest.com.  There, you enter in the ‘password,’ better known as the flavor of the chips, which is ‘ MountainDew.’  Then you can begin a journey, with a prize.  Go ahead and try it, I dare you.

Discussion has been coming up again about how the web is changing, and those that change with it are seeing results.  After reading what is quite possibly the best thing I’ve read all year, I thought I would share my own example with you.

Today on RWW, Sarah Perez wrote the piece, Why Gen Y Is Going to Change the Web.  From the ‘Marketing Has To Change’ section, I quote:

Because Gen Y is media savvy and conscious of being marketed to, brands that succeed in the future will be those that open a dialog with their customers, admit their mistakes, and essentially become more transparent. Companies’ web sites that want to attract Gen Y’ers will become more like today’s Web 2.0 sites. Social networking will be just a feature. Blogs will be standard ways for companies to reach their customers. Customer service won’t just be a phone call away, it will be available via non-traditional means, too. Today, savvy companies might be using Twitter, but that could change at any time if Gen Y moves on. Companies will have to keep up with Gen Y and not get too comfortable using any one format.

My favorite RSS reader, Shyftr, gets this.

A few weeks ago, there was a generalized issue that came up, and Shyftr was the scapegoat.  I discussed it briefly in, Why Are We Blaming Shyftr?  It was a hot topic over that weekend, as it seemed every tech blogger had something to say about it, creating a vast echo chamber.  They quickly responded to the issue, as Dave Stanley wrote on Shyftr’s blog,  That was a good and rapid response to a hot topic issue, and they don’t neglect what their users are saying.

I had recently needed to do a clean install of my OS, and as it turned out, I had no backup copy of my feed list.  At the time, Shyftr had not yet implemented OPML importing (they have it now), but needing to recover all of my feeds individually anyways, this wasn’t an issue.  This was one of my first steps to take more of my daily activities off the desktop, and Shyftr looked like a good choice.  I slowly found most of the feeds I had been reading, and added them to Shyftr.  Through the course of doing this, Louis Gray had written about them, and I had gotten the chance to discuss Shyftr with some of the founders.  Of the Shyftr team, Matt Shaulis has become my go to guy.  He is eager to hear feedback, bounces ideas off of me on occasion, and will quickly try to resolve any issues I have.

Now Shyftr is still in beta, so I usually cut them some slack and just go about my business, because like any good startup, they diligently work and tweak and improve their code.  However, when Matt started talking to me today, to find out if I had figured out something I had wanted to do with Shyftr, he immediately was able to tell me just what I needed to do, piece of cake.  He then proceeded to ask me about a new feature they implemented, seeing who else has added the feed you’re looking at.  I like this feature, although I haven’t had much time to do a lot with it.

This is where they really helped me though.  I was having a frustration, when I would look through my feeds, and want to open up a post on its native site to read it in full and comment on it, I would right click the link to open it in a new tab.  This works the same as any other site, except that Shyftr would then scroll to the top of the page, forcing me to scroll back down the list of posts to resume my reading.  This isn’t a major issue, but it is annoying.  I told Matt about it, and he did some poking around.  I was out and about for a few hours, but as soon as I got back, he spotted me, had me check, and the problem had been tracked down and fixed.  Now this is customer service, talk to the people, get immediate reaction, and rapid results.  He then bounced another idea off of me, and made note of my thoughts.  Listening to someone who already loves their product, treating them well, and getting results.  It’s going to be one heck of a challenge to pull me away from Shyftr with this kind of service!

This is what Perez was talking about when she said:

…brands that succeed in the future will be those that open a dialog with their customers, admit their mistakes, and essentially become more transparent.  …..  Blogs will be standard ways for companies to reach their customers. Customer service won’t just be a phone call away, it will be available via non-traditional means, too.

I may have gotten to know Matt on Twitter, but most of our discussion is done over GTalk.  We don’t talk every day, we often don’t talk every week.  But I know he listens and cares, and he knows I’m happy.  The wireless industry has often said that it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one.  This is the same in any business.  Keep the people you have happy, and they’ll do word of mouth advertising for you.  I’ll gladly promote Shyftr, because they steadily improve the site, and they listen to me.  What more can I ask for?

You can follow me at Shyftr with my profile link.  Or you can just follow my favorite stuff that I find there.

I’m finally posting this, which is long overdue.  When you bookmark something, it’s important to go back to it again, but things came up, and I got distracted.  Better late than never I suppose!

Fellow Tweeter Patrick Curl is planning a road trip to all 50 states.  He is currently in fund raising mode, and is taking donations in the form of cash and hardware.  He wants to interview a blogger in all 50 states, which can be a great traffic boost for your blog.  The interview will be in the form of text/audio/video, and will be spread throughout the internet through whatever means he can.  I hope you all swing over to his American Bloggers page and give him some support.  This will surely be a fun trip to keep our eyes on, and we’ll all be certain to learn something new, as well as find some great new blogs to read!