Chausse.org

Just a random bunch of recent pix. Enjoy.

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No, I’m not going to cease blogging or anything, but I’m suffering from a bit of Web 2.0 ennui - a personal bubble bursting if you will. The sheer number of people out there who think they’re working on the Next Big Internet Thing is staggering, when 99.99% of it just involves shoving the same information around in different ways. It’s all quite overwhelming. Do I want my RSS feeds in my email? My email in my RSS feeds? Aggregated or not aggregated? Perhaps this will pass, but I’m thinking this is actually a healthy development. It’s about time I develop some offline hobbies. If I may quote my own blog post from the last time something similar happened, (as inspired by Lloyd Dobler)

“I don’t want to blog anything, aggregate anything, or syndicate anything as a hobby. I don’t want to aggregate anything blogged or syndicated, blog anything aggregated or syndicated, or syndicate anything aggregated, blogged, or syndicated, or tag anything aggregated, blogged, or syndicated. You know, as a hobby. I don’t want to do that.”

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Stuck owning a house worth less than your mortgage, and having trouble making the payments? Selling the house won’t really help, since it won’t pay back the mortgage.  Why not try “voluntary foreclosure?” Of course, you lose the house, but if you play your cards right  you can actually stay in your house for 8 months or so, payment free, on top of not having to pay back the mortgage.

Obviously, foreclosure is often a drawn out process, due to laws usually designed to protect the homeowner.  But a company called You Walk Away sells a $995 “kit” to help you intentionally complicate things for the mortgagor - extending your free ride as long as possible.  They will then supposedly help clean up your credit rating.

Legal? Apparently.  Unethical? Oh HELL yes.  But the mortgage industry doesn’t exactly have a spotless ethics record, either.

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ZoomInfo is looking for an Information Architect with usability testing experience for our growing User Experience team, here in sunny Waltham, MA. Check out the job description, and if you think you’ve got the right stuff, contact me directly with your resume (jchausse {at} gmail {dot} com). If I agree, you’ll be in here interviewing before you know it.

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What do you call it when a group blog retroactively attributes your blog posts to someone else after you leave? Well, whatever it’s called, it appears Hill, Holliday decided to do this to the HHCC.com posts I made while working there, and I’m pretty sure it’s illegal, even if inadvertent.

Obviously, they wanted to prevent me from logging in after I left (a reasonable move). But, guys, you could have just changed the password, instead of attributing my writings to someone else.

I’ve copied the posts over here, in their own category - “The HHCC.com Posts“, and will shortly be in touch with Hill to have then either properly attribute the posts or remove them entirely.

Update: Hill fixed the problem pretty quickly after I notified them.  Obviously, it was a technical oversight (anyone who’s used Wordpress would know what happened), but any time you’re messing around with people’s right to their own ideas, some extra caution is warranted.

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Non-parents may as well ignore this post, but I found this random baby video on YouTube quite amusing. Seems the kid wants to skip crawling… skip WALKING, and go straight to flying. Very cute.

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The Pipettes. Yes. Listen to them.

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For the parents of young’uns out there, there is now a Sesame Street podcast in the iTunes Store.

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I’m learning me some web stuff at An Event Apart.

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I was recently at Toys ‘R’ Us when I spotted this “TV Game” I’ve had my eye on for a while. It’s a 2-player Atari 2600 “paddle” game system. I’ve wanted it because no matter how good an “emulator” may be, that clunky controller could never really be faked. Anyway, this time around I actually brought it home, since it was now being sold for under 5 bucks.

I haven’t plugged it in yet, because a bullet point on the back sent me into a deep depression from which I have yet to recover. Check out the first bullet:

You know, it really sucks when what you thought was “retro” is now pretty much considered antique.

On another note, I really wish they had cut a deal with Activision to put “Kaboom!” into this thing. When played with proper 2600 paddles, that game is pure crack cocaine in video game form.

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Just had to share this with the world.

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I’m feeling a bit blog/web 2.0 fatigued at the moment. I was planning on writing a long whiny post about it, but instead I’ll put it this way…

“I don’t want to blog anything, aggregate anything, or syndicate anything as a hobby. I don’t want to aggregate anything blogged or syndicated, blog anything aggregated or syndicated, or syndicate anything aggregated, blogged, or syndicated, or tag anything aggregated, blogged, or syndicated. You know, as a hobby. I don’t want to do that.”

You haven’t seen the last of me, but excuse me if I go underground a while as I ponder my role in the blogiverse (or not).

Filed under Humor, Personal Notes, The Internet Biz 1 Comment »

I’m extremely excited to announce that I have accepted the position of Digital Technology Director at Hill, Holliday in Boston, where I’ll be working with their Interactive team to create new ways to reach customers with Internet technology.

I want to give a huge thanks to Baba Shetty, Hill’s Director of Media + Interactive, for seeking me out for this position based almost entirely on the contents of this blog. For several years now, I’ve been writing about marketing, branding, and innovative web technology - even though my job history has primarily been that of your basic, everyday web monkey. This experience should serve as a lesson that blogging about something you’re passionate about can truly change your life. It may not happen overnight, but with patience and persistence, eventually the right person will take notice.

So, what will I be doing at Hill, Holliday? Basically, I’ll be combining my technical skills and obsessive industry watching to help their Interactive Marketing team create compelling web experiences that truly expand the definition of “online marketing.”

One example of how Hill, Holliday has proven itself as a leader in this area is WhatsYourPolicy.com - an interactive site that has managed to build a passionate, loyal fanbase centered around an insurance company.

Hill, Holliday’s Interactive team is small, but unbelievably talented. It feels like I’m working at a startup, yet we’re steering the creative direction of some of the world’s biggest brands. Plus, we get all the free Dunkin’ Donuts coffee we can drink. My day-to-day role hasn’t entirely been fleshed out yet - I’m sure I’ll be doing a wide variety of things. But, hey, doing things is what I like to do.

Filed under Marketing, Personal Notes, The Internet Biz 5 Comments »

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing my brand new (first born) son, John Walter Chausse…

Born Friday, October 20th at 2:15 AM

7 pounds, 6 ounces

20.5 inches long

Everyone is now home and doing great. I hope you’ll find my brief absence from blogging understandable… though I have another very big (though not quite as big) announcement coming up very soon…

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I’m thinking of spinning off a separate, more “personal” blog, especially with a baby on the way. I doubt a huge percentage of my audience wants to see YouTube flicks of my son blowing his first spit bubble. But meanwhile, since I have nowhere else to put it, check out what I found swimming in my pool on Saturday… Aside from the infinite bugs of every variety, this makes a grand total of one salamander, 4 or 5 frogs, and one very bedraggled mouse.

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I’ve been doing a LOT of home renovation lately, and because I’m too lazy busy to track down quality independent contractors, I’ve been making most of my major purchases via Home Depot. It’s been a mixed bag. Some jobs were done well, and at least one was a horrible, spectacular failure.

As you may or may not know, when you go to Home Depot and arrange for flooring, cabinets, decks -what have you - you don’t actually get Home Depot employees doing the work. All work is done through subcontractors. You pay Home Depot, and Home Depot pays them when you sign off on the work.

I’ve been told that this is actually a pretty good setup for the consumer. Since Home Depot is a humongous corporation, they can afford to eat the cost of fixing a botched installation now and then. Also, contractors do NOT want to lose their contract with Home Depot, so if they get caught screwing up, they’ll be eager to fix things to please their corporate master.

Lucky me, I am now in the process of finding out if this is actually how things go down. I had Pergo laminate flooring put in by a subcontractor called AAA Carpet of Wilmington, MA. The job was horribly amateurish. The contractors showed up 4 hours late (that is, AFTER the late end of the four hour range given for their arrival), changed crews in the middle of the job (a 5 hour job, not a multi-day job), installed all the transitions wrong, knocked holes in my walls, walked off with over $100 of returnable unused materials, and were, all-around, totally incompetent.

So I wrote a letter (a physical, dead tree letter)to the local Home Depot management and CC’ed the owner of AAA Carpet. The management at Home Depot has been very sympathetic and responsive so far, and the Install Manager of AAA apologized profusely and is sending over a supposedly more qualified “inspector” to figure out how to set things right. IMHO, it is now AAA’s job to just get the damn floor up to par, and then it’s Home Depot’s job to give me a little something for my troubles. Then it’ s up to Home Depot whether or not AAA get paid, and if so, how much. Not my problem. Good.

Anyway, I was talking to a friend of mine who is an accountant. He said that he’s done financial work for several Home Depot subcontractors, and he said he has a pretty good idea of what Home Depot’s subcontracting strategy is:

1. Hire the cheapest contractors possible
2. Go out of your way to fix the screw-ups

This makes a lot of sense for them, if you think about it. If you send in the cheapest possible subcontractor to do a job, one of four things will happen:

1. The contractor will do an OK job - Home Depot just saved a lot of scratch.
2. The contractor will do a crappy job, but the customer won’t really care, or won’t bother to complain - this type of customer won’t usually spread the negative word to others.
3. The contractor will do a crappy job and the customer will complain. Then, Home Depot gets to spring into action, fix the problem with what amounts to pocket change from their bank accounts, and look like a hero.

   Whichever happens, Home Depot wins.

   What’s the lesson here? Well, one, it’s always good to have deep pockets. But, aside from that, it shows that you can get away with a mediocre product if you have stellar customer service. Ideally, as a professional, you’d want to provide an always perfect product. This strategy, however, can only be profitable at a very high price. For most customers, for most services, cost is a significant factor. In this case, you simply must lower your quality standards. However, as product quality goes down, customer service quality must rise. Seems pretty simple, but look at Dell’s history as of late. Dell’s aggressive cost cutting simultaneously reduced product quality and customer service quality, as a result their reputation plummeted.

   For an interesting study of this delicate quality/service balance, look no further than the LCD monitor industry’s “Dead Pixel Policies”. LCD monitors consist of so many delicate transistors that a perfect screen is nearly impossible to guarantee. So, what do you do? Well, according to this Tom’s Hardware article, no one has quite managed figured this out. What would you do?

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I did not expect to stumble across thought-provoking political commentary while scouring Rhapsody for lullaby albums for my baby-to-be. Then I came across this, which stopped me dead in my tracks:

“Lullabies from the Axis of Evil” is a collection of 14 lullabies from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, North Korea, Cuba, and Palestine.

And they are beautiful.

With the birth of my first child about two months away, I’m starting to turn into emotional Jello thinking about the responsibility of keeping my son calm and safe in a stressful and dangerous world. Yet, as a suburban American, whatever stress and danger my son will encounter on a daily basis is less than nothing compared to what parents in war-ravaged nations have to suffer through. I have a newfound sympathy for those images of uncontrollably wailing parents whose children are victims of violent attacks in countries like Iraq.

This album is a reminder that countries are more than just lines on a map, or a collection of policies devised by dangerous dictators. Even in the most “evil” country, people love their babies, and wish peace and safety for them. I’m not saying the existence of this album precludes agressive foreign policy decisions, but it should make people think twice about who really suffers when we start bombing civilians.

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I’ve added a new section to the site called “Jeff 2.0” (it’s right there up in the red bar). This page is basically a directory to my presence on various “social” web sites.

While I intend to keep Chausse.org around for the rest of my mortal days, my interest in adding functionality to it (especially functionality which can be found elsewhere for free) has waned drastically. In the past 8 months, I’ve gotten married, taken on a challenging new job, became a father-to-be(!), turned 30, and started the process of buying a home. Strangely enough, random web hacking has dropped WAAAY down my list of priorities for the foreseeable future. Thankfully, there are so many cool sites for sharing stuff online that I can still have an interesting web presence without doing a whole lot of work - hence “Jeff 2.0.”

I still have lots of cool ideas in my noggin, so I hope that I don’t get too boring as I approach middle age, but coding little hacks “for the heck of it” just doesn’t hold much appeal for me these days. Anyway, the point being: Jeff 2.0 - bookmark it, live it, love it.

Filed under Personal Notes, This Site, Web 2.0 3 Comments »

And now, for something totally different… I’ve lived in Massachusetts for the past 12 years or so, but I was born and raised in northern Rhode Island. People crack jokes about the size of the state when I add the “northern” prefix, but northern Rhode Island has a culture far different than that of our Newport brethren. And one cultural force to be reckoned with is that of Chicken Family-Style - the unofficial favorite meal of northern Rhode Island.

In January 1990, Yankee magazine ran an article about the meal in which writer Bonnie Tandy Leblang noted that “Nine out of ten weddings in northern Rhode Island feature chicken family-style.” She further contended that this dish made up more than half of all orders in area restaurants, and that at one restaurant offering a full menu, it accounted for ninety percent of all orders.

No one outside of the area seems to understand why in the world you would eat french fries and pasta in the same meal but, growing up, nearly every special event I attended featured this same culinary experience.

If you care to experience it for yourself, look no further than Wright’s Farm - the Mecca of Chicken Family-Style. The place seats 1500 people and you can STILL expect an hour wait.

Why am I posting this? No real reason, excpet that I never expected to find such an in-depth article on this subject and wanted to share it…

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