moot!

In case anyone's wondering I've been away in Malaysia & Vietnam for the past 3 weeks. I didn't really want to announce when I was going away, and for how long, because I'm still paranoid. ;)

It was a fun trip and I'll be uploading some of the 900 photos to Flickr over time. I prefer to add descriptions to most of my Flickr uploads as its more interesting for viewers, or a title at the very least.

Soong Kee

Malaysia was much the same as last year. One thing I noticed though is the rapid Americanisation of Kuala Lumpur. There's more and more mega-malls popping up, containing many well known international brands. Alongside that the hawker stores are also being modernised - Soong Kee has been air-conditioned for some time, and some malls have food courts with stores selling traditional hawker food alongside the McDonalds and KFCs of the world. There are also standalone mega-hawker-centres.

Vietnam is a really interesting place to visit. I vaguely recall reading that the average salary is between US$1-2 a day which is amazingly low. During my visit one USD was equivalent to 16,000 or 17,000 Vietnamese Dong (VND) depending on whether you were buying or selling. A bowl of Pho on the street seems to cost a minimum of 10,000 VND which is cheap for visitors but quite expensive if you're only earning a buck or two a day. I'm hoping there is local pricing which I didn't have access to. :)

I found the Vietnamese diet to be quiet healthy, if the lack of any obese people is to be any evidence. In the 11 days I was there I only saw one fat person, which I'm going to assume is/was an ex-pat. The vast majority of Vietnamese are lean and I saw not one McDonalds or Starbucks. One of our tour guides explained that Vietnamese people simply don't like to eat hamburgers. Good on 'em.

I'd also say that Vietnamese are generally hard working, and a cheerful, respectful people. On the latter point the road traffic is visibly chaotic, with horns blaring non-stop between 7am and 11pm every day, and no one observes road rules. The horn is used less as a "fuck you" as in most of the world, but more as a friendly "watch out, I'm here" toot. As the lane markings are typically ignored you would for instance toot when you are approaching someone's blind spot to make sure they know you're there. You might, as one of our taxi drivers did, also toot repeatedly if you are about to U-turn right through 5 lanes of traffic flowing in both directions. This sort of behaviour is completely acceptable - people don't seem to get agro, they just wait patiently as you manouevre.

Crossing the road is similarly nuts. The traffic, at least in the tourist areas, never stops. In Ho Chi Minh City there are 6.5 million people and 4.5 million motorbikes. You are expected to walk through the traffic which seems like a crazy thing to do but in reality its quite safe. As long as you walk steadily the sea of motorbikes will part and flow around you like water. I think in general this level of chaos and the traffic density (meaning generally slower speeds) means that drivers & riders are a lot more vigilant than drivers anywhere else. I honestly believe I have a higher chance of getting run over at a pedestrian crossing in Sydney than I would crossing any busy road in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi.

We started off in Ho Chi Minh City and had no troubles there getting around. Taxis are cheap - 12-15k VND for the first kilometre, then 11,000 VND per kilometre thereafter. The tourist attractions are all within a few kilometres so most fares should not exceed 30-50k VND. This wasn't a problem in HCMC but Hanoi was a different story where 3 out of 6 cabs that we caught were running dodgy meters. The first guy was unbelievably greedy. His meter already ran at 3x the regular rate (its quite noticeable as traffic moves slowly in Hanoi's Old Quarter) but the fool decided to also take us the longest way possible. Having a reasonable sense of direction both dad & I noticed this so when we finally arrived at our destination and his meter said 80k VND instead of the expected 25-30k VND, we gave him 50k and walked away (I didn't have anything smaller). The next two fellas weren't so greedy - they took the most direct route but both guys started bargaining with me when again we paid 50k of a 30k fare, asking for another 10k just for the hell of it. We told one driver that we knew his meter was dodgy even as we were driving as I saw the bloody thing jump up several times within a second as we were waiting at a traffic light. He must've thought we were distracted because we were making some idle chit chat. He apologised and slowed the meter thereafter(!) but still tried to get the full meter reading out of us.

Now Vietnam isn't all about traffic and taxis, more to come as I find time to upload the accompanying photos. :)

I'm quite surprised at how busy things seem even though I'm now officially unemployed. Thursday was spent deciphering the industrial relations and tax arrangements, and catching up with various folks.

Halloween Hack Day

Friday I went back to the office to pickup my stuff. After almost 8 years I had a literal car boot full of stuff on my desk, crammed into drawers and on the *two* returns I needed to display all my toys. :D Played a game of soccer up at KGV as we had entered a lunchtime indoor soccer tourney there prior, and then spent the afternoon distracting folks from Hack Day.

The weekend was the same as any weekend. I had to go to Ikea to buy a shelf to store all the crap that was previously at work. :) Mum & dad suggested we visit Vietnam & Malaysia since I now have some free time and dad has long service leave. The tickets are now booked and I went to the Vietnamese Consulate today to get my tourist visa.

Monday saw me back in the office to hand in the various redundancy forms & legalese, a few goodbyes then it was up to the pub and dinner with my fellow unemployed bums. :)

This morning I went into Donington, the start of a series of sessions paid for by Yahoo! aimed to help staff transition to whatever they choose to do in future. Its pretty cool - using a few strength/weakness like/dislike exercises they try to help you clarify what you might like to do next but they don't actually find a job for you. I think this separation is good, avoiding potential conflicts of interest and it allows for a lot of flexibility in terms of folks wanting to do their own thing etc.

Sydney Harbour Bridge

After that I popped into Paxtons as I needed a passport photo for the tourist visa mentioned earlier. Paxtons do passport photos for $15 with a one hour turnaround. I couldn't understand why it cost so much, nor the slow turnaround, so I pulled out my digital camera (which is always in my backpack), took a photo of myself in front of their handy white screen, and used the Kodak kiosk to create my own "mini-prints". I printed 9 passport sized photos for $1.50 (the minimum cost for a "mini-print", printed instantly), and it took all of 15 minutes. For whatever reason the "proper" way of printing takes an hour but doing it myself with the kiosk allows instant printing. I did call the Consulate to check if this was ok and I highly recommend this method if its suitable for your needs (passport photo requirements can be notoriously picky so beware).

Last Wednesday I was notified that my position at Yahoo!7 was being made redundant, effective immediately. It was quite a shock as I had just started a new project which was exciting and was looking forward to a hectic final 2 months of the calendar year. I was expecting to finish the year on a high as this project would have resolved an issue which had been bugging Y!7 for a number of years.

Although a complete shock I have to say I haven't felt too sad about it. There were certainly some aspects of the company that I found incredibly frustrating - I won't go into details suffice to say that its your typical big company stuff. I get the feeling that some folks are surprised that I'm not more bitter about what happened and I think its worth explaining that I worked pretty hard over the 7 years, 9 months and 3 weeks to help build the company to what it is today. It would be simply childish to "undo" all that effort by rubbishing the company over a simple parting of ways. I obviously still have many friends at Yahoo! and I think I will forever be a yahoo at heart so I wish everyone the best. :)

Sunrise @ Freshie

In fact, one of the most pleasant things about the past few days has been the overwhelming support extended to me by yahoos all over the world. I can't thank everyone enough for the general well wishes through to the offers to provide recommendations to, and contacts in other organisations as well as other parts of Yahoo! :D

Yahoo! was my first "real" job which I started before I finished Uni. It caused my 3 year undergrad degree to be dragged out over 7 years. :) I was digging through various Yahoo! paperwork earlier tonight and came across my original offer letter and even reading it today it still gives me a little buzz as I remember how excited I was to receive it all the way back in October 2000. I am really proud to have been a yahoo.

I'd describe my mood as hesitantly excited right now. Opportunities abound but for now I'm going to take a few weeks/months off to toy with some ideas I've had for a while and generally reflect on what I might do next. And yeah, I'll be surfing. :)

Reading today of Bigpond's plan to add an IVR in front of their tech support gave me the following business idea: What if, instead of having to wrestle with IVRs and/or wait on hold for customer service, you could have someone (or something) else do that for you and call you when they've reached a human?

There are two things I'm aware of that sort of do this today:

1. Callback - some call centres allow you to leave a number so they can call you back when an operator is free, rather than have you wait on the line. This is a great feature and I'm not sure why more places don't do this.


2. Gethuman - a listing of many IVRs, mainly in the US/Canada and what sequence of buttons you should press to get a human; note that it isn't so helpful for IVRs that require voice input

On Hold thanks to FLC

Building a system to fully automate this would not be so hard. You could work off a prioritised list of the most frequently used call centres - e.g. big banks, utilities, subscription services (PayTV etc), telcos, ISPs and so forth - experience shows its mainly larger companies that bother with IVRs, and implement them in the most annoying way possible so there's not that large a list. Work down each company working out the shortest path to a human, whether that's through voice input or PSTN tones, then simply record those.

Now the customer calls you (this needs some thought), you log their number using caller ID or through manual input from them and the call ends. Your service dials the customer support line, plays back your recorded sequence, and upon detecting a human voice you play a "excuse me the kettle's boiling" and dial the customer back, connecting them to the customer service rep.

I don't have a super elegant solution for the initial customer contact. One option is to outsource that to your own overseas callcentre who understand enough to know that the customer wants to contact "Bigpond" or "Telstra", or "NAB" or "Commonwealth Bank". Alternatively you could have a different phone number for each and move the mapping problem to the end user, or, (oh the shame), your own IVR with a selectable list. :)

The business model for this would basically be user pays. Given that automating this is entirely feasible I think a flat fee model is simple and works best. Maybe use a premium in-bound 1900 or SMS which bills the user $2-5 or something equally small - given the basically zero marginal cost of service I think going for a smaller price makes sense - it makes it cheap enough for anyone who becomes aware of the service to give it a try since its not much to lose, and a helluva lot better than sitting on hold for 20 minutes.

So a little over a year after I saw a cyclist mown down by a 4WD I saw a girl get run over at a pedestrian crossing. Seriously, Sydney-siders, I know you're all busy people with your large mortgages, fancy houses and designer clothes, but SLOW THE FUCK DOWN AND PAY ATTENTION.

I was walking home along Harbord Road and I see a girl pause at the crossing waiting for the oncoming car to slow down - which it did, it stopped. So she starts walking across, breaking into a run, I guess she's thinking at this point that everyone's going to stop. Oncoming car in the other direction slams into her - I barely heard the screech of brakes - and she bounces off the windscreen onto the road. Given that a car on the other side of the road had already stopped for this girl, how the hell did the driver coming in the other direction not notice that traffic was stopped and a girl wearing a bright red top is crossing?

Its really such a sad thing to see for all involved. The driver was shocked as hell as you would be, and needlessly so. Slow down, pay attention, you're steering over a tonne of metal on the road - it does bad things when you hit squishy bodied people. Fortunately, the girl appeared to be as ok as one can be after being hit by a car - fully conscious and no visible injuries though she was sore. I called an ambulance which arrived after about 5 minutes and they stretchered her off.

One of my biggest bugbears about Sydney life lately is the failure of drivers to stop at pedestrian crossings. As a pedestrian I've stopped at the side of the road and looked oncoming drivers in the eye thinking they would stop, only to have them drive straight through and in some cases speed up! I've been trying to think of a way to penalise these drivers without causing a major accident but so far have not come up with anything workable. The latter point is really critical - sure I could throw shit at their car but if that causes them to swerve to avoid being hit it may well result in a much larger accident, something I have no desire to cause. I wish there was a way to report the license plates of such cars but the flipside is how would you stop people abusing such a system to report drivers they dislike for any reason?