COMCAST "FUCKEN" ROCKS!!!

A few days ago, after reading an article about a guy named Frank Eliason at Comcast keeping up with Twitter and RSS feeds on any mention of Comcast, I decided to try to get his attention on a problem that had stumped their tech support and made life difficult for me and Lil’ Pinot. I wrote the following blog post: http://direwolff.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/frank-eliason-from-comcastcan-you-hear-mehear-mehear-me/.

Well wouldn’t you know it, Frank responded the very next day. I hadn’t checked my e-mail so I only got it tonight and responded to him. Also updated my post to note that he had gotten back to me. It gets even better, after my note back to him elaborating on the issue his next response was the perfect answer and solved our problems!!! Two e-mails and the guy nailed it, all from me posting it on my blog. While there’s plenty of bad things we can say about Comcast, it’s clear that we need to differentiate between the institutional issues and the people, because when it comes to the people it’s clear that some care a lot about the customer. Note, Frank’s interactions with me occurred from 10:30pm to 11:00pm on a Friday night. That blew my mind and really forces me to rethink how I consider this company. It’s clear that some people there totally *GET IT*.

Kitesurfing Ad in Tel Aviv…COOL!

A buddy of mine took this picture of a billboard in Tel Aviv advertising kitesurfing just outside of his hotel there.

Gotta love that! :)  SEND IT!!!

Bularoo Update…

As you may recall from my previous post on this matter, “Best Bularoo Quiver; the Good, the Bad and the Ugly“, I mentioned the mishap that happened with my 10m Bularoo that was suffering from two slow leaks. The good news is that my dealer, Live2kite.com, replaced it without incident and told me that he would take care of this with Best. The bad news is that today is day number 4 of riding the new kite, and again a slow leak seems to have manifested itself. This time I was in very intense waters just outside of the Golden Gate Bridge, with big swells and somewhat gusty winds averaging 21kts (16-26kt range). After falling off a swell, while holding my kite up above me and reaching for my board I noticed the kite nearly fold up then straighten out again. This sometimes happens if a big gust hits it followed by a big lull. But something about the way it folded didn’t feel right.

I immediately signaled to my buddy Bill that I was going to head back to shore, and we both motored down wind. It took about 15 minutes to get back to Crissy Field and sure enough upon landing the kite and checking the main bladder it had lost tons of air. The leading edge was very soft and I was very lucky to have made it back to shore when I did or I would have surely experienced another kitemare. This is nuts!!! As I let it sit for a bit longer, more air escaped so that it was nearly all flat within another hour. This is the second brand new Bularoo 10m kite I’ve gotten in a month that’s had this happen to it. I’m pumping it up to the recommended 10psi and making sure every valve is properly closed (especially these days since my last incidents).

Well, I need to get to the bottom of this and find out what’s going on here. I’d hate to believe that Best is selling defective kites. I’m a big fan and have lots of other friends riding their other kites. One of my buddies is riding the Bullies too and two days ago he felt one of his end rib bladders was low. Not good. I’ll update this post with what I learn, but suffice it to say, I “ain’t” happy. Given the conditions and situations we get into up here in Nor Cal, having unreliable kites is not only disconcerting but downright dangerous and the last thing you want on your mind as you get out to sea.

*** UPDATE 5/2/08: After the Cabrinha Thursday Night Race Series at Crissy Field last night, the racers are invited to unwind at St. Francis Yacht Club adjacent to the park. While there, I met a young guy whose name escapes me, but he flies a Best Nemesis XP quiver. We got to talking about the slow leak issue I’ve been facing and he explained that it’s a known problem. What’s happening is that the small plugs for the valves on the struts are actually a tiny bit too small. Under air pressure from being pumped up, they tend to release air. This was also happening to his kites. He explained what he learned from another friend.

Pull the plugs off the velcro and the plastic ring that keeps them attached to the valve. Find a pencil or something that can be inserted into the hollow end of the plug that will stretch this. Next, boil some water, then drop the plugs in (I’d recommend one at a time since it doesn’t take long to soften a plug) for a minute. While soft from having been in the hot water, insert the pencil or other device into the hollow end of the plug so that it’s forced to stretch just a tiny bit (the pencil seemed to work best as it barely fit and provided just enough stretch for the plug). Stretching the plug too much will mean that it won’t be able to fit in the valve when you put it all back together, so err on the side of less stretching, not more. After putting the pencil into the plug, then dip the two into cold water to harden the plastic. Consider twisting the pencil while inside the plug before dipping in the cold water just to make sure that the plug is legitimately stretched. That’s it. Then put the plugs back in the velcro and in the plastic holder that’s attached to the valve, and you should be good to go.

Yesterday I pumped my kite up to check on it before fixing it, and it deflated sufficiently to notice within 10 mins. and by 30 mins. it had lost a lot of air. After fixing it today, I left it out for 3 hours and no air had escaped. This afternoon, with a bit of confidence under my belt, I went out to Crissy Field again in 25 kt winds and it held up perfectly. Checked all the ribs and the leading edge, and everything appeared to hold up fine. While I’m no fan of buying a new kite that I then have to work on, I’m just happy to gain some peace of mind from having this issue resolved. I wish Best Kiteboarding would take the time to make this information available as it’s my understanding that this problem is not occurring with Bularoos only, but with all of their kites. Nothing on their web site or their forums explicitly addresses this issue, and from what I understand from the guy who shared this, he has discussed it with Shannon Best to no avail. Sad but true.

Frank Eliason from Comcast…can you hear me…hear me…hear me…

Just got done reading the Social Media Insider e-mail newsletter from MediaPost titled, “All A-Twitter About Comcast’s Twitter Guy“.

It’s a great post about how Frank Eliason from Comcast has been tracking RSS feeds and Twitter to keep up with commentary on the company. It’s very cool and innovative, so I’m going to give it a try by talking about them here about a specific nasty little problem that’s developed with our use of Comcast at our home/office. It all started on April 3rd of this year when all of a sudden my wife called me while I was on business in New York to tell me that she couldn’t send e-mail. She was receiving e-mail just fine, but was getting errors in sending e-mail. My first thought was that she’d gone and done something weird and just needed to reboot and everything would be fixed. That didn’t work. Then I went and looked at our domain service and our hosted e-mail service to make sure those were operational, and sure enough they checked out. On my end, I was having no problems sending and receiving e-mails to my Crackberry so I knew the basics were working just fine.

When I got back home a day later, my computer got on our wi-fi network without a hitch and I was able to get on the Internet and was receiving e-mails with no probs, but guess what? Sending e-mails wasn’t working. Actually, the more I diagnosed things the worse it seemed. Not only could I not send e-mail to the SMTP servers from our domain but I couldn’t send e-mail through Yahoo! Mail or Gmail from her machine or mine. Note, she’s using a MacBook with Microsoft Entourage and I’m using a PC running Vista and Microsoft Outlook 2007. This was nutty. So I booted up my old PC with XP and Outlook 2003 on it to see if that would work, and surely that too didn’t work. Note that the POP protocol was working fine since we could receive e-mail, but sending through SMTP both where it was secured and where it wasn’t didn’t work.

In calling Comcast support, I knew this would be out of the league of a general support person as this was a very nuanced problem. Considering we have been living in the same house for nearly three years without a problem other than the occasional reboot of our computers, the wi-fi router or the cable modem, and all of a sudden computers using three different operating systems and three different mail clients stopped working, it wasn’t going to be easy to diagnose. He recommended that we try our Comcast mail account which we had never used. It was easy enough to add it to the list of e-mail accounts and once again, this too was able to receive e-mail through the client apps but not send any. Yikes!!! He then mentioned that they didn’t support Outlook, only Outlook Express, which sounded like an immediate cop out. For Pete’s sake, given the dominance of the Outlook platform, you’d have to be an idiotic company not to support your users’ use of all flavors of Outlook. More importantly, it was clear that it wasn’t the problem since we had been using our e-mail clients for nearly three years without incident. I did also try to “ping” the e-mail servers and in a twist of irony I could ping all of the SMTP servers and get responses except for the Comcast SMTP server. Too funny, but weird at the same time. Why can I get a response off of “ping” but not from the Outlook test sends to the accounts. Hmm…

Well, since this fiasco I’ve been relegated to using Gmail through the Web client which is perhaps a good thing as it’s helping me virtualize my system and reduce my dependency on my PC’s software, basically I’m now working off the cloud ;) However, it is frustrating having to change my organizational system.

With this said, I hope Frank catches my blog post so that I too can write about the awesome Comcast service that I’ve grown accustomed to and have found to be reliable. My wife is not as pleased with the virtualization experiment, so it would be helpful to resolve this issue so her life could be made easier since she finds using the Web e-mail clients impractical for keeping track of her e-mails.

Frank, can you hear me?!!! Please…

*** UPDATE 5/2/08: I hadn’t had a chance to check my e-mail yesterday, but Frank responded with some thoughtful consideration.  We haven’t fixed it yet, but at least we’re in a dialog.  This guy ROCKS!!!  That he saw my post and responded shows that Comcast has some really bright people who understand and care about their customers.  Some times bureaucracy gets in the way of people being able to do the right thing, but every now and then a few get together to overcome this and do the right thing.  Frank and whatever team he has working with him on keeping up with these channels of communications deserve a big fat round of applause.  I’m totally blown away that this story about Frank is actually true and someone at Comcast is helping me get through a really tough time.  This is how to keep a customer, and in an age where customer acquisition costs are growing rapidly and making a switch to another service is fairly easy, this kind of behavior will always be rewarded with loyalty and a story I will tell any friend who disses Comcast.

Great coverage of the Cabrinha Race Series 2008, first event

Steve Gunn from Cabrinha Kites wrote up a great recap and shared some cool pics of the first Cabrinha Race Series 2008 event from Thursday April 17th here.  While it’s a beautiful site to see all of these colored kites nicely ordered making their way to the start, being in the pack of racers is pretty crazy and feels a lot less organized ;)  A blast was had by all though, and I highly recommend this event.

Here’s the newly designed perpetual trophy for the event…

Very cool to have Cabrinha involved in this event and even nicer to see two good friends in Anthony Chavez (as 2006 champion) and Jeff Kafka (as 2007 champion), have their names mounted first.  2008 should bring some great fun and competition to this event, if this first race is any sign of what’s to come.

Preparing for the U.S. Kite Board Racing Championship 2008

Well, the preparations for the U.S. Kiteboard Nationals being held this year here in San Francisco, are under way. Last night was the first meeting of the organizing committee and it really sounds like it’s going to be an even better event than last year’s. As a kitesurfing addict myself, thought it was worthwhile to channel some of that energy in a positive way for the sport in general, and in this spirit I accepted John Gomes’ (head honcho and responsible for making this a great event last year) invitation to be part of the organizing committee.

The event is expected to host somewhere between 80 and 100 riders from all over the world, who will travel to the San Francisco Bay Area to participate. Team riders from many of the top kitesurfing companies will be here ready to mix it up for what will be an exciting week of wind action in the San Francisco Bay, hosted by the St. Francis Yacht Club.

Last year’s event was the first Kitesurfing Nationals and drew an excellent field of riders. Word spread, and we’re likely to see increasing numbers of riders showing up for the event.

This year’s event will be taking place the week of June 9th, 2008. Check here (https://app1.regatta-manager.com/Regatta/RegattaPage.do?page=home&clubContext=stfrancisyc&regattaContext=kitenats08), for registration information.

What’s important to note about this event is that it’s being run like professional sailing regattas with similar rules so that kites can simply be considered a different class of vessel. This really lifts this sport to a new level, not reached so far by many of the other racing events out there. The hope is that in subsequent years, this event can be held in other locations around the country and eventually around the world, so as to spread the sport’s popularity and get more people exposed to its breathtaking nature. Who knows, maybe some day it will be worthy of Olympic attention.

Cool Aussies and a discussion about Plaxo

While at the SocialMedia Happy Hour this afternoon met some cool Aussies, one of which I knew while the other two became new acquaintances. One of them is involved in some of the social media standards work going on behind the scenes, but for the purposes of this post, it’s not necessary to mention who they were.

As we discussed the various social media services we somehow got to Plaxo with me stating that since the beginning of Plaxo’s release, I was always impressed with the service. But while I found it theoretically elegant and worthwhile, I was never able to get past the point of distant admiration to the point of becoming a registered user. For the life of the service and the changes and evolution that they have undergone, it’s teams have always been bright, but some how that just wasn’t enough to get me over the hump of adoption. Even where I’ve been an early user of just about every social network that came out during the initial years, services like Ryze, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, MySpace, Vox and Facebook once it opened up, Plaxo was just never an option.

In discussing this with my acquaintances, I was surprised by the fact that both of them echoed the exact same sentiments. Both praised the service yet neither one of them was a member. Now with Comcast having acquired them, or so the very persistent rumors go, it’s not likely to be a choice for any of us at all, but what was it that kept us away, I wonder. It’s very perplexing to me how many folks I’ve talked to who understand the service (pre-Pulse), who thought it was a useful service, who thought highly of folks like Joe Smarr, but who never joined or leveraged this power to maintain their address book in this distributed service. It’s something I’m going to ponder further, as it’s requiring me to be very introspective about what seems like it should have been a natural choice application for me.

Best Bularoo Quiver; the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

So this season I decided to sell my Best Waroo ‘07 11m kite and move full-on into a Bularoo quiver of a 7m, 10m and 13m kites. My main reason behind this move was that ever since I decided to spend more time riding the waves on the northern California coast, I realized that the ‘07 Waroo just didn’t have the turning speed nor the ability to stay ahead of me enough when riding down a wave at speed. In learning how to ride the Bularoos I noticed several differences between each size which takes some getting used to. I’ll start by saying that I’m generally super pleased with these kites, but do have some beefs which I’ll lay out here as well.

On the pro side, all three sized Bullies are super stable kites. You can literally let go of the bar if you need to fix something while in the water and not worry about the kite moving suddenly into a power zone and yanking you to attention. The kites move very deliberately, and can basically stay put in one position while taking your eyes off of them. In big waves, their stability has been most welcomed, especially after getting caught in an overhead break and noticing that the kite didn’t fall from the sky as is customary when getting washed up by a big wave. The other positives is the turning speed which never leaves me wanting for more power especially when carving a toe-side turn off the top of a big wave (note, I ride goofy footed) on my surfboard. Even when I start my kite turn late coming into the face of a wave, it never feels like it’s too late to complete the motion and get the kite ahead of me with good speed. The exception to this rule is with the 13m kite, which really doesn’t turn proportionately at the speed of the 10m or 7m. While it may be obvious, the difference is more significant than it should be.

The low-end grunt in these kites is also amazing. This is what gives them their range. I’ve been out comfortably on my 10m when people are riding anything from 9m up through 12m kites. In that range, I’ve never felt over or under powered, which I guess is a good thing given the spread in the quiver. When winds are light for any of these kites, moving them up and down seems to generate some serious apparent wind which for now I’m attributing to their mid-aspect nature. I’ve gotten myself out of trouble quite a few times by moving the kite when the wind was clearly low for the Bully I was riding. A very welcomed feature.

Now for the bad. Last week, on a very gusty 7m day at Crissy Field in San Francisco, I was riding far out into the channel when suddenly my kite sputtered out of the sky. First some herky-jerky motion which eventually led to the kite crashing hard. It temporarily relaunched, but it was obvious that it wasn’t going to last nor was it happy. Finally, the kite settled down in the water and had obviously lost its air. After further inspection, it turns out that the small bladder valve, despite being velcro’d down, opened up and let the air out. Because the Bularoo is a one-pump with a one way air flow from the leading edge to the ribs, the air simply flowed out of the leading edge into the bladder with the valve opened. I don’t know how long this was opened, but suffice it to say, it was a very unpleasant experience. Still trying to figure out how the valve opened. Of course this happened on a cloudy, cold, god-forsaken day, but fortunately, there was another kiter nearby who was able to drag me away from the shipping lanes until the Coast Guard came to the rescue. (Quick note here, the Coast Guard out here in the San Francisco Bay ROCK!!!)

Where it gets ugly is that after only having ridden my 10m kite 6 times within the past 3 weeks, it appears that it developed small slow leaks in two of the bladders. After an hour of riding at Stinson Beach yesterday, with no warning, this time my 10m did exactly what my 7m had done at Crissy. But for those not familiar with Stinson, the web cam we use to check the conditions there is called the “Shark Cam”…for a reason ;) Once again, I was fortunate to be riding with some good buddies who came to the rescue and dragged me to shore. The water was super cold for a drag, but far better than the alternative. Fortunately, given that I’ve had the kite for less than 3 weeks and have only ridden it six times without dropping it (except due to this bladder failure), the dealer I bought it from is getting it exchanged for me, as these two leaks constitute an obvious defect. The reason I consider this “the ugly” is because unlike the Slingshot one-pump system, where you can clip the bladders so as not to loose the leading edge if anything happens to those, the Bullies totally conk out when a bladder is affected. Both in the case of the valve opening and the slow leaking bladders, I was out of commission without a chance to get back to shore once I realized what was happening.

Having said that, I hope these incidences don’t become a standard part of my Bularoo experience, as I really love the good aspects of this kite so much, but they certainly are cause for concern. Today on my 13m kite, I was so nervous after 20 minutes of riding that I brought it down on shore to check the pressure in all of the bladders before going out again. Lest you consider me too much of a newbie, I’ve been riding for 8 years now and feel pretty proficient in most conditions.

Oh yeah, one other cool aspect of the Bullies is the land “hot” self-launch maneuver that is relatively easy to perform. Worth learning this trick, comes in super handy.

*** UPDATE 5/2/08: See my follow-up post and update titled, “Bularoo Update…“.

The geek in me couldn't resist…

…trying out Six Apart’s new BLOG IT Facebook app which lets me post to my SEND IT WordPress blog from Facebook while also then posting it into my news feed. Pretty cool if it works and sure is a nice effort saver.

Gotta love the level of constant innovation taking place in this space :)

Google & Salesforce getting just a lil’ closer to my prediction

Activities since August of 2006, have been bringing these two behemoths of the post-bubble Web closer and closer together.  Most recently is their announcement about integrating Google Apps with Salesforce’s CRM service.

In the last paragraph of a post back on October 4, 2005, I wrote:

So I posit here for a minute, what if Google were to acquire Salesforce.com?…hmmm…they don’t really overlap in their product offerings, and if anything complement each other quite well. As well, Salesforce.com’s market cap is only $2.6B, and Google just got $4B in cash…doh! All I have to say is that Microsoft better not sleep with both eyes closed at this point, as I believe the assault on its operating system is coming from both Google and Salesforce.com (at this point separate companies ;-), and could be very difficult to combat in the not-so-distant future.

Well, it looks like that “not-so-distant future” is a little less distant.  Marc Benioff’s response to Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch when asked about why Google doesn’t just acquire Salesforce was, “You should give them a call and ask them about that”.  This is very telling that Marc probably agrees with the logical conclusion as well, these two companies should get married :)

One important change from my original October post is that Salesforce is worth a heck of a lot more, now having a market cap of $7.17B, but at Google’s $141B market cap, I’d say this is still somewhat of a rounding error acquisition that would catapult Google into a very stable and competitive position versus Microsoft and Oracle.  The clear advantage for Google here is that they would be playing the role of the progressive solution and have the significant advantage in the small-to-medium sized business market.  This surely is a case of the combined entities being worth a heck of a lot more than the sum of the parts.