Thursday, September 22, 2005
AOL Customer Service? I Quit!
Today I read a BusinessWeek story which mentioned in passing that 900,000 AOL subscribers cancelled last quarter. The article didn't make a big deal of it -- after all, in another quarter in 2003, close to 850,000 AOL customers quit. No, I have never been an AOL customer.
Thinking how amazingly pathetic this is, I grabbed my calculator..
Let's assume that AOL only allows you to cancel your account over the phone during a time period of Monday through Friday, 8:00-5:00EST. Thats 9 hours. There are 52 weeks in a year -- each with 5 business days available in which to call in. Subtract 5 holidays and thats 255 business days in a year, or 64 in a quarter. So 64 business days times 9 hours is 576 "business hours" in a quarter.
So.. 900,000 cancellations divided by 576 hours is 1562 per hour, or one highly dissatisfied customer taking action every 2-3 seconds.
Good for them. I hope they are upgrading to a nice broadband service. Especially since the demo for Doom 3 on Mac OS X came out today -- every potential torrent peer counts.
Thinking how amazingly pathetic this is, I grabbed my calculator..
Let's assume that AOL only allows you to cancel your account over the phone during a time period of Monday through Friday, 8:00-5:00EST. Thats 9 hours. There are 52 weeks in a year -- each with 5 business days available in which to call in. Subtract 5 holidays and thats 255 business days in a year, or 64 in a quarter. So 64 business days times 9 hours is 576 "business hours" in a quarter.
So.. 900,000 cancellations divided by 576 hours is 1562 per hour, or one highly dissatisfied customer taking action every 2-3 seconds.
Good for them. I hope they are upgrading to a nice broadband service. Especially since the demo for Doom 3 on Mac OS X came out today -- every potential torrent peer counts.
Channel 6 Please
Mike mentions an article on the ubiquity of Linksys routers and their clueless owners.
I monitor my neighbors WiFi with MacStumbler. I currently have 3 "Linksys" SSID's coming through my walls (they must have run a special on Linksys WiFi routers at Best Buy..). All are on channel 6 (Linksys default channel?). All with the same SSID.
I wonder if all these people just open the box and blindly plug the router in. Do they get interference from others who do the same?
Why do I monitor the neighbors WiFi? To make sure channel 1 stays free and clear (for my precious network) of course..
I monitor my neighbors WiFi with MacStumbler. I currently have 3 "Linksys" SSID's coming through my walls (they must have run a special on Linksys WiFi routers at Best Buy..). All are on channel 6 (Linksys default channel?). All with the same SSID.
I wonder if all these people just open the box and blindly plug the router in. Do they get interference from others who do the same?
Why do I monitor the neighbors WiFi? To make sure channel 1 stays free and clear (for my precious network) of course..
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Hibernate and Java 5, and Data Access Objects - The generic DAO
Generic data access objects (DAO) are seemingly the Holy Grail of today's modern Java solution. We've all fantasized about them -- writing one elegant library of persistence code which can be reused over and over. Today, it seems as if everyone is looking at Hibernate as a way to write less DAO code. Once you read about or use Java 1.5 generics the generic DAO doesn't seem so far fetched. Eric has pondered the idea, kicked it around and experimented quite a bit.
It appears we may be getting more to chew on soon. Core Hibernate team member and co-author of Hibernate in Action, Christian Bauer has written a blog on how to use the DAO pattern with Hibernate 3, and Java 1.5. He also looks in the mirror and self evaluates his first pass at using the DAO pattern with Hibernate 2 (discussed in the book). I have found it a fascinating read and plan on re-reading it again and again (until I can slide the next edition of Hibernate in Action in my laptop bag). Check it out..
Generic DAO pattern with JDK 5
It appears we may be getting more to chew on soon. Core Hibernate team member and co-author of Hibernate in Action, Christian Bauer has written a blog on how to use the DAO pattern with Hibernate 3, and Java 1.5. He also looks in the mirror and self evaluates his first pass at using the DAO pattern with Hibernate 2 (discussed in the book). I have found it a fascinating read and plan on re-reading it again and again (until I can slide the next edition of Hibernate in Action in my laptop bag). Check it out..
Generic DAO pattern with JDK 5
