A father's journey into relevance. 21st Century Dad...

And now the story can be told: Last December I thought it would be nice to get a present for the whole family, and upgrade our 27" Magnavox CRT television to an HDTV. I did my research, including a perfectly timed article in PC World. I went to the stores, I checked on-line, and I decided on a Philips 42PF9631D. So I ordered it on-line at Philips, taking advantage of a corporate discount program.

As many people tend to do when anticipating a delivery, I checked the website daily for signs that the TV was being shipped. I wanted to know the exact day that I could expect this wonderful 21st-Century marvel at my doorstep. But it took a few days before it showed that a company I had never heard of was going to ship it. I'll just call it "Ship2U" to protect their identity.

After waiting a few more days, I hadn't seen any updates on delivery, so I called Ship2U. It turns out that they were ready to deliver it the next day, and were supposed to call me to arrange for a day and time. It turns out that the next day was not good, but the following day (a Friday) would be fine. It was a Work-From-Home day for me. They were to deliver it between 2pm and 5pm. And of course they show up at 5:15pm.

I should have realized something was not quite right when they proceeded to lift the top off of the box, and an inner box with the TV stand slipped off the top of the TV and onto the floor. But I was able to inspect the TV, and not being a fool, I plugged it in while it still sat in the base sytrofoam in the box bottom. The screen lit up, and I dismissed the movers.

My family went out for the evening, and when we came back there was no time to set up the TV on its stand. So instead I played with it while it was still inside its foam and box bottom. The remote sensor was covered a bit by the box, so I opened it a bit. This caused the TV to lean forward ever so slightly at what I would call an 85-degree angle. The picture looked really good. I even watched 5 minutes of "Lord of the Rings' before tearing myself away from it and going to bed. I just took one last look to make sure the TV was stable. Nope, it was not budging.

Then at 6:45 that Saturday morning, I was woken up by a muffled "thud". I knew exactly what the sound was. If a large plasma TV tipped out of its box onto the carpet, that's the sound I would imagine it would have.

My heart started beating rapidly. Tipping onto the carpet surely wouldn't break it, would it. I raced downstairs, to get my suspicion confirmed. The TV had taken 8 hours to lean far enough to break out of its foam support and land face-down on the carpet. I slowly lifted the (very heavy) TV up and back into the box. It looked okay. The glass front was not shattered or anything. I felt a bit of relief as I decided that plugging it in would be the best thing to do at the moment. The power light came on, but there was no picture!

And then I saw them. The little cracks all over the inside plasma tube. I broke our brand new expensive television! Noooooooooo! I wanted to throw up. (Yes, I knew it was only a TV and I shouldn't be so materialistic and it was only money, but I still wanted to puke.) I was also thinking about how disappointed my family would be, now that daddy broke the new present (keep in mind these were pre-teens, not toddlers).

So of course I spent a few minutes trying to justify how it wasn't my fault. That is when I saw the bottom of the box say "WARNING: DO NOT LEAVE TV IN BOX!!!" Okay, there was no way it wasn't my fault. As the family awoke in the next few hours, I gently let them know that their dad was a big loser who broke their brand new TV without them even getting to see it working. They were kind. They said it was okay, and I shouldn't beat myself up too much. There's a lesson there somewhere.

The next thing I did was try to find my credit card purchase protection policy. It basically said that it would pay up to the first $500. So much for full coverage. But maybe it could be repaired for less than that. Ha! The 2 authorized repair shops said it would cost double to just get a new plasma tube shipped to them. So repair was out of the question. But I could at least dispose of the broken TV at their stores.

I then went to see if I can just order another TV and worry about the replacement costs later. Of course the sweet deal I got had now expired, but Amazon.com sold the same model for just $100 more. I decided that after all my time and research, I wanted to just stick with the same one. So I hit the "complete transaction" button and ordered a 2nd TV. I would be out the difference over the credit card refund plus the $50. Not a total loss, at least.

I kept the broken TV in it's box covered with a blanket, so I would not be constantly reminded of my expensive mistake. And I began the paperwork for the credit card refund. That's when I read the delivery invoice. It stated that they were supposed to set the TV up for me. They had never even offered. So I was now thinking that maybe it wasn't entirely my fault.

So I went through the same exercise of waiting for the new TV to be delivered, checking for a delivery date. Hmmm. No actual date. I called up, and found the same story as with the first TV: Someone was supposed to call me first to arrange a date. It was the same shipping company. And when they arrived with the new TV, it was the same delivery guy!

So here is where I started to show what I had learned from the incident so far. When they brought the TV in, I explained to them that they were supposed to set it up on its stand for me. So they proceeded to open the box from the bottom again. I had to point out that the box said "open from the top first". This prevented the big inside box from slipping off, and guess what? Unpacking instructions where right there too! They moving guy admitted that they never set one up before, and were never told to. So I directed and assisted in following the instructions to the letter, and we got the TV up on its stand, and onto the entertainment center. Before they stepped out the door I made sure it was all working fine.

So now I realized something. If they had done their job on the first TV, I would not have tried to set it up myself, and it would not have fallen. So my wonderful wife called up the moving company the next day. And they transferred her to Philips, who heard our story. And then the most amazing thing happened! They agreed that the moving company was at fault, and they reimbursed me for the TOTAL AMOUNT of the first TV! They sent the same moving company to pick up the old TV and send it back, and we were only out the $50 difference in price between Philips and Amazon.

Lessons learned:

My wife is wonderful and can perform miracles.

Read the invoice when movers deliver something.

85 degrees is not a stable angle for a 75 pound object in foam.

Never laugh at people who broke their plasma TVs with a Wii controller.

Take responsiblity for your mistakes, but it always helps to share the blame.

Google Maps now has a great feature: My Maps. It lets you keep your own personal set of tags. Some people have gotten very creative: Presidential Election maps, vacation maps, all the Major League Baseball stadiums, and more.

I decided to make a personal map, and marked it with all the places I have lived in my life. You can find it
here (if anyone is really interested in where I have lived). I'm sure I can think of really good uses for My Maps, but for now I'm content to stare down at roofs of the places I have called home.

And speaking of Google Maps: Remember your first flight across the US when you were little? You looked out the window and wondered why you couldn't see the big dotted lines marking the borders between states. Well, I've been using the Hybrid feature of Google Maps for a while. When I was flying across California recently, I was trying to figure out which city or highway we were over. I really wished I could click a button and see the hybrid feature of street and city names overlaid across the landscape. And coming home, I didn't know if we were crossing the Sierras or the Rockies. It would have been nice to have everything labeled for me, at least as an option. And while I'm wishing, I wouldn't have minded a feature to remove the cloud cover. You don't see any clouds on Google Maps!

My family is going to be flying to Mexico this Saturday. Yesterday I was talking with my kids about what I learned from Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat". He does a very good job of explaining the root causes of why we will be getting up at 4am for a 9am flight.

So my kids and I started talking about taking off our shoes when going through security, and why we started to do that. I explained how it was pointless, because "those bent on doing us harm" (I don't want to raise any NSA flags with the "T"-word) would say "Oh, they're onto us with the shoe thing. Better move to the _____ thing." It might make a lot of people feel more secure, but it won't really make them more secure. My kids are 13 and 11 years old. They get it.

This led my intelligent children to start talking about new ways that people might think of doing harm. They talked about ingesting dangerous liquids, and then vomiting them out. Then they started talking about using other bodily functions to cause things to go "boom" (I did mention that they are 13 and 11, right?).

We are going to have a field day at the dinner table tonight with the latest security alert. There is now a ban on bringing liquids, gels and lotions onto the airplane. The exceptions are baby formula, breast milk, or juice for small kids travelling with an adult. It doesn't define what a small kid is. So some poor 7-year-old might just get his juice box taken away. Deoderant or toothpaste for those long flights? Forget it. Guh-ross! Drops for those contact lenses? Better wear your glasses. Chapped hands from the cabin air? Live with it.

And how will they know that the stuff really is breast milk?

I did not originally plan on participating in Black Friday this year. There were no major electronic or software components that I felt I really needed. And then I saw the ads on Wednesday. I was working from home, and was being very good at resisting the call of the newspaper. But Wednesday evening I opened them up, got out the notepad, and began leafing through the ads one by one.

I had made a little list of things to look out for, just to keep me focused. I could use a 2nd harddrive for my video editing. And my daughter wants a digital camera for Chanukah. And to go along with that we could use more SD memory cards. And there were a few other things that would be worth it if I could get a hold of them.

So I committed myself to wake up at 6:15am Friday morning. My 12-year-old son wanted to come along, so I quietly went into his room. He normally takes a bit of shaking and tickling and calling his name 10 times to wake him. But when I whispered "do you want to come shopping with me?", he sat bolt upright and said "yeh". So we grabbed some waffles and headed to our first destination.

Circuit City was our first stop, just 10 minutes from our house. We got there at 6:45am, but this was almost 2 hours after they opened. The parking lot of totally full. Not a good sign. The checkout line started at the front of the store, and snaked on all the way back and around the corner. To save $15 on a memory card and $10 on MiniDV tapes was not worth an hour or more in line. But just to be sure, I checked the racks with memory cards. Of course they were out of the ones on sale. And I didn't even check the items on the short list from my brother-in-law. I knew they'd be out of them. So we went on to our next stop.

Office Depot was our next stop, just a couple of minutes down the road. The parking lot was relatively empty, and the store looked just a bit more busy than a typical Sunday afternoon. My big surprise for my kids: a new computer for them, since the 766 MHz Athlon system upstairs was too slow to run their favorite websites. So where was the HP computer advertised for only $100 (minus a bunch of rebates)? It was on-line only. So they get us into the store, then log us onto the internet. And the big catch: $100 shipping charge. On principle, I said "forget it" and walked away. But a 2.8 GHz system with 256 MHz RAM, 40 GB disk, monitor and printer was still a bargain at $200, so I said "what the heck!" and ordered it. And of course the harddrive and memory cards were already gone.

Next stop: CompUSA about 15 minutes away. Parking lot looked good. Store looked empty. Shelves also looked empty. As usual, CompUSA had nothing left that I wanted. No DVD-RWs, no harddrives, and no memory cards. Not surprising, since they actually opened at Midnight. The assistant manager told me that he had to break up one fight, and one of the aisles had been strewn with keyboards and other products. I'm glad I did not try coming at Midnight. So we left CompUSA empty-handed.

Staples was 10 minutes away. Small crowd, empty shelves. So once again we left empty-handed, but now it was around 8am, and time for a coffee and bagel at Starbucks. I was glad I had brought my son, who didn't seem to mind the shlepping back and forth. And he got to watch some of the Star Wars III DVD on a large screen at CompUSA.

With our stomachs warm and full, we had just one more stop to make. We went to the neighborhood Walgreens. We found the camera for my daughter, a Polaroid 3.2 MP no-optical-zoom camera for $40 after $20 rebate. It was the only tangible item that we were able to come home with.

As for the computer we ordered? We did have a stack of rebate forms we were handed as we left the store. But I just got a notice that it is arriving on Wednesday. For only losing an hour of sleep and 2 hours of driving around, I came away with a computer (virtual), a camera and a little bonding time with my son. And as for Fry's? Nothing good in their ads, so we just skipped it. Been there, done that.

Why am I blogging to my kids? Well...

When I was a kid, we didn't have blogs. We didn't have computers. Communication was accomplished by phone, or by paper and pen (and a 16-cent stamp).

When I was a kid, computers were something we visited. I remember visiting a room with a computer when I was around 7 years old. It was at UC Berkeley, where my older brother attended school. The computer was a box about 4 feet square, and 3 feet high. It looked pretty big to me. I didn't realize until much later in life that I was only looking at the printer. The computer was in another room. Or rather the computer was the other room.

When I was a kid, we didn't have video games. When Pong came out as the first video game, there was a long line inside the Exploratorium in San Francisco just to play on the free console. Blip.....blip.....blip....blip....blop. Today, in the comfort of my own family room, I can select from an arsenal of 15 different weapons as I try to defeat Dr. Nefarious in the 3rd installment of Ratchet and Clank.

So listen up, kids (my kids -- if any other kids want to listen up, that's fine with me). Stop your whining and complaining about how the wireless network is too weak to work upstairs, or how we don't have the right plug-in for the latest Neopets game. I'll get StarOffice 8 onto the computer upstairs, and you can just be glad you are living in the 21st Century. Appreciate what you have, because when I was a kid...