links for 2010-07-21
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48 Hour Magazine is now Longshot!
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Purchased and enjoyed!
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Garbage-workers of the web, I salute you.
I Love My New Woolly Pocket
Say you’ve got a wall that gets nice light – the bright, indirect light that plants love – but you don’t want to hang a planter (hanging planters are still stuck in the ’70s design-wise) or slide over a bookcase just to set a pot down. What do you do? Enter the Woolly Pocket.
I’d seen Woolly Pockets in action at Flora Grubb. They have an immense vertical garden that’s full of all my favorite tropical plants. But it’s gigantic. Somehow it never occurred to me you could use just one until my visit this weekend, when I remembered this spot in my living room that gets nice indirect light but has no place for plants. So I got one!
Installing it was a breeze – just two screws with drywall mounts. Then I just shoveled in some dirt and added a few plants. In this case, I put in a small Elephant Ear (Colocasia Esculenta Elepaio), a small African Mask, and a couple different Pothos Ivys (one’s a clipping from another plant in the house). The idea is, the Elephant Ear and the African Mask will grow up, and the Pothos will grow down, filling out the wall.
The Woolly Pocket’s made of recycled plastic bottles and has a rubber lining so hopefully it won’t leak. I can’t wait to see how it breaks in. If this one works out, I’ve got big plans for the kitchen.
If you want one of your own, I’ll include a link to their site in a sec. First I wanted to warn you that their site is heavy on the Flash and they made this extremely stupid series of videos that tend to pop up annoyingly. But the product is great. Link! (And no, I get no kickbacks for this – I’m just excited about it.)
UPDATE: My New Vertical Jungle Wall!
links for 2010-07-20
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"Is Amazon seeing a reading revolution? It's impossible to tell."
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What incredibly silly thing will we apply the "slow" prefix to next? Note to The Guardian: People scan text in print, too.
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This is pure spin. Hardcover sales are a fraction of paperback sales. So Kindle sales now top … a tiny fraction of print sales. Whoa.
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A step in the right direction, but asking for real names is no panacea, and there's no guarantee you'll get them just because you asked.
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MagCloud is out of beta, now supports perfect binding and worldwide shipping, and has released an iPad app. Boom!
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My awesome wife on Dan's awesome show.
Jean-Louis Gassée’s Customer Service Kung-Fu
Jean-Louis Gassée on customer service:
A customer complaint dialogue is structured around a two-position toggle: a) it’s terrible, b) it’s nothing. The first one to grab a position forces the other person to assume the only one left. When Dear Customer calls, “Canon Law” dictates the first words out of my mouth: ‘This is terrible, how could we have let this happen to you!’. This forces the caller to concede: ‘Well, it’s not the end of the world, I just would like to…’ A cooperative conversation ensues.
However, if I argue that it isn’t the end of civilization, civility goes out the window. Dear Customer feels disrespected and insists things are awful. It’ll take time to lower the temperature and hear one another.
This is total customer service kung-fu. I’ve done it, and it works. Sometime all a complainer needs to hear is that you understand, and empathize with, their complaint. You can never convince them that their complaint isn’t important, and trying will only amplify the problem.
links for 2010-07-18
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"There was a time when these kinds of threats worked, and maybe it was a good thing."
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"So if plants aren't using electrical signals in nervous systems like animals, what do they do with the electrical impulses they produce? In most cases, plant biologists don't know."