Eliza has learned how to clap. Now she can’t stop doing it. She claps for everything, and all the applause is great for mommy’s ego! 🙂
In other news, she stood alone for about 2-3 seconds yesterday. She started off holding on to her “toddle truck” and then decided to let go. She stood there, without holding onto anything, and just looked at us. It’s amazing how brave she is getting.
So in a pretty convoluted story with a straightforward beginning, Amazon has announced that it will be purchasing the social book network Shelfari. Just last month, Amazon also purchased AbeBooks…which is a minority investor in LibraryThing.
*boggle*
So Amazon buys a competitor to a service that they, in effect, already own part of. I can see them wanting Shelfari for the interface, especially as part of a “next generation” Kindle device. But Shelfari doesn’t have much else for Amazon to want, honestly…Shelfari relies on the Amazon book data to begin with, so they don’t have any data that will improve Amazon in any way (except the little bit of social data that can be scraped from the site).
There’s a long discussion about this over on LibraryThing, where Tim is talking the thing out in his open and transparent style. I don’t think this is going to hurt LibraryThing at all…they have better book data, for one, and Amazon now has to fit Shelfari into its systems, which will take a looooong time.
Has anyone seen a value given for the Shelfari acquisition? I’m curious what Amazon paid for them.
Here’s hoping this doesn’t cause Tim too many sleepless nights.
Kudos to DLK and Libraryman for putting this together, and for all my friends that took part. Is cool to see so many people collaborate on something so silly and yet interesting.
Eliza just learned how to move herself forward yesterday. It’s not crawling in the traditional sense but more like an “army crawl” or what some people call “creeping.” Basically, she keeps her belly on the floor, puts her butt in the air, pushes with one of her legs, and reaches forward with one of her hands. We’ve been trying to entice her to move forward for months. What was the first thing she finally went for after all those attempts? Mommy’s lap. Then I tested it with other tempting things placed just out of her reach: my cell phone, her baby monitor, a ball, some favorite toys. Yep! She can move forward alright! It isn’t elegant or fast, but at least she’s getting somewhere. Video to come soon.
I’m just stopping in to make sure this still works. Feels like a month since I posted, but I know it hasn’t been that long.
I’m working on a couple of videos, though, that should explain why I’ve been so busy. Look for them here, soon.
Eliza turns 8 months today! Such a big girl, in all senses of the word. Wanting desperately to walk, not very interested in crawling. Learning how to navigate the scary world of daycare, being without mom, and lots of new emotions. Developing likes and dislikes and letting you know them. Napping like a champ for the first time in her life. Eating everything, including some grown-up food. It seems like she’s not even a baby anymore.
Favorite foods: spinach (although it hurts her tummy), mango, prunes (still!), sweet potatoes
Favorite toys: lift-a-flap books, balls, links, a small stuffed giraffe that she chews on, peek-a-blocks that rattle when you shake them, plates/bowls/cups, bubbles
Favorite hobbies: standing, standing, and more standing. Trying to cruise, especially around her crib. Playing with Indy (the dog). Trying out new sounds. She currently likes “dadadada” best. Playing with her new friends at daycare.
First things first: is that the biggest Buddha belly you’ve ever seen or what? I rub it for good luck.
On to daycare: It has been pretty hellish for both of us, I have to be honest. Last week I left her for 2 hours on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She cried the whole time on M and W, and only cried one hour on Friday. Improvement! Today, the teacher said she cried for maybe 15 minutes after I left, then she was pretty much okay. A bit fussy here and there, but not the constant screaming of last week. Yay! She’s smart. I knew she would figure it out, but it’s hard knowing that she is upset and I can’t do anything about it. Hopefully things will continue to get better. Stay tuned!
The last two weeks have been not the most pleasant with our telephone provider, Vonage. We’ve been using Vonage as our land-line now for something like 2 years, with great results. I’ve been terrifically happy with the quality and features. But now, given my first run-in with their customer service…well, there’s an interesting outcome to this story. Stay with me for the payoff:
So, two weeks ago we came home after a trip to KY to find that something was seriously wrong with our house…cable out, no internet, and because of that, no phone. So we contacted Charter, and they were there the next day to fix the cable and our internet access. But even with the ‘net back…no Vonage.
So I put in an email to support, and that started a 2 week long exchange where they suggested fixes, I tried them, and then they suggested new ones that didn’t work either. It finally came down to the fact that they Vonage router seems fried. Here’s where it gets interesting.
So a new Vonage device on their website starts at $49.99, plus shipping, for the most basic of their boxes. The one I had was a wireless router as well, which pushed the cost up a considerable amount. I asked about the cost for a replacement, and was told that as an existing customer I could get a one time credit of $50. This was where I got interested in the actual customer service aspect of this…they weren’t offering me credit for the fact I’d been down 2 weeks, which seemed an obvious step to me. As well, isn’t it in Vonage’s corner to provide me with equipment, if need be, in order for me to continue being a customer? Even cell-phone companies will give you a reconditioned phone if yours gets broken, and by and large they have the worst customer service in the world.
To make matters worse, they were offering on their website a $79 retail router for $9 to new customers. So a new customer gets a $70 subsidy, but an existing one gets $50. And only after spending two weeks trying to fix the equipment.
So I got aggressive, more from a desire to see what the outcome would be than anything. I told customer support that I found the situation unfair, and that I was unhappy with the outcome. I gave them a chance to step up…and they didn’t. So my next letter, expressing my displeasure, was crossed to the CEO, the Chief Marketing Officer, and the Senior Vice President of Customer Care. How did I get their email addresses? I didn’t…I guessed. I found the emails of other Vonage employees online with a simple Google Search, and noticed that the format was always the same: Firstname.Lastname@vonage.com. Finding the names of any public company’s CEO and such is pretty trivial, and with those two pieces of info, we were off!
So what do you think happened? Not even 12 hours after I sent the email I received a phone call from a Customer Service rep. Said CS rep assured me that I would be receiving, at no cost to me at all, a new Vonage device…the $79 dollar one, as it turns out. Free shipping as well, all credited to my account, device shipping today. Huh.
What’s the moral of our story? That is shouldn’t take complaining to the CEO of a company to get results…the front-line people who are dealing with the public need to be enabled to make decisions like this and engender goodwill. This is even more true in the library…don’t force a patron to wade up the chain of command in order to get something done. Empower your workers, and hire people that have good judgment and can make these calls themselves.
Yesterday, in a fit of frustration at MPOW (well, not really MPOW, but the larger University), I started poking around some feeds, and found someone who had made their FriendFeed into their homepage.
“How did they do that?” I asked myself. Turns out that it’s an embed feature of FriendFeed that doesn’t look like it’s particularly well documented.
The code for the embed is:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://friendfeed.com/embed/widget/USERNAME”></script>
There are at least two variables that seem to work with this string: ?num=VALUE after the username, where value is the number of entries you want to show up, and ?source=VALUE, where value is the source of the feed in your FriendFeed account (Twitter, Last.fm, etc).
So I decided to redo my own homepage, and do something similar, where the FriendFeed just fills the page, with navigational links to my other, more robust online presence. I’ll probably convert it into a two column layout at some point, but for now, it’s a nice lifestream that’s always active and gives a decent accounting of my day-to-day online.
