I always felt great knowing I shared a birthday with Mr. Spock. As has been said on the interwebs today, he did live long and prosper.

I took this 90-second video when I picked up Graecyn and Mia at Mama and Papa’s house. Graecyn was in a conversating mood.

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Mia having fun during Susana’s birthday celebration. We were upstairs just finishing watching Susana open her presents when Mia decided to leap from a chair to a few pillows. This was captured with an iPhone 5S. Sure wish I had an iPhone 6, which can do 240fps vs the 120fps an iPhone 5S can do.

The girls are in the City once again. Farrah sent me the above photo from the Palace of Fine Arts. I wish I could be up there with them enjoying the day.

I had a similar conversation with Comcast when I was simply trying to find out how many Filipino stations they offered. DirecTV offers eleven Filipino stations. Comcast only offers five. I simply asked if they would be offering more, but the representative avoided the question and started talking about their other channels and how much better they are than DirecTV.

The one-sided conversation took off from there. The Comcast person started talking about pricing, channels, and other features that I was not interested in. When I pushed back he would ask, “Why?” “Why aren’t you interested in this great deal?” “Why do you need more Filipino channels?”  Perhaps because those channels are being watched by someone in my house?!?!?

It took some time with me becoming more agitated to be able to pry myself off the phone. I think I finally hung up on them as I simply said, “You are not listening to what I am wanting and asking about, so this conversation is over.”

I understand the person was trying to make a sale, and I was the one who called Comcast. But to turn around and try to thrust their services on me was very off-putting.

Listen to the below call. But be warned: you might get a little agitated after listening to it all.

This is a simple story of a bad customer experience turning into a worse one by the day.

My truck battery was on its last legs. I managed to get it charged so I drove it to the closest Sears Auto in Cupertino. I was able to be checked in fairly quickly about 11 am, and told my car would be done a little after noon - or within the hour.  This sounded great.

The mall in Cupertino isn’t that great, so I called Farrah who, with the kids, picked me up at Sears. We decided to have lunch at the local park and let the kids play. This provided a couple of hours of fun, more than enough time to get the battery changed in the truck. It was strange, though, no one called from Sears Auto during the time we were at the park. As we started driving back I began to wonder if they even started work on my truck.

It was a little after 1:30 when I got back to Sears Auto. I saw my truck in the same spot which concerned me a little. But then I thought, well all they need to do is pop the hood, disconnect the old battery and put in the new one. They shouldn’t need to move it far. In any event, I stood in line to talk to one of the customer representatives. I stood in line for about 30 minutes, a line only 3 people deep, before I got to talk to what apparently was the one working representative. This was strange because earlier in the day, just a few hours ago, there were at least three representatives working. The representative told me that they hadn’t gotten to my truck just yet but it should be done soon. He would make sure.

I was a bit peeved but was able to occupy my time with Farrah and the kids by going across the street to do some grocery shopping. This ate about an hour of time. I asked Farrah to drop me off and just head home with the kids, thinking the truck would be done. Boy was I wrong.

All I could do was vent through Twitter:

then

<a href=““https://twitter.com/al3xgiron/status/485915995437928448">

then

Unfortunately, according to Sears, I was sending my tweets to the wrong account. Instead of @Sears I should be sending tweets to @SearsAuto. Silly me. I thought that a service with the name Sears would be concerned about the bad customer experience several people were experiencing.

Hoping to get some resolution, I sent tweets to @SearsAuto. They responded the next day:

But they have been silent ever since.

I don’t believe I will be hearing from them. Even if  I did I suppose I would only get some half-hearted apology with no rational explanation for the problems experienced by the many people that day.

Thinking back on what could have been done differently by anyone at Sears Auto that day I could only come to this conclusion: they should have set expectations appropriately. If they couldn’t do the work in a timely manner, then they shouldn’t have promised it could be done. They should have stopped taking new work in. Continually building up the workload for a number of workers had only frustrated the customers.

I am guessing this trend will continue at Sears, uh I mean, Sears Auto. In any event, Sears, as a whole entity has lost me as a customer.

The KizON wearable also features a ‘One Step Direct Call’ button, which lets parents contact their children easily. If the kid fails to answer a call from any pre-set phone number within 10 seconds, KizON will automatically connect the call so the parent can listen through the built-in microphone. Kids can also dial a pre-configured phone number in case they need to speak to an adult.

Good idea, but the device is too big. I don’t think it will fit on my kids' arms. I don’t think I can convince them to wear this either.

A very effective commercial for a very good beer. Damn advertising!

Damn these Apple commercials keep getting better all the time. They are very smart now, showing what apps are highlighted in the commercial. They are making it easy to spend your money.

I always knew I would have girls, just a feeling growing up with two sisters. I know they’ll have problems like any other kids. I hope they will know that being a girl is a good thing.

Jay-Z & Beyonce - Run [Cinematic Trailer] from Tony Zeven Curtis on Vimeo.

Manage to get tickets to the second concert at AT&T Park. Can’t wait to see the show!

For several months, Amazon has been quietly discouraging the sales of Hachette’s physical books by several techniques — cutting the customer’s discount so the book approaches list price; taking weeks to ship the book; suggesting prospective customers buy other books instead; and increasing the discount for the Kindle version.

Good thing Amazon has competition, right?

The Santa Claus at Stanford Shopping Center has been our staple Santa over the years. The only other time we saw Santa Claus elsewhere was in Hawaii. This year we waited until the weekend before Christmas to visit Santa. It seemed like a lot of other people had the same idea, given the long line we encountered early that Saturday morning.

But the girls were very patient waiting. And when it was their turn to sit on the jolly old fellow’s lap, the girls were well-behaved - for the most part. I think Graecyn is going through a little stranger danger/separation issue right now. But Mia was all in awe of Santa. Mia even spent several moments after the photo session talking to Santa about her gift ideas.

Mia tells Santa her wishes for this year.

Graecyn waits for Mia.

Fan comic take on Batman and the Joker’s last dance. A bit bloody and violent, but it’s worth a quick read if you are a Batman fan.

Decent article on Ars Technica about what I’m doing now - an iPhone user using a Nexus 5. I hope to write a few words about this in the weeks to come. But the (pain) points about the process are well covered in the linked article.

Of 381 college admissions officers who answered a Kaplan telephone questionnaire this year, 31 percent said they had visited an applicant’s Facebook or other personal social media page to learn more about them — a five-percentage-point increase from last year. More crucially for those trying to get into college, 30 percent of the admissions officers said they had discovered information online that had negatively affected an applicant’s prospects.

You never know how your social media accounts will bleed into your real life.

It’s always tough getting the girls ready in the morning. Sometimes they place nice, like this morning. This gives mom and dad the opportunity to actually get ready for work instead of rushing to work.

It must be a slow news day. But seriously, why would you eat at either of these places since you have other burger joint choices? Though the fries and Mighty Wings are pretty good at McDonald’s.

Excellent service, but now it is (will) be gone. I did pay for the year, so I was supporting the product and service. It makes me wonder, will Loom be OK?

As the owner of a 65-inch plasma television, this is bad news. But newer technology will arise that will displace LCDs as well.

The new X-Men trailer is something to see. It looks like a good movie, but trailers can be deceiving. I hope they don’t mess up this great comic book storyline when translating it for the big screen.

Entertainment Weekly does a nice breakdown on the trailer as well.

The San Francisco Giants placed 6th on this Bloomberg chart. Not bad. Of course, the Yankees are 1st.

Sherlock will return to PBS Masterpiece on Jan. 19 at 10 p.m. That means the show will air back-to-back for the first time with that other hugely popular and influential Brit import, Downton Abbey (which returns Jan. 5).

Great!