seanwillson.com

last wednesday our 11 month old siberian hamster died. she hadn’t been eating very well and had been acting strange for weeks. about 2-3 weeks ago she starting digging in her food bowl spraying the food all over the cage and she never seemed to eat. when we fed her treats in the past they were devoured in seconds, recently she wasn’t even able to get the seeds off the outside. amy has her theories and has posted something on her site about it as well. it looked like she lost or hurt her front teeth. it’s a sad way to see a pet die and it was hard to lose the first one even if we knew it would happen eventually. she will be missed … rest in peace elliot chalupa.

still no word yet on my telescope, yea i’m a bit pissed. i’m not sure to what level i’m pissed but it’s definitely eating at me. i’ve talked about canceling it a few times but amy keeps talking me out of it, she knows how much i want one. hell i know how much i want it yet i think a certain quality of service is expected when someone pays out $5k for something. heck even my family ask about it all the time, it’s starting to get embarrassing. it makes me look like a fool having hyped it up and after saying so many good things about the portaball and i still don’t have it.


i’ve heard so much about how great the scopes are and i’ve even looked through one. i’ve also heard about the quality of the service and the ordering process yet it’s been nothing but a nightmare for me since i sent in my deposit. first it was “next month”, then “3 months”, then “the glass is on back order because of the war”. the most recent was that the glass was in and now he is waiting on the parts to be made. i’m starting to get frustrated at this point.


i know that people wait 5 years sometimes for telescope orders from astrophysics. the difference is that they know going into the order that they have to wait a huge length of time. the expectations were clearly defined in the beginning of the purchase. had i known that i’d be waiting for 2 years for my 10 month telescope i think i’d have went with another vendor. despite the quality of the views, part of the experience is waiting and interacting with the vendor. i can honestly say that dealing with mag 1 instruments has been painful and completely driven by me calling or emailing them about the order. i know that is going to come back to bite me when i’m still waiting in 6 months for my 10 month telescope but as my brother told me there is always the better business bureau.


with all of this ranting your probably wondering what they should do differently that would make me happy. i can think of a number of things actually:

1. change the order timeframes on your site to more realistic dates, try doubling them. people who expect things to take longer and get them sooner are happy customers not disgruntled ones like me.
2. call or email your customers once in a while. if the date is approaching and you’ve heard nothing from your suppliers then call the customers who are giving you their hard earned money and explain the situation. they will understand … the key though is don’t let the customer get to the point where they are so angry that they are calling or emailing you.
3. if the customer calls, be honest with them. don’t make excuses if you misjudged something, tell them straight up what is going on. then do your best as a professional to rejudge the future ship date. don’t mislead them by providing over aggressive dates.
4. provide status updates. i think this would be great and if i had a company the first thing i would do is write some simple web software to give my customers an idea of where their order was in processing and what the stages of processing are. i mean come on, $5k is a lot of money for a telescope. scale that up and compare it to cars and we’re talking like a $100k plus car. you get insane service from auto dealers, they kiss your ass when you buy a car for that kind of money.

i know this posting is going to come back to bite me and i’ll likely get flack from other happy portaball orders. you know what, i really hope that in a few weeks when i get my scope (not likely) that i am so happy that i have to retract this posting. i just want the service and expectations that i paid for, nothing more, nothing less.

i drove to michigan this weekend to see my family. it had been a few months since i last saw them and amy had to study for a bunch of exams so i figured it was a good time. christina is looking great … she’s glowing and is getting pretty excited about the baby. it’s a pretty exciting time right now for the whole willson family actually. the baby shower will be in a few weeks in michigan, amy and i both will be attending. we’re looking forward to setting up the games for the shower, should be a fun time for everyone.


my brother broke down and bought an 20gb apple ipod mp3 player this weekend. he has started to see the light of good computer / device design. who knows, maybe some day he’ll be a switcher as well. i think an apple imac would be perfect for christina so she can do all the photos, e-mail, movies, browsing, and chatting. we’ll see … hehehehhe … we’ll see.


mike and lori were looking fantastic. they are both following the atkins diet and are doing great. between them them they are down around 60-70 pounds. not to shabby, make me want to give it a try …. hehehhee. i definitely need to do something different, that’s for sure. molly is the cutest thing every. she’s crawling around on the floor, speaking baby talk, smiling, laughing and making everyone around her happy. you gotta love da babies.


the trips are never long enough, but we’ll be spending a lot of time there in december when baby samantha arrives.

i’ve spent the last week using my new powerbook and i have to say i absolutely love it. i’ve downloaded all of my music, images, personal files and everything else i needed. it was more difficult getting my mail transfered to my mac that i first expected. i had to install mozilla on my windows machine, import my outlook mailboxes, ftp the mozilla mailboxes to my mac, and then import those into mail.app. once it was imported everything was perfect though, just a few more steps than normal. i wonder if apple ever plans on supporting the ability to import mail from outlook for other switchers? anyhow, i love the spam protection in mail.app, it’s pretty sweet. it’s identified about 95% of my spam correctly and is still learning.


the first mac application that i bought was pixadex. it allows you to organize your icon collection and easily export them to folders and containers that can then be applied with candybar to your whole system. i like to change the look of my desktop, files, and folders but never did it in windows because it was a pain in the ars. anyhow, i’ve downloaded 2939 icons since installing pixadex, pretty cool ahe.


the other applications that i’m planning on buying soon are transmit and launch bar. transmit is a very slick ftp application that allows you to easily edit remote files locally, synchronize remote folders and files, and also supports sftp. it’s made my recent web design work a million times easier. launch bar is a very cool utility that allows you to quickly, usually within 3 key strokes, access any application, file, url, or email on your computer. these applications are very cool and are making the switch that much more pleasant.


in case you didn’t know what my new computer looked like i’ve included a few images in this posting for you to check out. sweet looking isn’t it?


i’m also really enjoying the new bluetooth mouse. it’s weird not having any cords going anywhere and not having a base station like some of those other cordless mice. it really does fit in well with my new mobile computing lifestyle.


after i finish designing the website this weekend i’ll spend more time getting my machine tweaked even more. i have a few things i want to mess with to make my web and application development a lot easier, i’ll keep you all posted.