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First Correspondence

The Social Security Administration shows a little lightheartedness by being the first entity to send a letter personally addressed to Yuna.

Technorati Tags: Yuna

Give your Skype Packets High Priority (Linksys QoS)

We recently made the switch to Skype at home and while generally happy with it, there has been a bit more choppiness to the voice connection than we would have liked. Our first question was whether or not it was related to our new internet service (Comcast cable instead of Speakeasy DSL). I then remembered that part of the solution for fixing our last VoIP-ish service (net2phone) was increasing the priority/quality-of-service settings for net2phone traffic. I started looking for what ports Skype uses, shuddering at the remembrance of the non-stop popups that occur while using Skype on a PC with a personal firewall running, then saw this amazing screen on my new Linksys SRX400 802.11 pre-N router:

All you have to do is choose Skype from the Applications menu and then click "add". Go Linksys!

Technorati Tags: Linksys, Skype

Zillow vs. Trulia...

Steve just forwarded this excellent vertical search site: Zillow, for realtors.

Technorati Tags: Real Estate, Search Engines

Parks Commission Comes Weak

Lawyers and greed win over common sense (as if it has anything to do with Chinese/Japanese -- it's about whether or not the operator has historically, regularly, and consistently cheapened our city through his actions) when city officials are involved. If you're lucky enough to build a beautiful monument to leave as a present to your favorite city, make sure to set up a foundation with specific rules to avoid this kind of tragedy. Would that the Coit tower concession were also being contested...

Technorati Tags: San Francisco

Restoring the SF Japanese Tea Garden

In retrospect, it should have been obvious that the ugly, cramped, cheap shops you see at Coit Tower and the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park were operated by the same guy. He's making millions peddling useless knickknacks that cheapen our city's best attractions. The San Francisco chronicle outs him in this article.

If the Recreation and Parks Department has the courage to follow through (PLEASE!), I might actually be encouraged to go back (we went once and never went again because it was so made so touristy and "low"). It need not be Carol Murata (though her history in Japantown makes her an obvious choice), but please make it someone who understands and appreciates Japanese culture.

Technorati Tags: Japanese Culture, San Francisco

Camp Sysadmin's Almost Full...

Camp Sysadmin. Is it sys admin or sysadmin?

Technorati Tags: Splunk

Splunk Product Manager

We're looking for a superstar product manager at Splunk. Peeps with the good street cred (you know who you are), get in touch if you're looking.

Technorati Tags: Splunk

The Buck Stops at SixApart

I've had the experience of a company stepping up, mostly unbidden, to make itself accountable to its customers only a few times in my life. Usually, the company is being forced into the action by a class action lawsuit. Sometimes, it's a whirlwind of controversy that they've been resisting for a long time (e.g., the current Sony rootkit/DRM debacle). More often than should be legal, the company won't deal with its problems until legal action is threatened (anyone ever have problems with DSL billing at the phone company?).

But every so often, a company prides itself on outstanding products AND service. They trust in their customers' intelligence, integrity, and discrimination. They try to do the right thing on that assumption -- think Nordstrom (I had a friend who returned jeans a year after buying them there once), the first years of Lexus (I had a friend who worked in customer service there and told me some amazing stories of how far Lexus would go to keep their customers happy), Apple, Google, USAA (if you're lucky enough to be eligible for their service).

The folks at Six Apart today put themselves, from my humble perspective, solidly in that group. There were problems at the service. They acknowledged those problems to their customers and to the general public a couple of weeks ago. They made a solid commitment (financial and verbal) to never find themselves in that position again. Today, they voluntarily charged themselves across the board for violating trust with their customers. They also gave us discretion in deciding how much pain was appropriate to deal back to the service for the downtime (credit for 0, 15, 30, or 45 days of service, with 15 the default). Kudos for stepping up, folks.

Technorati Tags: TypePad

Splunk 1ups with Steve Sorkin

Steve Sorkin (old, out of date page) is joining Splunk...check out the cool stuff he's done:

• Market based resource allocation at HP's Information Dynamics Lab
• Security/Privacy at Berkeley
• Probabilistic Path Planning while at Stanford's Robotics Lab
• He was a key member of the team that sorted out ManTrap at Recourse Technologies

Hmm. More propellerheads...wind farm?

Technorati Tags: Splunk

Fear and Loathing in the Kingdom of Loathing

A fairly popular commercial online adventure game goes down while trying to perform an upgrade.

Technorati Tags: Gaming