On May 6, 2007 my son was born.  After many months of preparation it all got started during the 8th inning of the Padres, Marlins game on Saturday May 5th.  Katies water broke and things were sent into motion.  The calls went out and we put together our things for the hospital.  At 10:52 am the next day Jack was here and he’s was perfect.  It’s an awe insipiring moment watching your child being born filled with a barrage of emotions.  The greatest and most constant of those being Love.

Jack is now 3 days old, we’re all adjusting to eachother and doing great.

Here’s some pictures of Jacks “Birthday” and the days following.  Check back soon as I will be uploading new pics as I take them.

http://picasaweb.google.com/mmorrisset/JACK

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It seems these days that everywhere you look there are stories of horrible customer service, whether it be the apathetic teenager waiting on you or the rotten salesperson putting you in his sights with the scam of the day.  I remember the last company that wowed me with their service on the phone.  USAA handled my needs for various insurance plans with the smoothness of a babies bottom without breaking the bank and you know what?  I’m still a customer of USAA 7 years later.

About a week ago, my 3 month old monitor developed a solid horizontal strip of dead pixels (A black line across the screen).  My first thought involved me being on the phone for hours, bringing the monitor into a service shop 50 miles away or something of that nature.  Boy was I wrong.  I called Samsung at roughly 11am PST and got the message, “we are experiencing an extremely large volume of calls…”  (Here we go I say).  30 second later a friendly voice comes on the phone, an english as a first language grew up in my neighborhood voice!  (whoa, they whipped through that call volume quick!)  I tell the guy I bought the monitor in November of last year and it now has the dead pixels…  He asked for the serial number off the back, I gave it him He said it was under warranty and gave me 2 options.  I opted for them sending a new one out and me shipping the broken one back in the same box.  All shipping to and from paid!  3 minutes on the phone and I felt like a winner.

So why am I writing this now?  Maybe, if we spend as much time rewarding good customer service as we do putting bad acts under the spot light people will start moving towards the better companies.  Often times choosing which company to buy the latest gadget from becomes like an political election.  Choosing the lesser of the evils.  Rather than seeing which store has the least complaints maybe it would be good to also check which store or brand has the most praise! 

By Samsung making me feel important as a customer I am now spreading the word to others through this post and by word of mouth.  What could be better advertising?  I’ll take a persons word for it before any TV ad any day.

Way to go SAMSUNG…

Update 2/14/07:  New monitor was sitting on my doorstep 6 days after calling.  Swapped the broken one out, stuck the enclosed pre-paid shipping label on and dropped it off at my neighborhood shipping store.  Probably the most painless experience I’ve ever had with a mal-functioning computer component.

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A Wyoming cowboy was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe PhotoShop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored.

He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says the cowboy.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government”, says the cowboy.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about cows…this is a herd of sheep.

Now give me back my dog.

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We’re having a baby and we’re 99% sure it’s a boy!  The little guy will be arriving sometime in early May.  Mom is doing well. Here’s the first pictures taken December 1st.

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Project of the week, a loft bed for Thianas room.  She slept in it last night and didn’t fall out.   A success in my book

Here’s some pics
Pic 1
Pic 2
Pic 3
Pic 4

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Katie and I are having a great time in Hawaii.  Here’s some of our pics so far…

Click here for Gallery

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I am constantly amazed by how easily our opinions and ideas are shaped by the media… and how often they are completely wrong.  I don’t think anyone is exempt from this.  That’s why marketing is so big and so important to companies these days.  Two of the best examples (at least fresh in my mind) are BOSE speakers and top 3 antivirus scanners.  An odd pair I know.  What they do have in common is huge marketing budgets, inflated prices and huge profits. 

But Why?  Brand recognition?  - I’ll admit.  I go for brand recognition as I walk the aisles of Bestbuy and Frys but I am beginning to think differently.  Take speakers.  They’re sole purpose is to reproduce sound.  Would you rather have some really nice looking speakers that sound horrible or some ugly speakers that sound great.  Some may say the nice looking speakers but we’ll write them off to natural selection.  Now that we’re all on the same page with wanting good sounding speakers what do we look for?  BOSE?  I used to think BOSE made good quality speakers.  Why did I think that?  I had no imperical evidence, heck I have never heard BOSE speakers compared side by side with others (BTW, BOSE purposely seperates their speakers from others at stores.  Don’t believe me, go find a sound room that has BOSE and other brands sitting side by side for your listening pleasure.) Marketing planted the seed that grew into the giant BOSE is good tree.  I really can’t think of any other speaker commercial that I’ve seen on TV other than BOSE.  What do I get from this bombardment of marketing?  A mis-conception of the product and jacked up prices that cover the massive expense of their marketing budget.  The bottom line is, marketing works.  Through marketing BOSE has built the biggest name for itself in the industry.  “Shame on BOSE for relying on Maketing and business plays rather than actually creating a good product” - we cry outraged.  BOSE spent $500,000,000 on marketing last year.  You think they could’ve done some inovation or just used more quality parts instead… hmm

How does Brand recognition hurt us in terms of virus scanners you ask?  Take the top 3 antivirus scanners on the market today (McAfee, Symantec & Trend Micro).  Which one do you have?  I actually run McAfee on some and Symantec on others.  According to Ingram Micro 80% of Malware attacks pass right through the big 3.  This time I don’t point my finger at the big 3 companies as evil or even for putting out a bad product.  You have to look at it like a battle.  The whole point of people writing viruses is to infect as many computers as possible which means getting past as many walls as possible.  It goes without saying that people serious about writing a good virus will test with the big 3.  Success is measured by their ability to get through.  Here marketing and brand recognition work for and against the big 3.  Once again, I recently choose my scanners based on price, features and brand recognition.  What I didn’t know is that very brand recognition that made me feel all warm, fuzy and secure was actually working against me.  Turns out, you may be better off going with the little guys who provide comparible products that aren’t as widely tested by virus writers.

When I think of antivirus software I think of a small stream of water flowing down a dirt hill.  Antivirus may build a dam to stop the water(viruses) temporarily, some may even evaporate, but some new virus will always find it’s way around followed by an onslaught of others riding its coat-tails.  Antivirus then comes in and plugs up the hole until another one is discovered.  As water

 The moral of this story is to ALWAYS be informed.  If you have an opinion, ask yourself what it’s based on. 

“ Ignorance is the root of misfortune” - Plato

 BOSE - Better profits through Marketing

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Been playing with our engagement photos…  Here’s a couple of fun examples.

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As a web developer one of my routines is to visit all my clients sites to make sure everything is still on the up and up.  The other day I go to check out protowsurfers.org and come across a surfing related Google ads site…  You know the ones you usually accidently stumble upon when you mis-type URL’s.  Ironically, the same day there’s an article titled “Microsoft sues domain squatters” which goes into ‘typosquatters’ and ‘cybersquatting’.  Now I’m impressed that my clients niche site for extreme surfing actually has a typosquatter.  I retype the domain name and the same things comes up.  ‘WTF’ I say.  After confirming I have the correct domain name the ball starts rolling.  

It seems my client overlooked or never got the domain name registration emails and the domain slipped into limbo.  Enter Scott Meyers of Las Vegas, NV.  According to Whois, Scott Meyers is the new owner of the domain.  Lovely.  So now my client has a custom website without a domain, tons of marketing materials and merchandise with a domain name that he doesn’t own as well as tons of affiliated sites linking to a google ad site putting money in Scott Meyers pocket. 

The real kicker here was that the .com version of the domain name was available at the time he purchased the .org version.  Protowsurfers.org was the home of the “Association of Professional Towsurfers” (APT) a non-profit organization that justified the .org extension while Scott Meyers is in the business of snatching domains from people and turning a profit. 

Multiple attempts by myself and my client to contact Scott Meyers went without answer.  APT even put out a press release to it’s affiliates to let them know what happened.  The release was also forwarded to Mr. Meyers with no reply.

I think the point here is to cover your backside because there’s always some bottom feeder waiting for you to let your gaurd down.  Our plan now is to register the .com and hope the Scott Meyers does what is right and releases the domain back to us.

Update 11/1/2006: The adsense site magically turned into a “Domain name for sale” site the other day.  My client replied immediately and was quoted $100 for his domain.  After easing the frustration of being extorted $100 I talked him into just buying the domain back.  Business is back to usual.

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Katies’ mom, sister Jen and Nena came up and we took our engagement photos at Ventura point.  Here’s a quick example of what’s to come
 

See the rest here

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