I opened up my digital piano, found the problem, and fixed these broken keys by replacing the broken hammers with new ones. Here is a video of how I did it.

Fortunately, I have security cameras installed at my home so that I could find out what happened. UPS did drop off the package at my home, but never ringed the bell. I was actually home at that time and could have easily received the package had I known it had arrived. What’s more, my security camera revealed that within six minutes after my package was dropped off, a thief walked onto my property and stole my package straight off my porch! (For the full security camera footage, check out my video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/vdv9Wftq0Wc)

The UPS driver, dropping off the package.

The thief, stealing my package six minutes later.

The Weakest Link

As I shared my experience on Facebook and YouTube, I found out that I was not alone. In fact, several of my friends and team members have had packages stolen off their property in the past or knew someone to whom this happened. While eBay and PayPal have invested heavily in their e-Commerce and Payment platforms, we are still at the mercy of shipping providers. Shipping providers all have their own policies and may or may not handle your package properly or make sure that a person receives the package. Even with tracking systems, we cannot fully prevent negligence. Therefore, I believe that Shipping is the weakest link in E-Commerce.

Workarounds

How do we overcome this weakest link? I don’t think there is a solid solution yet, though there are several workarounds:

• Have packages shipped to the office. (Increases mailroom costs.)
• Wait at home for the package. (Takes away time from work or other activities. Doesn’t work if the shipping provider doesn’t ring the bell.)
• Require a signature for every delivery. (This option is not always available.)
• Post a sign to always ring the bell, like the one I posted below. (Shipping providers tend to ignore this sign.)

Sign for mail carriers to leave ring bell.

In my case, I filed a police report and shared the security footage with UPS, the merchant, and the police. Given that UPS repeatedly neglected to ring my doorbell when delivering a package which my security cameras show, UPS offered to mark my address in their system as “always requiring a signature”.  I gladly accepted this offer, and this should solve it for me. But how can we solve this for you or any other consumers?

Innovate!

I challenge you to put on your innovative hats and come up with creative solutions to strengthen the weakest link. If somehow, you can ensure that any shipments are guaranteed to reach their buyers safely; this would be an awesome win for E-Commerce at large!

Think again! Instead of a simple wizard to do this automatically, there is no easy way to migrate your iTunes Library from Windows to Mac. After searching on the web, and some trial and error, I finally found this 6-step procedure to do this migration. It worked fine, though I would recommend computer novices to get a little familiar with some simple UNIX shell commands and file / folder manipulation.

After I followed these steps, my iTunes library on my Mac was identical to what it was before on Windows.

Earlier this year, my company started to provide iPhones as an option in addition to the Blackberry phones that it normally provides. I, of course chose an iPhone (3G S) because of all the Apps! After Yuli saw what cool things my iPhone could do, she wanted one too. Also, my home-built Windows XP PC was starting to crash very often, so I was eyeing for my new computer to be an 8-core Mac Pro. So on Black Friday, 11/27/2009, I bought Yuli an iPhone and myself a 3.0 GHz 8-core Mac Pro.

The Apple Migration has come full circle.

I used this technique on Eric and Cynthia’s wedding video, which originally had an incorrect 4:3 aspect ratio, and now the video plays back correctly at 16:9.

The following video demonstrates how long it takes to load a disc and navigate to the main menu, using a regular DVD and a Blu-Ray disc. I used a Panasonic DMP-BD605 with firmware version 1.5 and Quickstart enabled

Here are the summarized results :

As you can see, the Blu-Ray takes more than twice to initially load a disc versus a DVD. What’s worse, navigating to the Top menu takes over 10 times longer on a Blu-Ray disc versus a DVD. I cannot believe that people tolerate this kind of latency when they are used to the shorter times on a DVD. It gets to a point that it is way too slow for my taste and I am seriously considering to return this Blu-Ray player.

The picture quality of Blu-Ray is unmatched for sure, but I’ll be happy to wait a few more years until load times become more acceptable.

Although I have tried to manage priorities before using todo lists, it had been somewhat a challenge to do so using off-line solutions. What I needed was an on-line solution that was easily accessible anywhere. I found this app in Google Tasks.

Google Tasks allows you to jot down your todo list, and access it on-line or through your mobile device. I thought that it was quite useful as an orgnizational tool. Here is a screen shot of what such a task list would look like:

This is Palm’s latest phone. Could it be an “iPhone Killer” as mentioned in the video? Even though the Palm Pre seems to have many technical feats, the iPhone has gained large momentum in its number of apps, and many happy followers.

The answer is simple: Use the powerful interface of Google Mail for your domain. E.G. mail@yourdomain.com

By using the Google Messaging app and updating your domain’s MX records, you can achieve this. See these detailed instructions on how to do this.