Got word today that I have received the Microsoft MVP Award for the third time. Of course it is April 1, so it could all be a big joke. I am hoping not.

Dear Nik Kalyani,  

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way to say thank you for promoting the spirit of community and improving people’s lives and the industry’s success every day. We appreciate your extraordinary efforts in ASP/ASP.NET technical communities during the past year...

I am honored. Thanks Microsoft.

This is turning out to be my rant on crappy service by companies week.

Today, after almost four years or mediocre voice quality, I finally decided to ditch my Vonage line. As required by them, I called in to cancel my account.

For 20 mins. straight, despite my increasingly urgent pleas to just cancel my account, the rep kept insisting that I stay for two additional months free and they would have a tech out to my home tomorrow to look at the problem. WTF! I can understand a couple of attempts to keep the customer, but after 20 mins. I could not take it any more and I hung up.

Vonage does not get it...these kind of pushy sales tactics are not going to help their growing decline. It will only make customers more irate and increase negative PR for them. They appear to be totally clueless.

I am going to call them again today and hope I'll have better luck this time.

Guy Kawasaki has a good interview with Mickos here.

My favorite:

Question: Have you had any kind of concerns that MySQL will be run like a "big company"?
Answer: I had those concerns even when we were a small startup! Complacency and arrogance can creep in without your noticing in any sort of organisation. To avoid it, we have taken some specific steps. We have released our software under the GPL thus exposing ourselves to the risk of forking. This keeps us running fast. We have also chosen to serve the fastest paced and fastest growing business in the world such as YouTube, Flickr, Zillow, and Nokia.

This also forces us to run fast. And we have a company culture of no-nonsense and of following The No Asshole Rule by Bob Sutton--pardon my French, but the book by that name is so good. For these reasons, there is no time for complacency. These aspects apply to Sun as well. And if for whatever unlikely reason we would ever encounter some big company behavior within Sun, we will do our utmost to help change it.

I want my daughters to grow up having good fundamental knowledge of things like basic electronics, plumbing, mechanical stuff, construction etc. I recognize that more and more analog things will be digital in her future, but it never hurts to know the basics.

To that end, I recently bought Gia, my three-year-old, her first electronics project kit. I researched this quite a bit -- I did not want anything overly complex, nor did I want anything too simple. Something that would be fun and get her to think and ask questions. I found the perfect kit -- Snap Circuits.

Although their website is horrible and ugly, their product is awesome. I got the SC-100 basic kit. It has about a 100 projects you can do using a battery pack, motor, speaker, music chip, alarm chip, resistors and a few other parts.

So far, we have created mostly projects that make cool sounds. I think Gia's favorites were the ones where the motor speed can be increased and then shut off causing the flimsy plastic wheel to become airborne. Another one is a water alarm where two wires have to be inserted into a glass of water to cause an alarm to go off.

Overall, I am pleased with Snap Circuits. It is helping me achieve exactly the goal I wanted while giving dad+daughter some fun things to do besides tinker with home brew computers.

In this picture, Gia is trying out a fun, motion-activated "Happy Birthday" tune player project.

Dan Farber's report that Flickr will support video in beta next month is welcome news. As I commented on Dan's blog, it is a big pain to share photos and videos of the same event (example: vacation photos) using different sites. If Flickr does a good job of making the user experience so it is context-sensitive according to the type of media (i.e. photo or video), then I would move my videos to Flickr and use it for sharing both photos and videos. On the other hand, if the UX requires that photos and videos be in separate Flickr buckets, then it is not so appealing.

Currently, I am using the slick PhotoSync for WHS (review) add-in to automatically share photos on my Windows Home Server with friends and family on Flickr. Having videos sync'd up to Flickr in the same way would be wonderful.