Bill Bennett

Yesterday I had an email from Genesis Energy titled “Check you are on the best plan”.

This is a good idea and should be welcomed. But the good idea is so poorly implemented it has actually made me less happy with Genesis as my energy provider. I probably won’t change provider, but today I’m thinking about it. Before I saw the email I wasn’t.

Here’s how Genesis screwed a decent customer relationship opportunity:

First, my email says I used 22,623 units of energy in the past year.

It then goes on to tell me if I used less than 8000 kWh (kilowatt hours) I would be better off with one plan and if I used more I’d be better off with another.

Easy-peasy, the letter says I used 22,623 units. That’s 22,623 kWh isn’t it? So its the big hitter plan for me.

Not so fast. 22,623 kWh is a huge amount of electricity. My degree was in Physics and while I’m out of touch with the subject, I still remember this would be a lot of kWh.

So, I ring the 0800 number at the bottom of the email to find out what the relation is between kWh and ‘units’. We’ll forgive the poor English implicit in this – technically the kWh, or perhaps more accurately the Wh is a unit in the usually accepted sense.

On the phone. And lo. I’m asked for my customer number. Now I have this to hand, it’s in the email, but I’m buggered if I’m going to let them know it’s me who is calling. For all I know, Genesis might regard this kind of question as impertinent and mark my CRM record as a “difficult customer” to be deliberately given the run-around in future encounters and charged extra “difficult” fees.

Three times the phone system asks me, and not politely to enter my customer number. Eventually it gives up and I reach another menu where, as is so often the case with CRM systems, I have to listen through a long list of options before reaching the “all other enquiries”. My telephone handset has a timer. It took nearly three minutes to reach a human. There was no music on hold. That’s a big plus point for Genesis.

Eventually I reach an operator. I explain about the email and the mention of “units” and ask how many units are in a kWh. She then asks me again for my customer number and almost cuts me off when I don’t provide it. She says she can’t help me without looking at my customer records.

I tell her she isn’t listening. The question is generic. It is independent of my customer record. After a couple of turns of the loop, she gives in and tells me there are 660 units in a kWh.

Now I’m curious. What exactly are the ‘units’ we are talking about here? It’s clearly nothing to do with electron volts eV. It could be related to the Joule or perhaps the calorie. Can anyone enlighten me?

Updated

You can read a gazillion other opinions of the worthiness or otherwise of Apple’s iPad device elsewhere. Here I’m concerned only with its credentials as the eBook reader that will lead the great unwashed away from print towards a brighter, possibly greener digital future.

On balance it’s a serious contender and likely to displace Amazon’s Kindle from its current pole position. While I believe the iPad in its current form is still well short of ideal, it nudges the product class nearer to the goal.

Of course, this barely matters. Consumers will queue up in their hoards to buy the device regardless of considerations over its suitability as an eBook reader. In that respect, the iPad could be the breakthrough eBook device. My comments here relate only to the iPad as an eBook reader.

How I rate the iPad as an eBook reader:

The device’s size is about right. It’s lightweight, slim and big enough for comfortable reading.

I’ve some doubts over the way Apple will sell eBooks – in my view the company is prone to clipping the ticket just a little too hard. No doubt publishers will feel they have little choice but to conform. It’s an ironic lock-in given Apple’s historic market strategy of being the anti-Big Brother computer maker.

Ten hours battery life is at the low-end of acceptability. It may handle a long-distance flight, but other readers do better.

At 9.7 inches, the display size is right. Colour is good. The screen resolution at 1024-by-768-pixel is less than ideal for long-term text reading - I’ve seen reports of either 100 or 115 dots per inch (dpi). I’m indebted to Bruce Hoult (@brucehoult) who twitters a simple calculation sqrt(1024^2+768^)/9.7 shows it’s 132 DPI.

While this is way better than the 72 dpi on a standard PC display, it’s going to mean tired eyes. Likewise the LED-backlit display is less than idea.

Apple’s price is respectable for a multi-function device able to handle many applications but at US$499 plus, it’s a hefty tag for an eBook reader.

My first impression is it needs a lower price, better display and improved battery life if the iPad is to become a serious threat to the printed book – these are all matters Apple may address in coming months.

Scorecard (out of ten):

Finally

These opinions are based on media reports – I haven’t yet touched the device.

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Rosabeth Moss Kanter makes an interesting point on her blog at The Harvard Business Review when she writes about a successful legal action brought by Mattel, owner of the Barbie brand against MGA Entertainment Inc which owns Bratz.

Former Mattel designer Carter Bryant was charged with intellectual property theft because the company said he had the idea for Bratz while working for Mattel. The company’s contracts make it clear inventions made while working for the company become its property.

So, if your current employer does things badly and you know a way to do them better, you now need to halt your thinking processes while you serve out your notice or you could find yourself on the nasty end of a writ. It’s a twist on the idea an knowledge worker is someone who is paid to think for a living.

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Scanning and stitching pages and stories from old broadsheet newspapers has long been a problem.

I’ve been a newspaper journalist for most of the past 30 years. My story portfolio is largely a pile of yellowing paper, that is now fraying around the edges. There’s enough to fill three filing cabinet drawers.

Clearly my hoard is a prime candidate for scanning and digital storage. Yet it’s not easy turning broadsheet newspaper pages into .pdfs or .jpgs. Most home office flatbed scanners are A4 size or maybe fractionally larger. They rarely scan a whole newspaper story in a single go and full pages are out of the question.

You can scan and store pages in sections, but converting from, say, The Sydney Morning Herald, into six overlapping A4 pdfs is clumsy.

And the saved documents aren’t much use for anything.

Software stitching

It’s possible to use applications like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp to stitch photographs together, so in theory they should do the same with newspaper pages. In practice the job is tricky, although I’m told recent versions of Photoshop do a better job.

There are specialist programs able to piece together overlapping images to form bigger documents. Photographers use them to create panoramas. Most are optimised for photos not printed pages, but I came across ArcSoft’s Scan n Stich which automates the task making it easy.

I’d give ArcSoft 9 our of ten for ease of use and practicality. There are two versions of the program. I’ve previously used the US$20 Standard Edition to deal with magazine and tabloid newspaper pages in my portfolio. The program whizzed through the task producing stunning results. I also use Nuance’s PaperPort to organise scanned documents and the same company’s OmniPage to handle optical character recognition so I have both text documents of my old stories and facsimile pdfs.

To scan my broadsheet pages, I’d need to shell out a further US$40 to ArcSoft for its Scan n Stich Deluxe version. I’ve no philosophical objections to paying for software to do this kind of job, but a very practical one; I don’t use credit cards making it hard for me to buy software online.

Free alternative

So I needed to cast around for either something available from local retailers or a free downloadable alternative. I wasn’t too optimistic and started bracing myself for a lot

of Photoshop work. On the other hand, I could just hang on to the paper.

Luckily a friend told me about Image Composite Editor (also known as ICE) from Microsoft Research. It’s a free downloadable program which appears designed for photographic images but brilliantly melded six A4 scans into a single broadsheet-sized document.

ICE is on version 1.2r1 and has been since November 2008, so it’s clearly not a priority for the world’s largest software company. There are a few rough edges and barely anything in the way of documentation, but hey, it not only gets the job done, it does things quickly.

Best of all the application is simple to use. You simply drag and drop images in any order on the main Window and let the program do its stuff. One complication is that you’ll need to have roughly 20 percent overlap between the various pages – but this would be standard in any stitching application.

When you’ve finished there’s a basic crop tool and the option to export the completed image in a several formats.

I had to play around a little with the images to get the best output. My scans were initially black and whites – it was hard to get the contrast level right and some text was always left unread. My scanner software has an enhanced text mode, but I didn’t use this for the composite image instead opting for greyscale images captured at a potentially unnecessarily high 400 dots per inch resolution. The results looked more like photo images, which seemed to help with the stitching.

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From the New Zealand Herald January 26, 2010:

At the peak of the power cut, more than 50,000 homes in the city were without power and traffic ground to a halt, rail services were delayed and some businesses were forced to close.

And

Aucklanders had no disruption to hot water this morning after lines company Vector warned of possible hot water cuts.

Oh, the irony. This Friday will see the deadline for company’s wanting a slice of the action in New Zealand proposed government subsidised ultrafast broadband network project. Taxpayers will be stumping up NZ$1.5 to build a fibre network.

It’s ironic, because Vector is one of the companies expected to bid for this 21st century infrastructure project. And yet yesterday, Auckland, the nation’s largest city and commercial powerhouse was dark after the third major power outage in the last five years.

The lights and power were off from around 4pm to 8pm. Thankfully it’s summer, so the consequences aren’t quite as drastic as in earlier outages. There’s daylight until 8:30 pm, heating isn’t necessary, schools are closed and many workers are still on holiday.

But nevertheless, there was traffic chaos and companies had to send staff home – yet another unproductive day thanks to a third world infrastructure. Many believe the problems stem from earlier industry ‘reforms’ and deregulation.

And here’s the biggest irony of them all. New Zealand’s government wants lines companies and others to help build a world-class internet that should already be in place. The only reason it isn’t is because of historic regulatory failure in the telecommunications industry. But the likely winners of contracts to build the next generation internet are companies that wax fat and lazy as a result of regulatory failure in the electricity industry.

You may be interested to read my earlier post about the urgent need to fix Auckland’s power problems.

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I hate the term ‘platform’ in technology writing. The word is often used in a vague hand-waving way to refer to a piece of hardware or software, or even a combination of the two.

Like ‘thing’ the word comes in useful when the writer doesn’t want to be precise.

Platform is also used as padding to make whatever is being discussed sound more important. For example, there are people who think “the Windows platform” somehow trumps “the Windows operating system” or even plain old “Windows”.

Likewise “the Intel platform”, or any other bloody platform.

Environment too

The same can be said about ‘environment‘. To me an environment is a pond with frogs hopping around. A rain forest is an environment.

To describe an operating system as an environment is pompous, wordy and just poor communications.

I can accept Windows being described as ’software’, it’s accurate, if not precise. We can shorten operating system to OS when communicating with more tech-savvy readers.

There are people who think Apple’s tightly-knit combination of software and hardware qualifies as a platform or an environment (though frequently people who use one term will use both to mean exactly the same thing). It’s not. Software plus hardware adds up to a computer.

If you want to talk about what goes on in the world of Apple computers, say so, be precise, be accurate, call it an Apple computer.

Good writing is clear, concise and unambiguous. “Platform” and “environment” fail on all three counts.

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Sometimes giving old stuff away on Freecycle is more trouble than simply tossing it in a landfill (see Frustrating Freecycle). Taking it to an op shop isn’t always trouble-free either. But I’m not happy chucking out perfectly usable hardware and other items with plenty of life left in them. In my case this is a mixture of greenery, plain old-fashioned protestant hatred of waste and memories of hard times.

One alternative is to list unwanted items on TradeMe, but with a $1 reserve – for overseas readers TradeMe is New Zealand’s home-grown equivalent of eBay, which is in many ways superior to the well-known international auction site.

Listing an item for sale on TradeMe is free. If the item sells, there’s a 6.9 percent commission fee. So if the item sells for $1, I’m 7 cents out-of-pocket. Or, more accuratly, I’m 93 cents richer as it is something I’m ready to give away. These numbers are so small they are negligible. In effect, there’s no discernible cost difference  between selling on TradeMe and giving things away on Freecycle.

Yet the cash element involved seems to oil away some of the friction associated with Freecycle.

As mentioned in Frustrating Freecycle, Freecycle transactions don’t always go smoothly. In my experience more than half the transactions fall through. While many are perfect fine, some Freecycle people are a pain to deal with.

On the other hand, when someone pays for an item on TradeMe, no matter how small the price, the nature of the deal is different. People turn up as promised.

I suspect the reason for this is people don’t put a value on things they get free, so they don’t value my time and effort at the other end of a Freecycle transaction and feel comfortable stuffing me around. When they pay, the transaction has a value to them and they act accordingly.

Thanks to Parsley72 who pre-empted this post in a comment on Frustrating Freecycle.

You may have a different view.

Benefits of TradeMe over Freecycle:

• Money oils away transaction friction
• Feedback scores show good people to deal with
• There’s a legitimacy with TradeMe
• Questions and answers get dealt with in a single, visible place
• Efficient, no need to deal with tons of emails after item has been taken
• Less email aggravation, less rudeness for disappointed recipients
• TradeMe has wider reach

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British marketing consultant Johnny Moore articulates something that has been bothering me in The Tyranny of the Explicit. He writes about “a creeping extension of the need for academic qualifications, the ability to write clever essays.”

He says:

The intention is good, but the practical effect is to engulf people in explicit, complicated systems and reduce their freedom – based on an unconscious assumption that everyone is not to be trusted. We give ascendancy to people who are really great at theory and effectively degrade practice. I think its rooted in the idea that one person or a group of people can effectively oversee a system and control how it works with written instructions.

One disturbing aspect of this is the arse-covering qualifications provide. If, say, a marketing manager hires a copywriter with a degree in copy-writing, they feel absolved of any blame if the writer stuffs up. There’s an incentive inside most organisations to engage the best-qualified person for a task rather than the most experienced, best skilled or highest performer.

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