2010: The Year of the Christmas Song!

I’m intrigued by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I love their gritty, unconventional renditions of Christmas song medleys.  And though  they try to “bust out” of the Christmas Band label, it doesn’t appear to be working. Bummer for them, but that makes me interested to make some of my own arrangements of Christmas songs and “contemporize” them.

As I ramp up on my guitar practice and poise my pen to make a new arrangement of O Come All Ye Faithful, it causes me pause and ask, “Which Christmas song are you interested in hearing in a more contemporary fashion?”

Or, “What’s your favorite Christmas song of all time?” Please post your comments! I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

The Internet vs. Brick-and-Morter (or The Times They Are A Changin’)

I continually hear businesses complain about how Internet companies are stealing their business–that it just isn’t cost-effective to do business any more. Boo Hoo!

Here’s a story for you. As an amateur photographer, I am constantly in the market for equipment upgrades and accessories to maximize and optimize my photographs and experience. I have window-shopped several of the local establishments here in Denver, both their new and used departments. I like to patronize the local shops for several reasons. First of all being convenience, then because they ARE local and I like to see businesses succeed.

The other day on impulse, I bought a used lens from one of the local Denver shops at a reasonable price. It wasn’t a steal, I could’ve gotten it cheaper elsewhere (keh.com in particular), but they insisted on the price and they were offering a six-month warranty. Cool, I couldn’t really quibble over $25 for a $850 purchase! Especially when there’s lag-time and shipping costs involved from an Internet company.

The next morning, dork that I am, I got cold feet as I need to sell a few things before I can truly fund a hobby purchase of this nature (fellow photographers understand what I mean) so I attempted to return my recent acquisition not even 24 hours later. That’s when things got ugly.

In attempting to make a return to this local establishment, I was presented with a statement on the bottom of my own receipt: store credit only on returned items over $100 in value. Right–who reads their receipt? And at that point it’s too late! Besides, what can you buy in a camera store for less-than $100? Then I was presented with a 15% restocking fee (about $120). Unacceptable. I negotiated the fees down to about $40–they had to be compensated for the Visa fees–still feeling that was too much. I ended up getting a check from them, negotiating the fees down to $20.73 to compensate them for one-way Visa charges. It was a MAJOR hassle in my opinion.

Now if I’d bought the lens from one of the reputable photo dealers on the Internet, keh.com, adorama.com, or bhphoto.com, I would have had at the very least a 7-day no-quibble return window. But also would’ve been out return shipping. However, I wouldn’t be hassled over why I was returning it–whether it was a problem with the equipment or not, etc. Neither would I be presented with a restocking fee nor would I have to quibble over Visa fees!

It is interesting to note that ALL of the fore-mentioned companies have a brick-and-mortar presence. I’m sure they still pay Visa fees. And I’m sure people purchase items to shoot an event or stuff around the house then return them.

So I ask you… do you think I’ll be returning to patronize that particular local camera store? Do you think I’m being unfair? I think businesses need to catch up with the times and consider that local stores CAN compete when they offer truly great customer service, convenience and friendliness. This business offers very little, if any, of that. Bummer.

As far as I’m concerned, if you want to stay in business now days, you need to pay attention to what’s going on, how you fit into that, and what unique benefits you provide–focus on those, providing even more of what you’re good at.  Or you can be stingy, focused on lack, and go out of business.

The Absurdity of the “Cadillac Pick-Up”

Over thirty years ago (I won’t tell you how old I am), my dear old grandfather said to me, “Honey boy, if they ever make a Cadillac Pick’em Up, I’m going to buy me one!”  Knowing full well, of course, that “they ain’t ever gonna make one, you know?”

Now, my grandpa (may he rest in peace) was a true maverick.  Not in the new, political sense where one pretends to be different than an incumbent.  But someone who holds an opinion and sticks with it come hell or high water, if you know what I mean.  A rebel who smoked like a chimney, swore like a sailor, but loved like a saint.  Yesteryear stories encompassed the gamut between being on board ship in the Big War and participating in dancing contests with his betrothed, picking hops and working construction.  So I ask you, why did he think it was so absurd to conceive of a Cadillac Pick-Up?  We used to chuckle about the concept quite regularly while we harvested wood for the winter stove.

If it’s true that the deceased actually roll over in their graves when something outrageous happens, grandpa is doing somersaults presently because of the adjacent picture.  Here’s your Cadillac Pick-up, Grampa:

The absurd Cadillac Pickem-Up
The absurd Cadillac Pick'em-Up

I wish like crazy that GM could be like other businesses, and disappear when they make stupid business decisions!  Cadillac doesn’t mean “pick-up truck.”  It doesn’t mean “luxury.”  It means “big, comfortable, roomy, luxurious car.”  Duh and good riddance, GM.  I’m ready for an American car company that gets it.  Quality, innovation and target marketing.

Interoperable, Fast Enterprise Messaging

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to consider various messaging frameworks. Being I’m a “Java guy” my bias has been JMS, of course. There are several interesting open source options in that space. Of particular interest to me is Apache’s ActiveMQ. I’ve had good luck with it and enjoyed it’s performance even when compared to high-buck options like Fiorano and Tibco.

As of late, however, because I’m working in a largely C# shop, language support is a new and interesting consideration. Additionally, performance and scalability via commodity hardware is increasingly important. So I’ve been shopping around for options. Yes, ActiveMQ supports C# via the NMS client. But what other options are out there, perhaps in non-Java languages? Erlang, for instance, which offers some compelling scalability opportunities…

Here’s what I’m looking at currently, which might be of interest to you:

  • Apache’s QPid – An AMQP messaging platform.
  • Zyre – An interesting RESTful enterprise messaging approach
  • OpenAMQ – Claiming 590,000 messages per second on a single broker maching (130,000 mps per client)
  • ZeroMQ – An extremely fast C++ AMQP platform, claiming 2.8 (8 byte) messages per second.
  • RabbitMQ – an Erlang AMQP implementation.

Stay tuned….