Cuisinart’s customer service rules

My wife Kelly got a Cuisinart espresso maker as a gift about a year and a half ago and has used it religiously! Every day she happily makes herself a latte. One morning last week her beloved espresso machine began to balk at making her morning coffee. I knew how sad this would make her so I was already determining how much it would cost to buy her a new one.

I needn’t have worried. Kelly called Cuisinart’s (now owned by Conair) support number and, unlike many companies today, spoke to a live person. Not just a live person, but a clueful, live person! After offering Kelly a few strategies to get her ailing espresso maker working, the helpful rep offered to replace the whole thing for free.

Yep. It didn’t matter that it was a gift and Kelly didn’t have the receipt, nor did it matter that it was a year and a half old. Cuisinart is shipping her a brand new espresso maker and taking back her broken one, for free!

At a time when so few companies remember who keeps them in business (ahem, their customers), Cuisinart goes above and beyond. Bravo!

“Force Quit” Yourself to Get Your Sleep Schedule Back

I suppose some people need this.

It’s easy enough to decide to go to bed strictly at a certain time, but actually doing it is another story. We often get carried away in the late hours of the night, trying to knock off just a few more things we wanted to do, whether it’s for work or fun. The next day, we’re tired and filled with regret yet we don’t stop. If this sounds like you, it’s time to start “force quitting” yourself at the end of the day. Here’s how.

via “Force Quit” Yourself to Get Your Sleep Schedule Back on Track and Avoid Another Day of Fatigue.

Time to bus a move

I’ve been looking for a way to take the bus to work and think I’ve found it! There’s a Park and Ride lot just off Blue Ridge Road where a Triangle Transit bus departs at 9:07 AM. It stops at the Factory Outlet Mall at 9:22, from where I can ride my bike over to the office and be there by 9:30. I still have to drive to Blue Ridge Road but it beats driving all the way out to RTP.

I drove over to check out the P&R lot this morning and was pleasantly surprised to see it was almost entirely full! No bike racks, though, which was a disappointment. I would love to have a place to put my bike in the event that the bus bike racks are full and I have to leave it.

I might also consider buying a used bike to leave at the outlet mall so that I don’t have to haul it on the bus every day. As with the Park and Ride lot, there are no bike racks at the outlet mall. I’m not sure why major transit stops don’t have bike racks but I’ll see if I can get an answer.

Oh, and I tweeted yesterday that I could never commute by bus until there’s a bus dedicated to singing. I guess I’ll have to keep quiet or make quick friends with my fellow commuters!

Where I’ve worked: Applebee’s


A thread on Reddit about a restaurant customer leaving two pennies and a nasty note for bad service got me thinking I needed to blog about my time working for Applebee’s. Working as a server was the hardest job I’ve ever had and likely will have.

As I traveled the world in my previous jobs I was fascinated by the different ways different cultures pay their restaurant staff. In Australia there is no tipping as restaurant workers there get paid a full salary. Do you know what restaurant workers here in America get paid? Try $2.13 an hour. Yes, you can’t even buy a gallon of gas for that, but that’s a server’s base pay. The really sad thing is that that rate hasn’t changed since I waited tables at Applebee’s twenty years ago.
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Why Young Americans Are Driving So Much Less Than Their Parents

More about the shift away from driving.

“Unfortunately for car companies,” Jordan Weissmann noted at TheAtlantic.com a couple weeks back, “today’s teens and twenty-somethings don’t seem all that interested in buying a set of wheels. They’re not even particularly keen on driving.”

Now a major new report from Benjamin Davis and Tony Dutzik at the Frontier Group and Phineas Baxandall, at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, documents this unprecedented trend across a wide variety of indicators.

Their two big findings about young people and driving:

The average annual number of vehicle miles traveled by young people (16 to 34-year-olds) in the U.S. decreased by 23 percent between 2001 and 2009, falling from 10,300 miles per capita to just 7,900 miles per capita in 2009.

The share of 14 to 34-year-olds without a driver’s license increased by 5 percentage points, rising from 21 percent in 2000 to 26 percent in 2010, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

via Why Young Americans Are Driving So Much Less Than Their Parents – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.

Lucid dream tracking with my Zeo

Lucid dream tracked by my Zeo


What you see above is a graph supplied by my Zeo sleep headset showing how I slept last night. The green bars indicate dream sleep while the orange bars indicate wake events. My Zeo does a fantastic job of tracking my sleep but there are moments when it gets confused. For instance, the two orange bars to the left don’t indicate when I was physically awake, they show when I was experiencing lucidity in my dream. You see, my mind was fully awake and aware in my dream. I became aware that I was dreaming while I was dreaming!
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Is Traffic Making Us Lonely?

One nation, on the road, indivisible.

This month’s Atlantic cover story, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” has contributed to an ongoing national debate over whether Americans are more socially isolated than ever before, and whether our dependence on electronic communications is keeping us from forming meaningful social ties.

But a generation ago — long before the invention of social media — a man named Donald Appleyard was investigating how automotive traffic isolates us from one another and diminishes our human connections.

via Is Traffic Making Us Lonely? – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.

Cheap Thoughts: automating appointments

After years of constant sessions spent updating our respective calendars, Kelly and I recently began to share our calendar details directly. It’s been much easier to know who’s supposed to be where, and it all happens automatically.

Why is it that coordinating appointments is still difficult if not impossible? I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists for charities and the like, and each one has important dates that they share with me. Yet, I have to manually add the information to my electronic calendar, risking typos and errors in the process.

Why hasn’t this been automated by now? An appointment has a set number of common fields, like date, time, description, participants, etc. It should be easy to standardize, yet everyone still does things the hard way. Why?

The iCalendar format was invented to solve this problem and most mail clients now support it. Still, it’s rare that I get an iCalendar invitation in my email: usually an event is described only in plain text. Why is this?

Facebook’s events are convenient for announcing events but this is only available to Facebook users. If someone came up with a easy-to-use calendaring server that put event details into an iCalendar format reached through a shortcut link, I think it would be heavily popular.

Ting – a different mobile phone provider


Frustrated by the glacial pace of Virgin Mobile to add newer phones to it’s prepaid service, a friend alerted me to a new phone provider called Ting. Ting was started by Tucows, the first company to bring competitive pricing to domain registrations, so I have high hopes Ting can shake up the telecom world.

Ting offers pay-for-what-you-use pricing plans. If you don’t use the minutes or data you signed up for, Ting credits your account. You have very finite control over how your plan looks as well, choosing very specific amounts of minutes, texts, and data you think you’ll use.

Ting also offers tethering with its phones, allowing you to share your phone’s Internet service with up to 5 computers. Ting also supports power users and seems open to allowing its subscribers to extend their phones’ functionality.

Overall, Ting looks to be setting itself up to make some waves in the mobile phone provider market. I hope to purchase one of Ting’s phones soon and give their service a test drive.