Auspost Attempted Delivery

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You may have seen it all before. You order something online and have the delivery sent to your home address. Then immediately regret it, because you know exactly what comes next. Days of frustration, anticipation and anxiety.

I’m talking about the dreaded ”Australia Post attempted delivery of your parcel…” message / card.

Anticipation

The first thing you do, is try to rationalise which day the parcel is going to arrive. You plan it out with some wizardry. Like trying to calculate the rate of decline of an orbiting satellite along with the weather and other atmospheric conditions that will ultimately affect the final resting location of your rock, you calculate your parcel will arrive on Thursday.

Anxiety

Should you take the morning off? Will it arrive in the afternoon? They’ve given you a tracking number, so you log in every 5 minutes to check to see if they’ve updated it. You quickly interpret the changes in information as your parcel moves from conveyor to conveyor, until ultimately it hits the back of a truck. “Onboard for delivery.”. YES you think to yourself, this is it! All of my training, planning and preparedness have paid off. Now to execute the perfect hand off, be there at the right time to ensure that the delivery man attends.

You strand your loved one at home, safe in the knowledge that they’ll be there to intercept your parcel so the ordeal can end there and then. You tell them it’s for the greater good, you kiss them goodbye and wish them well.

Frustration

“Australia Post attempted delivery” – no you didn’t you filthy liars.

You’re stranded love one pleads with you over the phone. “I was there! I didn’t have my headphones on! I had the music down so low I could hear the old man muttering to himself three doors down”. It’s time to choose sides, your loved one and their pleas for mercy, or Australia Post, the faceless organisation who has burned you before.

You chose to believe that no one is at fault. “hey” you think to yourself, “No one is out to get me, my loved one must have been using the blender, or the kettle was boiling, or they dropped a pan, then slammed the cupboard at the exact moments that the postman was knocking with an UNQUESTIONABLE DETERMINATION on the door, until his hands were red and sore from beating on the door to gain attention from within only to exhaust all options and walk away defeated, all the while the noise of the kettle, pots and pans or some other freakishly timed events within preventing your loved one from hearing the calls of your valiant Australia Post delivery man.

You make your second mistake, you look at where the delivery has been ‘delivered’ for your ‘convenience’ to collect within 72 hours. It’s Ethiopia.

It may as well be. You can’t drive to the postal location because there’s no parking, or it’s a school zone, next to a shopping strip that doesn’t have it’s own parking. It’s right near a speed camera, on a one way street, down a dark alley on a hill that’s guarded by the riders of the night.

“Ok,” you think to yourself, “You can do this!”. Step one, return home. You know you can’t collect your spoils without that little paper card they left in your mailbox, or your door, or on the floor because it blew out of the door. You attempt to reconstruct the few parts missing that the snails ate. “Is that a 5?… blast” you think to yourself, “the postal people know how to read swiss letters”.

You take the morning off, because the post office is only open from 9:59am to 10:01am on every second day, that’s not a thursday or Tuesday, when the sun rises between 5:58 and 6:04am on the days after the sun sets with a red haze and lowband cloud cover.

You plan your attack. You’ll be smart, you’ll park a little away because you know you won’t get a spot out the front. You know it’s safer to walk the gauntlet of the local strip mall that it is to attempt to arrive directly at your destination.

Frustration Again, bit of anxiety

“Sorry love, you need to collect this after 3pm”. You call in sick to work. It’s your only hope, you don’t even make an excuse, you just tell them simply “I’m collecting a parcel” and they get it. They sign off with the faintest “good luck”.

You hang around the house, pacing. Your spoils are only a mere hours away. You wait, you pace, you take your mind off it with some daytime tv. 4:06pm. “SHIT”, you think “SHIT, I fell asleep!”. You grab your keys, race out the door “no time to lock the house!” and in your car you go. They close in 54… no 53 minutes and you know they’ll shut the doors early.

As you near the strip mall that announces the post offices presence you see it, the little red and white P, the flag of the emPire, you dart down the road, do an illegal u-turn, you trawl the front of the store. End to end cars, no space for you, you see another panicked face of the driver heading towards you, you know their pain, but you’ll stop at nothing – NOTHING, even if it means their demise, to beat them to a suitable space.

You race around the corner, “Small car only” PERFECT, you think, “I’ll get my 4WD in there!”. You park at an angle, with the rear of your car half hanging out, you stick on your hazard lights and hope that everyone ‘gets’ it. You leg it to the front of the store and just make it in as a cranky person gives you a huff, then a dry smile “I was just going to lock that”, “I bet you were” you snark to yourself.

You stand in the line, which feels like it takes forever. The 35 people in front of you all seem to want to know why the increase in stamps has been so sharp of late. By the time you reach the front few places in the queue you can recite their response subconsciously, “it goes up every year, but it hasn’t really changed that much in the past few years”. You’re at the front. Someone is muttering as they are walking past you! “YES” you think “Empty counter”. *This counter is closed* “Noooooo” you scream as you fall to your knees.

“NEXT” – excellent, you race, flustered to counter 4 and you shove the little red and white checkered card on their padded little counter puff, and wonder if it makes it easier for them to stamp things, or to buffer the anger of the folks who work there… “Oh, a parcel is it, ID?” you fumble with your wallet. You KNEW this was coming, you didn’t prepare! IDIOT! You clumsily throw your cards all over the floor, sacrificed while you fiddle with the licence which just won’t come out. Success! You go to hand it over and accidentally throw it at her boob. “Sorry” you mutter. “It’s alright love” she says, as she gives you a stern look. “You could have just popped down the side of the queue for a parcel”. How? YOU KNEW THAT! but you didn’t want to bear the judgement of the souls in the queue ahead of you, as somehow you’d be burnt at the stake for attempting to queue-jump for such a trivial visit. Aren’t they all trivial? SOLIDARITY you think, as you mumble “Oh, ok, next time! Thanks.” Lies, you spout, lies to appease the lady with your spoils.

“Hang a tic, it will just be a second” she recites as she turns to head out the back. An hour passes? An hour? Maybe, I can’t remember. In all the time you’ve been fidgeting int he queue and now standing here knowing your moments from your goal, NOW your brian can process everything. Operating at 300% it’s normal speed, your brain cycles through all the things wrong: “Pretty sure that flash was a speed camera, I bet I got a parking fine, I wonder if I turned the stove off, did I really leave the front door open? Oh god, I hope this parcel has all my items and no backorder!” She’s back. “Here you go, thankyou, NEXT” she says without a pause.

You collect all your cards from the floor, why, why did you wait this long? You hold your parcel under your arm and as you pass the reaming few souls in the queue you avert your eyes in shame. This has not been you at your best, don’t make eye contact, just get out!

You return to your car and find a small yellow envelope in the window. You don’t care, it’s been worth it. The $160 visit to the post office is pretty standard. You jump in the drivers seat, place the parcel on the seat next to you and collapse on the steering wheel for just a moment before honking behind you as someone actually in a small car appears in your side mirror, motioning at you with a cranky face to move your car.

You comply, and as you’re relaxing, smiling and thinking to yourself “I’ve made it! It’s done!” you pull the car out onto the road, start on your journey home and catch a glace of the parcel on the passenger seat. “Dr Rick Montoro”. Wait a minute, you’re not a Dr. You’re not Rick.

“Noooooo”.

A Kinship

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For those not accustomed to disability this post may be confronting, so I’m posting this warning right at the top, so you can be sure to read it and decide if you want to continue reading.

This post contains details discussing death and life with a terminal illness.

Quite late Thursday we heard news from a friend with a terminal illness that she was in hospital and her doctors were fairly convinced that she wasn’t going to live much longer. We, of course, were on the first flight we could get on to head to her to say goodbye.

Our friend has something called Eisenmenger’s Syndrome, which means that she’s constantly struggling to breathe, to move blood through her body and fighting against heart failure almost constantly. This is something we are both very familiar with. Eisenmenger’s Syndrome cannot be fixed with surgery alone, it requires a full heart and double lung transplant in order to correct the problems.

When you are dealing day to day with an incurable disease you learn to rate problems accordingly, you change the way you operate across the board. It’s not something you have to do consciously your brain just does it itself. Small things become huge, huge things become small.

Because of the significantly reduced amount of oxygen pumping around an Eiso’s (person with Eisenmenger’s Syndrome and significantly shorter to type) body they can’t do some simple things. Like walk up stairs, or ramps, or far, or sometimes at all. There’s a very good analogy using spoons which you can read here: Spoon Theory

Everything “normal” seems a bit “foreign”, problems and issues get compared to the bigger picture and sometimes this means that I appear cold, or heartless about people going through challenges. You also start to think of accomplishment, achievement and goals differently – your interests and objectives start to deviate considerably from the norm.

Suddenly you’re not moving to a suburb because it’s a beautiful place to live, with great schools, your assessing the hospitals and medical clinics. When you go out you look for fun, excitement – a lack of stairs, an elevator and good parking and distances.

This gives people a weird impression of you – you’re difficult to go hang out with, because there’s a list of checks and balances that you have to do, it’s not hard for us, but I can imagine when you don’t have to deal with it, the list seems extreme! So you start to really identify with your “kind”, people who are sick and caring for those who are sick.

Your people become really important – they get you without having to explain it, they get what’s happening and they understand. While I happen to be fit and abled, I get to identify with families and partners and you can just ‘click’ and share stories. For all those involved there’s history, before you’ve even met – you’re all the same, your history is inherited with only the stories that change.

Having been apart of this click and the military click I can tell you they are both the same in many ways. The stories, deployments, government oversight, special services, family services, insurance, finance and travel are all your stories and your wars and merits, your surgeries and your episodes are your medals to discuss at length.

This kinship is deeply rooted while you are always aware of the inevitable, the sudden and unexpected sickness and hospitalisation, the strokes, threat of embolism, sudden spike or drop in chemical levels, the knowledge that before you can get transplanted you have to be given a timeframe to die, you work through it all and contemplate a future.

So when you hear one of your kinsmen is at their end, you act. We flew immediately to her and her family and I can’t tell you how surreal that is. You are acutely aware of everything, the insignificance of the parking ticket the woman is getting, the seeming waste of energy the people fighting have – perspective, it gets right up in your face.

Travel time is where all of this happens, but when we got to the hospital and were met with an open embrace by our friend all of this was suddenly gone. The world, was in that room, our universe contained within the walls of the hospital, nothing else mattered and time seemed to stop completely.

We spent the next two days talking about life, adventure, hospital visits, doctors  clinics and perception (a post for another day), the transplant system (another post) and of course death. It was wonderful. Our friend was so content with her future and what was happening to her that we could just talk openly and freely about everything – it was one of the most refreshing conversations I’ve had with a group of people in a long time.

Time went very quickly and by the end of our visit we were all feeling tired but so very happy to have been blessed with spending time with her, and hopefully her with us – we talked about her funeral and the places she loved and of course traded war stories and opinions on the ‘system’.

Returning home we were reminded of the fragility of life itself, the importance of the time we have and of the people we surround ourselves with – and importantly having been able to be there for our friend.

Hang in there.

Click Frenzy – a failure that was expected.

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Australian retailers have been complaining for some time about the ease of which consumers are now able to import lower cost items from overseas instead of paying a premium for the same goods in a bricks and mortar shop down the road. They’ve claimed everything from the lack of taxation on the imports, right through to the high risk of counterfeit goods and of course questioned the loyalty to ‘Australia’ of the savvy consumer.

Of course, purchasing online has become also a non-event for most people these days. Most people have a credit card which doesn’t charge higher fees for purchasing off an international site, or use Paypal to get around the problem and now with more US and UK based retailers shipping to Australia, it’s a perfect storm of low prices and high availability which could be encouraging the consumer to shop out of country.

However for me I blame a misguided culture of ‘build it and they will come’, blended with the blindness of ‘bricks and mortar-online’ and a hint of ‘do it the same – just online’. It’s a typical ‘not my fault’ mentality of both the technologists behind Australian Online Retail and the retail giants themselves that I would guess is sending consumers overseas.

A classic example was the complete anti-event of ClickFrenzy.com.au, which was due to launch with much fanfare last night. It was touted to be the Australian ‘Cyber Monday’, an online retail experience that will get consumers going to send a clear signal to consumers that Australian Retailers take online shopping seriously.

Well, it did send a clear message. That message was received by consumers as “Go away! We don’t know what we are doing!”. Not only did the doors fail to open on time, the systems were not built to handle the capacity and furthermore, websites even remotely related to the deals crashed while consumers tried desperately to get more information.

It was an utter embarrassment from a technological and architecture point of view – and demonstrated the infancy of Australian Online Retail. Ebay will be celebrating in style tonight, with a very public fall in consumer confidence for Australian Retail.

Online sales consistently kill Australian Websites

Madman, Dick Smiths, Deals sites and ‘catch’ events are classic examples of how Australian retailers are not willing to invest the time and money in a good systems architecture to ensure that their websites don’t go down. They set the maximum allowable purchase items and wait for their websites to crash.

For some morbid reason, this is a badge of honor for these companies. As an architect, this is an embarrassment to my industry – the fact that these websites go down consistently shows companies like Ebay, Amazon, Apple and Wall Mart take their consumer seriously. If they run out of an item, they notify them, they allow a purchase and give the consumer an entire end to end experience.

Websites can easily survive the levels of traffic that an Australian ‘event’ can throw at it. Look at online ticketing websites, and others. This is an industry lacking in Australia and it’s not because the skill is not here. I’ve worked with amazing architects with Yahoo, Google, News, Fairfax and even smaller no-names sites which have a better systems architecture than these ‘amazing deals websites’.

When you visit an american or british outlet, you can bet the customer experience is heavily invested in. There’s someone thinking about the best way to get you from your product, to the checkout with as many items along the way as you can. This experience, is an opportunity to cross sell, promote, care for and nurture your consumer into making them want to come back, making them want to spend their money.

Australian online retail sites bang up a few items on a page, loosly base them categorically on what isle or section you’d find them in at a bricks and mortar location and leave you to not only find the items you want but then force you through a cumbersome ‘cart based checkout process’, where you have to select values for multiples, can’t handle gifting and etc.

The experience is that which I’d expect to see in a pre 2010 experience, pre-2005 even. This is another clear demonstration that the Australian Retailers are not ready to be the great online destination they expect comes with having an online store, nor do they deserve it.

The tactics that work for brick and mortar sales, do not work online, the attitudes of demand and supply when it comes to availability of something as simple as a website do not equate to the mass ‘first in first served queue based ideology’ of the 90′s mega-sale camp-outs at stores.

The sooner Australian Retailers grow up and treat their consumers right, the sooner they’ll start making money.

Hacking the Government, in the UK

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Recently I was over in the UK for our big Rewired State kids event in Birmingham. After we finished up and trekked back to town I had the opportunity to drop into Parliament and Number 10 to chat about what’s coming up in the near future.

Burgers at Number 10

This year again, Rewired State will be taking part in Parliament Week, a new national initiative which aims to build greater understanding of and engagement with parliamentary democracy in the UK. It was amazing to be able to not only get a great tour of the Parliament, but to also talk about how we can help them engage developers and understand what kind of data developers want to access from their banks of information! It was also good to have the ever impressive Bill Thompson along to talk about some fun ways to engage the developers on the day. Be on the lookout for some implementations from Bill’s mind.

Fun stuff aside, I’m continuously impressed with how ready the teams at Parliament and Number 10 are to engage with developers and really make data open for all. They are chasing not only opening up the data and providing it, but also working to provide interest around the data. After all, the data really isn’t much use unless someone is using it.

It’s always a challenge to convince people, organisations and especially government of the importance of being a data generator and provider of information rather than attempting to solely build and deploy applications on data only they can see. The brilliant work of the teams at both offices really is making a big difference.

In Australia, we’ve seen some interesting hacks built on Parliamentary and Government specific data and I’m really looking forward to seeing what apps hackers and developers manage to put together with it. There’s also some interesting things on the horizon here to share with you later. Hush hush, stay tuned.

Getting Started with PHP

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So, I’ve offered my assistance to some of the team over in the UK in getting them up to speed with some basic concepts of PHP. To kick of the tutorials, I quickly wrote an introduction to how PHP works and a small hello world.

I’m aiming to have these tutorials to be really easy to read and understand. If you have some suggestions on how they can improve, that’d be great. You can check out the quick intro I did here on the Rewired State Library, it’s basic – and that’s how it’s meant to be.

Hopefully I’ll start adding some more as I go, while also explaining some of the concepts of programming methodology along the way, two birds, one stone!

MySQL and Not Using Foreign Keys

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There’s something interesting about relational databases. They are quite handy when you want to apply some kind of contraints to your data, that is to say refuse the creation of a row in one table, if a record doesn’t exist in another table that can be referenced to.

The problem with this, is that when people are learning how to play with databases, they are less interested in how relationships work between tables and databases and more interested in how they can create tables and play with them.

So when I was asked about foreign keys and contraints, I quickly posted this up: Tutorial – Tables Foreign Keys and Faking It

While I’m not really ‘faking’ the foreign keys here, it quickly shows new comers that adding constraints and foreign keys isn’t specifically important in setting up a table when you are just getting started.

Implementing OAUTH2 – Quick Tutorial

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OAuth 2 is quickly becoming adopted by a number of providers of web services. While there are many things that I dislike about this standard over it’s predecessor, it’s obvious that the future of authentication interactions are going to be heading toward this as their new standard.

So, to help our developers along, I have posted a quick tutorial on getting started with OAUTH2 and used YouTube’s data API as an example. You can read through the whole tutorial here: https://library.rewiredstate.co/display/oauth/Getting+Started

Enjoy.

Micro and Social Payments and The Like

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Today, I grabbed the latest in a series of payment tools the Kaching app from the Commonwealth Bank. This is the first app of the sort that I’ve seen from a mainstream bank, so I was very surprised to find that the app lets you pay anyone, (providing they have an Australian bank account).

To test it out, I quickly sent 75cents to a mate just using his phone number on the sender list. Given the application was intended to be designed for quick ‘social scenario’ payments, the 75 cents allows for a quick check of the sanity of the app, but also what the end result looks like on my end of month statement. Success was had when I received a quick reply from my mate.

The interesting thing about this app, apart from it’s quick access to my cards, accounts and bank address book, but it also allows you to pay by mobile number, emails and surprisingly – Facebook contacts. This is very much in line with another player in the Australian market, Pygg. Pygg allows you to pay people using your Twitter account.

Australia was always going to be a follower in this space, but I’m excited to see that there is movement. Paypal allows for micro payments, social (in the sense of sending money via email address) and of course Flattr and Payclick. The fact that a major bank is playing now is a great indicator for the future of micro or social payments.

The downside to Paypal has long been their policy on making you prove the money is yours, and their recent actions haven’t instilled confidence in the internet in general. The other downside of Paypal has been the transaction costs. This goes in line with the idea that payments online need to be integrated with online stores and carts. The drastic change from the norm here is that instead of consumer to business style payments, these new ones are aimed squarely at consumer to consumer transactions.

This year, I expect to see many more of these types of service popping up, with $0 transaction fees and maybe settling on a monthly fee for access. I think that while we fight to establish what the baseline in the technology is we’ll see great deals from the majors where the entire service is free, but ultimately there will be a settling on a standardised price in the form of an ‘addon’ to your existing bank account.

It will be exciting to see this play out and I for one will be playing with them all.