Category Archives: Customer Service

A Few Drops of Blood

Wouldn’t it be amazing if all of our disease and medical health testing could be done with just a finger prick of blood? Elizabeth Holmes and I share that dream.

She said her company could do it with a small robotic lab-in-a-box. Now she’s facing criminal charges because the blood testing company she founded took some shortcuts.

Elizabeth Holmes and I Have a Dream

It’s a dream of being able to run medical tests from a single finger prick of blood. Holms initially had a dream of diagnosing and treating disease with a patch on the skin. That didn’t work out (neither the diagnosis nor treatment parts).

She founded a company called Real-Time Cures, which became Theranos. (The renaming presumably happened when the idea of providing “cures” to accompany the testing was abandoned).

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Amazon Go Grocery is the perfect answer to the Social Distancing question

Grocery stores are not my favorite places.

In the best of times shopping carts are covered with germs, whether or not you can see them. Annoying as it is to find all of the carts are wet (which is common here in the Pacific Northwest) the silver lining is that you know the rain water has given them a rinse.

I generally think of the belt at the cash register being the biggest health risk. One grocery store chain said they are now cleaning the belts at least every 30 minutes. That is less frequent than I’d like to see during “normal” times. I tend to stack things on the belt to reduce the number of items that actually touch that belt.

Now with social distancing the checkout line is an even bigger concern. Standing in a line of strangers, and setting my groceries on checkout belts that I’ve never trusted to be squeaky clean, I can’t help but wish there was an Amazon Go store in my neighborhood. No checkout line and no checkout belt means nobody and nothing touches your groceries except you and the employees that stock the shelves.

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Why I Donate Blood

Folks who know me know I give blood, and do it as often as I’m allowed to. (That’s every 56 days, which means six or seven times a year.)

One morning the staff double-checked my stats and told me where my unit of blood was going: Straight to the hospital, where it would be used for a baby’s surgery. How can that not warm your heart?

What is your Favorite Cause?

When GeekWire selected me as their Geek of the Week, they asked about my favorite cause. That was an easy choice: “Blood donation. You donate a pint of blood and around an hour of your time, and you give a gift that’s priceless.

Lately a related mini-cause is the Blood Donor Emoji (like the ones at the top of this post). As the sponsors explain:

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Fighting Back Against Package Theft and Porch Pirates

I got a surprise when my latest shipment arrived from Amazon. Though their app has been providing delivery notifications for a long time, this one startled me.

Photo Finish

Screen shot of the Amazon app showing a package in front of the doorstep where it was just delivered.
Photo of a package at the moment of delivery

Not only did the app tell me when the package was delivered, but it included a picture of it in the place where it landed.

The photo was crude. You wouldn’t be able to identify either the package or the doorstep in a lineup. However, I recognized the location where it was delivered.

The photo was so bad that I wondered how it was taken. A typical police body cam would have done a better job, even while clipped onto an officer being dragged by a car. Still, it met the need.

did take the opportunity they provided to “Tell us what you think about this photo.” I responded:

It’s a really poor quality picture, but still useful. Of course a better photo would be more useful if I didn’t find the package waiting for me.

I.E.: I couldn’t definitively identify the package or the location, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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The Genius Behind Small Business Saturday

Small Business Saturday is held annually on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Looking at that another way, it’s sandwiched between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday.

Small Business Saturday Rocks

I heard people talking about Small Business Saturday days before Black Friday kicked-off. That’s pretty impressive, considering that it was launched less than a decade ago.

Small businesses like it. Folks who support small businesses like it, and who doesn’t like small? Local businesses have a reputation for the kind of personal service that you might not receive from a bureaucracy or impersonal multinational corporation.

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How I Repeatedly Broke My WordPress Web Site

In the beginning, I was a support tech at a vertical market startup. The developer asked me to try to find issues with the software, and I found some – including one major bug. He dubbed me Bug Buster, and the nickname stuck.

Before WordPress

It was only logical that my first site was called BugBuster’s Best. It was a very simple site, and I prided myself on hand-coding it using Notepad. The next incarnation was Steve Case’s Place. Since it was still a simple, hand-coded site, it was easy to migrate to the stevecase.org domain when I acquired it. I completely gutted it soon after that, because my original content had been pretty random.

Twitter’s 140-character limit was far too little for some topics, so I decided it was time to compliment my microblogging with a full-on blog. The hosting company where my site lived offered WordPress as a free blogging platform, so the obvious choice was to start with that.

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