Deep questions

1. Is it wrong to call my son "critter"? (Consider, we do live in the South)

2. When did invite become a noun?

3. If an entire generation were raised as vegetarians, would anyone buy fake meat?

4. Am I stealing from Steven Wright, or is the ironic-question-as-[attempted] comedic device in the public domain?

5. Are there any wrong answers?

Broken is Broken.

I've had thisisbroken.com in my links list since launching Flippish, and I once blogged about my own submission to the site. But it's time for an update: thisisbroken is broken.

Well, not exactly broken, but no longer being used. It was owned/maintained by Mark Hurst, proprietor of Goodexperience.com and customer experience consulting firm Creative Good.

Instead of maintaining submissions at thisisbroken.com, they will now be listed occasionally in the Good Experience Blog, which will replace "Broken" in my link list. In addition, there's a flickr group for photos of things that are "broken".

Annoyingly, I still haven't found a way to make the links in my list Some Things to Click open in a new window. In my blog entries, I painstakingly insert the HTML code target="_blank" into each URL to make sure that they will launch a new window and not deprive you, dear reader, of the rest of my witty commentary... but when you go to Some Things to Click, unfortunately your browser window is taken over by the blogspot gremlins and sent away from Flippish.

Also - Woot! (also linked under Some Things to Click) recently launched shirt.woot, which joins the original as well as wine.woot. The original continues to offer electronics and related items on a deal-a-day basis, while wine offers change weekly and shirt operates only during the work week and offers witty and/or bizarre designs on high-quality t-shirts.

Wow, I might have just set a record for links within a single entry on Flippish.

Drive a Korean

Two maligned types of automobile come to mind when I see the letters "orean" -- DeLorean (properly, the DeLorean DMC-12, which sounds like the name of a movie theater) and Korean, like the two specimens currently sitting in our driveway.

Only difference is, the DeLorean brand disintegrated like a water balloon, while Korean brands are climbing in both popularity and reputation.

Edmunds Inside Line points out today that Hyundai is now the #8 "Best Global Brand" automobile, ahead of Nissan and Porsche, among others. Since this is a global survey, it's a strong signal that most of the world has caught onto the fact that Hyundai and its subsidiary, Kia, are building some first-rate cars these days.

For better or worse, the auto industry -- like so many others -- has entered the age of true globalization. Our Hyundai Sonata was manufactured in Alabama, as are some Mercedes Benzes. In a 2006 comparison between a Hyundai Sonata, Toyota Camry, Honda Accord and Ford Fusion, a major car magazine pointed out that the Ford is the only one of the quartet that is not manufactured in the USA. It's built in Canada, on a Mazda platform (Ford owns a controlling interest in Mazda).

So what does this all mean? A couple of things:

1. No more generalizations about the quality of a car brand based on the country it's from. German-based Mercedes has recently fallen near the bottom of most quality rankings, while some "cheap brands" (American and Asian) are in the top 10. Globalization means that every car company is capable of building top-quality automobiles, and each can also build clunkers. Modern Quality Control, not country of origin or location of corporate headquarters, is what matters.

2. What was true 20 -- or 10 -- years ago may no longer be the case. Most American car-buyers have come to the realization that American cars are no longer the most dependable on the market - far from it. But in more recent memory, many brands were associated with certain reputations, and those are quickly being shattered too. Hyundai was known for econo-shoeboxes like the original Elantra, and they're getting ready to release a V8-powered luxury sedan that will rival Lexus at half the price. Saturn, which came to be known as GM's flimsy division, is starting to sell mostly rebadged Opels -- the European GM brand, which builds some of GM's most exciting and well-designed cars in the world.

The rest of the world is quicker to dismiss their old notions and make really practical purchasing decisions. Europeans have caught onto the fact that there are some solid cars coming out of Korea, while Americans (by-and-large) are more inclined to spend big dollars on a brand with status, without regard to practicality or even reliability ratings. Car and Driver magazine recently suggested that Hyundai change their logo, in order to help the American public move past their old perceptions of the brand.

My advice to car shoppers? Make a list of the criteria that are important to you, like fuel economy, fun-to-drive, passenger space, safety features, reliability, etc. Narrow down your list of candidates based on your criteria (Edmunds.com is helpful) but with complete disregard for brand names. Then, test drive each candidate - even if it means driving a Saturn back-to-back with a Lexus. You may be surprised.

Trading deadline deal...

Braves to trade Salty along with shortstop and pitching prospects for Mark Texeira and a LH RP.

Here's the email conversation between me and my brother on this topic:

Daniel: All I can say is we better win THIS YEAR.
Me: A shame... After all those hours spent attaching the letters S-A-L-T-A-L-A-M-A-C-C-H-I-A to the back of a Braves jersey...
Daniel: And now we have to figure out how to pronounce Texiera.

To which Rachel weighed in, it's Tə-share-uh. As in, "Texeira is to care-a."

Miss me?

It's been a while since I've done much blogging. I apologize to my faithful readers. I was hoping that six degrees of wikipedia and the Thriller video would keep you entertained long enough for me to take a hiatus.

Truth is, there hasn't been a whole lot of excitement to report. I've been spending most of my time on the internet, playing games and reading blogs looking for jobs. Not much to report there, except that it's hard to find anything very exciting (to apply for!).

Seth has become fully mobile. He crawls like he's going for a land speed record and pulls up to stand against anything that's 12 to 18 inches tall - chairs, coffee tables, his stroller. Yesterday, we took him to a "family day" with the new moms' group (family day includes Dads too). There were probably 15 babies there with their parents, and Seth was the only one who is fully mobile. He spent much of the day crawling over other babies and stealing their toys. I wouldn't call him a bully because he doesn't seem to have mean intentions, but he can have a tendency to leave a pile of crying babies in his wake. He better be careful - when all those other babies start crawling and they're on equal footing, they might put out a bounty on him.

In the news

When sibling rivalry goes wrong: A guy driving a motorized cart at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia crashed through a closed elevator door, falling down the elevator shaft and landing on the elevator... in which his own brother was riding. (Deadspin)

A bad week to be a daredevil pilot. (Piloting a news chopper is just as daredevil as piloting a stunt plane)

Why I don't believe in exorcism. Then again, maybe the demons just jumped from the 3-year old to the grandfather...

Drew Carey to host TPIR

Although The Price is Right will never be the same without Bob Barker, I have so say I'm pleased with the replacement. Evidently, CBS has offered the hosting duties to Drew Carey.

Don't get me wrong - he's not the greatest comedian of our day - but he's generally funny and personable. I'm confident that TPIR will continue to be as watchable as ever with Carey hosting. And that's a good thing, since the timeslot works pretty well for the unemployed.

Time for a Playground!

Yesterday, we took Seth to a neighborhood playground about a mile away. We put him into a "bucket swing" (basically, a rubber bowl-shaped swing with holes for legs) and let him swing a while.

He loved it - in stark contrast to the plastic swing we tried in our front yard about a month ago, which just seemed like another place to sit and look around. So now we're thinking that The Boy is ready for a swing at home.

This actually presents a bunch of options:

• Buy a swingset and assemble it
• Buy lumber and other supplies and assemble a swingset
• Come up with plans, buy lumber and other supplies and build a whole playground, including swings

I'm really considering all of these options. I'm hesitant to just build a swingset because it would require cementing into the ground, and I'm not sure we want to give up yard space permanently - not to mention, having no idea what would be the effect on our home's value. I'd love to build a more elaborate playground, most of which could sit above the otherwise-useless slope in our backyard, but again there's the question of impacting our property value -- not to mention the question of allowing my son to risk his life on a contraption that I built myself.

I guess option #4 is to walk a mile to the playground whenever he wants to play... not a bad fallback for the time being, especially considering the price.

Simply... Thrilling.

Here is the latest internet video craze, for those of you who use my blog to keep up with such things.

1,500 inmates at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (read: prison) in the Philippines, rehearsing... what else, but Michael Jackson's Thriller. Words don't do it justice, so just watch the vid.

Thanks to Zac for sending this by way of Daniel.

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

I still remember when I first heard about Wikipedia several years ago. I think it was Stephanie who shared it with the warning that it would probably hurt my productivity at work -- an site that could kill hours.

Well, here's the next evolutionary step in killing time online: Six Degrees of Wikipedia. As you might imagine, it finds the shortest route of links between any two wikipedia articles. Apparently some searches will require more than six links, but the best I've found so far took five (Mirthmobile to Minyan).

Bye-bye, productivity!

Update: (9:55pm) Found a path that requires seven links: phylacteries to rheumatoid...

Spy Squirrels!

Came across this on Engadget, and I can't imagine how this hasn't made bigger news. Evidently, Iran "arrested" over a dozen squirrels for carrying foreign intelligence devices. Then again, maybe they arrested foreign spies posing as squirrels...

Where ya been?

Sorry about my recent lack of blogging last week. We took The Boy down to the family vacation week in Georgia, where the only internet hookup available was virus-prone. We're back now, so be ready for a flurry, making up for lost time.

Flippish Hen!

Our third Flippish Hen is awarded to Stephanie, in gratitude for her two very informative posts this week on the Simpsons Movie and Slurpees - er, squishees. Keep up to positive contributions!

Please hold for the next available representative.

ABC News has an article today about consumers' frustration with customer service. In general, I agree with this article: there are a handful of companies that get it right, and hundreds that seem to be clueless.

However, there's one part of the article that, in my opinion, glosses over reality. The article points to the increase in touch-tone phone menu systems (Interactive Voice Response or IVR in industry-lingo) as a contributor to consumers' frustration. I don't entirely disagree here, but the assertion that companies do this "to save money" makes it sound like the entire purpose of phone menus is to make executives rich while telephone agents get laid off.

Reality is far more complicated. There's a reason that phone menus and self-service systems have become so commonplace: they can handle tremendous volume with very good efficiency. In many industries, the majority of customer service calls are very simple inquiries - account balance, bill payment, store locations and hours, etc. If 70% of calls are simple enough for a computer to provide the answer, the 30% of calls that are truly complex can be more efficiently handled by live agents.

Assuming that ratio (70/30), imagine that customers complain about being put through phone menus in order to get anything done. (Not that hard to imagine, huh...) The company has three options:

1. Continue to put all calls through the phone menu
2. Route all calls directly to your existing pool of live agents, as a result of which everybody who calls will be subjected to 10-30 minutes of waiting on hold for an exasperatedly busy agent
3. Hire enough live agents to handle all calls immediately, as a result of which the company must raise prices of their products by 10% in order to cover the increased servicing costs

The results of options 2 and 3 are very real. One large company discovered that the cost of implementing a "zero-out" (press zero at any time to reach an agent) was approximately $40 Million annually, as a result of the additional agents they'd be forced to hire in order to handle those calls. And to be honest, it's not an efficient use of those agents -- they will probably get thousands of mis-directed calls, since the customer will have skipped the menu that normally directs calls to the right group of agents.

Okay, I left off option #4 above. The fourth option is to invest a moderate sum of money in a phone menu system that is extremely easy and intuitive to use. These systems are constantly improving - and in fact, many of them are now capable of "learning" based on customer inputs and behaviors so they become more efficient over time. This investment would be much smaller than adding additional agents, and would have a better payout.

Problem is, consumers have become trained to hit zero as soon as they hear a menu, and would need to give the new system a chance to work.

Slurp Today!

Today is July eleventh -- also known as 7/11. In their annual tradition, today is the day that 7-Eleven stores give a free Slurpee, measuring 7.11 ounces if memory serves me correctly.

I tried to link to their site for validation of this deal, but both 7-eleven.com and slurpee.com have been taken over by promotions for, you guessed it, the Simpsons Movie.

Simpsons Me

Thanks to Stephanie for the useful tip-for-the-bored in her last comment. Keep it up, Ernie, and you'll be gunning for your very own Flippish Hen!

Anyway - here's my Simpsons avatar.

Simpsons Movie plug

Just watched Homer Simpson provide his own intro for the All-Star Game. Leave it to Fox to insert a plug for the upcoming Simpsons movie - but at least Homer's All-Star segment was sort of funny. If only they'd played "Talkin' Softball"...

Well, Mister Burns had done it,
The power plant had won it,
With Roger Clemens clucking all the while.
Mike Scioscia's tragic illness made us smile,
While Wade Boggs lay unconscious on the bar-room tile.

We're talkin' softball, from Maine to San Diego,
Talkin' softball, Mattingly and Conseco,
Ken Griffey's grotesquely swollen jaw,
Steve Sax and his run-in with the law,
We're talkin' Homer, Ozzie and the Straw.

I'm not sure how I feel about the Simpsons movie. I'm sure I'll feel the need to see it but I'm a little nervous that it might disappoint.

Update 7/11 1:12pm: Added the full lyrics, from memory!

Poop on a Plane

I came across this story today about a horrific Continental Airlines flight that occurred last month. I can't do it justice, so read one passenger's account. There's also a whole blog dedicated to this topic, also linked from the account above.

I don't consider myself aggressive when it comes to lawsuits, but this sounds like a pretty legitimate complaint.

Happy Swimming!

Seth's kiddie pool was a success. We played for almost an hour yesterday. He loves splashing and playing with water toys. And the water level is just right for him to crawl around and keep his head out of the water.

We also cleaned out (mostly) one end of the family room and made Seth's first real playroom. He's got a foam alphabet mat to crawl all over, and plenty of toys.

On the other hand, he's starting to outgrow some of his things. Besides the obvious (clothes), he's no longer fitting into his infant carrier, so we've installed convertible seats in both cars. Those can be switched to forward-facing when he's over a year and will last until he's 65 lb. His changing pad has also become relatively useless -- he squirms and rolls so much during diaper changes that we're afraid to do them on top of the dresser, and instead we change him on the floor.

I wasn't prepared to find a place to store all the stuff he can't use anymore...

Udpates: Seeing and Swimming - and CRAWLING!

Today, I took the girly glasses back to Lenscrafters and exchanged them for a pair that might aptly be described as more "neutral." Fortunately, the frames that I chose were the same price as the last pair, so there was no cost. They do stand behind their 30-day guarantee.

Also today, I went to Toys-R-Us (where's the backwards R key?) and purchased a large, plastic kiddie pool to indulge Seth's enthusiasm for swimming. They were sold out of normal-sized kiddie pools, so I splurged ($13) and bought one large enough for Rachel and I to join The Boy while he swims laps.

While at T-Я-U (found it!), I also purchased... drumroll please... a baby gate. Why, you might ask, do we need a baby gate? Well, Seth came very close to crawling while we were in Israel, and finally proved himself yesterday afternoon. He was crawling back and forth on our queen size bed to get to various toys. Still haven't seen any sustained crawling over a distance on the floor, but I think he'll be ready for that within days.

Looks like our next adventure will be baby-proofing the house, now that he's mobile. Actually, I don't think baby-proofing is possible -- we'll be making the house "baby-resistant." The alternative, making the baby house-resistant, would require a good deal of foam rubber and duct tape, and probably wouldn't be very kind.

So far we've capped many of the electrical outlets, installed latches on the under-sink cabinets where various cleaning chemicals are stored, and installed the aforementioned baby gate. Probably the biggest and easiest change will be that Rachel and I will need to get into the habit of closing doors behind us -- for things like bathrooms, closets, utility room, etc. Got a while to go before he'll be reaching or turning doorknobs.

Awarding of the Flippish Hen!

The second Flippish Hen award goes to...

Rodrigo, for his comment on my Radio Smack entry. His comment merits this award for three reasons.
1. It's in another language -- Portuguese, as it turns out -- which is all exotic and stuff.
2. He obviously was under the impression that my blog gets enough traffic as to be a good place to advertise his own blog, where he sells printed t-shirts. I'm flattered, and I certainly hope his server can handle all the traffic. :)
3. The translation of his comment, courtesy of freetranslation.com, is uniquely entertaining:

Hello, I found your blog by the google is well interesting I liked that post. When it will give gives a passed by my blog, is about undershirts personalized, sample I pass to pace as create an undershirt personalized well way. To more.

Keep up the good work, loyal readers and commenters!

Home, sweet home

Just a quick post to share that I'm back home (along with The Boy and his mommy) after a fantastic trip to Israel.

Here are a few highlights:

• Seth was amazing. Our group thought they'd never hear him cry and/or that he was a giggling robot. We really threw out any semblance of a schedule and he rolled with it like a champ. His favorite moment: Swimming in the Kineret (aka Sea of Galillee) -- it was his first swim anywhere besides his bathtub and he loved it! Now we're probably obliged to join a neighborhood pool...
• Israel is an incredible place. If I ever leave the USA (think Cheney presidency), it would be the first place I'd want to go. Everything is so much more tangible there: food comes from orchards instead of factories; socio-poloitical issues really have deep impact; thousands of years of history everywhere you turn; and a beautiful composite of cultures. All that, along with Kosher Big Macs and Whoppers. (Okay, some food still comes from factories.)
• While operating on about 36 sleepless hours, I was interviewed on-camera by ABC News at Dulles Airport yesterday regarding airports and travel security. I didn't think I was very coherent, but apparently the clip made it into last night's national broadcast of World News Tonight. (I still haven't seen it, so if you can find it on the web, please post a link!)
• Very good job news: I got a call while in Israel to set up a "final" intreview with some Senior Management folks at a company-to-be-named later. I'm going in on Thursday, hopefully recovered from jet-lag by then

Good to be back home after visiting home-away-from home.

Update: I found the link to my few seconds of fame on ABC World News Tonight.