Wow, this is so fantastic....

I had occasion to call Delta Airlines customer service, and when the representative hung up, the call tripped over to customer-service survey kind of thing. but instead of the normal banal questions ("Were we able to solve your problem?", etc.), they asked just one question:

“ Would you hire the person you just talked to if you owned a customer-service business? ”

Wow, what a fantastic question. It concentrates on the person's competency and people skills, rather than the services and restrictions of the company behind them.

(In my case, I answered an unequivocal "yes", [...]
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As I mentioned in a recent post, the local cyclocross circuit came to Kyoto last week. In the photo above, Jason Eisenmenger is yelling encouragement(?) to rider Yukikaze Ishiyama.

I'd met Yukikaze earlier in the week when Jason and Joey, during their visit to Kyoto, had paid him a visit at his work while we were out and about.

This is the same race that I wrote about two years ago, in a series of posts starting with "Watching My First Cyclocross Bike Race". I'd intended to blog about it right away, but got overwhelmed by the 1,400 photos I [...]

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Wow, what a weird bit of scheduling twists and turns...

Cycling friend and fellow computer geek Jason Eisenmenger, whom I met on this ride last year, had plans to visit me from Okinawa (southern Japan), to do some cycling together here in Kyoto. Then a week before he's to arrive, he asks whether it's okay to bring a friend, who had a sudden week off to visit him from The States. It was fine with me, except I had to tell him that I had my own sudden change of plans and wouldn't be here: Google had invited me to [...]

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I normally do all my computer work on a MacBook Pro; the convenience of being able take it anywhere with me is worth the cramped feeling of having "just" 1TB of disk and a small screen. Unfortunately, my MacBook Pro, which is about 3½ years old, went south yesterday, and now and it freezes up after a minute or three. I spent all day trying stuff to fix it, but it seems to be a hardware issue, So I called up Apple Support to arrange repair.

While creating my repair case, the guy asked whether it was covered by AppleCare, [...]
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In the 12 years I've been blogging, I don't think I've ever gone two weeks without posting something new, but today's post is the first in almost a month, the first this year. The break wasn't intentional... I just haven't felt like writing, I guess. But today I visited a cafe with coffee so unique -- I'd never had anything like it -- that it deserved to roust me from my blogging lethargy.

I've been feeling lethargic about cycling as well, not having done many rides since autumn. For months I'd been planning to ride an hour south to visit [...]

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