Now that Amazon and the State of California have come to an agreement whereby Amazon will start collecting sales tax next year, Amazon has reinstated all their California affiliates. So I setup a new account (I had already closed mine) and will start linking to products again and hope that people use the links as well as the search box on the right side. While I don’t expect to earn a ton of money off the affiliate links, it does basically pay for hosting this site. I’m happy that the affiliates are back, but the sales tax thing may end up being worse depending on how much we buy from Amazon.

Last week I changed my AT&T account to be a 900 minute plan. As part of the change, AT&T sent email confirming it. The automatic email, however, was not proofread. The bullet points should have been alphabetical (in English), numerical, or simply bullets. AT&T sent the email with the bullets being Hebrew letters.

Also, the link in the email goes to a server that doesn’t exist.

A few weeks ago, my wife started complaining that our cordless phones started dying. So, I decided to get a new battery and see if that fixed the issue or I’d have to get a new set of phones due to bad charging circuits. I bought a battery from Fry’s and it failed to charge, so I suspected that the charging circuit was bad. Since I didn’t need the battery, I went back to Fry’s to return the battery.

When I presented the battery to the returns clerk, he looked at it and was a bit suspicious as he said that Lenmar batteries usually have a label on them with the Lenmar name. At that point, things began to click. When I brought the battery home, it looked identical to the battery I already had with the exception that the code on it was a little different. The package said 850 mA whereas the battery (and the ones in the phones) said 800 mA. The clerk went back and retrieved another battery and it was yellow (the ones I had including the replacement I bought were white) with a Lenmar label on it.

Now it was Fry’s word against mine; I said that I bought the battery I was returning. I couldn’t prove I hadn’t swapped the batteries and they couldn’t prove that the battery I took home was the real Lenmar one. The clerk asked his manager and the manager said to go ahead and accept the return. That was a big relief; I almost had to eat $10 for the battery. So it looks like someone swapped the battery in the store (the packages for the batteries only has a stable at the top and you can easily slip the battery out). Normally this kind of theft just impacts the store (and the consumer indirectly with higher prices), but in this case, I almost got stuck with the bill.

Normally Fry’s is an easy target for me to pick on as their staff isn’t the most helpful, some of their sales tactics are questionable (I’ve seen returned items shrink wrapped and resold as new), and I only shop there as a last resort. However, in this case, I was quite pleased with their customer service. Maybe this is way manufacturers put products in the bubble packaging to prevent people from stealing like this.

The other day I received a letter from SDGE, my local power company giving me a run down of my electric and natural gas usage compared to 100 of my neighbors with similar house sizes. We aren’t the most efficient, but we aren’t the least efficient, either. Of course, there were tips in there on how to reduce consumption, but the letter is quite clever in making people a bit competitive to encourage them to conserve more.

I think we do a reasonable amount to conserve; we run our air conditioning a few times a year, we turn off lights, and I turn off a bunch of my computer equipment at the end of the day. However, can more be done? I was at Fry’s last week getting a power strip to combine a bunch of other strips and picked up 2 little energy conservation helpers.

The first is a Belkin Conserve Socket which I bought not because of the energy savings aspect, but because I forget to unplug chargers for my RC car and helicopters. I am always afraid of leaving them when I’m not around as the warnings on the labels are pretty scary. Also, I had 2 chargers for my RC car melt and the batteries start overheating. This gadget should give me a little piece of mind.

The second was an APC 4 outlet surge protector with a timer. You basically set on and off times for it and it switches off power to the outlets. I was trying to figure out where to place it to handle a few chargers I have lying around (outlets are kind of scarce in my office) when today I figured out what to do with it.

Like a lot of geeks, I have a large collection of equipment centered around the TV. I have a Mac Mini for a media center, 2 El Gato EyeTVs, a Time Capsule, an Ooma, a cordless phone, a cable modem, 3 Squeezebox devices, 2 audio distribution units, 1 amplifier, 2 8 port gigabit switches, a Wii, a coax amplifier and a TV. With all that stuff, what could I have automatically turn off and what was consuming the most? While much of the equipment uses wall warts and uses a little power each, the big consumers are probably the audio distribution units, so I plugged those 2 into the timer surge protector as well as 2 other small devices. That takes care of cutting power to 4 devices. Next, I unplugged the amplifier I don’t use.

Lastly, I have an APC UPS that has a master controlled outlet which shuts down power to 3 other outlets when the main device draws very little power. I set my Mac Mini as the master unit and used Energy Saver to set a schedule for it to shut down around 11:30 pm and wake up around 4:30 am in time to start processing TV shows that it recorded. Then I plugged in the EyeTVs and a hard drive into the controlled outlets. So of all the mess I have, I just set 8 devices to stop drawing power for at least 5 hours a day (the audio stuff I set to come on even later). While this isn’t the end of my quest to reduce power consumption, it is a decent start.

I like the idea of the timer controlled power strips, so I may pick up a few more of those.

Too bad SDGE stopped sending the real time power consumption data to Google. I’ll have to search to see if something is available as I have a smart meter and it would be neat to see if my efforts are doing something.

Last week I had a discussion with some of my colleagues about interviewing. As they have come from a computer science background, their questions consisted of things like showing how a linked list works, how to do bitwise operations, etc. I actually struggle with these questions as I don’t have a computer science background, I haven’t been in college for 16 years, and I pretty much haven’t touched this type of code in years since I’ve been doing Objective-C development. So do these questions help find solid candidates? I have no idea.

When I’ve interviewed people, I’m not clever enough to come up with this types of computer science questions, so I’ve taken different routes and try to get at how a person thinks and what they can learn. One of the most important things I learned in college was how to teach myself anything which has proven to be an asset. A number of years ago, I had an interview at Apple for AppleWorks and I basically didn’t get the job because I didn’t know C++. The next interview I went on, I don’t believe I was asked highly technical questions and was hired. Within 2 weeks, I learned C++ and was off and running.

There is no magic to interviewing and maybe computer science questions are great for candidates right out of college, but do they help adequately screen candidates? If the candidate gets the CS questions wrong, could a good candidate be slipping through the cracks? Possibly. I find that if I probe a person for specifics on what they have on their resume, I can get a pretty good idea of how the candidate will work.

To each his own; there are no right answers or formulas for finding and retaining good employees/contractors.