My family doesn’t have a whole lot planned for Family Day this year. We’re in the midst of a major home reno (work began a few weeks ago and walls on the main floor start coming down on Friday), so we’re a little limited in what we can do at the moment. Moving is always a pain, but I’ve discovered that this is possibly worse -much of the house still has to be packed up so it’s not really accessible, but there’s a generous smattering of drywall dust everywhere. My poor hard drives… It’s snowing right now, so I think we’ll grab the sleds and walk to the local toboggan hill for an hour or two. I also have a LEGO Millenium Falcon set sitting in the van (no, not that one) that we might tackle. Maybe some assemble-your-own nachos, a roaring fire, hot chocolate and a movie will round the day out. If I have enough energy and I can find the cookie sheets, I’ll bake enough cookies to be able to throw a few containers in the freezer and keep me going through the coming “no oven or stove access” weeks. Then it’s back to packing up what’s left of the kitchen and looking forward to a few weeks of nightly BBQing…

Family Day at the ROM. Image from the Royal Ontario Museum.

If you live in Ontario and you’re looking for some last minute ideas for family activities today, here are a few possibilities:

• Ottawa: The Museum of Civilization and the War Museum are offering free admission for kids under 18 (one child per adult) today. Winterlude is also underway.
• The Toronto Zoo is offering free admission on Monday for kids under 12 who bring a valentine for their favorite bug (one child per adult). The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is including Mesozoic Monsters with museum admission
• Victoria Park in London is offering a free Family Day Skate, all day on Monday and Circle R Ranch is holding an open house with free hay rides and hot chocolate.
• Waterloo Public Square in Waterloo has a free family skate along with a food fair, magician, music, face painting and additional activities.
• Geeky dads and moms in Hamilton might want to check out the Family Day Toy and Collectible Show/Sale that promises Star Wars toys, action figures and plenty of other interesting ways to spend a little money (admission $2, kids under 10 are free).

And, as if that weren’t enough cause for celebration, we at GeekDad are proud to announce that seven members of the GeekDad crew will host a panel at PAX East! The panel, titled “Bringing Up the Next Generation of Geeks,” will include Core Contributors Dave Banks, Natania Barron, John Booth, Doug Cornelius, Michael Harrison, and Corrina Lawson, and me, your friendly neighborhood Assistant Editor. We’re hoping to convince a few better-known geek dads and moms to join us there, but either way we’re hoping it’ll be a lot of fun.

Of course, we want the panel to be enjoyable, and hopefully informative, for audience members as well as us. So, if you’re planning to be there (and if you don’t have tickets yet, you should register soon, because they’re expecting a sellout), or if you just have some ideas of topics that would be fun to discuss in a panel about geek parenting, please leave a comment.

We’re looking forward to meeting a lot of our readers, both at the panel and elsewhere at PAX East. Hope to see you there!

DONATE TO HAITI RELIEF THROUGH THE GEEKDAD GIVING PAGE!

We all know what has happened, and how desperate the need for medical resources is right now in Haiti. There are plenty of good avenues for charitable donations out there, and by no means to we mean to replace any of them, but all of us at GeekDad want to do our part as well. To that end, we have set up a donation page at First Giving in support of the medical relief organization MerlinUSA.

Merlin specializes in health, saving lives in times of crisis and helping to rebuild shattered health services. Merlin works within existing health systems to realize everyone’s right to accessible, appropriate, affordable health care. We are committed to helping build lasting health services which are used and championed by everyone. We are specialists in rapid medical response and rebuilding health systems, effectively taking countries from emergency to recovery. We are undaunted by the challenges of providing health care to vulnerable people living in the most difficult, forgotten and remote corners of the world.

We are determined to make health a global priority; giving people caught up in conflict, disaster and health system collapse the chance to lead healthy lives. We care or people at risk, for the lives of the people we work to save, and for the safety of our staff. We are accountable to our patients, partners, supporters and donors. And we keep our promise: to stay on, beyond the crisis, for as long as we are needed.

They were on the ground in Haiti in hours to help:

Merlin’s eight strong Emergency Response Team left on the first available flight to Haiti. Their initial task is to assess the most urgent needs, which are likely to be water, sanitation, shelter, disease prevention and restoration of basic health services. Our team is likely to concentrate immediately on distributing essential shelter kits, as well as medical equipment such as hygiene kits and blankets, supporting local health staff and mobilizing communities to ensure disease outbreaks are prevented. We are mobilizing all necessary resources now.

Now is your chance to donate to the relief effort (or donate again). Through our First Giving page, we hope to raise $15,000 in support of the relief efforts on the ground in Haiti. And as an incentive (not that we need any more than the desire to help people in a time of great need), for every $15 you donate, you’ll earn one change to win a geeky giveaway item. We’re still compiling the prizes, but to start we have a batch of seriously cool stuff from John Kovalic, and some rather significant gift cards from our good friends at ThinkGeek. This means we just need a thousand GeekDad readers to donate $15 each (but you’re welcome to donate more if you can).

UPDATE: The amazing John Kovalic has pledged that for every donation of $100 or more, he will send the donor an autographed and specially-doodled copy of the first Dork Tower compendium. How cool is that?!?!

DONATE TO HAITI RELIEF THROUGH THE GEEKDAD GIVING PAGE!

GeekDad UK Style

Spreading the family tech projects to other parts, GeekDad has been going in the UK for a few months now. There you will find more of the same GeekDad goodness, but with a UK bent.

It’s not all umberellas, weather-talk and gardening though, there is plenty of family life meets gadget writing. Recently we have been talking about Games that Fit Your Family, Homemade Light Sabers and Head-Cooling Life-Saving Crash Helmets.

If you want a little more island -living in your GeekDad arsenal then why not pay us a visit.

Logo © Rod Roddenberry

Lots of people sell off stuff that used to belong to their parents after their parents pass away. Some of those people, surely, donate the money they raise to worthy charities. But it’s safe to say that you haven’t ever seen an estate auction quite like this before, mostly because most people’s parents didn’t create and act on Star Trek.

Rod Roddenberry, who was Gene and Majel Roddenberry’s only child (Gene had two daughters from an earlier marriage), has decided to auction off some of his parents’ things to raise money for Haiti relief. Only a few of the items are overtly Star Trek-related; most of them are fairly prosaic. But I think it’s safe to say, for most geeks, a set of golf clubs (for example) does gain a certain amount of interest if you can honestly say that they used to belong to Gene Roddenberry.

There’s a wide variety of items, from a script of Majel’s lines as the ship’s computer for an episode of The Next Generation to several collections of assorted books. The auction is being run via Facebook comments, so you will have to have a Facebook account to bid. 100% of the auction’s proceeds are promised to go to HaitianHero.com (a site run by Jimmy Jean-Louis, better known as “the Haitian” on Heroes, and who is actually Haitian).

The auction is scheduled to end at 11:59 PST on Friday, January 29. New items are being added to it every day, so check back between now and then in case something new strikes your fancy.

Zombie Hulk SMASH bad customer service! (Image by Flickr user Bob Jagendorf)

“The televisions these days, they depreciate when you take them home. Like a used car.” - Customer Service manager at [insert electronics store here.]

Dear retail customer service folks, that was the justification I received when I was handed a gift card for nearly a third less than what I paid for the LCD HD Television I was exchanging via a warranty exchange. I raised one eyebrow to express puzzlement to the manager, then proceeded with a short diatribe into the logical and perfectly rational reason why he was completely wrong in his assessment in the situation and why he was making a mistake. Not to mention, the gift card I was originally handed wouldn’t even cover the tax on the replacement television. After a short discussion, then attempting the transaction again in the computer, a gift card was created with the correct amount. As a customer, I was finally satiated, but still left in mild bemusement at the complete level of incompetence I routinely experience when dealing with retail customer service representatives.

Now, to be clear - this isn’t everywhere and everyone. This is a select bunch of folks who seem destined to cross my path when I walk into a store to return something. With electronics, this happens often enough to warrant a rant. The lack of intelligence and general problem solving skills, not to mention the seemingly oblivious behavior when it comes to standard transactions, is amazingly curious for this day and age. Perhaps it’s simply a lack of training, perhaps it’s a lax standard in education up to that point. Perhaps they really just don’t care. Having worked in retail myself for many years in my formative years, I’d have to say it’s a little bit of all three. So how can the retail customer service folks optimize their service? How can they get better at what they do so I don’t have to explain it to them every time I walk into a store? Here are a couple ideas that have been around for a while they may want to take heed to.

Learn the Inventory.

Retail jobs can be fun, for some they can be a career. For most, they are a stepping stone to the next thing. They are a filler until a professional job comes along, or a second job. No matter place your retail job holds in your life, you should still take the time to learn the inventory. Especially if you are working at the customer service desk in the front of the store. You should know what you have on sale, what you don’t and what’s in stock. If it’s not something you can pull off the top of your head, you should know what quick keystrokes to punch into the computer to bring it up.

Sadly, this is rarely the case. More often than not I am being helped by a customer service representative that appear as if they either just woke up, or just finished off a batch of “special” brownies. Maybe it’s just here in Central Florida, but no matter their state of mind, they should at least be able to tell me if they have a particular brand of television in stock that is advertised for sale in the weekly. They should be able to point me in the direction of the splitter that I need, or be able to quickly know if they carry the hard drive enclosure I’m asking about. Scanning the shelves for 6 minutes then giving up is not customer service. That’s laziness.

Case in point, my friend Justin and I recently went to a large electronics retailer to pick up a new Plasma television he had bought at the same store across the county. They were out of the television, so we went across town with the receipt to pick up one of several they had in stock. This is what the customer service representative at store #2 told the representative at store #1. This was after the rep at store #1 was on hold with store #2 for 45 minutes. We arrived at store #2 and after slowly explaining the situation and presenting a receipt, we were told the television was out of stock.

At the same time, we heard the stock-man say out loud, “I wonder if there are any in the warehouse.” So before checking the warehouse to see if any were in stock, we were told there were none in stock. Know your inventory!! Turns out, there were plenty in stock. To further add insult to ignorance, Justin and I had to carry the TV out ourselves as when we asked for assistance, they offered a cart (in which a 50″ TV won’t fit.) Major customer service fail.

If You Can’t Figure it Out, Ask for Help.

This is just a quick note to customer service representatives that have either just started the job or are in the middle of training. It’s alright to ask for help. 12 years into my professional career, I still ask for help when I don’t know the answer. Don’t stand there struggling with a transaction that you aren’t familiar with for upwards of 15 minutes before asking a more experience co-worker. Your pride will not take a hit if you ask for help. It’s okay. I won’t look down on you or anything. If I ask you for an SCSI cable and you have no idea what I’m talking about - direct me to someone who does. Don’t stand there looking befuddled and then tell me you don’t have any because you don’t know what they are. This takes you right back to knowing your inventory.

Math is Your Friend. Embrace it. Use it. Love it.

I am fully aware that the registers are pretty self sufficient these days. They do all the adding and subtracting for you, and most customer service representatives don’t have to think about things like division and multiplication tables when processing a transaction. There is still an element of human interaction. When processing a return and entering the tax calculation, mind the decimal point. Seven percent is .07 not .007. When you see the tax on a $700 item is $4 you must know that is incorrect. Right? Right?

What I can’t figure out is at what point customer service reps were no longer required to learn basic math. For the short six months I was forced to work the register at the retail store I worked, I did the math in my head along with the register. I knew what things cost and how they would add up. I could calculate a transaction down to the penny. I don’t expect that same type of exemplary math skill from customer service reps today, but I do expect they be able to tell when they’ve put in a ten percent discount as a one percent discount and not argue with me about it. All it takes to solve this problem is one day working without a register. Everything by hand in a notebook (which I had to do at a hardware store I worked at) will force a learning of general math.

The Customer is Always Right, Unless they are Wrong.

There is a creedo in customer service that we are all aware of, “the customer is always right.” From personal experience on both sides of the counter, I can say that this isn’t always accurate. Now more than ever, due to a lack of general education and a strange sense of entitlement by the populace, sometimes the customer is a jackass. The problem is when the jackass was the customer in line in front of you. That sets the tone for your transaction, and it’s not a good tone. The best advice I can give the customer service rep in this situation is not to let the bad transaction carry over to the next one. Too many times I’ve dealt with a surly customer service rep because the customer before me was a moron.

In general though, the customer is almost always right. They know what they want or are looking to you for assistance. It’s the job of the customer service rep to provide that assistance in the least stressful way possible. I know all of this seems like textbook obvious stuff for $10 an hour jobs, but if you’ve been to a big box electronics store lately, you’ll agree that there has been a serious disconnect between the one on one customer service of yore and the current “next please” mentality. More important than knowing that the customer is always right is knowing that I am always right. I research everything I buy, I know how to add and subtract before your computer does it. Challenge me with ridiculous claims of falsehood and I will destroy you in front of your co-workers.

What it all boils down to is training. Both by management and by the employee. The management has an obligation to the shopping public to make sure the employees are trained correctly. The employee has that same obligation to receive that training and use it to earn their wage. As I mentioned, I’ve worked in retail and can understand the animosity that arises between employee and customer due to so many terrible customers. What they don’t think about, and what took me years to realize, is that the customer is the one paying your check. The customer is directly paying your rent. If that customer decides not to shop at your establishment anymore because of a terrible customer service experience, that hurts you directly.

With the availability of online retailing and shopping, it is so much more imperative that direct retail customer service gets it together. It’s the only way to survive. I like the personal touch, I like to hold the product in my hand and talk to an expert. The moment I stop getting that, that’s the moment I stop shopping at your store.

What are some of your good/bad customer service experiences at retail stores?

Taking a ride at the Tang Museum. Image: Kathy Ceceri

We dropped in to our local art museum the other day, and I was reminded of why taking kids to see art – especially contemporary art – is such a serendipitous experience. Just past the coat room is a space that is sometimes used for educational programs and special exhibits. But this time it was dark, and strewn with ladders, sheets, and other signs of not-for-display use.

In the middle of the room was the weirdest bicycle we had ever seen, and the man who made it – Torrance Fish, Senior Preparator at the Tang Teaching Museum & Art Gallery.  Mr. Fish explained that he was taking advantage of a hiatus between shows to set up his work, Lifecycle, and make a record of it. Lifecycle is made of steel tubing, bike parts, and electronics. When you sit on it and spin the pedals, a projection on the wall of roads Fish is fond of begins rolling. You can also see little video images of Fish using the Freecycle in what look like rear view mirrors.

The kids climbed aboard and gave it a whirl, while I, all unprepared, snapped pictures with my cell phone. It was incredibly cool.

The Lifecycle by artist Torrance Fish

But this kind of thing happens all the time at the Tang. One year, they had an exhibit of sound. One piece consisted of a wall full of file drawers. When you pulled one open, the sound would be released. (The museum usually has a sound exhibit programmed for its elevator, as well.) Another year there was a miniature movie theater. Inside the mini-theater everything was built to scale, which created the illusion that you were in the balcony of a vast cinema. When the usher showed you to your seat and you put on your headphones, you heard what sounded like people rustling around you as you watched the film on the tiny screen. And of course, the year they had the giant rotating bird’s nest, into which chairs and Legos and all kinds of neat things were woven. (I hear the artist came and roosted in the nest for an event, but we missed it.) Admittedly, not everything on display is suitable for kids, but there’s definitely a good chance something will appeal to them.

Why modern art? Personally, I think it’s the King Has No Clothes effect. A work that is meant to have deep meaning a lot of times is actually pretty goofy if taken at face value, the way a child does. And the “my kid could do that” style of so much contemporary work means that kids don’t feel the least bit intimidated. In fact, they might even be inspired to go home and make some modern art of their own.

What’s your kid’s favorite kind of art?

Kathy Ceceri is the author of Around the World Crafts and other hands-on art and activity books.

The First Tuesday of every month The Museum of Natural History hosts The Known Universe:A Grand Tour at the Hayden Planetarium. Guests are taken from earth to the edge of the known Universe with an astrophysicist as the tour guide.

Tuesday January 5th at 6:30 P.M. you can join astrophysicist Brian Abbott  on the biggest adventure you can have without leaving New York.  Brian oversees the Digital Universe Atlas, an interactive, 3-D atlas of the Universe that you can download for free.  So if you have any burning questions in astrophysics, come on admit it you do, join Brian for this amazing journey.

WHEN: Tuesday, January 5, 6:30 pm
WHERE: Hayden Planetarium, Space Theater
American Museum of Natural History
Enter at 81st/Rose Center
ADMISSION: $15 adults $13.50 Members, students, and seniors

Check out this video for a preview:

By Flickr user massdistraction. May be a Game Cube controller, which is only 8 year-old game tech.

Hello there, Hotel Industry Person, I am one of your customers. In fact, I’m a pretty good customer. I and my family have stayed in some of your hotels for weeks of total time in the last year on various vacations and business-related trips. I have helped you weather the current economic downturn, and have even purchased some premium services that are the real money-makers for you. It would be reasonable, I think, for you to hear me out on one or two things I’ve noticed; things you could be doing better to make me, the customer, happier and more likely to spend more money in your establishments.

You like to cater to family travelers, don’t you? At least, you give off that impression. If that is indeed the case, let me let you in on a little secret: kids need things to do in your hotel rooms.

Okay, hold on there. I know what you’re going to say. You have televisions in your rooms with on-demand movies to watch, and all sorts of cable channels, and…. wait for it… VIDEO GAMES! Kids these days LOVE the video games!

How old are you, Hotel Industry Person? Do you really consider yourself in touch with “the kids these days?” I can’t tell you how many hotels I’ve stayed in over the last decade where the special video game feature to the TV in the room was to pay some exorbitant hourly rate to play (I shudder to say) Nintendo 64 games. N-64!

So let’s just take a little look at what Wikipedia says about the N64, shall we? Oh look, the N64 was released in 1996. My goodness, do you know that was before my kids were even born? Let me put this as clearly as possible: the N64 was an aging game system before I even started being a family traveler, and you’re still trying to sell it as a feature in your rooms. This is what the kids these days call an “epic fail.”

Okay, I will cop to the fact that the picture above that I found online shows a LodgeNet system running Nintendo Game Cube games. Okay, so it’s only an 8 year-old system. Personally I’ve never seen that in a hotel room, but the picture is at least proof it exists.

Of course, many families have portable game systems and portable media systems that they bring with them, and which can be easily hooked up to TVs. They’d love to hook ‘em up to the TVs in your hotel rooms, except that in many cases those televisions have all their input ports and switches locked down, and only offer the excitement of LodgeNet’s most basic offerings (like the overpriced movies and N64 games).

But I can’t be too mean to the ubiquitous LodgeNet. Having checked their site, they seem to be offering all kinds of packages for hotels to use in offering the most up-to-date media capabilities to their customers - including lovely A/V panels for hooking just about any media device possible to an in-room TV. Then why does it seem most of your hotels only offer a system based on technology over a dozen years old?

And let me be clear - this isn’t a situation where I checked into an old hotel still holding onto equipment installed back in the Clinton administration. No, my most recent stay in one of your establishments was in a hotel tower finished in just the last year. The rooms were fitted with new Sony flat-screen LCD televisions. But they were running the exact same setup I’ve seen dozens of times before, including the N64 gaming system and a complete inability to hook up any peripheral devices.

So, what’s the story? I can guess. I can presume that you, person from the Hotel Industry, have made the decision along with a large number of your cohorts to use the cheapest available system, so that you can have something available for your marketing materials, but you also make sure you make your customers pay through the nose for what it offers. And you won’t let them use their own alternatives, for fear of losing a revenue stream. Pretty shoddy, if you ask me (and if you’ve read this far, you are in some way asking).

I’m sure there’s much more to this. I’m sure there are perfectly lovely establishments out there renting 360s and PS3s to their guests, and leaving all the various input ports open on the TVs so that people can bring their Blu-ray players with them if they want to. But if my sampling is indicative, they are few and far between, and you should really get off your collective duffs and do something about it.

</rant>

Okay, with that out of the way, please feel free to include your experiences with hotel in-room entertainment in the comments below. If you’ve found hotels or hotel chains with better setups, please let us know about them - so we can start supporting the good ones as wel!

The Patee House Museum is a cornucopia of all things St. Joseph, Missouri (city slogan: “Where the Pony Express began and Jesse James ended.”)  Patee House is St. Joseph’s only National Historic Landmark.  Built in 1858 as a luxury hotel, the Patee House served as headquarters for the Pony Express from 1860 to 1861. Around the corner from the Museum is the former home of infamous outlaw Jesse James, the place where he was shot and killed by Robert Ford in 1882.

The Patee House stands four stories tall, resembles a red brick warehouse, and occupies a full city block. Only two of the floors are used for exhibits, but the Museum manages to squeeze in lots of great stuff. And some of it is interactive: you can climb aboard a train from the 1860s, and ride the vintage “Wild Thing” carousel.

Other things in the Patee House Museum’s eclectic collection include:

• a stagecoach;
• horse-drawn hearses;
• a case filled with old steam whistles (you can toot them by pushing a button);
• a wall of pistols and shotguns used by people in St. Joseph to murder people;
• a 1,050-pound ball of string;
• an exhibit on Robert Wadlow, then the world’s tallest man, who came to St. Joseph to sue a local doctor for writing an article that was critical of giants;
• a display of antique light bulbs;
• 1960s-vintage cameras and sets from KQTV, the local television station;
• the dental office of the father of broadcaster Walter Cronkite, a native of St. Joseph;
• a wagon-maker’s blacksmith shop;
• the gallows from the Buchanan County jail (never used);
• George Warfel “Westerners on Wood” art collection of 42 life-sized portraits of famous westerners; and
• vintage fire trucks from the 1920s.

One highlight of the Patee House Museum for my five year old son was the steam engine with the mail car attached to it. In order to install the display, the Museum knocked down one of its four-story brick walls, dragged the train on newly-built tracks, and then built the wall back up.

The mail car is a replica of the car built to speed mail from Hannibal, Missouri to St. Joseph and then on to the Pony Express. Unfortunately, the original car was not finished until 1862, almost a year after the Pony Express went broke.

The other highlight was the “Wild Thing” carousel. Renowned carousel animal maker Bruce White created all of the animals on the 1941 vintage merry-go-round and donated it to the Museum when the local mall no longer wanted it. Mr. White is one of the most prolific makers of carousel animals. He supplies Applebee’s Restaurants with their carousel animals, and the first copy of Ms. Applebee runs in a circle on the Wild Thing.

The Patee House Museum was listed by True West magazine as one of America’s Top 10 Western Museums in 2008, and it is one of 1,000 Places to See in the U.S.A. & Canada Before You Die. It’s located in the historic museum district in downtown St. Joseph, Missouri.

All photos by Doug Cornelius. You can see more on Flickr: Patee House Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri.