My thoughts

The Definition of Success

2014-05-23 by Jim Goodrich

[Disclaimer: Theresa Carter, founder of The Local Tourist LLC, is my fiancée. I love her and I am in love with her. But more than that I both admire and am very proud of her and her success. Read on and you’ll see why. These thoughts are my own.]

Success Event

I was perusing Facebook today and came on a “suggested post” (the screenshot you see here) by Sosh Chicago. It’s a pretty obvious salvo launched at The Local Tourist, whose company tagline is “Experience the fascination of a tourist; Feel the comfort of the local”. I saw that and thought to myself “She’s being recognized for her success!”. That may seem a little odd to you at first, but let me explain.

Who the Players Are

If you haven’t heard of Sosh Chicago yet, I wouldn’t be surprised. They first came to my attention about a month or so ago, when I saw they launched for Chicago. So I did a little research and by little, I mean I looked them up on CrunchBase. They’re based in San Francisco, CA, started in 2010. They have $16.30M in funding and “…Sosh is being built by Offline Labs, a stealthy startup founded by former Google and Slide employees.”. In other words, they’re very smart, they’ve got a lot of money and they can afford to move very quickly into a new market.

On the other hand, The Local Tourist started as an online business directory for the River North neighborhood in 2002 on a nonexistent budget. That’s not long after Theresa moved to Chicago and saw the need and saw she could fill it. Over the past 12 years, it’s grown organically to include all of Chicago by neighborhood and everything that’s happening in Chicago that you would want to know about. For most of those years, Theresa was the IT team, the Editorial staff, Sales staff and the Writing and Photography staff. While a good part of that has changed in the past few years, the Local Tourist still runs on a bootstrap budget.

While this does have a ‘David and Goliath’ element to it, that is not the point, by far.

Why This Shows Success

So what do you do when you have the team, you have the funding, you basically have everything in a new area but the market share? You do what I like to call ‘the young gun in town’. You’ve seen it in most Westerns. The young gun finds out who the best gun in town is and puts them on notice, the “I’m gunnin’ for ya” approach. And if the young gun is really smart, they figure out who the real best gun in town is, not just the one with a reputation.

I don’t know about you, but if I was looking for a team to tell me who has the best market share in town when it comes to a web presence, a team of former Google employees would be exactly the group I’d want. And who did they find? The web arm of a National Media outlet? Nope, the home town, organically grown, bootstrap media outlet, The Local Tourist. That says success in my book.

So as a supporter of The Local Tourist and its success, I’d like to say thank you to Sosh Chicago for the compliment and kudos, but more than that thank you for taking time to research and find out what The Local Tourist is truly all about; The best Chicago has to offer.

3 things about Comcast’s Neighborhood WiFi HotSpots

2013-06-17 by Jim Goodrich

I haven’t read anything about the Comcast Neighborhood WiFi hotspots issue, I just found this and decided to make an observation or three. I’m not sure how well this was thought through by Comcast…But I digress.

1. You’re now a commercial transmission site

Photo Credit: Susie

Let me explain. When you start your internet service with Comcast, there is a physical installation of the transmission cables and you either pay a technician for that, or it’s already been done and you either pay to have the technician hook up the equipment or you can do a self installation. Regardless of the method, the physical cable has to be run in order for you to receive personal, protected (as much as possible), reliable Internet service.

Comcast is now taking that private, physical installation and making it a transmission site for a commercial WiFi hotspot that any Comcast customer can use without your permission or knowledge or ability to opt out, from what I can see [Update 2013-06-19: I had a reader inform me that the customer can opt-out of the program and confirmed it based on the Mutlichannel.com article Cable Show 2013: Comcast Turns Wireless Gateways Into Neighborhood Wi-Fi Hotspots]. That Hotspot can’t exist if only the cable is there. There has to be a modem and router in order to broadcast, or distribute the hotspot signal. If there’s no Comcast customer there, there can be no hotspot.

Think of it like all the cell towers you see around you. While the companies own the equipment, it would be impossible for them to own all the land and buildings those towers are on, so they pay some sort of combination of rental and/or access fees for their towers to be transmitting from those locations. I don’t know of any compensation for Comcast customers and especially for those who own their own modem and router.

2. You’re providing an unpaid public endorsement for Comcast by being a Neighborhood WiFi HotSpot

Funny story. I was going to use a photo of Captain Amazing (here’s a link to the results of a Google image search on Captain Amazing if you’re interested) from the 1999 Universal Studios film Mystery Men which is owned by Comcast, but couldn’t find a copy marked for free use. If I used one, it would be me distributing their product without a licensing agreement or compensation, which could be considered piracy, as opposed to them distributing their product using me as a distribution point without a licensing agreement or compensation which is considered…What now?

Anyway, you might ask how that’s a public endorsement? It goes hand in hand with the last thing…And I’ve saved the worst for last.

3. Your privacy can easily be violated

[There will be a lot of blanked out information following for privacy reasons]

I went to the site and saw that you could search for HotSpot locations, so I did. I went to http://hotspots.wifi.comcast.com/ put in a zip code for a Chicago neighborhood and I got this result:

Xfinity Neighborhood WiFi HotSpot Search Results

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This was my first search and I noticed something about the first street address result and I left it uncovered in the picture above. It says Fl Ground, short for Floor Ground. That doesn’t sound like a business address to me, it sounds more like a billing address. So I went to http://www.switchboard.com/ [UPDATE 2020-03-25: that URL now redirects to https://whitepages.com] and did a reverse address search and these are a portion of the result:

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From two quick searches, I got these pieces of information:

A person’s name (And it was a person’s name, not a company or business)
Street address
Telephone number

And one last piece of never before publicly available information that ties all of this together in a scary and possibly dangerous way:

The extremely high probability of that person being a Comcast customer. A business which sends technicians out to onsite service calls, in many cases house calls.

As I said in the beginning, I don’t think this was thought through very well and based on the information I was able to find out in less than 5 minutes using only widely available internet tools, Comcast might want to work on plugging some holes and soon.

Without a second thought

2013-05-15 by Jim Goodrich Leave a Comment

Big Tony’s Pizza in Logan Square

I’ve had a couple of weeks of horrific customer service, so I decided to focus on an example of customer service that will keep me as a customer for a long, long time.

There’s a little place called Big Tony’s Pizza in the area. Yes, they’re a pizza place, but they also have Burgers, Italian Beef, Gyros and more. There are some tables in the place, but I’d be willing to bet that most of their business is split between carry out and delivery. I tend to pop in, order and bring it home because I can run some quick errands after I order and be back in time to pick it up and I really like their burgers and Italian Beef a lot. It’s one of those “Ooo, you know what sounds good right now? A burger from Big Tony’s.” type of thing. But that’s why I started going there. Here’s why I’ll keep going there.

Not long ago I went in with Theresa and it was the busiest I’d seen it in there in awhile. I don’t think there was an empty table and people either ordering or picking up orders were 3 – 4 deep. We ordered and sat down and this time we decided to eat there. We were talking when I heard someone say something I couldn’t make out, but it made me look up just in time to see the man behind the cash register say “just a minute” to line of people three or four deep. He turned and walked over to a physically challenged man in a wheelchair who had a couple pieces of pizza and a soft drink in a can with a straw and put the straw to the man’s mouth so he could take a drink and turned back to the cash register in almost one single motion. If I hadn’t looked up right then, or I had blinked, I would have missed it. A lot of the people did miss it. But there was also this moment of “you saw that, right?” bit of silence for those who did see it.

It wasn’t that it was the right thing to do, even though that’s exactly what it was, or that it was good customer service. It was those things and there was no complaint, no fanfare, not even a break in stride.

It was done without a second thought.

I don’t know about you, but a place that employs people with customer service like that gets my return business, period. And it makes Big Tony’s Pizza a happy place for me.

Dichotomy, thy name is Migraine

2010-06-08 by Jim Goodrich Leave a Comment

I have a migraine headache today so I can barely see to type this, but I think I’m through the worst of it and for those of you who have never experienced one I’m going to try and describe what a migraine is or does to me.

First, all the stories you hear about the sensitivity to light are true. the best way I can describe it is this: Think of the pain of stubbing your toe a hundred times at the same instant and put it one eye, and now put it in the other eye too. That’s how sensitive I am to light. But that’s not the worst of it for me.

What’s worse is being in physical Limbo. I’m constantly on the verge of the dry heaves to the point that I’m practically praying to throw up, in hopes that throwing up would provide some relief while knowing it will only be like hitting the reset button back to being on the verge. And while I’m not normally a temperature sensitive person, I need to be cool, but I’m almost immediately chilled to the bone and if I pull a blanket over me, I’m sweating. But by far the worst part of a migraine of this magnitude is simply this: All I want to do is lie still and the last thing I can do is get comfortable. Nothing is right, not lying down, not standing up, not the low setting on a ceiling fan, not a blanket, nothing and yet, those are all things I need. In fact, that’s how I can tell when I’m through the worst part of the migraine, when I can finally get comfortable. It’s not about the pain, which is considerable. Think of a plastic garbage bag full of heavy, sharp, pointy objects. You don’t question whether the bag is going to break, that’s a given. It’s a question of when it’s going to break and will it get the job done before it breaks. With a migraine, the pain is the only true, unwavering constant, it will be there throughout and will be the last thing to go, so in its own way can be put aside and dealt with later.

And after all this, I can still say I’m lucky for a number of reasons. One, I don’t get this level of a migraine often. Two, when I do I tend to avoid the worst of it because I see the signs and can head it off most of the time with over the counter drugs and Three, I don’t generally have them for a long period of time. I have a friend who gets these for three days at a time.

So while I still have the pain, I can lie still in one place and get comfortable. Oh, and the screen is starting to look a little clearer now too. Maybe I can catch a quick nap before finally getting something to eat.