A tale of great customer service

Last year, at Valentine's day, my mother-in-law bought our daughter a pink, stuffed cat. Pinky, as he's been named, is my daughter's "favorite and best!" Pinky sleeps with her every night and comes down every morning to sit with her as she has breakfast or watches TV. Out of the last four show-and-tells at school, she has taken Pinky to show off four times. I'm not exactly sure how to make this clear to you, but....

She really loves this cat!

My wife and I live in terror of the day something happens to Pinky. Since we got our new dog, we've found she has a fondness for chewing on stuffies. Since he is well loved each day, Pinky spends a lot of time in the washing machine and has lost a lot of his luster. You can see this clearly in this picture with him and a not-so-loved sibling.



So, on a whim, we decided to look around some to see if we could find another kitty just like Pinky we could keep on hand as a "spare". Now, we know clearly that should we need to replace Pinky, it isn't going to be a one for one swap. She'd know immediately it wasn't him. Our planned cover story is that Pinky's brother came to town to be her friend since Pinky got lost. Or, something like that.

After poking around for a few, I decided one night to just look at Pinky's tag. Sure enough, the name of the company, Galerie USA, was there along with a URL. Score! I was a little discouraged at first as it appeared they might not deal directly with individuals, but figured I'd drop them a line all the same.

I relayed basically the same story to them as I have now to you and a day later I got an e-mail back from someone in customer service with a picture attached of a stuffed pink cat. She wanted to know if this was him, and if so they could help us out right away. It wasn't the Pinkster, so I sent her one of what's left of our boy (note: see the above picture again). The next day, they replied right back with a picture of a brand new Pinky!

I replied that was our kitty and offered to pay however necessary to get him in hand and was told...nope, thanks, just send us your address, we'll send him out to you. Wow! When I sent the address, though, they told us they were sending...well, let's just go to the picture...



Yup, that's Pinky, second from the left, surrounded by THREE siblings! They sent us THREE! They arrived today and are waiting patiently for the day they can come out of their box in the closet (our second daughter is arriving next month, perhaps she will one day get her own Pinky).

Now, granted, this was a small gesture and probably cost them all of $2 to do this, but that's not the point. Joni, the lady I dealt with spent a couple of days e-mailing me back and forth trying to find the right toy and then shipped them out within minutes of confirming we had the right one. It made a big difference to this dad to know there are potentially a couple of future tears that could be avoided by our having something to fill the void should it ever come, and that means the world to me.

Thank you, Galerie, and especially Joni, for helping us out. You got 2012 off to a great start for us!

Life logging with Evernote

One of my primary reasons for moving back to Evernote is that I've always wanted to keep a journal. I've never been good at it all, and it's come back to haunt me from time to time as I try to remember when a certain event happened. Before my journal, my e-mail served as my primary method of refreshing my memory, but that's limited to stuff I might have needed to say to someone. Major and minor events went unrecorded.

I've also been thinking about all of the data that I put "out there" each day that is captured only on Facebook or Twitter and might be difficult to find again in the future. Or, I might want to relate something that I posted on Facebook to something in my journal. Sure, Facebook's Timeline feature helps a great deal in finding older posts, but I'd like to have as complete a record of my day as possible in just one spot.

So, inspired by this TED video, I needed to figure out a way to create my own aggregator and use it to log my life...or as much as possible.





In terms of a basic app where I write what happens each day, Evernote is perfect. Each morning, I simply create a new note in my Journal notebook and type away. But, we're here today to talk about some of the other stuff I put in there.

Similar to in my previous post, the secret sauce that will tie the social network aspect into the journal is IFTTT.com. To recap, "If This, Then That" monitors the social networks you give it access to, and when something happens that matches criteria you setup, it'll trigger an action you specify. In this case, a lot of what I wanted to pull in is covered by the default triggers and actions. When I post a status, it's pulled directly into Evernote. When post a photo, same thing. Easy!

Twitter's a bit more difficult. I'll admit, not a big fan of Twitter. I use it because I have to, because so many others use it. But, as the first network I'd axe if I could, yup, Twitter. As a result of my disdain, I rarely ever check the Twitter, so I miss things. But, not anymore! I've setup actions so that if someone mentions me (or TEDxRochester) or sends me a message, I'm sent an e-mail. My own posts are injected into Evernote directly. Why do I have it go to e-mail? So I can see it, of course! I've then got a filter setup in Gmail to automatically forward those to my Evernote account. Two birds (it's Twitter. Tweets. Get it? Birds?), one stone.

The big drawback to this methodology is I get a very cluttered journal. My end goal is to have one note per day that I can go to. Evernote itself provides the mechanism in their Merge Note feature. Select two or more notes and you'll have a bunch of options come up. Simply choose Merge! Now, a hint: click on them in the order you want them in the merged note. I start by clicking my daily note, then my e-mails with my wife (more on that in another article) then the social network stuff notes before hitting Merge. That way, they end up in the note in that order. Done!

With these simple steps, I'm able to cull together a daily journal entry that covers a lot of what I do during the day, but it's not perfect. Still a number of things to pull in. Most importantly are the conversations between the most important person in my life, my wife! But, that's still a work in progress with lots of custom stuff to make it happen....

In the next installment, I'll tell you about the tags I put into posts and how I can use them to gain some basic statistical insight into my life. I'll also talk about some of the more esoteric data that makes its way into the life log.