Sunday December 24, 2006

My Christmas presents are all wrapped and ready, save one. That present is sitting in a UPS facility in the next town, having arrived there at 4:02am on Saturday morning. It wasn't delivered yesterday, and now I'm sure won't be delivered in time for Christmas since the tracking records says the package is "on time" and scheduled for delivery on the 26th.

Yet another example (see the Toyota example here) of how giving the consumer better visibility into the inner workings of a business can reduce customer satisfaction. If I didn't know the package was sitting a few miles from my house, I'd probably conclude it got hung up somewhere due to the snow in Colorado. It's much easier to be philosophical about an act of Nature...

Sun is closed now for Winter Break, the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. The flood of internal email has slowed to a wonderfully quiet trickle.

I'm getting very close to being totally Windows-free. If not for the occasional need for a few Windows-only applications, I'd be rid of it already. I use Parallels on my Mac Book Pro to run Windows XP when I need it.

Working at Sun, you get used to rock solid operating systems. I can't remember the last time my Sun Ray server crashed, and I don't believe my work-issued Solaris laptop ever crashed on me. Ditto with my Mac Book Pro and Mac OS X. I've had a few application issues (notably Mail.app), but the machine has never crashed on me.

I had to smile as I continued working, uninterrupted...